The proverbial "Babe in the Woods" expressing a wish for her mother’s enfranchisement.

MAINSTREAM USE OF DOMESTIC IMAGES AND MOTHERHOOD

By the end of the 19th 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 [3] role.