From the Sinn Féin MP Constance Markievicz, elected in December 1918, to Labour’s Janet Daby, elected a fortnight ago for Lewisham East, the name of every woman ever elected to parliament is printed on a wall of an exhibition in Westminster celebrating 100 years of women’s suffrage.

There are just 491.



At the opening of Voice and Vote: Women’s Place in Parliament, Maria Miller, the chair of the women and equalities committee, said: “This exhibition is not just about equality, and the anniversary of some women gaining the right to vote, it’s about women’s right to stand for election, to sit in the House of Lords … It’s about what still needs to be done.”

Fewer women have been elected to parliament than there are MPs in any one parliament (650). And in the thousand years of its history, there were always more male MPs in the House of Commons at any one time than the number of women MPs who had ever been elected, until Caroline Johnson won a by-election on 8 December 2016, 98 years after the first female MP.

At one end of the exhibition in Westminster Hall – one of the central points of the suffragettes’ campaign – are the doors where Alice Hawkins was arrested in 1909 for disorderly conduct and resisting the police. Her bail warrant is also on display.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alison Thewliss MP views a bust of Nancy Astor at the exhibition. Photograph: Kirsty O'Connor/PA

At the other corner is the crypt, and the broom cupboard where Emily Wilding Davison hid on the night of the 1911 census so she could give her address as parliament. The exhibition recreates the space, complete with mop and bucket.

The curators, Melanie Unwin and Mari Takayanagi, have spent four years collecting pictures, words and objects that trace the history of the fight for women’s suffrage from the moment in 1832 when voters were first defined in law as “male”.

Davison’s broom cupboard is the best known of three immersive spaces they have recreated that illustrate women’s physical and political exclusion from the processes of democracy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Visitors take part in a ‘parliamentary debate.’ Photograph: Kirsty O'Connor/PA

There is the ventilator, a space above the Commons chamber where before the fire in 1834 it was possible to hear and partially see the debates beneath. In the era before parliamentary reporting, it was an audacious breach of the tight control on access.

A coloured sketch by one of its visitors, showing women on tiptoes peering down on to MPs many feet below, was unearthed from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-on-Avon, after an archivist there tweeted for help identifying it.

When Barry and Pugin rebuilt Westminster, the select committee in charge of the process recommended a ladies’ gallery. Located where the public gallery is now, women visitors were concealed behind an ornate metal grille. “It was quite unmistakably like a harem,” Takayanagi said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A visitor views an exhibit. Photograph: Kirsty O'Connor/PA

Even when women had won the right to vote, and to be elected, the physical humiliation continued. The Lady Members’ room – also partially recreated with some of the original furniture for the exhibition – was so small that by 1945 there were more women than seats. There was one small mirror, and only one peg.

Peter Barratt, the great-grandson of Alice Hawkins, who has loaned the family collection of historic objects, says his mother, Alice’s granddaughter, remembered a stern, determined awkward woman. “She always said, use your vote – we suffered for it.”

The curators hope visitors to the exhibition will remember that. Takayanagi said: “We want everyone to be more likely to vote when they leave than when they arrived.”

• Voice and Vote: Women’s Place in Parliament runs until 6 October in Westminster Hall. Tickets, which are free, can be booked online