Anti-feminist Caricature in France: Politics, Satire and Public Opinion, 1890–1914

Abstract

The Belle Époque has been considered to be the peak years of French feminist and suffragist activism. Yet this period can also be seen as one of gender conflicts and contradictions that have been skilfully revealed by talented artists working in what is called the ‘golden age of caricature’. This article is conceived as an analysis and decoding of satirical representations of feminists by French political caricaturists at the height of the women's suffrage campaign. Their work circulated relatively freely in the mass illustrated press, targeting the dominant bourgeois political order and its failure to address social inequalities. Caricaturists also mocked bourgeois feminists and suffragists as class enemies whose demands for political rights would, in their opinion, provide no guarantee that their participation in politics would be any different from that of bourgeois men. Leading artists, such as Jules Grandjouan and Juan Gris, recycled the misogynous anti-feminist arguments so prevalent in the literature and social sciences of this period, and deployed a new visual language that expressed the extreme violence of this reactionary opposition to feminism. The article analyses three issues of the influential satirical magazine, L'Assiette au Beurre, devoted to feminism and feminists, women's suffrage, and their eligibilty for public office. The author argues that these caricatures were part of an aggressive countermovement against the bourgeois social order and against feminism as a legitimate political movement.