Cspan radio and listen to washington journal daily at 7 00 a. M. Eastern, important congressional hearings and other Public Affairs events throughout the day. Weekdays at 5 00 p. M. And 9 00 p. M. Eastern catch washington today for a fastpaced report on the stories of the day but listen to cspan any time just tell your Smart Speaker plate cspan radio. Cspan powered by cable. So, that the seminar even thinking about images during the 19th century. And specifically today we are going to think about the ways images constructed gender roles, particularly in the 19th century. And the way activists use images to shape, alter, change in gender roleses during this time. Two. I like to start off with is just to think up by the ways images are part of our culture today. And one is the way portraits like Susan B Anthony portrait which we see in the 2017 womens march paraded for it we see Susan B Anthonys coast close has had to us. With a circle and glasses. Weow see a marched on pennsylvaa avenue. The emphasis on the very celebrated 19th century womens rights leader. We will talk today about how she became such a famous suffragist not only in the 19th century but also o today. Between these two women who are riding horses and these urban areas and symbols of these political causes that it gives us a sense of how the similarities between the images that were so famous and the images that still resonate with us today. Inin fact, this became a book person so she ended up this image promoting a particular idea but also a particular product. Another produced image you might remember is this black lives matter painted outside of dc and you know they were the first group to protest in 1917. They made such an important place for political protest and atover a hundred years later it remains that way today. If youve ever been to washington, d. C. Youve probably seen somewhere outside of the white house protesting because of these famous protests that got to the place outside of the white house that was so important to our political movement. Another image that is probably part of your news Media Consumption the last several years are images of women wearing white particularly leading figures. This is a group from the state of the Union Address all wearing white and they are wearing white to recall the suffrage is in particular so a photograph from the 1913 parade they were white and a lot of them for two reasons. One was to emphasize their morality and all of the kind of connotations. The other reason they did it is because they wantedw to show up in blackandwhite photographs. So people marching in the streets with very toned backgrounds they knew that they would show upan better in the blackandwhite photographs and the blackandwhite photographs when they had tones printed in newspaper it would show even better so even in the 21st century where we see these women in congress at the state of the union or even in this photograph here they do tend to stand out and that is one of the reasons why the suffragists chose white to begin with so in a lot of ways the emergency that the suffragists created into the 20th centuries is still part of our modern political culture. Im going to go back a little bit further into the 18th century just to start us off and set us up for the visual conversations that are taking place duringso the 19th century. Id like to start us off with a political cartoon in 1775. He probably read about this boycott happening in a local newspaper. As far as we know he had never been to thear colonies but this was the scene that he imagined after he read about this boycott. A group of women signing a petition that they are not going to purchase t. You can look closely at the scene and a lot of the images as you can hear from the library of congress you can zoom in on them much more closely than you can on this video. This is not a flattering picture so theres a Woman Holding a gavel. Very unflattering features and another holding a punch bowl that we know isnt filled with fruit punch, its filled with alcohol. Theres a group pouring canisters in the background and reall the women in the room are ignoring the child who is under the table. These women are supposed to be caring for that child and the w idea is that these women are ignoring their duties as mothers and caregivers in order to participate in this petition signing. The other detail i want you to Pay Attention to is the black woman standing behind the woman with of a gavel. Shes holding a quill and not only supporting these women in their participation, shes also looking very eager to slain herself. She looks interestedes in the process and in participating. So this image is doing at least two things i want to point out. One, it is challenging the patriarchy end of the gender hierarchy suggesting that if women participate in politics, it will do a topsyturvy in the gender roles that they are experiencing in the 18th century and it will make women more masculine and mean that the enslavedee women that we see emphasize that this petition is cnn challenging the racial hierarchy and of the supremacy. Its challenging the dominance of slavery which is a Central Economic driver in the british colonies so the idea is to laugh at these women, to mock them and not to take them seriously. And its also expressing anxiety about whether this rebellion that is starting inol the colons not just challenge the british government, the empire as theygh know it but it might also be part of the challenge of gender and racial hierarchies. This kind of representation doesnt change much, so want to stick with kind of the similarities of this conversation over time so as you know by the 1840s, the womens rights activists are petitioning onon o a much broader scale modl neighbor the right to vote but also to have better access to education and to be participants within the church. So we have these National Womens rights conventions in massachusetts and this is happening in 1851s are just a year after that. So by this time they are very aware a of this growing womens Rights Movement and its vibrancy and increasing power in the United States and yet the images are changing very little. This is about 75 years