Making Noise, Making News Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism

For most people, the U.S. suffrage campaign is encapsulated by images of iconic nineteenth-century orators like the tightly coifed Susan B. Anthony or the wimpled Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, as Mary Chapman shows, the campaign to secure the vote for U.S. women was also a modern and print-cultural phenomenon, waged with humor, creativity, and style.

Making Noise, Making News also understands modern suffragist print culture as a demonstrable link between the Progressive Era's political campaign for a voice in the public sphere and Modernism's aesthetic efforts to re-imagine literary voice. Chapman charts a relationship between modern suffragist print cultural "noise" and what literary modernists understood by "making it new," asserting that the experimental tactics of U.S. suffrage print culture contributed to, and even anticipated, the formal innovations of U.S. literary modernism. Drawing on little-known archives and featuring over twenty illustrations, Making Noise, Making News provides startling documentation of Marianne Moore's closeted career as a suffrage propagandist, the persuasive effects of Alice Duer Miller's popular poetry column, Asian-American author Sui Sin Far's challenge to the racism and classism of modern suffragism, and Gertrude Stein's midcentury acknowledgement of intersections between suffrage discourse and literary modernism.

Mary Chapman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the coeditor of Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature 1846-1946.

Acknowledgments
Chronology of the American Women's Suffrage Campaign
Introduction: Throwing the Voice and Making It New

Chapter 1: "Seditious Organs": The Noise of Modern Suffrage Print Culture
Chapter 2: "Voiceless" Speech: The Silence of Modern Suffrage Print Culture
Chapter 3: "Magpie Habit": Quotation and Ventriloquism in Alice Duer Miller's "Are Women People?"
Chapter 4: Miss Marianne Moore: "Bulldoggy" on Suffrage
Chapter 5: "Straight Talk, and Quick Talk": Conversation as a Politic in Modern Suffrage Fiction
Chapter 6: Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far's "Revolution in Ink": Print Cultural Alternatives to U.S. Suffrage Discourse

Coda: Genealogies of Modernism and Suffrage
Notes
Bibliography
Index