While American Suffragettes were parading and demonstrating, their British counter-parts were adapting more radical tactics, such as throwing bricks through shop windows. What percent of British Suffragettes actually engaged in violent or destructive protest, versus non-violent demonstration, I don’t know. But even if just a small number, the anti-suffrage crowd on both sides of the Atlantic quickly seized upon that image, painting all in the movement as dangerous anarchists.

Note here in this posting, how the majority of cartoons in this posting — scanned from various issues of Cartoons Magazine — were created mostly by Americans. And all but one of them drawn by men.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and better read the words within them.

Above, from April 1913, British Women’s Suffrage as depicted by Oscar Cesare.

Beneath, Ole May and Harold Heaton depicting the troubles in Britain. (From the March 1913 issue.)

Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling and Ralph Everett Wilder, above (March 1913), with more British problems.

Below, an actual British cartoon on the subject, by Bernard Partridge in Punch magazine, and reprinted in the February 1913 Cartoons Magazine. The reason for showing this one, seems more to poke fun at Americans’ long-standing view of Punch — that it was so ridiculously subtle, as to be unfunny, with the points it was trying to make, incomprehensible to American readers, even at the time…

Above, from May 1913, American cartoonists Guy Spencer, Harry J. Westerman, and Nelson Harding.

Below, the other Brit in this posting, and the only one by a woman — Mabel Lucie Attwell. Reprinted from The Tatler, in the February 1913 Cartoons Magazine.

To close, still more American cartoons on the struggle in Britain, from February 1913, Milton R. Halladay, Paul A. Plaschke, and W.A. Ireland

To find prior postings on Women’s History Month, click here.

Doug Wheeler

Women’s History BritPunch Billy Ireland