US suffrage literature

doi:10.1017/CHOL9781107001374.018

16 - US suffrage literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012

Mary Chapman

Edited by

Dale M. Bauer

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Mary Chapman: Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
Dale M. Bauer: Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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Summary

On Valentine's Day 1916, US suffragists sent more than 1,000 illustrated rhyming poems to legislators in an effort to court congressional support for a federal woman's suffrage amendment. One, sent to Congressman William Cary (R-Wisconsin) and reprinted in The Suffragist magazine, depicted a woman watering a flower in a pot and was accompanied by a parody of a well-known nursery rhyme (see Fig. 16.1):

Cary, Cary, quite contrary

How does your voting go?

With pork barrel bills

and other ills

And your suffrage vote

so – slow.

Another, sent to Congressman Edward Pou (D-North Carolina) and reproduced in The Suffragist magazine, depicted a chivalrous man presenting flowers to a charming woman; the caption read (see Fig. 16.2):

The rose is red

The violets blue

But VOTES are

Better Mr. Pou

Suffragists were prompted to try this literary stunt because, as the valentine campaign organizer conceded, the “eloquence of the soap box, cart tail, and back of an automobile variety” had little impact on legislators: “We hope that rhymes may influence the politicians where the other forces did not” (“Suffragists Use,” n.p.).

These witty rhyming valentines represent only a fraction of the extensive archive of literary works written in the service of the US suffrage campaign. From the early 1850s, when an organized national women's rights movement emerged, to 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women was ratified, US women writers from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds published hundreds of short stories, novels, poems, plays, essays and conversion narratives in support of woman suffrage.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 326 - 351

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9781107001374.018 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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16 - US suffrage literature

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