During the turned of the century, 1900s to be more specific, women have remained second-class citizens behind men. Women have yet to wi...
During the turned of the century, 1900s to be more specific, women have remained second-class citizens behind men. Women have yet to win the right to vote in most Western countries and it took a few more decades before universal suffrage was granted in most countries. The women's liberation movement only emerged in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, and other developed countries during the late 1960s through the 1970s.
The first decade of the 1900s was still influenced by Victorian values where women did not have the right to vote, sue, or own property. As a result, the rising suffragette movement has encouraged more women to adopt feminist ideas where it eventually spread among the educated middle classes where it helped repealed most of the discriminatory laws that targeted women.
Posters have become common during this time for conservatives who are afraid of women empowerment in society. A 1908 drawing from the political magazine "Puck" envisioned a world where women are co-equal as men. They can be seen with their fashionable period dresses inside a pub doing men normally do - smoking cigars, drinking liquor, and even gambling.
Many illustrations were published in magazines, newspapers and postcards throughout the United States and the United Kingdom with one common theme: women's right is a dangerous precedent and letting them get away with these rights would destroy society.
Suffragettes where caricatured into weird looking buck-toothed women who has this ultimate goal to take over the government controlled by men. The movement is even compared as a secret society. Some posters have even encourage men to torture a suffragette by force.
Every possible angle has been utilized to discredit the growing women's rights movement by branding women as incompetent, incapable and disruptive to the natural order of things. Pictures of subservient, henpecked husbands and crying babies can be seen to encourage public opinion to go against the movement.
Active suffragettes are characterized as manly-looking women and lesbians while men are illustrated as victims of physical abuse from women. Men are relegated to doing menial household chores while women do all have the leisure time gossiping with girl friends.
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