Front Pages, Front Lines

Media and the Fight for Women's Suffrage

Linda Steiner, Carolyn Kitch, Brooke Kroeger, Linda Steiner, Carolyn Kitch, Brooke Kroeger

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780252084973
  9780252043109
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252051982
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Social Sciences

Suffragists recognized that the media played an essential role in the women's suffrage movement and the public's understanding of it. From parades to going to jail for voting, activists played to the mass media of their day. They also created an energetic niche media of suffragist journalism and publications.

This collection offers new research on media issues related to the women's suffrage movement. Contributors incorporate media theory, historiography, and innovative approaches to social movements while discussing the vexed relationship between the media and debates over suffrage. Aiming to correct past oversights, the essays explore overlooked topics such as coverage by African American and Mormon-oriented media, media portrayals of black women in the movement, suffragist rhetorical strategies, elites within the movement, suffrage as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, and the influence views of white masculinity had 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

1

Historiography

Women’s Suffrage and the Media

LINDA J. LUMSDEN

Culture. Multiculturalism. Spectacle. Public sphere. Interdisciplinary studies. Those terms sum up the major directions of the media historiography of the suffrage movement since the 1990s.

This chapter traces the evolution of diverse scholarship on a wide range of media in relation to the American suffrage movement. Scholars began investigating the role of suffrage periodicals in the early 1970s, when women’s history emerged from the second wave of feminism as an exciting new field within the historical profession. The first decades concentrated on retrieving to public memory the many periodicals and personalities that shaped the suffrage press. Cultural historical approaches began to appear in the 1980s. Black feminist scholars in the 1990s challenged the racist assumptions that tinged earlier Whiggish accounts of persevering white suffrage editors. Visual rhetoric studies emerged as scholars rediscovered the spectacle of suffrage. Journalism scholars, however, have lagged in recognizing the central role of the suffrage press in reshaping the public sphere.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the historiography of suffrage media has grown exponentially, but it has been driven largely by disciplines outside of journalism history. Interdisciplinary studies have offered the most comprehensive accounts. Literary scholars, art historians, anthropologists, black studies scholars, and even cartographers have put new spins on the history of suffrage media, which besides newspapers and magazines encompass theater, film, and fiction; cartoons and postcards, cookbooks and costumes, banners and songs. Three strands weaving through interdisciplinary suffrage media scholarship are: an embrace of cultural approaches; the retrieval of excluded voices and a scourging of racism; and a celebration of suffrage as spectacle in myriad forms. My essay begins by tracing early suffrage media scholarship, then surveys major directions of the past twenty years (especially innovative British cultural approaches to suffrage media), followed by suggestions on how US journalism historians can reinvigorate the field.

Journalism historians Catherine Mitchell in 1993 and Elizabeth V. Burt in 2000 critiqued the historiography of suffrage journalism, providing precursors to this essay on American suffrage media in the broadest sense. Mitchell urged scholars to interrogate the white, middle-class suffrage press’s performance on issues of race and class.1 Burt similarly invoked multiculturalism but also suggested more interdisciplinary studies and new theoretical frameworks.2 Both called for more cultural approaches, echoing James Carey’s oft-quoted appeal in the inaugural issue of Journalism History in 1974.3 Thirty years later, women’s historian Kathi Kern likewise called for more cultural analysis in women’s history.4 Cultural history currently dominates studies of diverse suffrage media.

Pioneers of Suffrage Media History

The history of American suffrage media began with what pioneering scholar Gerda Lerner terms compensatory studies of forgotten individual journals and their editors.5 Lynn Masel-Walters launched the field with her groundbreaking analyses in 1976 of two key suffrage newspapers, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Revolution (1868–70), and the Woman’s Journal (1870–1917), official organ of what became the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).6 (Marion Marzolf summarized the suffrage press in four paragraphs in Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists, the first detailed work of women’s journalism history.)7 Sherilyn Cox Bennion followed, identifying more than a dozen western suffrage newspapers and editors.8 Suffrage editors beginning with Oregonian Abigail S. Duniway attracted scholarly attention as early as 1971. Duniway continues to attract interest for both her writing and her speeches.9

Masel-Walters also led the move beyond compensatory history in her 1980 investigation of suffrage newspapers’ internal workings, for which she delved into nineteenth-century suffrage newspaper records.10 Burt also utilized suffrage organization records and correspondence, analyzing them through the prism of social movement theory to detail how power struggles within the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association were mirrored in its organ, the Woman Citizen.11 The encyclopedic Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues, edited by Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck, includes sixteen suffrage journals as well as three antisuffrage periodicals.12

