Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement

by Allison K. Lange

For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images—whether illustrations, engravings, photographs, or colorful chromolithograph posters. Some of these pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending, and others downright incendiary. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural ideas of women’s perceived roles and abilities and often have been circulated with pointedly political objectives.

Picturing Political Power offers perhaps the most comprehensive analysis yet of the connection between images, gender, and power. In this examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Allison K. Lange explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. She shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and win the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized the compatibility of voting and motherhood, while Sojourner Truth and other leading suffragists of color employed pictures to secure respect and authority. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Feminism

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 18, 2020

Reviews

[Laine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a really timely look at the impact of women's ability to make a political impact and win the vote through the image they made for themselves. I found the discussion of the schisms between white and black suffragists to be really on point and still relevant today. Super interesting to look back at the images of women at the time both from external perspectives and from the images of themselves they put out into the world. Yes this is history, but the content really resonates in the present as well.

[Gwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating dive into the images, debates, and figures that defined the American women’s suffrage movement and continues to shape discussions of political womanhood today. This book beautifully brings the different chapters of this movement to life using photographs, portraits, and political cartoons. I really appreciated the author’s analysis of race, which was completely left out of my education on the subject. Brava, Allison!

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

We modern women take so much for granted, and think that somehow the women's suffrage movement took place so long ago it was ancient history. Nope, the photos in this book prove that it was just a hundred years ago that women successfully won the fight for our right to vote! Of course, these days we still have men trying to control women's bodies. SO amusing to see during this pandemic that there are men who vocally object to being "made" to wear face masks because they have the "right" to control what they do with their own bodies. Hypocrisy anyone?

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat academic book discussing the different types of images used in the struggle for women's suffrage. This told me more than I wanted to know about the difference between full-face and three-quarter portraits, how engraving was used to illustrate news stories or booklets prior to development of technology to reproduce photographs, and how symbolism was used in the images for both pro and anti-suffrage women.
On the other hand, it was a decent history of how the suffrage movement evolved in the U.S. and the role played by some less well-known activists.

[Annette Stephens]

WMST 100