MOST RADICAL DEMAND

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the Seneca Falls convention's leaders, reminisced, "We were but a handful . . ." recalling the supporters of woman suffrage at that convention, when the right to vote was women's most radical demand. Between this first convention advocating the rights of women, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women's right to vote in 1920, lay a long and arduous journey. Victory was never assured until the final moment

In the intervening years, the drive for women's voting rights encompassed the lives of several generations of women. Suffrage supporters survived a series of dramatic transformations in their movement that included: fifty years of educating the public to establish the legitimacy of woman suffrage; approximately twenty years of direct lobbying as well as dramatic militant action to press their claim to the vote; the division of each generation into moderate and radical camps; and the creation of a distinct female political culture and imagery to promote "votes for women."

CAMPAIGN SYMBOLS

Despite extensive research on the American woman suffrage movement, little attention has been paid to the imagery the movement created. This imagery of suffrage should be understood and treated as a legitimate form of political communication. Examining the political imagery and artifacts of the suffrage movement provides insight into the ideologies and strategies of the divergent wings of the movement and brings a clearer understanding of the relationship between that ideology and the political processes of the period. It also highlights the practical role that symbolism played in unifying the movement and in transmitting the suffrage message to a wide public audience. An analysis of suffrage imagery shows the emergence of a distinct female political culture, demonstrating how women transformed the concept of their domestic role into a dynamic political strategy emphasizing social reform.

Until women's history became a legitimate academic field of study in the early 1970s, and women began to write their own history, suffrage was barely mentioned in history textbooks. Indeed, militant activism by American women in the suffrage movement was almost unknown. Even in our own time - outside the ranks of women historians and feminist activists - leader Alice Paul and the militant National Woman's Party (NWP) which she founded, are hardly known. Few know that it was women who first picketed the White House for a political cause, or faced jail, hunger strikes, and forced feeding while they were in prison. For that matter, few know about Carrie Chapman Catt and the mainstream suffrage organization which she led, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and their years of public education, strategizing, and lobbying in the fight for the vote.

MASS MOVEMENT

The prevailing public perception of the drive for women's vote envisions a small, dogged, determined group of women who persisted against the odds until men finally "gave" them the vote. Nothing could be further from the actual facts of a mass movement that encompassed the lives of millions of American women over several generations, employed highly sophisticated political strategy and organization, and developed brilliant, politically-savvy, charismatic leaders.

SUFFRAGE ACTIVITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

WOMEN‰S STATUS

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Quaker activist Lucretia Mott, called the convention at Seneca Falls out of their deep anger with male abolitionists and the patriarchal system they represented. In 1840, when Stanton and Mott attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the predominantly male convention refused to seat them and other female delegates. Stanton and Mott, like other activist women in the United States, began to see similarities between their own circumscribed status and that of the slaves. Seneca Falls lit a fire among women determined to change their legal and political position. Women's conventions were regularly held during the 1850s, but the Civil War halted these gatherings as women turned their energies to war work.

Women, thinking that their patriotism, war work, and agitation against slavery would be rewarded with the vote after the Civil War, were bitterly disappointed. They soon found that Congress and the public felt that this was "the Negro's Hour," and that citizenship and voting rights for Black men were not to be jeopardized by adding something so outrageous as votes for women.

Congress passed, and the states ratified, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution that abolished slavery, conferred citizenship on African-Americans, and granted the vote to Black men. Women were conspicuously and constitutionally absent.

TWO STRATEGIES

Men and women who had worked for abolition and women's rights before the Civil War formed the Equal Rights Association to renew their work after the conflict ended. Yet, the Equal Rights Association could not agree on a single strategy to achieve women's right to vote. By 1869, the Association had split into separate, antagonistic camps. By 1870, two new organizations emerged from the wreckage of the Equal Rights Association: the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (who had joined the cause in 1850), and the American Woman Suffrage Association headed by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. Stanton and Anthony's National Association espoused a radical platform of sweeping social change to improve the status of women, and favored a constitutional amendment to achieve women's vote. The very name of their periodical, The Revolution, was evidence of their radical approach to women's rights. Lucy Stone, a pioneer in women's rights, and Julia Ward Howe, a leader in the women's club movement and author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," founded the more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association. This group favored passage of woman suffrage voting laws at the state level. Their periodical, the Woman's Journal, had a more polite, literary tone and generally considered topics within "woman's sphere."

