Propaganda and Public Relations: How Suffragists Pioneered Visual Campaigning - Allison K. Lange Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 324 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226703244.

Abstract

Allison Lange begins Picturing Political Power by describing Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's 2016 visual campaigns, arguing that such contemporary visual representations support her assertion that the suffragists' "visual campaign illuminates the roots of today's gendered political imagery and its constrains" (217). Lange argues that Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Church Terrell, and Alice Paul all "decided what the public would see. They worked to leave out the parts that did not fit their vision" (211). She further opines that we can understand the world we live in and the difficulties that female politicians face today by understanding these earlier struggles and strategies.Lange walks readers through various visual advancements, from mezzotints, lithographs and ambrotypes to cartes de visite and half-tone printing, but she does not get bogged down in technical detail. Instead, she wisely chooses to show the reader how these visual innovations allowed suffragists to control their image and craft visual campaigns.Lange argues that suffragists "needed to change minds about the bounds of female citizenship," and that visual campaigns helped "to transform notions of political womanhood" (2).