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

by Mary Chapman (Editor), Angela Mills (Editor)

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
• 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.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Vicki Seide · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in preparation for a Suffragette Tour I was going to take in June. Sadly, that trip has been cancelled due to COVID-19. I am not sorry to have read this book, however! This is an original source book. It's full of insightful and entertaining shorts written by a wide variety of women authors covering a time period of mid 1800’s to early 1900’s. Honestly, some of the modern introductions to each chapter were a little too academic for my taste, but the original texts were wonderful. A true first hand look at the trials and conditions of the decades leading up to 1920 when women won the right to vote.