John, this is very cool and I'm glad you're thinking of these posts as a corpus! "The woman question" intrigues me, and just to see what would happen, I eliminated some of your stopwords and got the following frequency stats: 'Her' appears (51) times; 'she' (34); 'woman' (6); 'women' (17); 'his' (161); 'he' (92); 'him' (24); 'man' (101); 'men' (46). [Note: some of these terms included asterisks as wildcard operators, but Steemit markdown won't allow me to include them easily]
I know that these words are usually left out for good reason, but I also think that in this case they reveal that posts about women, though occurring a lot less frequently than posts about men or just people in general, may not explicitly use the word "woman." For example, I wrote a whole heck of a lot (sorry, not sorry) about Edith Wharton without describing her as "female" or "a woman." I actually think that may be a good thing, if it reveals our unintentional bias (or lack thereof).
Whoa! Thanks for expanding this Cynthia--super useful additions! I agree, we seem less concerned about gendering our subjects, which exposes a whole lot about us. I’m just surprised by the few (if any) direct mentions of women’s suffrage. Was WW1 not a watershed moment for the suffrage movement? I think it’s interesting to see President Wilson directly mention this in his SOTU but little mention by us 100 years later.
Agreed, it is kind of befuddling, especially in hindsight that women will get the franchise within a couple of years. Anecdotally (because I don't have the sources to back it up in front of me), I think that suffrage was an issue put on the back burner during the war because it would look selfish to push an agenda like that in wartime. Maybe I'll write about it :) Wanna collab?
I think it would be interesting to look individually at each of these examples, to examine in what contexts we're writing about men in more explicitly gendered terms than women.