Free article from Canadian Review of American Studies

 

 

UTPJournals Focus

 

Included in the free articles for October 24-30, 2012  

Canadian Review of American Studies 36.1 “‘Eighty Years and More: Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment” by Mary Chapma and Angela Mills

Abstract: ‘‘Eighty Years and More – Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment’’ is the introduction to a special issue on American Woman Suffrage timed to coincide with the eighty-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The anniversary invites us to raise questions about memory and memorialization, about which stories about suffrage endure (such as Susan B. Anthony’s primacy in the campaign) and which figures and activities have been excluded from myth-making chronicles like the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. As an overview of the collection, the introduction outlines both the impetuses for and the implications of dismantling traditional narratives of suffrage and refiguring the campaign as a multilayered, multifaceted phenomenon, functioning on many fronts and involving many figures whose efforts have been hidden from history. The special issue as a whole works to challenge old orthodoxies about the suffrage campaign by re-evaluating the contributions of figures like New York author–activist Lillie Devereux Blake and Wyoming justice of the peace Esther Morris and by reconsider­ing the rhetorical work performed by the creative tactics that characterized the campaign, including oratory, literature, and stereotyping. Reviews of three recent works of scholarship on American suffrage remind us of the persistent interest in interrogating the historiography of suffrage and of the continued need for research that furthers the goals of re-evaluation.