Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor

Ray, Angela G.; Richards, Cindy Koenig

doi:10.1080/00335630701449340

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“… 5. See, e.g., Idaho: Idaho Historical Society (1902); Kentucky: Henry (1880), Interior Journal (1893); Massachusetts: Million (2003); Missouri: Ray and Richards (2007); Montana: Cole 1990, Daily Yellowstone Journal 1887: 2; Nebraska: Fus (1972), Stanton et al (1886: 676). Space and time constraints prevent us from including detailed discussions of events leading to passage in additional states. …”

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confidence: 99%

A Radical Demand Effect: Early US Feminists and the Married Women's Property Acts

McCammon¹,

Arch²,

Bergner³

2014

Social Science History

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Numerous scholars consider the economic origins of the late-nineteenth-and earlytwentieth-century US married women's property acts. Researchers investigate how economic downturns and women's inroads into business spurred lawmakers to reform property laws to give married women the right to own separate property. Such economic explanations, however, are only a partial story. Our investigation reveals the important role of women's collective activism in winning these legal changes. Women mobilized for property rights often as they pressed for voting rights and, in one case, as they campaigned for an equal rights amendment. We examine circumstances leading to passage of married women's property acts in seven states to show that as women mobilized for property rights alongside voting rights or a broader equal rights law, a radical demand effect unfolded. Lawmakers often considered demands for woman suffrage or an equal rights amendment as more far-reaching and thus more radical and threatening. Such feminist demands, then, provided a foil for property-rights activism, and the contrast led lawmakers to view property demands as more moderate. In addition, as they pressed for these combined reforms, women often engaged in hybrid framing that allowed them to moderate their demand for property reforms by linking their property goals to beliefs already widely accepted. The confluence of these circumstances led political leaders to deem property changes as more moderate and acceptable in an effort to steer feminists away from their radical goals. In the end, the radical demand effect created a political opportunity for passage of the married women's property acts.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Radical Demand Effect: Early US Feminists and the Married Women's Property Acts

McCammon¹,

Arch²,

Bergner³

2014

Social Science History

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“…In these novels, "race facilitates a gender identification that hides the extent to which class-based notions of privileged womanhood originate in ruthless plantation production." 119 This important observation overlooks an important difference, however. Where slave narratives strove toward freedom, southern popular novels concluded by reifying marriage -an institution which these novels constructed as inherently oppressive.…”

Section: Southern Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…118 In what could have been an example of this action, Susan B. Anthony asked her audience: "[C]ould we but feel for the slaves, … and love him as ourself, … how easy would be the task of converting us all to abolitionism." 119 Unlike the associations generated through the earlier mobilisation of the abstract slavery analogy, these strategies resulted in a more heightened and direct relationship between reformers and their imagined idea of what it was like to be enslaved.…”

Section: American Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera (Thousand Oakes: Sage Publications, 2006), 112 and 114-115. See also: Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Anti-Slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chapter One: "From Sentimental Sympathy to Activist Self-Judgement." 119 Susan B. Anthony, "Make the Slave's Cause our Own," Speech for Tour for American Anti-Slavery Society (c.1857) (Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University). 120 Yellin, Women and Sisters, 24.…”

Section: American Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Still, their interpretation often used similar rhetoric in a way that juxtaposed white reform critiques of fashionable dress. 119 In spite of Truth and Tubman's illiteracy, Jacqueline Jones Royster suggests it to be likely that they understood "literacy as emanating from lived experience." 120 These African American reformers challenged the way white reformers employed the woman-slave analogy even as they appropriated discourses of slavery to inscribe fashion with new meanings.…”

Section: Civil War Overturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The woman-slave analogy: rhetorical foundations in American culture, 1830-1900

Stevenson¹

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During the 1830s, Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and women's rights reformer from South Carolina, stated: "It was when my soul was deeply moved at the wrongs of the slave that I first perceived distinctly the subject condition of women." This rhetorical comparison between women and slaves -the woman-slave analogy -emerged in Europe during the seventeenth century, but gained peculiar significance in the United States during the nineteenth century. This rhetoric was inspired by the Revolutionary Era language of liberty versus tyranny, and discourses of slavery gained prominence in the reform culture that was dominated by the American antislavery movement and shared among the sisterhood of reforms. The woman-slave analogy functioned on the idea that the position of women was no better -nor any freer -than slaves. It was used to critique the exclusion of women from a national body politic based on the concept that "all men are created equal." From the 1830s onwards, this analogy came to permeate the rhetorical practices of social reformers, especially those involved in the antislavery, women's rights, dress reform, suffrage and labour movements. Sarah's sister, Angelina, asked: "Can you not see that women could do, and would do a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered?" My thesis explores manifestations of the woman-slave analogy through the themes of marriage, fashion, politics, labour, and sex. The white reformers who employed this prominent rhetorical device often privileged the position of white women over their enslaved African American counterparts. As a result, the woman-slave analogy has been derided by twentiethcentury scholars, leading to a lack of historical examination regarding its nineteenth-century cultural significance. My thesis fills this critical omission through a historical and cultural examination of this rhetoric: examining the broader cultural context reveals the woman-slave analogy was much more than racist rhetoric. Yet this oversight is based on the assumption that the use of such rhetoric was limited to white women. My thesis proves that this was not the case by demonstrating that a variety of nineteenth-century Americans relied on discourses of slavery to describe women's oppression, from proslavery ideologues to African American reformers, for both reform and conservative purposes. However, unlike white reformers, African American reformers emphasised the plight of the slave and the experiences of black women over those of white women.This thesis therefore suggests that it is more useful to consider the woman-slave analogy as a nineteenth-century attempt toward understanding interdependent forms of oppressionintersectionality. During the antebellum era in particular, when comparisons were predominantly based on a direct analogy between women and chattel slavery, many reformers and cultural commentators demonstrated a profound awareness of how different forms of oppression could III intersect. However, following the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments that privi...

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The Pragmatic Force of Making an Argument

Goodwin

Innocenti

2019

Topoi

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Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

A Radical Demand Effect: Early US Feminists and the Married Women's Property Acts

A Radical Demand Effect: Early US Feminists and the Married Women's Property Acts

The woman-slave analogy: rhetorical foundations in American culture, 1830-1900

The Pragmatic Force of Making an Argument

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