MHS History of Women and Gender Seminar

A “fine looking body of women”: Woman Suffragists Develop Their Visual Campaign

Allison Lange, Wentworth Institute
Comment: Susan Ware, Schlesinger Library and American National Biography

Suffragists coordinated a visual campaign to promote their cause and counter caricatures that depicted them as masculine. In the 1880s, they increased their efforts to establish a positive public image of their movement. Suffrage leaders—especially Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—began to change the way they represented themselves and fellow prominent figures. In the 1890s, as press committees took control of visual propaganda, suffragists honed their visual strategies to transform the imagery of political womanhood in the mainstream press.