The suffrage movement was mainly women from middle class backgrounds. These women were frustrated by their social and economic situation and sought for an outlet through which to initiate change. Their struggles for change within society, along with the work of such advocates for women’s rights as John Stuart Mill, were enough to spearhead a movement that would encompass mass groups of women fighting for suffrage. Mill had first brought the idea of women’s suffrage up in the platform he presented to British electors in 1865. He would later be joined by numerous men and women fighting for the same cause.
“Agitate! agitate! Ought to be the motto of every reformer. Agitation is the opposite of stagnation—the one is life, the other, death.”
Ernestine Rose, nineteenth-century women’s rights activist, would certainly have marched this past weekend to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to biographer and women’s historian Bonnie S. Anderson.
On This Day in Herstory, August 26th 1920, the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution is incorporated, giving women across the US the right to vote.
After more than a century of struggle and protest in America the Women’s Suffrage Movement finally won, and women across the country were granted the same voting rights as men. (This is legally speaking, but in practice women still struggled. Black women weren’t given equal voting rights until 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed.)
The Women’s Suffrage Movement officially began on a national level in the US in 1848 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott held the Seneca Falls Convention. Stanton, Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Minor, and countless other women fought to raise awareness of Women’s Suffrage, and on August 18th 1920, Tennessee ratified the bill granting women the vote, and became the final State needed to win a three-fourths majority.
Just over a week later US Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the law and so it became the 19th Amendment to the constitution.
Women across the country were able to exercise their newly earned right, when on November 2nd 1920, 8 million women were allowed to vote in the US Presidential election. Finally, on March 22nd 1984, Mississippi became the final State to ratify the amendment.
First World War postcard art by Douglas Tempest, who added a little bit of sexiness to the sexist worry that women would not return to their homes after filling jobs left by men serving in the trenches. The homophobic theme also recalls conservative anxieties about the suffragette movement.
A century later, Tempest’s work has been appropriated by feminist and queer activists to celebrate the changes feared by the artist: women pursuing careers and becoming more bold in expressing their romantic and sexual orientations.
War often brings a relaxation of moral standards, something Tempest took advantage of in this play on the meaning of censorship. The implied nudity would have been shocking in mainstream popular art prior to the weakening of Victorian prudishness.
The “surprise” of not being censored may not refer as much to the content of the post card as the freedom illustrators such as Tempest were gaining to tiptoe toward slightly salacious imagery.
Nazi propaganda leaflets attempted to revive fears about infidelity during the next war, but the new threat was American soldiers, not lonely lesbians.
