"Vote Yes for Woman Suffrage" (1915), a New Jersey Next poster stamp

A 1915 poster stamp from the "New Jersey Next" Campaign Committee of New York Suffragists shows a horn-blowing rider in a tricorn hat under the words "Vote YES for Woman Suffrage" and the referendum dates for New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Smithsonian copy, CC0.

A stamp on the committee's own envelope

The object is a colour poster stamp, stuck on an envelope of the committee that issued it. A running rider blows a horn, dressed in a tricorn hat, knee breeches and a cape. The appeal is printed above him, and the stamp also carries a ballot box with an X, the year, and two voting days. The archive notes that the committee's name and street address are printed on the envelope, not on the stamp.

THE "NEW JERSEY NEXT" CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE

OF NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS

17 WEST 8TH STREET, NEW YORK

[union printing label] 12

VOTE YES

for

WOMAN SUFFRAGE

[ballot box marked X]

1915

NEW JERSEY

Oct. 19th

NEW YORK,

MASS., PENN.

Nov. 2nd

© APP. FOR E.S.L. SUMMIT, N.J.

[monogram: L G T]

What the costume borrows

The archive tags one technique, transfer. The rider's eighteenth-century messenger's dress lends the standing of an earlier era to a ballot question of 1915. The rest of the stamp is instruction: vote yes, here are the dates. The record lists the issuer type as a movement, the audience as the domestic public, and the themes as gender and suffrage, and elections and party politics.

Nothing in the record suggests any office required anyone to use the stamp; it is a private group's appeal for a vote. This copy carries a committee name and a street address, so a reader knew who was asking. The committee's name also states its plan: New York suffragists campaigning for a yes vote in the state next door. No print run is given, and nothing says how the stamps were distributed.

The other side of the same question

Opponents printed too. A card from the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage, from about the same year, lists reasons to vote no, three of them about keeping Black Georgians from the polls. In 1920 a Montgomery league printed America When Feminized against ratification. The suffrage case study follows both camps, and a 1917 photograph of the "Kaiser Wilson" picket banner shows Virginia Arnold of the National Woman's Party holding it.