Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing by Sari Edelstein, and: Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U. S. Modernism by Mary Chapman (review)

Two engrossing new books significantly change the way we understand the history of women’s participation in the public sphere by tracking women’s textual production in relation to the news and media industry, from which they were largely excluded. Covering complementary consecutive time periods, Sari Edelstein’s Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing and Mary Chapman’s Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U. S. Modernism chart women’s use of traditionally feminine modes—the novel in Edelstein’s study and tropes of feminine voice such as silence, feminine “influence,” and ventriloquism in Chapman’s study—which they retooled to critique the politics of exclusion and to forge women’s participatory ethics. Both books argue that the news media was an important interlocutor and shaper of women’s written forays into the public sphere. In Edelstein’s long nineteenth century, it is the antagonist driving women to textual counterproductions in the form of novelistic experiments. In the tactics of twentieth-century suffragism chronicled by Chapman, news and media print culture becomes an essential tool, allowing women to embrace new—and immanently modern—modes of discourse that register their voices in public ways. Both books thus insist that women’s relation to the news and their attempts to gain a public platform shaped aesthetics as well as politics. Edelstein reveals the hitherto obscured politics of the novel, while Chapman illuminates the aesthetics of suffrage politics, which contrary to theories of the great divide between high and low modernism, energized modernist experiments with voice.

Edelstein’s Between the Novel and the News entirely reboots our sense of how and why American women’s writing emerged. With verve and wit, Edelstein argues that women’s writing did not arise from cultural concerns centered on their roles in the private sphere but rather as a reaction to their exclusion from the public sphere of debate and critical engagement, which in the nineteenth century, came to be centered in the news industry. This fresh new view reveals that the social consciousness, ethical critique, and gendered strategies long associated with women writers did not emerge out of the sweet generosities of hearth and home but rather out of protest over exclusion from public discourse, outrage over the representational politics of the media, and a staunch gendered critique of rationalist, empirical modes of inquiry styled as “objective” and “universal” by the news industry.

Edelstein’s cover illustration, taken from the serialized run of E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand; or, Capitola the Madcap (1859) in the New York Ledger, wittily captures Edelstein’s premise. An affluent man and woman sit in reading chairs on opposite sides of a parlor table, the man reading the paper, the woman absorbed in a book. Edelstein transmutes our sense of the separate reading and literary cultures we think we see here. Rather than assume that the woman recedes into a “private” realm by sinking into a novel while the man keeps an eye on public events, we must understand the novel and the news as competing modes of public engagement. Edelstein reminds us that the news began as penny dreadful stories that investigated sexual scandal and reified women’s bodies with the male investigative gaze. In the cover image, the man peeps over his paper at the woman. The woman’s layered skirts visually echo the sheets of the man’s paper, suggestive of the way the paper constitutes women’s bodies according to male-dominated modes of reading and evocative of Edelstein’s brilliant readings of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s...