Front Pages, Front Lines
This book addresses the role of media, particularly periodicals, in the American women’s suffrage movement, and in public understandings of the campaign for a Constitutional amendment enfranchising women. Chapters deal with the rhetoric of pro- and antisuffrage activists as covered in the mainstream regional and national press; several chapters deal with suffragists’ own periodicals, as well as with other non-mainstream periodicals, including the black press and socialist and radical periodicals. These new studies offer fresh perspectives on relatively familiar suffrage narratives while exploring lesser-known aspects of the roles of journalism, publicity, visual communication, and external alliances with organizations and individuals. Taken collectively, the chapters clarify intersections of suffrage ideas with other social and political movements as well as differences by geography and culture. The essays are marked by attention to the movement’s long-term implications; to contemporary concepts such as social movement and countermovement strategies, status conflict, and the public sphere; and by sensitivity to race, class, and regional politics. As the historiography offered here makes clear, these issues were largely ignored in the first wave of suffrage research.