Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editorial| October 01 2017 Editor's Introduction: Betterment Mark Lynn Anderson Mark Lynn Anderson Mark Lynn Anderson is an associate professor of film and media studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he hosted the Eighth International Women and the Silent Screen conference in 2015. He is currently writing a book on early histories of the studio system, posterity, and the rise of public relations. He is the author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2011). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2017) 3 (4): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Lynn Anderson; Editor's Introduction: Betterment. Feminist Media Histories 1 October 2017; 3 (4): 1–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.4.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search One of the sad ironies of twentieth-century political life in the United States is how the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended voting rights to all women citizens of the republic, effectively worked thereafter to mark almost every social, political, and cultural initiative mounted by women as only “special interest.” Prior to the amendment's ratification in 1920, the suffrage movement had provided women of various ideological stripes and from diverse backgrounds a context for both complaint and action within a public sphere where their very disenfranchisement was increasingly grounds for both acknowledging and granting them a voice in cultural enterprises, regulatory and reform institutions, and even social policy formation, albeit stratified by those hierarchies of race, ethnicity, age, religion, and class that operated everywhere else in American society. By the 1910s it was practically unthinkable to hold a hearing on a pressing social problem, form a commission addressing inequities... You do not currently have access to this content.