"The Best and Strongest Argument for Woman Suffrage": Miriam Michelson's Newspaperwomen and Progressive Era Periodical Culture

Recent research by literary scholars such as Mary Chapman, Angela Mills, and Leslie Petty has broadened our understanding of the suffrage movement beyond the polemics of first-wave orators, demonstrating that a range of writers, from experimental modernists to middlebrow moderns, helped women get the vote. This paper contributes to ongoing attempts to expand the canon of suffrage literature by taking as its case study an overlooked figure, journalist and fiction writer Miriam Michelson (1870-1942). Considering Michelson’s coverage of women’s conventions, such as the 1895 Woman’s Congress of the Pacific Coast, for the San Francisco Call alongside short stories that she published in the Saturday Evening Post and other mass circulation magazines, we explore how women writers mobilized Progressive-era print culture to advocate rights for women and to expand their participation in the public sphere. While Michelson’s oeuvre offers a colorful panoply of New Women characters, from suffragettes and female criminals to Hawaiian princesses and Amazonian goddesses, we contend that the figure of the newspaperwoman—whether rendered in the journalistic persona Michelson assumed for her first-person reportage or in the fictional “girl-reporter” Rhoda Massey, heroine of her 1905 Yellow Journalist series—served as the writer’s “best and strongest argument for woman suffrage.” Examining Michelson’s use of different forms of print (the daily newspaper and the mass circulation magazine) as well as different genres (journalism and serial fiction), we show that periodical culture remains a rich and still un-mined site for interdisciplinary feminist scholarship in literature and women’s history.