Never A Fight of Woman Against Man: What Textbooks Don’t Say about Women’s Suffrage

In this article for The History Teacher, an academic journal about history education published by the Society for History Education, Joe Miller aims to debunk a misconception that is widespread, particularly among students who consume history textbooks: that a battle of the sexes was a key political dynamic of women’s struggle for enfranchisement.

In fact, Miller shows, the divide was less between sexes than between political opponents. He notes that there were men who supported suffrage, and women who opposed it. Women’s opposition to suffrage—often based on the notion that partisan politics would not advance women’s status; hostility to black women getting the vote; the increase in the cost of elections that would result; and the belief that women could influence politicians without the vote—was not uncommon.

However, Miller writes, the fact that some prominent women opposed women’s suffrage is not well-covered in history textbooks, some of which portray the suffrage movement as one which pitted men and women against each other.

Miller closes by suggesting how history textbooks could correct the narrative, arguing that they should emphasize three points:

(1) that suffrage was never desired by a majority of women before 1920; (2) that more women were organized against suffrage than in favor of it until 1916; and (3) that for many years, men were on the whole more progressive on the issue than women were.

You can read the whole article here, free of charge.

Examining Depictions of the Suffragette Through the Lens of Mary Poppins

In this article, historian Laura E. Nym Mayhall examines how suffragettes were represented in post-suffrage social and political orders of the 20th century.

Analyzing a statue of the suffrage luminary Emmeline Pankhurst and the character of Mrs. Banks in the film Mary Poppins (perhaps the first representation of a suffragette that recent many Americans of recent generations encountered), Mayhall concludes that the suffragette was repurposed in the post-suffrage period; while the figure of the suffragette had the potential to be “a radical disrupter of the political order,” it instead “serves to consolidate the authority of the nation-state and women’s subordinate place within it.”

The following is the article’s abstract:

Part of a special section on the politicization of mediated, celebrity representations; the histories and processes related to the transformation of female icons; and the global commodification of women. By means of a juxtaposition of readings of the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the militant British suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, and Walt Disney’s 1964 blockbuster film Mary Poppins, the writer contends that the figure of the suffragette, while potentially a radical disrupter of the political order, serves to consolidate the authority of the nation-state and women’s subordinate place within it. She contends that anxieties about shifting configurations of dominance and subordination along the lines of race, class, and gender find expression in a figure removed far enough historically to pose no threat to the existing order yet apparently sufficiently radical to denote progress.

You can read the entire article for free via JSTOR—though you will have to register for a JSTOR account to do so if you don’t already have one.

The Woman Citizen: A Study of How News Narratives Adapt to a Changing Social Environment

In this article for the journal American Journalism, scholar Sheila M. Webb provides an in-depth look at The Woman Citizen, a suffragist periodical originally founded by Carrie Chapman Catt, then the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Webb examines every issue of The Woman Citizen‘s decade-long run in order to explore how its content shifted after the passage of the 19th Amendment. She concludes that The Woman Citizen’s “coverage of the fight for suffrage shifted into narratives of women’s place in the new culture, narratives that served as proof that women could and would succeed in fulfilling their new duties and opportunities.”

Here is the abstract for the article:

This narrative analysis of the suffragist journal the Woman Citizen, published from 1917 to 1927, addresses the challenges social activists face when reframing progressive narratives. This article provides insight into the press as a site for identity; considers how a magazine positions itself to effect social advances; and explores the hurdles for a reform magazine to survive when the landscape changes, as it did for women with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and with the end of the first wave of feminism circa 1930. To ascertain if the editorial strategy and content of the journal shifted to absorb the ramifications of suffrage, the study examined each issue published, comprising some 6,300 articles. This study found that, although the journal adapted by fostering more dynamic narratives of women’s new place, it continued themes prevalent over the previous forty years, and depended on narrative framings characteristic of the suffragist movement—motherhood, altruism, equality, profiles of women of accomplishment, pioneers, and success “by chance.” This examination of a women’s journal from the 1920s also sheds light on our current environment, and shows how, despite almost a century of citizenship, coverage of women’s participation in the public sphere is still presented in ways that mimic coverage from that era.

