Essence Magazine offered this opinion column by Michelle Duster, the great granddaughter of Ida B. Wells, an important suffragist and civil rights leader. New York State has approved monuments of Sojourner Truth and “General” Rosalie Gardiner Jones. The artist Meredith Bregmann has designed the proposed sculpture of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for Central Park. 
The book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, published in March 2018, tells the fascinating story of the fight over suffrage in Tennessee, the last state needed to secure a Constitutional amendment to give women full voting rights.
Smithsonian published an informative interview with the book’s author, Elaine Weiss. The interview discusses, among other topics, the role race played in the debate over suffrage in Tennessee, the money behind the anti-suffrage forces, and what conventional wisdom gets wrong about the suffrage movement.
Read the full interview here.
February 12, 2018
By ALEX KANE
On November 6, 1917, New Yorkers voted to give women the right to participate in elections. It was a milestone for the national movement to get women the vote, and helped paved the way for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which enfranchised every eligible American of voting age in 1920.
Celebrations across the state in 2017 honored the 100th anniversary of this New York milestone. Up, down, and across the state, local communities both big and small held events that highlighted the sacrifices and activism that led to victory.
Performers for “Votes for Women,” a play put on in New York that chronicled the suffrage movement. Photo: Ron Schubin/”Votes for Women” by Krysta Dennis.
The New York press dutifully followed along. Media outlets, particularly local newspapers, covered many of these events. The local coverage focused on reenactment marches; historic markers commemorating particular suffragists; book talks and readings; museum and historical society exhibits; plays; and the elected officials who showed up. The volume of local press coverage was substantial.
The deluge was not accidental. It grew out of years of organizing among pockets of advocates who pushed for government funding for suffrage centennial commemorations and concerted publicity drives to put these often voluntary efforts in the public eye. The state centennial funding appropriation of $500,000 was far below the $2 million suffrage event organizers had requested.
Scarlett Rebman, a grants officer for Humanities NY, spoke about the considerable energy community organizations put into digging up local suffrage history. She said local media outlets were important contributors. She said they “uncovered a lot of interesting stories and interesting sources.” Humanities NY had responsibility for distributing $266,000 in grants around the state for New York suffrage centennial events.
The attendance count for events her organization funded stood at more than 90,000 by January 2018.The total number is likely higher, since the organization does not keep track of the numerous other events that did not receive Humanities NY funding.
Some examples of significant local news coverage:
The opening of the women’s suffrage exhibit at the New York State Museum in Albany is a centerpiece of the celebration. Called “Votes for Women,” it features over 250 items that help tell the story of how New York activists won their fight. In addition to extensive coverage in the local press, the Associated Press covered it, generating reprints in such outlets as US News and World Report, the Seattle Times, and the Washington Times, among others.
Attendees at the “Votes for Women” exhibit at the New York State Museum in Albany. Photo courtesy of the New York State Museum.
“It was covered around the state quite a bit mostly because we borrowed from so many different local institutions,” said Jennifer Lemak, the chief curator of history for the New York State Museum, adding that the museum borrowed artifacts from over 50 institutions in New York State, creating interest in the project from communities whose artifacts are on display.
Lemak added that tours of the exhibit were well-attended. And while the state museum does not keep track of attendance by exhibition, Ashley Hopkins-Benton, a senior historian and curator at the museum, said that on “social media right now, if you look at the photographs people post from the museum, a quarter to a third are from the suffrage exhibit.”
Lemak said that the museum exhibit has had success in attracting a younger audience, even though the exhibit was light on the use of multimedia or interactive features. The exhibit’s two digital components were a video about the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act—which prohibits creditors from discriminating against applicants on the basic of race or sex (see the video below)–and a big map of New York with videos and pictures of women’s protests projected on it.
“We declined to have more AV/digital components in the gallery because the artifacts are so great we did not want to distract attention away from them,” she said.
