Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 ed. by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills (review)

In her preface to the woman’s rights novel Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? (1892), Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared, “As the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons and the facts of science, I hail with pleasure all such attempts [at writing suffrage fiction] by the young writers of our day” (vi). Indeed, many such attempts were made by American writers, eager to chronicle the wrongs done to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women, but most of these have been lost to history until now. Mary Chapman and Angela Mills, the editors of Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946, have gathered an impressive array of texts written about or because of the fight for woman suffrage, one that goes well beyond speeches by Stanton and others that we usually associate with it. While a few of the speeches are here, more notable are the literary works such as novels, short stories, poems, and plays, not to mention the humorous and sensational newspaper columns, the memoirs, and the graphic texts such as cartoons, banners, and even a valentine. Spanning about a hundred years, this diverse collection “chronicles the shifting [textual] strategies of suffragists determined to have a ‘say’ in the public sphere” (5).

Chapman and Mills describe Treacherous Texts as both a “scholarly intervention” and a “classroom resource,” and those scholars interested in American women writers and gender studies will certainly appreciate the editors’ extensive recovery work (5). Beginning with a “Petition for Woman’s Rights,” which predates the Seneca Falls Convention, and ending with Gertrude Stein’s libretto about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All, the volume gives researchers access to a plethora of (often previously out-of-print) documents that “trace the development of a heretofore neglected tradition of intersecting activism and art” (6). The editors have arranged the documents chronologically into four sections, each with a brief introductory essay that provides historical and aesthetic context. There is very little that is original in these introductions, but they are excellent summaries of existing scholarship—clear, concise but thorough, and accessible for students or others new to suffrage history and literature. Assigning these essays alongside selections from the anthology would be an excellent strategy in the undergraduate classroom.

Treacherous Texts is predicated on the editors’ belief that many suffrage texts, far from being mere propaganda, are aesthetically rich and rhetorically sophisticated. Ultimately, Chapman and Mills hope not merely to recover lost works but to convince readers of their creative value by situating them within their aesthetic (and not just historical) milieu. “Part I: Declaring Sentiments, 1846–1891,” for example, includes excerpts from novels such as Laura J. Curtis Bullard’s Christine, or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856) and Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life, or Lord and Master (1874). These demonstrate how mid-nineteenth-century activist authors tapped into contemporary literary modes such sentimentalism and sensationalism, harnessing these traditions in inventive ways to sway readers while entertaining them. Vernacular poems by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and frontier humor by Marietta Holley further demonstrate the intersection of activism and popular genres early in the movement. “Part III: Making Woman New! 1897–1920” makes an even stronger case for the aesthetic prowess of suffrage authors, illuminating how they engaged in the stylistic experimentation and formal innovation that we most often associate with “serious” writers like Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot.

In fact, one of the anthology’s real strengths is how it juxtaposes authors we consider “high modernists” (such as Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, to name a few) with those better known for writing more popular “women’s fiction” (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Fanny Fern, and Edna Ferber), placing all of these well-known names alongside women...