after the previous image. You see a woman in the center smoking, wearing bloomers, showing usme her ankle which may not seem very scandalous to us in the 21stt century but it was remarkable in 1851. She has her hand barely condescendingly placed on this mans head who is hunched over looking like during these menial tasks. Both off them are in ignoring te child who is crying in the front of the room. It says no more papa and mama. In the background we have these two women also wearing bloomers. One says no more basement and kitchen and i think she is to represent servants of workingclass women and the other has a sign protesting slavery. So it is in the same theme as the previous one is suggesting that if women seek power and wind have power they would force men to become more womanly and it is going to lead to other changes including challenging the class hierarchy as well as the racial hierarchy and the system of slavery. All these things are wrapped up in this print. This is the moment when there are a lot of print. The newspapers are on the rise andd ever more popular. I want to give you a sense of the other one from 1851 from harpers new monthly magazine. Very similar. A woman smoking a cigar and wearing mens clothing. Women wearing bloomers and i should note v they are very shot and the reality of a lot of the women that were skirts they were down to their angles. We t had another one off to the right side pulling up her bloomers pants showing us her ankle again. And also in this image we have two women with their back to word us who are actually linking arms giving us the suggestion that these women are so reliant on each other and interested in only promoting the interest of other women that they are interested in other women as well and can kinda fully abandon men in this version of the reality. So i want to kind of connect this to some of what youve already been talking about in your other conversations because by the timee we get to the civil war era the association between womens dress with weakness and the kind of person you dont take very seriously politically or otherwise becomes part of a meme related to the capture of Jefferson Davis after the civil war because he is caught wearing Womens Clothing and this becomes incredibly popular to reproduce in a variety of ways. Youor can find many more exampls of this and it only works if you think of men and Womens Clothing as Womens Clothing being this kind of signifier that you were less than, that you were weaker and worth mocking, that its laughable. So its a signifier that he is no longer a powerful person when we see him in Womens Clothing like this. Soso this is the way that even e imagery when we see them wearing bloomers it is a signifier of their power and of their genderr role during this time period. This is right around the same time period 1869 just after the civil war and in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, people are considering what to do next. By 1869re americans are debating the amendment about to be ratified. The amendment of course prohibits the further discrimination based on race and effectively enfranchise as black franchises black men and so in this moment, people are also wondering should women get the boat so this image actually suggests that what will happen if women wear the boat and it looks toha all of us coming very soon from what weve been seeing. In the traditional clothing they are wearing kind of outlandish versions of the clothing. Their. Hair is larger than it ever has been. Its to emphasize that they are too f interested in fashion and not practical enough to be voters. One of the details is vote for the celebrated man hammers. I think this phrase what it really explicitly says what they think about the women in politics at the time and in fact a lot of people in politics even in the 21st century. The other detail that i want to make sure we point out is this man carrying a baby which is a very popular trope that is repeated over and over again in these images and you see the women telling him he needs to take care of the baby and at the man is absolutely appalled that hes going to have to take care of this task. So these images as you can see this is as century after the first image that i showed you. Si they remained fairly consistent over time and they do through the end of the passage of the amendment and in fact a lot of these images, these themes still are part of the antifeminist imagery of the 20th century. You can see by the suffragists worked very hard to challenge these ideas and they are not coordinated. They are not in a group together deciding to coordinate but simply a more disorganized affiliation where every publisher knows the majority are against so they publish these illustratede newspaper most of the readers will support them and if so one change we have as you know is that v it becomes so very populr and they have very little control over mainstream news consumption, newss publications. But what they can control, they can take these photographs and show them to the supporters and perhaps even a broad public through a studio. Sojourner truth is the first activist to do this theory effectively in ate coordinated way. Thisan is one of her many photographs. A lot of her photographs she looked very similar so this is a very thoughtfully posed richard and also as you know photographs were made using sunlight during this period so it is a common term for a photograph and shes selling this to the support a substance and lives off the money that she makes as a reformer and the substantial reform so she puts money into supporting herself and also the causes that she works to words. So antislavery activist who by the 1860s is a very popular lecturer and decides to sit for the portrait to prove a couple of things about herself. One is that she wants to portray herself as a very respectful, respectable, fairly refined feminine figures so we can see that all of the details in the scene are part of that image we have this kind of suggestion with the arrangement of flowers on the table and the tablecloth as well as the suggestion of the tikind of willing activities. Shes also emphasizing that she is a matronly respectable woman with her clothes. They are fairly simple and emphasize that she is a working woman. In contrast we have Elizabeth Cady stanton and anthony. They look more aggressive. They have a little bit less to prove. Sojourner truth is not only challenging the cartoons we are looking at but also the racist stereotypes that are still popular at the time as well. So they see the success of distributing a portrait like this and see the interest in them and at the way that it can challenge these ideas and they decided to do their own portrait in 1870. They are more interested in these you can see they are clearly wealthier than Sojourner Truth but they are emphasizingha that they are leaders of the movement and you better not cross them and that they are going to be pushing forward together. This doesnt change too much but it does in. A significant way ad that iss the previous illustration emphasizes generic women but once the individual portrait like Susan B Anthony comes more familiar, the cartoonist, you can see here and they basically copied this portrait illustration and its very similar to the other cartoons we were looking at earlier with Susan B Anthony wearingg masculine clothing. She has boots on and in the background we have a political rally. Some were not yet having these protest rallies. We also have a woman that is a Police Officer and two men holding a baby in the Grocery Shopping so very similar to the other images we are looking at but updated and you can tell the artist wasnt so intent on emphasizing that the artist actually replicated. If you look closely you can see one of her eyes is slightly out of focus and this is one of the reasons that she posed in profile. But the artist perhaps knew this and decided to replicate this in the front page illustrations on the daily graphic. They still wanted to appear like these president ial candidates in the images we are so familiar with today and i am sure you can think of many versions of these now political readers and the institutions. They decide to create one of their first representation projects in the history of the womens suffrage First Published in 1881 and it eventually became six volumes that were about a thousand pages each published from 1881 to 1922 so these are two images from the first volume edited by Anthony Stanton and they told a very particular story of the womens suffrage movement. They wanted to emphasize first that women were leaders and so when they were creating these portraits they made sure that the reason for her tos, the portraits that we are looking at here. They also decided that they wanted to emphasize that they didnt want to include any purchase of men. Despite the fact that men were imported into the womens voting Rights Movement. They were important political leaders and they played a really significant roleam for example e publication of the newspapers but this book skewed the image and emphasized the female leadership. They also only included this portrait of white women in the text so even though they worked with her on and off regularly. They have their own organization then there was another called the Suffrage Association and very little attention in this book. They skewed the version that became the dominant and still affects our interpretation of the Movement Today because we often think about stanton and anthony and often the women of color and the fact that it was dramatically larger than ours and far more successful newspaper in the written narrative that they created. Its the most popular images in the 19th century. This is a stereo from 1999 by the late 19th century and early 20th they decided to change tactics so they promoted portraits of the leaders especially in the 19th century but they decided that they needed a more effective visual campaign and needed to respond directly to the political cartoons and suggested if womenh women when Political Rights than they become manly so this is why imagery like this becomes the dominant kind of imagery produced by suffragists. This is imagery that emphasizes that white women need the votes in order to be better mothers. At the other thing i want to emphasize is that it gives a lot of women opportunities that includes who created this image published in the journal as well as the transcript. In that word and phrase to good votes this is an emphasis on many other suffragists like her who they think of as a good voter. You see this white mother with her children, three children around her in this ideal home, a teakettle on the stove and this is the kind of good voter that so many others envisioned. Maybe they cant have one. To stay at home with other children so they dont have as much money as this woman or people of color or an immigrant perhaps these people are kind of not included in this propaganda representation of why women need the vote and that is a very popular kind of component of the campaign. Another famous professional at the time you might remember. In the political tunes suffragists are also fashionable and very feminine so this isin kind of the before and after. The skirt was a little too short and theres this long fluffy jacket shifting to a more idealized elite fashionable type with this extravagant hat very similar to the representation of this ideal from this era. And you can imagine why women of color are trying to be included in this imagery. So the womens suffrage imagery thats created by these mainstream organizations. None of the imagery emphasizes that they are also planning for the vote for the women of color. Mary church was born enslaved but she became one of the first women in the United States, first black women in the United States for the bachelors and masters. Also elected to be the first president of the association of colored women which was founded in 1896 and this organization is different from other suffrage organizations. They wanted the vote for women ander also speaking more broadly about gender and race based racebasedissues they were thint protecting the vote for black men who were losing on a broad scale in the south by the 1890s. They were thinking about antilynching and how to educate their children better. There was t a much more broad movement. And as you can see from this image. She was very interested in fashion and has an extravagant hat on herself in these images. Fairly wealthy women in washington, d. C. At the time and you can see the similarities between her and this image from one of her speeches and this representation of you in idealized from 1904. Its not dissimilar in the hairstyle and address from the ideal that we were looking at just a moment ago. I like to also kind of mentioned this image because i like all the images like sharon so far, this one is really unusual. You could find many others like it butut this is the only one tt i found in my research that emphasize be needed to be good mothers to protect their families. What the votes mean to the south and unfortunately, the National Association of colored women didnt have the funds were the resources or the people power to create the same kind of propaganda that the right womens organizations did for a portion of the organization and the budget to be spent on the campaigning. It also created this for the crisis so this is one of the few Voting Rights began to pieces we have that emphasizes the political power. Shes beating down segregation and the jim crow law in order to protect people so this is emphasizing not only white women need to but black women do too. Due to. And tois protect their families. We also happened to photograph, and this is different from the images weve been looking at previously and it corresponds with a different shift within thees movement itself as well. This is a moment starting in 1907. We looked at it at the beginning of the conversation in 1913. This is the same per grade and a very different world of protesting different from the images of mothers weve been looking at so this emphasizes that women are taking the streets and very conscious of taking advantage of the fact that they are becoming more popular in the news publications. They are also in this particular case taking advantage of the fact thatt the next day was goig to be Woodrow Wilsons inauguration so they are aware there would be a lot of photojournalists and they take advantage of that with this parade and they have this idealized spectacular representation and the next thing im going to show you kind of adds the sense of why someone was working so hard on her public image. This is 1913 and its making fun of the women participating in the 1913 per grade. The women that were organizing it did not want to have blackandwhite women marched together so originally, they were open to it but they protested against it and thats what we see here. Appalled that they want to march with her and we can see that its a doing two things. Its making fun of the suffragists who dont want them to participate and also raising a stereotype of those that want to march in the parade as well and emphasizing facial features and they dont of idealized body types and the fashions are not current. We can see that this is kind of doing both things and we understand why someone like mary church they are doing the work that shes doing sole when we ae thinking about these political protests she is actually able to get a contingents. College students from Howard University to march in the parade it was far more integrated than the cartoon suggests. But we should also remember that they were marching in the parade and far more threatened as well. They were more susceptible to violence and more susceptible even to critique from their fellow marchers. Mary church also participated n the pickets in washington, d. C. That i mentioned at the beginning. As i said these are the very first to pick at the white house and they started putting them together in january, 1917 which as you might know is the same year they are entering world war i. Theres a lot of controversy over whether they should be doing this at the time. Im going to argue that we need to bothof of these and the publicity they attract that are published across the United States. As you know they were ultimately arrested and sent to workhouses. Not to mention the fact that the president drove by them every day and him and many other politicians were having to kind of deal with the consequences of this protest. And get one of the powerful images that made a compelling case for it the idea that they were participating in the war effort and were patriotic citizens, motherly caregivers like the poster that we see here. Its a kind of direct continuation that we were looking at a moment ago, that the greatest mother in the world is the mother that is a citizen that is willing to extend her caregiving expertise and support of her country not just as a voter but as a nurse in this particular case. So i want to emphasize this assent a suffrage poster but its building off the rhetoric imagery of campaigns that we discussed. In comparison to the protesters that we were just looking at, there were a lot more suffragists who decided to enlist as nurses and become farmers and decided to work in factories to support the war effort and ultimately their existence became the reason why political officials including woodrow himself used these women as examples for why they were supporting the womens Voting Rights. They said they were being patriotic citizens demonstrating support for the nation in these various ways and rarely acknowledged the importance of the picketers at the white house but i think that we can each agree that it was a combination of these two kinds of popular images that are controversial that kept them on the news and this more moderate and even conservative representation that the more conservative politicians and officials and morere moderate kind of an argument. Ultimately its requested very much by the imagery that weve been looking at. So the amendment declared that it prohibits the discrimination based on gender and sex and so this means any state law that puts into place grandfather clauses and anything that they dont have Citizenship Rights on theve whole. The 19th amendment and franchises white women and we can see a lot of the propaganda is requesting that. A lot of the suffrage organizations were specifically fighting for the votes of white women as well