Both groups engaged in organizing and educational campaigns throughout the country. Women gave speeches on the lecture circuit, distributed thousands of educational leaflets and pamphlets about votes for women, and rallied support through presentations to women's clubs and temperance (anti-alcohol) groups. Both associations waged relentless and grueling campaigns to support suffrage referenda in the states. The National Association also lobbied Congress. Year after year, Anthony led groups of women lobbyists to urge passage of a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage. Despite all these efforts, Congressional hearings were rarely held, and the question of suffrage was never sent to the floor of Congress for a vote.

NEW LIFE FOR THE MOVEMENT

By 1890, the fierce rivalries and animosities of the previous generation of suffragists had waned, and a new cohort of women had joined the ranks. Leaders in both the National and American Associations voted to unite, becoming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. This newly merged group took on the more moderate approach of the American Association, yet Stanton and Anthony from the National Association were elected as leaders and remained until their deaths in the early 20th century. (Stanton died in 1902; Anthony in 1906).

Despite their unyielding efforts, progress was exceedingly slow. At the turn of the century, only four western states - Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado - allowed women the right to vote. As the new century dawned, the fifty year old suffrage movement, now represented by NAWSA, was mired in what its own leaders called "the doldrums." Congressional hearings on a Constitutional amendment for suffrage had not been held since 1887. Success was nowhere in sight. Yet, the NAWSA and its predecessor organizations had planted the educational seeds of enfranchisement, ensuring fertile ground for a new period of activism in the new century. After 1900, the suffrage movement experienced a dramatic shift from education to agitation, employing dramatic publicity, dynamic nonviolent confrontation, and civil disobedience to promote the cause.

A coincidence of events at the turn of the century also helped revitalize the suffrage movement. The Progressive Era (usually given in history texts as the period from 1900 - 1920 but, for the women's movement, it spanned the period from 1890-1925) gave a new life to all reform. Millions of women from all ethnic, class, and racial backgrounds entered public life to address severe social problems through innovative reforms. As women's roles in society expanded, so did the activism that politicized women and brought them into mainstream politics. Soon realizing that virtually every reform they sought was regulated by law, and that legislators who passed these laws responded to voters, suffrage supporters and women reformers alike believed that the social policies they supported could be achieved only if women had the vote. Soon after the dawn of the new century, the question of woman suffrage had become mainstream politics.

CREATING A FEMALE POLITICAL CULTURE AND IMAGERY

Creating a powerful political imagery was crucial to establishing a political presence in the American public's consciousness and in bringing about the acceptance of voting rights for women. As political parties developed in the nineteenth century, and politicians and their supporters vied for the votes of an expanding popular electorate, male politicians created potent images of the soldier-statesman, the log cabin common man, the rough-and-ready frontiersman, and the political sage, which they manipulated to achieve popular political support. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as women expanded their roles outside the domestic sphere into the public arena, they found in the mainstream political culture no images that spoke to women's experience or conveyed women's political objectives. It was essential that women create a political culture of their own, including an imagery of suffrage that would form a vital and instantly recognizable means of political communication in a pre-television age.

SUFFRAGE‰S TWO FACES

Out of the two distinct suffrage organizations in the early 20th century, the mainstream National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the militant National Woman's Party (NWP), with their different philosophies and strategies, two separate suffrage imageries evolved. One set of images was aimed at moderate, mainstream women, emphasizing motherhood and social service. The other was directed toward more radical feminists and stressed equality, individual freedom, and personal empowerment. This powerful new political culture promoted women's inclusion in the public life of the nation, and proved a significant tactic that successfully propelled suffrage to final passage by Congress and ratification by the states.

