 One of the things that I would emphasize with students are the abundance of political cartoons that are produced in the first two decades of the 20th century, mainly because this is a moment when the mass circulation of daily newspapers has reached its full potential and is reaching hundreds of thousands of customers in each city locale and also across cities. This cartoon which is called the Dirty Pool of Politics and what it shows is a fashionably dressed woman with an elaborate hat and very up-to-date and trendy clothes with a shovel and she's shoveling dirt in front of her as she goes and in front of the dirt is characterized as white slavery, graft, food adulteration and these are problems of the city of the moment and the point of the cartoon which says can we clean it, give us a chance is to talk about how women are imagined as having a greater instinct for cleaning, a greater commitment to it, an investment of it, a set of skills and experiences that allow them to be not only the cleaners of their own homes but municipal house cleaners. This is very prominent theme in the 1890s and by 1900 when suffrage becomes once again on the public consciousness and you see the merging of the two kind of rival suffrage associations, the NWSA and the American Women's Suffrage Association, the National and the American, this is what they're going to in large part base their rationale on. So instead of what we had seen for most of the second half of the 19th century which was an emphasis on the human right to political participation that should be shared equally by men and women, sort of principle, you see a change in tactics, not that many of the suffragists actually gave up thinking along those lines but they certainly switched rhetoric to something that felt would be more practical, more pragmatic, and some historians have used the term expedient. The one closest to hand was the idea that women are responsible for the home and in an industrialized context the home is no longer a private domicile that a woman has control over the quality of. So if you want to be able to clean up your home, if you want to make sure that you, one of the things in this cartoon was food adulteration, you want to make sure that the meat that you're serving, your children is healthy and not rotten, that the fruit is clean and hasn't been soiled by being sitting out in an open market. If you want to make sure that the water that's coming into the home does not have disease in it, does not have airborne or waterborne diseases, all of those things is going to require the woman to actually step out of the private sphere into the public sphere and have some political participation and some influence and control. So this cartoon shows you right at the beginning of that movement the opportunity that women are seizing upon to say we require the vote in order to be the traditional mothers and homemakers that we agree we primarily are. It's a very powerful and very effective and strategic argument and a cartoon like this says it in a very short punchy way.