Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930 Cindy Koenig Richards Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930. By Wendy B. Sharer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004; pp xiv + 218. $30.00. Throughout the history of the United States, women have pursued full citizenship in the political sphere. Contrary to popular perceptions that advocacy for U.S. women’s rights can be accounted for in terms of two waves—a first wave of suffrage activism that culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment, and a second wave of feminist advocacy that crashed with the defeat of an Equal Rights Amendment—scholars are finding that women’s participation in reform discourse spans historical eras and rhetorical situations. In Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930, Wendy B. Sharer reveals that in the decade following the achievement of the Nineteenth Amendment—an era too often characterized as a period of still water between two “waves” of activism—large groups of women used extensive communicative practices to create pressure for public change. Focusing on the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the League of Women Voters (LWV), Sharer illuminates rhetorical tactics through which U.S. women, after they achieved official recognition as voters, entered into and challenged existing structures of political discourse. This contribution alone is an important one, but for readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Sharer’s work offers more than a historical corrective. Vote and Voice provides insight into persuasive practices that sustain movements in [End Page 164] unfavorable times, that gradually cultivate the positive reception of reform arguments, and that promote civic engagement. By analyzing forms of “political literacy” employed by members of the WILPF and the LWV as they sought to alter restrictive practices of political communication in the United States and abroad, Sharer develops a framework for “understanding how groups of people collaborate in order to challenge configurations of power perpetuated through existing traditions of reading, writing, and speaking” (162). Conceptualizing literacy not merely as the ability to read and write, but as “the rhetorical savvy to participate actively in larger, more complex processes of information access and use,” Vote and Voice illuminates the faculty to observe in any case the available means of persuasion (9). Sharer’s work explicates political literacy as a compelling rhetorical practice; her study achieves this in part because it looks beyond the kind of symbolic act upon which rhetorical critics traditionally focus—that is, a singular text produced by an individual author—to examine a myriad of collective productions. To understand the goals and discursive practices of the WILPF and the LWV, Vote and Voice analyzes objects that include but are not limited to theatrical productions, study kits and curricula, alternative classrooms, and organizational publications. Drawing on a manifold collection of artifacts, Sharer begins by outlining a broad history of politically literate practices among U.S. women’s organizations—from benevolent societies to suffrage associations—prior to 1920. As chapter 1 outlines the discursive characteristics of these antecedent organizations, it links their rhetorical traditions to the practices of the WILPF and the LWV. Chapters 2 and 4 discuss the goals of the WILPF and the LWV, which were broadly similar: to make women citizens and their concerns heard in the public realm, and to transform restrictive conventions of political communication. Both groups were significant for their challenges to the traditional functioning of politics, and for the collaborative persuasive activities they enacted to mobilize support for their reforms. “To correct what they saw as fundamental flaws in the traditional methods of political communication—flaws that led to militant nationalism, antagonistic display, and violence,” members of the WILPF worked to engage citizens, from elementary schoolchildren to high-level diplomats, in the study and discussion of international matters (36). Chapter 3 analyzes a variety of politically literate practices—such as educational initiatives, artistic productions, and the strategic deployment of messengers and texts—through which the WILPF involved citizens in discussions of pacifism. As these rhetorical tactics incorporated women’s voices into public discourse about diplomatic issues, they also imparted a model of new internationalism that valorized collaboration and negotiation...