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.

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.

Woman Suffrage Memorabilia: A Site Devoted to Such Artifacts as Buttons, Post Cards, Ribbons, Sheet Music, and Ceramics

This delightful website, curated by Kenneth Florey, includes a plethora of rich visual materials from the suffrage era.

From the site:

The primary purpose of this site is to provide a repository for information about memorabilia connected to the woman suffrage movement in both England and America. Subjects discussed here will include woman suffrage buttons, suffrage ribbons, suffrage sashes, suffrage advertising cards, suffrage jewelry, suffrage sheet music, suffrage postcards, Cinderella stamps and other aspects of suffrage ephemera. The focus is not on pamphlets and autograph material, although articles about these types of items do appear on occasion.

Florey is also the author of American Woman Suffrage Postcards, a book of photographic history.

American Woman Suffrage Postcards: A Study and Catalog

Google books provides significant excerpts from this book, which offers a fascinating look at suffrage-themed postcards from the era.

An abstract:

American women’s suffrage activists were fascinated with suffrage themed postcards. They collected them, exchanged them, wrote about them, used them as fundraisers and organized “postcard day” campaigns. The cards they produced were imaginative and ideological, advancing arguments for the enfranchisement of women and responding to antisuffrage broadsides. Commercial publishers were also interested in suffrage cards, recognizing their profit potential. Their products, though, were reactive rather than proactive, conveying stereotypes they assumed reflected public attitudes–often negative–towards the movement. Cataloging approximately 700 examples, this study examines the “visual rhetoric” of suffrage postcards in the context of the movement itself and as part of the general history of postcards.

Additional information and commentary on suffrage-era postcards can be found on the author’s curated site, womansuffragememorabilia.com. (Not ready to commit to visiting the site? You can read our description here.)

Both American Woman Suffrage Postcards and Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.’s book Winning the Vote have gorgeous full-color images of suffrage photographs and ephemera.