By July 1912 workers across Oregon were active in the final campaign for woman suffrage that would result in victory in the November election. Oregon suffragists were building their campaign by using mass media and advertising techniques to get their message across to voters in early twentieth-century consumer culture.

The Portland Equal Suffrage League sponsored a three-day engagement for the film Votes for Women at the Star Theater in Portland. The film featured the story of a fiancée of a state senator opposed to the movement "whose signature alone is needed to put through equal suffrage legislation." She "becomes an ardent suffragist" and, along with suffrage workers, convinces the senator to vote for the bill. Filmmakers blended this fictional account with appearances by national suffrage leaders Anna Howard Shaw and Jane Addams, real-life "equal suffrage slogans and banners" and footage of a New York City suffrage parade.

The use of films like Votes for Women helped to create the modern suffrage movement and brought success to campaigns in states like Oregon that used mass media to put their message across. 

References

Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)

Kimberly Jensen, "'Neither Head nor Tail to the Campaign': Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Victory of 1912," Oregon Historical Quarterly 108:3 (Fall 2007): 350-383.

Rebecca Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004)

"Motion Pictures Plea for Equal Suffrage," Oregon Journal, July 17, 1912, 5.

Suffrage comes from the Latin suffragium, which means "voting tablet," or more commonly, "right to vote," and is the civil right to vote in political elections, or the exercise of that right. Having suffrage is also referred to as the franschise or the ballot.

The quest for women's suffrage began with the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Various western states extended suffrage to many of their female residents from 1860 through 1914. National suffrage for women did not occur until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Consitution in 1920.

Kimberly Jensen's award-winning article, " 'Neither Head nor Tail to the Campaign': Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Victory of 1912," gives the most complete analysis available on how Oregon women finally won the right to vote. Drawing from early twentieth-century newspaper accounts, extensive correspondence records, and archived material from a wide variety of local and national suffrage associations, Jensen's article fills the gap left by historians who have noted the importance of the 1912 suffrage vote but have not analyzed the cause of that victory.

The article was published in the Fall 2008 issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly (the journal of record for Oregon history, published by the Oregon Historical Society) and is available here.