Suffragists carefully crafted their image in the media during the twentieth century. They wanted to present themselves as young, vibrant, feminine, bright, and witty. However, this vision they created was successful only because of an astronomical rise of media consumption in the Progressive Era. Mass media is defined by its sheer volume and distribution, it is distinguished from popular culture because it lacks a specific audience. Mass media was only made possible by technological innovations that allow for the wide circulation of identical messages and images. The Progressive Era marked a distinct shift in the way Americans consumed media because the explosion of industry at the turn of the twentieth century. Newspapers could bear more illustrations than ever before, magazines reached high circulations, postcards were at the height of popularity, and cinema was a popular leisure activity for city dwellers.  Woman suffragists understood that the success of their movement would lie in two key factors: getting the support of the largest amount of women possible to create solidarity in their message and getting the support of men who already had the vote in order to ratify an amendment. To engage the broadest audiences possible, suffragists utilized a wide variety of new, emerging media.

            The stratification of American culture that existed prior to the 1900s became increasingly less significant to Americans who were all reading the same newspapers, seeing the same ads, shopping from the same Sear’s catalogue, swooning over the same film stars, and mailing the same postcards. American culture had much less rigid divides between high and low brow forms of entertainment.^[1] All Americans became consumers of popular culture, which gave a great amount of influence to those who controlled the production of these new and spectacular media. In the twentieth century, woman suffragists recognized the incredible power of this command over media.
As a result, suffragists took conscious ownership over their image in print, film, and in person. If suffragists could take command of this new, distinctly modern form of mass culture, they could shape the way the American public perceived their movement.