CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cartooning with a Feminist Twist

IN ITS FINAL DECADES, the suffrage movement was an intriguing mix of old and new. It drew on the energy of New Women, who took advantage of expanding opportunities for higher education, entry into the professions, and more egalitarian relationships with men to move confidently into many aspects of modern life. At the same time, it deliberately allied itself with notions of women’s traditional roles as wives and mothers—conservative ideals that helped offset the often unsettling connotations of its political activism. Cora Smith Eaton’s mountaineering exploits featured in a suffrage cookbook or Hazel MacKaye’s suffrage spectacle drawing on classical tropes of virtuous (white) womanhood exemplify this dual thrust.

Another example is Nina Allender’s “Come to Mother,” an illustration created for the cover of the March 31, 1917 issue of The Suffragist, the official publication of the National Woman’s Party. The cartoon spotlighted Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, who is clearly identified by a purse stamped “J. R.” and “Montana,” her home state. Even though Rankin never married or had children, she is portrayed as a kind and friendly mother reaching out to a young girl, who has “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” embroidered on her skirt. Two well-dressed and attractive suffragists stand in the background, saying sotto voce, “That child needs a woman to look after her.” Effectively coopting traditional female values of motherhood and maternal concern while hitching them to women’s new political roles, the cartoon reinforces the ideology that women are different from men and thus will bring a fresh perspective to public life. As suffragists pitched their arguments to politicians and the general public, they were careful never to stray too far from prevailing gender norms.

“POLITICAL CARTOONING gives you a sense of power that nothing else does,” Nina Allender told a Christian Science Monitor reporter the year the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. For so long, women’s rights activists and suffragists had been the butts of jokes and cartoons, with satirists lampooning their supposedly unnatural aspirations, mannish appearances, and frivolous mannerisms. Now the tables were turned. As female political cartoonists took up the pen for woman suffrage, they created positive images in service of the larger feminist cause. Nina Evans Allender, the official cartoonist of the National Woman’s Party, was one of the most prolific.¹

Political cartooning is by definition a pointed and aggressive act. A form of propaganda, it challenges or destabilizes the status quo in a single image, the message of which must be instantly grasped by its viewer. Humor, allegory, satire, metaphor, and irony are its stock in trade. Until the 1910s the field had been entirely dominated by men. Thomas Nast, the creator of the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, and the Tammany tiger, as well as the popularizer of Uncle Sam and Columbia as symbols of the American nation, was the nineteenth century’s preeminent American political cartoonist. His work and that of other cartoonists and illustrators found an audience in the proliferating newspaper print culture and a range of humor magazines founded in the 1870s and 1880s, such as Puck, Judge, and Life. Politicians quickly realized the power of such images to sway voters and influence public opinion. As William Tweed, the boss of New York’s Democratic Tammany machine, said in reaction to a Thomas Nast cartoon exposing the corruption of the so-called “Tweed Ring,” “I don’t care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can’t read; but d—n it, they can see pictures.”²

By the early twentieth century, conditions were ripe for women artists to enter this realm. Foremost was the expansion of higher education for women, which opened possibilities for careers beyond just marriage and motherhood. Just as important was the opening of formal artistic training to women, both in Europe and the United States, which laid the groundwork for women’s professional (as opposed to amateur) careers as artists or in art-related fields. Finally, the woman suffrage movement was gaining momentum, and victory was now a distinct possibility rather than a distant dream. Since professionally trained women artists were already pathbreakers in their field, they often harbored feminist sensibilities that made them stick up for their sex, both in their professional lives and in the art they produced. The woman suffrage movement, with its network of publications and outreach, offered a perfect place to combine these dual thrusts. As a result, at least three dozen female cartoonists, mainly born in the 1870s and therefore in their thirties and forties at the height of suffrage activism, plied their trade and their feminism in the movement’s final decade.³

