The woman’s suffrage parade in Washington D.C. was one of a great many efforts that suffragists made in the first two decades of the twentieth century to take control over media portrayals. Their message had been restricted to small groups of women who communicated primarily amongst themselves in closed meetings and conferences throughout the nineteenth century, when woman suffragists struggled immensely to gain support. While the movement saw some early victories in the West, by the 1880s political gains had slowed to a crawl. Many historians refer to the period as the “doldrums” of woman’s suffrage.[1] Out of this, however, emerged a strikingly different suffrage movement.

Twentieth century suffragists tried to engage the masses through a variety of new media – film, postcards, photographs, mass market magazines and newspapers as wells as suffrage newspapers. They took control over how they were portrayed in the public’s eye to appeal broadly to both voters and their wives. They used mass media – a new phenomenon related to technological innovations like improved printing, film, and newspaper circulation – that created a culture that was predominantly homosocial. Instead of the stratified class culture of the nineteenth century, mass culture helped integrate men and women of various classes and backgrounds to the same cultural dialog.[2]

As cultural venues became increasingly affordable for the less wealthy, culture became a meeting place for bottom-up and trickle-down processes of exchange. Michael Kammen argued that class lines began to dissolve between popular forms of entertainment in the late nineteenth century as leisure activities underwent a price revolution.[3] Class tastes continued to mingle to form an increasingly muddled division among Americans. Essentially, he argued that America culture, as it became more universal, was inherently democratic because it could reject a singular cultural authority, and it allowed for widespread participation. As culture became more universal in the Progressive era, suffragists became more adept at using mass media as a vehicle to communicate with the masses.

The suffrage parade in March, 1913 stands as a single example of how twentieth-century woman suffragists consciously took ownership of the visual representation of their cause. The new generation of suffragists embraced a wider range of tactics than nineteenth century suffragists had. They promoted a vision of women voters who deserved the vote, but still maintained positively feminine characteristics. They argued that the vote would not make women manlier, but that women could make the vote into a tool for positive reform. This tenet of the new suffrage argument was very much a part of the wider Progressive reform movement. Women became, in the words of many historians, municipal housekeepers. They extended the sphere of what was considered woman’s roles by arguing that political reform outside the home was directly related to the lives and welfare of their own families. Further, women took up causes that championed the nation’s youth because women felt the need to protect children. This rise of female activism is linked directly to the rise of higher education for women; as upper-class women graduated from college they sought to use their education without acquiring wage earning positions, which were very rarely held by women of status. The rise of women’s clubs in the early 1900s was very much a product of educated women.

Many suffrage advocates began in positions of municipal housekeeping. Activists, in large part, saw the potential that the vote had for reform. They did not subscribe to the ideology that men and women were equal, but rather that women needed special protective legislation to counteract oppression of women and protect children. Some activists supported the suffrage movement as a means to promote these women’s issues. Municipal housekeeping served as a bridge between radical suffrage in the nineteenth century and women in the public sphere during the twentieth century. Municipal housekeeping contended that women had an equal burden of citizenship through the influence that society held upon their homes. The concept was very much rooted in traditional gender roles, yet it proposed a modern approach to dealing with problems facing society.

In a similar vein, suffrage emerged as a way for activist women to engage in politics by presenting the cause as both very traditionally related to women’s traditional gender roles, but as a modern method for reform. But, in order to effectively argue that activism and suffrage were both natural extensions of woman’s domestic position, woman suffragists presented a vision of suffragists as idealized, hyper-feminine creatures who needed the vote to spread the
positive values which they embodied.