VIDEO: KATHY ROBERTS FORDE ON THE ENDURING PROBLEM OF WHITE SUPREMACY

In her Afterword for Front Pages Front Lines, Assoc. Prof. Kathy Roberts Forde of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst returns to white southern suffragists’ ‘unholy alliance’ with white supremacy, including through the support of the leading suffragist periodical in the South. She points out that in the early 20th century, the National American Woman Suffrage Association capitulated to southern prejudice, for example, by acknowledging the right of southern chapters to exclude black women from membership.

VIDEO: JINX BROUSSARD ON AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN SEEKING THE VOTE

Prof. Jinx Broussard is the Bart R. Swanson Endowed Memorial Professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications. With Robin Sundarmoorthyith in Chapter 4 of Front Pages Front Lines, she addresses black women journalists and coverage of black women’s positions on suffrage, looking at both the suffrage activities of black women journalists and the black press coverage of black women’s participation in the movement, which was controversial in black communities across the country.

VIDEO: JANE RHODES on THE NEW NEGRO IN THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE

In Chapter 5 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Jane Rhodes, the head of African-American Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, examines the positions on suffrage and black women’s suffrage activism of black periodicals attached to socialism, the Communist Party, and black nationalist papers. She focuses on the post–World War I era, when black periodicals conveyed the anxiety and grievances about a widespread backlash against black American soldiers, urban antiblack violence, and lynching.

Video Interviews with the Authors of Front Pages, Front Lines

Links to all video shorts for the chapters of Front Pages Front Lines are below. Read more about the book here.

“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“Broussard addresses black women journalists and coverage of black women’s positions on suffrage, looking at both the suffrage activities of black women journalists and the black press coverage of black women’s participation in the movement, which was controversial in black communities across the country.”

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“Rhodes examines the positions of black periodicals attached to socialism or the Communist Party, as well as black nationalist papers, regarding suffrage and black women’s suffrage activism. She focuses on the post–World War I era, when black periodicals conveyed the anxiety and grievances about a widespread backlash against black American soldiers, urban antiblack violence, and lynching.”

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“Grasso 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.”

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“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.”

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“Marcellus offers a close reading of the Nashville press as the country watched to see if Tennessee would become the final state to ratify the 19th amendment. She contends that for both the Nashville Tennessean and the Nashville Bannert, competing views of Southern white masculinity were at stake.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“Forde’s Afterword returns to white southern suffragists’ ‘unholy alliance’ with white supremacy, including through the support of the leading suffragist periodical in the South. Indeed, she points out that in the early twentieth century, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) capitulated to southern prejudice, for example, by acknowledging the right of southern chapters to exclude black women from membership.”

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NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY, VIDEO, PODCAST INTERVIEWS: Linda Lumsden, “Historiography: Women’s Suffrage and the Media”

Linda Lumsden’s (University of Arizona) introduces our special issue of American Journalism, with a prodigious historiography of suffrage and the media research across the past half-century. Decade by decade, she traces the scholarly research trends—and gaps—from the recovery efforts in the 1970s, through the cultural-historical and media coverage analyses in the 1980s, to intersectional approaches of black feminist scholars in the 1990s that challenged earlier accounts. As the century turned, scholars considered suffragists’ contributions to consumer culture and cast a critical eye on the visual rhetoric of spectacle in the form of parades and the White House pickets. By 2017, as the national centennial celebration commenced, three new books reflected on “the golden media effect” of elites with style, money and celebrity-like appeal who became engaged with the movement in its final decade. Much suffrage media research has been piecemeal, Lumsden argues. She calls for fresh comprehensive examinations of how U.S. suffrage print culture drew women into the public sphere and changed them both. Listen as Dr. Lumsden discusses her historiography for this episode of the Journalism History podcast.

In the video below, Dr. Lumsden expounds briefly on what emerged from her work on the historiography of research into the subject of women’s suffrage and the media, from the 1970s through the decades until today. (This page will take you to all the synopses of articles in American Journalism‘s special issue, “Women’s Suffrage and the Media.”) The direct links to the article are below. Taylor & Francis opened full access for the period April 15-July 15, 2019.

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898

This book by historian Lisa Tetrault tackles what she calls the “myth” of the famous 1848 Seneca Falls convention. Here’s a summary of the book:

The story of how the women’s rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women’s suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War. The founding mythology that coalesced in their speeches and writings–most notably Stanton and Anthony’s History of Woman Suffrage–provided younger activists with the vital resource of a usable past for the ongoing struggle, and it helped consolidate Stanton and Anthony’s leadership against challenges from the grassroots and rival suffragists.

As Tetrault shows, while this mythology has narrowed our understanding of the early efforts to champion women’s rights, the myth of Seneca Falls itself became an influential factor in the suffrage movement. And along the way, its authors amassed the first archive of feminism and literally invented the modern discipline of women’s history.

