Training for the Draft

The few surviving news photographs of the arrest of the suffragist picketers do not adequately capture the drama of these historic moments. However, Nina Allender’s small sketch Training for the Draft, which The Suffragist published on September 29, 1917, conveys the physical abuse that the picketers endured. At the center of the drawing, a lone woman dressed in white holds a banner that reads, “Governments Derive Their Just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” Furious men grab at her, attempting to pry the banner out of her hands. By giving her drawing the title Training for the Draft, the artist suggested that the women were preparing for combat. Published only months after the United States had entered World War I, the picture of the woman figuratively at war while on the home front resonated with many suffragists.

National Woman’s Party, Washington, D.C.