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

By Ann Marie Nicolosi, The College of New Jersey

"Miss Inez Milholland" (1911), Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States, 1907–1917, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62–110994].
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.
On the eve of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration in 1913, suffragists organized a concert featuring speakers for the cause. A broadside for the event advertised Inez Milholland as a scheduled lecturer. Milholland, a committed activist and lawyer, was one of the movement's biggest draws. The broadside paid homage to Milholland's physical attributes in a parenthetical notation below her name indicating that she was "Said to be the Most Beautiful Suffragette."2	1
Three years earlier, an anti-suffrage illustration predicted what was to come if women became voters. Employing the tried and true technique of portraying women voters as masculine, cartoonist C.W. Gustin played to the anxieties of those who feared a reversal of traditional gender roles. Gustin's illustration, "Election Day!," featured a severe, dour-looking woman, wearing masculine clothing, including spectacles, a tie, and a bowler, who had abandoned the sanctity of the home presumably to enter the public sphere. Her milquetoast husband, drawn smaller in scale, is left behind to tend two screaming infants.3	2
What these images reveal is the manipulation of the media by suffragists as well as by anti-suffragists. Both sides consciously used imagery and literature to make their messages, goals, and ideologies palatable to the public. In so doing, they attempted to sway public attitudes, especially the opinions of undecided women, in their favor. Suffragists and anti-suffragists made use of the media available to them, especially political cartoons, magazine illustrations, and lectures. Opposing camps, using the language of prescribed gender roles for women of the era, manipulated societal fears and sentiments to present their respective cases to a public grappling with the changes and challenges suffrage and/or feminism posed to tradition and to the future.	. . .