You can find the full PDF of this article through the academic database EBSCOHost, or here through Taylor & Francis. Many libraries have access to these databases—check WorldCat to find one near you.

For more information on how periodicals covered suffrage, see Linda Steiner’s chapter “19th Century Suffrage Periodicals: Conceptions of Womanhood and the Press”; the book Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues;  Tracy Kulba and Victoria Lamont’s article “The Periodical Press and Western Woman’s Suffrage Movements in Canada and the United States: A Comparative Study“;  the book A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910; Linda Steiner’s “Finding Community in Nineteenth Century Suffrage Periodicals“; “A New Generation,” in Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence; and Women and The Press: The Struggle for Equality.

The Library of Congress also has a phenomenal digitized archive of NAWSA-related primary sources, for those who are interested in learning more about the organization.

 

‘Advertising the Work’: Women’s Suffrage Campaigns Leading the Way in Modern Media Publicity

This article by Ellen Warne, originally published as part of the book Seizing the initiative: Australian Women Leaders in Politics, Workplaces and Communities, examines the role of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in winning women’s right to vote in Australia, a state-by-state process that happened at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, as its name suggests, was devoted to curbing the consumption of alcohol. But it also played a major role in winning Australian women voting rights. Warne shows how the Union used “lantern slide shows, stereopticons, and other modern visual aids” to publicize its advocacy. The organization also frequently wrote letters in local newspapers to push the cause of suffrage.

This is the abstract of the article:

Members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union were keenly aware that many of the social concerns of the day flourished when they were out of the public gaze. They also realised that universal (white) suffrage was critical to engineer the progressive legislation and social change they believed necessary. They consciously sought to achieve both aims by attempting to catch public opinion by advertising their ideas and influencing the voting public, using modern media to expand their influence and public leadership.

The full PDF of the article is available for free here.

 

“Feminist Periodical Culture: From Suffrage to Second Wave,” in Women: A Cultural Review (Special Issue)

In this special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review, scholars explore feminist periodicals from the suffrage era to the epoch of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s in Britain.

From the introduction, “Mediated and Mediating Feminisms: Periodical Culture from Suffrage to the Second Wave,” by Victoria Bazin and Melanie Waters:

This special issue brings together, for the first time, scholarship on feminist periodicals in Britain from suffrage to the second wave. In doing so, it aims to explore the cultures of feminism through the verbal and visual ‘cacophony’ of feminist magazines. These periodicals resonate with the voices of individual women testifying to the everyday experience of feminist activism at a grass-roots level. They are archives of feminist feeling—rich resources for an expanding field of scholarship concerned with recovering a sense of how social movements are formed, how they are mediated and how they are remembered. Above all, these magazines are mediating objects that heighten our awareness of the material histories and cultures of feminism.

Three of the articles in this special issue deal directly with the suffrage era:

As the official organ of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, Votes for Women was one of the most successful suffrage papers of the Edwardian period. The famous ‘split’ over militant policies that divided the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union in October 1912 severed the suffrage paper Votes for Women from its sponsoring organization. This traumatic event offers a window into the workings of the feminist periodical networks of modernity since it shows how the connections and disconnections of the network are filled with feeling and emotion. Bringing affect theory, especially conversations regarding transmission, to the materialist strategies of new periodical studies provides a new window into the feminist periodical networks of modernity, revealing them to be saturated with affect. This offers a new understanding of the role of emotion and sentiment in the formation of the political movements and collectives of modernity.

