User:The Mad Hatress/sandbox

American Women's Suffrage Literature was a very influential way for suffragettes to use propaganda in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. By authoring works that were aesthetically pleasing, fun, moving, and thought provoking women writers efficiently and effectively expressed their radical ideas. They hoped that this new method of using “rhymes [would] influence the politicians where the other forces [had] not” in order to "passionately [address] public and political issues of the day.”

Suffrage Literature for Adults
Stories and poems during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries were enjoyed as literature is today, but an argument quoted from The Una (1853), a journal about American women's rights, suggests that during these earlier centuries the enjoyment was mainly due to literature's tendency to “[bring] the truth of nature—the probably, the possible, and the ideal” forward. Characters and plots were relatable and easy to access experientially for readers so that they could easily put themselves in the character’s place and thus sympathize with them. In this way readers were brought closer to the piece and consequently to the cause represented.

Nursery Rhymes
Familiarity, however, was another way for suffragettes to gain supporters. Since most Americans knew traditional and commonly recited nursery rhymes, re-writing them in a radical way was therefore a very clever tactic that expressed, without question, but often subtly, the views of the suffragettes to all those who read them. The propagandistic characteristic of this method then was to use “familiar texts or [...] poetic forms as entertaining ‘containers’” to convey more suggestive and controversial ideas in a less threatening way. This idea extends, as well, to the women who wrote these pieces given that many of them chose to be anonymous. The communicative form of writing, then, actually protected and distanced the authors from being abused and ridiculed for their disputable ideas. It “allowed the female suffragist 'speaker' to control the visibility of her gendered body: to be strategically less visible, her voice potentially less gendered and hence less controversial" while still being extremely influential. So, by publishing anonymously as well as writing nothing more than what would have been seen, upon first glance, as simple little ditties to convey their arguments, the overall effect was much less daunting to those who disagreed.

Further, not only was using this child-like model less fanatical, but because it was also inherently simple, short, and had a sing-song rhythm (which was catchy and capable of getting stuck in the reader's head) there was a better chance even illiterate people could read, or be read the few simple lines. Additionally, it is likely that people would have known immediately upon reading, or hearing the suffrage version of the rhyme what the original rhyme should have sounded like. Therefore, the literate reader and illiterate listener would be highly sensitive to the word changes made by the suffragettes, but perhaps less aware consciously of what they meant. Thus the propagandistic quality that allowed the message to resonate, or be stuck, in the reader’s mind for long after. Finally, due to the explosion of print culture at the time, newspapers were cropping up everywhere and were eager to be filled with new stories and articles, hence it was extremely easy for the suffragettes to get their messages out into the world very quickly which served to enhance their popularity.