This article considers the emergence of women into the public sphere during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries via portrayals of women's public speech in three literary texts associated with the suffrage movement—Laura J. Curtis's Christine: Woman's Trials and Triumphs (1856), Elizabeth Robins's The Convert (1907), and The Sturdy Oak: A Composite Novel of American Politics (1917), edited by Elizabeth Jordan. All three novels depict members of the suffrage movement negotiating tensions between private and public, speaker and audience, leader and led, and individual and crowd or collective. Read together, the novels register a transition from an early focus on the female public speaker as an individual set apart from the crowd—and thus as a single, authoritative voice—to an increasing interest in the dynamics of an integrated relationship between speaker and crowd, which ultimately results in the development of a more democratically informed conceptualization of political action and appeal. In this way, the novels offer valuable insight into women's growing understanding, during the period, of what it means to organize a mass movement and, in a more general sense, to participate in public space. Cet article a pour objet l'émergence des femmes dans le domaine public au dix-neuvième siècle et au début du vingtième siècle, à travers l'interprétation du discours public des femmes dans trois textes littéraires liés au mouvement pour le suffrage – Christine: Woman's Trials and Triumphs (1856) de Laura J. Curtis, The Convert (1907) d'Elizabeth Robin, et The Sturdy Oak: A Composite Novel of American Politics (1917), édité par Elizabeth Jordan. Les trois romans proposent une représentation des membres du Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'e€tudes ame€ricaines 36, no.1, 2006 mouvement pour le suffrage alors qu'elles surmontent les tensions qui se créent chez elles entre les domaines privé et public, entre la conférencière et le public qui l'écoute, entre la leader et ceux et celles qu'elle inspire, et enfin entre l'individu et la foule ou la collectivité. Lus comme un ensemble, ces romans témoignent de la transition qui a eu lieu entre une analyse centrée sur la femme conférencière comme individu qui se distingue de la collectivité – et donc comme une voix unique faisant figure d'autorité –à un intérêt croissant pour la dynamique qui caractérise la relation qui s'établit entre l'oratrice et la foule, ce qui en définitive conduit au développement d'une conceptualisation de l'action politique plus approfondie et plus attirante. Dans ce sens, ces romans offrent une perspective privilégiée sur la conscientisation des femmes au cours de cette période, au sujet de ce qu'implique l'organisation d'un mouvement politique de masse et, dans un sens plus large, la participation à la chose publique.

This article considers the emergence of women into the public sphere during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries via portrayals of women’s public speech in three literary texts associated with the suffrage movement—Laura J. Curtis’s Christine: Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856), Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907), and The Sturdy Oak: A Composite Novel of American Politics (1917), edited by Elizabeth Jordan. All three novels depict members of the suffrage movement negotiating tensions between private and public, speaker and audience, leader and led, and individual and crowd or collective. Read together, the novels register a transition from an early focus on the female public speaker as an individual set apart from the crowd—and thus as a single, authoritative voice—to an increasing interest in the dynamics of an integrated relationship between speaker and crowd, which ultimately results in the development of a more democratically informed conceptualization of political action and appeal. In this way, the novels offer valuable insight into women’s growing understanding, during the period, of what it means to organize a mass movement and, in a more general sense, to participate in public space.