Analyzing the Effectiveness of The Remonstrance, an Anti-Suffrage Publication

Elizabeth Burt examines the publication The Remonstrance, a journal published by the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, a women’s group strongly opposed to the suffrage movement.

This is the abstract for the article:

This article examines the anti-suffrage ideology, rhetoric, and structure of The Remonstrance, the publication of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women. As a countermovement publication, The Remonstrance was principally reactive, that is, driven to respond to suffrage claims and strategies. Basic themes illustrated the ideology of the anti-suffrage movement. Further, the anti-suffrage ideology was reflected in the organizational structure of both the MAOFESW and The Remonstrance. Although they changed over time, they failed to keep step with the broad social changes affecting women’s lives in the early twentieth century.

Burt concludes by writing that while the publication may have voiced a majority view when it began in 1890, “over the next thirty years they became rhetorically and strategically trapped by their negative and reactive stance.” The Remonstrance, she argues, was unable to create new and persuasive arguments against women’s voting rights, and therefore failed to develop a mass base of support that could defeat the suffrage movement.

This article is only available in academic databases. You can access it by searching for it on EBSCO Discovery Service or by going to this link, where you can buy short term access. The article can also be found at many libraries; find one near you using WorldCat.

You can read a copy of a The Remonstrance issue at the Library of Congress.

For more information on women who opposed suffrage, see this academic article in The History Teacher or this PhD dissertation on anti-suffrage activism in New York.

For more information on how periodicals covered suffrage, see Sheila Webb’s article on The Woman Citizen; Linda Steiner’s chapter “19th Century Suffrage Periodicals: Conceptions of Womanhood and the Press”; 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.

National Women’s History Project: Suffrage Centennial Gazette

The National Women’s History Project produced two volumes of a gazette to promote activities across the country in the run-up to the 2020 national Women’s Suffrage Centennial celebration.

The first volume includes a report on the critical New York State victory; information on notable suffragists and dates from every state; and national news and online resources, the 2020 poster and more. It was produced in newsprint and as the full PDF seen here, which you can also download below.

The second volume offers encouragement to those planning events and celebrations for the suffrage centennial, gives updates on different ways organizations are already commemorating the women’s suffrage movement, publishes historical context on the drive to ratify the 19th Amendment and highlights when every state voted on the amendment and the vote’s outcome. You can also download the gazette below.

Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms

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

Lesson Plan: The First Amendment and the Women’s Suffrage Movement

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.

Advertisement: “Gift for National Woman’s Party”—Susan B. Anthony Medallion

This newspaper clipping from the May 5, 1922 edition of Tennessee’s Dickson County Herald shows sculptor Leila Usher next to her bas-relief portrait of the famous feminist and suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Usher presented this work to the National Woman’s Party, to be put on display at the organization’s national headquarters in Washington, DC.

A digitized version of the original photo of Usher and the portrait is available for viewing and download through the Library of Congress website.

You can read about the National Woman’s Party’s pro-suffrage public awareness campaign here and access an archive of primary source material related to the NWP here.

Book: Representation of the British Suffrage Movement

About the book:

Focussing on The Times, this monograph uses corpus linguistics to examine how suffrage campaigners’ different ideologies were conflated in the newspaper over a crucial time period for the movement—1908 to 1914, leading up to the Representation of the People Act in 1918.

Looking particularly at representations of suffrage campaigners’ support of or opposition to military action, Gupta uses a range of methodological approaches drawn from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and CDA. These include: collocation analysis, examination of consistent significant collocates and van Leeuwen’s taxonomy of social actors.

The book offers an innovative insight into contemporary public understanding of the suffrage campaign with implications for researchers examining large, complex protest movements.

Digital Exhibit: Arkansas Women’s Suffrage Centennial

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.

The Husband-ist of a Suffragist and Other Parodies

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.

The Woman Citizen: A Study of How News Narratives Adapt to a Changing Social Environment

In this article for the journal American Journalism, scholar Sheila M. Webb provides an in-depth look at The Woman Citizen, a suffragist periodical originally founded by Carrie Chapman Catt, then the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Webb examines every issue of The Woman Citizen‘s decade-long run in order to explore how its content shifted after the passage of the 19th Amendment. She concludes that The Woman Citizen’s “coverage of the fight for suffrage shifted into narratives of women’s place in the new culture, narratives that served as proof that women could and would succeed in fulfilling their new duties and opportunities.”

Here is the abstract for the article:

This narrative analysis of the suffragist journal the Woman Citizen, published from 1917 to 1927, addresses the challenges social activists face when reframing progressive narratives. This article provides insight into the press as a site for identity; considers how a magazine positions itself to effect social advances; and explores the hurdles for a reform magazine to survive when the landscape changes, as it did for women with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and with the end of the first wave of feminism circa 1930. To ascertain if the editorial strategy and content of the journal shifted to absorb the ramifications of suffrage, the study examined each issue published, comprising some 6,300 articles. This study found that, although the journal adapted by fostering more dynamic narratives of women’s new place, it continued themes prevalent over the previous forty years, and depended on narrative framings characteristic of the suffragist movement—motherhood, altruism, equality, profiles of women of accomplishment, pioneers, and success “by chance.” This examination of a women’s journal from the 1920s also sheds light on our current environment, and shows how, despite almost a century of citizenship, coverage of women’s participation in the public sphere is still presented in ways that mimic coverage from that era.

You can find the full PDF of this article through the academic database EBSCOHost, or here through Taylor & Francis. Many libraries have access to these databases—check WorldCat to find one near you.

For more information on how periodicals covered suffrage, see Linda Steiner’s chapter “19th Century Suffrage Periodicals: Conceptions of Womanhood and the Press”; 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.

The Library of Congress also has a phenomenal digitized archive of NAWSA-related primary sources, for those who are interested in learning more about the organization.

“Feminist Periodical Culture: From Suffrage to Second Wave,” in Women: A Cultural Review (Special Issue)

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:

• “The Feel of the Feminist Network: Votes for Women after The Suffragette” by Barbara Green

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.

• “Politicizing the Home: Welfare Feminism and the Feminist Press in Interwar Britain” by Maria DiCenzo and Alexis Motuz

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.

• “‘The Modern Weekly for the Modern Woman’: Time and Tide, Feminism and Interwar Print Culture” by Catherine Clay

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.