The museum was able to broaden the impact of the exhibition with a suffrage program, based on the museum exhibit, made available to more than 50 different institutions in New York, which then were able to print it out and put it on display.
In addition, many historical societies created their own exhibits to highlight different communities’ contributions to the suffrage movement, exhibits that in turn generated local press coverage. Attending the Suffolk County Historical Society’s suffrage exhibit was mandatory for students at a local high school, and several Girl Scout troops came, said Wendy Polhemus-Annibell, the head research librarian at the society.
The Ticonderoga Historical Society’s exhibit was similarly well-attended. “I know from informal feedback that our ‘Votes for Women’ exhibit was very popular,” said Diane O’Connor, the program assistant at the historical society. “And, since we set an attendance record during the 2017 season (nearly 3,000) visitors to the museum, it would follow that the exhibit was enjoyed by many.” Local media attention was also strong, she said. “We had several local angles to the history of suffrage (Sarah Thompson Pell and Inez Milholland), and I believe this made our local media very receptive.”
And the Rochester Area Suffrage Centennial Alliance’s exhibit, “Because of Women Like Her . . . Winning the Vote in New York State,” was featured at the Rochester Public Library. Michelle Finn, Rochester’s deputy historian, said that during the exhibition’s 2017 run, more than 27,000 people were counted at the library’s door.
Celebrity involvement in suffrage-related events also attracted media attention. For instance, Meryl Streep’s narration of a short film on suffrage, “We Rise,” which exclusively played at the New York Historical Society museum exhibit “Hotbed,” garnered coverage outside the local press. For instance, Hollywood Reporter and Refinery29 ran articles on Streep’s involvement.
Another popular event that the local press covered was the placement of historic markers to highlight particular suffragists. The William G. Pomeroy Foundation gave out over $20,000 dollars to communities in New York. That money funded the placement of 20 markers to honor suffragists such as Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, a philanthropist and suffragist from Sag Harbor, Elizabeth Browne Chatfield, a suffragist who was the secretary for Susan B. Anthony and who lived in Owego, NY, and Mae Groot Manson in East Hampton, NY.
Standing in front of a suffrage marker for Mae Groot Manson in East Hampton, NY. Photo: Coline Jenkins.
“The dedication ceremonies were highly attended, and had some amazing speakers,” said Paula Miller, the executive director of the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. Those dedication ceremonies lead to substantial local press coverage of the marker program, she added.
Coline Jenkins, the great-great granddaughter of suffrage icon Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said local media coverage of suffrage markers, and other centennial events, was “a way of reminding women how hard it was to get the right to vote, how it shouldn’t be taken for granted, how it should be used. It is the right that you get all of your other rights from. It’s really important to get all these messages out.”
But much to the chagrin of volunteers who organized suffrage events, major newspapers such as the New York Times gave only minimal attention to centennial coverage.
The Times did not completely ignore it, however. The paper ran an article on an opera on the issue, and a piece on the New-York Historical Society’s exhibit on the role Greenwich Village played in suffrage activism. It also reviewed two relevant books in its metropolitan section. In all, only three articles on the New York centennial appeared in the newspaper, although its online-only New York Today did mention the centennial a few times, including suffrage-related events at local venues. Articles on the subject of the suffrage movement more generally did not give the state centennial celebration special focus.
The Wall Street Journal appeared to be even less interested. The newspaper did reprint a number of Associated Press stories on the topic but produced no original reporting on the subject.
In general, little attention was paid to the role of particular minority groups who played a big, if little unacknowledged, role in the suffrage movement.
There was some coverage of the role that black women played in the movement, many of whom worked hard for the vote despite divisions in the movement over black civil rights and outright racism.
That said, numerous media outlets covered Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s announcement of plans for a statue of Sojourner Truth, a black advocate for suffrage and the abolition of slavery. There was also some local press coverage on the role black women played and the divisions in the movement over black civil rights. Some local outlets covered book talks given by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, whose book, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State, includes chapters on the voting rights advocacy of black people, the working-class, rural New Yorkers, and immigrants. Still, the coverage of minority groups’ role paled in comparison to more general coverage of suffrage.
