Suffrage Posters Exhibit
This exhibit was created and designed by students in the course U.S. Women's and Gender History at the Rochester Institute of Technology in fall 2020.The posters are from the Alice Park Poster Collection at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Alice Park led the public relations effort for the California Equal Suffrage Association's (CESA) successful 1911 campaign for women's suffrage in California. Her work on that campaign influenced suffrage messaging in the U.S., leading to the adoption of bold type, brief and clear texts, images and maps, and bright color, all of which are visible in the posters she collected from both the American and British suffrage campaigns. Park wrote about the 1911 campaign, "we made good use of color... we said it [yellow] was the most beautiful color in the world, especially in the Golden State; that California owed its life to the gold in the hills; that the golden poppy is the state flower, that the golden orange grows here, and golden grain."
Bertha Margaret Boye's luminous "Votes for Women," the first poster in the carousel below, was the symbol for that campaign.
Park participated in international women's activism as well and served as a delegate to the Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, Hungary in June 1913, and the Tenth Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Paris in May 1926.
Sources
Finding Aid, Poster Collection of Alice Park, https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5626
National Park Service, "Alice Park," https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5626
Skahill, Karen Lynn. "'A Higher Amibition': Bay Area Women Fight for Suffrage in California," PhD Dissertation, San Jose State University, 2004.
