Media Portrayals of the Woman Suffrage Movement

Contributor Tina Olsin Lent investigates representations of the women in four recent filmic representations of this movement: Ruth Pollak’s 1995 episode of PBS’s American Experience, One Woman, One Vote, Ken Burns’s 1999 documentary, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Katja von Garnier’s 2004 HBO feature, Iron Jawed Angels, and Sarah Gavron’s 2015 feature film, Suffragette. Lent relates the new pattern of films to a number of cultural shifts that arise by the mid-1990s. Women assume more prominent positions within the film industry. Stories centered on women begin to find their way into films circulated in wide-release. Women also become more active in politics. And, notable anniversaries of various woman’s suffrage movements around the world begin to occur. Lent pays particular attention to the ways in which the histories found in the above four films bend to fit the narrative and political priorities surrounding each production.

The Politics of Commemorating the Woman Suffrage Movement in New York City: On the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument

This article traces the commission, design, and public reception for New York City’s Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument as a case study for the contentious politics of monument-building. The Central Park statue—as of this writing, not yet realized—has followed a protracted, frequently contested path since its conception in 2015. It was originally designed to depict women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. What began as an initially well-received initiative to correct the gender imbalance in the city’s public art became mired in controversy amid the politically charged atmosphere of the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. I argue that, while the polarity of contemporary politics amplified the statue’s controversy, the tensions at play are the product of more than 170 years of conflicts inherent in the progressive activism of the American woman suffrage movement and commemorations of it.

Immigrant Declarants and Loyal American Women: How Suffragists Helped Redefine the Rights of Citizens

As a result of the woman suffrage movement, citizenship and voting rights, though considered separate issues by the courts, became more intertwined in the mind of the average American. This interconnectedness was also a product of the concurrent movement to disfranchise immigrant declarant voters—immigrants who had filed their intention to become citizens but had not completed the naturalization process. This essay shows how suffragists pursued immigrant declarant disfranchisement as part of the woman suffrage movement, arguing that the same competitive political conditions that encouraged politicians to enfranchise primarily white, citizen women led them to disfranchise immigrant declarants. It analyzes suffragists’ arguments at both the state and national levels that voting was a right of citizens who had met their wartime obligations to the nation, and maintains that woman suffrage and the votes of white women who supported the measures disfranchising immigrant declarants and limiting immigrant rights should be included in historians’ understanding of the immigration restrictionist and nativist movements.