Thesis: Drawing on Women: Representations of Women and Suffrage Imagery in The Masses, 1913-1917

This masters thesis examines depictions of female suffragists and other women in the now-defunct socialist magazine The Masses. The following excerpt comes from the paper’s abstract:

This study examines the ways that suffrage imagery and other depictions of women were mobilized as political symbols in the graphics of The Masses, a socialist literary magazine published monthly in Greenwich Village from 1911 to 1917. The Masses, whose roster of artists included John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Charles Allen Winter, typically invested in images of women to signify the “lyrical” left’s re-working of socialist and suffragist ideologies. Thus the magazine’s drawings of women shed light on shifts in American socialist iconography and ideologies from the high point of the movement in 1912, to its fragmentation in the mid-1910s, to its decline in 1917 following the nation’s entry into World War I. Similarly, they also provide insight into the fluctuating discourse surrounding women’s drive for the ballot.

Representations of suffragists, New Women, working-class women, as allegorical female figures were used as a point of identification and differentiation for the lyrical left from not only orthodox socialists, but other political forces as well. This project demonstrates that the role these pictures played in this process of signification is complicated and contradictory.

Interested in learning more about (alleged) connections between socialism and suffrage? Click here to read some anti-suffrage arguments rooted in opposition to socialism.

Women’s Suffrage Prison Narratives

Prison Narratives from Boethius to Zana examines selected works of writers, from the 6th century to the 21st, imprisoned for their beliefs. The book’s seventh chapter, “‘From Prison to People’: How Women Jailed for Suffrage Inscribed Their Prison Experience on the American Public,” focuses on Alice Paul and members of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) who were jailed for picketing for suffrage in Washington, DC.

Since most of the NWP suffragists who were “jailed for freedom”—to use member Doris Steven’s term—were denied personal items like pens and paper, they did not leave behind a large body of jailhouse writings. However, if we expand our definition of “prison writing” to include other forms of visual and verbal rhetoric designed to inscribe their experience upon public consciousness, a great deal of material is available, including picket messages, The Suffragist magazine, and the “Prison Special” speaking tour. The chapter examines these efforts in light of Paul’s approach to non-violent “militancy” and rhetorical strategies such as “political mimesis.”

A free excerpt is available through Google Books, where you can also purchase access to the full work. You can purchase a physical copy of the book through the publisher’s website.

ISBN: 978-1-349-49153-7

The Masses: Suffrage Issue 1915

In November 1915, The Masses, an early 20th century socialist magazine, weighed in on the raging debate over suffrage with an issue dedicated to the topic.

This issue of the magazine, led by the magazine’s eidtor, Max Eastman, who was the founding secretary of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York, featured cartoons, poems, essays and reported articles on suffrage.

In “Adventures In Anti-Land,” the novelist and journalist Floyd Dell goes undercover to an anti-suffrage organization’s office in New York, and write humorously of what he discovered. “They show not merely that women isn’t fit to vote, they give good reasons for believing that she isn’t fit to live,” he writes sarcastically.

Eastman also wrote his own essay. He argues that the suffrage movement should stop trying to convince opponents by changing their opinions but should rather appeal to the fact that the suffrage movement is fundamentally about liberty. He also adds another argument he believes suffrage activists should adopt: that universal suffrage will lead to universal education, and that education will allow women to turn into “fully developed, active and intelligent” individuals.

For more on The Masses, Max Eastman and the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, see Eastman’s essay in the suffrage publication the Woman Voter. You should also read Brooke Kroeger’s 2017 book, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote.

The full PDF of this Masses magazine issue can be accessed by clicking the link below.

The March of 3,000 Women in New York

Journalist Bertha Damaris Knobe, a well-known writer who covered the suffrage movement, wrote an account of a May 1911 suffrage parade in New York City for Harper’s Weekly.

Knobe writes evocatively, explaining the scene that unfolded during a march on Fifth Avenue and rally in Union Square. There were 3,000 women marching to the tune of five bands, drawing thousands of spectators—men included, who mostly watched respectfully, save for a few hecklers. Knobe notes it was “the first big woman’s suffrage procession in America,” and that among the marchers were prominent women such as the 90-year-old Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first ordained female minister in the United States.

The Harper’s Weekly article also included photographs that show the parade, march and speakers.

The cover of this Harper’s Weekly issue can be viewed by clicking on the link below. And a copy of this article can be found below. It can also be found in the HarpWeek historical database, which many libraries and academic institutions have access to. You can check WorldCat to see if there’s a library with HarpWeekly near you.

For more on Bertha Damaris Knobe’s journalism on the suffrage movement, see her article on the suffrage victory in California, and this account of suffragist activism for The Independent magazine.

Woman Suffrage: Wyoming Women Had the Right to Vote Years Before the 19th Amendment

This 2011 National Geographic article by Mary Schons examines Wyoming’s pioneering role the history of women’s suffrage, how it happened, and the arguments for and against women’s right to vote. Wyoming women got to vote for the first time in September 1870. In 1890, Wyoming became the first US state to have full voting rights for women and so gained its moniker as “the Equality State.”

