She's Got the Point

Sloan, John. “She’s Got the Point.” The Masses (Vol. 5, No. 1): 9. New York: The Masses Publishing Co., 1913. 

John Sloan’s cartoon “She’s Got the Point” depicts a public address from a suffragette on a busy street corner, a common scene from the years leading up to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Unlike Glen Coleman’s unkempt suffragette, however, this woman is polished and seems to successfully command attention with her speech. A large—and predominately male—crowd of onlookers has gathered around her. The notable exception to this masculine cluster of bystanders is a woman standing at the periphery of the circle, in the foreground of the illustration. The woman appears to be wealthy, sporting a feathered hat and white gloves. Her white attire creates a strident contrast with both the dark mass of the crowd as well as the suffragette, who wears a black dress and hat. The contrasting colors suggest that the two women embody separate femininities: the conventional and the progressive. The woman in white addresses a man on her right-hand side. “You’d better be good, Jim,” the woman warns, “or I’ll join ‘em.” The woman’s playful threat is emblematic of the larger perceived threat that suffragettes posed to traditional gender roles. The cartoon therefore captures the cultural anxiety created by women’s political organizations and the ways in which they challenged the traditional masculinity of the public sphere.

Though the cartoon addresses the suffrage movement in general, it also makes a special appeal to Sloan’s New York readers. Behind the speaker hangs a banner inscribed with a series of acronyms that require some historical decoding. The banner reads, “W.S.P.—25th A.D.—N.Y.” “W.S.P.” stands for the New York Woman Suffrage Party, which was founded in October 1909 by 804 delegates from local suffrage groups. The organization played a key role in the regional and national fight for suffrage and contributed to New York state’s suffrage victory in 1917 (Schaffer 269). Known for their diverse public demonstrations, the WSP often endured ridicule and occasional violence for its efforts to stage events in order to garner support for social reform. Some of the most notable resistance came from other women, who felt that the group’s theatrical tactics were demeaning and indecent (271).

In the cartoon, we sense this playful resistance from the woman in white, who implies that she would only join the suffragists if her husband fails to be “good.” The wife, in this scene, exercises a kind of power over her husband’s behavior. The husband’s clear displeasure is emblematic of broader concerns over a woman’s ability to circumvent masculine authority and step outside of its control, either by joining the suffrage movement or by using avoidance of the movement as leverage. The cartoonist seems to suggest that the suffrage movement is counterintuitively empowering even for traditional women who never formally supported the cause.

Sources
Schaffer, Ronald. “The New York City Woman Suffrage Party, 1909-1919.” New York History 43.3 (July 1962): 269-287. JSTOR. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.