This article examines the role of feminist periodicals in mobilizing consensus for and against welfare reform measures such as the endowment of motherhood and birth control in the 1920s. It argues that the tendency to characterize the differences between ‘old’ (equalitarian) and ‘new’ (welfare) feminists as a conflict between equality and difference has been reductive and misleading. Both camps aimed to liberate women from the domestic sphere by ensuring opportunities and access in the sphere of work/professions, but for welfare feminists, equality was not enough because it accepted a world structured for men. The concept of self-determination is central to how new feminists like Eleanor Rathbone attempted to redefine the home and maternal labour as they championed controversial policies aimed at ensuring a degree of economic and reproductive autonomy for women. An analysis of the debates that played out in and between the Woman’s Leader and Time and Tide in the 1920s underscores the role of the feminist press in the processes of political and strategic communication, at a time when self-declared feminists were trying to achieve a range of goals in a context of hostile reaction. The article encourages a reassessment of the ambitious goals of welfare feminism in the interwar period and suggests that these struggles (often obscured by ‘equality’ feminism) have never completely gone away. They resurface in various forms—from ‘wages for housework’ campaigns to assessing the conditions and economics of motherhood for working women—all of which underscore the impact of the welfare state on relations in the family and the home.

This article examines the ways in which one of Britain’s most significant feminist magazines, Time and Tide (1920–79), constructed a modern feminist identity through its interactions with other feminist print media and with the mainstream interwar press. At once drawing on a long tradition of feminist periodical publishing, from the outset this women-run magazine also worked to distance itself from the feminist label in order to take up a position among the leading general-audience weekly reviews. Exploring the tension Time and Tide negotiated over its feminist designation, the article also demonstrates the central role this magazine played both in feminist debates about ‘work’ in this period and in wider public debates about the ‘modern woman’. If Time and Tide’s disavowal of the ‘women’s paper’ category was part of what made this feminist magazine ‘modern’, its commitment to women’s participation in the public sphere is one that would sustain it throughout the interwar years and beyond.

This special issue is available to buy from Taylor & Francis Online. Academic libraries are also likely to have access; to see if there’s one near you, check WorldCat.  

Thesis: Drawing on Women: Representations of Women and Suffrage Imagery in The Masses, 1913-1917

This masters thesis examines depictions of female suffragists and other women in the now-defunct socialist magazine The Masses. The following excerpt comes from the paper’s abstract:

This study examines the ways that suffrage imagery and other depictions of women were mobilized as political symbols in the graphics of The Masses, a socialist literary magazine published monthly in Greenwich Village from 1911 to 1917. The Masses, whose roster of artists included John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Charles Allen Winter, typically invested in images of women to signify the “lyrical” left’s re-working of socialist and suffragist ideologies. Thus the magazine’s drawings of women shed light on shifts in American socialist iconography and ideologies from the high point of the movement in 1912, to its fragmentation in the mid-1910s, to its decline in 1917 following the nation’s entry into World War I. Similarly, they also provide insight into the fluctuating discourse surrounding women’s drive for the ballot.

Representations of suffragists, New Women, working-class women, as allegorical female figures were used as a point of identification and differentiation for the lyrical left from not only orthodox socialists, but other political forces as well. This project demonstrates that the role these pictures played in this process of signification is complicated and contradictory.

Interested in learning more about (alleged) connections between socialism and suffrage? Click here to read some anti-suffrage arguments rooted in opposition to socialism.

 

Women’s Suffrage: A Cinematic Study

This article—a case study of the film Iron Jawed Angels analyzed in a legal context— is available from the Lisa Revues website. The following is the article’s abstract:

Cinema reflects actualities about law but it also shapes other possibilities for law. These assumptions guide my case study of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and the conflicting conceptualizations of women’s equality in which that movement was embedded. Drawing on methods from feminist jurisprudence, intersectionality namely, I locate Katja von Garnier’s film Iron Jawed Angels (2004) in its historical, legal and discursive contexts to suggest how it constitutes meaning about the solidarities and divergences within the American women’s movement at the turn of the 20th century. I do so through a close reading of three key moments in the film’s narrative which suggest how women’s participation or lack thereof, in formal institutions, remains today, an indicator of aspirational and actualized gender equality.

Dissertation: The Other Woman’s Movement: Anti-suffrage Activism in New York State, 1865–1932

This doctoral dissertation examines anti-suffrage activism in New York State.

