Modern Print Activism in the United States

Rachel Schreiber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317094623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The explosion of print culture that occurred in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century activated the widespread use of print media to promote social and political activism. Exploring this phenomenon, the essays in Modern Print Activism in the United States focus on specific groups, individuals, and causes that relied on print as a vehicle for activism. They also take up the variety of print forms in which calls for activism have appeared, including fiction, editorials, letters to the editor, graphic satire, and non-periodical media such as pamphlets and calendars. As the contributors show, activists have used print media in a range of ways, not only in expected applications such as calls for boycotts and protests, but also for less expected aims such as the creation of networks among readers and to the legitimization of their causes. At a time when the golden age of print appears to be ending, Modern Print Activism in the United States argues that print activism should be studied as a specifically modernist phenomenon and poses questions related to the efficacy of print as a vehicle for social and political change.

Chapter 1
Print Culture and the Construction of Radical Identity: Juliet H. Severance and the Reform Press in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Joanne E. Passet

For the cause that lacks assistance,

For the wrong that needs resistance,

For the future in the distance

And the good that I can do.

—Juliet H. Severance1

“I am ashamed of professed Liberals,” declared Juliet H. Severance in 1893, who are “so ignorant as not to perceive that this [the Comstock Act] is the club with which the church intends to beat out the brains of the Liberal movement.” Enacted in 1873 to prohibit the sending of obscene material through the mail, the Act was used to prosecute a number of Severance’s friends, among them the sex radical publishers Victoria Woodhull, Moses Harman, and Ezra Heywood, as well as authors Ida Craddock and Lois Waisbrooker. Calling for action, she demanded that readers of a weekly freethought paper, the Truth Seeker, take up their pens to “[a]gitate the subject. … Awaken a public sentiment against it. Write what we please and print it, and send it through the mails to whom we will at any and all costs.”2 They should persist, Severance demanded, even if it meant prosecution and imprisonment. Few followed her advice to the point of risking arrest, but thousands devoured her words in the sex radical and freethought press where such controversial ideas as free love, marital rape, and the sexual double standard could be discussed. With their dissenting ideas validated by print, readers of these publications began envisioning themselves as part of an alternate public sphere, one that fostered a sense of collective power while creating print-based tools they could use to challenge the mainstream and proselytize their cause.

According to historians Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, radical voices reached wider audiences than their advocacy of marginalized causes might suggest. Improved access to education and decreased publishing costs made printed works increasingly affordable, and even radical leaflets and newspapers permeated late nineteenth-century American culture. As an increasingly diverse range of groups—for instance, those identified by race, ethnicity, radical rhetoric, or political positions—advanced their views in print, their messages acquired a degree of legitimacy and, in turn, access to mainstream readers. Anthony Comstock and his agents waged a valiant war against vice, but over time their efforts to maintain cultural hegemony could not withstand the onslaught of divergent viewpoints. Indeed, as cultural historian Paul Boyer notes, “print material once deemed inappropriate was increasingly published by established houses or eager newcomers.”3 As Severance’s reform career illustrates, the persistent championing of socially marginalized ideas—in print and from the podium—contributed to the larger cacophony that shaped the worldview of Progressive-era Americans.

An amalgam of nineteenth-century religious, reform, and third-party political movements, Juliet Severance’s life offers an excellent opportunity to explore how social radicals used print culture to construct identity, build community, and challenge socially and legally sanctioned ideas. As the historian Genevieve McBride argues, many nineteenth-century women “empowered themselves by becoming wise in the ways of power, especially the power of the press.”4 Like most social reformers of the era, Severance never achieved significant wealth, but print culture provided her with an opportunity to establish herself as a physician and as someone who offered a valid social critique and plans for a better world. An outsider by virtue of her marital status and uncompromising advocacy of the rights of chattel, wage, and marital slaves, she became a well-known name nationally among health reformers, Spiritualists, freethinkers, sex radicals, and anarchists.5 The epistolary nature of the many nineteenth-century reform periodicals to which she contributed, among them the Water-Cure Journal, the sex radical Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, the freethought Boston Investigator and Truth Seeker, and the Spiritualist Banner of Light, Religio-Philosophical Journal, and Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, enabled tens of thousands of readers to read and respond to her ideas, thus serving as incubators for social change.

* * *

Print culture played a primary role in transforming Severance from a farmer’s daughter into a physician. Born on a Madison County, New York dairy farm in 1833, Juliet H. Worth was the 13th of 17 children, and her formative years provided a solid foundation for subsequent engagement in social and political reform. As a young girl she learned important lessons about the impact of patriarchal marriage on women by observing her mother and sisters. The farmer’s wife, she explained in a speech that was subsequently published in the agricultural press, was on an “everlasting treadmill of domestic drudgery” and for her efforts owned “nothing, not even herself, her husband or the children.”6 The Worth family’s religious heritage fueled the young girl’s tendency toward nonconformity and her commitment to activism. From her father she absorbed such Hicksite Quaker views as obedience to the inner light and a tendency to question authority. In The Quakers in America, historian Thomas D. Hamm explains that followers of Elias Hicks often adopted ultraist, or extreme, positions and could be found within the antislavery, women’s rights, and nonresistance movements. From her mother’s Seventh Day Baptist faith, young Juliet learned that women and men are inherently equal and that people had a duty to improve themselves and the world around them. Noted for worshiping on Saturday, the Seventh Day Baptists championed beliefs that provided her with a solid foundation for future participation in the American freethought movement, especially freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.7

