Photographs by Christina Broom (Museum of London collections) show stalls at the W.S.P.U.’s Women’s Exhibition of 13 to 26 May, 1909. One is stocked with ‘artistic’ gowns and coats, identified in the exhibition programme as donated by Amy Kotze. More than 50 stalls raised funds for the cause by selling a variety of donated goods from sweets to millinery, depicting suffragettes in a ‘good’ light, as conventionally feminine makers and creators of beautiful things, rather than as destructive ‘shrieking sisters’. Department stores donated hats and other goods for sale. W.S.P.U. ‘branded’ goods in the organisation’s colours of purple, white and green were also sold. Kotze raised £50.00 (£3,000 today) from the sale of her clothes.

Similar Arts and Crafts influenced dress is seen in contemporary photographs of campaigners such as Charlotte Marsh, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney. Embroidered blouses and pinafore dresses were popular round about 1908-10. Suspended pockets also featured in fashionable dress. The large scale embroidery and cut of our gown is similarly inventive and reminiscent of Kotze’s work. I particularly like the embroidered buttons and stylish finish to the belt at the back waist.

Further research

The dress came to Killerton in the 1980s, with absolutely no record of its provenance. Without a dressmaker or shop label it would be hard to prove its origins.

So how do we find out more? London archives may yet have more to reveal. Little is known about Kotze and her career as an embroiderer and dressmaker. Her name does not appear on the 1911 census. Perhaps she protested by not completing the census form in that year. From about 1913 Amy Kotze was advertising millinery rather than gowns, and by the 1920s was running an art gallery.

Kotze did not label her gowns in a conventional way. Instead she hid an embroidered arrow (symbolic of suffragette imprisonment) inside the seams.

Guess what we will be doing when the dress comes off display at the end of the exhibition?