FEMALE POLITICAL CULTURE

Creating a female political culture had been an ongoing endeavor for American women. Women of the Revolutionary Era, seeking a political role for themselves in the new nation, created the concept of Republican Motherhood, a concept thoroughly explored by historian Linda Kerber in her work Women of the Republic. Building on the concept of Republican Motherhood, echoed again in the mid-19th. century by such influential women as Catharine Beecher (famous educator and promoter of the study of domestic science for women) and Sarah Josepha Hale (editor of the popular and influential women's magazine Godey's Lady's Book), women at the turn-of-the-century continued to use aspects of their cultural role to political effect. The images and rhetoric comprising this political culture enabled women to transform their domestic experience into a powerful political statement, allowing them to extend their culturally-sanctioned role to include new public responsibilities. This politicized rhetoric and imagery of motherhood, as both a socially redemptive and politically compelling concept, became a central and forceful rationale, setting patterns for women's political participation in this country that continue to the present.

In creating a female political culture, American women used materials rooted in American traditions as well as others borrowed from the British suffrage movement and adapted to American usage. American suffrage women were inspired by political parades and demonstrations familiar throughout the 19th century from presidential campaigns, as well as symbols that drew on both British and American traditions. The suffragists also embraced classical figures of women representing America, Democracy, Liberty, and Justice, which had been in American political use since the time of the Revolution. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (a women's anti-alcohol and drug crusade that became the largest women's organization in the 19th century) had a history of street actions and public parades dating from the mid-1870s. Suffrage supporters in California had staged parades as early as 1906 (prior to the first British suffrage parades) to promote a state amendment for women's vote.

The American cultural emphasis on women's presumed "inherent" domestic nature, her responsibilities for nurturing children, and her duties in the maintenance of the home resulted in the mainstream movement's (NAWSA and its state affiliates) pervasive use of domestic images and rhetoric. In fact, this domestic emphasis was the single most important distinction between the public discourse of the American and the British suffrage movements, and between the mainstream and militant wings of the American movement.

WOMEN‰S "SPECIAL" QUALITIES

By the end of the nineteenth century, American suffrage rhetoric based on motherhood and the "special" qualities of woman's nature became almost universal. Mainstream women's movement leaders such as Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, Frances Willard, Anna Howard Shaw, Ida Husted Harper, Alice Stone Blackwell, and the major suffrage journal of the NAWSA, the Woman's Journal, all championed the creed of Motherhood under the banner of "Social Housekeeping." Society was to be uplifted by woman's higher moral nature (superior to that of man, so the concept held) as that morality was infused into the social and political system. Political and social reform became a moral and civic necessity that would enable women to carry out effectively the work of "woman's proper sphere." Rather than intruding into the male sphere, the rhetoric stressed that woman's sphere was expanding outward to include the community and the nation as the larger "home." Women needed the ballot, so the mainstream argument went, not because they sought to intrude into the male sphere of activity, but in fulfillment of woman's traditional role.

Themes of women as moral arbiters of society, keepers of cultural tradition and agents of cultural transmission, nurturers of children, philanthropists to the less fortunate, and mothers of the race were extensively emphasized. These themes fit perfectly with the prevailing cultural concepts, held by both men and women, about the role of women in society. Stressing these themes opened up the arsenal of suffrage arguments to a wide range of new strategies and persuasive tactics. With the reawakening of the suffrage drive in the early twentieth century came a proliferation of political materials whose aim was to sell the movement.

SUFFRAGE COLORS

In an age prior to electronic communication and television, the use of color served as an instant means of visual recognition and became vividly symbolic in the suffrage movement. Two major color themes were used throughout American suffrage imagery: (1) the indigenous American tradition using gold or yellow coupled with a variety of subordinate colors; (2) the imported use of the British suffrage colors purple, white, and green, and its American variant purple, white, and gold.