The reading of numerous religious, medical, and social reform periodicals, consumed in conjunction with rural newspapers, promoted a reading culture and, according to historian Nicholas Marshall, helped transform rural families like the Worths into “a broad-based potential constituency for the great social movements.”8 In the wake of the countless abolitionists, health and dress reformers, revivalists, temperance advocates, mesmerists, and phrenologists who traveled the “Burned Over District” of upstate New York in the 1830s and 1840s, enthusiastic converts turned to books, newspapers, and periodicals to feed their newfound interests and to find others who shared their convictions. This was possible, in part, because of the antebellum expansion of the postal system and innovations in printing that historian John Tebbel has labeled “the golden age of magazine publication.”9

When 13-year-old Juliet Worth enrolled in the DeRuyter Institute, a school established by the Seventh Day Baptists, she pursued a rigorous curriculum that included Latin, Greek, algebra, botany, and moral philosophy. After a religious revival swept through the Institute in the late 1840s, the birthright Quaker and a number of her classmates converted to the Seventh Day Baptist faith. Eager to put her newfound convictions to work, the zealous student donned the reform dress (a shortened skirt worn with pants) and began giving lectures on temperance, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery to classmates and neighbors. Naturally gifted in the art of oratory, she paid close attention to the style and content of other orators, for instance Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman Speech” delivered at an Akron, Ohio Women’s Rights convention. By the time of her graduation in 1851, Juliet Worth had developed confidence, a questioning mind, a quick tongue, and a strong sense of individual agency unlimited by gender.10

Juliet Worth first learned of hydropathy, a system of healing more commonly known as the water cure, from a local physician who introduced her to the Water-Cure Journal in the 1850s. Like many other subscribers she devoured its pages in search of ways to improve her health and thus gain greater control of her life. Upon first glance, hydropathy appeared to be a system of water treatments—bathing, showering, douching, or wrapping with wet sheets—but further study of the movement’s journals and books revealed a holistic approach to health that entailed exercise, vegetarian diet, and temperance. As historians Susan Cayleff and Jane Donegan reveal, thousands of Americans, including the author Harriet Beecher Stowe and suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe, viewed water cure as a form of empowerment because it taught individuals how to care for themselves and freed them from dependency upon drugs and doctors.11

Access to print culture ensured that marriage to John D. Stillman, motherhood, and migration to a Seventh Day Baptist colony in eastern Iowa did not deter Juliet Stillman’s reform and career aspirations. One of approximately 50,000 subscribers to the Water-Cure Journal, she studied enough articles by hydropathist Russell Trall to know that she shared his reform-minded goals, which included the training of women and men to become water cure physicians and health reform lecturers. Unlike male-dominated “regular” medical schools, the only admission requirements for his Hygeio-Therapeutic College were “a common-school education, and the possession of common sense.”12 The hydropathic profession’s receptiveness to female practitioners meant that a married rural woman could gain access to medical education, which, in turn, offered the possibility of economic self-sufficiency. With the begrudging consent of her husband, she deposited her two young sons with a sister and traveled to New York City to enroll in Trall’s school.

In the fall of 1857, New York City newspapers were filled with news of a nationwide financial panic caused, in part, by the declining value of western lands and railroad securities, in addition to the political uncertainty resulting from struggles between free soil and slavery forces fighting to determine the future of Kansas and Nebraska.13 News of bank closings, business failures, massive unemployment, and civil unrest heightened Juliet Stillman’s already keen interest in the social and economic inequities stemming from the modern industrial market economy. Because Trall viewed water cure as a holistic reform, he required students to read widely, attend lectures on current social and political events, and participate in debates on critical issues of the day.14

During the economic and social chaos of the late 1850s, Americans sought understanding in a variety of sources, among them a rapidly spreading belief system known as Spiritualism. The movement emerged in upstate New York in the 1840s and had thousands of devotees by the late1850s, among them author Harriet Beecher Stowe, bridge builder John A. Roebling, journalist Horace Greeley, and the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. More than a 100,000 women and men turned to such Spiritualist periodicals as The Banner of Light (Boston), Mind and Matter (Philadelphia), Religio-Philosophical Journal (Chicago), and Spiritual Telegraph (New York City).15 Typically they featured letters from readers sharing their experiences at séances, messages conveyed to them from the departed, reactions to books and articles, and responses to other contributors’ letters. Often, readers offered personal advice, as did A. Hillside to the woman who asked The Banner of Light readers for advice on how to keep her husband’s affection. Readers, especially those isolated by geography or advocacy of marginalized causes, saw the depth and breadth of their communities confirmed on the pages of these publications, and, in time, their print-based conversations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Featured Journals
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Print Culture and the Construction of Radical Identity: Juliet H. Severance and the Reform Press in Late Nineteenth-Century America
• 2 Changing Feelings: Fallen Women, Sentimentality, and the Activist Press
• 3 “She Will Spike War’s Gun”: The Anti-War Graphic Satire of the American Suffrage Press
• 4 Publishing a “Fighting Spirit”: Marianne Moore in the Little Magazines During WWI
• 5 Holiday Activism: Good Housekeeping and the Meaning of Mother’s Day
• 6 “Give this copy of the Kourier magazine to your friend. You will help him. You will also help society”: 1920s KKK Print, Propaganda, and Publicity
• 7 Productive Fiction and Propaganda: The Development and Uses of Communist Party Pamphlet Literature
• 8 Containment Culture: The Cold War in the Ladies’ Home Journal, 1946–1959
• 9 Challenging the Anti-Pleasure League: Physique Pictorial and the Cultivation of Gay Politics
• 10 Calendar Art: How the 1968 SNCC Wall Calendar Brought Activism Indoors
• 11 Amazon Quarterly: Pre-Zine Print Culture and the Politics of Separatism
• 12 Crafting Public Cultures in Feminist Periodicals
• Works Cited
• Index