Suffrage literature

Dedicating his life to the welfare of children, Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke (1887-1970) was one of the twentieth century’s most successful charitable fundraisers.  In the last decade of his life, Dr. Clarke began writing his autobiography, “Fifty Years of Begging.”  It exists today only as a scattered and badly fragmented manuscript in various stages of editing.  I have compiled, edited, and commented on “Fifty Years of Begging.”

In this article I examine the portraits of Martha Washington that circulated during the antebellum period. Her image became associated with a form of political womanhood that prized indirect participation in politics instead of the direct political participation that women's rights activists advocated. Washington's portrait and the type of political womanhood it represented dominated American culture during this time period. Martha Washington became the first woman whose portrait appeared on American currency.

Recent studies have begun to examine propaganda as a vital aspect of the suffragette movement in Ireland and England. From such research it is clear that propaganda was at the very heart the suffragette movement’s militant activities. By contrast, the non-militant suffrage campaign received little media attention. This article will show that the radical suffragist, Eva Gore-Booth, recognised the power of the media; an insight which prompted her to launch her own unique propaganda campaign.

Blog post on the Irish Women's Writing (1880-1920) Network Blog on Donegal novelist, short-story writer, and columnist Erminda Rentoul Esler (1860-1924), who was active in many London literary networks of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

News is an extensively researched analysis of the creative activism of the latter years of the U.S. women's suffrage movement. It offers readers an in-depth look at the trope of "voice" as understood and manipulated by suffrage activists and authors as well as a thoughtful analysis of the relationship between the aesthetic techniques employed in twentieth-century suffrage writing and activism and the development of literary modernism. Centered on the primary argument that the modern suffrage campaign was successful in getting the Nineteenth Amendment passed "largely because the print culture that it developed was astonishingly innovative and irresistible" (4), Chapman's study provides a wealth of detailed and carefully contextualized examples of this print culture and examines some of the particular ways it was innovative and often attractive to its consumers. But this is not all the book does. Key to a full appreciation of what proves to be a very rich and rewarding read is, perhaps, to approach it prepared for a significantly broader undertaking than one might anticipate from the book's subtitle.