The use of gold began with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's campaign to help pass a suffrage state referendum in Kansas in 1867. The Kansas state symbol was the sunflower, which was adopted by the pro suffrage forces in the campaign. The sunflower, and the color gold or yellow, was associated with the suffrage cause thereafter. Suffrage supporters used gold pins, ribbons, sashes, and yellow roses to denote their cause. During the nation's Centennial celebrations in 1876, suffrage supporters sang "The Yellow Ribbon" song that associated the color with "God's own primal color; born of purity and light" and with the "flame of freedom's fires."

SUNFLOWER

By 1887, at the 37th annual convention of the Indiana American Woman Suffrage Society, "the ladies and gentlemen present all donned the 'sunflower' [gold] ribbon of the suffrage cause."

The pro-suffrage, pro-women's rights journal, Justicia, in an 1887 article entitled, "Show Your Colors" stated:

It has remained . . . for the 'Equality before the law' agitators to don an emblematic color. Yellow, the color of sunflower petals, has been adopted as the distinguishing badge of the woman suffrage army;. . . The sunflower seems an appropriate flower, as it always turns its face to the light and follows the course of the sun, seemingly worshipping the [arche]type of righteousness. Let us all don the yellow ribbon, and fling our banners to the breeze. By this sign let us be known, and the more who wear it the greater our strength will be. . . . It [the color yellow] was first adopted at the American Woman Suffrage Convention in Philadelphia [probably the 1876 convention of the suffragists celebrating the United States Centennial], and was the suggestion of Mrs. Laura Johns, of Kansas.

During the major push for suffrage between 1910 and 1920, it was customary to decorate local suffrage headquarters in yellow and gold. "In Auburn's [New York] business section there is a store whose windows, always cheerful with yellow banners, yellow dolls, and other yellow souvenirs, draw the attention of many passers by."

"GOLDEN LANE"

In 1916, at the Democratic National Convention held in St. Louis, the National American Woman Suffrage Association staged a striking demonstration called "The Golden Lane." "A line of women dressed in white with yellow sashes and parasols, spaced four feet apart, stood along the curb beside their state suffrage banners on both sides of the street, forming a land through which the Democratic delegates must walk . . . to the Coliseum on the opening day of the convention." Yards and yards of gold bunting inside and outside the hall were much in evidence.

By the early 20th century, the color gold coupled with the phrase "Votes for Women," borrowed from the British movement, brought instant recognition of an entire movement with its shared cluster of images, to those inside and outside the cause. The phrase, politically calculated to appeal to a broad middle-class concensus, appeared on buttons of every size and shape. It was used by both local and national suffrage societies; on round and oval buttons, on pins shaped like flags or shields, and on pins in the form of pennants, which immediately conjured the parades in which the pennants were used.

TRI-COLORS - BRITISH & AMERICAN

A second color theme widely employed in the American movement was the use of the tricolors purple, white, and green and, later, the use of purple, white, and gold. Purple, white, and green originated with the Women's Social and Political Union in the British suffrage movement to symbolize loyalty, purity, and hope. The use of these colors was transferred to the American scene by Harriot Stanton Blatch (daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton) and others returning from their work with the Pankhursts, leaders of the militant suffrage movement in England. The use of the colors purple, white, and green was concentrated primarily in New York, where Blatch set up her suffrage association, and in the neighboring states of New Jersey and Connecticut. As these states had strong suffrage organizations, these colors also became symbolic along with the more traditional American color, gold. Suffrage parades and demonstrations in New York often featured the use and intermingling of both color themes.

When Alice Paul and Lucy Burns set up the Congressional Union (later to become the militant National Woman's Party in 1916) as part of the NAWSA in 1913 to work for suffrage, so strong was the American traditional use of gold that it influenced the selection of the National Woman's Party's colors of purple, white, and gold, despite the group's British organizational antecedents.

Indeed, so centrally symbolic was gold to the American suffrage cause that when passage of the 19th amendment appeared imminent after so many years of struggle, the women of the NAWSA ordered a pen specially made for the historic signing ceremonies in the Senate - a pen of gold.

