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Contents PROOF PROOF Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgments viii Introduction: The Challenges and Contributions of Feminist Media History 1 Contentious voices 2 Media history as a field 4 Locating feminist media history 7 The early feminist and suffrage press 13 Structure and argument of the book 15 Part I Publics, Social Movements, and Media History Introduction 21 Revisiting debates about the public sphere 22 Publics and counterpublics 25 Publics and social movements 29 The private and the public 31 Suffrage history and social movements 35 Key aspects of contentious collective action 38 Social movement organizations 42 Temporal continuity and cycles of protest 43 Framing 45 Culture and social movements 47 Media and social movements 54 Situating women’s political periodicals in press/media history 57 Research to date 58 The impact of feminist media research 63 New directions 64 The feminist press and alternative media 66 The significance of early feminist media 68 v September 28, 2010 7:46 MAC/DICE Page-v 9780230_241268_01_previii PROOF vi Contents Part II The Case Studies Introduction 73 1 Unity and Dissent: Official Organs of the Suffrage Campaign 76 Maria DiCenzo “Causy papers”: The uses and abuses of official organs 78 The emergence and proliferation of suffrage organs 84 Suffrage and its discontents: Internal conflict 89 Agendas for change: Suffrage organs and the 1910 general election 99 Post election conciliation 116 Conclusion 118 2 The Englishwoman: “Twelve Years of Brilliant Life” 120 Leila Ryan and Maria DiCenzo Languishing in the archive 122 Finding a niche in a crowded print market 125 The Englishwoman: Anatomy of a feminist review 132 Arts and culture in the Englishwoman 139 Women’s movements, suffrage, and war 141 Women, work, and the Englishwoman 150 Conclusion 156 3 Individualism and Introspection: The Framing of Feminism in the Freewoman 159 Lucy Delap Contributors and readers 163 Experimental collective identities 165 Periodical communities 172 Framing: Sexual morality and practices 180 The Freewoman Discussion Circle 184 Conclusion 191 Conclusion 194 Notes 201 Bibliography 213 Index 229 September 28, 2010 7:46 MAC/DICE Page-vi 9780230_241268_01_previii PROOF 1 Unity and Dissent: Official Organs of the Suffrage Campaign Maria DiCenzo Society is grouped by the Press in many ways. It divides it by strange untraceable lines into communities of individuals ...But journalism not only groups society ...it also promotes social action by presenting information or opinion which is the nec- essary basis of action. It serves to link together the members of each group, and enables them to co-operate. (R. A. Scott-James, The Influence of the Press, 1913: 208) The Press of the country, with very few exceptions, contributed largely to our difficulties, by advertising every outrage and by failing almost altogether to report us .... It will be impossible for any future historian to write an adequate account of the Suffrage movement by reference only to the public Press. The censorship was extreme and grotesque. (Helena Swanwick, I Have Been Young, 1935: 221) News is a window on the world .... the news aims to tell us what we want to know, need to know, and should know .... But, like any frame that delineates a world, the news frame may be con- sidered problematic. The view through a window depends upon whether the window is large or small, has many panes or few, whether the glass is opaque or clear, whether the window faces a street or backyard. The unfolding scene also depends upon where one stands ... (Gaye Tuchman 1978: 1) The Women’s Coronation Procession of 17 June 1911 saw an esti- mated 40,000 women suffragists, marching together through the streets of London. Evelyn Sharp described it as “greater ...than any national 76 September 27, 2010 14:17 MAC/DICE Page-76 9780230_241268_05_cha01 PROOF Official Organs: Unity and Dissent 77 assembly of people that a common cause has ever called together,” stressing that “the greatness of it depended not so much upon its num- bers, but rather upon its representative character and its unanimity”: Never before have Militant Suffragists and Constitutional Suffragists, Liberal, Conservative and Socialistic women, Anglicans, Catholics and Nonconformists, rich and poor, leisured women and workers, consented to forget the smaller differences that usually divide them, for the sake of showing that they were at one in demanding that much bigger thing – liberty for half the human race. (Votes for Women, 23 June 1911: 627) The intended impact was predicated on the event as a grand display of unity – a unified front was, after all, crucial to legitimating the cause at the national level. But the reality by 1911 was more complicated, as Sharp’s catalog of participants only serves to underscore. The suf- frage campaign faced a dilemma all too common to social movements before and after it: while a broadly based movement – clear and strong in purpose – was the key to gaining public and government support, social movements are almost invariably complex and divided entities. This was exacerbated in the case of the British campaign by its