Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism by Mary Chapman (review)

Making Noise, Making News traces the connections between U.S. Progressive Era woman suffrage campaigns and modernist literary experimentation, brilliantly demonstrating the intersections between suffrage and modernism, aesthetics and politics, voice and print. Impeccably researched and lucidly argued, the book challenges scholars to revisit the “deep affinities” (223) between strategies of expression in suffrage campaigns and the literary avant-garde, affinities that were likely obvious to writers, speakers, and activists before the “great divide” of the 1930s between high and mass culture severed our sense of their shared history and foreclosed the kinds of richly comparative readings Chapman offers here (87, 223). For example, chapter 1, “Seditious Organs,” examines suffragists’ use of noise makers such as the hurdy-gurdy and bold lettering on news bags carried in the street (“votes for women”) alongside the “noisy” experiments in literary style and typography in little magazines like Wyndham Lewis’s blast. In the third and fourth chapters, Chapman contrasts the writing of Alice Duer Miller and Marianne Moore, bringing Miller’s “doggerel” into conversation with high modernist citational poetics. Miller’s closed form verse for her popular poetry column in the New York Tribune parodied the male literary tradition while ironically ventriloquizing anti-suffrage arguments, anticipating the “quoting poem” and citationality of much high modernist poetry, such as The Waste Land. Chapman then goes on to question assumptions about Moore’s supposed lack of political reference in her poetry, rereading her early work in relation to suffrage activities documented in recently unearthed archival documents such as Moore’s unsigned suffrage propaganda.

Like the work of several of the writers she examines, then, Chapman’s book is a collage of voices, traditions, forms, and styles: Gertrude Stein’s libretto for The Mother of Us All over here, the “silent sentinels” of suffrage street demonstrations over there. In this corner Henry James’s grumpy pronouncements about the shrieks and dissonance of mass print culture; in that corner the quietly challenging short fiction and journalism of Chinese North American writer Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, who brought her knowledge of China’s growing feminist movement to her critique of mainstream U.S. feminism’s individualist bias and nativist blind spots. All are brought into dialogue by the book’s central theme of sonic modernity and its primary trope, that of “voice.” To her credit, Chapman doesn’t try to pit the sonic over and against the visual in some kind of battle of the senses as so often happens in sound studies. Instead, suffrage modernism emerges as a heterogeneous phenomenon in which strategies of vocalization, noise-making, talk, and silence traveled freely across a range of both print and acoustic forms and genres. Print forms like the serial suffrage novel The Sturdy Oak (1917), a compilation of contributions by fourteen popular male and female writers, borrowed the power of dialogue between voiced interlocutors. Meanwhile, typically vocalic forms like the street demonstration invited a growing feminist public into silent acts of reading through suffragists’ unvoiced display of placards and banners. Voice thus emerges powerfully in its many senses: as materially acoustic, embodied, and historically salient—as voice with no quotation marks—but also as hallmark of literary style and metaphor of democratic self expression and empowerment.

Chapter 2, “Voiceless Speech,” is in my opinion the strongest in the book. Chapman shows how suffragists brilliantly responded to proscriptions and legal injunctions against the noise and nuisance they created in public (described in chapter 1), by performing acts of “stylized silence.” For instance, suffragists appropriated the polite drawing-room tradition of the silent female tableau, popular throughout the nineteenth century as an appropriate form of expression for women. Rather than reading this as a conservative concession to the ideal of the silent suffering woman, Chapman regards this and other such strategies as an implicit rejection of the male-dominated tradition of the single-voiced platform orator. Along with other scholars of...