Feminist Things: Votes for Women and the Circulation of Emotion

Abstract

This chapter explores the complex relationship between subjects and things in the brief sketches, marketing campaigns, fashion columns, and advertisements in Votes for Women, the suffrage paper of the Women's Social and Political Union. Focusing on the entwined discourses of shopping and sacrifice, this chapter shows how sentiment was channeled into the movement through discussions of ordinary practices of daily life such as shopping or dressing. Using “thing theory,” especially the work of Bill Brown and Daniel Miller, this chapter traces the ways in which the marketing of suffrage collectibles—games, tea sets, jewelry—as well as suffrage campaigns that encouraged activists to buy from merchants who advertised in the pages of Votes for Women transformed ordinary commodities into affect-filled suffrage “things” that forged a sentimental relationship to the movement.