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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
This article examines the role of beauty and image in the U.S. suffrage movement. It focuses specifically on Inez Milholland and on how she and the movement capitalized on her extraordinary beauty and used her image and media popularity to present an icon for the movement, thereby softening and making acceptable the spectacle of women in public spaces and political matters. Milholland provided the movement with a representation that undermined the association of female political participation with masculine women and gender transgression. She provided a constructed model of acceptable white femininity, one that answered the anti-suffrage movement's accusations that suffragists were masculine women, inverts, and “abnormal” women whose lobbying for the vote was proof of their wretched state. Milholland thereby helped to bring women into the movement who might fear the taint of masculinity and gender transgression.
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61 Although initially dismayed at the violence in the D.C. parade, Paul and fellow suffragists benefited from the widespread sympathetic coverage of the parade and the police investigation that followed.
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80 Ida Furney Mackville to Doris Stevens, Oct. 14, 1916, NWPSY, Reel 34.
81 Mackville to Stevens; see reel 34 for numerous telegrams between Milholland and Paul, and between Paul and other tour participants on this topic.
82 Abby Scott Baker to Alice Paul, Oct. 12, 1916, NWPSY, Reel 34.
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87 She might have been suffering from pernicious anemia, a rare disorder in which the body does not absorb enough vitamin B12 from the digestive tract, resulting in an inadequate amount of red blood cells. Today the disease is easily managed by administering B12. There is some confusion as to whether she had pernicious anemia or aplastic anemia, in which the capacity of the bone marrow to generate red blood cells is defective. There is also the possibility that she was suffering from leukemia.
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94 Dr. Catherine Lynch to Alice Paul (telegram), Oct. 25, 1916, NWPSY, Reel 34.
95 Alice Paul to Emily Perry (telegram), Oct. 26, 1916, NWPSY, Reel 34.
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