BIG READ: In full colour: celebrating underrecognised women of a century past

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” wrote literary innovator Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own.

It’s an appropriate quote to open A Woman’s World: 1850-1960, the third collaboration between photographic artist Marina Amaral and historian Dan Jones. Their work brings new perspectives to history, in this instance by focusing, in full colour, on the experiences of women in the century before the watershed 1960s feminist decade.

It’s true that, even today, some photographers prefer to work exclusively in black and white. Photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank believed that “black and white are the colours of photography”, because their contrast “symbolises the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected”.

But for Amaral, colour amplifies features and emotions. “Colour brings life back to the most important moments,” she argues. And, according to WIRED magazine, she is the worldwide master of photographic colourisation.

In this book the colourisation elevates these women’s accomplishments, dramatising them for the digital age. It removes their remoteness, so that we can better remember and acknowledge their achievements.

Smartly, rather than a chronological presentation, the 200 images in A Woman’s World are grouped in 11 thematic chapters involving the realms of human endeavour, including politics and leadership (Women in Charge), business (Women on the Shop Floor), activism (Women in the Streets), exploration (Women in the Wilds) and science (Women in White Coats).

Women on Stage opens with a 1953 picture of Marilyn Monroe. Real name Norma Jean Mortensen, she was already a megastar at 26 when the photograph was taken. Is it possible that it shows her anxiety and loneliness, that her dull and slightly narrowed eyes betray insomnia and general unhappiness? She died of an overdose just 10 years later.    

Certainly, some of the women included are too predictable, or the images mundane, even boring, like Queen Victoria surrounded by her royal brood, Florence Nightingale with an apron of nurses, and a meaningless photograph of two unidentified women travelling serenely in a car in Tokyo circa 1915.

But most are intriguing, especially the obscure or near unknown characters, such as Fanny Cochrane Smith, one of the last Tasmanian Aborigines, pictured recording her voice on a wax cylinder phonograph in 1903. Or the Anglo-Irish activist, pacifist, suffragist, anti-imperialist Charlotte Despard, shown at a 1933 communist rally in Trafalgar Square, London, at the age of 89. She’s a hunched and haggard Old Mother Hubbard, but still feisty, clenching a fist to make her point.

I’d never heard of Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii before the monarchy was overthrown by rebels, supported by US Marines, in 1893. Her photograph is dated about 1910; she looks resigned and weary. Hawaii was annexed by the US shortly after the coup.  

As if to underscore Woolf’s point, some of the most powerful images are of subjects that remain anonymous. Probably photographed about mid-1952 during the first mass anti-apartheid civil disobedience protests, a black woman sits on a train, right below the Slegs Blankes/Europeans Only sign. Her lips form a devil-may-care smirk, but her eyes and tensed shoulders reveal a combination of anger and angst. Jones’s accompanying text notes the vital role played by women such as Ida Mntwana, Annie Silinga and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in kick-starting the anti-apartheid struggle.

There’s a complicated, sad story behind the picture of British scientist Rosalind Franklin, herself busy taking photographs using a microscope. In the mid-20th century she was the world’s best X-ray crystallographer, and took what has been described as the most important photograph of all time, an image revealing the structure of DNA. This opened the field of molecular biology. Jones’s narration is inadequately scathing of the behaviour of her three fellow scientists, all men, who received the 1962 Nobel prize for her discovery, and refused to acknowledge her contribution. It was “one of the most egregious rip-offs in the history of science”, writes one of Franklin’s biographers.

There’s hardly any colour in the ghostly visage staring from the page at the start of the Women in White Coats chapter. Marie Curie is grey-faced, grey-haired and wears a grey tunic and dark jersey. The photograph isn’t dated, but it’s likely that she was already seriously ill. Curie won two Nobel prizes, one for physics and one for chemistry, having discovered the elements polonium and radium and, by isolating the latter, pioneering the field of radiology. She always carried bottles of both elements with her, Jones writes, and slept with a jar of glowing radium on her bedside table. She died in 1934 — of radiation poisoning.

Sports lovers will revel in the Women at Play section. The best image is of Gertrude Ederle, taken during her swim, the first by a woman, across the English Channel on August 6 1926. Amaral has done well not to embellish the image: the water is an oily dark, the swimmer’s skin looks pallid from cold, her cap is dull in the dim light of either dawn or dusk. There’s little to see except the face, the essence of human determination in action. Ederle completed the crossing in 14 and a half hours — two hours faster than the men’s record at the time.

“Why should I merely be a footnote in his life?” was Martha Gellhorn’s rebuke whenever she was asked about her five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn was a noted novelist and journalist in her own right. Her face, in the image of the two of them, standing side-by-side but notably apart, reflects pride and strength. She was brave and headstrong, too, the only female reporter to land at the Normandy beaches on D-Day in 1944. She had been refused journalistic accreditation, but hid on a Red Cross boat. Once ashore she worked as a stretcher bearer between filing reports of the invasion.    

Women were good at fighting wars, too. I knew of the legendary Russian sniper in World War 2, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, without knowing what she looked like. She was one of 2,000 female snipers deployed by the Soviets, whose average number of confirmed kills was five. Pavlichenko’s was 309.

The opposite applies to singer and performer Josephine Baker, whose image I recognise, but I wasn’t aware that she used her fame as cover to spy for French intelligence during the same war. She was given a state funeral with full military honours when she died in 1975.

These sorts of surprises are on almost every page. Amaral’s colourisation is soft rather than saturated, and many images retain a grainy composition or imprecise focus in keeping with early photographic techniques. And Jones’s narrations strike the right balance between contextual brevity and small, intriguing details, so that they highlight the image rather than distract from it.  

The overall result is enthralling. And photography enthusiasts will delight in the appendix: thumbnail-size images of each original photograph, allowing comparison to Amaral’s adaptation.

The book conveys how women’s opportunities, roles and rights changed during the period. Across the world, these 200 featured women were ambitious, courageous, brilliant thinkers, and often powerful. They broke the constraints and conventions of their times. It’s fitting that history, through creations such as A Woman’s World, is starting to recognise that they shaped our world as much as men did.

Virginia Woolf would be pleased.