Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-2017
Capstone Advisor
Pedro DiPietro
Honors Reader
Erin Rand
Capstone Major
Women's and Gender Studies
Capstone College
Arts and Science
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Humanities
Subject Categories
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Abstract
This paper argues that mail correspondence among 19th century suffragists functions as a practice of creating space for cultivating a political feminist consciousness and sustaining the first women’s rights movement. Using Michel de Certeau’s theory of space and Nancy Fraser’s work on feminist counterpublics, letters from a variety of suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, were analyzed. Through a close reading of these letters, this paper identifies alternative discursive patterns as they circulate within those epistolary spaces. The early suffragists used letters to reaffirm their identity as white, middle-class, educated, Protestant women at the same time as they subverted the meaning of “woman.”
Recommended Citation
Mosier, Hannah-Abigail, "The Role of Mail in the First Women’s Rights Movement: A Project of Resistance and Knowledge Formation" (2017). Honors Capstone Projects - All. 1035.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/1035
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
