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Winning Woman Suffrage in the Masculine West: Abigail Scott Duniway's Frontier Myth

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10570314.2011.553877

1745-1027

Tiffany Lewis,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Abstract Through close textual analysis of Abigail Scott Duniway's speeches, this essay attempts to reconcile the paradoxical origin of woman suffrage in the West: that the earliest advances for women's voting rights first appeared on the mythically masculine frontier. Duniway, an Oregon suffragist, contested the notion of the male frontier hero through a telling of the frontier myth that featured the White heroines of the West earning their citizenship by surviving on the frontier. Although she included White women as frontier heroines, she excluded Eastern women and non-White women in the West and thus maintained the myth's masculine and White foundations. Keywords: Abigail Scott DuniwayAmerican WestFrontier MythMasculinityWoman Suffrage Acknowledgments This paper was presented at the 2009 NCA convention in Chicago, IL. The author wishes to thank Kristy Maddux, Shawn Parry-Giles, James Klumpp, Brian Ott, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful readings and feedback throughout the revision process. Notes In this paper, I use the term "West" to refer to the trans-Mississippi West, defined as the area west of the 98th meridian. However, it is important to note that life in the West, and women's experiences there, varied greatly by geography, climate, and regional economies (Armitage & Jamieson, 1987 Armitage , S. , & Jamieson , E. ( 1987 ). The women's west . Norman , OK : University of Oklahoma Press . [Google Scholar]). Four of the five speeches printed in her autobiography matched the versions of the speeches that were printed in the newspapers. However, the version of her address at the Idaho Constitutional Convention in her autobiography only included edited excerpts of the speech printed in the Idaho Statesman. This analysis used the newspaper version of the speech. In this paper I reference three suffrage organizations. The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was started by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In 1890, the two organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and Stanton was elected the first president (Flexner, 1968 Flexner , E. ( 1968 ). Century of struggle: The woman's rights movement in the United States . New York : Atheneum . [Google Scholar]). Duniway's involvement in suffrage began in the NWSA and continued in the NAWSA. This spelling of "compleat Americans" is consistent with how it is spelled in other literature on the frontier myth (Dorsey & Harlow, 2003 Dorsey , L. G. , & Harlow , M. H. ( 2003 ). 'We want Americans pure and simple': Theodore Roosevelt and the myth of Americanism . Rhetoric and Public Affairs , 6 , 55 – 78 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 63–64; Slotkin, 1992 Slotkin , R. ( 1992 ). Gunfighter nation: The myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America . New York : Atheneum . [Google Scholar], p. 11). Additional informationNotes on contributorsTiffany LewisTiffany Lewis is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.