She's Good Enough: How Suffragists Borrowed a Roosevelt Cartoon (Lesson, Grades 6–8)

Sheet music: "She's Good Enough to Be Your Baby's Mother and She's Good Enough to Vote with You," lyrics by Alfred Bryan, music by Herman Paley. Ann Lewis Women's Suffrage Collection.

About this activity

A learning activity for grades 6–8 (ages 11–14), made with the Hard History Project, in the National Park Service's Teaching Suffrage series.

Guiding question: How is popular culture used to engage audiences and change people's minds?

Students will:

• tell individual unfairness (such as hurtful speech) from institutional or systemic injustice (such as discrimination);
• identify figures, groups, events and ideas around the world;
• show empathy when others are left out or mistreated, and speak up when they themselves are treated unfairly;
• make principled choices about when and how to stand up against unfair treatment, even under pressure from peers;
• plan and carry out collective action for change, and judge which strategies work best.

Suffrage in popular culture

To win the vote, suffragists had to change what Americans pictured when they thought of a political woman. Popular culture said such women rejected home life for politics; women who wanted to vote and take part in public life seemed a threat to the nation's values and traditions. Artists, editors, authors, publishers and printers who shared that view made cartoons mocking the reformers — cartoons that both reflected and shaped how Americans saw women activists.

Suffragists learned the power of images and answered with visual campaigns of their own.

"Votes for Women — She's good enough for me!" Postcard, 1915, by Emily Hall Chamberlain, published by the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company. Ann Lewis Women's Suffrage Collection.

In this 1915 postcard, one of a series from the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company, artist Emily Hall Chamberlain uses cute children to calm fears about women voting:

• The boy is dressed as Uncle Sam, the familiar symbol of American patriotism. He holds the girl by the shoulders and gazes at her admiringly.
• She wears a yellow flowered gown — yellow was a color the suffragists often used, tied to the cause of women's rights — and holds a bouquet. Her hair is pinned up, with curls framing her face.
• Every detail stresses her femininity: she looks sweet and unthreatening. (Compare the girls in the "Militant Suffragists" postcard in another lesson.)
• Above: "Votes for Women." Below: "She's good enough for me!"

Who is "good enough"?

"He's Good Enough for Me," cartoon by Homer Davenport, 1904. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; via the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Dickinson State University.

Chamberlain's cartoon copies an image Americans of the early 1900s would have known at once: Homer Davenport's cartoon of Uncle Sam patting President Theodore Roosevelt on the back, endorsing him for a second term. It first ran in a New York newspaper, then was reprinted everywhere — on billboards, posters, postcards and handbills. So anyone who saw "Votes for Women" would connect the campaign for Roosevelt's re-election with the campaign for women's suffrage.

Think about it

• What is the suffrage postcard saying about women who want to vote? Why might suffragists have borrowed an image from Roosevelt's campaign?
• What issues are Americans talking about today? How is popular culture used to shape what the public thinks?
• Have you ever become more interested in an issue because of something in popular culture — a film, a song, a video, an advertisement? How did it get your attention? Did it change your mind?

Vocabulary

More from the Park Service

• "From Mannish Radicals to Feminist Heroes: Suffragists in Popular Culture," by Allison K. Lange
• Nina Allender, the suffrage cartoonist
• "Why We Oppose Pockets for Women," a Suffrage in 60 Seconds video on Alice Duer Miller's satirical poem
• Previous in the series: Anti-Suffrage Postcards · Next: Six Reasons for Suffrage

Sources

Based on "Teaching Suffrage: She's Good Enough," Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument and National Mall and Memorial Parks, National Park Service, created with the Hard History Project; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The sheet music, the 1915 postcard and the 1904 cartoon are old enough to be in the public domain. The source's list of outside resources — a commercial video, a car advertisement and a song — is not reproduced.