Nobility, Duty and Courage: Propaganda and Inspiration in Interwar Women’s and Girls’ Pageants

Abstract

Though the interwar years have been characterised as having limited opportunities for women compared to the excitement of the suffragette campaigns and wartime, the organisation of pageants gave them a chance to literally step on to the public stage. Even where managing committees and script writers were largely male, women were often the backstage driving force of costumiers, organisers, ticket sellers and performers. But occasionally women took over the entire production, creating pageants in female-only institutions ranging from small girls’ schools to huge groups of Women’s Institutes.
The results were enormously varied productions, from the very traditional messages of the Girls’ Friendly Society (to which only virgins were admitted) to the unorthodox heroines of the Methodist sisterhoods. Their choices of characters and framing give us an insight into the varied politics and visions of these buoyantly optimistic years, in which newly-enfranchised women were exploring for the first time what their new citizenship meant. Class, religious belief and education were all reflected in the histories they chose to portray.