Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.

Votes For Women.

Hartford, Connecticut: Calhoun, [ca. 1915]. Banner on glazed linen printed in purple and green, 14” x 60”. CONDITION: Very good, some light creasing and scuffing.

A scarce, large, and striking women’s suffrage banner in colors unusual for the American movement, probably commissioned by the Women’s Political Union of either New York or New Jersey.

This banner was printed by the Calhoun Steam Printing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, best known for printing mammoth posters and theatrical broadsides in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The use of purple and green is unusual in American women’s suffrage materials, which, following the adoption by Kansas suffragettes of the sunflower as their symbol in the 1860s, tended to favor gold. (When the National Women’s Party formed in 1916, its official colors were purple, white, and gold.) The color scheme used here was almost certainly modeled after that of the Women’s Social and Political Union, a British suffrage organization founded in 1903. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, a leader of the organization and editor of its weekly newspaper, Votes for Women, explained the colors’ meanings: “Purple, as everyone knows is the royal colour, it stands for the royal blood that flows in the veins of every suffragette, the instinct of freedom and dignity…white stands for purity in private and public life…green is the colour of hope and the emblem of spring.” 

It is possible that this banner was commissioned by Harriet Eaton Stanton Blatch, the daughter of pioneering suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose Women’s Political Union of New York adopted the British color scheme in the early 1910s, before merging with Alice Paul’s Congressional Union (whose colors were purple and gold) in 1916. It is also possible that it was created for the Women’s Political Union of New Jersey—founded in 1908 by activist and social worker Mina Van Winkle—which also preferred a green, white, and purple palette. The latter affiliation appears more likely, since examples of this banner (in two sizes) are recorded in a ca. 1915 photograph of several women at their suffrage booth on the Asbury Park Boardwalk in New Jersey, along with other placards urging men to “vote yes on women suffrage” on October 19th—the date of the 1915 referendum in New Jersey. 

A rare and bold emblem and artifact of the fight for women’s rights.

Item #8105

Sold