Votes for Women: A touring exhibition exploring the fight for female suffrage

We’re delighted to introduce a new exhibition Faces of Change: Votes for Women, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition will tour three of our places and is part of our Women and Power programme, exploring the stories from women’s history and the debate over female suffrage.
As part of this special touring exhibition, you’ll be able to see well-known but rarely seen paintings, drawings, photographs and documents from the National Portrait Gallery Collection and items from our places that explore the debate that waged over women’s suffrage.
The exhibition will include items relevant to each place, connecting local stories of social protest, family divisions and deeply held beliefs to the wider national story.
Presenting an overview of the campaign for Votes for Women from the late 19th century until 1918, it includes portraits of key figures such as suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, and surveillance photographs of militant suffragettes.
Also on display are portraits representing the legacy of the suffrage movement, including Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat as an MP in the House of Commons, by John Singer Sargent, and a photograph of MP Ellen Wilkinson leading the Jarrow March in 1936.