Equality, y'all: newspaper coverage of first wave feminism and suffrage in the American South

The American South has long been characterized by institutionalized racism and highly traditional Christian values. It would be easy to assume that the Women’s Suffrage Movement would not have been welcomed in this particular region of the United States; however, newspapers that covered the seventy-year fight for women’s right to vote indicate this is not completely true. This paper will examine the presentation of this first wave of feminism in southern newspapers. It is vital to examine the ways the southern media portrayed feminism’s first wave for two reasons. The first is the perpetual need for society to look back and recognize mistakes made in the past and think about ways to avoid remaking them in the future; the second is to discover how the South specifically reacted to and treated this social movement, considering the cultural and religious context present in the newspapers of the time.