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

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First [199] Lines —— 0.00 —— Norm PgEn [199] Notes introduction 1. Although the singular noun “woman” in “woman’s rights” and “woman suffrage” might seem awkward to modern readers, I employ these terms because of their historical accuracy. I also employ them because the choice of the singular noun by nineteenthcentury feminists was strategic, intended to unify women across boundaries of class and race and region by stressing their commonality. Of course, as later historians have noted, the conception of their commonality was narrowed considerably by the white, middleclass perspective of the leaders of reform, and I think this limitation is also important to keep in mind. Nevertheless, while middle-class values were dominant in the movement , they were often internally contested. See Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism for further discussion of this issue. 2. Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879) was an incredibly influential woman in nineteenthcentury America. Although she promoted the idea that women should stay in their domestic sphere, she worked outside the home as the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Journal. In this capacity, she controlled the content of the nation’s most popular women’s magazine, disseminating her views about women’s proper roles. Maria W. Miller Stewart (1803–79) was born to African parents and “bound out” to a clergyman’s family at the age of five. As an adult, she was an abolitionist and essayist, and in 1832 she became the first American woman to address publicly a mixed-gender audience. Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–79) were born to a slaveholder in South Carolina, but as adults they moved to the North, joined the abolitionist movement, and delivered speeches in New York and Massachusetts during the late 1830s. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell observes, “Their lectures were the beginning of major efforts to break the barriers against women speaking in public” (A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric). 3. Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett’s Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction is one of the first and most comprehensive of the critical studies about feminist activism’s relationship to American literature . They look at several ways that women’s political participation influenced American literature, but they dismiss what they call “pro-woman’s rights novels” as “little more than fictionalized didactic tracts” (180) and reduce them summarily to a single thesis: “All agree that the vote, and only the vote, can ensure protection for women” (180). In her book, Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915, Clare Kahane specifically explores the nineteenth-century phenomena of women entering the public arena as speaking subjects. However, The Bostonians 200 notes to pages 2–18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [200] Lines —— 1.28 —— Norm PgEn [200] is the lone example of novels representing feminist activists in her book. Thus, her picture of the fictional incarnation of the speaking woman is incomplete because she omits novels less ambivalent about the value of reform and the positive potential of women’s political intervention. In contrast to Kahane’s book, which offers a psychoanalytic reading, Caroline Levander ’s Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture looks at the social work accomplished by novels that pay attention to women’s voices and how they helped construct and solidify the emerging middle-class culture of the nineteenth century. Levander ultimately argues that depictions of women speaking in public serve a conservative function by devaluing such public performance, a contention that is problematized considerably by the tradition of feminist activist fiction discussed in this book. 4. Davidson and Hatcher are the editors of No More Separate Spheres (2002), a collection of essays that includes many articles from the American Literature issue of the same name and whose goal is to begin this dismantling. Another collection of essays, Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930, edited by Monika M. Elbert, was published two years...