Existing comment:
The Awakening
Henry Mayer, 1915
During the early 1900s, suffragists argued that getting the right to vote was a reform measure born out of democracy, and they developed visual culture to reinforce this idea. Suffragists held up states in the West and California in particular as models for an awakening of democracy. In this illustration, an allegorical figure representing liberty holds a torch as she strides across a map of the country, symbolizing the movement's state-by-state progress. Starting in the western states that already had granted women full suffrage, Lady Liberty advances toward the East Coast, enfranchising women as she crosses the nation. |