Music and women's suffrage in the United States
[1] The songs, written for the cause, unified women from varying geographic and socioeconomic positions because the empowering lyrics were set to widely known tunes.
These "songsters" relied on their shared cultural experience of nursery rhymes and common hymns to unify everyone.
[6] Finally, in the mid-nineteenth century, the fight for women's rights came together in an organized fashion in Seneca Falls, New York.
[3] Toward the end of the nineteenth century, women began to write their own hymns with the purpose of sharing their testimonies and experiences through their own words.
[3] As women across the nation worked to have their voice heard in the churches, suffragists struggled against the political silence that had been forced upon them for decades.
[3] Women's role in composing hymns would eventually evolve into writing music for the Suffrage movement.
[9][10] Baker's song is more supportive of a change in women's rights, while Horn's work emphasizes traditional values.
[11] Some suffrage music written in the late nineteenth century implied, hopefully, that women would soon have the right to vote, including "Daughters of Freedom!
[11] Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the History of Woman Suffrage that the family actively worked to help the cause through music, especially in Kansas in 1867.
"[13] For the campaign, John W. Hutchinson co-wrote "The Kansas Suffrage Song," which was sung to the tune of "Old Dan Tucker.
"[11] On the election day, the Hutchinson family traveled with Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to all the polling places in Leavenworth, Kansas.
[15] The South Dakota Suffrage Organization printed a twenty page songster in 1888 and sold it for ten cents at their Huron headquarters.
[16] NAWSA often borrowed imagery from the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom to illustrate sheet music covers.
[15] Raye-Smith, a professor and editor of the Woman Lawyer's Journal, had often been called on to write music for the suffrage movement before she died in 1914.
[26] The idea was "meant to shock by placing white women—the embodiment of 'civilization'--on par with incompetent and mentally incapacitated men.
[28] This famously included the, "Sister Suffragette" song in the hit 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins.
"[4] The introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s led to the rise of pop culture songs playing a role in the feminist movement.
[4] Evidence that this year was important for women's rights as Shirley Chilsom was running for President and Roe v. Wade had reached courts.
