Scissors, Paste and Social Change: the Rhetoric of Scrapbooks of Women’S Organizations, 1875-1930
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SCISSORS, PASTE AND SOCIAL CHANGE: THE RHETORIC OF SCRAPBOOKS OF WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS, 1875-1930 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Amy L. Mecklenburg-Faenger, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2007 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Nan Johnson, Adviser Professor James Fredal Adviser Professor Kay Halasek English Graduate Program Copyright by Amy L. Mecklenburg-Faenger 2007 ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars in rhetoric and composition studies have focused increasingly more attention on “everyday” rhetorical practices, particularly those of marginalized groups, as well as the alternative educational sites where such practices are taught and learned. Feminist historians such as Anne Ruggles Gere, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Wendy Sharer argue that women’s organizations functioned as significant sites of rhetorical education for women throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era in which women were denied access to higher education and public spheres of rhetorical activity. In “Scissors, Paste and Social Change: the Rhetoric of Scrapbooks of Women’s Organizations, 1875-1930,” I extend the focus on women’s organizations as educational spaces by examining the scrapbooks compiled by Progressive Era women in literary and social clubs and reform organizations like temperance and suffrage. I argue that progressive-era women appropriated the gendered genre of the scrapbook to compose vernacular histories of women’s reform efforts that situated women within a larger narrative of citizenship and national progress. Furthermore, I argue that scrapbooks served as sources of invention and self-education, similar in function to commonplace books, even though gendered perceptions of both genres typically assigns commonplace books to public rhetorical pursuits and scrapbooks ii to private domestic hobbies. Finally, I argue that women in progressive era clubs and organizations developed their own arrangement strategies, such as appropriation, juxtaposition, layering and collage, to represent the complexity of their experiences. While scrapbooks have received limited scholarly attention from scholars such as Patricia Buckler, Susan Tucker and Todd S. Gernes, the focus of existing studies has largely been on the autobiographical qualities of individual scrapbooks, which are often characterized as private, idiosyncratic documents, allowing “silent women to speak.” However, I argue that the scrapbooks compiled by women’s organizations were collective productions of articulate women who intentionally composed scrapbooks for public audiences. In the context of progressive era women’s organizations, scrapbooks constitute a fully public rhetorical practice, one which clubwomen developed for themselves and valued highly. iii This dissertation is dedicated to my Mother, Grandmother and Great-Grandmother, who taught me how to be a strong, smart, and independent woman, and to all the women in progressive-era clubs and organizations who knew their work was historically important and left me the records to prove it. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my adviser, Nan Johnson, for the untiring support, advice, and encouragement that made this project possible. I am also grateful to James Fredal and Kay Halasek for the excellent advice and feedback they gave on successive drafts of this dissertation. I also wish to thank the archivists at the Library of Congress, The Women’s History Resource Center at the GFWC, Western Historical Manuscript Collection in Kansas City, The Ohioana Library, The Ohio Historical Society, The Iowa Women’s Archives at Iowa State University, and The Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University for their help in locating materials. Finally, I wish to thank my husband Chris whose unflagging optimism and faith sustained me throughout this project. v VITA July 22, 1974…………………………Born – Chillicothe, Missouri 2001………………………………….M.A. English, University of Missouri - Kansas City 2002-2007……………………………Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University 2006-2007…………………………….Writing Across the Curriculum Consultant Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing The Ohio State University 2005-2006…………………………….Graduate Administrative Associate Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies The Ohio State University 2004-2005…………………………….Writing Program Administrator First-Year Writing Program The Ohio State University 2003-2004…………………………….Outreach Consultant Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. Mecklenburg-Faenger, Amy and Wendy E. Wolters. “Meeting the Pedagogical Challenge of Familiar Images: Teaching Familial and National Gazes” Instructor’s Manual for Rhetorical Visions: Writing and Reading in a Visual Culture. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2007. 2. Mecklenburg-Faenger, Amy, Assistant Editor. Rhetorical Visions: Writing and Reading in a Visual Culture . New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2006. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication.......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments................................................................................................................v Vita..................................................................................................................................... vi Chapters: Introduction: Living Scrapbooks and Everyday Rhetorical Practices ................................1 1. Efemmera: The Gendered Construction of Scrapbooks in the Progressive Era and the Present.................................................................................................34 2. The Map and the Compass: Composing Histories of the Nation and Women’s Activism ................................................................................................76 3. Making Sense with (of) Scrapbooks: Invention and Rhetorical Education.........113 4. Scrapbooks, Faithbooks, Crapbooks, and Other Sundry Albums: Scrapbooking and Contemporary Culture ...........................................................152 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................194 vii INTRODUCTION LIVING SCRAPBOOKS AND EVERYDAY RHETORICAL PRACTICES Our life is a living Scrap-book. Clipped from the scroll of time and pasted in by the hand of Fate, every day brings its contributions, and the leaves accumulate until the book is filled…Here a gleam of Poetry, there a long dreary stretch of Prose, now the Tragedy of an accident…then a ripple of Fun, a dash of Sentiment, a thrill of Joy, a pang of Grief. These are the scraps that make up our Books; it is the record of us all. We are all Scrap- books; and happy is he who has his pages systematized, whose clippings have been culled from sources of truth and purity, and who has them firmly Pasted into his Book. E.W. Gurley, Scrapbooks and How to Make Them (1880) Tracking everyday writing, like following people we have not previously noticed, is accepting an invitation to watch how cultures are made, remade, and finally ensconced in memory, the miscellaneous space for writing that teaches us to ourselves. (13) Susan Miller, Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing (1998) In a how-to manual on scrapbook making published in 1880, E.W. Gurley 1 conferred a great deal of value on a scrapbook by suggesting somewhat playfully that “we are all scrapbooks;” our life stories are a series of events that are selected, clipped, and pasted firmly into our memories. Gurley’s fifty-six page how-to manual was a comprehensive guide to keeping scrapbooks of all types, purporting to contain “full 1 Further information on Gurley has proven elusive. The text itself offers no concrete clues as to the writer’s identity, though he/she does report having worked (perhaps as a journalist?) for an unidentified Minnesota newspaer. Gurley does not tuen up in biogrpahical dtatbases, and searched of hsitorical newspaper databases only return reviews or advertisements for the book which do not list Gurley’s full name. Several scholars refer to Gurley as “she” though it is posible they simply assume feminine gender because scrapbooks were associated with women. Women writers in the nineteenth cnetury often used intials rather than their full name to conceal their gender, so it is possible that Gurley is female. However, men, such as Mark Twain, also kept and wrote about scrapbooks in the nineteenth century. 1 instructions for making a complete and systematic set of useful books” (title page). The little volume prescribed scrapbooking for anyone who reads, suggesting that the farmer and the politician, the teacher and the student, the mother and the child, all have something to gain from carefully selecting and arranging printed scraps for self- education. Scrapbooks are suggested as a remedy for the overabundance of the printed word, a way to save the most interesting or important items printed in popular magazines or newspapers. Gurley argued that scrapbooks can be used to stimulate critical thinking and reading. By carefully selecting and arranging only the most important or relevant items, one could cure “gossipy” reading habits and develop a discriminating