Top of page

Exhibition Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote

The New Woman–Wash Day. Photographic print on stereograph card mount. New York: Strohmeyer & Wyman, ca. 1897. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (045.00.00)
Enlarge

Fears of Domestic Upheaval and Feminized Men

Few suffragists seriously expected men to assume equal housekeeping responsibilities, but, in challenging men’s monopoly on the public political sphere, women’s campaign for voting rights unsettled those who perceived suffrage as a threat to gender roles and the domestic division of labor. These fears surfaced in cartoons, leaflets, and as shown here, the popular parlor entertainment of stereographs, a pair of photographs, which when looked at through a special viewer appear as a single three-dimensional image.