Carter never married and was neither a well-known suffragette nor a genteel southern woman. She may have put current suffrage debate into the mouth and mind of an anonymous narrator to personalize that debate and persuade readers, or, as a journalist, she might have interviewed a suffragette and decided to ghost-write, quote, or appropriate that account to promote women's suffrage. As with Carter's previous "autobiographies," it is possible that this narrator is a composite character. The Woman With Empty Hands functions as testimonial suffrage propaganda that argues against anti-suffragism views—held by northerners and southerners, men and women, alike.Anonymous (Carter, Marion Hamilton). The Woman With Empty Hands: The Evolution of a Suffragette. New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1913: 33-35. As suffrage scholars Mary Chapman and Angela Mills note, the story is part of a suffrage literature tradition that privileges dialogue "over individual utterance"Chapman, Mary. Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014: 10. and that dialogue plays out within a conversion narrative.Chapman, Mary and Angela Mills. Treacherous Texts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011: 225 According to anti-suffragists, women like the narrator at the beginning of Carter's story were already equal to men in their God-given role as mothers and wives in the private sphere, a world characterized by piety, purity, submission and domesticity (defined in the late twentieth century as the Cult of Domesticity). Chapman and Mills recognize that The Woman With Empty Hands "invites women to imagine themselves as members of collectives other than those provided by marriage and motherhood."Chapman, Mary and Angela Mills. Treacherous Texts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011: 173
