Abstract
August 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—the amendment that guarantees women their constitutional right to vote. The long and complicated march to that milestone is the subject of Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage, an impressive collection of essays that examines both the suffrage movement’s own strategic use of the press and the mainstream media’s coverage of the issue.
As Linda Steiner, one of the book’s coeditors, notes in her introduction, the collection aims to put the discussion of suffrage on new ground, that is, to explore “new ways to tell and retell suffrage history.” It succeeds in doing so with essays that recognize the key (if contentious) role media played in the fight for women’s suffrage. Indeed, drawing from a constellation of contemporary theory from multiple disciplines, including social movement theory, intersectionality, and status politics, Front Pages, Front Lines brings together new perspectives on suffrage and offers compelling suggestions for further research into media and social change.
Roughly chronological in its organization, the book opens with an overview of the historiography of the suffrage movement beginning with the scholarly work of the early 1970s that sought to recover the stories of lost suffrage publications and their editors (Lynn Masel-Walters’ work on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s newspaper The Revolution figures here). In the 1980s, research increasingly turned to cultural history, and in the 1990s, intersectional perspectives addressing issues of race and class interrogated the record of erasure on the part of the White leaders of the early suffrage movement. Scholarly work on the visual rhetoric of the suffrage movement—posters, banners, leaflets, and political cartoons—is included here, as is work on the suffrage movement’s relationship with consumer culture and on the new directions to be found in work on British suffrage media. Comprehensive and eminently useful, this opening chapter establishes where the field has been and where it might head in the future.
The chapters that follow explore several new directions. Well-known suffrage publications—The Revolution, the Woman’s Journal, The Una and The Lily—are included, but lesser-known ones predominate as various chapters surface the suffrage discourse that emerges in publications like the Woman’s Era (1894–1897) for African American women, or in a myriad of suffrage papers in the Midwest and West—The Pioneer, the New Northwest, the Coming Century, the Queen Bee (formerly the Colorado Antelope), and the Woman’s Tribune. Utah’s Woman’s Exponent—a pro-suffrage newspaper published for women members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—is the focus of an early essay that puts the Exponent into conversation with another Utah publication, the Anti-Polygamy Standard, which was opposed to extending the right to vote to Utah’s women. The Standard’s rationale: Utah’s women in polygamous relationships would vote as their husbands wished, and husbands would not vote against the practice.
Later chapters in the collection explore mainstream media coverage of suffrage, the discourse that emerged in anti-suffrage publications, and the news-generating capacity of social elites. An analysis of two Nashville, Tennessee newspapers, for example, surfaces a complicated discourse on race and southern masculinity at the heart of those papers’ divergent discourses on suffrage. (One newspaper supported suffrage; the other opposed it.) Another chapter examines the role of social and professional elites—high-society women and progressive male newspaper editors among them—as “media influencers” who helped propel the movement in its last decade.
Building on Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s ground-breaking work on Black women suffragists—and acknowledging that debt—other chapters foreground the perspectives of African Americans in the suffrage movement. As Steiner notes in her introduction, past scholarship on suffrage “rarely noticed its own whiteness.” That is, it rarely acknowledged the ways in which White, middle-class suffrage leaders—Stanton and Anthony among them—ignored the concerns of African American women. The anti-Black rhetoric of prominent White suffrage leaders and the adoption of a so-called southern strategy to ensure passage of the 19th Amendment worked to largely erase African American women from the movement’s history. Race and gender, though, are at the heart of three thought-provoking chapters. A chapter on “Writing and Righting: African American Women Seek the Vote” foregrounds the work of journalists like Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—prominent African American suffragists—showing both the women’s own suffrage work along with the black press’s often “lackluster support” for the movement. That relative dearth of interest extended, curiously, to the radical publications of New Negro era, the topic of a separate chapter on the Black public sphere.
Front Pages, Front Lines features the work of emerging scholars as well as that of some of the most established voices in the field of journalism and media history—voices like that of Maurine Beasley, professor emerita of journalism at the University of Maryland; Jane Rhodes at the University of Illinois–Chicago; Jinx Coleman Broussard of Louisiana State University; and others, all of whom have written extensively on issues of women and the press throughout their careers. That expertise is the volume’s strength, making it an excellent choice for researchers in the fields of media history, women’s studies, and social change as well as for classroom use.