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.

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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BOOKS: NEW in 2020 for the SUFFRAGE CENTENNIAL

 

 

Here are the publishers’ links to three new books for 2020, timed to the suffrage centennial celebrations and their publishers’ descriptions.

Ellen Carol DuBois (Simon & Schuster) SUFFRAGE: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote

“Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this exciting history explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists. Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth as she explores the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, Congress granted freed African American men the right to vote but not white and African American women, a crushing disappointment. DuBois shows how suffrage leaders persevered through the Jim Crow years into the reform era of Progressivism. She introduces new champions Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who brought the fight into the 20th century, and she shows how African American women, led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, demanded voting rights even as white suffragists ignored them. DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. In vivid prose DuBois describes suffragists’ final victories in Congress and state legislatures, culminating in the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee.DuBois follows women’s efforts to use their voting rights to win political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for women. Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote is sure to become the authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of American democracy.”

Johanna Neuman (Wiley-Blackwell)AND YET THEY PERSISTED: How American Women Won the Right to Vote

“A comprehensive history of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, from 1776 to 1965. Most suffrage histories begin in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton first publicly demanded the right to vote at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. And they end in 1920, when Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, removing sexual barriers to the vote. And Yet They Persisted traces agitation for the vote over two centuries, from the revolutionary era to the civil rights era, excavating one of the greatest struggles for social change in this country and restoring African American women and other women of color to its telling. In this sweeping history, author Johanna Neuman demonstrates that American women defeated the male patriarchy only after they convinced men that it was in their interests to share political power. Reintegrating the long struggle for the women’s suffrage into the metanarrative of U.S. history, Dr. Neuman sheds new light on such questions as: Why it took so long to achieve equal voting rights for women? How victories in state suffrage campaigns pressured Congress to act? Why African American women had to fight again for their rights in 1965? How the struggle by eight generations of female activists finally succeeded? And Yet They Persisted: How American Women Won the Right to Vote is the ideal text for college courses in women’s studies and history covering the women’s suffrage movement, as well as courses on American History, Political History, Progressive Era reforms, or reform movements in general.”

Linda Steiner, Carolyn Kitch, and Brooke Kroeger, editors, (University of Illinois), FRONT PAGES, FRONT LINES: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage

“The press, women, and the long road to the Nineteenth Amendment. Suffragists recognized that the media played an essential role in the women’s suffrage movement and the public’s understanding of it. From parades to going to jail for voting, activists played to the mass media of their day. They also created an energetic niche media of suffragist journalism and publications. This collection offers new research on media issues related to the women’s suffrage movement. Contributors incorporate innovative approaches to social movement, media theory, and historiography while discussing the vexed relationship between the media and debates over suffrage. Aiming to correct past oversights, the editors curate essays on overlooked topics like the participation of African American and Mormon-oriented media, coverage of black women in the movement, suffrage-related historiography, suffragist rhetorical strategies, elites within the movement, suffrage as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, and how views of white masculinity influenced 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. From Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote: “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.”

Doris Stevens, introduction by Angela P Dodson (Black Dog & Leventhal), JAILED FOR FREEDOM: A First-Person Account of the Militant Fight for Women’s Rights

The 100th-anniversary special edition of Jailed for Freedom, the essential history and first-person account of the courageous and militant suffragists who fought for their right to vote.
“First published in 1920, Jailed for Freedom is the courageous, true story of the militant suffragists who organized some of the first-ever, large scale demonstrations and protests on Washington. At a time when President Woodrow Wilson’s administration refused to acknowledge women’s voting rights as a tangible issue, the National Woman’s Party coalesced, organized, and fought a fierce battle for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment with heroism, bravery, and radical vigilance.
“What makes Jailed for Freedom especially compelling and such an important contribution to women’s history is that it is a personal testimony from a suffragist who persevered through it. With depth and clarity, Doris Stevens details the bravery of the women who picketed daily outside the White House, opened themselves up to ridicule and physical violence, were arrested on no viable charges, jailed when they chose not to pay fines, and even beaten and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes.
“Including a new introduction from suffrage historian Angela P. Dodson, author of Remember the Ladies, and accompanied with poignant, archival illustrations, Jailed for Freedom is a tribute to the women and acts it took the pass the Nineteenth Amendment, apropos of radical activism that is still mobilizing in politics today.”

Allison K. Lange, (University of Chicago) PICTURING POLITICAL POWER: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement

“For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images—whether illustrations, engravings, photographs, or colorful chromolithograph posters. Some of these pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending, and others downright incendiary. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural ideas of women’s perceived roles and abilities and often have been circulated with pointedly political objectives.

Picturing Political Power offers perhaps the most comprehensive analysis yet of the connection between images, gender, and power. In this examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Allison K. Lange explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. She shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and win the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized the compatibility of voting and motherhood, while Sojourner Truth and other leading suffragists of color employed pictures to secure respect and authority. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.” 

Dawn Durante and Nance A. Hewitt, compilers (University of Illinois) 100 YEARS OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE, A University of Illinois Anthology

100 Years of Women’s Suffrage commemorates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment by bringing together essential scholarship on the women’s suffrage movement and women’s voting previously published by the University of Illinois Press. With an original introduction by Nancy A. Hewitt, the volume illuminates the lives and work of key figures while uncovering the endeavors of all women—across lines of gender, race, class, religion, and ethnicity—to gain, and use, the vote. Beginning with works that focus on cultural and political suffrage battles, the chapters then look past 1920 at how women won, wielded, and continue to fight for access to the ballot.

