Example of the game Suffragetto. 12 cruel anti-suffragette cartoons. Woman-as-Cat in Anti-Suffrage Propaganda. Cats and dogs are gendered in contemporary American culture, such that dogs are thought to be the proper pet for men and cats for women (especially lesbians). This, it turns out, is an old stereotype. In fact, cats were a common symbol in suffragette imagery. Cats represented the domestic sphere, and anti-suffrage postcards often used them to reference female activists. The intent was to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement. Cats were also used in anti-suffrage cartoons and postcards that featured the bumbling, emasculated father cruelly left behind to cover his wife’s shirked duties as she so ungracefully abandons the home for the political sphere.
Oftentimes, unhappy cats were portrayed in these scenes as symbols of a threatened traditional home in need of woman’s care and attention. As suffragettes increasingly found themselves jailed, many resisted unfair or inhumane imprisonment with hunger strikes. Anti-Suffragette Postcards Posters & Cartoons « History of Feminism. A collection of cartoons and posters mocking the suffragette campaigns for votes for women : Suffragette Plain Things Suffragettes Who Have Never Been Kissed c.1910 UK Origin and Development of a Suffragette When Women Wear Pants, c.1915 USA We Want the Vote 1910 UK Woman’s Rights 1910 USA Did I Save My Country For This? Flapper 1925 USA anti-feminist postcard We Don’t Know What We Want But We’ll Get It Anti-Suffrage postcard, unknown date Nobody Loves Me Home for Lost, Stolen or Strayed Suffragettes The Suffragette. The poster reads: “The Morning Suffragette Bulletin.
Card reads: “If you will only marry me you can have all woman’s rights Such as staying up on evenings when I’m out late at nights And should such things not satisfy the longings of your soul You can wash up all the dishes and carry all the coal As a really model husband I feel I’m bound to shine So say that you take me to be Your Valentine” A Procession of Suffragettes Suffragists On The War Path Suffragettes Attacking House of Commons.
Vintage Anti-Suffrage Postcards. A while back, David Dismore posted about his archive of suffragist postcards, which appeared in the early 1900s as part of the campaign for women’s right to vote. The postcards got the messages of the movement across in short, clear, and often humorous ways. Those opposed to women’s suffrage also used postcards to get their message out to the public. The Palczewski Postcard Archive at the University of Northern Iowa, sent to us by Katrin, has a number of great examples that illustrate the frames used to present women’s full political participation as threatening. For instance, a 12-card series produced by Dunston-Weiler Lithographic Company presented suffrage as upending the gender order by masculinizing women and feminizing men.
In an effort to win her own rights, then, women make their families suffer — a message complete with visuals that don’t seem out of place among stock images of crying babies and their working mothers today, as Katrin pointed out: