| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Margaret Finnegan. Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women. (Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives.) New York: Columbia University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 222. Cloth $49.50, paper $17.50.

This is one of several books about the woman suffrage movement in the United States published since 1995 (the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment). Margaret Finnegan develops a cultural history of the woman suffrage movement that focuses on white, middle-class women in the urban North during the early twentieth century. Finnegan connects rising consumer capitalism in the decade of the 1910s to the cultural milieu of the middle class, arguing that the women of the nonradical woman suffrage movement adapted their strategies and campaigns to the commercial and consumer-capitalist environment of urban culture. In so doing, she finds that these twentieth-century suffragists incorporated modern methods of advertising, publicity, and performance in attempts to convert the masses of the voting public to the cause. 1

In discussing the various strategies used by nonradical, modern suffragists, Finnegan goes back in time to the nineteenth-century movement to examine the similarities and differences in woman suffrage ideologies, arguments, and strategies and their transformations over time. This approach, which she uses in each chapter, is quite helpful to historians because it contextualizes the development of consumer culture as it parallels changes in the suffrage movement. Finnegan hypothesizes that early nineteenth-century suffragists would not have accepted the argument of their Progressive-era counterparts, who believed consumerism contributed to the success of women winning the right to vote. She notes how even in the post-Civil War years, many suffragists were still ambivalent toward the ideas of consumerism. . . .

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