Suffrage and the Silver Screen

Suffrage and the Silver Screen explores how suffragists used the new medium of film to advance their cause.

About the book:

In the 1910s, the American woman suffrage movement became a modern mass movement by using visual culture to transform consciousness and gain adherents. As part of this transformation, suffrage organizations produced several films and related cinematic projects, including four full-length, nationally distributed feature productions. This activist use was one of the first instances in the United States that a social movement recognized and harnessed the power of cinema to transform consciousness and, in turn, the social order. Suffrage and the Silver Screen discusses how the suffrage movement accomplished this formidable goal through analysis of the local and national uses of cinema by the movement. Amy Shore argues that these works must be considered as part of a political filmmaking tradition among feminists. The book contextualizes the films within the politics and practices of the suffrage organizations that produced them in order to understand and assess the strategic role of these films. By examining these works, the history of both suffrage and cinema is necessarily reconsidered and expanded. Suffrage and the Silver Screen is an essential resource for those studying early cinema, women and cinema, the woman suffrage movement, and the use of visual media in social movements.

You can buy an e-book version through the publisher’s website.

Kay Sloan’s documentary Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema may also be of interest to readers curious about this subject.

ISBN-13: 9781454192404

ISBN-10: 1433117819

Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote

In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York’s most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names—Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like—carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women’s right to vote into a fashionable cause.

Although they were dismissed by critics as bored socialites “trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris,” these gilded suffragists were at the epicenter of the great reforms known collectively as the Progressive Era. From championing education for women, to pursuing careers, and advocating for the end of marriage, these women were engaged with the swirl of change that swept through the streets of New York City.

Johanna Neuman restores these women to their rightful place in the story of women’s suffrage. Understanding the need for popular approval for any social change, these socialites used their wealth, power, social connections and style to excite mainstream interest and to diffuse resistance to the cause. In the end, as Neuman says, when change was in the air, these women helped push women’s suffrage over the finish line.

Reviews of the book:

Setting the record straight on the driving forces in the early-20th-century fight for women’s suffrage . . . Neuman counters the popular opinion that these women were merely “bored socialites trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris,” and she makes a solid case . . . Neuman concisely explains how these gilded women have been airbrushed out of history, resented by those who felt exploited, but thankfully, they succeeded, and women vote today because of them. —Kirkus Reviews

Gilded Suffragists can be purchased from its publisher’s website.

ISBN: 9781479837069

“There is Filth on the Floor and It Must Be Scraped Up: The Muckrakers and Press of the Early 20th Century” in Media’s Role in Defining the Nation: The Active Voice

In Chapter 6 of Media’s Role in Defining the Nation: The Active Voice, David Copeland discusses the influence of press that critiqued American society and advocated for social change in the early 20th century. The topics covered include food safety, worker rights, and suffrage. In the “Suffrage” section, Copeland explores how the media of the time commented on, supported, and criticized the suffrage movement. He argues that “the mainstream American press and an advocacy press that championed suffrage kept the issue as a topic constantly in front of the public for decades” and that this exposure helped secure women the vote.

A preview of the “Suffrage” section of this chapter is available through Google Books. You can buy an e-book version from the publisher’s website, which also has instructions for other buying options.

ISBN:9781453911990

A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910

A Voice of Their Own explores the consciousness-raising role of the American suffrage press of the latter half of the 19th century. From the first women’s rights convention, a modest gathering of 300 sympathizers led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, grew the ever-expanding movement for equal rights, greater legal protections, and improved opportunities. Although the leaders of that and subsequent conventions realized that such public rallies, with their exhortative speeches, were crucial in gaining support for the movement, they also recognized the potential impact of another medium: woman’s suffrage periodicals, written and published by and expressly for women.

The 11 essays of this volume demonstrate how the suffrage press—in such forums as Woman’s Journal, Woman’s Tribune, Woman’s Exponent, and Farmer’s Wife—was able to educate an audience of women, create a sense of community among them, and help alter their self-image.

