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Editor's Introduction: Betterment

Editor's Introduction: Betterment One of the sad ironies of twentieth-century political life in the United States is how the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended voting rights to all women citizens of the republic, effectively worked thereafter to mark almost every social, political, and cultural initiative mounted by women as only “special interest.” Prior to the amendment's ratification in 1920, the suffrage movement had provided women of various ideological stripes and from diverse backgrounds a context for both complaint and action within a public sphere where their very disenfranchisement was increasingly grounds for both acknowledging and granting them a voice in cultural enterprises, regulatory and reform institutions, and even social policy formation, albeit stratified by those hierarchies of race, ethnicity, age, religion, and class that operated everywhere else in American society. By the 1910s it was practically unthinkable to hold a hearing on a pressing social problem, form a commission addressing inequities or corruption, or found an institute dedicated to reform without seeking the valued testimony, perspectives, and participation of women as women . Yet by 1930, this expansive politics of inclusion was all but forgotten, replaced in historical memory by grotesque caricatures of matronly reformers, those meddling Mrs. Grundys who had been (and continued to be) perpetuated in the social imaginary by, for example, anti-censorship constituencies that, curiously enough, included … http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal University of California Press

Editor's Introduction: Betterment

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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2017 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
eISSN
2373-7492
DOI
10.1525/fmh.2017.3.4.1
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

One of the sad ironies of twentieth-century political life in the United States is how the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended voting rights to all women citizens of the republic, effectively worked thereafter to mark almost every social, political, and cultural initiative mounted by women as only “special interest.” Prior to the amendment's ratification in 1920, the suffrage movement had provided women of various ideological stripes and from diverse backgrounds a context for both complaint and action within a public sphere where their very disenfranchisement was increasingly grounds for both acknowledging and granting them a voice in cultural enterprises, regulatory and reform institutions, and even social policy formation, albeit stratified by those hierarchies of race, ethnicity, age, religion, and class that operated everywhere else in American society. By the 1910s it was practically unthinkable to hold a hearing on a pressing social problem, form a commission addressing inequities or corruption, or found an institute dedicated to reform without seeking the valued testimony, perspectives, and participation of women as women . Yet by 1930, this expansive politics of inclusion was all but forgotten, replaced in historical memory by grotesque caricatures of matronly reformers, those meddling Mrs. Grundys who had been (and continued to be) perpetuated in the social imaginary by, for example, anti-censorship constituencies that, curiously enough, included …

Journal

Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal – University of California Press

Published: Oct 1, 2017

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