‘Tearing Off the Bonds’: Suffrage Visual Culture in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, 1890–1920

What is it about?

Inspired by the histories of chattel slavery and convict transportation, this article demonstrates how white suffragists and anti-suffragists in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States used the iconography of bonds, chains and whips to mediate the possibility of women’s enfranchisement.

Featured Image

Photo by Ian Deneumostier on Unsplash

Photo by Ian Deneumostier on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article moves beyond a focus on suffrage visual culture in the United States and Britian to examine how transpacific suffrage visual culture imagined and reimagined an artistic tradition centred around the figure of the bound woman. Haunted by the legacies of settler colonialism, transpacific suffrage cartoons directly and obliquely evoked the spectre of chattel slavery, convict transportation and incarceration alongside the elusive ideals of humanitarian reform. While anti-suffrage cartoons lamented the prospect of women’s enfranchisement, pro-suffrage cartoons appropriated this iconography primarily for the benefit of white women.