As an artist, I find very interesting artworks that are meant to promote certain messages. Some messages are good or at least harmless; others are pretty nasty. This time I am going to analyze vintage anti-suffrage postcards and cartoons and take a closer look at the exact messages found in them. As you will quickly notice, some of these ancient and outdated ideas are still alive even in our more modern society a whole century after the initial artworks were created.
When you look at a somewhat large sample of several dozen anti-suffrage artworks, it turns out that the messages repeat themselves, in all those images there are just a few basic ideas that get depicted over and over again. For this reason I have grouped various images together and I will look at them in batches.
1. The Ugly Woman
Here’s the first group, which depicts suffragettes as extremely ugly, men-hating women. The message here is clear: only an ugly woman would want a right to vote. There’s an assumption that happily married women want nothing to do with the right to vote, and that only the loneliest old maids can participate in the push for equal rights.
The idea that a woman who wants equal rights must have an ugly body is a very old one indeed. Unfortunately, not much has changed since these artworks were created. When a female author publishes online an article that promotes women’s rights and equality, some sexist readers tend to start writing comments about how the author must have an ugly body. If the author’s photo is visible and the troll army concludes that she is, after all, pretty enough to be worth raping, then the narrative shifts towards, “She must have a nasty personality; she must be single, because no man could ever love a person like her; she must be leading a miserable and loveless life.”
There are also artworks in which suffragettes are portrayed as undergoing torture. The overall message being: these women are ugly, nasty, disgusting; they deserve to be disliked, scolded, humiliated, and abused. These artworks depict what the author would like to do with the suffragettes (namely, the artist would like to abuse and torture them). Rape and death threats are surprisingly common also in 21st century, women who are activists promoting equality and what ought to be basic human rights tend to hear a lot of this crap.
2. The Stupid Woman
Here’s the second group, which depicts women as stupid, hysterical, crazy, childish; as people who must be patronized at best and brutally “handled” and restrained at worst. Women are infantilized and compared with a spoiled and silly child that demands rights it cannot even use.
Pay particular attention to this image that says “a woman’s mind magnified.” You might imagine that humanity has overcome something that ridiculous, yet even in the 21st century a significant portion of books and movies portray their female characters with minds exactly like shown in this misogynistic artwork. I assume you probably have heard about the Bechdel test, which is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. A movie passes the test if it satisfies the following requirements: (1) the movie has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man. The test is very crude and inaccurate at judging how well female characters are represented, but the troubling fact remains that a significant portion of fictional works still fail to pass even such a basic test.
Male fictional characters tend to be portrayed as having varied goals and interests. A movie or a book with a male protagonist can be about said character participating in some athletic competition, pursuing a career he is passionate about, attempting to succeed as an artist/musician/performer, trying to influence politics, saving the world, trying to survive in some hostile environment, etc. The possibilities are endless. Sure, the media often portray male characters falling in love, getting married, and having children, but those things usually aren’t the sole events of the entire plot, male characters having also other goals and interests. Love, marriage, and babies are shown as being only a part of the man’s life rather than everything the character’s life consists of. Female protagonists, on the other hand, only care about beautifying their bodies with pretty clothing and make-up, falling in love, getting married, and having babies, and that’s it. Sure, I know there are exceptions, there are some movies and books with interesting female protagonists, but statistically it still remains a problem, because even in 21st century female characters are still portrayed with minds exactly like shown in this sexist artwork from a century ago.
For a practical example, let’s compare two books: The Country Girls, a trilogy by Irish author Edna O’Brien, and Bellwether, a novel by Connie Willis. (Keep in mind that both novels were written by female authors.) I had to read The Country Girls trilogy for a university literature course, and I hated this book. Caithleen, the female protagonist whom I strongly disliked, had a mind that was exactly like this sexist anti-suffrage artwork. She only cared about beautifying her physical appearance with pretty clothing, she dropped out of school, she had no deep aspirations or interests, she worked menial jobs expecting those to be temporary until she fell in love with some rich man, at which point she would marry and become a housewife. Contrast that with Bellwether, a book I liked, which also features a female protagonist who falls in love over the course of the book. The difference was that in Bellwether the protagonist was a female scientist, she had various interests, she had a meaningful job she cared for. Her life was much more than just pretty clothing, love, man, marriage, and babies.
3. The Masculine Woman
The next category consists of images with swapped gender roles. The father is forced to take care of his babies while the mother reads newspapers, goes out of the home in order to participate in various public events and cast her vote.
