Marketing Rights

By Maggie Bukowski

The items that humans create, use, and attach meaning to are important and help historians understand a society’s culture through its material production.[1] Material culture seeks to move beyond just using written records. This approach allows for different people to be included in the historical narrative that may not have left extensive written records.[2] Material culture is also important to investigate even when a group or person has left extensive written records because it allows for a fuller understanding of that person and the physical world they knew. The women and men who supported women’s suffrage provide a perfect case study for why studying material culture is important because they created both extensive written and material objects. Suffragists heavily used material objects to stage country wide marketing and lobbying campaigns to convince people to allow women to vote.

The campaign for women’s rights is generally acknowledged to start in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention.[3] It was not until the early 1910s the suffragist began to heavily utilize modern methods of advertising, publicity, mass marketing, and mass entertainment to entice voters.[4] The phenomenon of suffragists marketing their cause stems from generational changes and the shift of some women and men towards a more radical viewpoint. Those who believed that older suffragists had not been forceful enough began embracing and using political spectacle such as parades, mass meetings, and entertainment.[5] Eventually both radical and non radical suffragists embraced the use of marketing to advertise their cause and created and marketed a wide variety of objects including badges, pins, sashes, clothing, fans, postcards, wagons, picket signs, stationary, and a variety of other objects. These objects circulated widely and were used by the suffragists to both identify themselves and advertise their message.

While many western states, such as Nevada in 1914, legalized women voting the United States did not approve it as a whole until the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920.[6] The road to women’s enfranchisement was long and it taught the women and men involved to become expert lobbyist. This lobbying rested heavily on the use of material items to both identify themselves and advertise their ideologies. This master marketing would help the movement gain a larger audience and help assure the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Sources:

[1] Karen Harvey, “Introduction,” in History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Karen Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2009), 6. In her introduction Karen Harvey quotes Jules Prown describing material culture as, “…the manifestation of culture through material productions. And the study of material culture is the study of material to understand culture, to discover its beliefs – the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions – of a particular community or society at a given time.

[2] Archeologists and academics interested in gender history/studies have been on the forefront of incorporating material culture into their work so as to incorporate more diverse voices, Moria Donald and Linda Hurcombe, Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), xv.

[3] The Seneca Falls Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York from July 19 to 20, 1848; Sally G. McMillan, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[4] Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)

[5] Ibid., 2-6. For more information on the history of political spectacle in the United States see, David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

[6] Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004)

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