Studies on mainstream press coverage of the suffrage movement began in 1980 with Lauren Kessler’s content analysis of the Portland Oregonian, which, she concluded, reported on suffrage only after it perceived the movement as legitimate.13 Anne Messerly Cooper found that ten daily newspapers put passage of the Nineteenth Amendment on page one, regardless of whether their state ratified the amendment. The suffrage movement did not exist in isolation: Janet Cramer discovered that turn-of-the-century women’s periodicals connected four themes to suffrage: motherhood, women’s moral superiority, female altruism, and women’s equality with men.14 Similarly, Nancy Burkhalter’s analysis of coverage from 1918 to 1920 in the Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, the New Republic, and Literary Digest concluded that editors appeared most concerned with minimizing any impact the vote might have on the traditional role of women valorized in their magazines.15 Burt’s studies of the Wisconsin press found newspapers conveyed diverse views variously influenced by their publishers and editors, political affiliations, competing interests, regional demographics, circulation, place of publication, and suffrage story sources.16 Rodger Streitmatter, who has outlined the importance of several suffrage periodicals, dissected the hostility of nineteenth-century media toward woman’s suffrage.17 In a study of The Delineator, a hugely successful women’s magazine in the 1910s, Sidney Bland demonstrated that the popular magazine fostered community among suffragists seeking to redefine themselves for the modern age.18

I examined ten dailies’ coverage of the 1913 national suffrage parade and pageant in Washington, DC, and found that newspapers offered a forum for a broader debate on women’s place after a drunken mob broke up the parade. Editorial indignation over the women’s ill treatment conferred legitimacy upon women’s right of assembly, moving mainstream media closer toward the conclusion that women should have a right to vote.19 The 2017 Women’s March in Washington drew parallels to the 1913 parade, although Teri Finneman’s analysis of 1913 press previews concluded that their episodic approach resulted in shallow diagnostic framing of the suffrage issue.20 Tiffany Lewis similarly observed that reporters covering a small band of suffragists who hiked from New York City to Albany in 1912 to urge passage of a suffrage amendment depoliticized the transgressive protest by framing it as entertainment.21

A shortcoming of all these works is their piecemeal approach to mass media coverage of one of the nation’s largest social movements. Many suffrage histories rely heavily on mainstream media as sources but never address their relationship to the movement. Just one example is Elna C. Green’s fine Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question, whose bibliography lists nineteen commercial periodicals.22 Several books deal briefly with suffrage and the media in the course of discussing other aspects of the movement, since media are so enmeshed with history, culture, and politics. Sally G. McMillen’s Seneca Falls and the Origin of the Women’s Rights Movement devoted three pages to mainstream reactions to the convention.23 In Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly, I sporadically discussed the importance of newspaper coverage of suffrage conventions, soapboxers, parades, and the White House pickets.24

Susan E. Marshall discussed the antis’ Remonstrance newspaper and the press tactics of antisuffragists in her Splintered Sisterhood.25 Brooke Kroeger’s The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, mines myriad newspaper accounts.26 Two other books reflect on wealthy white suffragists’ golden media effect, including Johanna Neuman’s Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote.27 Joan Marie Johnson describes the energizing effect of Mrs. Frank Leslie’s $1 million bequest to NAWSA; Johnson maintains, “The publicity and NAWSA’s winning plan were essential to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.”28

The most comprehensive look at US mainstream media so far is Genevieve G. McBride’s examination of how Wisconsin women marshaled the press in their fight for suffrage and other reforms; her book is a model for taking a deep dive into journalism’s role in a state, regional, or national suffrage campaign.29

Cultural History Emerges

Cultural history began to emerge in suffrage press studies in 1983 with Linda Steiner’s semin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Historiography: Women’s Suffrage and the Media
• 2. Nineteenth-Century Suffrage Journals: Inventing and Defending New Women
• 3. The Woman’s Exponent: A Utah Case Study in the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage
• 4. Writing and “Righting”: African American Women Seek the Vote
• 5. Woman Suffrage and the New Negro in the Black Public Sphere
• 6. Differently Radical: Suffrage Issues and Feminist Ideas in The Crisis and The Masses
• 7. A Countermovement on the Verge of Defeat: Antisuffragist Arguments in 1917 Press Coverage
• 8. Discourses of Race and Masculinity in the Nashville Press: “A White Man’s Country and a White Man’s Government”?
• 9. The Facilitators: Elites in the Victory of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
• 10. After Suffrage: An Uncharted Path
• 11. Memory, Interrupted: A Century of Remembering and Forgetting the Story of Women’s Suffrage
• Afterword: Women’s Suffrage, the Press, and the Enduring Problem of White Supremacy
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover