Exhibition Overview

This exhibit explores the process of changing ideas about a woman's place in society and the role representations played in that process.  As America entered the twentieth century and the modern age, the woman suffrage movement challenged women's traditional place. Suffragists insisted women should have a political voice and vote. As with any argument, people held a variety of opinions about what was right.

Woman suffrage was a national question debated through the mass communication media of the day, magazines, newspapers, and postcards. People communicated their meanings through both text and images. 

Images represent ideas, make thoughts visible, and make an argument through visual rhetoric. This exhibit focuses on images, both hand-drawn and photographic, used in the national conversation over woman suffrage and woman's proper place in society. 

As you move through the exhibit tabs on the menu bar you will learn about

• national suffrage organizations representing a spectrum of opinions about the woman suffrage question in the early twentieth century 
• popular opinions expressed through the representations in the political satire magazine, Puck, and in independently published postcards 
• the ideal of women's place in society in the nineteenth century
  
• types and stereotypes in woman suffrage representation that communicate different viewpoints about women's proper place in society in the early twentieth century