Annie Lucasta “Lou” Rogers, who published several hundred suffrage cartoons in newspapers and magazines such as Judge, the Woman’s Journal, The New York Call, and Woman Voter, was one of the most successful members of this pioneering cohort of cartoonists. Born in rural Maine in 1879 and possessed of both artistic and independent bents, she gravitated first to Boston, where she enrolled at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, then decamped to New York, “certain of only one thing: I would be a cartoonist.”⁴ Submitting her work under the name Lou Rogers to sidestep the sexism she faced as a female artist, by 1911 she had turned her attention primarily to suffrage. The Woman’s Journal proudly noted that she was the “only woman artist to devote all her time to feminism.” Her cartoon “Breaking into the Human Race” inspired the title of the lecture series on feminism in Greenwich Village in 1914 where Charlotte Perkins Gilman and others spoke. One of her best known images, “Tearing off the Bonds,” featured a suffragist bound in rope which spelled out “politics is no place for women.” This image clearly influenced William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman in the 1940s, whose cartoon panels often featured women in chains or bondage—until, that is, they break free. Like Lou Rogers, Marston was a staunch feminist.⁵

Blanche Ames embodied the vibrancy of the cartooning tradition in Boston. Born in 1878 in Lowell to a prominent Massachusetts family—her grandfather was the Civil War general Benjamin Butler, who later served in Congress—she was an early graduate of Smith College, class of 1899, where her professors strongly encouraged her to pursue her interest in art and illustration. In 1900, she married the Harvard botanist Oakes Ames (no relation), with whom she had four children. Determined to pursue interests beyond the home, she served as an illustrator on many of her husband’s botanical expeditions and became his trusted partner and collaborator. When not off searching for orchids, both husband and wife were avid suffragists. Blanche Ames frequently contributed cartoons to the Boston-based Woman’s Journal, and from 1915–1917, she served as its art editor.

Lou Rogers’s “Tearing off the Bonds,” which appeared in the October 19, 1912 issue of Judge, shows a woman doing just that, aided by the “spirit of 1,000,000 women voters.” Soon there would be many more. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Ames preferred pen-and-ink sketches, whose sharp contrasts were well-suited to the Woman’s Journal’s text-heavy format. Her 1915 cartoon captioned “Meanwhile They Drown” is particularly notable. It depicts a woman (“We don’t need it”) sitting on a dock alongside a man who holds a life preserver inscribed “votes for women” (“When ALL women want it, I will throw it to them”). The man steadfastly refuses to extend the life preserver to the struggling women and children in the water who are being swamped by waves identified as “white slavery,” “sweatshop,” “filth,” and “disease.” Meanwhile his female companion, seated on a box labeled “antisuffrage,” passively watches.⁶

New York and Boston were important beachheads for suffrage activism, and so was Washington, DC, especially after Alice Paul came to town in 1912 and took over the Congressional Committee of NAWSA before breaking away to found what became the National Woman’s Party. Based in the nation’s capital, Nina Allender emerged as one of the most influential members of this cohort of pioneering suffrage artists. “Mrs. Allender is the first woman artist who has ever won a name in the magazines of the country as a cartoonist,” noted an article in The Suffragist in 1918. “Mrs. Allender not only brings to politics quick insight, but also the eye of a feminist. No man could have projected such a series of cartoons on the suffrage situation.…” The suffragist Inez Haynes Irwin made a similar point: “It would be impossible for any man to have done Mrs. Allender’s work. A woman speaking to women, about women, in the language of women.”⁷

Blanche Ames knew her cartoon “Meanwhile They Drown” had hit its mark when it drew a public rebuttal from William Howard Taft. The former president was quite a large man, and his hefty girth is prominently featured in her cartoon reply, “Our Answer to Mr. Taft,” which appeared in the Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News on September 18, 1915. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

The future suffrage cartoonist was born Nina Evans in Auburn, Kansas, on Christmas day 1872—just a few years after the decisive and divisive Kansas referendum of 1867 dealt both woman suffrage and African American male suffrage resounding defeats. After moving from Philadelphia to Kansas in its early days of frontier settlement, her mother, Eva Moore, began teaching school at the age of sixteen. In 1871, the young schoolteacher married David J. Evans, a somewhat older superintendent of schools who had been a teacher in Oneida County, New York before migrating west. The couple had two daughters, but Mrs. Evans grew dissatisfied with the relationship and took the highly unusual step of leaving the marriage and moving with her daughters to Washington, DC, where she found a clerical position with the Department of the Interior in 1881. As far back as the Civil War, the federal government had become the employment option of first choice for genteel if often impoverished women who needed or wanted to work. Clearly an independent-minded woman, Eva Evans passed that trait on to her elder daughter.

