Suffrage 125: Cartoons celebrate long fight for rights

125th anniversary of the suffrage movement. Illustration / Rod emmerson

It's been 125 years since women won the right to vote in this country.

To commemorate the special occasion, Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson drew several cartoons on the suffrage theme.

It was top one, and the Editorial cartoon, that caught the eye of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who selected them for this edition. They both show that while we've come a long way in the past century or so, there's a way to go yet.

Emmerson is certainly not the only cartoonist to tackle the many issues affecting women, among them the pay gap and equal representation.

'Women want equal pay' tea towel from New Zealand Clerical Workers Union 1985, gift of Jan Noonan to Te Papa.

The theme of women's rights has been a source of material for artists for decades as shown in the two drawings featured here - a tea towel from the New Zealand Clerical Workers Union in 1985, and a cartoon printed in August 1893 showing suffrage supporter Sir John Hall presenting the petition to Parliament.

Political cartoon on women's suffrage. Photo / Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections

It was the largest of 13 separate petitions collected by women's suffrage supporters and Hall noted they contained the signatures of 31,872 women - almost a quarter of the adult European female population of New Zealand at the time.