tator in history programming. Media people consider they have “done women” when they’ve put 30 minutes on the air. All women, only women, any women, merely women—that’s the attitude that came through a few months ago when the New York Times Book Review ran a half-page photograph of a delegation holding “Peace” signs arriving at a 1916 international women’s conference to illustrate a book about opposition to World War One. “Women” was how the caption writer identified Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, Mary Heaton Vorse and several others. It reminded me of the difficulty of finding and writing women’s history at all when, researching the suffrage movement, I uncovered photographs in newspaper archives captioned “suffs leaving prison” or “suffs on a rooftop.”
Others may call this carelessness, but I call it disdain.
The suffrage movement was not a bunch of old fashioned old ladies reeking of camphor talking about an irrelevancy called The Vote. We have not exhausted the possibilities of this and all the other rich stories in our history and I, for one, hope we will not let them fade.
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and do not represent WMC. WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates.
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