From an early age, Nina showed an interest in drawing and art, primarily painting. Her mother encouraged her aspirations, arranging for lessons at the newly opened Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. While training to become an art teacher in the 1890s, Nina met and married an Englishman named Charles Allender. Like her parents’ marriage, this one did not last. After stealing money from the bank where he was employed, Allender skipped town with another woman. The couple, who did not have children, quickly divorced, and Nina Allender set out to support herself. She shared a home with her mother and, following her mother’s lead, found good employment opportunities in the federal government, landing a position in the Treasury Department. She continued to be active in the local arts scene, and she also joined the woman suffrage movement, taking time off from her job to campaign in Ohio in 1912.

In early 1913, she had a fateful meeting with Alice Paul, who was new in town and eager to revitalize NAWSA’s Congressional Committee to lobby for a federal suffrage amendment. Paul arranged to call on Nina and her mother, whom she had never met. After a brief conversation, they agreed to donate both time and money to the cause, specifically to help pay the office rent for the headquarters Paul needed to coordinate plans for the upcoming suffrage parade in March. As Inez Haynes Irwin later recounted, “their amazement arose partly from the fact that they had not been begged, urged, or argued with—they had simply been asked; and partly from the fact that, before this arrival of this slim little stranger, they had no more idea of contributing so much money or work than of flying.” That story perfectly captures Alice Paul’s legendary ability to get people to do things they hadn’t planned to do. And she wasn’t done yet with Nina Allender.⁸

The next year, Paul asked Allender to contribute political cartoons to The Suffragist, the publication of the recently formed Congressional Union. No matter that Allender was by training a painter and had never drawn a cartoon in her life—once again she couldn’t say no to Alice Paul. Her first drawing appeared on the cover of the June 6, 1914 issue. Somewhat busier and denser than her later drawings, “The Summer Campaign” depicts an attractive, slim suffragist addressing a mixed crowd from the back of an open automobile. One week later, she contributed her first cartoon: a crowded slum street scene featuring a young mother and two children, a babe in arms and a young girl playing with a cat in the gutter, under the caption “The Inspiration of the Suffrage Worker.” In late July, she linked suffrage to protective labor legislation under the banner “Child Saving is Woman’s Work—Votes for Women.” In general, working women did not often figure in her cartoons, although when they did, they were treated sympathetically. For example, under the intentionally ironic header “Woman’s Place is the Home,” a shawl-clad immigrant mother glances back sadly at her six children as she trudges off to her factory job.⁹

Herself an independent, modern professional woman, Allender drew respectful portraits of women that were sympathetic to their new roles. As the suffrage historian Alice Sheppard noted, “Allender created an image of suffragists in sharp contrast to the typical caricature of the bespectacled old maid seen in the national press. Her suffragist appeared infused with a new spirit, the spirit of pride and daring, and possessed the vigor of youth.” Drawing mainly in charcoal, her cartoons presented their central points in an uncluttered and straightforward fashion. As The Suffragist noted, “she gave to the American public in cartoons that have been widely copied and commented on, a new type of suffragist—the young and zealous women of a new generation determined to wait no longer for a just right. It was Mrs. Allender’s cartoons more than any other one thing that in the newspapers of this country began to change the cartoonist’s idea of a suffragist.” This type of suffragist was so identifiable that it was often referred to as “The Allender Girl.”¹⁰

In 1916, Nina Allender was part of an innovative National Woman’s Party campaign that combined Valentine’s Day on February 14 and Susan B. Anthony’s birthday on February 15 to flood Congress with valentines making the case for suffrage. “We have tried reasoning, eloquence of the soapbox, cart tail, and back of an automobile variety,” explained a suffrage spokesperson, “and we hope rhymes may influence the politicians where the other forces did not.” Over a thousand “Dripping Hearts and Rhymes” valentines were sent, many of them hand-drawn and tailored to the recipient. Nina Allender’s valentine to Woodrow Wilson, which was one of several reproduced in The Suffragist, featured a group of attractive suffragists from the various states where women already voted carrying baskets of hearts with “vote” on them, accompanied by this caption: “Will you be our Valentine if We will be Your Valentines.”¹¹

President Woodrow Wilson, who in the eyes of the National Woman’s Party never did enough as the leader of his party or the nation to support woman suffrage, was one of Allender’s frequent targets. Even though Allender never picketed the White House and never was arrested, she was in total sympathy with the radical turn NWP activism took after 1917. One cartoon titled “President Wilson says, ‘Godspeed to the Cause,’ ” shows three comely suffragists behind prison bars, unlikely criminals whom readers would know were in jail for the minor charge of obstructing traffic while picketing the White House. Gazing out from their cells, they entreat Wilson: “Mr. President what will you DO for woman suffrage?” In the past, political cartoons of transgressive women like the pickets would have painted them as harridans or ugly, mean spirited women. Instead, Allender portrays them with sympathy and understanding.¹²