A curation of important scholarship on a pivotal historical moment, 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage captures the complex and enduring struggle for fair and equal voting rights.

Contributors: Laura L. Behling, Erin Cassese, Mary Chapman, M. Margaret Conway, Carolyn Daniels, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Ellen Carol DuBois, Julie A. Gallagher, Barbara Green, Nancy A. Hewitt, Leonie Huddy, Kimberly Jensen, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Lady Constance Lytton, and Andrea G. Radke-Moss

“From the brutal imprisonment narratives that roused a nation’s sympathies to the suffragists’ plight to the ‘gender gap’ in contemporary voting, this text is a rich collection of University of Illinois Press works on the American women’s suffrage quest and its aftermath. 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage highlights rarely discussed regional and racial approaches in the fight for women’s ‘first class citizenship’ through a fascinating mix of primary accounts and historical and gender studies essays. A recommended anthology that rightly honors the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial.”–Michelle R. Scott, author of Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South

“Offering a unique and creative way to reflect on the suffrage movement, this anthology includes a full gamut of suffrage-related topics and controversies. This collection from years of scholarship from some of the most important scholars of women and voting will enrich our understanding of the subject in all its diversity and range. In revisiting the arguments, it will assuredly prompt new scholarship on the movement.”–Susan Goodier, coauthor of No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement

Neylan McBaine (ShadowMountain) PIONEERING THE VOTE: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West

PIONEERING THE VOTE tells the remarkable, largely unknown story of the suffrage victories that happened in the American West. With the encouragement of their Eastern sisters, women from Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and Utah organized into one group whose goal was to win the right to vote, state by state. This culminated in May of 1895 when 8,000 people–including East Coast suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Reverend Anna Howard Shaw–attended the Rocky Mountain Suffrage Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah. This book brings together the stories of those influential Western women. McBaine contributed this commentary to the Deseret News on the importance of efforts beyond the eastern seaboard.

PANEL, VIDEO, PODCAST: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage and the work of the San Francisco journalist, suffragist, and fiction writer Miriam Michelson

The Newseum celebrated the work of journalist, feminist, and novelist Miriam Michelson with a sold-out  panel June 25, 2019 that featured the author of a collection of Michelson’s work, Lori Harrison-Kahan, a professor at Boston College, with Anna Palmer, Playbook co-author and Women Rule Editorial Director, POLITICO; Shawna Thomas, Washington D.C. bureau chief, VICE News, and Michelson’s great-great niece, the journalist Joan Michelson as moderator. The latter day Michelson is a writer for Forbes and host of the podcast “Green Connections Radio” which also featured the book in the podcast linked here and below. Harrison-Kahan’s collection of Michelson’s writings is called The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson. Here is a brief biography of Michelson from the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Her 1905 book, The Yellow Journalist, which first appeared serially in the Saturday Evening Post, includes an installment titled “The Milpitas Maiden” (The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 177, Iss. 52, June 24, 1905, pp.3-5,16), in which Michelson’s protagonist covers a suffrage convention. Michelson based the story on her experiences as a San Francisco Call reporter covering the 1895 Woman’s Congress of the Pacific Coast. The episode follows the series’s journalist-heroine Rhoda Massey as she competes with male reporters for a big convention scoop. Rhoda, a seasoned reporter for the San Francisco News, triumphs, thanks to her alliance with another “lady journalist,” a rookie reporter for the small-town Milpitas Mercury.

For further information on Michelson, read this interview with Harrison-Kahan on the New York Public Library blog and this piece for CNN.com on how the seeds of the #MeToo movement were sown a century ago. See also Harrison-Kahan’s article on Michelson and Elizabeth Jordan, “The Girl Reporter in Fact and Fiction: Miriam Michelson’s New Women and Periodical Culture in the Progressive Era,” which appeared in the academic journal Legacy (Vol. 34, No. 2 2017, pp.321-338), and can be found in JStor at this stable link.

BOOK: “Why They Marched” By Susan Ware

From Harvard University Press comes Susan Ware‘s new book, Why They Marched, which trains its focus “beyond the national leadership of the suffrage movement” to “give voice to the thousands of women from different backgrounds, races, and religions whose local passion and protest resounded throughout the land.” Ware has written about parts of her work in the Washington Post history blog, arguing that black women need to be returned to the center of suffrage movement history. And Harvard Magazine published this feature about the book. Ware, a distinguished scholar, is leading the Schlesinger Library’s suffrage centennial commemoration initiative. Alex Kane interviewed her for sufrageandthemedia.org, which can be found at this link. Among the early reviews of Why They Marched are these from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.

AUDIO: NPR’s All Things Considered: Sally Roesch Wagner, Editor, New Anthology on Women’s Suffrage

Women’s historian Sally Roesch Wagner has edited a new Penguin Classics anthology of classical writing on the topic from a diverse array of suffragists. It’s titled, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, with an introduction by Gloria Steinem. Here, Wagner is interviewed for  a March 22, 2019 episode of NPR’s “All Things Considered.”