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“The Most Beautiful Suffragette“: Inez Milholland and the Political Currency of Beauty1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Ann Marie Nicolosi
Ann Marie Nicolosi
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey
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Extract

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.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 287 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2007

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References

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