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.

Gotham Center for New York City History: The Men Who Helped Get Women the Vote by Brooke Kroeger

Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York History published an excerpt from Brooke Kroeger’s book, titled The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote.

Kroeger introduces readers to the subject of her book, the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, an elite group of men who lobbied New York’s legislature and governor on women’s suffrage.

Kroeger explains the significance of this league, which included luminaries like Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Max Eastman, the well-known intellectual and writer, in this excerpt:

From a contemporary standpoint, it is remarkable to consider that one hundred years ago, these prominent men — highly respected and influential, their exploits chronicled regularly in the national media — not only gave their names to the cause of women’s rights or called in the odd favor, but rather invested in the fight. They created and ran an organization expressly committed to an effort that, up until the point at which they joined, had been seen as women’s work for a marginal nonstarter of a cause. From the beginning of their involvement, these men willingly acted on orders from and in tandem with the women who ran the greater state and national suffrage campaigns. How many times in American history has such collaboration happened, especially with this balance of power?

You can read the entire excerpt here. You can buy Kroeger’s book here.

Gotham Center for New York City History: How World War I Impacted the Suffrage Debate by Johanna Neuman

This chapter of Johanna Neuman’s book Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote,  excerpted here at Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York History, analyzes the impact of World War I on the fight for suffrage.

Neuman notes that suffrage activists changed their rhetoric in light of the Great War, turning to hyper-patriotism as they pursued their quest for voting rights.

She writes:

[S]uffragists won the vote not because of their war service itself but because fighting for their cause during wartime forced them to make wrenching choices between pacifism and patriotism that hardened them as political actors. Suffrage in the end was not a gift from male lawmakers for female war service. It came not because they served in war but because they excelled in displaying that service in the public square. War had given them a platform, not a guarantee. How they performed was riveting.

Meanwhile, the more militant tactics of those like Alice Paul alienated the media and authorities. Paul lead a group of protesters who picketed the White House, a “symbol of national identity,” Neuman writes, at a time of war. Suffragists who disagreed with Paul’s actions distanced themselves from her.

Read the whole excerpt here. Buy Neuman’s book here.

Additional resource: Marcela Micucci’s review of the book in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City.

Gotham Center for New York City History: Black Women and the Right to Vote in New York by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello

This excerpt, run on the Gotham Center’s blog, of Susan Goodier’s and Karen Pastorello’s book Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State focuses on black women’s suffrage activism.

The scholars note that black women saw winning the right to vote as a fundamental component of their fight against segregation and lynching. In their eyes, suffrage meant a chance to utilize political power at the ballot box to effect change that could strike against racism.

Goodier and Pastorello write:

True to their commitment to “uplift” the race, black women wove agitation for the vote into their activism for civil rights, moral reform, and community improvement. Because black women typically had more power within their own communities than did white women in theirs, black women saw the need for suffrage differently than white women did. Issues that occupied the energies of white women, such as the need for “equality within their families, political rights, and access to paid work,” did not mean as much to black women. Some black women did not feel the necessity to press for the vote as much as they felt the need to agitate to “emancipate their race from the oppressive conditions under which they lived.” However, core groups of black women certainly agitated for the vote throughout the movement, with or without a connection to white women’s suffrage organizations. They saw the vote as a way to solve the problems the black race — and especially women — faced, including segregation, lynching, and other forms of systematic racism.

Read the whole excerpt here. You can buy their book here.

Additional resource: Marcela Micucci’s review of the book in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City.

Gotham Center for New York City History: Mrs. Frank Leslie’s Million Dollar Gift to Women’s Suffrage by Joan Marie Johnson

In this Gotham Center-published excerpt, Joan Marie Johnson prints a portion of her book on the monied women who funded suffrage activism. 

The excerpt looks at Mrs. Frank Leslie, who was born Miriam Folline but took on the alternate name after her husband, Frank Leslie, died.

Leslie gave over her entire fortune to Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), who used the money to fund a campaign to pass a federal amendment granting women the right to vote. The gift also allowed NAWSA to spend cash on publicity that included weekly newspapers and books documenting suffrage activism.

Johnson writes:

Although she was not an activist, Leslie consistently supported the suffrage movement with small donations for well over two decades before leaving her estate to Catt. Moreover, she demonstrated through her life choices and business acumen that women were capable of economic independence. Together, Leslie’s love life and business achievements reveal that she took control of her own life and her finances, despite the steady stream of men in her life — men on whom she could not rely. This independent spirit was probably the source of her dedication to woman suffrage. It should not be surprising that Leslie wrote that the woman of the future “must free herself from her swaddling clothes and go into the world with courage and self-reliance,” traits she had already proven to have herself.Leslie decided to leave her considerable fortune to Catt to use for the suffrage movement in order to provide other women a means to the independence and power she had been able to develop through the publishing business she inherited.

Read the entire excerpt here. You can buy Johnson’s book here.

How Suffragists Reacted to the Titanic Disaster

The book Print Culture in a Diverse America is a collection of essays on “books, newspapers, and magazines issued by and for diverse, often marginalized, groups.”

In chapter nine, Steven Biel writes about the “contested meanings of the Titanic disaster”—the 1912 sinking of the British passenger ship.

Suffragists are among the groups Biel looks at. To make his case, he uses media produced for newspapers and journals that reported on or captured the feelings of suffragists and how they reacted to the Titanic disaster.

Biel writes that suffragists used the conventional narrative of the chivalrous men who saved women and children on the Titanic to argue for suffrage. For instance, Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the National American Woman Suffrage Association journal Woman’s Journal, argued for a new type of chivalry that would expand protection to everybody, and asserted that voting rights for women would help advance that principle. An editorial in the Progressive Women lambasted men’s hypocrisy because they protected women on the ship but did not protect women in politics and denied them the right to participate in government. Other argued that women also showed bravery on the Titanic, and that “attention to this fact would advance the suffrage cause.”

The full chapter is available for free on Google Books.

‘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.

19th Century Suffrage Periodicals: Conceptions of Womanhood and the Press

In the fourth chapter of the book Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History, journalism scholar Linda Steiner delves into the history of 19th century women-run suffrage periodicals and how they provided an arena for collective action and the forging of new identities. Many men-run publications dismissed suffrage, or scarcely covered it, so prominent activists created their own publications.

The periodicals she covers wanted to change the image of women as meek subjects to people entitled to status and honor, which the right to vote represented.

Steiner details how suffrage periodicals were not concerned with the conventions of modern-day journalism. They were non-hierarchal, unconcerned with objectivity and did not separate their publishing and business departments.

Steiner focuses on seven different publications in her chapter: the Lily (1849-1856); the Una (1853-1855); Revolution (1868-1870); the Woman’s Journal (1870-1931); the New Northwest (1871-1887); the National Citizen and Ballot Box (1876-1881); and the Woman’s Tribune (1883-1909).

For more information on how periodicals covered suffrage, see 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.

Google Books has most of Steiner’s chapter for free. You can buy the book on Amazon here, or directly from the publisher here. The book is available in many libraries. Check WorldCat to see if a library near you has it.

ISBN 978-0-8166-2170-5.