2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This session on “Women, Politics, and Periodical Culture” investigates how American women readers and writers made strategic use of periodicals during the Progressive Era. Building upon current scholarship on women and print culture, the three papers examine the production and consumption of periodicals, including the ways in which they were repurposed and re-circulated through reading groups and scrapbooks. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, including meeting notes from women’s clubs, popular magazines, daily newspapers, and scrapbooks, this session explores how the rise of mass print culture allowed women to participate in “difficult conversations” about a range of topics, including suffrage. This session asks: what are some of the innovative and understudied ways that women readers and writers used print culture to contribute to national debates and to position themselves as leaders and activists? What new insights and contradictions arise when we consider women’s political and intellectual engagements via popular periodicals rather than through literary classics or more traditional political discourse? This session brings together six interdisciplinary scholars from three countries and at different stages in their professional careers. Mary Chapman, whose recent work on suffrage literature is quickly transforming how scholars approach women and print culture, will chair the session, while historian Mary Kelley, whose work on nineteenth-century American women writers and print culture was foundational to the field of women’s intellectual history, will serve as respondent.

Note: This session includes a co-authored paper by Lori Harrison-Kahan and Karen Skinazi.