Suffragette Cat Tea Towel

The image on this tea towel was intended by its original publishers in the early 20th century to rubbish the cause of women’s suffrage. It shows a cat wearing the Suffragette colours of purple, white and green. It was thought that portraying a campaigner as a cat would show the idea of women voting to be equally absurd: the cat was seen as passive, feminine and ineffectual. There may also have been an oblique reference to the UK’s so-called Cat-and-Mouse Act of 1913, which permitted women’s suffrage hunger strikers to be released from prison in order to recover before being re-arrested and continue serving their sentence (likening the legislation to the way a cat plays with a mouse). The image on this tea towel is based on a postcard from c.1908. Postcards were used both by suffrage campaigners and their detractors in support of their cause.