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“Fine Dignity, Picturesque Beauty, and Serious Purpose”:

The Reorientation of Suffrage Media in the Twentieth Century

Emily Scarbrough, Author

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The Anti Shift

However, it seems that antisuffrage media died down during the war years. For instance, fewer films depicting suffragists one way or the other seem to exist after 1914. The decline of suffragists on the silver screen probably correlates to the war, which eclipsed discussion of the cause following its European beginning in July, 1914. Additionally, one could attribute the decline of negative portrayals of suffragists to a declining interest on the part of consumers, who were possibly taken by the comprehensive nature of the woman’s suffrage campaign. Despite the cause, by 1915 the suffrage movement seemed to have the battle against the antis. From that year onward, a number of third-party media seemed to favor woman’s suffrage. Including Life magazine who had published
a number of anti-suffrage illustrations. 

For example, Life magazine published a cartoon on their cover in 1918 during the Great War, which featured a woman farmer, completely feminine with a pink bonnet, ruby lips, and bright cheeks, kissing her soldier goodbye. The caption for the illustration reads, “From producer to
consumer.” 
The phrase situates the cartoon within the larger trend for women to take on a larger responsibility for supplying the war. Certainly, this specific cartoon emulates the style of NAWSA’s campaign to present suffragists as helpful citizens during the war. The magazine seems to move away from a staunch antisuffrage campaign in 1908 slowly toward a stance that, if not pro-suffrage,
is at least significantly less resistant to the cause. This illustration does not feature the “producer” as threatening, instead she is decidedly feminine. The women in the cartoon fits snugly into the mold for women to take on the role of production in times of war. She is discernibly female despite taking on a male role. In this vein, the cartoon could easily have fit into NAWSA’s large-scale campaign to get women to support the war. Certainly, this type of cooperation on behalf of women was persuasive both to President Wilson and his Congress.


Life even dedicated an entire special issue to support suffrage in 1913. The magazine explained, “This issue of Life perpetrates, illustrates, defends, and illuminates the cause of Woman Suffrage. It has seemed to Life that it was only fair that this side should be given.”[1] It seems likely that Life felt compelled to produce an issue in support of suffrage as a result of the surging popularity of the movement, which was predicated largely on the success of the suffrage parade in Washington D.C. that March. In the special issue, magazine published cartoons like “Barred Out,” which plays into the vanguard prototype that suffragists presented in their own media. The cartoon features a woman’s hand holding a ballot that contains a wall of graft, corruption, and pollution within a city. The side under the vote’s protection appears pristine with the sun peeking out above the city municipal building.

[1] “This Number,” Life (October 16, 1913), 648.

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