Mass Appeal(s): Representations of Women’s Public Speech in Suffrage Literature

Abstract

Abstract: This article considers the emergence of women into the public sphere during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries via portrayals of women’s public speech in three literary texts associated with the suffrage movement—Laura J. Curtis’s Christine: Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856), Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907), and The Sturdy Oak: A Composite Novel of American Politics (1917), edited by Elizabeth Jordan. All three novels depict members of the suffrage movement negotiating tensions between private and public, speaker and audience, leader and led, and individual and crowd or collective. Read together, the novels register a transition from an early focus on the female public speaker as an individual set apart from the crowd—and thus as a single, authoritative voice—to an increasing interest in the dynamics of an integrated relationship between speaker and crowd, which ultimately results in the development of a more democratically informed conceptualization of political action and appeal. In this way, the novels offer valuable insight into women’s growing understanding, during the period, of what it means to organize a mass movement and, in a more general sense, to participate in public space.