| dc.description.abstract | "The story of Alice Mary Robertson is complex and fascinating. Constituents from the second district in Oklahoma elected her to the United States House of Representatives in 1920. That same year, women had gained the right to vote through the passage of the nineteenth amendment. Robertson, however, had served as the vice president for Oklahoma's anti-suffrage association in 1916 when the state pushed to amend women's voting rights. This major contradiction has enabled academics to continue writing about the former-congressperson, attempting to unravel her anomalous lifestyle. The national media of the 1920s played a major role in characterizing Robertson as an anti-suffragist and anti-feminist representative, using her congressional seat to preserve the values of the Cult of True Womanhood, or domesticity, piety, and purity. Many secondary authors, since the rise of U.S. women's history in the 1970s, have continued to depict the former-congressperson in this way. None of the writers on Robertson, however, have attempted to place her within the time-specific context of first-wave feminism or exhausted all manuscript collections that relate to her directly, facilitating her defamed and misunderstood legacy. Few academics investigated: Robertson's brother's papers, Samuel Worcester Robertson, held at the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma in Norman; her sister's papers, Ann Augusta Moore Robertson, held at the Oklahoma Historical Society's Research Center in Oklahoma City; papers she submitted to Elmira College in Elmira, New York; and vertical files from any library, including the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. This thesis draws heavily on all the existing manuscript collections that relate to Robertson, as well as placing her within the context of women's movements during the first-wave. With that said, Robertson emerges with a very different persona. In fact, this thesis finds she consistently emulated aspects of New Womanhood throughout her life. By discussing women's movements during the turn of the twentieth century, looking at Robertson's life before she became a media sensation in 1920, highlighting the manipulation of newspaper articles that were written about her during her term in congress, and using manuscript collections to discuss her side of congressional issues, this thesis asserts that Robertson operated as a transitional figure between the ideals of True and New Womanhood."--Abstract." | |
