Woman suffrage activists took control of this cultural shift in America by taking ownership of their own print organs and film productions. Further, they engaged in the type of public spectacle that captured the attention of newspapers nation-wide. For suffragists, the most essential part of their persistent campaign was being in the limelight as conversation pieces. During the 1910s suffragists became masters of gaining and maintaining the attention of masses. Whether or not individuals supported suffrage, they were certainly discussing it in a way that no one would have done in the preceding years.

Though the suffrage movement formally began in 1848, by the twentieth century very little had changed for women’s political roles. The only states to implement woman’s suffrage laid west of the Mississippi where only a very small percentage of the nation’s population resided. The so-called “doldrums” persisted into the twentieth century when the older leaders of the movement – Anthony, Stanton, Stone, and others – passed away.[1] The new leaders of the movement emerged from a new background of educated, middle-class women rooted in reform activism.

NAWSA was reinvigorated by young college women interested in the vote for a variety of reasons. Many young females felt that their ability to use their degree was dramatically restricted because they had limited political power – they could not vote. From among these young college-educated suffragists emerged Alice Paul – who quickly revolutionized the way that women campaigned for the vote. Paul had been an eye witness to the British suffrage movement and admired the militant strategy of its activists. Unhappy with the slow progress of NAWSA, she organized her own suffrage organization, the National Women’s Party (NWP). The NWP and NAWSA often butted heads in the last decade of the suffrage movement, but together they embraced new tactics to make suffrage possible. 

Fundamentally, this study is one of modernity. It traces the way that NAWSA and the NWP defined themselves for the public. They embraced mass media as a method to create a marketable, approachable model of who suffragists were and what suffragists could be. In a short article from 1999, Susan Strasser explained, “Americans became consumers during the Progressive Era.”[2] The twentieth century had replaced the face-to-face, individualized relationship of customers and replaced it with an amalgam of people labeled “the consumer.” It was a new world where industry replaced agriculture, moving films replaced vaudeville, and brightly colored photos could grace the covers of magazines. Individual leisure time was largely overwhelmed by commercial amusements like Coney Island and Nickelodeon motion picture theaters.[3] Americans were bombarded with advertisements and postcards. Images were everywhere, constantly emitting a subtle influence on the thoughts and opinions of millions of Americans. The distinction between “high” and “low” brow culture dissolved with the rise of new media that confronted not one singular class of Americans, but rather all of them. [4] The Progressive era departed through its use of commercialized leisure and a prominent visual culture that thrived in magazines, newspapers, postcards, and films.