Should Women Vote? The Politics of Suffrage Using Political Cartoons to Explore Different Perspectives

suffrage cartoons “can serve as a positive learning tool, especially for today’s generation of young people, whose historical memory of women is not only impoverished but for whom the ideals and goals of the feminist cause have little meaning.” Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Introduction: Image, Rhetoric, and the Historical Memory of Women,” in Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 5-6.

Should Women Vote? Could Suffrage Advocates Persuade Parliament to Alter Voting Statutes? Working with eight cartoons, originally published in the British commentary periodical Punch; the pro-suffrage publication, The Suffragette; and the main voice of the opposition, The Anti-Suffragist What insights do these cartoons reveal about the nature of the suffrage campaign, why the right to vote became so important to women and democratic reformers, while also threatening to those invested in the existing distribution of political, cultural, and economic power?

Below the guiding question are other questions of the historical process/historical representation for discussion… In what ways do these cartoons interrupt the single narrative of suffrage and begin to shift the perspective to current historiographical debates on the meanings of militancy, the influence of diverse historical actors, and the legacies of the suffrage campaign(s)? In what ways do these cartoons serve as a way to historicize what you see and explore the complex relationship between meaning, symbols, and content? How could you use these cartoons to enable students to understand symbolic meanings and the use of rhetoric in a particular historical contexts?

What symbolic meanings do you think students might immediately focus on and which ones they might miss, not understand, struggle with, or derive a misconception from? Why? How would you deal with that in your class? Which of these cartoons do you think may have students offer up diverse or different representations of suffragists and their causes?

Which cartoons do you think might prompt student responses shaped as much by present day perceptions and concerns as by attitudes and issues from the 1910’s? How would you respond to students who did this- especially when thinking about teaching about the nature of history? How can you use these cartoons to illustrate the extent to which representations of roles of women, women’s identities, the gendering of power, and seemingly “universal categories of women” (women are more open minded or activist women are too militant) are historically contingent?