Mainstreaming Feminist Media

"Oh, I'm wicked but do take fiendish delight in offering 'Votes for Women' to the clergy. . . . But the looks of some are blacker than their clothes," confessed suffrage newspaper seller Jessie Anthony in her 21 July 1911 diary entry. Her comment revels in the subversive side of advocacy journalism and, for the editors of Treacherous Texts, offers a glimpse into a world where text-based media offered women a space to move seamlessly between the boundaries of public and private. One of among more than sixty selections of writing from a range of genres that include literature and ephemera, Anthony's "Diary of a Newsy" is one of my favorite examples of the many voices of the U.S. women's suffrage movement collected by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills. A more theoretical approach informs Feminist Media History. Instead of reproducing a variety of primary texts, Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Leila Ryan offer the reader new approaches to writing a feminist history of the media. The feminist press and literature remains understood in both accounts much as Anthony once did: a revolutionary medium for and by women.

These attempts to mainstream alternative media take seriously the project of understanding feminist texts as crucial in constituting the stuff of politics and public discourse. What both books share is an underlying assumption that current scholarship has marginalized women's voices in contemporary media studies, in the case of Feminist Media History, and in U.S. political history, in the case of Treacherous Texts. Defined as "feminist interpretations of early forms of media and institutions, be they feminist or not," feminist media history, according to the authors of Feminist Media History, "has much to offer media history more generally"(7). The focus on a diverse range of texts to chronicle the women's suffrage campaign positions literature, broadly defined, as a superior form of persuasion. By telling this story through both famous and less familiar voices Treacherous Texts aims "to trace the development of a heretofore neglected tradition of intersecting activism and art" adapted "to changing political and social realities" (6).

Making the case for the relevance of one's subfield to larger historical forces and academic trends is nothing new. This is worth considering in the case of feminist writing in modern periodical studies, a subfield that has grown in recent years. What makes these texts important to researchers beyond those working as feminist and social movement scholars? For the authors of Feminist Media History, engaging with feminist texts furthers the project of disrupting an accepted historical narrative by "reconfiguring the 'generalizations' of history" (8, 13). In Treacherous Texts, suffrage writing looked to persuade while experimenting with "a range of aesthetics" that made the movement visible, diverse, and relevant beyond a small circle of fervent supporters. Bringing these texts and interpretations into a broader frame requires making the case for their relevance in a more global sense. At the same time, as both books recognize, the work of recovery and analysis of texts so long hidden from history continues. Quoting Jessie Boucherett in the book's concluding sentence, the authors of Feminist Media History insistently remind readers of "the work we have to do" (200). While certainly not mutually exclusive, these dual tasks of relevance and recovery persist and can, at times, overburden feminist scholarship.

Treacherous Texts appeals most to the teaching side of scholarship. Though, disappointingly, it is priced at seventy dollars, making it difficult to assign in an undergraduate course with multiple required texts. It includes a chronology of the women's suffrage campaign in the United States, short introductory sections on the history of the movement, and readable excerpts from texts dating from 1846 to 1946. The collection begins with a section entitled "Declaring Sentiments" and includes selections from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Illustrations...