Gilded Age Americans and the Consumption of the Civil War

Burns and Alice Paul took advantage of new print technology allowing the easy reproduction of photographs in newspapers, along with “modernized campaigns by designing spectacles that would attract professional press photographers who sold their pictures to newspapers and the public” (160). Their militance and their protests won them increased attention but clashed with the NAWSA’s goal of portraying suffragists as “refined, white, and moral mothers” (161). The NWP and the NAWSA both freely emphasized the whiteness of their activists, however. Lange’s analysis of suffragists’ visual campaigns shows the difficulty in changing the nation’s opinion about women in public and highlights the many fissures that further confronted the lived experiences and political ambitions of Black women. The visual strategies developed by suffragists, however limited, nevertheless challenged the masculine world of visual representation. And, as Lange argues, twenty-first century graphical representations of women continue to draw upon the precedents the suffragists set in their campaign for the vote.