4.1 Experiment Until you Like it, Takeaways!

Analysis, Part Two:

When looking at this data, there are a few more obvious takeaways I wouldn’t have seen in the total picture. First, I can tell women are speaking more frequently about topics such as people-centric words, the idea of the use of government, and the adjectives that would come along with it, such as “fair” and “great”. You also see terms like house, shoekeeper, consent, and history. I found these words’ frequency and visualization fascinating, as they were not in the “distinctive word list,” but using the Word Cloud tool, they began to piece together a narrative that the suffragettes were espousing. Making their points personal and realistic, they grounded their speeches in spaces by speaking about topics such as the family, the home, and education. They strived for their goals of equality by bringing these essential themes closely associated with women, and with the admirable and respectable values of our ideal nation. The distinctive word list I copied below is for ease of comparison.

Most frequent words in the corpus:

• women (347); men (124); people (81); woman (77); come (60); war (59); vote (52); suffrage (52); government (52); life (49); great (46); country (46); time (45); said (43); world (42); want (42); make (42); political (41); years (39); know (39); way (37); think (36); say (36); american (35); situation (33)

On the other hand, you can see that in the word cloud by the Presidents, those conversations are appealing to a different audience and touching on different themes. In this cloud, fiscally related words and connections to governance were dominant and visible. “Employment”, “Power”, “Wealth”, “Necessary”, and “Law” were all terms that stood out to me and seemed to be more indicative of these speeches’ key themes. Despite the speeches being collected from 1917 to 1935, women and the plight of suffrage do not become visible within this tool. Now, looking comparatively, the tool, when used on the main page of my Voyant, the one which is the combined full corpus with both Suffragettes’ and Presidents’ speeches, the conversation changes. This is evident first perhaps in the distinct words section, which now represents the women’s words as follows:

1. SuffragetteSpeeches.1911-…: woman (77), vote (52), suffrage (52), understand (23), militant (23), woman’s (21), prison (21), england (20), victory (19), suffragists (19), won (17), sympathy (17), windows (16), win (16), having (16), fight (14), position (13), militancy (13), london (13), ireland (13), golf (13), agitation (13), went (12), voters (12), property (12).

The sudden appearance of geopolitical tensions and global topics makes itself more apparent in this hybrid view of the full corpus, drawing out these women’s conversations on “militancy”, “fighting”, “agitation”, and interestingly, “prison”. The presentation of their plight now appears confrontational, aggressive, pointedly violent even. This mirrors how suffragettes were treated by the patriarchy when trying to express their needs, with their words being brought through a lens of violence and power. Comparing this hybrid or blended conversation, we see a pattern that highlights the gendered nature of the context of suffrage and the struggle for truthful visibility by these activists.