Sample Analysis II: Look At Them Together!
There are many photos of women publicly demonstrating. That's a good chunk, and a lot for historians to draw on. What you can do is you can juxtapose these photographs, one next to the other, to examine the differences in the photos and the continuities. In this case, we can see a strategy the suffragettes use to attract attention to their cause.
One of the things the suffragettes did—which is similar to the political cartoon that we just looked at—is they made sure that all the women looked fabulous. So they are wearing big hats and they were wearing as expensive clothes as they can afford, even when they are striking women workers. This did cause comment in the newspaper because it seemed in some ways to be a contradiction of terms. You're talking about how you can't really live on the salary that you make while at the same time you're trying to look like a leisured individual.
But for the most part it worked in this important way: it got their picture taken. And it made people attracted to and amenable to their message because they looked young and fresh and fashionable and they just seemed more appealing. This is at a moment when the public sphere was becoming inundated with images and the images in large part are of women. This is the emergence of cinema; it’s the emergence of advertising. So being able to look like those images that are held up as ideals for young women gave them an edge in the public consciousness; even if it created a kind of logical conundrum. It also made them sort of stand up straighter, feel proud, feel unified by their sex. It seemed to have a real centrifugal impact on their organizing.
The suffrage parades—which became a powerful way to get the public attention by about 1910 and certainly we're at the height of this in 1913—thus become the talk of the nation.
source: https://teachinghistory.org/best-practices/examples-of-historical-thinking/25635