AJ 2019 Suffrage Issue
NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY, VIDEO, PODCAST INTERVIEWS: Linda Lumsden, “Historiography: Women’s Suffrage and the Media”
Women's Suffrage and the Media, Special Issue, American Journalism, Spring 2019
Era: Post-Suffrage Era, Suffrage Era | Media: Academic Journal, Academic Paper, Book-Academic, Radio/Audio, Scholarly Resarch, Video, Web-based
Linda Lumsden’s (University of Arizona) introduces our special issue of American Journalism, with a prodigious historiography of suffrage and the media research across the past half-century. Decade by decade, she traces the scholarly research trends—and gaps—from the recovery efforts in the 1970s, through the cultural-historical and media coverage analyses in the 1980s, to intersectional approaches of black feminist scholars in the 1990s that challenged earlier accounts. As the century turned, scholars considered suffragists’ contributions to consumer culture and cast a critical eye on the visual rhetoric of spectacle in the form of parades and the White House pickets. By 2017, as the national centennial celebration commenced, three new books reflected on “the golden media effect” of elites with style, money and celebrity-like appeal who became engaged with the movement in its final decade. Much suffrage media research has been piecemeal, Lumsden argues. She calls for fresh comprehensive examinations of how U.S. suffrage print culture drew women into the public sphere and changed them both. Listen as Dr. Lumsden discusses her historiography for this episode of the Journalism History podcast.
In the video below, Dr. Lumsden expounds briefly on what emerged from her work on the historiography of research into the subject of women’s suffrage and the media, from the 1970s through the decades until today. (This page will take you to all the synopses of articles in American Journalism‘s special issue, “Women’s Suffrage and the Media.”) The direct links to the article are below. Taylor & Francis opened full access for the period April 15-July 15, 2019.