Thesis: “Fine Dignity, Picturesque Beauty, and Serious Purpose”: The Reorientation of Suffrage Media in the Twentieth Century

In this 2015 masters thesis, Emily Scarbrough, then a history graduate student at Eastern Illinois University, delves into suffrage-era media depictions of suffragists. In particular, Scarbrough examines how, early in the 20th century, a new generation of suffragists sought to change how they were treated in the media. They tried to subvert then-commonplace media depictions of suffragists as overbearing, uncouth, masculine agitators (see Charlie Chaplin in “A Busy Day“), hoping instead to “rebrand” themselves as feminine reformers who could bring a much-needed woman’s touch to politics. In so doing, Scarbrough argues, suffragists changed the movement’s broad argument from one based on women’s equal rights and sexual equality to one that—though perhaps more effective—used gender-normative rationales to justify women’s enfranchisement.

The abstract of the thesis:

Throughout the first half century of the woman’s suffrage movement, the women of the movement were depicted as dastardly, masculine women who usurped the family structure with their penchant for politics. In the twentieth century, a new generation of woman’s suffragists took command of their appearance in the media. Instead of controversial figures, woman’s suffragists restructured their campaign to convince the general public that society needed women to clean up politics. In doing so, suffragists sacrificed their goals of sexual equality in favor of their particular femininity. They celebrated their gender as the particular reason that they needed the vote, unlike earlier suffragists who declared that they deserved it. Using film, postcards, illustrations, and public demonstrations, suffragists created a comprehensive campaign that reached millions with the singular message that enfranchisement would be both politically significant and a natural extension of feminine virtues. Though the woman’s suffrage movement in the twentieth century was one of moderns means, the message was fundamentally traditional.

“Those Knights of the Pen and Pencil”: Women Journalists and Cultural Leadership of the Women’s Movement in Australia and the United States

An abstract and information on how to access this 2013 article are available from JSTOR, which local and academic libraries are likely to have as a resource. You can check WorldCat to see if there’s one near you. The following is the article’s abstract:

Journalism has been crucial to progressive political movements, and the work of journalists has
provided the cultural leadership necessary for recruiting members and advancing the cause.
This cultural leadership is explored through the journalism of three women who in Australia
and the United States, wrote for a labour and socialist readership and also edited a periodical.
Combining paid work and activism, journalism gave them an occupation that was an example
to other women, and a vehicle for publicising women’s rights. Exercising leadership through
print media was important in expanding women’s economic citizenship and their political
engagement. Through their words and personal example over a century, these three women
journalists – Alice Henry, Jennie Scott Griffiths and Delia Elliott – provided the leadership
that helped construct women in the twentieth century as active political subjects.

For more on women journalists and suffrage, see Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality and “A New Generation,” in Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence.

DOI: 10.5263/labourhistory.104.0081

Thesis: Changes in Newspaper Portrayals of Women, 1900-1960

This undergraduate thesis shows how mainstream newspapers depicted women in the first half of the 20th century, and how these portrayals changed along with society’s views of women during this era. In addition, it looks at how coverage of women and the transformations occurring during these 50 years may have influenced and affected each other, as well as how media treatment of women contributed to the beginnings of the second wave of feminism that started in the latter half of the century.

Geopolitics in the Anti-Suffrage Cartoons of American John Tinney McCutcheon and Canadian Newton McConnell: Stopping Trans-Atlantic Flow

Writing professor Jaqueline McLeod Rogers offers an analysis of the anti-suffrage cartoons of John Tinney McCutcheon, an American, and Newton McConnell, a Canadian. The piece, published in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition, emphasizes the suffrage movement’s transnational nature. It swept the streets not only in Britain, but in the former British colonies of the United States and Canada, too.

The cartoonists, both of whom opposed suffrage, were reacting to the militant British movement for voting rights. As Rogers explains, however, they expressed their opposition in different ways. McCutcheon’s cartoons portray the US as a place where women were winning the right to vote through peaceful tactics. He believes that the British women’s movement could, in fact, learn from the Americans. In contrast, McConnell’s cartoons depict the British suffragettes as a mob that could tear apart Canadian society.

Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition offers a PDF of this article for free here.

