Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women's Suffrage (original) (raw)
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Journalism History, 2020
Answering continued calls for a cultural approach to the study of women's history, this article explores what social historian Raymond Williams referred to as lingering traces of "structures of feeling" about women's suffrage in letters published in the U.S. commercial periodical press. Through a discourse analysis of 225 letters to the editor published in five prominent U.S. newspapers, alongside other relevant primary and secondary sources, this study offers insight into the production of letters to the editor as an act of strategic communication by suffragists and anti-suffragists, the regulation of letters to the editor by news gatekeepers and agenda-setters, and the consumption of letters to the editor by newspaper readers in 1917, a pivotal year in the decadeslong cultural struggle over women's suffrage. This article contends that these contested editorial spaces were important strategic sites where the negotiation of common-sense logics that continue to inform our present-day discourse unfolded.
The Suffrage Centennial and Reading Black Feminisms
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 2020
N ineteenth-and early-twentieth-century African Americans had a capacious understanding of literature, which included writings on art, science, politics, and society. I focus on Black women's letters to the editor as part of this broad sense of literature and as an index of how, to quote Joanna Brooks, "Blacks. .. entered the public sphere, not with the negative identity of the disinterested individual citizen, but through positive collective incorporation" (73; emphasis added). I do so in order to ask what might shift in our understandings of both Black feminisms and the suffrage movement in the United States if we were to read letters to the editor as counter-public practices and politics. What shifts when we read them for what Ashon Crawley calls practices of making not taking-"making space against the settler logic of taking and claiming and owning space through displacement" (14)? 1 Data visualization as one protocol of reading Black women's letters to the editor can help us to see the "circulation of discourse" through the periodical press as a primary organizing feature of Black feminisms (Warner 119), which then also enables us to map the national reach of Black feminist politics well before the emergence of the Black women's club movement, which is typically mistaken as the inauguration of organized feminist politics among Black women. I see letters to the editor as a key form of what Judith Madera calls "black flow, " which "does as it makes" by "feeling out the normative organizational codes that cohere in oppressive power systems, and then finding disruptions in, contradictions to, and corridors through these codes" (5). Making place in print is a doing and making of Black flow that contests or disrupts who can speak publicly of what and where, as well as who can be, and who can move, where. As scholarship on Black politics has long argued, any understanding of the political must be recalibrated from a focus on formally organized and national politics to a focus on on-the-ground, informal, and infrapolitical forms and political practices. 2 The circulation of politics can be difficult to document beyond known networks of political leaders, organizations, and political gatherings or associations, yet data visualization may offer us further insight into politics on the ground. Mapping a "circulating
Suffrage and Women’s Writing, 2020
Women's literary activity during the first two decades of the twentieth century, fuelled by the progressive spirit, served as a form of cultural lobbying through which they could articulate social and political problems and propose solutions. This article focuses on the struggle that enfranchised women by examining two long-forgotten suffrage novels, written in a period when grassroots activism, suffrage parades and house-to-house canvassing were a means of propaganda: Marietta Holley's Samantha on the Woman Question (1913) and Elia Peattie's The Precipice (1914). With her use of satire, Holley familiarizes her middle-class audience with women's suffrage and politics. By presenting the plight of different women in a vernacular style, Holley addresses the older generation of anti-suffragist women, illuminating how countless unfortunate women are oppressed by a political system that does not acknowledge their presence. On the other hand, in The Precipice, Elia Peattie appeals to the younger generation of New Women, portraying the life of a twentieth-century social reformer, who tries to balance her career as a municipal housekeeper with the traditional roles and values of her day. The article argues that both novels functioned as catalysts to bring about social change at a time when, on the federal level at least, women still could not vote or hold an elected office. Thus, even before women were enfranchised, these novels influenced the beliefs and opinions of female audiences, for whom reading fiction was a favourable pastime. Without marginalizing female protagonists or blatantly alienating readers by transgressing socially accepted gender norms, these authors were able to find a middle ground, successfully creating role models who try to change society from within. By rendering the New Woman unthreatening, they challenged the ideology of separate spheres and prepared the public for the great changes ahead. During the Progressive Era, a widespread concern over social justice unavoidably shaped American politics. Although progressive women played a prominent role in the regulatory policies enacted, they remained peripheral to the progressive movement as they had not attained their political rights-in particular, the right to vote. By virtue of their domestic roles as housekeepers and
Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere
Media History, 2012
Should the success of a political movement be measured solely by the degree to which its particular demands are met? Or is the formation of a new political class whose collective identity and power are established through activism more significant than whether the specific target was achieved? To pose the question in such a polarised form may seem absurd yet that has often been the premise upon which historical interpretation has been made when it comes to the suffragette movement in Britain.