Many farsighted women writers in nineteenth-century America made thoughtful and sustained use of newspapers and magazines to effect social and political change. “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916 examines these pioneering efforts and demonstrates that American women had a vital presence in the political and intellectual communities of their day.
Women writers and editors of diverse social backgrounds and ethnicities realized very early that the periodical was a powerful tool for education and social reform—it was the only efficient instrument to make themselves and their ideas better known. This collection of critical essays explores American women's engagement with the periodical press and shows their threefold use of the periodical: for social and political advocacy; for the critique of gender roles and social expectations; and for refashioning the periodical as a more inclusive genre that both articulated and obscured such distinctions as class, race, and gender.
Including essays on familiar figures such as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Only Efficient Instrument” also focuses on writings from lesser-known authors, including Native American Zitkala-Sä, Mexican American María Cristina Mena, African American Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and the Lowell factory workers. Covering nearly eighty years of publishing history, from the press censure of the outspoken Angelina Grimké in 1837 to the last issue of Gilman's Forerunner in 1916, this fascinating collection breaks new ground in the study of the women's rights movement in America.
Many farsighted women writers in nineteenth-century America made thoughtful and sustained use of newspapers and magazines to effect social and political change. “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916examines these pioneering efforts and demonstrates that American women had a vital presence in the political and intellectual communities of their day.
Acknowledgments xi American Women Writers and the Periodical: Creating a Constituency, Opening a Dialogue 1(22) Aleta Feinsod Cane Susan Alves SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ADVOCACY Margaret Fullers Tribune Dispatches and the Nineteenth-Century Body Politic 23(22) Annamaria Formichella Elsden Gendering Gilded Age Periodical Professionalism: Reading Harriet Beecher Stowes Hearth and Home Prescriptions for Womens Writing 45(21) Sarah Robbins Parental Guidance: Disciplinary Intimacy and the Rise of Womens Regionalism 66(12) Janet Gebhart Auten Kate Chopin and the Periodical: Revisiting the Re-Vision 78(17) Bonnie James Shaker GENDER ROLES, SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS, AND THE WOMAN WRITER The Heroine of Her Own Story: Subversion of Traditional Periodical Marriage Tropes in the Short Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Forerunner 95(18) Aleta Feinsod Cane Emma Goldman, Mother Earth, and the Little Magazine Impulse in Modern America 113(13) Craig Monk ``An Ardor That Was Human, and a Power That Was Art: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Art of the Periodical 126(23) Michele L. Mock REFASHIONING THE PERIODICAL Lowells Female Factory Workers, Poetic Voice, and the Periodical 149(16) Susan Alves Redefining the Borders of Local Color Fiction: Maria Cristina Menas Short Stories in the Century Magazine 165(14) Amy Doherty Zitkala-Sa and the Commercial Magazine Apparatus 179(23) Charles Hannon ``A Deeper Purpose in the Serialized Novels of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 202(15) Michelle Campbell Toohey Works Cited 217(14) Contributors 231(2) Index 233
