Suffragist and Antisuffragist Songs in the United States, 1867-1920

Scholars have shown that American suffragists enlisted music, songs, and sound to display their views and to influence lawmakers, voters, and disenfranchised women. My dissertation is the first to show that antisuffragists, too, used the same sonic tools to achieve similar ends. Those opposed to woman suffrage centered the racial, religious, national, and class identities that the suffragists tried to marginalize, creating music replete with offensive connotations of exclusionary Otherness. In response, and in an effort to appeal to voters—who were mostly white men—suffragists cultivated a sound that problematically, yet effectively emphasized the whiteness, upperclassness, Christianity, and American nativism of would-be women voters. Through three chapter-length case studies that place these diametrically opposed musical repertoires in dialogue for the first time, I deliver new insights on political songcraft and performance practice surrounding the American women’s suffrage movement.