Secondary Source

Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere

Maria DiCenzo with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryann. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, VIII, 239 pages.

Era: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Book Reviews, Book-Academic

Highlighting the contributions of feminist media history to media studies and related disciplines, this book focuses on feminist periodicals emerging from or reacting to the Edwardian suffrage campaign and situates them in the context of current debates about the public sphere, social movements, and media history. The book is available from Palgrave Macmillan, its publisher, which offers a preview at the linked URL.

Scholar Michelle Tusan summarizes and reviews this book and another book about suffrage media, Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946, edited by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills.

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. You can check WorldCat to see if there’s a library with access near you. Google Books also has a preview.

Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 is an anthology of diverse literature aimed at convincing Americans to support the suffrage movement. Feminist Media History: Suffrage Periodicals and the Public Sphere discusses feminist periodicals and argues that feminist media history has been marginalized in academia.

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

DOI: 10/1057/9780230299078

 

Reviews:

Women’s History Review – by Laurel Foster (2013) 

This is a book everyone interested in print media or feminist history should read. It aims to broaden our interpretative strategies by expanding the theoretical, critical and historical framework available to periodical studies. It does this by aligning social movement theory and discussions about the public sphere with feminist periodicals of the early twentieth century, thus combining the work of feminist recovery with current communications critiques. (…)

American Journalism – by Jane Marcellus (2013)

One might ask, on seeing the subtitle of this book, why we need another study of woman suffrage. As the authors themselves note, it “seems a well-traveled path” (p.15), particularly in light of calls to look beyond the West in media and feminist research. Yet this is not simply another woman suffrage book. Its purpose, suggested by the main title, is to define and locate the broader subfield “feminist media history” at the intersection of scholarly areas such as media history, social history, and feminist media studies. Having done so, the authors use British suffrage periodicals as case studies to illustrate their argument that feminist history too often falls between disciplinary and theoretical cracks. (…)

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