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The Awakening

Women's Suffrage Cartoon - 1915

By , About.com Guide

Cartoon titled "The Awakening" shows a woman with a torch personifying "Votes for Women" (the words on her flowing garment).
Women's Suffrage Cartoon

Women's Suffrage Cartoon = personification of Votes for Women - 1915 cartoon by Hy Mayer

Public domain image, originally published in Puck, February 20, 1915 - courtesy Library of Congress

In this cartoon, the women of the states without the vote are reaching for "Votes for Women" and she is striding across the states where women have the vote. The cartoon is from a drawing of Hy Mayer, first published February 20, 1915.

Under the cartoon as published is a poem by Alice Duer Miller, famous for her pro-suffrage poems including those in her book, Are Women People?.

Here is the text of the poem printed under the woman suffrage cartoon, "The Awakening," in its original appearance in Punch, 1915:

Look forward, women, always; utterly cast away
The memory of hate and struggle and bitterness;
Bonds may endure for a night, but freedom comes with the day,
And the free must remember nothing less.

Forget the strife; remember those who strove --
The first defeated women, gallant and few,
Who gave us hope, as a mother gives us love,
Forget them not, and this remember too:

How at the later call to come forth and unite,
Women untaught, uncounselled, alone and apart,
Rank upon rank came forth in unguessed might,
Each one answering the call of her own wise heart.

They came from toil and want, from leisure and ease,
Those who knew only life, and learned women of fame,
Girls and mothers of girls, and the mothers of these,
No one knew whence or how, but they came, they came.

The faces of some were stern, and some were gay,
And some were pale with the terror of unreal dangers;
But their hearts knew this: that hereafter come what may,
Women to women would never again be strangers.

-- Alice Duer Miller

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