Rebman of Humanities NY said it was her sense that “a lot of groups, as they developed their events, were sensitive to telling an inclusive story, and also in dealing with the complicated sense of that story.” Still, she said, “There was sensitivity to that but there’s more work to be done.”
Publishing houses timed a few books to the New York centennial and they, in turn, received wider attention than they likely would have, given their placement with academic houses. Sam Robertson’s “New York Bookshelf” column in the New York Times featured both The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, by Brooke Kroeger (who runs this website), and the aforementioned Goodier-Pastorello book, Women Will Vote. Kroeger wrote articles for Town & Country, the New York Daily News, and Tablet magazine on the men who lobbied for suffrage, and one in press for Zócalo Public Square/ASU/Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be an American” series. The Gotham Center for New York History’s blog devoted the month of November 2017 to a series of articles on women’s suffrage, including essays growing out of the research by all the current suffrage authors and several others.
Other outlets that ran book reviews and articles on those books, as well as Johanna Neuman’s Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote, included The Ithaca Journal, which also reviewed Women Will Vote, and the Poughkeepsie Journal.
Neuman also attracted national press attention. The Atlantic magazine published an in-depth interview with Neuman on her book, and Neuman authored a Wall Street Journal article reviewing the “five best” books on the fight for suffrage.
Authors for all three books gave speeches and appeared on panels at dozens of local events across the state and beyond.
Cornell University Press, which published Women Will Vote, was pleased the attention the book received. “As a university publishing house, many of our titles are generally reviewed solely in academic outlets (which post reviews 1-3 years after publication date),” Jonathan Hall said in an email. He handled publicity for the book.
The SUNY University Press publicists for Votes for Women, a catalog based on the New York State Museum’s exhibit of the same name, and for Kroeger’s book, were similarly upbeat. “I definitely think that the centennial played a big role in the amount of interest we saw,” said Katherine Dias, who had publicity responsibility for Kroeger’s book.
But Christian Purdy, the publicist for Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote (NYU Press) said he felt that other events in the news overshadowed the coverage the book received. “While Gilded Suffragists received some great reviews in mainstream periodicals, I was hopeful there would be more media interest given the 100th anniversary of the suffrage movement’s securing the right to vote for women in NYS,” he e-mailed. “Unfortunately media seem more obsessed with Presidential tweets and other DC nonsense than this historic milestone.”
About the book Transatlantic Print Culture:
Building on recent work on Victorian print culture and the turn toward material historical research in modernist studies, this collection extends the frontiers of scholarship on the ‘Atlantic scene’ of publishing, exploring new ways of grappling with the rapidly changing universe of print at the turn of the twentieth century.
This book includes a number of references to print media’s use in the suffrage movement, in chapters such as “Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-American Feminist Press and Emerging ‘Modernities'”; and “Feminist Things.” Both chapters focus on newspapers, magazines, and advertisements from the suffrage era. For example, in chapter three (“Transatlantic Print Culture”), Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo discuss the transnational connections of feminist periodicals on suffrage, which were produced in and circulated between both Britain and the United States.
Significant excerpts of the book are available for free preview on Amazon.com and Google Books, and you can buy a full-length e-book version from the publisher’s website. Also, academic and public libraries may hold copies of the book; check WorldCat to see if there is one near you.
ISBN 978-0-230-22845-0
This teaching resource, put together by the Washington, DC-based Newseum, features a wealth of lesson plans and primary sources that can be used for students in grades six through 12.
The Newseum teacher’s resource includes access to newspapers, magazines, periodicals, photographs, and artifacts related to the American suffrage movement. The lesson plans all focus on how the women’s suffrage movement used the First Amendment’s five freedoms—speech, religion, press, petition, and assembly—to advance their cause.
