VISUALIZING THE CLAIM FOR THE WOMEN’S RIGHT TO VOTE: REPRESENTING FEMININITY IN THE FIRST WAVE GERMAN WOMEN’S MOVEMENT 1900-1919

Inspired by the commemoration of the centenary of women’s suffrage and its display in exhibitions like Damenwahl! – 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht in Frankfurt, this paper expands on the visual aspect in the German women’s movement’s claim for the women’s right to vote. Building upon the visual turn in academia, the thesis opens a new, visually guided academic perspective on the early German women’s movement and its claim for the women’s right to vote, but also adds to examinations of suffrage culture in the international context. Asking how the first wave German women’s movement visually articulated its claim for the women’s right to vote between 1900 and 1919, the analysis grounds on a tripartite theoretical framework that is mirrored in the empirical chapters: 1. femininity and female (collective) identity, 2. social movements and repertoires of contention, and 3. visuality, visual culture and visual rhetoric. This takes a semiotic turn and pays attention to the way visual images related to norms and values of femininity that were established or challenged in the Wilhelmine society and considers how the women’s voting right campaigners tried, by visual means, to establish their cause as a matter of public discourse. To do so, the thesis focuses on a multifaceted corpus of visual sources that reaches from printed products like posters, flyers, postcards, stamps and photographs over non-print objects such as badges, brooches and banners up to traditional printed products in form of women’s magazines. The core of this visual analysis looks at tropes of femininity that were visually diffused to further the demand for women’s political say. This deductively elaborates on feminist connotations of progress, justice and maternity as identity building factors of a (soon-to-be) enfranchised female identity. The analysis hereby uncovers a pictorial suffrage language in the German women’s movement and reveals the multidimensional character of visual practices in the feminist claim-making and performance of identity politics. This strengthens a call for more multidimensional approaches in social movement studies that need to merge concepts of identity, agency and visual representation to illuminate new perspective in social, cultural and visual history.