Making Noise Making News

WINNER OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS TRIENNIAL BOOK AWARD (2015) WINNER OF  THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN STUDIES BOOK AWARD (2015). FINALIST FOR THE 2014 MODERNIST STUDIES ASSOCIATION BOOK PRIZE!For most people the U.S. suffrage campaign is encapsulated by images of iconic nineteenth-century orators like the tightly coifed Susan B. Anthony or the wimpled Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However as Mary Chapman shows the campaign to secure the vote for U.S. women was also a modern and print-cultural phenomenon waged with humor creativity and style. Making Noise Making News also understands modern suffragist print culture as a demonstrable link between the Progressive Era''s political campaign for a voice in the public sphere and Modernism''s aesthetic efforts to re-imagine literary voice. Chapman charts a relationship between modern suffragist print cultural noise and what literary modernists understood by making it new asserting that the experimental tactics of U.S. suffrage print culture contributed to and even anticipated the formal innovations of U.S. literary modernism. Drawing on little-known archives and featuring over twenty illustrations Making Noise Making News provides startling documentation of Marianne Moore''s closeted career as a suffrage propagandist the persuasive effects of Alice Duer Miller''s popular poetry column Asian-American author Sui Sin Far''s challenge to the racism and classism of modern suffragism and Gertrude Stein''s mid-century acknowledgement of intersections between suffrage discourse and literary modernism.