The business of correspondence: Politics, friendship, and intimacy in suffragists’ letters
The business of correspondence: Politics, friendship, and intimacy in suffragists’ letters
This chapter considers the politics and practice of Australian and New Zealand suffragists’ letter writing. Tracing Australasian women’s intercolonial and international circuits of discussion, it finds them smaller, more functional, and less complete than previously described. Examining the scribbled letters, typewritten communiques, and signed cartes-de-visite sent between suffragists and preserved in organisational archives and personal scrapbooks, it also scrutinises the material and emotional cultures of feminist correspondence, uncovering the intimate practices that bound suffragists into an international movement. It concludes with a close reading of the expatriate British libertarian and social purity activist Mary Steadman Aldis’ 1894–95 campaign to harness metropolitan outrage to force the reform of New Zealand’s dormant Contagious Diseases Act. Juxtaposing tropes of epistolary friendship against the disruptive possibilities of letter writing, it sheds new light on a moment when cracks emerged in the relationship between enfranchised and disenfranchised women in the English-speaking world.
Keywords: Australia, cartes-de-visite, Contagious Diseases Acts, correspondence, intimate practices, letter writing, material culture, New Zealand, scrapbooks
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