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Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction

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Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction ROMANCING THE VOTE: FEMINIST ACTIVISM IN AMERICAN FICTION, 1870-1920 by LESLIE ELLEN PETTY (Under the Direction of Kristin Boudreau and Tricia Lootens) ABSTRACT While women’s cultural and political roles in nineteenth and early twentieth- century America have long been interesting to scholars, this interest has not often included attention to literary representations of women’s public political participation. Accordingly, the central concern of my dissertation is how American fiction written about the woman suffrage and other related movements contributed to the creation and continued viability of these movements. Specifically, I am interested in the ways these novels can be viewed as models of feminist activism and of reform communities and how they, wittingly or not, emulate for readers ways to create similar communities in the real world. The primary texts I discuss are Elizabeth Boynton Harbert’s Out of Her Sphere (1871), Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874), Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Hamlin Garland’s A Spoil of Office (1892), Marjorie Shuler’s One Pedestal – for Rent (1917), The Sturdy Oak (1917), a composite novel edited by Elizabeth Jordan, and Oreola Williams Haskell’s Banner Bearers (1920). I begin with an analysis of two novels written by suffragists in the 1870’s that explore the movement’s key issues and rhetoric in an effort to convince their audiences to support woman’s rights. I then turn to two texts from the 1890’s, Iola Leroy and A Spoil of Office, which expand the literary vision of feminist activism by demonstrating the fluidity among and shared concerns of diverse reform organizations, including the Black Uplift and Populist movements. In the third chapter, I argue that activist authors use formal innovations to account for the complexity of the large, thriving suffrage movement in the 1910’s. In the final chapter, I read The Bostonians as part of a larger body of feminist activist fiction and speculate about the lessons it can teach its reform-minded readership. Throughout, I interweave the three threads of discourse that drive the project: the ways authors appropriate narrative conventions to fictionalize feminist activist heroines, the relationship between this fictional depiction and actual reform activity, and the tradition of feminist activist fiction in American literature of which these individual texts are representative. INDEX WORDS: feminist theory, suffrage, American literature, feminist activism, heterosexual romance plot ROMANCING THE VOTE: FEMINIST ACTIVISM IN AMERICAN FICTION, 1870-1920 by LESLIE ELLEN PETTY B.A., Emory University, 1992 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1995 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2003 © 2003 Leslie Ellen Petty All Rights Reserved ROMANCING THE VOTE: FEMINIST ACTIVISM IN AMERICAN FICTION, 1870-1920 by LESLIE ELLEN PETTY Major Professors: Kristin Boudreau Tricia Lootens Committee: Roxanne Eberle Anne Mallory Barbara McCaskill Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2003 iv DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my sisters, Lisa Garcia-Arrese and Lizette Smith, and to my parents, Monk and Ellen Petty. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Anyone who has written a dissertation understands what a collaborative effort it truly is. It has taken the assistance of many, many people and institutions to write this one, and while it would be impossible for me to thank them all adequately, I am glad I have the opportunity to try. First, I should acknowledge the University of Georgia’s graduate school, for awarding me the Dissertation Completion Assistantship and the Friedman Research Award, both of which made it financially possible not only to finish the dissertation, but to enrich it with archival research. Further funding for my research came from the Carrie Chapman Catt Center at Iowa State University, which awarded me an honorable mention in its 2001 Catt Prize competition for promising research on women and politics. I owe thanks to Robert Bleil, who graciously shared with me the letters he found in the E. G. Jordan Collection at the New York Public Library, and to the library itself, for giving me permission to quote from those letters. I also want to mention the staff and fellow readers at the Huntington, especially Mona Noureldin and Roberto Alvarez, who helped make my visit there productive and enjoyable. As an academic-in-training, I have been blessed with professors who have been both exemplary professional role models and kind, generous mentors. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw at Louisiana State University taught me early in my career how graceful and fulfilling an intellectual life can be. Once I began working on the dissertation, I assembled what I like to call the “coolest committee ever,” which is shorthand for saying that its members -- co-directors Kristin Boudreau and Tricia Lootens, along with Roxanne Eberle, Anne Mallory and Barbara McCaskill -- seem to me the smartest, kindest, most engaging group of scholars (and women) I can imagine. Although she had to resign from the committee, I include Bonnie Dow in this group, and thank her for the invaluable historical and political context about American feminist activism that she taught me. I am especially grateful to my directors, Kris and Tricia, for their patience and their insightful, careful, instructive readings of the many drafts of this dissertation. It is an infinitely better work because of them. I am even more thankful, however, for their encouragement and their friendship. I could not have asked for better major professors. It would be much harder for me to quantify and articulate the ways in which my friends and family have contributed to this dissertation, but the fact remains that without them, it never would have been written. I do not have the space to thank everyone who has listened to me prattle on about the differences between AWSA and NWSA or bought me a drink or a meal to subsidize my graduate student salary. However, I would like to mention particularly those friends who have been my consistent supporters over the years, as well as those who have “closed ranks” and helped me survive these final months of writing: Meg Amstutz, Olivia Edenfield, Elizabeth Edwards, Bob Fernandez, Ellen Lachney, Stephen Miss, Angela Mitchell, Rachel Norwood, Caren Mayer Orum, Steven Price, Robert Reardon, Beth Ann Way, Lance Wilder, Shannon Wilder, Ben Underwood, and Aarti Verma. Most of all, I want to thank my family, especially my sisters, Lisa and Lizette, and my parents, Monk and Ellen. This dissertation is dedicated to them, because they always believed I could finish it, even when I didn’t. (Of course, it is also dedicated to my little Pie, who kept me company while I wrote it.) TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 “TRUE CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY” OR A RELEASE FROM THE “PRISON-HOUSE” OF MARRIAGE: FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMINIST ACTIVISM IN THE 1870’S .......29 2 EXPANDING THE VISION OF FEMINIST ACTIVISM: FRANCES E. W. HARPER’S IOLA LEROY AND HAMLIN GARLAND’S A SPOIL OF OFFICE.......................................................................................................89 3 MAKING IT NEW: INNOVATIONS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY SUFFRAGE FICTION..............................................................................147 4 THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL: WHAT THE BOSTONIANS CAN TEACH FEMINIST ACTIVISTS.............................................................214 CODA ..............................................................................................................................251 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................264 1 INTRODUCTION The first American journal devoted to issues of woman’s rights,1 The Una, was founded by Paulina Wright Davis in February of 1853, just 5 years after the Seneca Falls Convention. In this first issue, an essay entitled “The Truth of Fiction, and Its Charms” suggests some ways in which literature can be of value to the nascent movement: Making no pretensions to, and limited by none of the laws of narrative, truth and historic fact, [fiction] brings the truth of nature – the probable, the possible and the ideal – in their broadest range and utmost capabilities into the service of a favorite principle, and demonstrates its force and beauty, and practicability, in circumstantial details, which like a panorama, presents an image so like an experience that we realize it for all the purposes of knowledge, hope and resolution. (5) According to the author, the imaginative nature of fiction, bound by “none of the laws of narrative, truth and historic fact” makes it the perfect vehicle through which authors can envision a different world that not only reflects the “ideal” of a “favorite principle” but demonstrates the “practicability” of that world; for those concerned with feminist reform, the pages of stories and novels become a space to demonstrate vividly the problems with the current state of society and lets them envision a “possible” world in which those conditions are challenged and transformed.
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