Remember the Ladies: Celebrating Those Who Fought for Freedom at the Ballot Box

2017 begins the centennial celebrations of the enfranchisement of women in some US states, a trend that culminated in nation-wide suffrage three years later, in 1920. Angela P. Dodson’s book Remember the Ladies chronicles the milestones in that hard-won struggle and reflects on women’s subsequent political impact.

This book highlights women’s impact on US politics and government from the birth of the republic to the 2016 defeat of the first major-party female presidential candidate. Drawing on historical research, biographies of leaders, and such primary sources as photos, line art, charts, graphs, documents, posters, ads, and buttons, Remember the Ladies documents the fight for women’s right to vote in an accessible, conversational manner relevant to a general audience.

Here are the groundbreaking convention records, speeches, newspaper accounts, letters, photos, and drawings of those who fought for women’s enfranchisement, all in their own words, and arranged to convey the inherent historical drama.

Dodson’s book is full of little-known facts. For instance, it draws its title from Abigail Adams’ admonition to her husband John Adams—then participating in the Constitutional Convention—to “remember the ladies” by including rights for women in the Constitution!

Remember the Ladies does not isolate women’s suffrage from the inseparable concurrent historical movements for emancipation, immigration, and temperance; instead, the book’s robust research documents the intersectionality of women’s struggle for the vote.

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

ISBN-13: 9781455570935

Ken Burns’ Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Stanton & Susan Anthony

This two-part documentary film shown on PBS tells the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the duo that brought the suffrage cause to widespread attention in the United States.

The film, directed by Ken Burns, shows how the two leaders—despite their widely divergent personalities and backgrounds—came together to fight for women’s voting rights, though both died before their dream was realized.

Stanton grew up with wealth and privilege, the daughter of a well-known judge. Anthony grew up in a Quaker household, the daughter of a factory owner. The two met in 1851, and went on to found multiple suffrage organizations to advance their cause. As historian Judith Harper explains in a PBS article:

The two women not only developed a deep friendship but also helped each other prepare themselves to change women’s lives. Anthony thrived under Stanton’s tutelage—soaking up her knowledge of politics, the law, philosophy, and rhetoric. Stanton, confined to her home by motherhood (she gave birth to her seventh and last child in 1859), was stimulated by Anthony’s thoughtful critiques of her ideas.

Burns’ film traces their personal lives, places them in historical context, and underscores how the impact of their activism stretched far beyond their deaths.

The documentary garnered positive reviews in Variety and the New York Times, which latter called it “a vibrant and extremely moving portrait of a lifelong friendship and the political strategies that defined the women’s rights movement.”

The PBS website on the film is filled with teaching resources, companion articles, and historical documents. The IMBD entry contains a list of the experts featured in the film.

You can buy the film from PBS or Amazon, or search on WorldCat to see if your local library carries it.

Burns and Geoffrey Ward also wrote a companion book to the film which is also available on Amazon.

The Suffrage Roots of Wonder Woman

As Jill Lepore explained in a 2014 interview on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, chronicles the iconic superheroine’s suffragist roots. Lepore’s exploration of Wonder Woman creator William Molton Marsten’s involvement in women’s suffrage is capsulized in an NPR Books review by Etelka Lehocky. It began while he was a student at Harvard and, as a member of the Harvard League for Woman Suffrage, he joined a vociferous 1911 protest by students and alumni against the university’s refusal to allow the militant British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to speak on campus. Lehocky writes:

Marston had been a committed feminist for decades by the time he created Wonder Woman in 1941. He’d been exposed to the women’s suffrage movement while in college, and Sadie Holloway, whom he married in 1915, was “something of a revolutionary,” Lepore writes. 25 years later, Marston’s determination to depict Wonder Woman in chains was partly inspired by women’s suffrage imagery. (He had a rather forced argument for why the chains actually represented liberation.) Wonder Woman’s first artist, Harry G. Peter, had himself once drawn suffrage cartoons.

Lepore wrote about Wonder Woman for the New Yorker in a piece titled, “The Last Amazon,” in which she talks about Marston’s suffrage connection. Among the many reviews and notices of Lepore’s book are those that have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the New York Times.

Treacherous Texts: US Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946

Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 is an anthology of diverse literature aimed at convincing Americans to support the suffrage movement that collects “more than sixty literary texts written by smart, savvy writers who experimented with genre, aesthetics, humor, and sex appeal in an effort to persuade American readers to support woman suffrage. Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere. Uncovering startling affinities between popular literature and propaganda, Treacherous Texts samples a rich, decades-long tradition of suffrage literature created by writers from diverse racial, class, and regional backgrounds.”

Project Muse offers a download option for the book and Google Books features much of it. Check with your local libraries for availability.

Scholar Michelle Tusan summarizes and reviews this book and another one about suffrage media, Feminist Media History: Suffrage Periodicals and the Public Sphere, authored by Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Leila Ryan.

