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“Fine Dignity, Picturesque Beauty, and Serious Purpose”:

The Reorientation of Suffrage Media in the Twentieth Century

Emily Scarbrough, Author
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Understanding America’s “Girls”

In the course of gender history a number of woman’s historians have examined the cultural expectations of women in the nineteenth century. Early gender historians like Barbara Welter have labeled the hyper-feminine cultural language of womanhood in the nineteenth century as either a cult of domesticity or a cult of true womanhood. These
women, historians have argued, were supposed to, according to dominant culture, possess four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submission, and domesticity.[1] Historians have suggested that the women in the twentieth century departed from this exalted vision of womanhood as the ideal of the new woman emerged. The new woman was a celebration of real women. Winnifred Harper Cooley, daughter of Susan B. Anthony’s biographer and author of History of Woman Suffrage, Ida Husted Harper, wrote in 1904 The New Womanhood. The book argued “the woman has been worshipped in almost every stage of civilization, while women have been degraded. The Madonna adored, while the human mother has been despised or neglected.”[2] 
In response to the popular understanding of woman’s role within society, this new ideal emerged, in which women were given new opportunities. They were not “limited by physical burdens and suppressed by public opinion.”[3] In popular memory this new woman ideal is seen as a radical departure from Welter’s so-called Cult of True Womanhood, but in reality, popular gender norms persisted. The suffrage movement’s reorientation of its media presence is a reflection not of the ideal of the new woman, but primarily of the existing understanding of femininity.

Throughout the twentieth century suffrage campaign, leaders of the movement struggled to balance conservative
values with progressive goals. To make the cause approachable suffragists presented themselves along similar veins as popular media mainstays. Suffragists drew on the iconography of famous American illustrators like Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy. Advertising illustrations defined standards for beauty by creating an ideal that was mass produced and mass circulated. The American “Girl” had a thin waist, pouty lips, dreamy eyes, and sweetly chignoned hair. These depictions appeared in catalogues, magazines, and were brought to life on film and stage by actresses like Ethel Barrymore and Evelyn Nesbit. Suffragists aligned themselves with this vision of beauty rather than the more practical and more autonomous vision that new womanhood promised. Though suffrage media presented itself as a part of the American “girl” phenomenon many of its supporters were in fact women who had experienced
the “new woman” shift. 



[1] Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1966), 152.

[2] Winnifred Harper Cooley, The New Womanhood (New York: Broadway Publishing Company: 1904), 3.

[3] Cooley, The New Womanhood, 17.

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