HERALD/ANGEL

In addition to color imagery, both the NAWSA and the NWP used widely an allegorical figure, the Herald/Angel. This symbol, a female figure, sometimes shown with wings, sometimes blowing a trumpet, was based on an angelic figure created by Sylvia Pankhurst for the British movement. The Herald appeared in various forms in the United States with sword or trumpet, used primarily by organizations in the New York area influenced by Blatch and her Women's Political Union. It was also used by the National Woman's Party. Both these groups had especially close ties with the British movement.

To general American audiences, probably not specifically familiar with the Pankhurst origins, these Herald figures appeared as angelic reminiscences in the long tradition of idealized Goddesses of Liberty and Justice, of the figures America and Columbia, visually familiar in this country since the early Republic in both formal prints and works or art, widely circulated political cartoons and broadsides, and in folk tradition. The Herald/Angel was incorporated by American mainstream suffrage in a direct line of development from the 18th and 19th century American tradition of the Goddess or archetypal woman in classically draped form to represent abstract civic virtues, and the personification of countries and political parties.

In the United States, these Herald/Angel figures were frequently backed by, or displayed with, rays of sun, or sunbursts (the use of gold). The symbolic meaning of this merging of the figure with the color gold was heralding the dawn of a new day. In the U. S., particularly in NAWSA, the herald figure often blended with a woman carrying a torch, again the color gold.

One example of this American tradition appeared in a tableau staged as "The Golden Lane" at the 1916 Democratic political convention in St. Louis. "Midway on the Lane was the St. Louis Fine Arts Building and here a symbolic tableau was posed on the flight of steps leading to the entrance, the chief figure of which was the Goddess of Liberty [in white, flowing, classical garb, carrying a torch], impersonated by Mrs. David O'Neill of St. Louis."

ENLIGHTENERS

The color gold became suffused with additional symbolism for suffragists connoting purifying sunlight, and enlightenment; women with torches were enlighteners. In many of these American motifs of "light," the sun or torch is often depicted as moving from west to east, signifying enfranchisement in western states first and the spread of suffrage across the country from west to east. This symbol of "enlightenment" fit precisely with the American concept of woman's traditional, esteemed role of preserver and transmitter of culture.

"Enlightenment" was a common symbol used by both the NAWSA and the National Woman's Party. NAWSA used the enlightening woman in its propaganda and tableaus; the Woman's Party adopted as its official motto "Forward Into Light," after a golden banner lettered with those words carried in a 1912 suffrage parade in New York by suffrage leader Inez Milholland Boissevain [referred to hereafter as Inez Milholland]. [13] The Woman's Party later employed a variety of banners lettered with this slogan, and verbal variations, all of which used the tricolor motif of purple, white, and gold.

"THE WOMAN ON A HORSE"

While moderates and militants shared some common American thematic elements, as well as the color gold, the NWP imagery was more militant in keeping with the philosophy of the Party. Inez Milholland represents a classic study in the divergent imagery of the NAWSA and the NWP as well as a transmutation of English suffrage imagery into American usage. While at Vassar College (1905-1909), Milholland enrolled two-thirds of her fellow students in a campus suffrage organization. Later, while on vacation in England, she joined the militant Pankhurst suffrage group, for whom she made suffrage speeches and with whom she was arrested. [15] After her return to the United States, Milholland joined Blatch's Equality League of Self-Supporting Women which later became the Women's Political Union. It was during this interval that she appeared in the New York suffrage parades. When Alice Paul founded the Congressional Union in 1913, based in Washington, D. C., Milholland joined.

Milholland's participation in two major suffrage parades, one in New York city, the other in Washington, D. C., in March of 1913, fixed her firmly in American suffrage imagery as the breathtaking figure of The Herald, known to mainstream suffragists and their modern-day descendants as "The Woman on a Horse."

