For today’s Women’s History Month posting, our selected cartoons all purport to show the future results should women be granted equal rights. Such cartoons — drawn by men — were often used to express anti-suffrage viewpoints.

The above cartoon posits that gaining the same rights as men had, would result in women sinking — in imitation — to the moral character of men. Why Not Go the Limit?, by Harry Grant Dart, was published March 18th, 1908, in Puck magazine.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read the text inside them.

An Event of the Near Future, below, by Godwin M. Sheppard, takes the same theme still further, showing the start of the feminization of men, left to gawk wonderingly, outside the entrance of a Women Only club. (Loose page) from an unidentified 1890′s issue of Puck.

Next, the rise of women turns the feminization of men complete, in a wedding of the future In the Year 2001. Published originally in the New York World, this was scanned from a contemporary reprinting of it in the April 27th, 1895 issue of the New York City magazine, The Standard.

We end with a previously shown 1913 pro-Women’s Suffrage cartoon by Harrison Cady, published in Life magazine. Barred Out depicts the utopia that would result when women gain the vote, outlawing saloons, salacious theatre, red light districts, and seedy hotels. Women, concerned with the welfare of the family, would be certain to instead support the construction of libraries, schools, and public playgrounds!

Doug Wheeler

NYPuck NYLife NYStandard