These days, with the next presidential election right around the corner, most of us have voting on our minds.
Of course, compelling as the election is, I doubt anybody is thinking about their vote quite as much as the suffragettes were back before the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920.
It’s strange to look back on it today, but it’s pretty incredible that less than 100 years ago, women didn’t have the right to vote, despite petitions for universal suffrage dating back decades. Believe us, we aren’t nostalgic for the old days.
Still, what’s even more fascinating (and a distressing) is how badly women were treated in the press for petitioning for this basic right.
It was essentially the early-20th-century version of the anti-woman cyberbullying that’s fueled unkind acts like the mockery of this pregnant news anchor.
In fact, a quick peek back at political cartoons and illustrations of the era tells us all we need to know — it wasn’t easy to be a suffragette.
Scroll through the intriguing images below to learn more about this tumultuous moment in history.
The Women's Suffrage movement was vast and global, but mostly saw its origins in Europe and America in the latter half of the 19th century.
Women were demanding universal suffrage, meaning that all adult men and women, of every race and creed, would have an equal right to cast a vote.
The process was long and occasionally bloody, filled with the arrests of activists, like the 1914 arrest pictured above, and political agitation, before the bill was finally passed, at least in England and America, in 1918 and 1920, respectively.
Along with the physical real-world violence of the era, women were also subject to mockery in the media.
They're the kind of images that are a bit shocking at first glance, but sadly not so very surprising after a read through.
Mostly, they have to do with stereotyping the suffragette as a caricature, a sort of bitter, shrill harpy.
Sometimes she's an "old maid," and sometimes she's the irritable wife of a much put-upon man, as depicted above.
Many of these cartoons and illustrations depict suffragettes, particularly the leaders of the movement, as repugnant.
This particular illustration shows famous suffragist leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Baker Eddy on plinths in a museum space.
The caption reads, "A Suggestion To The Buffalo Exposition; —Let Us Have A Chamber Of Female Horrors."
The implication, of course, is that suffragettes are a disturbing spectacle, akin in that era to a freak show.
Romance and romantic desirability were often skewered in depicting these women.
A Valentine's Day card from the 1910s mocks the movement, saying that this man doesn't want a suffragette for a Valentine.
It reads, "To A Suffragette Valentine: Your vote from you will not get, I don't want a preaching suffragette."
Others tackled that age-old theme, that a woman searching for the right to vote is embittered or looking for a way to fill her life, because she has never married.
This postcard, entitled "The Origin And Development Of A Suffragette," is from the book American Woman Suffrage Postcards.
It focuses its ire on the idea that women who flirt don't marry, and women who don't marry agitate for the vote.
Some publications and cartoonists took the concept further, insinuating that giving women the vote would lead to women claiming all of men's fundamental rights instead.
Naturally, nowadays we see that this was a wildly overblown fear with no merit.
Giving women the vote didn't even the playing field at that time, it just graded the slope slightly.
The cartoonist also devoted a lot of time to despairing over the idea of men taking care of the while the women went off to vote.
This scene depicts a well-dressed suffragette leaving her husband to care for their kids.
The caption above reads, "What Is A Suffragette Without A Suffering Household?"
Even more horrifying to the media of the time? The idea of women in the workforce.
Male and female roles are reversed in this cartoon, with the father looking after a baby while the mother heads to office, wearing pants, no less!
Clearly, this concept horrified people at the time, but now it looks like a picture of modernity and equality in action.
Unfortunately, not every cartoon was limited to mere irritability and fragility in the face of women's suffrage.
In the 1910s and '20s, as ever, many of the depictions featured horrifying, violent descriptions of the fate the suffragettes deserved.
This particularly brutal illustration shows a woman with her head in a vise, labelled, "What I Would Do To Suffragists."
Are you surprised by the vehement anger against women who sought the vote? Make sure to SHARE to show women how far we've come!
