MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Drawing on Eyerman’s work on the deradicalization process that social movements undergo in order to be preserved in collective memory, this paper examines the wearing of “suffrage white” by the Democratic congresswomen at the 2019 State of the Union address within the context of forgetting. The example of suffrage white as an embodied symbol of female solidarity and resistance represents how this deradicalization and simplification of the American women’s suffrage movement has occurred and is occurring. The wearing of suffrage white becomes a commemorative event, and does little to advance suffrage history or provide any more than an iterative nod towards the collective memory of the American suffrage movement.

The paper begins by being positioned within the theoretical framework of collective memory and social movements, and then provides a brief historical context on the American suffrage movement and the color white as one of its symbols. It discusses modern accusations of racism in the American suffrage movement and its potential saliency for the racially diverse group that is the Democratic Women’s Caucus. The paper conducts a textual analysis of the press releases of the female Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the House Democratic Women’s Working Group’s Twitter account, and their contextualization, or lack thereof, of wearing suffrage white. A survey of mainstream media coverage demonstrates how the media were left to provide context for this symbolic gesture, because, as argued by Amazeen, journalists should critically analyze politically symbolic gestures that are designed to generate news. While the paper does not argue malicious intent in this ritualized forgetting of suffrage history, it does illustrate the process by which complex social movements are simplified into conveniently iterative, and eventually empty, symbols.