sheer duration. The splits and conflicts among organizations were played out in print in ways that often go unacknowledged. But the fact that unity and the attempt to suppress internal criticism became such an issue and posed a threat to securing public support must inform how we read the official organs of suffrage organizations which proliferated before and during World War I. Suffrage periodicals played an increasingly strategic role in how rival organizations communicated and managed their differences in terms of both their memberships and the wider public – a public which included sympathizers and opponents alike. The proliferation of official organs after 1907 indicated not just a growing movement, but also a changing and diversified movement. This case study explores how official organs negotiated the tension between the need for a coherent movement and the reality of its factionalism. It offers an overview of the genre of the ‘official organ,’ its emergence and development in the suffrage move- ment, with a particular focus on the links between movement media and the growing divisions and conflicts in the movement after 1907. The final section is devoted to an analysis of a selection of key publi- cations (Votes for Women, the Anti-Suffrage Review, the Common Cause, and the Vote) and their coverage of the January 1910 general election September 27, 2010 14:17 MAC/DICE Page-77 9780230_241268_05_cha01 PROOF 78 The Case Studies to illustrate different approaches to the framing and interpretation of events for a range of readerships. Then, as now, media played an impor- tant role in constructing and communicating competing versions of social and political change. “Causy papers”: The uses and abuses of official organs Expounding the need for independent weekly papers as the means “to correct the suppressions, distortions, exaggerations and inventions of the daily Press,” Christabel Pankhurst claimed: “There is, as there has always been, a certain prejudice against propaganda or ‘causy’ papers” (Suffragette, 17 Apr 1914: 5). Their status in later scholarship would change very little. What I am referring to as official organs have been variously termed: pressure-group periodicals, publications of spe- cial interest groups, special periodicals, campaign journals, and suffrage newspapers. These labels distinguish these publications from general feminist journals or reviews, as well as from commercial magazines and the mainstream or public Press of the day. Official organs, the most obvious example of organizationally based movement media, remain perhaps the most underestimated (in terms of scope and significance) and undervalued of early journalistic gen- res. The dismissive treatment is largely the result of assuming they fulfilled a solely propagandist function or that they represented lit- tle more than newsletters for league activities. Even if editors at the time expressed frustration with the limited space allowed by suffrage periodicals for an in-depth discussion of issues, they remained deter- mined to address a wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural issues. While historians of the movement draw on the official organs as evi- dence, there is often no attempt to foreground the suffrage press and to consider the implications of these sources – as sources – and what they represented at the time in terms of vehicles for competing groups and ideas. So they are often taken at face value without accounting for the strategic functions of movement media, or the fact that publica- tions might operate as sites of struggle within and between movement organizations. Even when they are approached as objects in their own right by media historians, they tend to be considered in generic terms, or as examples of differing ideological tendencies or positions within the larger movement. They are rarely analyzed in relational terms – namely, read in relation to one another and other publications that engaged with them directly. This is all the more surprising when we con- sider how much attention has been paid to the various organizations or September 27, 2010 14:17 MAC/DICE Page-78 9780230_241268_05_cha01 PROOF Official Organs: Unity and Dissent 79 leagues. The conflicting ways in which suffrage organizations framed their positions, appealed to or mobilized supporters, and engaged in forms of collective action not only created the need for specialized media, but they should inform how we understand and use those media now. By their very definition, official organs provide information about the organizations that produce them. But what we recover by examining these documents is only, in part, what the leaders and representatives believed; the ideas and positions expressed in official organs were also (even if only occasionally) what they thought would be expedient or appropriate, given the limits of expression and prevailing attitudes at a given time. Discrepancies between leadership and rank-and-file, or between public statements and privately held views, are often only apparent by means of sources such as diaries, memoirs, correspondence, league minutes, or dissident writings.
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