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.

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

The Women Who Drew for Suffrage

In the popular imagination of those who lived in the twentieth century, political cartoons were drawn by men. But in Alice Sheppard’s “Cartooning For Suffrage,” readers see how dozens of women artists drew political cartoons extolling the suffrage movement. Sheppard contextualizes these artists by explaining the history of political cartoons and the suffrage movement. She also delves into the individual lives of female cartoonists.

Sheppard’s work details this forgotten history, challenging stereotypes in the process and exploring artistic gems like the work of Lou Rogers, whose work was featured in prominent magazines of the era like the satirical publication Judge. The political cartoons Sheppard discusses–she includes 200 of them in her book–were drawn to subvert stereotypes of suffrage activists as seductresses or shrews.  As this informative Chicago Tribune book review notes, the author details the two strategies female cartoonists used to buck those stereotypes: Depicting “voting rights as a tool to end female oppression” and presenting “the idea that society as a whole lost out when women were excluded from the political process.”

In 1995, the Washington, DC-based National Museum of Women in Arts featured some of the cartoons Sheppard wrote about in an exhibit marking the 75th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Political cartoonists for suffrage “knew that you can’t argue against a picture,” Sheppard told the Associated Press in an article previewing that exhibit.

For more on Sheppard’s book, see Google Books for some snippets. A 1997 issue of the academic periodical Woman’s Art Journal features a review of the book You can sign up for a JStor account and read the review for free. For more suffrage-themed cartoons, see the scholar Jaqueline McLeod Rogers’ article on the anti-suffrage cartoons of John Tinney McCutcheon and Newton McConnell.

Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement

The following is a summary by Joni Hubred-Golden of the Michigan Women’s Forum of Robert P.J. Cooney, Jr.’s 2005 photographic book, Winning the Vote (three related essays by Cooney are also linked below):

Women in the United States didn’t win the right to vote until 1920 with passage of the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr., tell the story as no other book has. It captures the color, passion, and excitement of this important part of American history. 

This beautifully designed hardback presents the suffrage movement clearly and chronologically, with emphasis on the remarkable personalities and turbulent political campaigns of the early 20^th century.  The book uses over 960 photographs, posters, leaflets, and portraits to illustrate this fascinating account of the expansion of American democracy.  Large format images and a fast paced text highlight key developments between 1848 and 1920, including over 50 state electoral campaigns and the final, controversial, and hard fought drive for the 19^th Amendment.

Winning the Vote shows how women have long been active participants in U.S. history, and how many became politically powerful before winning the vote.  The book includes illustrated profiles of 78 American women and men, black and white, who led the drive for equal rights, and an unprecedented display of the symbolism, color, and imagery used by the increasingly sophisticated suffrage movement.  The opening three chapters, out of eighteen, cover efforts for full democracy in the 19^th century, and an Epilogue follows suffragists into government and other influential areas after 1920. While bits and pieces of women’s history have been scattered and forgotten over time, “Winning the Vote” weaves stories from around the country into a rich and exciting new tapestry.  Many of the stories and photos included have never before been made available to the general public.

In these three essays collated by the American Graphic Press, Cooney expands on the movement’s enduring effects in the 21st century. The essays, Taking a New Look: The Enduring Significance of the American Woman Suffrage Movement; Carrie Chapman Catt and the League of Women Voters: Winning Political Power for Women; and Winning California for Woman Suffrage, 1911, provide historical explorations of various moments in the suffrage movement as well as discussing the movement’s modern legacy. 

Cooney is Director of the Woman Suffrage Media Project. He serves on the board of the National Women’s History Project.

Both Winning the Vote and Kenneth Florey’s American Woman Suffrage Postcards have gorgeous full-color images of suffrage photographs and ephemera.

You can order the book here, via the website of the publisher, American Graphic Press. 

American Woman Suffrage Postcards: A Study and Catalog

Google books provides significant excerpts from this book, which offers a fascinating look at suffrage-themed postcards from the era.

An abstract:

American women’s suffrage activists were fascinated with suffrage themed postcards. They collected them, exchanged them, wrote about them, used them as fundraisers and organized “postcard day” campaigns. The cards they produced were imaginative and ideological, advancing arguments for the enfranchisement of women and responding to antisuffrage broadsides. Commercial publishers were also interested in suffrage cards, recognizing their profit potential. Their products, though, were reactive rather than proactive, conveying stereotypes they assumed reflected public attitudes–often negative–towards the movement. Cataloging approximately 700 examples, this study examines the “visual rhetoric” of suffrage postcards in the context of the movement itself and as part of the general history of postcards.

Additional information and commentary on suffrage-era postcards can be found on the author’s curated site, womansuffragememorabilia.com. (Not ready to commit to visiting the site? You can read our description here.)

Both American Woman Suffrage Postcards and Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.’s book Winning the Vote have gorgeous full-color images of suffrage photographs and ephemera.