Abstract In 1909, a group of mountaineers climbed Mount Rainier during the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition and placed a “Votes for Women” pennant at the mountain summit. I argue that their ascent of Mount Rainier exploited meanings of mountaineering and the wilderness for woman suffrage: mountaineering as a symbol of imperial power, the mountain wilderness as the new mythic frontier, and walking in the western wilderness as an enactment of freedom. The imperialist meaning of mountaineering constituted woman suffragists as powerful, victorious, and capable of winning their upcoming suffrage campaign. Climbing the new frontier demonstrated that the women were physically strong enough to participate in turn-of-the-century politics and invoked the meritocratic logic of the frontier myth that suggested these women had earned their right to vote through their labor on the mountain. Walking in the western wilderness performed the climbers’ freedom to walk, think, and vote for themselves and to resist society’s gendered restrictions. Their climb invoked the ideologies of imperialism, the frontier myth, and freedom to appeal to the citizens of the Pacific Northwest for voting rights and to gain more publicity for their cause, yet it simultaneously had a rhetorical impact on the climbers themselves. By appropriating the rhetorics of mountaineering and the wilderness, they motivated and increased the morale of suffragists in the midst of a struggling movement and positioned their male companions as suffrage advocates.

Abstract As Seattle’s mayor in 1926, Bertha Landes made history as the first woman elected to lead a large city in the United States. To respond to the complicated demands of female political leadership in the early twentieth century American West, Landes pragmatically appealed to expectations of both public men and domestic women by making arguments from both sameness and difference. Using a rhetoric of municipal housekeeping to justify her entrance into political office, Landes paradoxically asserted beliefs about the difference between men and women in leadership, while simultaneously suggesting her political service did not differ from a mans. Although her municipal housekeeping arguments essentialized women as moral and different, they also assisted her entrance into politics and attested to women’s suitability for political leadership. She simultaneously employed a rhetoric of Western masculinity and sameness that reified masculine conceptions of political leadership, and suggested that womens roles in the nation functioned similarly to mens roles, thus expanding the role of women in politics beyond exclusively municipal housekeepers. This analysis not only illustrates the use of sameness and difference arguments in elective office, but also how they oxymoronically functioned together.