ABSTRACT
The suffrage movement was unified in its anti-war stance at the start of the Great War in Europe. In particular, the graphic satire of this press demonstrates the shifting, and at times contradictory, approaches these women took to potential US involvement in the First World War over the course of the decade. Its new members, versed in militant direct political action they had learned from British suffragists, began to question the passive tactics, such as peace marches, of the pre-war peace movements. Meanwhile, the conservative suffragists distanced themselves from the pacifists. They came to see in preparedness an opportunity for women to materially demonstrate their roles as active, respectable citizens who should be enfranchised, and they called for suffragists to abandon their initial anti-war position. The result, by 1917, was a splintering of the suffrage movement around the question of support for war versus pacifism and non-intervention.