The Woman Suffrage Parades of 1910-1913: Possibilities and Limitations of an Early Feminist Rhetorical Strategy

An abstract and information on how to access this article are available from TandFOnline, which local and academic libraries are likely to have as a resource. The following is the article’s abstract:

This essay offers a greater understanding of how the introduction of annual parades into the women’s suffrage movement created both rhetorical possibilities and limitations for the campaign. Through an analysis of suffragists’ use of the parades as an innovative rhetorical strategy with formal limitations, I argue that the parades ultimately were successful in drawing attention to arguments for woman suffrage, but proved problematic for achieving the movement’s goals, particularly suffragists’ efforts to control the image of their movement and its members. I conclude with a consideration of how the parades’ contradictions reflected the larger rhetorical paradox inherent in early twentieth‐century gender politics.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570310209374724

Making the News: Votes for Women and the Mainstream Press

Remember Me

Journalism of the Suffrage Movement: 25 Years of Recent Scholarship

Abstract and ways to obtain access via Taylor and Francis Online.

Abstract: Woman suffrage publications have provided a fertile field for historic scholarship in the last two decades. This historiographic essay reviews this scholarship and suggests new areas to be examined and an interdisciplinary approach that makes use of other disciplines, such as rhetorical analysis and social movement theory.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2000.10739223

The Wisconsin Press and Woman Suffrage, 1911-1919: An Analysis of Factors Affecting Ten Diverse Newspapers

In this article, Elizabeth V. Burt describes a study in which she examined 10 Wisconsin newspapers’ coverage during six separate weeks in which important suffrage events took place. In particular, she examines various factors that might have influenced how the papers covered the movement for women’s suffrage, and whether it can be said that they manifested a sort of uniform “mainstream press” ideology.

The following article excerpt comes via Questia:

This study combines quantitative and qualitative methods in its analysis of ten Wisconsin newspapers during six week-long periods in which a significant woman suffrage event took place. It attempted to identify those factors that might have influenced individual newspapers’ coverage of the suffrage movement, including the personal positions of their publishers and editors, their political affiliations, the demographic characteristics of their readership area, circulation size, place of publication, and sources of the stories they published on suffrage. The study found that these examples of the “mainstream press,” far from representing a united ideological voice, represented a diversity of voices influenced, in part, by these factors.

Scholarship has often approached the American press as a monolithic institution. Content and qualitative analyses examining press coverage of specific events and issues often proceed from an unstated assumption that the press, often referred to as the “mainstream press” or the “general circulation press,” represents a united ideological voice in American society.

This author suggests that even after the rise of the mass circulation press in the 1890s, the American general circulation press was far from monolithic. Newspapers in the early decades of the twentieth century continued to reflect a wide range of political, geographic, economic, ethnic, professional, technological, and commercial characteristics. Likewise, newspaper publishers, editors, and reporters reflected a wide range of personal, political, and professional skills, motivations, and interests, which certainly influenced the way they pursued their profession. It might be concluded, therefore, that a particular newspaper’s coverage of issues or events would be affected by any of these factors and that the general circulation press, rather than representing a single monolithic bloc, could be expected to act as many voices.

This author tested this premise by studying the coverage of a particular issue—woman suffrage—by a score of general circulation newspapers, each representing widely different characteristics. This is an unusual approach in that content analyses typically focus on coverage of an event or issue by one particular news outlet, several examples of a single news medium, two or more different forms of the media, or examples of mainstream and alternative press.

In selecting newspapers for the study, the author proceeded from the hypothesis that factors such as demographic characteristics of the readership, political affiliation, geographic location and circulation size of the newspaper, and individual characteristics of newspaper editors and publishers would likely influence newspaper coverage of any issue. The central question to this study was, simply, “What factors might affect a newspaper’s coverage of woman suffrage?”

Hypotheses

This study examined how the Wisconsin press covered the suffrage movement between 1911-1919—a period during which suffrage mobilization and legislative activity were at their peak—with the goal of identifying those factors that might have influenced that coverage. It was expected, for example, that newspapers with pro-suffrage editors or publishers would print pro-suffrage editorials and sympathetic news copy and vice versa. When political parties took positions for or against the reform, it was expected that newspapers affiliated with them would reflect their platform. Finally, newspapers published in communities with a large German ethnic population, with a strong membership in the Catholic and Lutheran churches, or with strong economic ties to the brewing industry—all groups vehemently opposed to the reform—were expected to reflect their anti-suffrage position.

