Radical Visual Politics, Transatlantic Connections, and the National Woman’s Party in the 1910s

Allison Lange's paper focuses on radical suffragists in the United States and the visual tactics they implemented into their campaigns. Prominent leaders of the militant National Woman's Party (NWP), such as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, worked in England with militant suffragettes before founding their own organization in the U.S. in 1913. The NWP implemented the British suffragettes’ strategies for attracting publicity, which included circulating eye-catching, shocking imagery of them and their political demonstrations. Photographs, postcards, and engravings in illustrated newspapers showed the NWP suffragists parading in the city streets, picketing the White House, and being arrested, beaten, and jailed for their cause. Most American suffragists, including the leadership of largest suffrage organization (the National American Woman Suffrage Association, NAWSA), condemned the NWP’s tactics. NAWSA countered the militant suffragists by circulating their own imagery that portrayed woman suffrage as a way for women to extend their existing roles as housekeepers and mothers into politics. Postcards, for example, showed pictures of babies declaring “Votes for Mothers” and with a quote arguing that “Politics governs even the purity of the milk supply. It is not outside the home but inside the baby.” The NWP, in contrast, aimed to transform gender roles and women’s relationships to politics, and their imagery demonstrated these aims.

Analyzing the imagery of the NWP sheds new light on the relationship between the suffrage movements in the United States and Great Britain as well as on the conflicts among American suffragists over tactics and gender roles. More broadly, this paper demonstrates how transnational exchanges inspired American suffragists’ use of images to shape politics, social movements, and constructions of gender.