Allender was not afraid to take on the division between the two wings of the suffrage movement after the Congressional Union split away from the National American Woman Suffrage Association and formed the National Woman’s Party. In 1915, Senator John Shafroth and Representative A. Mitchell Palmer introduced a rival constitutional amendment that would require a state to hold a suffrage referendum if 8 percent of the voters petitioned for the move. NAWSA signed on to this approach, but the NWP strongly opposed it because the strategy undercut their push for a clean and simple amendment with national reach. In a drawing entitled “The Anthony and Shafroth Suffrage Amendments,” Allender makes it clear where her sympathies lie. She represents the Democratic-controlled sixty-fourth Congress as a donkey which a suffragist leads to a crossroad, clearly demarcated as “Anthony Road,” which leads straight to the franchise shining on the horizon, and “Shafroth Road,” which takes a far more circuitous route. The caption reads, “But I can’t get the old dear to take both roads at once.” Precisely. Soon after, NAWSA dropped its support for the rival constitutional amendment.¹³

Nina Allender’s wartime cartoons were especially provocative in linking the justice of the suffrage cause to the larger ideals of a democracy at war. In a cartoon that mimicked Wilson’s 1916 campaign pledge, a suffragist carrying a purse labeled “Suffrage Amendment” asks a man labeled “Congress,” who is spreading ashes on the slippery pavement, “Will you Make 1918 Safe for Democracy?” When the Congress finally passed the Anthony amendment in 1919 and sent it to the states for ratification, she penned a powerful image of a huge “V” for Victory (“One Vote for Victory Women”) with a suffragist proudly in the middle. And in a cartoon that truly says it all, “Any Good Suffragist the Morning After,” she paints an exhausted suffragist fast asleep under the covers with newspapers proclaiming “victory” littering the floor around the bed.¹⁴

Nina Allender’s suffrage imagery leaves a proud but muted legacy. There is no question that she portrayed women positively, but she did so in ways that gently tweaked existing gender roles rather than tackling them head on. In other words, she never distanced suffragists too far from prevailing notions of femininity as they stepped into their new roles in public life. One case in point is a cartoon depicting a small girl throwing a snowball labeled “vote” at a figure representing the Democratic Party, which causes a police officer (labeled “Judiciary Committee”) to challenge “Wha’ jer goin’ to do next?” But the girl is adorably dressed in a cute outfit and hat, which downplays the threatening aspects of the challenge to authority. And yet the snowball still hits its target.¹⁵

Contrary to popular perceptions, “any good suffragist” did not simply roll over and go back to sleep after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Suffragists enthusiastically embraced their status as women citizens and prepared to take on new roles in the postsuffrage era. Nina Allender’s cartoon appeared in The Suffragist in September 1920. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

And, as is true of so much of suffrage history, Allender’s cartoons often reinforced class and race prejudices. The “Allender girl” was an affluent, educated, middle-class white woman. Working women appeared only occasionally in her portfolio, and African American women were totally absent, not just in Allender’s NWP cartoons but in all the surviving suffrage images. (There was no equivalent of Nina Allender in the African American press.) In the end, Nina Allender’s cartoons were very much a mirror not just of the racism of the suffrage movement but of the racial and class hierarchies of Progressive-era American society.

Despite these limitations, Nina Allender’s cartoons demonstrate a willingness and ability to harness women’s expanding professional opportunities with new media technologies to get the word out about suffrage. More broadly, her corpus of work, especially when linked with the images produced by her sister cartoonists, is an important addition to our understanding of what female creative artists contributed both to artistic endeavor and politics in early-twentieth-century America. As Lou Rogers said in 1913, “It is not art as art that I am interested in; it’s art as a chance to help women see their own problems, help bring out the things that are true in the traditions that have bound them; help show up the things that are false.”¹⁶

Ironically, since the cartoons of these pioneering and politically engaged artists were published mainly in suffrage organs rather than mass-market newspapers or magazines, their impact was limited. In other words, they primarily reached the already converted, which helps to explain why the cartoons are so little known today. This is unfortunate, because most of these sketches are just as fresh and compelling a century later as they were in the 1910s.