Hillary Clinton was a modern suffragette in Ralph Lauren white for historic DNC speech

Update: Ralph Lauren confirms to USA TODAY the American fashion house dressed Clinton for her speech at the DNC.

Hillary Clinton made history Thursday night, becoming the first woman to accept a major party’s nomination for president. And it was not likely a coincidence that she chose to mark the occasion, and deliver arguably the most important speech of her career, in a white pantsuit.

For decades, Clinton has shunned the scrutiny on her dress, directing onlookers to her statements and actions rather than her personal style. She’s one of many who has labeled the focus on her clothing as biased — another one of the many burdens heaped on women alone.

But the counterpoint to that argument is the opportunity that comes with the ability to dress freely and command attention with those choices. And she chose to send a powerful visual message with that freedom Thursday night.

Striding to the lectern, she looked like a modern day suffragette.

American and British women of the early 1900s leveraged color and fashion to further their messages — call it a precursor to #ImWithHer. They used the colors green, white and violet, or purple, which some attribute to an acronym for the slogan “Give Women the Vote.” Most credit Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, editor of the weekly newspaper Votes for Women, who called on women to wear the colors as an inventive and effective form of early marketing.

The women stood out in crowds, and got big stores involved, including places like Selfridges, which would sell everything from sashes to underwear and decorate their windows with the suffragette branding.

Another common call, in addition to wearing the badge of color, was a plea to dress fashionably and femininely to rebuke stereotypes of strong-minded women as masculine or dowdy. The color white, a symbol of purity, further rejected sexually dismissive slurs thrown their way while protesting, much the same way women of the '80s used shoulder pads to combat sexism in the workplace, eliminating fuel for arguments that a woman was dressed too provocatively for the office.

It worked. British female householders over 30 — approximately 40% of women — were granted the right to vote in November 1918.  (A decade later, it was extended to all females over 21). The United States ratified the 19th amendment granting women the vote in August of 1920.

The result is lasting imagery of women in white, satiny dresses, marching in solidarity or riding through parades on horseback. Visuals that Geraldine Ferraro evoked as she became the first woman to accept the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in 1984.

And it is that imagery that Clinton so effectively conjured on her way to fully realizing the dreams of suffragettes, more than 100 years in the making.