With the blending and blurring of British and American images, this figure struck a resonant and responsive chord. With distinct cultural echoes of Joan of Arc, whom the British militant suffragettes adopted as their Patron Saint and who was widely used in the British movement, this figure was at once militant, yet godly. She represented moral authority and suggested Joan's martyrdom for a righteous cause. She coupled woman's righteousness with Divinely-sanctioned, even Divinely-ordained, militancy. She symbolized the leadership of righteous women in a patriotic "Holy War," in a cause of self-sacrifice for God and Country that closely paralleled the suffrage movement's rhetoric. The figure conveyed at once unquestioned patriotism, the redemption by godly women of venal and bumbling men for the good of the nation. She connoted marching (the suffrage parades) and, in the United States, the para-military discipline of a large corps of "troops," if not outright militancy. It is not accidental that this figure connoted "Joan" in the American groups with British militant origins, and was transmuted and secularized into a "Heraldic" figure by mainstream suffragists.

A MARTYR

In addition to portraying the herald, Milholland was also a lawyer and social activist whose true interest was reform causes. She enthusiastically worked long hours for the suffrage cause, to the point where, after several years of constant campaigning, her health began to suffer. Despite this, in 1916 Milholland, though suffering from pernicious anemia, undertook a strenuous speaking tour for the National Woman's Party in the enfranchised states of the West. The Woman's Party strategy in the western states was to campaign against the Democrats in 1914 and against the re-election of President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, urging women voters to cast their votes against him to protest the Democratic Party's failure to pass a constitutional amendment for women's vote.  This policy reflected the Party's strategy of "holding the party in power responsible" for the failure to obtain suffrage. In September, while campaigning for woman suffrage and against President Wilson in Los Angeles, Inez Milholland collapsed. The last words ringing from her lips were, "Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?" With her death, ten weeks later, the American suffrage movement had a martyr.

The National Woman's Party wasted no time in elevating her to sainthood and glorifying her death for the cause. Milholland's memorial service was a brilliantly staged pageant of suffrage imagery and symbolism. On Christmas Day, 1916, the Woman's Party staged the first memorial service ever held for a woman in the United States Capitol. Statuary Hall was ornately decorated with the Woman's Party colors:

"Between the pillars of the balcony hung . . . pennants of purple, white, and gold - the tricolor of these feminist crusaders. . . . Presently . . . boy choristers . . . marched into the hall chanting: 'Forward, out of error,/ Leave behind the night,/ Forward through the darkness/ Forward into Light.' Behind . . . came a golden banner with the above words inscribed on it. This was a duplicate of the banner that Inez Milholland bore in the suffrage parade in New York. Behind the golden banner came a great procession of young women . . . the first division in purple, the next in white, the last in gold, carrying high the standards which bore the tri-color."

Speeches of tribute followed. Maud Younger of California delivered the memorial address, eulogizing Milholland in familiar symbolic terms: "She was the flaming torch that went ahead to light the way - the symbol of light and freedom . . ."

After Milholland's death, the National Woman's Party widely circulated an idealized poster of her clad in flowing white robes, with gold helmet and star, riding a white horse and carrying a banner with the legend, "Forward Into Light."  The poster quickly became a classic as well as the official logo of the National Woman's Party. "Forward Into Light" became the Party's official motto. A reduced version of the logo continues today, rendered in purple, on all the Party's official stationery and correspondence.

JAILED FOR FREEDOM

Another militant image - that of woman breaking free, emerging from her imprisoned role - was the "Jailed for Freedom" pin, with its representation of a prison gate secured with a heart-shaped lock. This pin was presented to all members of the National Woman's Party who served prison sentences for picketing the White House on behalf of suffrage. This prison door symbol was modeled after Sylvia Pankhurst's Holloway Brooch, representing the portcullis gate of Holloway Prison where British suffragettes were incarcerated. The "Jailed for Freedom" pin was used exclusively by the National Woman's Party, and suggests its origins in that group: a small cadre of trained, disciplined, militant women, set apart from mainstream suffragists (note the use of sterling silver for the pin), who were willing to picket the White House and to go to prison for the right to vote.

