Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism

Google Books has significant excerpts of this book, which won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Book Award in 2015; the Canadian Association of American Studies Book Award of 2015; and was a finalist for the 2014 Modernist Association Book Prize.

An abstract:

For most people, the U.S. suffrage campaign is encapsulated by images of iconic nineteenth-century orators like the tightly coifed Susan B. Anthony or the wimpled Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, as Mary Chapman shows, the campaign to secure the vote for U.S. women was also a modern and print-cultural phenomenon, waged with humor, creativity, and style.

Making Noise, Making News also understands modern suffragist print culture as a demonstrable link between the Progressive Era’s political campaign for a voice in the public sphere and Modernism’s aesthetic efforts to re-imagine literary voice. Chapman charts a relationship between modern suffragist print cultural “noise” and what literary modernists understood by “making it new,” asserting that the experimental tactics of U.S. suffrage print culture contributed to, and even anticipated, the formal innovations of U.S. literary modernism. Drawing on little-known archives and featuring over twenty illustrations, Making Noise, Making News provides startling documentation of Marianne Moore’s closeted career as a suffrage propagandist, the persuasive effects of Alice Duer Miller’s popular poetry column, Asian-American author Sui Sin Far’s challenge to the racism and classism of modern suffragism, and Gertrude Stein’s mid-century acknowledgement of intersections between suffrage discourse and literary modernism.

Project Muse has made available abstracts of reviews published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2015, pp. 325-327 by Lisa Cochran Higgins; by Janice Schroeder in English Studies in Canada, Vol. 40, Issue 2-3, June/September 2014, pp. 226-229; and by Catherine Keyser in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2015, pp. 85-89. Wiley Online Library includes links to access to two others, one by Charlie Jeffries in History: the journal of the Historical Association, Vol. 101, Issue 344, January 2016, pp. 168-170; and one by Alison Schulz in the Journal of American Culture, Vol. 39, Issue 3, September 2016, p. 373.

Treacherous Texts: US Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946

Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 is an anthology of diverse literature aimed at convincing Americans to support the suffrage movement that collects “more than sixty literary texts written by smart, savvy writers who experimented with genre, aesthetics, humor, and sex appeal in an effort to persuade American readers to support woman suffrage. Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere. Uncovering startling affinities between popular literature and propaganda, Treacherous Texts samples a rich, decades-long tradition of suffrage literature created by writers from diverse racial, class, and regional backgrounds.”

Project Muse offers a download option for the book and Google Books features much of it. Check with your local libraries for availability.

Scholar Michelle Tusan summarizes and reviews this book and another one about suffrage media, Feminist Media History: Suffrage Periodicals and the Public Sphere, authored by Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Leila Ryan.

JStor offers a preview of this book review, and an option to download it for a fee. Click here to read JStor’s guide for how to access their database from your institution.

DOI: 10.5325/jmodeperistud.2.2.0253.

ISBN: 978-0-230-29907-8

eBook ISBN: 978-0-230-29907-8

Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-31695-3

The Women Who Drew for Suffrage

In the popular imagination of those who lived in the twentieth century, political cartoons were drawn by men. But in Alice Sheppard’s “Cartooning For Suffrage,” readers see how dozens of women artists drew political cartoons extolling the suffrage movement. Sheppard contextualizes these artists by explaining the history of political cartoons and the suffrage movement. She also delves into the individual lives of female cartoonists.

Sheppard’s work details this forgotten history, challenging stereotypes in the process and exploring artistic gems like the work of Lou Rogers, whose work was featured in prominent magazines of the era like the satirical publication Judge. The political cartoons Sheppard discusses–she includes 200 of them in her book–were drawn to subvert stereotypes of suffrage activists as seductresses or shrews.  As this informative Chicago Tribune book review notes, the author details the two strategies female cartoonists used to buck those stereotypes: Depicting “voting rights as a tool to end female oppression” and presenting “the idea that society as a whole lost out when women were excluded from the political process.”

In 1995, the Washington, DC-based National Museum of Women in Arts featured some of the cartoons Sheppard wrote about in an exhibit marking the 75th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Political cartoonists for suffrage “knew that you can’t argue against a picture,” Sheppard told the Associated Press in an article previewing that exhibit.

For more on Sheppard’s book, see Google Books for some snippets. A 1997 issue of the academic periodical Woman’s Art Journal features a review of the book You can sign up for a JStor account and read the review for free. For more suffrage-themed cartoons, see the scholar Jaqueline McLeod Rogers’ article on the anti-suffrage cartoons of John Tinney McCutcheon and Newton McConnell.