Romancing the Vote
Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870-1920
LESLIE PETTY
Copyright Date: 2006
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Pages: 240
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46ndzb
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Romancing the Vote
Book Description:

As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, novels about politically active women became increasingly common. Until now, however, no one has studied this body of writing as a distinct tradition in American literature. In Romancing the Vote, Leslie Petty recovers this tradition and also examines how the fiction written about the women's rights and related movements contributed to the creation and continued vitality of those movements. Petty examines the novels as paradigms of feminist activism and reform communities and elucidates how they, whether wittingly or not, model ways to create similar communities in the real world. She demonstrates how the narratives provide insight into the hopes and anxieties surrounding some of the most important political movements in American history and how they encapsulate the movements' paradoxical blend of progressive and conservative ideologies. The major works discussed are Elizabeth Boynton Harbert's Out of Her Sphere (1871), Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life (1874), Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office (1892), Marjorie Shuler's For Rent--One Pedestal (1917), Elizabeth Jordan's edited volume The Sturdy Oak (1917), and Oreola Williams Haskell's Banner Bearers: Tales of the Suffrage Campaigns (1920). Although these works discredit many traditional notions about gender and inspire their readers to seek fairness and equality for many American women, they often simultaneously perpetuate discriminatory ideas about other marginalized groups. They not only privilege the experiences of white women but also rely on widespread anxieties about racial and ethnic minorities to demonstrate the need for gender reform. By focusing on such tensions between conventional and unconventional ideas about gender, race, and class, Petty shows how the fiction of this period helps to situate first-wave feminism within a larger historical and cultural context.

eISBN: 978-0-8203-4289-4
Subjects: Language & Literature, Sociology
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. vii-viii)
  4. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-16)

    In 1839, Sarah Josepha Hale published The Lecturess, a novel about a woman’s rights activist whose transgressive behavior—she gives public lectures on gender reform and even ventures to the South to speak about abolition—leads directly to the loss of her husband and child and, eventually, to her death.¹ In this cautionary tale, Hale warns her readers about the dangers of women taking a public role in politics; at the time this was a national phenomenon that had attracted a great deal of attention because of women like Maria W. Miller Stewart and the Grimké sisters and it was...

  5. CHAPTER ONE “True Christian Philanthropy”; or, a Release from the “Prison-House” of Marriage: Fictional Representations of Feminist Activism in the 1870s
    CHAPTER ONE “True Christian Philanthropy”; or, a Release from the “Prison-House” of Marriage: Fictional Representations of Feminist Activism in the 1870s (pp. 17-63)

    A piece in one of the early volumes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s journal, The Revolution, quotes a passage from a book by Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson:¹

    There is an extremely beautiful fairy tale, exquisitely handled by our Poet Laureate, of a sleeping princess awakened by a true lover’s kiss. The story is thus far true in its suggestions, that warm and reciprocated love throws a superlative charm into the life of man or woman; but it is false if it suggests that woman has no duties or responsibilities of weight anterior to wedlock, and no subsequent...

  6. CHAPTER TWO Expanding the Vision of Feminist Activism: Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Hamlin Garland’s A Spoil of Office
    CHAPTER TWO Expanding the Vision of Feminist Activism: Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Hamlin Garland’s A Spoil of Office (pp. 64-102)

    In her book of essays, A Voice from the South (1892), the African American activist Anna Julia Cooper criticizes the racial bias of the woman’s rights movement and challenges it to see beyond the increasingly narrow agenda of woman suffrage:¹

    The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class,—it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity. Now unless we are greatly mistaken the Reform of our day, known as the Woman’s Movement, is essentially such an embodiment, if its pioneers could only realize it, of...

  7. CHAPTER THREE Making It New: Middlebrow Literary Culture and Twentieth-Century Suffrage Fiction
    CHAPTER THREE Making It New: Middlebrow Literary Culture and Twentieth-Century Suffrage Fiction (pp. 103-167)

    When Harriot Stanton Blatch returned to the United States from England in 1902, she found her fellow suffragists mired in “the doldrums,” a self-described stagnation that had stymied the movement since the mid-1890s.¹ According to Blatch’s memoirs,

    The suffrage movement was completely in a rut in New York State at the opening of the twentieth century. It bored its adherents and repelled its opponents. Most of the ammunition was being wasted on its supporters in private drawing rooms and in public halls where friends, drummed up and harried by the ardent, listlessly heard the same old arguments. Unswerving adherence to...

  8. CHAPTER FOUR The Political Is Personal: What Henry James’s The Bostonians Can Teach Feminist Activists
    CHAPTER FOUR The Political Is Personal: What Henry James’s The Bostonians Can Teach Feminist Activists (pp. 168-188)

    Any study about American fiction devoted to feminist activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must necessarily consider Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians. It is, after all, the only canonical text from the nineteenth century whose central heroines are woman’s rights activists. For that reason, it has for years seemed anomalous not only in James’s oeuvre, but in American literature in general.¹ Nevertheless, at the time James wrote to his editor, J. R. Osgood, to describe his plans for the novel, the author thought his topic exemplary rather than unique:

    The subject is good and strong, with a...

  9. Coda
    Coda (pp. 189-198)

    In considering the role that fiction played in creating and sustaining the first wave of feminist activism in America, it seems appropriate to return to Oreola Williams Haskell’s short story, “Tenements and Teacups,” because in many ways, it encapsulates the optimism of feminist activist fiction written between the years 1870 and 1920. The members of the “Squad” exhibit an unequivocal belief in the rightness of their cause and its potential for changing the world, and they gain strength from belonging to a community of like-minded reformers. It is also clear that the author firmly believes that storytelling plays a pivotal...

  10. Notes
    Notes (pp. 199-210)
  11. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 211-222)
  12. Index
    Index (pp. 223-231)
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