Reviews:

Journal of the Civil War Era

Women’s Review of Books

H-SHEAR

Buy the book here. 

Read excerpts of the book here.

American Women in Cartoons 1890-1920: Female Representation and the Changing Concepts of Femininity During the American Woman Suffrage Movement: An Empirical Analysis.

About the book:

Literature on the American woman suffrage movement is plentiful, but no work has systematically analyzed the visual aspect in the quest for woman suffrage. This publication fills this gap. Taking mid 19th century representations of women as a basis, it analyses political cartoons in three major woman’s journals between 1910 and 1920 and distills the visual representation of women in the counterpublic sphere of the woman partisan press. The portrayal of women in political cartoons of three general interest journals during the same time period simultaneously helps to trace sociocultural changes in the general concept of femininity in early 20th century USA. Women’s claim for suffrage not only asked for a political right. At the same time, the gender concepts of the day were being negotiated in a highly charged public discourse, in which the visual medium of the cartoon served as a particularly effective means of emotional persuasion.

The three major women’s journals analyzed in this work are: The Woman’s Journal (the official publication of the National American Woman Suffrage Association); The Suffragist (published by the Woman’s Party); and The Woman Voter (a regional suffrage publication based in New York City). Hundhammer also analyzes cartoons published in three general interest magazines: Life, Harper’s Weekly, and The Literary Digest. Of particular interest are the first few chapters of this book, which focus specifically on the suffrage movement.

ISBN-10: 3631637985
ISBN-13: 978-3631637982

A preview of the introduction is available in PDF format from beckshop.de. You can buy a copy of American Women in Cartoons 1890-1920 from its publisher’s website. College and public libraries are also likely to hold a copy of the book; check WorldCat to see if there is one near you.

Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America

In Fighting Chance, Faye E. Dudden writes about the controversies around the struggle for women’s right to vote and black suffrage.

About the book:

The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this?

Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women’s history and to 19th-century political history—a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.

Of particular interest regarding suffrage and the media is Chapter 6, Revolutionary Journalism and Political Opportunism, in which Dudden writes about the history of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s women’s rights newspaper, the Revolution, and its political impact.

ISBN: 9780199772636

Excerpts of the book are available through GoogleBooks and Amazon. You can buy a hardcover copy or an e-version of Fighting Chance from its publisher, Oxford University Press. University and public libraries are also likely to hold copies of the book; check WorldCat to see if there is one near you.

Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era

Angels in the Machinery discusses the historical intersection between gender and politics using primary sources, such as media products and campaign materials, including those from the suffrage era.

About the book:

Angels in the Machinery offers a sweeping analysis of the centrality of gender to politics in the United States from the days of the Whigs to the early twentieth century. Author Rebecca Edwards shows that women in the U.S. participated actively and influentially as Republicans, Democrats, and leaders of third-party movements like Prohibitionism and Populism—decades before they won the right to vote—and in the process managed to transform forever the ideology of American party politics. Using cartoons, speeches, party platforms, news accounts, and campaign memorabilia, she offers a compelling explanation of why family values, women’s political activities, and even candidates’ sex lives remain hot-button issues in politics to this day.

Excerpts of the book are available through GoogleBooks. You can buy a copy of Angels in the Machinery from its publisher, Oxford University Press. College and public libraries may also have a copy of the book; you can check WorldCat  to see if there is one near you.

Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women

Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women looks at the intersection of consumer culture and suffrage tactics.

About the book:

Margaret Finnegan’s pathbreaking study of woman suffrage from the 1850s to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 reveals how activists came to identify with consumer culture and employ its methods of publicity to win popular support through carefully crafted images of enfranchised women as “personable, likable, and modern.”

Drawing on organization records, suffragists’ papers and memoirs, and newspapers and magazines, Finnegan shows how women found it in their political interest to ally themselves with the rise of consumer culture–but the cost of this alliance was a concession of possibilities for social reform. When manufacturers and department stores made consumption central to middle-class life, suffragists made an argument for the ballot by comparing good voters to prudent comparison shoppers. Through suffrage commodities such as newspapers, sunflower badges, Kewpie dolls, and “Womanalls” (overalls for the modern woman), as well as pantomimes staged on the steps of the federal Treasury building, fashionable window displays, and other devices, “Votes for Women” entered public space and the marketplace. Together these activities and commodities helped suffragists claim legitimacy in a consumer capitalist society. Imaginatively interweaving cultural and political history, Selling Suffrage is a revealing look at how the growth of consumerism influenced women’s self-identity.

ISBN: 9780231107396

Excerpts of the book are available through GoogleBooks. You can purchase a copy of Selling Suffrage from its publisher, Columbia University Press. College and public libraries are also likely to have copies; check WorldCat to see if there is one near you.