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the benefits of women’s votes, use patriotic symbols to reference American history and
justify the right of woman to vote, or directly appeal to a specific group of women to
support suffrage. To a lesser extent, speeches and convention resolutions will also be
used as data sources. Such material can be used to analyze the strategies of the social
movement because it reflects the way the movement wishes itself to be seen by the
masses and the rhetoric used to gain support for its cause among voters. Fliers and other
images are also a means for the movement to reach large numbers of people easily,
including people from different interest groups or political associations. Because the data
are coming from within the movement itself, as opposed to publications by onlookers, the
problem of secondary bias is significantly lessened. Through these data, I hope to reveal
a change in presentation from an emphasis on natural rights to one of expediency and
social good. An analysis of the specific types of expediency appeals may correspond to
and support a theory of opportunity creation and alliance with other political actors.
Samples for this analysis range from the 1850s to the final ratification campaign
of the suffrage bill in 1919. Documents were collected from a variety of sources,
including collections of suffrage cartoons by movement artists, archives of the National
American Woman Suffrage Association, personal papers of suffrage leaders such as
Carrie Chapman Catt, and university archives of woman’s history. Online databases
were also used, such as the American Memory collection from the Library of Congress,
the Maine Memory Network, and the Center for Historical Study of Women and Gender
at the State University of New York. Additional documents come from the collection at
the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Data Coding and Classification:
Convention