"I want women to take on big and difficult tasks. I don't want them loitering on the shore all the time, afraid to set sail. I'm neither afraid nor needy; in my own way, I'm an explorer who firmly believes in the benefits of this pioneering work."
Ethel Smyth

On March 12, 1912, Ethel Smyth smashed the windows of the British Colonial Secretariat with stones. As part of the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), she fought for women's suffrage in Great Britain. Smyth had been resistant since her youth: as a young woman, she went on hunger strike to protest against her father's ban on her studying composition.
 

Ethel Smyth came from an upper-middle-class Victorian family. Her father was a major general in India and made a good living from the British colonial system, which ultimately enabled the young musician to study composition in Leipzig despite her family's enormous resistance. Her training at the conservatory disappointed her, but the newly discovered freedom also gave her room for musical growth. Smyth took private lessons from Heinrich von Herzogenberg and began a love affair with his wife Elisabeth. Elisabeth von Herzogenberg was also a patron of the arts and Smyth met many musicians in the couple's household, including Clara Schumann, Edvard Grieg and Johannes Brahms. However, she also experienced rejection as a composer there. In her autobiography "A Stormy Winter", she describes how Brahms was initially interested in one of her fugues until he discovered that it had been written by a woman.

Later, Smyth also met Tchaikovsky, who inspired her to write increasingly large-scale orchestral music. Among other things, Smyth composed the Mass in D Major, which was premiered in 1893. Dedicated to her Roman Catholic friend Pauline Trevelyan, it was Smyth's only sacred work, which she herself described as her best work. Despite its success, she subsequently had great difficulty finding concert halls and opera houses to perform her works - the works of a woman. The world premiere of the opera "Der Wald" finally took place in 1902. Until 2016, it was the only opera by a woman to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her operas "The Wreckers" (1906) and "The Boatswain's Mate" (1916) were also successful. From 1913, the first signs of hearing loss appeared, which ended in deafness. In this state, Smyth wrote the symphony "The Prison", which was premiered in 1931, but then turned to her writing skills and wrote several - very funny - autobiographies. During this time, she also developed a close friendship with Virginia Woolf. Ethel Smyth died of pneumonia in 1944 at the age of 86.

In 1910, Ethel Smyth witnessed the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst at one of her speeches and decided to dedicate two years of her life to the fight for women's suffrage. She joined the WSPU and from then on was also involved in political activities. These ranged from meetings to militant actions, such as the one described above, in which numerous windows were smashed around Oxford Street in London and which landed her in prison for two months.

During this time, Smyth composed three choral pieces for the movement in the "Songs of Sunrise" cycle. The best known of these is probably "March of the Women" (1911), which was regarded as the anthem of the suffragettes. During her time in prison, the song was sung by the prisoners themselves in the courtyard, with Ethel Smyth conducting them from her cell window with her toothbrush.

Text: Lena Lukow