Print Culture

Overview

Print culture, defined broadly, is the effect of printed communication on society. In context, the print cultures of the revolutionary period and suffrage movement refer to the ways that participants in each of these campaigns utilized printed images and words to advance their respective causes. As noted, there are significant similarities between the methods used by revolutionaries and suffragists to interact with the press.

One important shared feature of the Revolutionary and Suffrage print cultures is the imagined community that they created. Papers with mass circulation work hard to universalize the narrative of each movement. This created cohesion and made the press an effective binding agent to causes that spanned 13 separate colonies and 37 states, respectively. For colonists, this unity mitigated the chance that people belonging to different regions would fail to support one another should war break out with Britain. For suffragists, the hearing word about victories in the West helped all to feel that the movement was truly gaining ground, as those from other parts of the country were able to identify with the success as their own.

At the time of the Revolution, print was still relatively new. The popularity of this mode of communication grew rapidly in the middle of the 18th century, as general economic prosperity and a greater sense of connectedness between distant geographical regions made way for its rise. The fact that print presented a new avenue of profit to the crown meant that the industry quickly became politicized. The Stamp Act placed a financial burden on printers while also spurring them to support the production of anti-imperial material. It seemed that from the start print was destined to play a central role in affecting radical political change.

By the time the Revolution began, there were about three dozen weekly newspapers in production, each producing about four pages of content with each issue. Rather than reporting news from Europe, they were increasingly focusing on issues unique to the colonies, which contributed heavily to the quickly forming notion that colonists shared an experience and identity completely separate from their English counterparts. Printers quickly became a center of colonial life, as they both required engagement from their communities to obtain information to put in print, only to disseminate that information in a way that created a more aware and informed community. The process of turning attention inward rather than outward revolved around publications that heard colonist's voices and allowed colonists themselves to make their individual voices heard.

For disenfranchised women, the press was a uniquely important tool. Deprived of the ability to make their voice heard through the vote, they worked to influence public policy by contributing to the overall print culture. For many women, in fact, the press was one of their only access points to the public sphere. Given this, they were determined to utilize it to its fullest extent, and some scholars maintain that suffrage print culture was a more effective tool for debate and discourse in relation to government policy than even the vote itself.

Additionally, the press allowed women to participate in government without sacrificing their womanhood. Composing anonymously or pseudonymously, collectively or individually, women involved in print culture had the opportunity for their ideas to appear in the public sphere, without their bodies needing to make a physical appearance. Since forsaking their femininity and doing the "man's work" of oration or public spectacle was dangerous to point of impossibility for many women of the day, the press was vital to broadening participation in women's rights movements across the nation.