A Busy Day (1914) and A Lively Affair (1912) both portray very mannish suffragists that seem to be an affront to the separate sphere ideology that dominated gender roles of the era. The two films present similar images of suffragists. 

A Lively Affair, a seven minute film with an unknown production company, was produced circa 1912. The origins of the film remain unknown because the original title card and first minutes of the film have been lost. What remains of the film features suffragist women who abandon womanly duties and descend morally. The women in the film dress in bloomers and manly blazers. One woman leaves her husband at home with her children and goes to a suffrage meeting. Another woman realizes that she is going to be late to the meeting and decides to steal a young girl’s bicycle. A third woman hands her infant to a complete stranger on the street so she can make it to the meeting. All the suffragist women rush to the meeting place where they gamble while their husbands and families suffer in their absence. Even worse, the suffrage meeting devolves into a cat fight over the card game, and a police officer comes to apprehend the bicycle thief. The women attack the police officer, and when more arrive, are all carted off to jail. Instead of bailing the wives out of jail, the husbands of the suffragists go out for a beer and dance triumphantly around their wives’ jail cell. The final title card for the film reads “sadder but wiser” and quickly flashes back to the anguished faces of suffering suffragists.

A Keystone short, A Busy Day (1914) was another film released in this era. It cast Charlie Chaplin as a suffragist. The best way to convey the idea that suffragist women were manly was to have a man play a woman. In the film, Chaplin’s suffragist character becomes enraged at a parade when she sees her husband flirting with another woman. The woman kicks and punches several men at the event, but pauses to smile and wave for a nearby camera, implying that suffragists were media hungry. The suffragist fights several men and attacks the woman her husband was interested in with an umbrella. The suffragist dances after she has beaten up all those who opposed her, and then can be seen scratching her rear end in a very unladylike manner. At the very end of the film a man pushes the suffragist into the water and no one jumps in to save her. The film is subtitled The Militant Suffragette to make it very evident to the audience that the woman behaves in this crude, violent, and unfeminine manner because the militancy of her suffragist cause has made her this way. The film is unlike some other antisuffrage films in how Chaplin’s suffragist character actually fights for her husband instead of abandoning him. The film is less focused on the impact that suffrage would have on the home, and more interested in how the lines of male and female would blend together in society.

Both A Lively Affair and A Busy Day play up the dichotomy of the genders. If women win the vote, or even become suffragists who support the vote, they forfeit the features that make them distinctly feminine and begin to act like men. While suffragists saw the vote as a tool to accomplish reform, antisuffragists saw the shift of women’s roles as a threat to traditional gender roles and family values. A number of other antisuffragist films depicted similarly masculine women who run opposite of the traditional values associated with women. In How They Got the Vote (1913) a man-hating suffragist refuses to allow her daughter to marry the man she loves. Strong Arm Squad of the Future (1912) featured a parade of animated caricatured suffragists who were all either militant, masculine, and ugly or young, naïve women using the cause as an excuse to dress up. Out of this cultural climate a new depiction of suffragists emerged. The typical depiction of suffragists in film was interrupted in the same years that these two comedies were released through the increasing interest of progressives to portray suffragists as positive figures.