The Spirit of '76 — Votes for Women

Three Kewpies march in the old fife-and-drum formation, the wounded-patriots tableau every American schoolroom knew, except the banner over their heads reads VOTES FOR WOMEN and the marchers are naked, round-bellied babies with topknot curls. O'Neill drew her Kewpies as tiny agents of good, and she meant it politically. A committed suffragist, she put them to work on postcards and banners for the cause; this one was printed by a New Jersey art company in 1915, five years before the Nineteenth Amendment. It is easy to read the Kewpies as pure commerce — dolls, soap ads, cut-out pages — and forget that their inventor also aimed them squarely at the ballot box. The joke and the argument are the same drawing.