Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870-1920 (review)

While anti-slavery and temperance fiction have been recognized as distinct traditions in American reform literature, feminist activism within literature has received far less attention. Other than Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett's Declarations of Independence, no other scholarship has analyzed the cultural work performed by this literary tradition, until Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870–1920. Leslie Petty's compelling study maps out the literary history to which Henry James's The Bostonians belongs, tracing a tradition of American fiction featuring activists organizing for feminist causes, including women's rights, racial uplift, populism, and suffrage. Beginning with analyses of novels published in the decade before The Bostonians and culminating in readings of early twentieth-century suffrage fiction, Romancing the Vote explores the relationships among activism, codes of femininity, romance and community, and literary form.

Inspired by philosopher Ann Ferguson's theory of feminist "oppositional communit[ies]"—"network[s] of actual and imagined others to whom one voluntarily commits oneself in order to empower oneself"—Petty examines stages of feminist politicization. These begin with "existential moment[s]" at which heroines develop "self-consciousness" and culminate in the achievement of "revolutionary love," an affective bond with other activists that is always in tension with heterosexual romance (10).

Chapter One, "'True Christian Philanthropy'; or , a Release from the 'Prison House' of Marriage: Fictional Representations of Feminist Activism in the 1870s," contrasts the sentimental feminism of Elizabeth Harbert's Out of Her Sphere with the more sensational radicalism of Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life. Petty asserts that Harbert likens her activists to those of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, who promote change through womanly influence within a domestic sphere; Blake, on the other hand, compares her urban female characters to slaves who need immediate enfranchisement in order to be liberated from the sensationally violent, criminal, and abusive conditions in which they live.

Chapter Two, "Expanding the Vision of Feminist Activism," examines Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office. Both novels, about racial uplift and western states' populism, recognize women's rights as only one part of a larger campaign for human freedom. Chapter Three, "Making It New: Middlebrow Literary Culture and Twentieth-Century Suffrage Fiction," examines feminist activists in Marjorie Shuler's epistolary novel For Rent—One Pedestal and composite novel The Sturdy Oak, as well as Oreola Haskell's short story cycle Banner Bearers. Applying Ezra Pound's well-known definition of the project of modernism as "making it new," Petty argues that through conscious formal choices, wit, and love of spectacle—all characteristics scholars have associated with the modern—the three texts depict how middlebrow fiction participated in the modernist project.

The oppositional communities in all of these texts are not forged easily, Petty suggests. She argues, sometimes unconvincingly, that Harbert's appeals often extend only to white characters, excluding nonwhites from full political equality, that Blake displaces white anxiety about the aggressive potential of black men onto white, native-born men (49), that Harper's heroine chooses to form an African American oppositional community because white women's racism makes cross-racial identification virtually impossible, and that modern suffrage texts assert progressive reforms while exploiting the popularity of nativist xenophobia.

The final chapter of Romancing the Vote, "The Political is Personal: What Henry James's The Bostonians Can Teach Feminist Activists," acknowledges that the novel provides valuable observations about the challenges of forming feminist oppositional communities, in part through an analysis of a delightful fictional addendum to James's novel by "Henrietta James." The addendum details Verena's divorce, her return to a more selfless Olive, and her remarriage to the newly feminist Henry Burrage.

Petty's study fills a gap in American literary history by noting the recurring figures of activist heroines and the means by which oppositional communities are formed in fiction. Although Petty refers to other literary forms—speeches, essays, periodical literature, letters...