Teaching Suffrage

Early 20th-century anti-suffrage postcards mocked women who wanted the vote as cats, bullies, bribers and flirts. A classroom activity for grades 6–8 on how ridicule works, then and now.

A lesson for grades 6–8: a 1915 suffrage postcard copied a famous 1904 cartoon backing Theodore Roosevelt. Students ask how popular culture is used to win people over, then and now.

A NAWSA flier made the case for a federal suffrage amendment in six numbered reasons. One of them argued women deserved the vote more than immigrants, Black men and Native Americans.

Nina Allender's cartoons drew suffragists as powerful and in control. They also drew them young, white and well-off. A middle-school activity uses both sides to ask how art argues, and whom it omits.

In 1917, more than 150 women were arrested for picketing the White House for the vote. In 1919, many rode the Prison Special across the country in copies of their prison dresses to tell their story.