One Hundred Years of Campaign Imagery: From Woman Suffrage Postcards to Hillary Clinton Memes

One Hundred Years of Campaign Imagery: From Woman Suffrage Postcards to Hillary Clinton Memes

The early twentieth-century postcard phenomenon foreshadowed the ephemerality of today's Internet memes. Postcards, scholars suggest, constituted a communications revolution comparable to the digital revolution: nineteenth-century photograph albums have been described as the 'Victorian Facebook,' while the Edwardian 'craze' for postcards is seen as mirroring Twitter's popularity. Social media provides similar opportunities in the twenty-first century. Political cartoons, in turn, rely on an understanding of political commonplaces, literary and cultural allusions, character traits, and other contextual factors; they are 'enthymemes which invite the reader to respond in accordance with certain values, beliefs, and predispositions.' Since political cartoons have appeared continuously in American print culture since the 1860s, political imagery constitutes a rich medium through which to reflect on shifting cultural perspectives toward American women.