What You May Expect Some Day. A. Chasemore. Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal. (2 May 1877): 20. Courtesy of the HathiTrust and the Harvard University Library. Click on image to enlarge it enough to read the text.
Some of you Lordly and Masterly Persons. And serve you quite right, too! — Judy, dixit
Chasemore’s cartoon is one of a number of Victorian images of women moving into the male sphere and holding jobs and posiitions reserved for men: we see a woman coachman, police officer, naval officer, university graduate, and three women in particularly prestigious army units. Supposedly the most drastic and threatening of all — a woman proposes marriage to a man, though as some novels show at least some Victorian women knew how to maneuver a man into making one.
What is perhaps unusual and unexpected, the conservative Judy seems to support the coming changes with the exclamation “serve you quite right, too!” — George P. Landow
Links to Related Material
- The British Barmaid (Fun, 1876)
- Chained to the Counter; or the Modern Andromeda (Fun, 1885)
- The Ladies’ Advocate [Mill advocating female suffrage>] (Punch)
- Mill’s Logic; or, Franchise for Females (Punch)
- Gender Matters (homepage)
Bibliography
Scully, Richard. Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume II: The Rivals of "Mr Punch." London: Political Cartoon Society, 2018 (esp. pp.52-92).
Created 1 February 2022