Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism by Mary Chapman (review)

Building upon her groundbreaking anthology Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature 1846–1946 (2011, co-edited with Angela Mills), Mary Chapman provides the first in-depth exploration of U.S. suffrage print culture and American literary modernism. Making Noise, Making News maps, historically and aesthetically, the productive—and until now, overlooked—connections between the activist’s mandate to speak out and the modernist’s dictum to “make it new.” Chapman’s six chapters combine case studies, archival excavation, and culturally historicized close readings—all of which illuminate multiple intersections between suffrage discourse and literary modernism—culminating in a coda on Gertrude Stein’s midcentury opera The Mother of Us All. Chapman deftly and insistently re-reads the work and lives of canonical modernists like Stein and Marianne Moore as steeped in suffrage discourse. She simultaneously elevates, with deserved attention, the lesser-known writings and public interventions of groups like the Progressive Woman Suffrage Union (publisher of American Suffragette) and individuals like Chinese–North American journalist and fiction writer Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far.

In her introduction, Chapman asserts that the modern campaign to win the vote for women in the United States succeeded largely because its participants developed a print culture that was “astonishingly innovative and irresistible” and drew energy from prominent creative writers, professional journalists, and editors who harnessed both middlebrow and avant-garde literary forms and circulated mass print culture materials in periodicals and the public sphere alike (4). She argues that “in both theme and method,” the literary print cultural campaign to extend suffrage to U.S. women was “about the politics of voice: who could speak and for whom” (9). She asserts that the print cultural genres suffrage workers invented or adapted “asserted a much more complicated understanding of voice . . . [that] provide[s] alternative figurations of participation in the public sphere” (19). As such, she points out, suffragists shared common investment with literary modernists, whose experiments in voice embodied similarly multivalent textual forms, including quotation, assemblage, and dialogue.

In her first two chapters, Chapman situates public “print cultural stunts” staged in the 1910s as political strategies by which suffragists tapped into twentieth-century technologies for and signifiers of urban noise while also utilizing nineteenth-century traditions of quiet, womanly influence activated from within the domestic interiors of the parlor (87). Chapter One, “Seditious Organs: The Noise of Modern Suffrage Print Culture,” extends Juan Suarez’s concept of “sonic modernity” to frame early twentieth-century suffrage periodicals and print cultural objects as “both politically modern and aesthetically modernist”(23). Chapman focuses in particular on American Suffragette, revealing how—with its “bold design, brash editorial persona, ‘loud’ advertisements, and militant metaphors,” not to mention the brightly colored bags the “suffrage newsies” used to carry when hawking them on the street—it differed radically from Woman’s Journal and other earlier suffrage periodicals like Woman’s Era and the Lily. Chapman further points out that the “seditious organ’s” editorial approaches, when read in context with the Progressive Woman Suffrage Union’s other noisy public interventions like the use of the hurdy-gurdy, anticipated similarly “loud” tactics adopted by more literary modernist “little magazines” such as Wyndham Lewis’s Blast and complicated the limited vision of the public sphere so famously set forth by Habermas.

Chapter Two reads three types of silent protest employed by suffragists— the staging of tableaux and “voiceless speeches,” along with standing in public with banners conveying slogans and quotations—as stunts that enabled middle- and upper-middle-class white suffragists to use both their bodies and text to deploy silence as a “powerful form of rhetoric” while disrupting commonly held stereotypes about gender and dissent (54). Tableaux attracted media attention from newspapers, which “ventriloquized the suffrage message . . . that suffragists continued to be womanly and maternal while demanding women’s political power” (70). Voiceless speeches, in which (usually attractive) suffrage workers presented a series of boldly lettered placards with sequenced...