My Own Research
Chapter one examines the Progressive-era context for the suffrage movement, out of which the more culturally conscious campaign emerged. By drawing connections among media, education, and female gender roles, the
chapter sets the stage for the emergence of a modern campaign. The section illuminates the suffragists’ choice to move into a more perception-driven campaign that played with ideas of mass media and public spectacle, a product
of the evolving society from which this new generation of suffragists emerged. I look specifically at gender norms, standards of beauty, education, and race. From these elements, we can better understand why suffrage activists developed their visual representations in the way that they chose.
The second chapter looks more specifically at the woman’s suffrage movement in the twentieth century. It examines the political shifts that fostered its tactical changes. It examines most closely the intent of woman suffragists in embarking on this new strategy. Particularly, the chapter draws attention to the way that new leaders organized and created a political machine to produce and disseminate a newly crafted identity of woman suffragists, and how the two dominant suffrage organizations – the NWP and NAWSA – interacted.
Chapter three suggests that the public spectacles of parades, pageants, tableaus, exposure in newspapers and magazines, depictions in film and on postcards all worked in conjunction to present a unified vision of woman suffragists. The visual rhetoric of woman’s suffragists relied heavily on the standards of feminine culture in the era. To explain how they developed this visual language of woman’s suffrage, I offer substantial analysis of various suffrage-produced media content. Woman suffragists depended on traditional understandings of feminine virtue to present an idealization of woman suffragists. This chapter examines those depictions and virtues and tries to elaborate on how and why suffragists believed this kind of visual rhetoric would have a resounding impact with their audience.
The final chapter follows the reaction that the general public had to these radical shifts to the way American suffragists were depicted. This chapter looks at media produced outside of suffrage organs to offer insight into how major news outlets, magazines, and film companies presented or rejected the suffrage ideal. It also examines the ultimate impact that the more conservative campaign had. New media, the war, and modernity held such promise for change to the existing gender norms, yet, by 1920 the suffrage campaign presented a non-revolutionary picture of the future. Early feminists struggled to reconcile their vision of womankind’s future with the promise of suffrage as a natural extension of existing gender relationships.
Suffragists in the twentieth century interacted with the modern world with precision. They utilized new technologies and appealed to the new visual culture of the era. Instead of making suffrage a private matter, they depended on the new fascination with celebrity, fame, and spectacle. Woman suffragists presented themselves as paragons of female virtues; they were idealizations of what women should want to be. They developed a visual campaign that deradicalized the notion of women voters and replaced it with a vision that fed into emerging avenues of mass media and appealed broadly to women to want the vote and men to comply.
chapter sets the stage for the emergence of a modern campaign. The section illuminates the suffragists’ choice to move into a more perception-driven campaign that played with ideas of mass media and public spectacle, a product
of the evolving society from which this new generation of suffragists emerged. I look specifically at gender norms, standards of beauty, education, and race. From these elements, we can better understand why suffrage activists developed their visual representations in the way that they chose.
The second chapter looks more specifically at the woman’s suffrage movement in the twentieth century. It examines the political shifts that fostered its tactical changes. It examines most closely the intent of woman suffragists in embarking on this new strategy. Particularly, the chapter draws attention to the way that new leaders organized and created a political machine to produce and disseminate a newly crafted identity of woman suffragists, and how the two dominant suffrage organizations – the NWP and NAWSA – interacted.
Chapter three suggests that the public spectacles of parades, pageants, tableaus, exposure in newspapers and magazines, depictions in film and on postcards all worked in conjunction to present a unified vision of woman suffragists. The visual rhetoric of woman’s suffragists relied heavily on the standards of feminine culture in the era. To explain how they developed this visual language of woman’s suffrage, I offer substantial analysis of various suffrage-produced media content. Woman suffragists depended on traditional understandings of feminine virtue to present an idealization of woman suffragists. This chapter examines those depictions and virtues and tries to elaborate on how and why suffragists believed this kind of visual rhetoric would have a resounding impact with their audience.
The final chapter follows the reaction that the general public had to these radical shifts to the way American suffragists were depicted. This chapter looks at media produced outside of suffrage organs to offer insight into how major news outlets, magazines, and film companies presented or rejected the suffrage ideal. It also examines the ultimate impact that the more conservative campaign had. New media, the war, and modernity held such promise for change to the existing gender norms, yet, by 1920 the suffrage campaign presented a non-revolutionary picture of the future. Early feminists struggled to reconcile their vision of womankind’s future with the promise of suffrage as a natural extension of existing gender relationships.
The history of woman’s suffrage in the United States is one of a long and complicated process. Numerous historians have examined the political tactics of the movement, but there has been significantly less scholarship on the cultural transformation that occurred during the Progressive Era. The political success of the suffrage movement was intimately bound up in the shifting cultural perceptions of the general public. In the twentieth century woman suffragists developed their own media body to create and perpetuate a vision of woman voters. They created an identity that they could sell to mass audiences, an identity that played on existing gender roles instead of challenging them. They took the radicalized vision of the nineteenth century suffragists and instead recast the movement with mainstream appeal and calm, quiet logic.[1]
Suffragists in the twentieth century interacted with the modern world with precision. They utilized new technologies and appealed to the new visual culture of the era. Instead of making suffrage a private matter, they depended on the new fascination with celebrity, fame, and spectacle. Woman suffragists presented themselves as paragons of female virtues; they were idealizations of what women should want to be. They developed a visual campaign that deradicalized the notion of women voters and replaced it with a vision that fed into emerging avenues of mass media and appealed broadly to women to want the vote and men to comply.
[1] In 1848 early suffragists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fashioned a Declaration of Sentiments modeled after the United States Declaration of Independence that outlined the goals of the budding movement. The early suffragists also began their own newspaper named The Revolution. Nineteenth century suffragists had radical goals and played with the idea of revolution in a way that made the public nervous and kept the movement politically marginalized.
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