This is an excerpt from the press release explaining the teaching resource:
The Newseum launched the latest component of its free Digital Classroom website, “Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less.” The new learning module builds on the site’s rich civil rights resources to include one of the largest online collections of primary sources and historic periodicals about the women’s suffrage movement. The new module, made possible by the generous support of AAUW, explores how the suffragists embraced the First Amendment as a tool to help achieve passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, which gave women the right to vote.
The module draws on the wealth of resources maintained by the Newseum in its collection of historic artifacts and more than 35,000 newspapers and magazines. “Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less” features detailed images and descriptions of nearly 300 historic front pages, photographs and artifacts that illustrate how the suffragists used all five freedoms of the First Amendment—speech, religion, press, petition and assembly—to influence public opinion and win support. An interactive map of the United States pinpoints artifacts used to advocate for and against suffrage, and students can document their civic engagement using the latest Glogster EDU tools embedded in the site.
“Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less”—designed for students in grades six through 12—encourages a deeper understanding of the women’s suffrage movement that goes beyond the famous names and iconic images to reveal the roots of today’s social and political movements.
To gain access to the lesson plans and resources the Newseum offers, you have to sign up for a workshop at the Newseum itself. Information on how to do so can be found here.
Interested in other resources for educators? Click here to browse other Teaching Suffrage materials on Women’s Suffrage and the Media.
This virtual exhibit is part of the Arkansas Women’s Suffrage Centennial, a project that “commemorates the 100th anniversary of the right to vote for women in Arkansas by promoting events, encouraging research and education programs related to women’s suffrage, and helping to preserve the history of women’s suffrage within the state.”
The exhibit features a number of galleries, which include information as well as photographs and original documents from the suffrage era and focus on topics ranging from African-American suffragists to suffrage fashion.
Of particular interest is the exhibit’s media gallery, which features documents, cartoons, drawings, and photographs and includes this delightful suffrage fashion gallery.
As popular support for suffrage grew, the subject became ripe for satire. In this post, Brooke Kroeger, the author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, looks at how two publications, the Brooklyn Eagle and American Magazine, deployed satire when covering the suffrage movement.
The Brooklyn Eagle newspaper column made fun of the men who were increasingly coming to support the suffrage movement. Here’s an excerpt from the Eagle‘s “A Smile a Second” column, published on September 7, 1912:
D.T.B. writes: “My wife has been demanding the right to exercise the franchise so vehemently that I named our old horse The Franchise and told her to go exercise it. The temperature of our domicile has been slightly below zero ever since and I burned nine tons of coke last week trying to create a congenial atmosphere. Belonging to the Suffragents is too expensive for a man in my station in life. Please accept my resignation.”
The American Magazine piece poked fun at Chicago socialites who were coming out in support of women’s voting rights.
Digitized versions of both articles are available in the post on Kroeger’s website.
For more on satire and suffrage, check out Puck magazine’s satirical February 1915 issue on suffrage.
In this special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review, scholars explore feminist periodicals from the suffrage era to the epoch of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s in Britain.
From the introduction, “Mediated and Mediating Feminisms: Periodical Culture from Suffrage to the Second Wave,” by Victoria Bazin and Melanie Waters:
This special issue brings together, for the first time, scholarship on feminist periodicals in Britain from suffrage to the second wave. In doing so, it aims to explore the cultures of feminism through the verbal and visual ‘cacophony’ of feminist magazines. These periodicals resonate with the voices of individual women testifying to the everyday experience of feminist activism at a grass-roots level. They are archives of feminist feeling—rich resources for an expanding field of scholarship concerned with recovering a sense of how social movements are formed, how they are mediated and how they are remembered. Above all, these magazines are mediating objects that heighten our awareness of the material histories and cultures of feminism.
