The Awakening: Women Fight for the Vote (1915)

Echoes of today's fight for abortion rights

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The most striking of the "suffrage maps," which played a major role in the successful fight for women's suffrage in the U.S.

Illustration shows a torch-bearing female labeled "Votes for Women", symbolizing the awakening of the nation's women to the desire for suffrage, striding across the western states, where women already had the right to vote, toward the east where women are reaching out to her. The faces of these women are turned up to the light, and some reach out in hope. Many have fashionably short hair and hats, reflecting the middle and upper class core of the suffrage movement.

Caption label from exhibit of digital copy in Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote Western States Pave the Way: Suffrage Follows Lady Liberty Eastward in "The Awakening."

Suffrage wins in Washington, California, and Oregon were followed by hard-fought victories in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and Montana. By the end of 1914, more than four million women had voting rights equal to men in eleven states, all in the West, leaving women elsewhere still reaching for the light of Liberty's torch of freedom.

The illustrator was Henry "Hy" Mayer, a German-born artist who was Puck's chief cartoonist at the time this was published. Below the illustration is a poem by Alice Duer Miller, a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, member of the Algonquin Hotel Round Table and "popular poet of tremendous range and skill." Miller was an active and tireless feminist who produced a substantial volume of "defiant, witty suffrage verse."

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Title: The Awakening

Creator: Henry "Hy" Mayer,

Date Created/Published: New York : Published by Puck Publishing Corporation, 295-309 Lafayette Street, 1915 February 20.

Publication: Puck, v. 77, no. 1981 (1915 February 20), centerfold (pp. 14-15).

Library of Congress: 98502844