CARTOONS FOR THE CAUSE CARTOONING FOR EQUALITY

by the Sex Discrimination Unit of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. They were seeking to commission cartoons for a new set of guidelines for employers on how to manage pregnancy in the workplace. This stimulated me to think how much government agencies in Australia in the last twenty years have relied on cartoonists to get their message across in a disarming but effective way. The use of cartoonists by government agencies with equity responsibilities seemed to be an interesting extension of the way graphic images have been used as part of the repertoire of social movements. The extent to which Australian social movements ‘look to the state ’ has often been noted. In creating new government bodies, these movements have also imported some new forms of symbolic discourse into government communication. That process of importation is dealt with in the latter part of this paper. However, my first concern is to outline the way in which nineteenth-century cartooning was almost uniformly hostile to women’s rights, both in the United Kingdom and Australia and to show how themes common at that time continue in currency. I take as an example of this hostility the trope of the ‘man in the apron’, with us for over a hundred years. Suffragists themselves were regularly depicted in the English-speaking world as sharp-featured and short-sighted termagants. Wanting the vote made women vinegary and unattractive, while women who were not interested in the suffrage were depicted as rounded and buxom