Women’s Rights and American Citizenship – Ms. Magazine

Ms. is a proud media sponsor and partner of the League of Women Voters Los Angeles andUCLA Film and Television Archives Women to the Polls: Suffrage Film Festival. In this dedicated series, well be syndicating the program in time with each day of screenings.

In American Democracy (1832), Alexis de Tocqueville famously argued that the unique treatment of American women contributed to the fledgling democracys prosperity. Rather than trying to make the sexes equal or the same, as in Europe, in America, their difference is respected: American women never manage the outward concerns of the family or conduct a business or take a part in political life; nor are they ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields or to make any of those laborious efforts which demand the exertion of physical strength.

Eighty years later, in Making an American Citizen (1912), Alice Guy Blach filmed the story of Ivan Orloff, a swarthy Eastern European immigrant, and his unnamed and beleaguered wife, directly applying Tocquevilles ideas.

Ivan learns the lessons that will make him a citizen: his wife is not a beast of burden; he cannot beat her; and he, not she, should till the fields while she makes dinner, puts flowers on the table and leads them in saying grace. Using an immigrants assimilation story, Blach crystallizes the (no)place of American femininity in citizenshipelevated, disenfranchised and domestic, implicitly white and bourgeois, a key symbolic prop for masculine suffrage.

Crucially, work, business, labor and suffrage are not feminine.

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947), set in 1874, anachronistically revisits womens suffrage in relation to employment, femininity and heterosexual romance in the tale of Miss Pilgrim, one of the first trained typewriters, joining an all-male workplace, becoming a suffragette suffragist, and falling in love with her boss. Made right after the end of WWII, the film poses suffrage, employment and womens ambition as challenges to romantic and personal happiness.

Get tickets now to watch these films and engage in conversations around the issues of voting, feminism and politics at the suffrage film festival!

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Women's Rights and American Citizenship - Ms. Magazine