12 Cruel Anti-Suffragette Cartoons

In commemoration of the 93rd anniversary of the August 18, 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, the magazine The Week published this selection of anti-suffragette cartoons. The portrayals of suffragettes range from incapable of loving or being loved to shirking the duties of womanhood, i.e. cleaning and childcare.

If you’d like to explore more suffrage-era cartoons—both for and against women’s enfranchisement—see Puck magazine’s suffrage issue and the Catherine H. Palczewski Suffrage Postcard Archive.

A Gallery of Suffrage, for Your Voting Pleasure: Political Cartoons From Before Women Could Vote

This small digital gallery from The Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum and The Archive (published online on The Nib) showcases full-color political cartoons from the suffrage era.

If you’d like to see more suffrage-era cartoons, check out the Catherine H. Palczewski Suffrage Postcard Archive, Puck magazine’s suffrage issue, and Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

Graphic Novel Trilogy: Suffrajitsu: Mrs. Pankhurst’s Amazons

Suffrajitsu: Mrs. Pankhurst’s Amazons comprises three suffrage-themed graphic novels, set in World War I-era Britain, that blend historical fiction with martial arts. Primarily distributed as e-books, the series was written by Tony Wolf and illustrated by Joao Vieira. This excerpt comes from Suffrajitsu‘s website:

The year is 1914, and with Europe on the brink of war, the leaders of the radical women’s rights movement are fugitives from the law. Their last line of defence is the elite secret society of “Amazons”; women trained in the martial art of Bartitsu and sworn to protect their leaders from arrest and assault. The stakes dramatically rise when the Amazons are thrust into a deadly game of cat and mouse against an aristocratic, Utopian cult.

Though the secret society featured in the trilogy is fictitious, Wolf was inspired by an actual group of suffragette bodyguards.

You can purchase the Suffrajitsu trilogy in e-book format via Amazon.com. You can also buy Suffrajitsu—both as individual issues and as a series—from comiXology.

For a more extensive account of some British suffragists’ use of militant tactics, see Andrew Rosen’s Rise Up, Women!: The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1914.

Pro-Suffrage Illustration: The Awakening, Puck 1915

Henry “Hy” Mayer’s pro-suffrage illustration first appeared as a two-page spread in Puck magazine’s suffrage issue, published February 20, 1915. The German-born Mayer was Puck’s head cartoonist at the time.

This description is an excerpt from a Library of Congress entry on “The Awakening”:

[The] Illustration shows a torch-bearing female labeled “Votes for Women,” symbolizing the awakening of the nation’s women to the desire for suffrage, striding across the western states, where women already had the right to vote, toward the east where women are reaching out to her. Printed below the cartoon is a poem by Alice Duer Miller.

“The Awakening” appeared in Puck during the Empire State Campaign, a 1915 referendum on a proposed amendment to the New York State constitution that would have granted women in the state full suffrage. New Yorkers voted against the referendum.

You can access and download the image in various formats—and find out more about it, including how to access the original work—here, via the Library of Congress.

You can access a free digital archive of various issues of Puck, including the issue in which “The Awakening” appeared, here, via the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The Puck Magazine Suffrage Issue

The satirical magazine Puck was one of the most influential American publications of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Making liberal use of cartoons and drawings, Puck gave its readers an irreverent mix of current events, pointed social commentary, political opinion, and often-scathing criticism of the day’s prominent figures. 

Although in earlier years Puck had ridiculed the idea of women’s enfranchisement, the magazine took the opposite tack with its February 20, 1915 “Suffrage Number.” Conceived as part of a massive mobilization campaign in support of a 1915 referendum to grant New York women the vote by amending the state’s constitution, the issue was a full-throated, heavily promoted endorsement of women’s right to vote. Puck enlisted the aid of a raft of major suffrage organizations and invited prominent pro-suffrage media figures to serve on a board of honorary editors. The issue borne of this collaboration devoted virtually all its content—including some of the most enduring imagery of the suffrage era—to the topic, and proved a milestone in the campaign for women’s enfranchisement.

Though the constitutional referendum failed that year, it gave momentum to the cause. New Yorkers voted their approval of a similar measure two years late in November 1917.

Adapted from Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (2017), pp. 159-160:

“Puck joined the charge, devoting almost the entirety of its February 20 issue to the subject of suffrage. The magazine ceded editorial direction for that month to the state’s major suffrage organizations, including the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, as prominently noted in the upper right-hand corner of its cover next to a sumptuous full-color illustration, titled “The Mascot.” The image depicted a young woman and a girl toddler, each draped in bright yellow “Votes for Women” sashes. A juggernaut of an editorial board came together to oversee the issue, dominated by Men’s League stalwarts: Oswald Garrison Villard of the New York Evening Post; Peter Finley Dunne aka “Mr. Dooley”; Arthur Brisbane of the New York Journal; Norman Hapgood, by then running Harper’s Weekly; Erman J. Ridgway of Everybody’s; William Dean Howells; S.S. McClure; Ogden Mills Reid of the New York Tribune; Irvin S. Cobb; John O’Hara Cosgrave of the New York World; and Frank Munsey of Munsey Publications. Cartoons, aphorisms, editorials, magnificent four-color illustrations, plenty of satire, and sufficient ridicule of the antis filled the issue. A note from the editor promised that Puck would keep hammering away at the subject week after week, ‘from now until the battle for woman suffrage is won’.”

