One of the biggest obstacles for woman suffragists was a general fear of gender inversion. The predominant anti-suffrage fear throughout the nineteenth century was that the female sex would transform into a masculine gender if women were granted the vote.[1] For a nineteenth and twentieth century audience, gender was a binary system –

male/female, masculine/feminine. The primary concerns among suffrage opponents in print and film revolve around this concern for inverted gender relations. Because of the belief that genders were mutually exclusive, there was little
room for departing from expected gender norms. It was in this vein that much of the anti-suffrage literature and sketches of nineteenth-century suffragists emerged. The twentieth century was certainly still very invested in this gender dichotomy, which is why suffragists worked so hard to frame woman’s suffrage as distinctly feminine through their own media. Still though, publications like Life magazine, which was opposed to suffrage, presented a number of cartoons that played with the idea of gender reversal. While suffragists saw the vote as a tool to accomplish reform, anti-suffragists saw the shift of women’s roles as a threat to traditional gender roles and family values. A number of
anti-suffragist media depict masculine women who stand opposed to the traditional values associated with women.