Teaching Suffrage Through Nina Allender's Cartoons — and Who They Left Out

Nina Allender helped change how Americans pictured women who wanted the vote. As the National Woman's Party's cartoonist, she drew suffragists as political, powerful and in control — hands on hips, standing proudly in public, demanding to be treated fairly. Her cartoons were visual headlines, capturing each week's news and the spirit of the cause. They also left many women out.

"Democracy Begins at Home," by Nina Allender. Credit: National Woman's Party collection, NPS.

Who is in the picture

The "Allender Girls" were young, white and upper-class. Yet working-class women fighting for their rights at work were important drivers of the campaign for the vote, and many influential suffragists were Black, Native American, Latina, Asian American and other women of color. None of them appear in her cartoons.

The activity

Designed with the Hard History Project for students in grades 6–8 (ages 11–14), the activity asks two guiding questions: How can art be used to advocate for change? Who has been left out of the picture?

1. Students look through a collection of Allender's cartoons and choose two.
2. For each, they describe what is happening and how the women are portrayed, find the argument through its symbols and words, and ask whose perspective is missing, why, and who the intended audience was.
3. Then they research a woman involved in an issue they care about — from history or today — and create a cartoon or other artwork from her perspective, with a sentence or two describing it.

The objectives focus on respect and empathy: engaging with people both similar to and different from oneself, describing difference accurately, and seeing people in their historical and cultural context rather than in oversimplified ways.

Vocabulary: amendment — a change, especially to a document like the Constitution; suffrage — the right to vote; suffragist — someone who works for the right to vote, especially for women.

Suffragists to meet

The National Park Service profiles several of the women missing from Allender's cartoons, among them Mary Church Terrell, Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Nina Otero-Warren and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, as well as Nina Allender herself.

Sources

Based on "Teaching Suffrage: Suffrage Cartoons" from the National Park Service (Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument), created with the Hard History Project; a work of the United States government in the public domain.