Three of the articles in this special issue deal directly with the suffrage era:
As the official organ of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, Votes for Women was one of the most successful suffrage papers of the Edwardian period. The famous ‘split’ over militant policies that divided the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union in October 1912 severed the suffrage paper Votes for Women from its sponsoring organization. This traumatic event offers a window into the workings of the feminist periodical networks of modernity since it shows how the connections and disconnections of the network are filled with feeling and emotion. Bringing affect theory, especially conversations regarding transmission, to the materialist strategies of new periodical studies provides a new window into the feminist periodical networks of modernity, revealing them to be saturated with affect. This offers a new understanding of the role of emotion and sentiment in the formation of the political movements and collectives of modernity.
This article examines the role of feminist periodicals in mobilizing consensus for and against welfare reform measures such as the endowment of motherhood and birth control in the 1920s. It argues that the tendency to characterize the differences between ‘old’ (equalitarian) and ‘new’ (welfare) feminists as a conflict between equality and difference has been reductive and misleading. Both camps aimed to liberate women from the domestic sphere by ensuring opportunities and access in the sphere of work/professions, but for welfare feminists, equality was not enough because it accepted a world structured for men. The concept of self-determination is central to how new feminists like Eleanor Rathbone attempted to redefine the home and maternal labour as they championed controversial policies aimed at ensuring a degree of economic and reproductive autonomy for women. An analysis of the debates that played out in and between the Woman’s Leader and Time and Tide in the 1920s underscores the role of the feminist press in the processes of political and strategic communication, at a time when self-declared feminists were trying to achieve a range of goals in a context of hostile reaction. The article encourages a reassessment of the ambitious goals of welfare feminism in the interwar period and suggests that these struggles (often obscured by ‘equality’ feminism) have never completely gone away. They resurface in various forms—from ‘wages for housework’ campaigns to assessing the conditions and economics of motherhood for working women—all of which underscore the impact of the welfare state on relations in the family and the home.
This article examines the ways in which one of Britain’s most significant feminist magazines, Time and Tide (1920–79), constructed a modern feminist identity through its interactions with other feminist print media and with the mainstream interwar press. At once drawing on a long tradition of feminist periodical publishing, from the outset this women-run magazine also worked to distance itself from the feminist label in order to take up a position among the leading general-audience weekly reviews. Exploring the tension Time and Tide negotiated over its feminist designation, the article also demonstrates the central role this magazine played both in feminist debates about ‘work’ in this period and in wider public debates about the ‘modern woman’. If Time and Tide’s disavowal of the ‘women’s paper’ category was part of what made this feminist magazine ‘modern’, its commitment to women’s participation in the public sphere is one that would sustain it throughout the interwar years and beyond.
This special issue is available to buy from Taylor & Francis Online. Academic libraries are also likely to have access; to see if there’s one near you, check WorldCat.
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.
Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues is a collection of alphabetical entries written by different scholars on various women’s publications that existed in the 19th and 20th centuries. For each periodical that it covers, this book provides history and background information, circulation numbers, and a bibliography that points readers to more information about it. Periodicals in the United States shows the diversity of women’s voices on the political and social issues of the day.
The topics that the chosen periodicals covered vary, but a number of entries deal with suffrage.
Linda Steiner wrote the entry on the newspaperThe New Northwest, started by Abigail Scott Duniway, an Oregon suffragist.
Sherilyn Cox Bennion explores the publications The Pioneer and The Queen Bee, both of which were pro-suffrage publications in the western United States.
Agnes Hooper Gottilieb wrote on the National Women’s Suffrage Association-linked periodical The Revolution.
Therese L. Lueck, a co-editor of the book, authored the entry on Woman’s Journal, a publication of the American Woman Suffrage Association.
The book also covers two periodicals that opposed suffrage: Lueck wrote the entry on The Anti-Suffragist, created by the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage; and Elizabeth Burt wrote about The Remonstrance, a big voice in the anti-suffrage movement. Excerpts of book’s entry onThe Remonstrance can be found here.
For more information on how periodicals covered suffrage, see 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.
You can find excerpts of Women’s Periodicals in the United States on Google Books and Questia, and you can purchase the book on Amazon.