Bloody Brilliant Women. Cathy Newman

figures as they flit across the drab Edwardian landscape like exotic birds. Some of her finest ‘suffragette’ photos were taken on 23 July 1910 at a Hyde Park rally to celebrate the Conciliation Bill being debated, where over 150 campaigners were due to give speeches. Walking at the head of the ‘Prisoners’ Pageant’ are three formerly imprisoned suffragettes: Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst and, wearing her academic robes and looking stern, Emily Davison.

      Christina stopped photographing the women’s suffrage movement in the summer of 1913. The following year, her health failing and increasingly confined to a wheelchair, she found a new subject: the military, especially soldiers before they left London for the Western Front.

      Her photos of young men relaxing and on parade at their barracks are exceptionally moving – we know, as they do not, what fate has in store for them. But other more random pictures tell another parallel story. Among her First World War photos is a portrait taken in May 1916 that shows the direction of travel for women – a group of women police officers at a Women’s War Work exhibition in Knightsbridge. In their long black skirts, barely mustering a smile, they look austere and forbidding. At the centre, holding her gloves, staring down the camera as if she is about to arrest it, is a former suffragette called Mary Allen, now a police inspector …

      An ambiguous, disturbing figure, Allen is the shape of things to come; a tidy emblem of the confusion many felt and would continue to feel as the twentieth century unwound; an example of what happens when a damaged personality grows convinced that the only meaningful solutions are extreme ones. But that is all in the future. For now, let us read the image as a celebration of female strength, solidarity and progress – a glorious summation of over thirty years of vigorous campaigning.