| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870–1920. By Leslie Petty. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. viii, 231 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2858-4.)
Romancing the Vote is a study of feminine activism as expressed in literature, written between the Gilded Age and the early twentieth century. Leslie Petty refers to this literature as "suffrage fiction" (p. 103). Petty begins her fascinating study with a quotation from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's 1869 journal, The Revolution: a reminder to their readers of the importance of female education. The two sought a larger audience for their suffrage movement and reached out to female fiction writers for help. They called for more realistic women's literature as a way to move women readers away from the sentimental romances that reinforced perceived gender roles.	1
Through numerous examples, Petty shows how traditional domestic novels changed to reflect the New Woman. They created a distinctly new literature that portrayed educated, activist women in dynamic roles, women whose vision had broadened from the private to the public sphere. That new literature helped create a universal appeal for both women's rights and other reforms associated with women. It seems implicit in Petty's argument that this literature influenced voters and changed the course of history. Certainly by the early twentieth century, Petty thinks it had.	. . .

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