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Abstract
This article uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore the messages promoted by anti-suffrage postcards produced in Britain between 1909 and 1914. It identifies five salient themes across the postcards (subversion of gender roles; physical ridicule of women; mental ridicule of women; violence towards women; and an imagined future), arguing that, despite their aim of presenting anti-suffragists as united in their objective of opposing women’s suffrage, they contained clear paradoxical messages. It concludes that the postcard campaign ultimately failed because of the power of militancy, mass opposition to the brutal treatment of suffragettes, and the outbreak of the First World War.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the Suffrage Postcard Project for help in sourcing the images for this article. See https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘The House’ being the Palace of Westminster – the meeting place for the two houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom: the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
2 Bush, ‘British women’s anti-suffragism and the forward policy, 1908–14’
3 Santino, Signs of War and Peace, 134.
4 Klich, cited in Bokat-Lindell, ‘Postcards from the Propaganda Front’
5 Palczewski, ‘The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam’, 384.
6 O’Hagan, ‘“Home Rule is Rome Rule”: Exploring Anti-Home Rule Postcards in Edwardian Ireland’
7 Florey, American Woman Suffrage Postcards, 213.
8 The Act granted the right to vote to women over thirty who met minimum property qualifications.
9 For example, Pacheco Costa, ‘The use of irony as a subversive element in suffrage theatre’; Paxton, Stage Rights!
10 Eltis, ‘A class act’; Jones, ‘Articulating the threatened suffragette body’; Daly Goggin, ‘“Bold Bad Ones” in Stitches’.
11 Waters, ‘The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in York and the 1911 Census Evasion’; MacDonald, ‘“No Vote No Census”’.
12 Elliott, ‘“Women who dared to ask for the vote”’; Edwards, ‘The Regiment of Women’.
13 Boyce Kay and Mendes, ‘Changing Representations of the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison in British Newspapers, 1913–2013’; Ryan, Winning the Vote for Women.
14 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14. Anti-suffrage postcards have been explored in far greater depth in a US context. See, for example, Palczewski, ‘The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam’; Florey, Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia; Florey, American Woman Suffrage Postcards; Florey, ‘Postcards and the New York Suffrage Movement’.
15 Palczewski, ‘The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam’, 384.
17 Ledin and Machin, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis, 4.
18 Machin and Mayr, How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis, 5.
19 Machin, ‘What is multimodal critical discourse analysis?’
20 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images; Kress and van Leeuwen, ‘Colour as a semiotic mode’; van Leeuwen, ‘Towards a Semiotics of Typography’; Djonov and van Leeuwen, ‘The semiotics of texture’.
21 Ledin and Machin, ‘Multi-modal critical discourse analysis’; Ledin and Machin, Doing Visual Analysis; Ledin and Machin, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis.
22 White, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, 322.
23 Hall, ‘The Rule of Difference’, 107.
24 Pugh, The March of the Women, p. 16.
25 Hume, The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 1897–1914.
26 Bush, Women Against the Vote, 189.
27 Bush, ‘British women’s anti-suffragism and the forward policy, 1908–14’.
28 Bush, ‘The anti-suffrage movement’
29 Crozier-De Rosa, ‘Shame and the anti-suffragist in Britain and Ireland’, 10.
30 Bush, ‘The anti-suffrage movement’
31 Bush, Women Against the Vote, 277.
32 Ibid, 109.
33 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 161.
34 van Leeuwen, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality’, 288.
35 Florey, American Woman Suffrage Postcards.
36 Richardson and Willis, The New Woman in Fact and Fiction, 12–13.
37 See https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/353, for example.
38 See https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/61 and https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/14
39 Florey, American Woman Suffrage Postcards, 216.
40 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, 18.
41 Watson, ‘Text and Imagery in Suffrage Propaganda’, 7.
42 Florey, cited in Lewis, ‘These Anti-Suffragette Postcards Warned Against Giving Women the Vote’.
43 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 164.
