To understand what made the woman’s suffrage campaigns of the twentieth century so distinctly approachable, the radical nature of the nineteenth century campaigns must be examined. An organized woman’s rights movement emerged out of the equally marginal abolition movement in the years before the Civil War. Throughout their campaign to abolish the institution of slavery, women abolitionists realized that they were not given the same platform as their male counterparts. When two abolitionists, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were denied seats at an international abolition convention in London, they agreed to organize a woman’s rights convention when they returned to America. The young movement modeled itself after the birth of America – it contended that the Constitution had ignored one half of the nation by leaving out women. The Declaration of Sentiments, a list of goals for the budding woman’s rights movement, was modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Suffrage was born as a dramatic departure from existing gender relations. Throughout the movement, suffragists reshaped their arguments to suggest that suffrage was not radical, but rational.

The claim by many of the earliest suffragists that woman’s rights needed to be a revolutionary restructuring prompted much criticism. In 1896 cartoonist George Yost Coffin created an illustration entitled “The Apotheosis of Suffrage.” The cartoon is modeled after the “The Apotheosis of Washington,” a fresco painted on the ceiling of the rotunda in the Capitol Building. In the original painting by Brumidi, George Washington is depicted as having ascended into heaven; apotheosis literally means to deify. Coffin’s spoof of the painting puts Stanton and Anthony flanking Washington. The juxtaposition of Washington and two suffrage women was absurb to many, and a pointed critique of how suffragists saw themselves. It paid particular attention to the way the two women envisioned themselves as revolutionaries and leaders. With Stanton is in the place of the Goddess Victoria, and Stanton in the place of the Goddess Justice, the cartoon mocks the movement for the type of radical rhetoric they had used. The cartoon appeared in the Washington Post to tease the suffragists who wished to revolutionize the nation. 

Significantly, this cartoon was produced not by suffragists. In the early movement suffragists did not create a lot of their own media, and that which they did produce was almost entirely controversial. Stanton and Anthony produced The Revolution, a newspaper with low circulation, funded by William Lloyd Garrison. The newspaper emphasized, much like the early movement, the necessity for woman to become men’s equal. The notion was particularly offensive to the Victorian ideals prominent in the golden age of domesticity. By suggesting that men and women could be equals, suffragists upset the very foundation of gender relations.

Susan B. Anthony was a particularly polarizing figure because her Quaker upbringing and the fact she never married. Popular depictions of Anthony showed her as masculine and imposing, unnatural. She lacked all the typical qualities that would make her distinctly feminine. In 1872, when she went on trial for voting illegally, she used the opportunity to discuss the concept of natural rights and how those rights were denied to the female sex. She utilized public spectacle in a way that closely resembles the kind of tactics that women would use in the next century, but because her message was rooted in a revolutionary rhetoric that frightened many, she failed to win public favor. Anthony stood in the courthouse and refused to pay a fine for voting, arguing: