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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C-SPAN and NATIONAL ARCHIVES VIDEO, PANEL: Women Suffragists and the Men Who Supported Them: The Suffragents and Their Role in the Struggle for the Vote

C-Span link to panel

https://www.c-span.org/video/?465423-1/role-men-womens-suffrage-movement

From the National Archives:

What role did men play in the women’s suffrage movement, and how did they aid in the fight for the 19th Amendment? At a time when public support for women’s issues could cause men ridicule, their backing of the movement was significant. A distinguished panel will discuss the men who involved themselves in the suffrage movement, including the Men’s League of Women’s Suffrage.  Moderated by Betsy Fischer Martin, Executive Director, Women and Politics Institute, American University School of Public Affairs, panelists include Brooke Kroeger, author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote; Johanna Newman, author of Gilded Suffragists; Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched; and others.

Presented in partnership with the 2020 Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative.

Presented in conjunction with our exhibition: Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote. Rightfully Hers is made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation through the generous support of Unilever, Pivotal Ventures, Carl M. Freeman Foundation in honor of Virginia Allen Freeman, AARP, AT&T, Ford Motor Company Fund, Facebook, Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation, Google, HISTORY ®, and Jacqueline B. Mars. Additional support for National Outreach and Programs provided by Denise Gwyn Ferguson, BMO Financial Group, Hearst Foundations, Maris S. Cuneo Foundation, FedEx, Bernstein Family Foundation, and The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation/Ambassador Fay-Hartog Levin (Ret.).

VIDEOS, SLIDES: Judges, Lawyers, & Women’s Suffrage: Recognizing the Men Who Stood with Women on the Front Lines

On March 25, 2019, the Gender Fairness Committee of the 3d Judicial District of the New York State Unified Court System presented a panel at Albany Law School, titled “Judges, Lawyers & Women’s Suffrage: Recognizing the Men Who Stood with Women on the Front Lines.” Acting Supreme Court Justice Richard Dollinger traced the legal actions of men who attempted as individuals to change marital laws of the 18th and 19th century that discriminated against women and NYU Professor Brooke Kroeger continued with the organized response of lawyers and judges in the final decade of the suffrage campaign, 1909 to 1920, as members of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage. Judge Dollinger followed up with an ethics discussion of the present day restrictions on judges, who are prohibited from public support of a controversial cause to avoid any appearance of impartiality.  This link contains details of the event and video and slides from the Dollinger and Kroeger presentations, also offered below.

Library of Congress: Suffragists in Song

The blog of the Library of Congress has highlighted its vast collection of suffrage sheet music in this blog post of March 25.  It begins:

“Our colleague Cait Miller published a pair of delightful posts about songs in the women’s suffrage movement over on the “In the Muse” blog recently, the most recent of which is here. But it being Women’s History Month, we just had to know more about one of the sheet music covers she featured  — the one with the remarkable title, ‘She’s Good Enough to be Your Baby’s Mother and She’s Good Enough to Vote with You.’

NEW RESEARCH AND VIDEO INTERVIEW: Linda Grasso, “Differently Radical: Suffrage Issues and Feminist Ideas in the Crisis and the Masses”

Linda Grasso (CUNY-York) has taken a close look at the “differently radical” stances of the Crisis and the Masses, two radical periodicals of the early 20th century by examining the content of each publication’s special suffrage issue of 1915. Here, Dr. Grasso responds to the questions: What prompted you to choose this topic and what surprised or fascinated you as you did your research? (This page will take you to all the synopses of articles in American Journalism’s special issue, “Women’s Suffrage and the Media.”) You can access her article directly through the links below. Taylor & Francis opened full access April 15-July 15, 2019.

NEW RESEARCH, VIDEO INTERVIEW: Tiffany Lewis: “Mediating Political Mobility as Stunt Girl Entertainment: The Newspaper Coverage of the Suffragists Hike to Albany”

Tiffany Lewis (CUNY-Baruch) acknowledges that the welcome avalanche of mainstream press coverage of New York’s suffrage hikers indeed subverted aspects of the suffragists’ purpose. For as the women walked the 170 miles from New York City to Albany in December 1912, the press often mocked and made light of their trek. She further contends that by portraying their pilgrimage as a journey of “adventurous, determined, and emotional heroines of an action-packed serial,” the press managed to publicize, represent and domesticate the meaning of the women’s public mobility in a way that made their activism seem less alarming and more intriguing

In the video interview below, Dr. Lewis responds to the questions: What prompted you to write about this topic and what, during your research, surprised or fascinated you about what you learned? (This page will take you to all the synopses of articles in American Journalism’s special issue, “Women’s Suffrage and the Media.”) Here are the links to the article. Taylor & Francis opened access for the period, April 15-July 15, 2019.

NEW RESEARCH, VIDEO, PODCAST INTERVIEWS: Teri Finneman: “Covering a Countermovement on the Verge of Defeat: The Press and the 1917 Social Movement Against Woman Suffrage”

No new research on suffrage and the media would be complete without attention to the anti-suffragists, which Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) provides with her work on local press coverage of the antis in the critical year of 1917, when their efforts neared defeat. Through the use of textual analysis and framing, and social movement theory, Finneman’s essay enhances the literature on press portrayals of counter-movements. Listen to Dr. Finneman talk about her research in this episode of the Journalism History podcast.

In the video interview below, Dr. Finneman responds in video to the questions: What prompted you to choose this topic and what surprised or fascinated you did your research? (This page will take you to all the synopses of articles in American Journalism‘s special issue, “Women’s Suffrage and the Media.”) The links to Dr. Finneman’s article are below. Taylor & Francis has opened access from April 15-July 15, 2019.