Around 1910 American postcard publisher J. E. Hale circulated a woman suffrage postcard featuring a photograph of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, alongside what are described as her “talismanic words”: “Failure Is Impossible.” This was just one of many official suffrage postcards, produced between 1901 and 1915, to celebrate departed nineteenth-century social reformers. Anthony herself featured on postcards by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The Literature Committee of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage depicted sculptor and feminist Adelaide Johnson's marble bust of Anthony. Other publishers printed photographic postcards of her parents, her birthplace, a thirty-six-year-old Anthony, and an elderly Anthony. A Trident Publishing Co. postcard quoted Anthony: “Woman suffrage is coming—no power on earth can prevent it—but the time of its coming will depend upon the loyalty and devotion of the women themselves.”

In many ways, the early twentieth-century postcard phenomenon foreshadowed the ephemerality of today's Internet memes. Postcards, scholars suggest, constituted a communications revolution comparable to the digital revolution: nineteenth-century photograph albums have been described as the “Victorian Facebook,” while the Edwardian “craze” for postcards is seen as mirroring Twitter's popularity. More than any other turn-of-the-twentieth-century communications technology, postcards “allowed people to see the world around them and to display their contributions to that world.” Social media provides similar opportunities in the twenty-first century. Political cartoons, in turn, rely on an understanding of political commonplaces, literary and cultural allusions, character traits, and other contextual factors; they are “enthymemes which invite the reader to respond in accordance with certain values, beliefs, and predispositions.” Since political cartoons have appeared continuously in American print culture since the 1860s, political imagery constitutes a rich medium through which to reflect on shifting cultural perspectives toward American women.

The celebration of suffrage pioneers such as Anthony anticipated their memorialization during the 2016 US presidential election a century later. “Women in Congress and a Woman President, Says Susan B. Anthony,” a New York Press headline proclaimed in 1905, the year before her passing. Echoes of Anthony's determination reverberated in the certainty about a Hillary Clinton victory.