Picturing Political Power

Book excerpt: "For as long as American women have battled for equitable political representation, those battles have been defined by images--whether drawn, etched, photographed, or filmed. Some of these have been flattering, many of them have been condescending, and some have been scabrous. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural tropes about the perceived nature of women's roles and abilities, and they have circulated both with and without conscious political objectives. Allison K. Lange takes a systematic look at American women's efforts to control the production and dissemination of images of them in the long battle for representation, from the mid-nineteenth-century onward"--