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

Abstract

This article will examine how transpacific suffrage visual culture imagined and reimagined an artistic tradition centred around the figure of the bound woman. White suffragists and anti-suffragists in Australia, New Zealand and the United States used the iconography of bonds, chains and whips to mediate the possibility of women’s enfranchisement. Haunted by the legacies of settler colonialism, 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.