Click here to view a free digitized version of Puck‘s suffrage issue, via the HathiTrust Digital Library.

You can also browse decades’ worth of other archived Puck issues here, via the HathiTrust Digital Library.

For more background on Puck and its political cartoons, see this article from Sidesplitter.

If you want to view and read more about iconic images from the suffrage issue, see “The Awakening” and “The Mascot.”

The Catherine H. Palczewski Suffrage Postcard Archive

This website provides a virtual tour of my archive of suffrage postcards. It is meant to provide a resource for scholars researching the visual images associated with the struggle for women’s suffrage in both the United States and Great Britain. These images have been collected by me and my partner, Arnie Madsen, PhD, over the last 15 years.

Feel free to use these images for non-commercial purposes, but please remember to provide attribution by indicating where you found them.

See also “War on women: Propaganda postcards from suffragette era show fierce battle fought by American women to get the vote… and Obama can thank them for his job,” an article about the collection by Helen Pow in the London Daily Mail of November 21, 2012 with a display of choice selections this “sobering collection of anti-feminist propaganda.” Postcard images from the Daily Mail article are below, along with more from a post on dangerousminds.net, published December 11, 2014.

The Suffrage Roots of Wonder Woman

As Jill Lepore explained in a 2014 interview on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, chronicles the iconic superheroine’s suffragist roots. Lepore’s exploration of Wonder Woman creator William Molton Marsten’s involvement in women’s suffrage is capsulized in an NPR Books review by Etelka Lehocky. It began while he was a student at Harvard and, as a member of the Harvard League for Woman Suffrage, he joined a vociferous 1911 protest by students and alumni against the university’s refusal to allow the militant British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to speak on campus. Lehocky writes:

Marston had been a committed feminist for decades by the time he created Wonder Woman in 1941. He’d been exposed to the women’s suffrage movement while in college, and Sadie Holloway, whom he married in 1915, was “something of a revolutionary,” Lepore writes. 25 years later, Marston’s determination to depict Wonder Woman in chains was partly inspired by women’s suffrage imagery. (He had a rather forced argument for why the chains actually represented liberation.) Wonder Woman’s first artist, Harry G. Peter, had himself once drawn suffrage cartoons.

Lepore wrote about Wonder Woman for the New Yorker in a piece titled, “The Last Amazon,” in which she talks about Marston’s suffrage connection. Among the many reviews and notices of Lepore’s book are those that have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the New York Times.

Cartoon Against Women’s Suffrage

This cartoon from the New Zealand History government website contains typical anti-suffrage imagery, warning how changing gender roles could harm society. In it, a harrassed and brow-beaten husband wears women’s clothing while making a mess of domestic chores. Meanwhile, his domineering wife—just returned from somewhere outside the domestic realm—criticizes his housekeeping. Though the scene is humorous, it argued that giving women the vote could upset traditional gender roles—to the detriment of men.

The Women Who Drew for Suffrage

In the popular imagination of those who lived in the twentieth century, political cartoons were drawn by men. But in Alice Sheppard’s “Cartooning For Suffrage,” readers see how dozens of women artists drew political cartoons extolling the suffrage movement. Sheppard contextualizes these artists by explaining the history of political cartoons and the suffrage movement. She also delves into the individual lives of female cartoonists.

Sheppard’s work details this forgotten history, challenging stereotypes in the process and exploring artistic gems like the work of Lou Rogers, whose work was featured in prominent magazines of the era like the satirical publication Judge. The political cartoons Sheppard discusses–she includes 200 of them in her book–were drawn to subvert stereotypes of suffrage activists as seductresses or shrews.  As this informative Chicago Tribune book review notes, the author details the two strategies female cartoonists used to buck those stereotypes: Depicting “voting rights as a tool to end female oppression” and presenting “the idea that society as a whole lost out when women were excluded from the political process.”

In 1995, the Washington, DC-based National Museum of Women in Arts featured some of the cartoons Sheppard wrote about in an exhibit marking the 75th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Political cartoonists for suffrage “knew that you can’t argue against a picture,” Sheppard told the Associated Press in an article previewing that exhibit.

For more on Sheppard’s book, see Google Books for some snippets. A 1997 issue of the academic periodical Woman’s Art Journal features a review of the book You can sign up for a JStor account and read the review for free. For more suffrage-themed cartoons, see the scholar Jaqueline McLeod Rogers’ article on the anti-suffrage cartoons of John Tinney McCutcheon and Newton McConnell.

Pro-Suffrage Illustration: The Mascot, 1915

This Puck magazine cover by Rolf Armstrong, later one of the most famous American pin-up artists, depicts a woman suffragist alongside the publication’s namesake mascot, Puck, who holds a pencil. Both sport a “Votes for Women” sash, an emblem of the suffrage movement that readers of the day would instantly have recognized.

The title of the work, which graced the cover of the magazine’s February 20, 1915 suffrage issue, is “The Mascot,” an apparent reference to the strong pro-suffrage stance the influential satirical magazine was taking: Puck was now a mascot not only for the magazine but also for the fight for women’s enfranchisement.

You can learn more about Puck‘s seminal suffrage issue here, and you can view a free digitized version of the issue here, via the HathiTrust Digital Library.

You can also browse decades’ worth of archived Puck issues here, via the HathiTrust Digital Library.