Driven from the Public Sphere: The Conflation of Women's Liberation and Driving in Advertising from 1910 to 1920
| Autor: | E. Michele Ramsey |
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| Rok vydání: | 2006 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Women's Studies in Communication. 29:88-112 |
| ISSN: | 2152-999X 0749-1409 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/07491409.2006.10757629 |
| Popis: | Automobile advertisements in the Ladies' Home Journal from 1910 to 1920 sometimes represented "woman's" relationship to the traditional public sphere in relatively liberating ways, but still maintained a restrictive overall message to women with regard to these roles. Relying on rhetoric surrounding the issues of woman's suffrage and World War I, these advertisements promote "freedom" for "woman" while simultaneously containing that freedom and conflating movement into the public sphere as consumers with political parity. Keywords: Advertising, Women's public address, Suffrage rhetoric, Public sphere, Ladies' Home Journal. ********** After learning the history of the long and sometimes dangerous struggle for woman suffrage in the United States, many students of these events wonder why the political presence of women was not more profound after the passage in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment granting woman suffrage. Theories explaining the drop in women's formal political activity include a loss of morale after the defeat of the Child Labor Amendment (1) (Campbell, 1989; Marilley, 1996), the struggles endured while working to pass the Sheppard-Towner Act (2) (Campbell, 1989: Marilley, 1996), and the influence of the Red Scare on the credibility of some movement leaders, especially social justice and labor activists (Campbell, 1989; Cott, 1987). Others suggest that the narrow focus on gaining suffrage left the movement without a broad agenda for future action (Flexner, 1975; O'Neill, 1975), that the transformation of the woman suffrage movement into the non-partisan League of Women Voters discouraged more active participation (Flexner, 1975), or that the overall decrease in voter turnout after 1920 could also be linked to the declining presence of women in politics after women won the right to vote (Campbell, 1989; Cott, 1987; Shklar, 1991). Although the precipitating events suggested above probably did affect women's political participation to some extent, the work of Sainsbury (1999) suggests that we should consider more carefully how we define this lack of political presence. Documenting the partisan political participation of women before and after the Nineteenth Amendment, Sainsbury contests the common division of women's political history surrounding the Nineteenth Amendment as "the great divide" wherein we talk about women's work toward suffrage before 1920 or women's political involvement after 1920. Sainsbury argues that women's political participation was consistent before and after 1920, with many women (even in states where they were still disenfranchised) in roles typically defined as masculine, such as political speaking, in third and major political parties throughout these years. Sainsbury presents scholars with a different way to think about women's political participation before and after 1920 and disrupts the somewhat cohesive historical narrative about women's lack of political participation after 1920. In this essay, I extend the conversations noted above and argue that we should consider the role of mediated representations of "woman" (3) within specific cultural contexts when addressing the political participation of women after 1920. Specifically, this essay highlights the representation of "woman" in automobile advertisements in the decade preceding the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and argues that advertisers defined "woman's" relationship to the traditional public sphere (4) in relatively liberating ways, but still maintained a restrictive overall message to women with regard to these roles. From 1910 to 1920 shifts in suffrage rhetoric, the move toward an industrialized and consumption-driven society, changes in mass media patterns, and U.S. involvement in World War I were all part of the larger cultural context that offered advertisers the opportunity to redefine "woman's" relationship to the traditional public sphere. As my analysis will show, advertisers took advantage of these cultural changes by promoting consumption as a new form of public action for women, a strategy that also reified masculine notions of the public sphere by defining "woman's" role in it in specific ways. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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