Allison K. Lange. Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

Abstract

Distinct among the many 2020 suffrage centennial books, Allison Lange’s Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement takes readers away from text-based sources and individual biographies to focus instead on the visual arguments that animated debates over women voting. Picturing Political Power analyzes the “public images” that helped develop a “shared national visual language, composed of symbols and gendered conventions” of what political womanhood should look like (6). Suffragists deployed images to “change minds” before they could “change laws,” just as their opponents relied on a standard stock of mannish women and demise-of-the-family images to uphold the status quo (6). Careful to distinguish between images that female activists fashioned for themselves and those fashioned for them, Lange effectively charts how, from the early 1800s until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, visual tools became increasingly vital in the suffrage arsenal. Suffragists’ early encounters with images of political womanhood put them on the defensive. After the publicity generated by the 1848 women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, newspapers and magazines across the country published cartoons depicting female activists as masculine ogres who threatened the patriarchal family and white supremacy. As the public became familiar with a wider array of female activists, these same mainstream magazines and newspapers began publishing adoring images of former First Lady Martha Washington to demonstrate that the appropriate way for women to engage in politics was indirectly via their husbands. Indeed, as Lange convincingly establishes, for much of the nineteenth century, Washington served as the “model for white feminine political power in the US,” not incidentally because she was dead (26).