SOCIAL HOUSEKEEPING

How far from the mainstream these images of prison actually were, however, can be gauged by examining the predominant imagery of the suffrage movement. Mainstream suffragists, represented by the NAWSA and its state affiliates, developed a powerful range of images that stressed the nurturing and redemptive qualities of motherhood and social justice. Emphasizing women's role in the home, the guardianship of children, and the building of communities, NAWSA distributed a variety of propaganda - postcards, cartoons, fliers, buttons, and banners - that transformed women's role as homemakers and mothers into a compelling political rationale.

A sub-set of images under the categories of Motherhood and Woman as Enlightener, were: Woman as Protector and Guardian - of children, home, and society; and Woman as an instrument of Social Justice and moral arbiter for the nation. Unlike the British suffrage movement, mainstream American suffrage stressed "social housekeeping." Drawing parallels between housekeeping and politics, women extended their influence outward from the home into the public sphere, employing images promoting protection of the home, and the "cleaning up" of "dirty politics" through "social housekeeping." As Jane Addams would announce: "Politics is housekeeping on a grand scale."

Suffrage postcards and cartoons were widely circulated depicting a mother protecting her family and home from the evils of an all male political system based on greed and corruption. Pro-suffrage cartoons emphasized woman's ability to "clean up politics." Cover pages of The Woman Citizen, official organ of the mainstream NAWSA, pictured a woman using her political power to keep "booze," "vice," and "corrupt politics" from "the home."

SOCIAL MOTHERHOOD

A series of circulars known as "The Rainbow Fliers," printed on a wide variety of colored papers, were produced and circulated by the National American Woman Suffrage Association and used also by state affiliated suffrage groups. These colorful fliers, with pro-suffrage propaganda based on arguments of motherhood, protection of the home and children, and "social housekeeping" were variously titled, "Women in the Home," and "The Woman's Reason."

A classic example of mainstream suffrage rhetoric on woman's "social housekeeping" was the statement by noted reformer, settlement house leader, and peace activist Jane Addams in an article entitled, "Why Women Should Vote" in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1909. As Addams put it:

"In a crowded city . . . if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; . . . a tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone in powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She cannot even secure untainted meat for her household . . . unless the meat has been inspected by city officials . . . If a woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her home and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside of her immediate household . . . [she] must take part in legislation which is alone sufficient to protect the home from the dangers incident to modern life."

As an earlier suffragist had put it: "The new truth, electrifying, glorifying American womanhood today, is the discovery that the State is but the larger family, the nation the old homestead, and that in this national home there is a room . . . and a duty for 'mother.' "

Even radical economic theorist and woman's movement leader Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated in an interview that her ideal was "social Motherhood." "Mrs. Gilman . . . contends that the rapidly enlarging range of woman's activity is a social duty . . ." and stated further that the ideal of social service would be made possible by "a new and better kind of home."

SUFFRAGE‰S CHILDREN

Despite the sometimes heavily laden, often moralistic imagery, the suffrage movement was not without humor. To make explicit their claim to the vote on the basis of motherhood, American mainstream suffragists also circulated a wide variety of comic postcards and cartoons depicting children. The children were appealing and, as juveniles, inoffensive. Children could get away with expressing impertinent and assertive messages sentiments in a way that was not permitted their mothers. They could "demand" what would otherwise have been unacceptable for an adult woman. In a series of pro-suffrage postcards, the female children appeared assertive, positive, and cooperative. The postcards employed culturally acceptable images such as Uncle Sam and Valentines to press their point. One such postcard depicted a little boy trying to steal a kiss from a little girl who is holding him at arm's length and saying," Suffrage First!" Another postcard featured a forlorn child who appeared to be the proverbial "Babe in the Woods" carrying a placard reading, "I Wish Mother Could Vote."

The approach, unlike many British circulars, was not biting or vindictive. The tone was lighthearted and jovial; the postcards appealed to men's sense of fair play. Mainstream suffragists also used children as an appeal to the larger audience of mother as yet uncommitted to suffrage in an attempt to secure a favorable climate for their cause.

