As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, novels about politically active women became increasingly common. Until now, however, no one has studied this body of writing as a distinct tradition in American literature. In "Romancing the Vote," Leslie Petty recovers this tradition and also examines how the fiction written about the women's rights and related movements contributed to the creation and continued vitality of those movements.

Petty examines the novels as paradigms of feminist activism and reform communities and elucidates how they, whether wittingly or not, model...