Race, Gender, and the Fight for Votes for Women: W.E.B. Du Bois On Suffrage

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most important early 20th century US scholars and activists, is best known as a key figure in the the fight for African-Americans’ civil rights. But he was also a prominent supporter of the women’s suffrage movement, and used the magazine he edited, the NAACP’s The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, to advance the movement for women’s voting rights.

In the pages of the Crisis, between 1911 to 1920, Du Bois published essays, commentary—his own and others’—and compiled symposia from leading women’s suffrage advocates, both black and white. The magazine also highlighted fierce debates in the black community over support for suffrage, as well as controversies over race within the women’s suffrage movement.

In one October 1911 editorial (click here and go to page 243), Du Bois took aim at Anna Howard Shaw, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA, who had asserted publicly that all African-Americans opposed suffrage, and that the suffrage movement should “not touch the Negro problem” because it would “offend the South.” Du Bois’ riposte was that the suffrage movement’s lack of support for civil rights was hypocritical, and that it undermined American democracy. 

In a March 1912 article (click here and go to page 195), Du Bois quotes from a resolution he submitted to NAWSA, which argues that blacks and women were “fighting the same battle” for voting rights and should therefore be in solidarity with one another. 

An August 1912 piece (click here and go to page 234) makes the case that “votes for women means votes for black women”—and that women’s suffrage would increase the black voting population.

And in August 1915, Du Bois’ Crisis published (click here and go to page 178) a symposium of articles by “leading thinkers of colored America” in favor of suffrage. 

For more on Du Bois’ thinking on suffrage as exhibited in Crisis, see Garth E. Pauley’s work in the Journal of Black Studies (accessible through JStor here) and Jean Fagan Yellin’s article in The Massachusetts Review (also accessible through JStor).

Brooke Kroeger’s book The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote also has more on the Crisis and women’s suffrage. See: pp. 81, 90-91, 124-126, 150, 162, 165, 172.

Lastly, pages 289-290 and 369-70 in David Levering Lewis’ book W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race discuss Du Bois and the women’s movement for voting rights.

Here’s a linked list of Crisis editorials on women’s suffrage:

October 1911, pp. 243-244.

March 1912, pp. 195-196.

June 1912, pp. 76-77.

August 1912, pp. 181-182.

September 1912, p. 234.

May 1913, p. 29.

August 1914, pp.179-180.

April 1915, p. 285.

August 1915, pp. 177-192.

February 1915, p. 182.

November 1915, pp. 29-30.

November 1917, p. 8.

March 1920, p. 234.

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.”

George Creel, “Chivalry Versus Justice”

Until April of 1917, when George Creel became the head of the Committee on Public Information as the United States entered World War I, he was an active member of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, serving as its publicity chairman. The willingness of well-known male journalists like Creel to take their support for suffrage public through the press and the magazines—he did both—was key to the movement’s growing support in the final decade of the campaign. In this piece, Creel counters a prevailing conception women’s position in society. “There is the bland theory of vine clad cottages and dense walls of fragrant honeysuckle, behind which every right thinking woman sits in security surrounded by her babes,” he wrote. “What of the squalid holes in 13,000 licensed tenements in New York alone?”

Creel had advanced a similar argument in a letter to the editor of the New York Times a year earlier, in response to a statement he heard at an anti-suffrage meeting, a contention that winning the ballot would mean the disintegration of the home. “Home? What home?” Creel asked rhetorically in his letter of response. “Surely they cannot mean the dark, squalid holes in the 13,000 licensed tenements in New York City alone, where whole families and adult boarders sleep, eat, and work in a single room, toiling incredible hours for incredible pittances.”

“Chivalry Versus Justice” was also printed in the magazine Pictorial Review. To find a nearby library where you can access the Pictorial Review issue it appeared in, click here. Downloads of the pamphlet and Creel’s letter can be found below, along with the link to the letter to the editor in the New York Times archive.

“‘Homes,’ Mr. Creel Wants to Know Which Ones Suffragism Threatens.” New York Times, April 18, 1914, p. 10.

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.

Historical Connections: The Weird Familiarity of 100-Year-Old Feminism Memes

This 2016 Atlantic article by Adrienne LaFrance links today’s political memes to suffrage and anti-suffrage propaganda imagery from the early 20th century. LaFrance argues that politics often clashes with gender norms, particularly when women and women’s issues are poised to make history—such as when women were fighting to get the vote or when Hillary Clinton was running for president. Both the images of yesterday (pamphlets, postcards, posters, and the like) and images of today (memes) often rely on humor to either support or oppose women’s role in politics.

You can find many examples of suffrage-era propaganda of the sort LaFrance describes in the Catherine H. Palczewski Suffrage Postcard Archive.