SUFFRAGE GRAPHICS

In general, images of women produced by mainstream suffragists were positive, strong, competent, capable, protective, righteous and, sometimes, mildly indignant Two widely circulated images, made into cards, used on magazine covers, and as graphic illustrations, were the idealized "Votes for Women" by B. M. Boye, and "Give Her of the Fruit" by Evelyn Rumsey Carey, using art nouveau styles that romanticized women, the forms softening and neutralizing their political content.

As Paula Hays Harper has pointed out in her study of British and American suffrage posters:

"[Suffrage graphics] are most interesting and important to us as a group of visual political documents. They reveal . . . the ideology of the faction they support. . . . The poster artists for women's suffrage . . . [chose] styles appropriate to their persuasive art by using modes of either illusionism or stylized realism. . . . The forms of art nouveau influenced commercial art . . . into the 1920s. . . . Art nouveau styles . . . romanticize women. They are "feminine" styles not created by women but carrying connotations of what constitutes femininity from a masculine point of view. The choice of styles of the suffrage posters seems to be politic; their forms soften and neutralize the content."

American suffrage images were iconic, creating and elevating traditionally accepted and culturally positive images of women. Suffrage materials displayed excellent, imaginative graphics; yet, they are idealized, "contained," and restrained, like the mainstream suffragists themselves. The images, like the movement, never seriously questioned, challenged, or attacked woman's role in society or the capitalistic economic order. Mainstream suffragists correctly perceived that if the suffrage drive were to succeed it must be couched in terms making the vote a necessary tool to carry out competently woman's proper sphere. Woman's purpose was to redeem the nation through social ministry and bring it to greater righteousness through reform and uplifted politics, by protecting home, children, and society. Much of the imagery demonstrates that suffrage had become, ultimately, a mainstream political movement.

No more fitting symbol could be found for the mainstream suffrage movement, at the time of the final drive to pass the constitutional amendment, than the banner carried by the National American Woman Suffrage Association in a 1916 parade in Chicago preceding the Republican National Convention. It read:

For the safety of the Nation/ To the Women Give the Vote/

For the hand that Rocks the Cradle/ Will Never Rock the Boat!

POLITICAL CULTURE AND IMAGES OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE - CONCLUSION

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

For more than a century, women political activists have led a struggle for social justice that demonstrated a distinct continuity of reform interests. Many problems faced by the women at the turn of the century have re-emerged in our own time with a new and demanding urgency: new waves of immigration, homelessness, racial divisions, threats to the environment, substance abuse and addiction, lack of affordable health care, concerns for the well-being of our homes and families, questions about women's roles in society, and world peace. Despite having the right to vote, until very recently, women were generally excluded from influential roles in the major political parties and in the formal political processes and office-holding. In response, women generated their own style of politics, -- beginning with the drive for woman suffrage -- organizing at the grassroots level around major political and social issues. Their national networks of women's organizations served, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as alternative political parties for women and helped to shape much of twentieth century social policy.

The generation of women activists who led the final drive for the right to vote developed a powerful political language and imagery to help attain woman suffrage and other reforms important to women. This language and imagery incorporated the values of home and family into public life. While this women's political culture empowered them in the early part of the twentieth century and served as a bridge from the private to the public sphere, it also set patterns and boundaries for women's political participation that have continued to the present.

Can the political language and imagery developed by women at the turn of the twentieth century be adapted to today's politics and empower women once more with a new immediacy? Or will women create a powerful new political culture - - one that incorporates the values of home and family but transcends old boundaries to reach full political partnership with men?

Edith P. Mayo, Curator Emeritus

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Inst.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: While many collections on Woman Suffrage in repositories across the country contain similar suffrage images, all the images that appear in this work can be located in the Women's History Collection, Division of Social History (Political Collections), National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. The author would like to acknowledge the support of her colleagues over many years at the Institution.