Book Description

Abstract: During its seven year run from 1911 to 1917, The Masses, a radical socialist magazine published out of Greenwich Village, addressed almost every contemporary controversial social issue on its pages, from socialism to sexual liberation and pacifism. The magazine was committed to feminist ideals and as such, The Masses dedicated articles and cartoons to women's issue such as birth control, prostitution, worker's rights, and women's social, political, and economic emancipation. As a central issue of the time and as a key fight for the liberty The Masses' socialists valued, The Masses gave the campaign for women's enfranchisement attention -- from 1913 to 1916, cartoons about or related to woman suffrage maintained a regular presence on the pages of The Masses. In their style and in their approach to the subject, the cartoons dealing with woman suffrage reflect The Masses' pictorial policy of art dedicated to radicalism and free expression. The drawings range in tone from pointed satire to direct editorializing, but on the whole, emphasize a feminist conception of the modern woman and advocate the extension of women's rights beyond the political sphere. In this thesis, I argue that the cartoons of The Masses, though displaying a fervent support of women's rights as defined by feminism, curiously exhibit ambivalence toward the subject of woman suffrage in its graphics. This ambivalence resulted from the magazine's socialist viewpoint which championed revolutionary societal change that would establish liberty and total political, social, and economic emancipation for all humankind, both men and women. The magazine advocated the vote for women as one of the many steps needed for women's total emancipation, but in socialist opinion, the ballot was only a reform measure. In addition, The Masses offered only moderate support of the national suffrage movement due to its narrow middle-class focus on achieving the vote. Employing campaign tactics that emphasized expediency, the suffrage movement largely ignored the working-class woman, the woman that The Masses identified as most in need of a political voice.