A Voice of Their Own won the 1991 Myers Center Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

Reviews of the book:

The book is especially valuable in that it traces changes in the women’s movement from an emphasis on a new self-image for woman to suffrage. . . . [The] writing is straightforward and clear. Documentation is superb. Endnotes are helpful guides to seminal works in women’s journalism. The index is useful and the bibliography is excellent.

—Choice

An excellent collection of articles exploring the role of journalism in creating, maintaining, and developing the analysis and membership of the first wave of American feminism. Drawing on theories of social movements from the discipline of communications, this volume, expertly edited by Martha Solomon, begins with the relationship between the suffrage movement and newspapers,…[and] seven useful case studies follow. Historians will benefit from this volume’s meticulous documentation of a plethora of publications and its discussion of their rhetorical strategies.

—Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society

You can purchase the book through the publisher’s website.

For more on women journalists and suffrage, see “A New Generation,” in Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence and Women and The Press: The Struggle for Equality.

ISBN-13: 978-0817351526

ISBN-10: 0817351523

“Women’s National Press Club, 1919-1970,” in Women’s Press Organizations, 1881-1999

In chapter 34 of Women’s Press Organizations, 1881-1990 (edited by Elizabeth V. Burt), Maurine H. Beasley discusses the founding of the Women’s National Press Club in 1919. The suffrage campaign led directly to the establishment of this club, the most important organization for women journalists in Washington, DC for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. This chapter details how three journalists and three publicists, who had become friends during years of suffrage struggle, founded the club in to advance their mutual professional interests when it became apparent that suffrage would be won.

Restricted access, including an excerpt from the chapter, is available here, via Google Books. You can purchase a paper or electronic version of the book through the publisher’s website.

For more on women journalists and suffrage, see “A New Generation,” in Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence and “Those Knights of the Pen and Pencil.”

ISBN-13: 978-0313306617

ISBN-10: 0387952659

Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives

Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives examine the evolution of women’s women’s suffrage worldwide, using collected works of scholars from Australia and New Zealand. All the papers in this book were presented at a three-day conference, “Suffrage and Beyond,” held at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in 1993.

About the book:

The 1980s and 1990s have seen an unprecedented emphasis on global feminism, on the connectedness of women regardless of race, class, or geography. And yet, the status and position of women throughout the world remains enormously disparate. Even so fundamental an issue as a woman’s right to vote has been—and in many countries continues to be—hotly contested. How then have suffrage movements evolved? What are the similarities and differences in the manner in which women, in a range of different economic, religious, and political contexts, have sought the vote?

Bringing together such eminent scholars as Nancy Cott, Ellen Dubois, and Carole Pateman, Suffrage and Beyond offers a comprehensive look at the political history of suffrage on a global scale. Chapters on the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and South America address a range of crucial issues: what is the relationship of indigenous people’s rights to women’s rights? What tangible effect has the right to vote had on women’s lives? What is the dialectical relationship between women’s activism and patriarchal institutions? How have suffragists been represented? What role did the racism of the suffragists themselves play in their quest? What have been their leadership strategies, their language, their ideas?

Google Books offers a limited preview of the book. It is also available for sale through online sellers like Amazon.com and through academic libraries (both as an e-book and in print). You can check WorldCat to see if there’s a library with access near you.

ISBN-13: 978-0814718711

ISBN-10: 081471871X

The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914

Deemed too artistic for political history, too political for art history, the visual history of the campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain has long been neglected. In this comprehensive and pathbreaking study, Lisa Tickner discusses and illustrates British suffragists’ use of spectacle—the design of banners, posters, and postcards, the orchestration of mass demonstrations, etc.—in an unprecedented propaganda campaign.

A limited preview of a review of The Spectacle of Women and full-text access options is available through JSTOR.

