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Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women's Suffrage (The History of Media and Communication)

Description

Suffragists recognized that the media played an essential role in the women's suffrage movement and the public's understanding of it. From parades to going to jail for voting, activists played to the mass media of their day. They also created an energetic niche media of suffragist journalism and publications.

This collection offers new research on media issues related to the women's suffrage movement. Contributors incorporate media theory, historiography, and innovative approaches to social movements while discussing the vexed relationship between the media and debates over suffrage. Aiming to correct past oversights, the essays explore overlooked topics such as coverage by African American and Mormon-oriented media, media portrayals of black women in the movement, suffragist rhetorical strategies, elites within the movement, suffrage as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, and the influence views of white masculinity had on press coverage.

Contributors: Maurine H. Beasley, Sherilyn Cox Bennion, Jinx C. Broussard, Teri Finneman, Kathy Roberts Forde, Linda M. Grasso, Carolyn Kitch, Brooke Kroeger, Linda J. Lumsden, Jane Marcellus, Jane Rhodes, Linda Steiner, and Robin Sundaramoorthy

About the Author

Linda Steiner is a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and a coauthor of Women and Journalism. Carolyn Kitch is a professor of journalism and media & communication at Temple University and the author of Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past. Brooke Kroeger is a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote.

Praise for Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women's Suffrage (The History of Media and Communication)

"Drawing from a constellation of contemporary theory from multiple disciplines, including social movement theory, intersectionality, and status politics, Front Pages, Front Lines brings together new perspectives on suffrage and offers compelling suggestions for further research into media and social change." --Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

"The greatest strength of this collection is the diversity that it represents . . . worth a slot on the bookshelf of any supporter of women's rights who realize the fight still rages on." --American Journalism

"Steiner, Kitch, and Kroeger have put together an important and fascinating anthology, the first book to explore, in depth, the complex relationship between the US women's suffrage movement and the media that both supported and resisted it. . . . Highly recommended." --Choice

”The centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment encourages a fresh rethinking of the history of the women's suffrage movement, to which this volume is a welcome addition. Special kudos for its sustained attention to racial and regional diversity, as well as its broad chronological sweep.”—Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote