Treacherous Texts: An Anthology of U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946

Treacherous Texts collects more than sixty literary texts written by smart, savvy writers who experimented with genre, aesthetics, humor, and sex appeal in an effort to persuade American readers to support woman suffrage. Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere.

Uncovering startling affinities between popular literature and propaganda, Treacherous Texts samples a rich, decades-long tradition of suffrage literature created by writers from diverse racial, class, and regional backgrounds. Beginning with sentimental fiction and polemic, progressing through modernist and middlebrow experiments, and concluding with post-ratification memoirs and tributes, this anthology showcases lost and neglected fiction, poetry, drama, literary journalism, and autobiography; it also samples innovative print cultural forms devised for the campaign, such as valentines, banners, and cartoons. Featured writers include canonical figures as well as writers popular in their day but, until now, lost to ours.

Includes writings by:
- Sojourner Truth
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- Frederick Douglass
- Fanny Fern
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Djuna Barnes
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Marianne Moore
- Sui Sin Far
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Gertrude Stein
And many others.

Author: Mary Chapman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 06/20/2012
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.37w x 0.93d
ISBN13: 9780813553535
ISBN10: 0813553539
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Political Process | Campaigns & Elections
- Social Science | Women's Studies
- Literary Criticism | American | General

About the Author
Mary Chapman is an associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the coeditor of Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture.

Angela Mills is a former assistant professor of English at Brock University.