Curiously, for me these images achieve the exact opposite of the intended effect. I see a drawing of some man who is clearly unhappy feeding his child and being denied representation and the right to decide for himself how he wants to live, and I feel sorry for the poor guy. Swapping the roles is a great way how to get across the point that some person is getting abused. Would a guy feel sad if his wife didn’t let him to vote? Then why the hell is he inflicting the same suffering upon his wife? If you believe that some lifestyle is unhappy, then you shouldn’t intentionally inflict it upon another person against their will.
Once you examine and compare the entire lot of these artworks, you will notice an odd trend—babies are portrayed as screaming, ugly, even repulsive. That’s odd. Usually artists choose to draw babies as cute and adorable. So why are the children in these artworks so ugly? Did the artists who made these images really believe that children are disgusting?
I know that many parents (of any gender) perceive parenting as enjoyable, but, for the sake of an argument, let’s imagine that parenting really was as unhappy as depicted in these artworks. If there is some disgusting chore that everybody hates but that must be done anyway, it would be fairer to divide this chore so that everybody has to do it every now and then. It’s unfair to force a single person to perform this chore all the time. It’s fairer to split it so that no single person is stuck with the job everybody hates.
Also, don’t you think it is funny how these artists were so afraid of, gasp, a woman wearing pants?
Speaking of masculine versus feminine fashion, I always found it odd that men were supposed to feel humiliated about having to wear women’s clothing. If a dress is humiliating for a guy to wear, how comes that it is not humiliating for a woman to wear the same outfit? I wrote about humiliation a while ago, so this time I won’t repeat the points I already made in that article.
Nowadays, the society has accepted that women are allowed to wear pants, but there are still many conservative people who believe that a woman’s proper place is inside the kitchen. The argument is that all women want children and being a stay-at-home mom is the only way how a woman can experience true happiness. All those women who try to pursue challenging careers are just delusional and still haven’t realized their true nature, their real calling in life. On top of that there’s also the claim that women are the happiest when they yield to their husbands. Interestingly, if women are supposed to get their maternal or submissive instincts naturally, then why are there still people out there telling women how to behave? If all women really has some instinct that resulted in them wanting to stay in the kitchen, they’d just do it, and there would be no need to tell them to be stay-at-home mothers.
4. Female on Male Domestic Violence
According to the artists who created these images, letting women wear pants is bound to result in their poor husbands getting abused. Don’t get me wrong, female on male domestic violence is awful. So is male on female domestic violence. Or any other combination.
Normally, I’d be fine with seeing an artwork that portrays female on male domestic violence as something really bad. After all, domestic violence is awful. But, unfortunately, this is one of those cases where context matters. For a significant portion of the 20th century, artists portrayed real male on female domestic violence as something perfectly happy. Simultaneously, they portrayed imaginary female on male domestic violence that only might someday happen as something awful. A society doesn’t get accolades for opposing imaginary female on male domestic violence if they treat very real and actually existing male on female domestic violence as perfectly normal and even desirable.
Conclusions
I hope you had fun looking at these old artworks. I sure did.
It’s funny how people used to fear things that now seem normal for us. Upending the gender order by masculinizing women and feminizing men turned out to be a good thing. For example, there are plenty of fathers who are great at taking care for their children, just like there are women who are happy with their careers. Women abandoning their household duties and becoming more aggressive and unladylike was also not that bad.
These artworks depicted women, who, in an effort to win their own rights, made their families suffer. Luckily, that mostly didn’t happen or at least wasn’t as bad as predicted by these artists. Equality in voting rights was clearly presented as female domination, and this nightmare scenario didn’t happen either. The message that giving women the right to vote threatens men, the family, and the entire natural order of things seems silly nowadays.
Unfortunately, some of the messages depicted in these century old artworks are still prevalent even nowadays. I decided to write this blog post exactly because in these old images all the silly ideas and stereotypes are extremely exaggerated, they lack any subtlety, thus they are easy to spot and identify. Nowadays, misogyny tends to be subtle, sometimes even barely noticeable. For example, there are women who support gender equality but won’t openly label themselves with the word “feminist,” because there’s an unspoken yet pervasive stereotype that women in happy relationships don’t worry about all this gender equality thing and only the loneliest old maids call themselves feminists. Then there’s also the stereotype that it’s somehow bad for a woman to be masculine, that, in order to get a boyfriend/husband, she must be ladylike and passive. Looking at these old silly and exaggerated cartoons exposes the inherent silliness of all these old misogynistic stereotypes, thus we might learn something by looking at them and analyzing what we see.
Since early 1900ties we as a society have made lots of progress. Yet there’s still room for further improvements.
Credits: Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA.