Literary Suffrage: Experiments in Taking Literature Public

Students in Dr. Jen McDaneld's Fall English 391 course (Suffrage Literature and the Long Nineteenth Amendment) developed public-facing projects that explored a range of suffrage literature and its engagement with the public sphere of its era. Only recently recognized as a genre, suffrage literature has been dogged by twin questions: first, is it good literature? And second, is it good feminism? Across the semester students developed responses to these questions as they simultaneously explored how suffragists used creative forms of representation to engage with the contradictory politics of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. From the creation of exhibits to be featured at the St. John's library, to the development of a website devoted to suffrage periodical culture, to interactive poster campaigns that ask participants to examine the genre of suffrage cartoons, these projects reveal the important role literature can play in shaping public stories about suffrage on the eve of the centennial.