This study also examined how a newspaper’s coverage might be related to its methods of gathering and producing news, which might be determined by the newspaper’s circulation size and its place of publication …

The article is also available online for payment or through your local library, with full access options, via Sage Journals.

DOI:10.1177/107769909607300309

Women’s Magazines and the Suffrage Movement: Did They Help or Hinder the Cause?

The Wiley Online Library has direct access to the article for payment, including a free preview of the first page. Questia offers this preview of the article’s introduction (as well as related resources):

Twenty-six million American women were granted the right to vote on August 20, 1920, after 72 years of struggle (see Table 1). The outcome of the movement remained uncertain until Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment only three months before the 1920 presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James Cox.

Ideological opposition to the bill was manifest and formidable. The theological argument, for instance, asserted that “…God had ordained men and women to perform different functions in the state as well as in the home….” Next, the biological argument, used by people who needed pseudoscientific evidence, assumed that women were the weaker sex and could not undertake the physically arduous task of voting. Last, the psychological argument contended that femininity was associated with emotionalism and illogicality, “traits that were inconsistent with the proper exercise of suffrage” (Kraditor 15-18).

Numerous powerful and organized groups that aligned themselves with anti-suffragists availed themselves of these arguments, including the anti-prohibitionists (or “wets”), the Democratically controlled Southern states and business interests.

Anti-prohibitionists saw that suffrage implied prohibition. They did not so much dread suffrage as the fact that it “could only hasten the advent of prohibition, and they marshaled every counterforce at their disposal [to defeat the amendment]” (Kobler 145). To counteract their force, early in the suffrage movement the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) realized they shared many members and consequently coalesced against the “wet” interests.

As late as 1916, none of the Southern states had endorsed the woman suffrage by constitutional amendment, even though the Republican and Progressive parties had done so. Degler said that the South’s reluctance came from “the fear that woman suffrage would reopen the race question.” True, the Fifteenth Amendment had granted all men the right to vote, including black men, but, Degler continued, “Many feared that the kind of coercion and violence that had been routinely used against black males who tried to vote or otherwise upset the political status quo would not be as easily or as effectively invoked against black women” (Degler 340-1).

Business interests opposed the measure because they feared women would demand too many reforms in the work place, which would hurt profits. It was not an unfounded fear: The number of working women had steadily increased, and by World War I, they became an economic force to be reckoned with.

With so many powerful groups militating against suffrage, it would appear that women’s magazines had their work cut out for them in fighting the battle for equality. However, two of the most popular women’s magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, did not choose to accept that mission. For the most part, they ignored the issues. Articles that did pertain did not actively support or even discuss the amendment until it had become a “fait accompli.” In general, articles perpetuated the ideologies that historically had detained and fought against the passage of suffrage.

In contrast to women’s magazines, general opinion magazines discussed issues, presented different sides of the controversy and, in general, favored woman suffrage. Being purveyors of, among other topics, political opinion, these magazines wrote much about President Wilson’s pro-suffrage stance. He praised women for their heroic part in World War I and vigorously lobbied in their favor in speeches and letters to congressmen. “Much of the morale of this country and of the world will repose in our sincere adherence to democratic principles,” Wilson said in a letter to a senator. Passage of the amendment would be “an essential psychological element in the conduct of the war for democracy” (“The War and Votes for Women” 33-34) …

DOI: 10.1111/j.1542-734X.1996.1902_13.x

Suffrage as News: Ten Dailies’ Coverage of the Nineteenth Amendment

The following abstract comes from EBSCO:

The article presents an analysis on the national coverage of the woman’s suffrage movement and the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment in the U.S. It mentions that the said amendment focused on the tone of and the prominence given to both. It provides examinations on newspapers and magazines towards the progress of the amendment following debates on it advantages and disadvantages. It notes questions regarding the prominence of suffrage on the news agenda and its portrayal as either negative, long overdue or neutral.

Accession No.: 74969844

The abstract and availability at your local library are linked here via EBSCO 

TandFOnline has the first page displayed and means of access. If your local library does not have this, you may also be able to request a scan through Interlibrary Loan.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08821127.1983.10731004