44 See https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/938 and https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/130
46 Kelly, Seeing Through Spectacles, 328–9.
47 Bauman and Briggs, 73.
48 See https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/158 and https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/126
51 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, 11.
52 Floerke Scheid, ‘Human Bodies Human Rights’, 44.
53 See https://collections.womenslibrary.org.uk/museum/museum-object/974443/and https://collections.womenslibrary.org.uk/museum/museum-object/973769/
54 Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 134.
55 Lennon, ‘Fasting for the public’, 19.
58 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, 18.
59 Ketabgian, ‘Foreign Tastes and “Manchester Tea Parties”’, 127.
60 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 211.
61 Thompson, The Edwardians, 38.
62 Richards, Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain, 134.
63 Kress and van Leeuwen, ‘Colour as a semiotic mode’, 343.
64 Pastoureau, Red: The History of a Color, 63.
65 See, for example, Palczewski, ‘The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam’.
66 Cowman, ‘Doing Something Silly’, 266.
67 Gupta, A corpus linguistic investigation into the media representation of the suffrage movement.
68 Pederson, ‘Hunger-Strikers, Anti-Suffragists and Celebrity’.
69 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 124, 119.
70 Harrison, ‘Visual social semiotics’, 49.
71 Ledin and Machin, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis, 81.
72 Payne, Winakor and Farrell-Beck, The History of Costume, 563.
73 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 204.
74 Ledin and Machin, Doing Visual Analysis, 61.
75 Ramsey, ‘Addressing Issues of Context in Historical Women’s Public Address’, 353.
76 Briggs and Bauman, ‘Genre, Intertextuality and Social Power’, 157.
77 Tagg, The Burden of Representation; Harrison, ‘Visual social semiotics’, 56.
78 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 122.
79 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 119.
80 Ledin and Machin, Doing Visual Analysis, 61.
81 Scull, Hysteria, 7.
82 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 204.
83 See speculation on the comment thread in the Propaganda Poster group on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/wc80k/what_i_would_do_with_the_suffragists/
84 See, for example, https://www.flickr.com/photos/lselibrary/45332455032/and https://msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Matters2.jpg
85 Royal Air Force Museum, ‘Flying and Votes for Women’.
86 Wainwright, Miss Muriel Matters, Chapter 14.
87 Ibid.
88 See, for example, https://bpsc.library.ualberta.ca/collections/victorian-and-edwardian-childrens-fiction
89 O’Hagan, ‘Principles, Privileges and Powerlessness in the Edwardian Prize Book’, 507.
90 S.W. Partridge & Co. and Religious Tract Society 1899 and 1904 publishers’ catalogues consulted at Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives.
91 See O’Hagan, ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’ for female representation of Hibernia used to gain viewers’ sympathy.
92 Schaffner, Writing as Punishment in Schools, Courts, and Everyday Life, 14.
93 Black, A History of Britain, 93.
94 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 119.
95 Ibid.
96 Cited in Chapman, ‘The argument of the broken pane’, 241.
97 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 119.
98 See, for example, O’Hagan, ‘“Home Rule is Rome Rule”’.
99 O’Hagan, ‘“Home Rule is Rome Rule”’.
100 Nicholson, The Encyclopedia of Antique Postcards, 196.
101 Smith, Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War.
102 Interestingly, Ticker notes that many of the images of women in anti-suffrage postcards were repurposed, now to show opposition to ‘feminist lecturers’ and ‘temperance fanatics’, The Spectacle of Women, 163.
103 Beaumont, ‘The Women’s Movement, Politics and Citizenship, 1918–1950s’.
104 BBC, ‘Is politics sexist?’
105 Drakett et al., ‘Old jokes, new media’.
106 Freeman, ‘The ‘Karen’ meme is everywhere.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lauren Alex O'Hagan
Dr Lauren Alex O’Hagan is a researcher in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University. Her research interests and publications focus largely on class conflict, literacy practices and consumer culture in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, using a multimodal ethnohistorical lens.