A Great Joke

Coleman, Glen O. “A Great Joke.” The Masses (Vol. 5, No. 1): 7. New York: The Masses Publishing Co., 1913.  

Glen Coleman’s “A Great Joke” cartoon appears alongside Seymour Barnard’s “Woman’s Place—A Nursery Rhyme” in the October 1913 issue of The Masses. Both texts take aim at suffragettes. Taken together, Coleman’s visual message and Barnard’s textual satire dehumanize and infantilize women participating in the suffrage movement. “Suffragette, suffragette,” Barnard’s rhyme begins, “why do you roam? Women are wisest staying at home.” The word “roam”, which is repeated throughout the poem, attaches a sense of aimlessness and futility to the suffrage movement. The poem explores the broader cultural impulse that sought to control and regulate a woman’s movements both inside and outside the home. That women should stay “at home” articulates a common refrain promoted by anti-suffragists. The nursery rhyme goes on to challenge the suffragette’s mothering abilities as well as her role in contributing to the rise of wayward children. Women, the rhyme suggests, must choose either political activism or motherhood; they cannot have both.

In “A Great Joke,” Glen Coleman responds to Barnard’s lines by showing what happens to women who “roam.” The cartoonist portrays the suffragette as an intriguing, animalistic spectacle for the rowdy crowd encircling her. Her unkempt and ragged appearance—evidenced by her untucked blouse and crooked hat—emphasizes the threat posed to her physical body by the aggressive mob gathered around the storefront. She sports a bruise on her cheek and, judging by the stick in her hand and the pile of litter at her feet, has had to fight off projectiles from onlookers. Children in the foreground point at the woman as if she were an animal in a zoo or an attraction in a freak show. A shopkeeper leans toward her with interest. Suffragettes, Coleman implies, create a theater environment and draw attention through their transgressive and bizarre womanhood. The political message of her activism thus becomes obscured by the crowd’s overarching interest in her appearance and critical appraisal of her deviant femininity. By framing the cartoon with a childish nursery rhyme, Coleman reinforces the crowd’s failure to take her cause seriously and articulates the widely held perception of the suffrage cause as a “great joke”. The cartoon joins the nursery rhyme in suggesting that the woman has entered a realm of public activism where she does not belong, and she would have been “wisest staying at home.”