BOOK, ESSAYS, VIDEO: FRONT PAGES FRONT LINES: MEDIA AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

 

Front Pages, Front Lines

Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage

(Read about the book on the Illinois Press site: here. Watch any of the short videos with insights to all the chapters here. Click author/editor names below for links to their other SuffrageandtheMedia.org links.) 

“The centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment encourages a fresh rethinking of the history of the women’s suffrage movement, to which this volume is a welcome addition. Special kudos for its sustained attention to racial and regional diversity, as well as its broad chronological sweep.”

                                                                            —Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

The press, women, and the long road to the Nineteenth Amendment

Suffragists recognized from the start that the media played an essential role in the U.S. women’s suffrage movement. From holding parades to picketing in front of the White House, activists played to the news media of their day. Meanwhile, they supported hundreds of energetic suffragist publications.

Front Pages, Front Lines offers new research on media issues related to women’s suffrage, incorporating innovative approaches to social movements and counter-movements, media theory, memory studies, and historiography. Aiming to correct past oversights and treating suffrage activism as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, the collection includes overlooked topics such as the participation of African American and religious media, coverage of black suffragists, suffragist and anti-suffrage rhetorical strategies, the role of social and media elites, and the impact of white masculinity on press coverage. Contributors: Maurine H. Beasley, Sherilyn Cox Bennion, Jinx C. Broussard, Teri Finneman, Kathy Roberts Forde, Linda M. Grasso, Carolyn Kitch, Brooke Kroeger, Linda J. Lumsden, Jane Marcellus, Jane Rhodes, Linda Steiner, and Robin Sundaramoorthy

Linda Steiner is a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a coauthor of Women and Journalism. Carolyn Kitch is a professor of journalism at Temple University. She is the author of Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines. Brooke Kroeger is a professor of journalism at New York University. She is the author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote.

VIDEO: JANE MARCELLUS ON DISCOURSES ON MASCULINITY IN THE NASHVILLE PRESS

In Chapter 8 of Front Pages Front Lines Prof. Marcellus of Middle Tennessee State, offers a close reading of a crucial state in 1920, when the entire country was watching to see if Tennessee would become the 36th and final state to ratify the 19th Amendment.The relatively liberal Nashville Tennessean, roughly aligned with the progressive “New South” view, supported ratification; the “Old South” Nashville Banner remained opposed. Offering a counterpoint to the usual emphasis on competing versions of womanhood, Marcellus contends that instead, for both newspapers, competing views of southern white masculinity were at stake.”

VIDEO: SHERILYN COX BENNION ON THE WOMEN’S EXPONENT OF UTAH

 

In Chapter 3 of Front Pages Front Lines, Bennion shows how the prosuffrage arguments of the Women’s Exponent, published for Mormon women, were reformulated in response to regional political shifts, using various rationales to counter attempts to disenfranchise polygamous women.

 

VIDEO: LINDA STEINER ON NINETEENTH-CENTURY SUFFRAGE JOURNALS: INVENTING AND DEFENDING NEW WOMEN

 

 

In Chapter 2 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Steiner argues that the suffrage and women’s rights papers of the nineteenth century created and experimented with very different versions of the new woman, and then dramatized and celebrated these identities.

 

VIDEO: TERI FINNEMAN ON A COUNTERMOVEMENT ON THE VERGE OF DEFEAT: ANTISUFFRAGIST ARGUMENTS IN 1917 PRESS COVERAGE

 

In Chapter 7 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Finneman draws on US news coverage to examine the rhetorical strategies of the anti-suffragists in representing themselves and their adversaries in 1917, when they began to lose significant ground with journalists as the progressive arguments of the suffragists gained more traction with journalists.

 

VIDEO: CAROLYN KITCH ON MEMORY, INTERRUPTED: A CENTURY OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING THE STORY OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

 

In Chapter 11 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Kitch analyzes how cover stories in Time, Life, and Newsweek, in the context of reporting on the so-called second wave of the women’s movement, both remembered and forgot the women’s suffrage movement and alternated between or combined celebration and dismissal of feminism, using suffrage memory at both ends.

 

VIDEO: LINDA LUMSDEN ON HISTORIOGRAPHY: WOMEN’S SUFRAGE AND THE MEDIA

 

In Chapter 1 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Lumsden offers a comprehensive historiography of suffrage and the media that highlights the near one-dimensionality of much of the early scholarship. She analyzes what historians, journalism studies researchers, and sociologists have found—and what they have ignored—beginning in the 1970s, when feminist scholars began to look back at both suffrage editors and mainstream news media coverage of the campaign.

 

VIDEO: MAURINE BEASLEY ON AFTER SUFFRAGE: AN UNCHARTED PATH

 

In Chapter 1 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Beasley examines how suffrage organizations and their new outlets shifted their policies, positions, and philosophies in the 1920s, analyzing the after-enfranchisement efforts of suffrage activists to decide whether to enter the existing male power structure or concentrate on women’s advancement outside of it.

 

VIDEO: BROOKE KROEGER ON THE FACILITATORS: ELITES IN THE VICTORY OF THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

 

In Chapter 9 of Front Pages Front Lines Prof. Kroeger shows the importance and influence, especially during the suffrage movement’s final decade, of high society women and men who enjoyed elite status as socialites, businessmen and professionals, especially as editors and publishers of important newspapers and magazines, and how suffrage leaders cultivated these recruits and the useful resources they brought.

 

 

VIDEO: LINDA GRASSO ON THE DIFFERENTLY RADICAL “THE CRISIS” AND “THE MASSES”

 

 

 

In Chapter 6 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Linda Grasso of CUNY’s York University, compares the approaches to women’s suffrage adopted by the NAACP’s The Crisis, under W.E.B. Du Bois, and The Masses, edited by Max Eastman and primarily serving white readers. Both magazines vigorously supported women’s suffrage, but Grasso analyzes their ‘differently radical’ approaches.