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

Mary Chapman’s Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism is situated at the intersections of gender, print culture, sound, and modernist studies. Chapman reads “voice as the primary trope for suffrage print culture” (11) and examines its various iterations. She notes that the voices of suffrage print culture were “multivocal, collective, anonymous, or pseudonymous” (19); they could be self-contradictory, ironic, parodic, and humorous; and they relied on quotation and ventriloquism via other genres. As such, these voices were “more disaggregated” from the bodies and identities of their speakers than we might imagine oratory or debate voices to be; thus, the “models of . . . voice” generated by suffragists serve as important “alternative figurations of political engagement” (20). Chapman’s study uncovers the relationship between the voices of suffrage print culture and modernist aesthetics and literary experimentation, illuminating suffragists’ contributions to modernist print culture in the early twentieth-century United States up to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

In the first chapter, Chapman attends to “the centrality of the auditory in modern suffragist discourse” (28), and, in particular, suffragists’ strategy of aligning themselves with “both noise and the ‘new’” to establish themselves as “representative ‘voices’ of modern America” (29). Chapman’s innovative and wide-ranging sonic analysis covers noise ordinances; gendered representations of oratory and public spaces such as “finance, government, and male competitive sports” (36); the intersection of mass print culture with such things as the hurdy-gurdy and the barrel organ; and the appearance of suffragist newsies on New York streets in the early twentieth century. Further, Chapman calls our attention to the ways in which typefaces, placards, and newsie bags all became invitations for passersby to “read” the bodies of suffragist newsies (specifically members of the Progressive Women Suffrage Union) as “signs” of the “modern suffrage subject position” (45). Such discourse, Chapman argues, inaugurated not only a distinctly modern US suffrage campaign but also new modes by which women could participate in the public sphere, both literally in the streets and in print culture.

Chapman takes up the issue of “voicelessness” in her examination of silence as a powerful rhetorical strategy in chapter two. She examines tactics women used to avoid censure for inserting themselves into masculine and vocal public spaces; for example, tableaux, “voiceless speeches,” and textual banners carried by “silent sentinels” (56–57). Chapman views such rhetorical gestures as important forms of participation in the public sphere and, indeed, as forms of writing expressing women’s viewpoints and creating a “counterpublic in which to express their political concerns” (57). These rhetorical acts emphasize the body as text; indeed, the tableaux vivants illustrate this idea since tableaux depended on the sentimental notion that “the silent immobile body was a legible and moving text” (65). Suffrage tableaux of important women from history demonstrate how modern suffragists utilized “the radical rhetorical possibilities implicit in traditional femininity while evading proscriptions of women public speakers” (67). In another strategic incorporation of gendered space into their political agenda, suffragists also staged “voiceless speeches” (in which silent women displayed a suffragist speech written in bold letters on a sequence of cards) in places such as shop windows, generally associated with the acceptable feminine activity of shopping. Women picketing with suffragist banners as “silent sentinels” appeared in more masculine spaces, such as in front of the White House. Chapman notes how “the arrests and forcible feeding of pickets turned silent suffragist bodies into melodramatic victims of state brutality,” and the “wasting bodies” of hunger-striking pickets made for particularly dramatic and effective tableaux (84). Chapman convincingly demonstrates how suffragists used women’s bodies as texts to establish women’s “voice” in the public sphere, but then deferred attention to the “silent disembodied texts” of banners and tableaux (84). Through such subversive strategies, women were able to challenge the physical differences that allowed the public to rationalize women’s...