"The Map Proves It": Map Use by the American Woman Suffrage Movement

In the early twentieth century, American suffragists used ‘‘a suffrage map’’ showing the spread of women’s suffrage on posters, pamphlets, and broadsides. The map was part of a shift in tactics used by the suffrage movement: leaving the parlours and taking to the streets, the suffragettes were claiming public space. This article explores the verbal and graphic rhetoric of these persuasive maps, as well as the politics of their placement, exploring how suffragettes moulded and used these traditionally masculinist ways of knowing to advance their cause while simultaneously marginalizing women of colour. Their adoption of maps represents an early example of critical cartography, an adoption of ‘‘the master’s tools’’ to advance their own interests.