Themes/Frames

MEDIA EFFECTS THEORIES

Framing: Framing is how news and information are “framed” or presented once is has passed through the news “gate” and on the public agenda. A media “frame” is the main idea for a news story that supplies a context and it will make certain aspects of a story important, while minimizing or ignoring others. In the movie, many framing strategies are practiced and framing is seen constantly throughout the movie. Along with framing is the theory of gate-keeping  This is the person or group that makes constant decisions about what information is or isn't important enough to pass along. They decide what information gets through the "gate" from the sender of a message to a receiver of that message. 

The New York Times covered the events with the suffrage movement, but they didn't always produce all the information to the public. For example, with the hunger strikes, the New York Times acknowledged that the suffragists were being force-fed, but it was incredibly downplayed.

The film shows the use of gate-keeping with the newspapers that were being published during the suffrage movement. The women would receive good and bad publicity, because of the newspapers. The papers would often time say that the women were radicals, but it would also show them as heroes.

The film framed all the women as hard working women who were not treated right. It glorified Alice Paul's actions and held her in a very positive light. However, what the film does not depict is that some women did not actually care if they gained women's suffrage or not. It just shows that all women were in support of it. In 1911, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) was formed. According to their leader, Josephine Dodge, the group believed that women would be better of without voicing their opinion with a ballot and would be more useful to the community if they weren't affiliated with political groups.

Men Framing: Almost all the men in the film are all framed to be unsupportive and cruel. The movie rarely depicts men supporting the ratification of the 19th amendment. In reality, many men supported woman's right to vote. Look at the men  page of our blog to see the men that supported the right for women to vote.  

In the film the director, Katja Von Garnier uses framing by shedding a very positive light on women’s rights. This could be because the director and the producers are very supportive of it and most of them were women.  As a viewer you feel very close and you think very highly of the suffragists. We see men treat them cruelly, no one is listening to their point of view, their rights are ignored, the women go to jail and the women endure lots of trials and hardships. If this film was directed by men, the suffragist may have been filmed in a slightly different light.

Omissions are also a strategy of framing. When a historical movie omits an event that was important, it is using the framing theory. Iron Jawed Angels included a great amount of historical information, however they did omit some events that happened during the time of women's suffrage. The movie could not include everything, but tried to include the most important events. 

Some events not included (framing strategy):

Historically, after the big parade in Washington, the women presented an allorgical tableu that presented the ideas for women's equality. This was not shown in the movie. The film also did not include the other big suffragist parade in New York.

In the movie, Lucy Burns is usually shown with Alice Paul, but in reality Lucy Burns was out on tour a lot without Paul promoting the idea of women's rights. 

In the movie, the women are shown as being in one jail all together. In reality, Alice Paul went to Washington Jail, while Lucy Burns and other women went to the Occoquan workhouse. Alice Paul started the hunger strike in the Washington Jail and as word leaked out about it's happenings, the women at Occoquan began the hunger strike as well. The film never differentiates the fact that Alice Paul and Lucy Burns are in different jails, it just gives us the idea they were all in the same jail. 


Visit out fact vs fiction page to see more things omitted from the film. 

Agenda setting: This theory means that although the mass media can’t tell us what to think, the media are very successful at telling us what to think about. The media does this through their selection of what is news (gatekeeping), the mass media serve to create an agenda for social discussion.

This was used often with the New York Times during the woman suffrage movement. The New York Times covered women's suffrage almost daily for a few years. They were making the women suffrage an important current event. The New York Times didn't tell us what to think, but they certainly told us what to think about.