Suffrage in Print

What is Suffrage?

Suffrage literally means the right to vote. However, when speaking about the suffrage movement, people are usually referring to the campaign led by women in America, from the mid-1800s to the start of the twentieth century, to gain access to this right. Prior to 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, granting all female citizens a legal right to vote, women's voting rights varied across the nation. In 1869, the then territory of Wyoming became the first to grant women unrestricted access to the vote. In the following years, many Western states and territories would follow suit, enfranchising women to varying degrees. At the same time, bills to do the same in the South and East failed numerous times, leaving women in those places with little hope other than the passage of a federal law. However, the fight for the right to vote began long before even the first Western territories recognized it. Many historians point to the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 as the official start of the movement. On July 19th and 20th of that year, approximately 300 men and women gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss uniquely female issues, among which was the lack of representation in government. While this event certainly served as a jumping off point for women to organize around their shared goals, it is not entirely fair to say that the suffrage movement as a whole stems from that meeting. Rather, small struggles for suffrage took place all over the country at various points, until-- with the help of mainstream media-- they were able to coalesce into larger, more cohesive and organized campaigns. In any case, suffrage was a piece of greater trend toward social progress in American society, exemplified by other reform movements like the push for better treatment of the mentally ill championed by Dorthea Dix or the call for birth control led by Margaret Sanger. Even so, suffrage is a valuable area of study in its own right. Suffragists employed a variety of revolutionary tactics in their campaign for the vote, including marches, pageants, and parades, silent protests, mailed propaganda, and all manner of civil disobedience. The literature produced by the suffrage movement, including periodicals and print, is equally varied, showcasing the many different facets of the struggle for the vote.

More than 70 years after the movement began, all the work that countless women threw into gaining the basic rights of a citizen finally culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment. While this was certainly an enormous victory, racist and classists tactics like literacy tests still barred many from using their vote. Additionally, many women living in the United States were not counted as citizens at all, thanks to legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the fact that Native Americans were considered wards of the state. Thus, the fight for truly universal suffrage continued into the 1900s, and even continues to this day.

The American Suffrage movement was a complex cause with a rich history and lasting impact. However, very few people today have a familiarity with it beyond the name of the Amendment that brought it to an "end." Given this, the questions remains: why don't more people know more about it?

Holes in the Narrative

History is the story that we tell ourselves about our past, usually constructed by those whose voices speak loudest in times past and in the present. Unfortunately, the white patriarchal nature of society means that men, followed at a distance by white women, are the primary recorders of history, choosing which details are remembered and which are forgotten. Suffrage, a cause that led to the legal enfranchisement of more than half of the population and continues to affect global politics even today, has been all but written out of that narrative. Why?

The idea that women were deprived of what is now considered to be the basic right of all citizens does not paint men in a favorable light. Additionally, the racism that plagued the movement from its inception casts shadows on many white female figures. In order to prevent these complex realities from disrupting the lives of men and white women today, the actions of their past counterparts are pointedly forgotten.

The problem is compounded by the general tendency of historians, literary critics, and scholars to de-emphasize and devalues women's work. Because the movement was conducted primarily by women for women, its history and impact have largely been written off or ignored. It was not until relatively recently that the complexities of suffrage have been began to be analyzed and unpacked, and even less time and energy has been devoted to reading, cataloguing, and writing on the various types of literature produced by suffragists.

All these social and societal forces work together to hide the reality suffrage movement from mainstream history and sum in up in sentence: women were granted the right to vote in 1920.

Revolutionary Parallels

From the Declaration of Sentiments to the revival of the concept of Republican Motherhood, the American Suffrage movement seems to be linked to the American Revolution at every turn. On a purely ideological level, the pleas of women deprived of the vote mirror those of the colonists as they sought after their basic right to representation in government. On an organizational level, women sequestered in the domestic sphere faced challenges in communicating and coalescing much like the those of the colonists, who were separated by physical distance. Cognizant of these similarities and of the way that the struggle for independence had been canonized in the country’s collective memory, many suffrage leaders sought to capitalize on this relationship in their rhetoric and writings. This is evident in similarities between the "Declaration" read at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848-- what many historians call the beginning of the suffrage movement-- and the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps the most striking example this tactic, however, lies in the publication The Revolution—a suffrage periodical which circulated from 1868 to 1872. Edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was more than conscious of the effect that revolutionary rhetoric might have on her cause, The Revolution makes an obvious and explicit callback—the very title of the paper invokes the spirit of the early American soldiers as they fought for liberty and freedom. Additionally, the form of the publication builds a second, implicit layer into the relationship between the two movements in that it mimics an important aspect of the Revolution as a social cause: print culture.

Given the apparent similarities between the two movements in terms of structure, impact, and advocacy, it seems strange that one is so ubiquitous in our understanding of history while the other is largely forgotten. Similarly, it feels wrong that the texts of one are well researched, widely read, and often cited while the literature produced by the other is overlooked, finding no place in the canon.

What Can I Find on this Site?

In order to remedy the above stated issues and highlight to equality of value between suffrage and other recognized movements, this corner of the internet is dedicated to studying the similarities between revolutionary print culture and suffrage print culture. Provided for your study is an overview of the way the press functioned in both instances, followed by something of a case study, in which an article from a well-known publication from each period is situated in its time and analyzed for its rhetorical techniques.