The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930

“In the Public Eye”

In 1889 Frank A. Munsey began the periodical that would become the leader in low-cost, high-profit American monthlies. By 1893 he charged ten cents for Munsey’s Magazine, which included extensive advertisements,heavily illustrated articles on famous public figures and performers, as well as serial fiction and poetry. Borrowing an eye-catcher from lowbrow entertainment, he also initially included halftone images of semi-nude women. Munsey repeatedly offered his readers stories of success obtained through a Horatio Alger–like work ethic. Although he was not considered a progressive reformer, Munsey published a number of stories and articles implicitly endorsing many of the changes associated with the New Woman. Circulation was at 700,000 in 1897, making Munsey’s Magazine the leader in circulation after Ladies’ Home Journal. Advertising revenue totaled between $25,000 and $35,000 a month.1 Mary Elizabeth Lease (1853–1933), renowned for urging economically depressed Kansas farmers to “Raise less corn and more hell,” was a lawyer, women’s rights activist,Populist Party leader,Union Labor Party member,socialist , and Social Darwinist, but she was best known for her fervid denunciations of big-money interests on behalf of the Populist Party in the late 1880s and 1890s. Like many Populists, Lease promoted Prohibition as well as women’s suffrage and political participation, but she drew greater fire in part because of her defiance of conventional gender roles. The anti-Populist press called her a “manwife ,” “demagogess,” and “the people’s party Amazon” and denounced her husband as childlike and effeminate. When Lease returns home from a political tour, the Topeka Daily Capital taunted,“her husband feels like a new woman.”In an interview for Lucifer: The Light-Bearer, a Kansas-based libertarian radical journal devoted to sex reform, Lease justified women’s political participation on the basis that women were essentially purer than men and would elevate politics. R “In the Public Eye” Munsey’s Magazine, Jan. 1897, 457–458. 103 She defined the New Woman as “a potent verity” whose purpose was to “exercise her God assigned mission to enter men’s souls and bring the race to harmony and completeness.”2 Her speeches in the 1890 senatorial campaign helped unseat Kansas Republican senator John J. Ingalls, who had denounced women’s suffrage advocates as “the unsexed of both sexes, the capons and the epicenes of society.” In 1896 Lease joined Pulitzer’s New York World as a political reporter, and by 1900 she had broken with the Populists. The following article was illustrated with a half-page frontal photograph of a serious, imposing Lease seated at a writing desk.3 For further information about Munsey, see the introduction to “Women in Another New Role”in part I. Whether Mrs. Mary E. Lease, the feminine Boanerges of Kansas, is or is not an ideal, she is certainly a type. She is the product of the political and social conditions of a wide and important section of the country. She represents an upheaval which had overturned the politics of several Western States, and which bade fair to sweep over the entire Union. She did more than any one else to overthrow the Republican party in Kansas, where it had been dominant since the war. Her oratory might evoke smiles in the classic halls of Congress, but it is a power upon the prairies. When she first made her pyrotechnic appearance, John James Ingalls sneeringly declared that “women, like the Decalogue, have no place in politics.” She retorted by driving the brilliant Senator into private life, where he has since remained. Mrs. Lease is not a Westerner, or even an American, by birth. She was born in Ireland, and came here as a child with her parents, shortly before the civil war. Her father entered the Union army, and died in the prison pen at Andersonville. Mr. Lease—who may be classed among the“unknown husbands of famous wives”— is a druggist in Wichita, Kansas. He is said to attend strictly to his business of mixing pills and powders, leaving the toils and honors of politics to his aggressive wife. american new woman revisited 104 ...