A Game of Pank-A-Squith: Remembering Women’s Social and Political Union in Sally Heathcote: Suffragette

This article studies a graphic narrative that engages with a key moment in the history of feminism and negotiates its meaning in the present. Mary M. Talbot, Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot’s Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (2014) is a work of historical fiction that places its working-class eponymous protagonist in the midst of the militant politics and internal conflicts of the suffrage movement in Edwardian Britain and follows her as she navigates the movement’s class dynamics and tensions around national belonging. The analysis draws on the field of feminist historiography and on a narratological framework in comics studies to examine how the affordances of the medium contribute to the collective memory of feminism, focusing specifically on the representation of narrative space. It uses the board game Pank-A-Squith, which Sally plays with her comrades, as a metaphor for the role of space in the narrative. The game showcases places associated with the actions of the suffrage organization Sally is a member of, the Women’s Social and Political Union, but it also functions as a structure that enables the movement of its members from the confines of the home towards the freedom of political representation. Similarly, this article argues, public and private places in the narrative, such as monuments, government buildings, squares, parks, upper-class parlors, working-class lodgings and prison cells, function not simply as setting but also as actors that determine the characters’ ability to move, as well as the meaning of their actions. Through the thematization of these spaces, Sally Heathcote: Suffragette expresses contemporary concerns about the assumed origin of modern Western feminism as a middle class, often nationalist, movement, and is in conversation with narratives that view the history of feminism as a development from a single-issue movement toward an intersectional one.