Abstract:

New York State, the birthplace of the woman’s rights movement, was the arena of the most dynamic anti-suffrage and suffrage activity throughout the battle for women’s enfranchisement. This study develops an understanding of the suffrage movement from the viewpoint of the women who opposed enfranchisement. The reasons women opposed suffrage are complex, but were intimately connected with their view of themselves as females, rather than as citizens. Anti-suffrage women were proud of what they considered to be women’s unique importance to the polity; they did not want that uniqueness stifled by the addition of masculine political responsibilities. The anti-suffrage movement was a vibrant woman’s movement, for anti-suffragists were convinced that they, like the suffragists, were fighting for women’s rights. Anti-suffragists established organizations after 1895 in New York State. In their first foray into the masculine realm of political power, they let men speak for them, but soon they preferred to speak for themselves. Anti-suffragists fully believed in the advancement and progress of women, supporting their advanced education and appointments to public offices. They even appropriated the political techniques of suffragists to present their views to the broader public. Anti-suffragists easily won the 1915 New York State referendum on woman suffrage. But they lost the 1917 referendum, not just because of the well-documented shift of Tammany Hall, but more because the events of World War I so distracted anti-suffragists they neglected the campaign for the referendum. Gaining the right to vote in New York State resulted in a split in the anti-suffrage movement. One group moved to Washington, DC and became the Woman Patriot Publishing Corporation. It continued to fight woman suffrage until a Supreme Court decision in 1922 declared the Nineteenth Amendment to be constitutional. The corporation became a board of five women at the forefront of fighting radicalism. The majority of women who had once opposed woman suffrage, however, accepted women’s obligation to vote. With some pride, these women voted, joined the Republican Party, and replaced anti-suffrage activities with party politics. Both groups of former anti-suffrage women abandoned the private domestic sphere to enter the public realm of politics.

A free preview is available through ProQuest; you can also purchase the full document. Access through ProQuest is also available in many academic libraries. You can check WorldCat to see if there’s a library with access near you.

The Periodical Press and Western Woman’s Suffrage Movements in Canada and the United States: A Comparative Study

An abstract and information on how to access this article are available from ScienceDirect, which local and academic libraries are likely to have as a resource. You can check WorldCat to see if there’s a library with access near you.

The following is the article’s abstract:

The early achievement of woman suffrage in the North American West is commonly explained in ways that elide the struggle involved. Building on recent historical work that recovers the decades of struggle and debate that preceded woman suffrage in the West, this article examines woman suffrage discourse in two prominent regional publications: The New Northwest of Oregon, and The Grain Growers’ Guide of western Canada. Against explanatory narratives of western suffrage as a gift or as a recognition of women’s pioneering contributions, we offer comparative studies of how these periodicals advanced strategic representations; how they were determined by the conditions of their emergence and engagement; and how they negotiated specific interventions. By drawing these analyses together, we hope to contribute to a broader re-evaluation of similarities and differences in women’s suffrage organizing across national and regional borders and to a growing body of work on the specific contexts and interventions of women’s print culture.

DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2006.04.005

Mediating Women’s Suffrage Literature

An abstract and information on how to access this article are available from ScienceDirect, which local and academic libraries are likely to have as a resource (you can check WorldCat to see if it’s available in a library near you). The following is the article’s abstract:

Although cultural productions of the women’s suffrage campaign have received increasing attention, the literary, historical and political issues raised by this body of material remain contentious. This article examines why suffrage literature has often been regarded as ‘insignificant’, and proposes new ways in which the body of writing can be understood from a literary perspective. Secondly, it addresses the problematic relationship between work produced by historians of suffrage and the perspective of cultural analysts, suggesting again that this dynamic raises questions about the politics of literary form. Thirdly, it suggests ways in which the organisation of material through new media archiving and research would enable new and more fruitful ways of reading across and interpreting the range of women’s writing.

If you’re interested in reading some suffrage literature, check out the novel The Sturdy Oak.

DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2006.04.006