Suffragette and Anti-Suffragette Posters

The film "Suffragette" (2015) inspired me to create this blogpost. It reminded me of an exhibition of suffragette and anti-suffragette posters I had seen in the 1970s. I decided to find and share some of them with my dear readers. The original version was a rather barebones effort. Now I have updated it with more, hopefully interesting, detail. 

The Suffragettes were followers of an organization founded in the UK in 1903 by a Manchester widow, Emmeline Pankhurst and a group of mostly middle class women determined to use radical measures if necessary to secure the right to vote for Parliament. They called it the Women's Social and Political Union, or WSPU for short. 

Women suffragists had been petitioning for voting rights for decades. John Stuart Mill had proposed a measure to enfranchise women as early as 1867, but it and later attempts failed. The women of the WSPU decided that it was past time to get militant. Their very name, "Suffragette" sounded more defiant than "suffragist."

At first they resorted to mass demonstrations and heckling anti-suffrage politicians at meetings. They went on to chain themselves to the railings around Parliament. They employed vandalism, such as pouring jam and honey into mail boxes. 

Using hammers concealed in their handbags, they smashed the large display windows in the new department stores. They burned "Votes for Women" in acid on those bastions of male privilege, golf courses. More dangerously, they turned to arson, carefully directed at empty buildings. 

When jailed, as many of them were, they went on hunger strikes, a protest tactic they invented. Mahatma Gandhi, a young lawyer in England at the time, took notice. He later used the technique in his campaign to free India from British rule.

In 1913, Suffragette Emily Davison ran out in in front of the king's horse at the Derby. She died several days later from the injuries she sustained. Prior to her martyrdom, she had been force fed 49 times in prison.   

The first suffragette poster here -- perhaps the most famous of them -- refers to an act Parliament passed in 1913. It allowed the authorities to release jailed suffragettes who went on hunger strikes when they became dangerously thin, then rearrest them after they fattened up to complete their sentence. The Suffragettes dubbed it "The Cat and Mouse Act." I bought a copy of the poster and kept it in my office in my professorial days.

The Liberal Party was in power in Britain when the act was passed, and the suffragettes of the WSPU (The UK Women's Social and Political Union) made the most of the law's conflict with proclaimed Liberal values of justice, freedom, and tolerance. 

The failure of this act made the concession of women's suffrage in the UK almost inevitable. The measure was postponed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but women over 30 gained the vote in 1918. In 1928 the vote was extended equally to all women and all men over the age of 21. Only men who were heads of households had the vote before then. 

The poster "Convicts and Lunatics have no vote" emphasizes the fact that women, even the most well educated women, were classed with convicts and the mentally incompetent in being denied the right to vote for Parliament.

The next poster stresses the handicap women labored under in the race of life without access to the vote, represented by the sail on the man's boat. The houses of Parliament hover symbolically in the distance.

Prior to the Cat and Mouse Act mentioned above, the authorities had dealt with hunger strikers by force feeding them. The Suffragettes and their supporters denounced the method as a form of torture. It was not only unpleasant but potentially dangerous if resisted. If food was forced into the lungs it could lead to pneumonia. The adverse publicity this strategy produced is what led the government to adopt the Cat and Mouse Act. Some of the women were force-fed hundreds of times.

The Suffragettes were active propagandists who spread their message through newsletters edited by one of the daughters of leader Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel. Below are posters advertising these works.

. 

The opponents of women suffrage countered with propaganda and posters of their own. They denounced the Suffragettes as unfeminine or "unwomanly." In the poster below "Clementine" is portrayed as a unlikeable, destructive little terror, a future Suffragette, putting trousers on.

Another anti-suffragette strategy was to portray the agitators as unattractive, man-hating, "old maids." 

"A Suffragette's Home" warns that politically involved women will neglect their "natural" domestic duties and imperil family life. The "breadwinner" and the children will be the ones to suffer. 

"Everybody Works but Mother" envisions a future role reversal in which women take over politics and deny men the right to vote.

"No Votes, Thank You" presents the "normal" and "natural" woman  as the majority of "womanhood" opposed to having the vote. Behind her a wild, mannish, hammer-wielding Suffragette runs at Parliament. The hammer is a reminder that some Suffragettes had used that tool to smash windows in posh West End shops.

"What I would do with the Suffragists" is a much less subtle approach to dealing with these "problem" women. 

Ending on a more positive note, we have a poster celebrating the coming of Woman Suffrage.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to become a follower of my blog, just click on the blue "FOLLOW" button on the right side of the first page. Below there you can also find my previous posts. Thanks!