The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

This week the UK is commemorating the centenary of women's suffrage. Women aged over 30 who met minimum property qualifications became entitled to vote, but it would be another ten years before they achieved the same voting rights as men.

I found this 1913 record at, of all places, a steam traction engine rally. Given that the composer is shown as "LE Femministe", not "LA Femministe", I suspect that his intentions were satirical as the Suffragette movement was widely lampooned at this time.

Phoenix was UK Columbia's budget label, introduced in 1913 to combat the flood of cheap imported records which were creating a price war.

I don't believe "Le Femministe" is a composer's credit, rather a subtitle......but the improper gender is probably due to ignorance.

Whoever the composer was, the piece is just a very ordinary military band number and therefore rather disappointing. I had hoped that it would contain at least a few bars of Dame Ethel Smyth's famous 1911 composition "The March of the Women" which became the Suffragette movement's anthem, but no such luck.

estott wrote:I don't believe "Le Femministe" is a composer's credit, rather a subtitle......

Yes, but I think it is probably an Italian plural ('The Feminists' – the singular would have been la femminista) rather than a French feminine singular with the article misspelt. In French the m would not be doubled.

Oliver Mundy.

Menophanes wrote:

estott wrote:I don't believe "Le Femministe" is a composer's credit, rather a subtitle......

Yes, but I think it is probably an Italian plural ('The Feminists' – the singular would have been la femminista) rather than a French feminine singular with the article misspelt. In French the m would not be doubled.

Oliver Mundy.

which begs the question - Why Italian?