Suffragette Cartoons

“Suffragette cartoon.” Scribner's Magazine (Vol. 47, No. 4): 112n. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910. 

This page from Scribner’s Magazine juxtaposes two different explicitly politically oriented cartoons. In the top panel, we see a debate between different female candidates—auspiciously for some office, possibly within a suffrage organization or a women’s club, a type of group that gained popularity during this time—in which one candidate evokes the other’s physical inferiority as a reason she should not be elected. The speaking candidate mocks her competitor’s weight, shoe size, and the fact that she has to dye her hair. In doing so, she employs contemporary feminine beauty ideals or standards in a debate that one would suspect, or hope, to remain focused on the political issues of suffrage and women’s rights. The cartoon thus mocks suffragettes by implying that women are incapable of fixating their minds on the “masculine” realm of politics; instead, they relegate themselves to the feminine concerns of physical beauty. In addition, the cartoon also suggests an internalized misogyny and a woman vs. woman belief system in which women are incapable of supporting one another and must, instead, continually attack their rival. Such a rival that, in this instance, is political, but could also be social or romantic. The cartoon reduces the suffrage movement to an imagined stereotype, which suggests a belief in the utter inability of women to work together and to engage, thoughtfully, with the masculine concerns of the public sphere.

The second cartoon presents two men gossiping about an angry looking suffragette walking by. They discuss that the woman has just spent a month in jail, with the punch line being that she went to jail because her influential husband sent her there. This cartoon reveals the aggression and tension associated with the suffrage movement—aggression seen in both the woman’s angry march and her husband’s disdain. Even more so, the cartoon suggests a split between men and women in which a man would fight against his wife’s mission to such an elaborate extent. In this cartoon, as well as others in the series, the texts present the suffrage movement as inherently a woman’s mission. These cartoons do not allow space for men to also engage with suffrage, despite the fact that in reality men too advocated for the movement. The cartoon suggests an irreconcilable split between women’s interests and men’s, which cannot even be bridged through the unity of marriage. Of all the cartoons, it is possibly the darkest periodical picture in the exhibit of a certain masculine aggressive attitude towards women in the early twentieth century.