Google Books offers a limited preview of the book. It is also available for sale through online sellers such as Amazon.com and through academic libraries (both as an e-book and in print). You can check WorldCat to see if there a library with access near you.

ISBN-13: 978-0226802459

ISBN-10: 0226802450

Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality

The struggle for gender equality in the United States long predated the suffrage era, and continues to this day. During the Constitutional Convention, for instance, Abigail Adams made her famous plea to her husband John Adams to “remember the ladies.”

In her 2005 book Women and the Press, Patricia Bradley examines the tensions that have arisen over the course of this journey as they relate to women in journalism. From their first entrance into the commercial press as sentimental writers up to the present day, the call for gender equality has had special meaning for female journalists. Is there a role—a responsibility, even—for advocacy in a newsroom setting? This is an account of how women in journalism sought to integrate the need for gender equality with the realities of their profession.

Restricted access is available here, via Google Books. You can purchase a paper or electronic version of the book through the publisher’s website.

A limited preview of a review of the book, as well as full-text access options, is available from Taylor & Francis Online.

For more on women journalists and suffrage, see “A New Generation,” in Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence.

ISBN 978-0-8101-2313-7

“The History and Structure of Women’s Alternative Media,” in Making Meaning: New Feminist Directions in Communication

In the seventh chapter of Making Meaning: New Feminist Directions in Communication (edited by Lana F. Rakow), Linda Steiner reviews the history of women’s media, conveying, “primarily through examples, a sense of the enormous range and diversity of women’s media while also highlighting their remarkable commonalities.” In her analysis, Steiner looks at both the structure and the content of various women’s media, noting differences and similarities rooted in a historical context.

Restricted access, including an excerpt from the chapter, is available here, via Google Books. You can purchase a paper or electronic version of the book through the publisher’s website.

ISBN: 9781138959583

ISBN (Hardback): 9781138940420

Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere

Highlighting the contributions of feminist media history to media studies and related disciplines, this book focuses on feminist periodicals emerging from or reacting to the Edwardian suffrage campaign and situates them in the context of current debates about the public sphere, social movements, and media history. The book is available from Palgrave Macmillan, its publisher, which offers a preview at the linked URL.

Scholar Michelle Tusan summarizes and reviews this book and another book about suffrage media, Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946, edited by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills.

JStor offers a preview of this book review, and an option to download it for a fee. Click here to read JStor’s guide for how to access their database from your institution. You can check WorldCat to see if there’s a library with access near you. Google Books also has a preview.

Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 is an anthology of diverse literature aimed at convincing Americans to support the suffrage movement. Feminist Media History: Suffrage Periodicals and the Public Sphere discusses feminist periodicals and argues that feminist media history has been marginalized in academia.

DOI: 10.5325/jmodeperistud.2.2.0253.

ISBN 978-0-230-29907-8

eBook ISBN: 978-0-230-29907-8

Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-31695-3

DOI: 10/1057/9780230299078

Reviews:

Women’s History Review – by Laurel Foster (2013)

This is a book everyone interested in print media or feminist history should read. It aims to broaden our interpretative strategies by expanding the theoretical, critical and historical framework available to periodical studies. It does this by aligning social movement theory and discussions about the public sphere with feminist periodicals of the early twentieth century, thus combining the work of feminist recovery with current communications critiques. (…)

American Journalism – by Jane Marcellus (2013)

One might ask, on seeing the subtitle of this book, why we need another study of woman suffrage. As the authors themselves note, it “seems a well-traveled path” (p.15), particularly in light of calls to look beyond the West in media and feminist research. Yet this is not simply another woman suffrage book. Its purpose, suggested by the main title, is to define and locate the broader subfield “feminist media history” at the intersection of scholarly areas such as media history, social history, and feminist media studies. Having done so, the authors use British suffrage periodicals as case studies to illustrate their argument that feminist history too often falls between disciplinary and theoretical cracks. (…)