Mediating Women: Evelyn Sharp and the Modern Media Fictions of Suffrage

Abstract

Among the many influences that suffragist authors drew from their New Woman precursors was an understanding of the central role of print media, particularly periodical culture, in constructing images and ideologies of the modern woman. Just as the New Woman was constructed from ‘foolscap and ink’ within the periodical press, so was the suffragette imaged and imagined within the vibrant periodical culture of the early twentieth century. My focus will be on the media fictions of Evelyn Sharp (1869–1955), a figure who bridges the periods considered by this collection on British women writers and whose long career as an activist, journalist, and fiction writer included contributing as a New Woman author to The Yellow Book, publishing a novel in John Lane’s famous Keynote series of New Woman fictions, and contributing, as a suffragette, short pieces to the paper of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Votes for Women, a paper she eventually edited. The term ‘media fictions’ is meant to indicate not only fictions that appeared in the suffrage papers that circulated in England and elsewhere, but also fictions that were energized through representations of modern media forms and communication technologies. Sharp filled her short suffrage sketches of the Edwardian period with media. Depictions of suffrage papers, street selling, and representations of various modern technologies of communication, or vehicles of communication enhancement, organize the plots of a great number of her suffrage stories. Some of these objects are associated with the modern, such as the typewriter, and others are decidedly more retro, such as the ear-trumpet. Sharp’s media fictions meditate on the association of gender and media and explore the ways in which modern media forms make possible—often inexplicably or by accident—the feminist networks of the suffrage period. In the sense employed by Friedrich Kittler and others, the ‘network’ is explored in relation to its own generative force rather than the actions of individual human agents. Laurel Brake has demonstrated how important this approach can be for studies of the complex interconnections of presses, editors, book-sellers, and reviewers that compose the print cultural networks of modernity. In feminist print culture studies, where discussions of agency are central, the idea of the ‘network’ is often exploited for its metaphoric potential since it connects discussions of friendship communities with discussions of publishing, marketing, and distribution venues. It is this sense that will govern my approach and it is at this intersection of feminist community and the mobilization of media forms and communication technologies that Sharp invests her interest.