SUFFRAGE STATE BY STATE

“Her Flag” by Marilyn Artus

The National Women’s History Alliance has put together a very thorough newsletter detailing commemorative events broken down by state, as well as a list of relevant media and resources celebrating the centennial through 2020 and into 2021.

Highlights include local projects and celebrations, large-scale art pieces and monuments, museum exhibits and more. The newsletter will also serve as a lasting resource once the month of celebration is through after August 26, 2020, as it contains a wealth of information and links to ongoing projects and educational resources related to women’s history and the suffrage movement.

View suffrage centennial events in each state.

VIRTUAL CONVENTION: Watch the Women’s Rights National Historical Park’s 2020 Convention Days Online

 

Melinda Grube portrays Elizabeth Cady Stanton in conversation with Frederick Douglass (Nathan Richardson).

The Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York, hosted a three-day convention on July 17-19, 2020 to commemorate the First Women’s Rights Convention in the U.S. in 1848. The event featured live historical performances and speeches, history tours, children’s activities, hands-on art projects and scholarly speakers, including keynote speaker Coline Jenkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s great-great granddaughter.

Click here to watch some of the key living history performances, speeches and tours.

VIRTUAL TOUR: Explore Alice Paul’s Home

In honor of the suffrage centennial and in compliance with social distancing guidelines, the Alice Paul Institute has released a video tour of Paulsdale, the historic home of suffrage activist Alice Paul, so that history lovers may still enjoy her incredible story from home. The videos cover the life of Alive Paul, the suffrage movement and her legacy through the history of women’s rights.

View the full video playlist here.

INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE: “She Resisted: Strategies of Suffrage”

As part of their American Experience documentary series on U.S. history, PBS has created an online interactive experience that uses video, audio and primary sources to explore the different methods used by suffrage activists. In addition to illustrating the different forms of events, publications and demonstrations that contributed to the movement, the site also features an interactive map that shows the shows the suffrage timeline state by state.

Explore the interactive project here.

VIDEO SERIES: Suffrage in 60 Seconds from the Belmont-Paul National Monument

In honor of the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S., the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument has been running a video series on Facebook titled Suffrage in 60 Seconds.

In these short videos, park rangers explain prominent topics and figures in the history of women’s suffrage, such as Ida B. Wells, Inez Milholland Boissevain and African American women and the vote.

View the full series here.

BOOK, ESSAYS, VIDEO: FRONT PAGES FRONT LINES: MEDIA AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

 

Front Pages, Front Lines

Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage

(Read about the book on the Illinois Press site: here. Watch any of the short videos with insights to all the chapters here. Click author/editor names below for links to their other SuffrageandtheMedia.org links.) 

“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.”

                                                                            —Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

The press, women, and the long road to the Nineteenth Amendment

Suffragists recognized from the start that the media played an essential role in the U.S. women’s suffrage movement. From holding parades to picketing in front of the White House, activists played to the news media of their day. Meanwhile, they supported hundreds of energetic suffragist publications.

Front Pages, Front Lines offers new research on media issues related to women’s suffrage, incorporating innovative approaches to social movements and counter-movements, media theory, memory studies, and historiography. Aiming to correct past oversights and treating suffrage activism as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, the collection includes overlooked topics such as the participation of African American and religious media, coverage of black suffragists, suffragist and anti-suffrage rhetorical strategies, the role of social and media elites, and the impact of white masculinity on 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


Linda Steiner is a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a coauthor of Women and Journalism. Carolyn Kitch is a professor of journalism at Temple University. She is the author of Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines. Brooke Kroeger is a professor of journalism at New York University. She is the author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote.

VIDEO: JANE MARCELLUS ON DISCOURSES ON MASCULINITY IN THE NASHVILLE PRESS

In Chapter 8 of Front Pages Front Lines Prof. Marcellus of Middle Tennessee State, offers a close reading of a crucial state in 1920, when the entire country was watching to see if Tennessee would become the 36th and final state to ratify the 19th Amendment.The relatively liberal Nashville Tennessean, roughly aligned with the progressive “New South” view, supported ratification; the “Old South” Nashville Banner remained opposed. Offering a counterpoint to the usual emphasis on competing versions of womanhood, Marcellus contends that instead, for both newspapers, competing views of southern white masculinity were at stake.”

VIDEO: SHERILYN COX BENNION ON THE WOMEN’S EXPONENT OF UTAH

 

In Chapter 3 of Front Pages Front Lines, 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.

 

VIDEO: LINDA STEINER ON NINETEENTH-CENTURY SUFFRAGE JOURNALS: INVENTING AND DEFENDING NEW WOMEN

 

 

In Chapter 2 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. 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.

 

VIDEO: TERI FINNEMAN ON A COUNTERMOVEMENT ON THE VERGE OF DEFEAT: ANTISUFFRAGIST ARGUMENTS IN 1917 PRESS COVERAGE

 

In Chapter 7 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. 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.