Mapping Social Movements and Leveraging the U.S. West: The Rhetoric of the Woman Suffrage Map

This case study of the U.S. woman suffrage map in the early twentieth century reveals the political map as an advocacy tool for social movements. By analyzing the suffrage map and its reception, I argue that the suffrage map projected the movement’s national influence and constituted suffragists as powerful political activists through the rhetoricity of maps and place. Mapping woman suffrage legitimized women’s voting rights, exaggerated their political influence, and invoked the rhetoric of the U.S. West as a frontier, which held enormous cultural power at the turn of the century. The map reimagined the meanings of the West, the East, and the mobility of women’s voting rights to suggest that woman suffrage was destined to spread across the continent. This analysis illustrates the potential for political maps to empower and motivate members of a social movement and convince them of their political agency.