Raise the Voice, Win the Vote: Song as Political Strategy in the U.S. Suffrage Movement

American suffragists enlisted music, songs, and sound to display their views and to influence lawmakers, voters, and disenfranchised women. However, antisuffragists, too, used the same sonic tools to achieve similar ends. Those opposed to woman suffrage centered the racial, religious, national, and class identities that the suffragists tried to marginalize, creating music replete with offensive connotations of exclusionary Otherness. In response, and in an effort to appeal to voters—who were mostly white men—suffragists cultivated a sound that problematically, yet effectively emphasized the whiteness, upper classness, Christianity, and American nativism of would-be women voters. Through seleected case studies the talk gives insights on political songcraft and performance practice surrounding the American women’s suffrage movement.

The talk is complemented by concert with jazz students from Nuremberg University of Music that brings on stage some of the repertoire of both American and European women’s suffrage movement.

The lecture is part of the event series “die Stimme erheben.”

This event will take place on June 16, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. in Room E.09 (lecture hall) and is organized by the Nuremberg University of Music. All questions should be directed to them.