Suffragette-defaced penny

• Suffragette was a word first used by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory term for the movement for women's suffrage.

By Helena Kennedy, human rights lawyer

Looking at this coin it is extraordinary to just imagine how they were thinking ways of affronting the public or drawing the public’s attention to what they wanted and here you stamped on to this copper coin ‘votes for women’, on the very face of the King.

It was an affront, it would have been so shocking to society at that time; it would be treasonous. That act was in itself seen as treachery and yet of course people would be handling coins in their purses and in their pockets and would suddenly see this invocation, this demand for a right, for an entitlement and I think it was quite an inventive thing to do.

Of course stamping a coin was against the law. Defacing coinage is against the law so there is that issue of whether it’s ethical to break the law in certain circumstances. Is it ethical to do it and my argument would be that there are some times when in pursuit of human rights it’s the only thing that people can do. As a lawyer I’m not supposed to say that but I think there are occasions when the general public would agree, that somehow one has to stand up to be counted.

There have been other examples of where civil disobedience has brought success. Gandhi was one of the great representatives of this, of a peaceful opposition and he created great change in his nation as a result. These women were so courageous because they were often so hurt and harmed in the process and they were fearful. But they overcame their fear because of their belief that this was right, that women should be treated equal to men and if we wanted to have a society where all voices were heard then there had to be an extension of the franchise.

This penny is just such a simple and tiny object and it says so much, so much about what we are wanting, about seeking equality for women and about how into the hands of those who had power and influence there was this small but huge demand, votes for women.

I get a really visceral thrill from this object. There is something so extraordinary about it, the idea that this tiny everyday item, a copper, a penny in your pocket and that some powerful politician, some banker, some eminent personage of those times would have taken from his pocket a penny to pay for something and there was the message, votes for women. To hold it gives you a sense of connection to the suffragettes. It’s wonderful and it’s those things from history, those objects that just take us back to a period, to a moment, to a wonderful imaginative way of making a political statement.