From God Terms to Gaga: The Bad Romance between Motherhood and Female Suffragists in American Film

Ninety-five years ago, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed by Congress, and women across America were given the right to vote. Nearly a century later, the long-gone figure of the female suffragist continues to subtly permeate American film, a reoccurrence that is not easily justified. Why would viewers in the English-speaking world continue an interest in a historically-contextualized feminist that seems, at first, to have little to do with what a “modern-day feminist” portrays?

Although the woman that history calls the suffragette hasn’t existed in America since 1920, representations of her in film and visual media have reminded viewers that this particular brand of female activist faced a challenge that women in America have faced throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: a female’s struggle to reconcile her identity as a woman and her identity as a mother. Each of the six films studied in this project, ranging from 1912 to 2012, raises some form of the question: “Can a woman be both an activist and a ‘good’ mother to her children?” Through the use of Burke’s dramatic pentad and Prelli and Anderson’s pentadic cartography and Buchanan’s rhetorics of motherhood, this project ultimately finds that American films tend to portray activist women as inadequate mothers, going so far as to invent fictional public and private sphere choices for their historical characters; finally, it places this idea in the context of the twenty-first century, suggesting that the suffragist figure’s plight remains the plight of women today.