The Female Cicero: Young Women's Oratory and Gendered Public Participation in the Early American Republic

Abstract

It is not unknown to you, how much wit has been scattered on the subject of the loquacity of women -and how much satire expended in ridiculing ladies who have a taste for learning', began Anna Harrington, a schoolgirl, in a 1793 speech before her Massachusetts school. 'But if an eminent faculty of speech be possessed by women, for once let it be employed to a good purpose'. She devoted her speech to a defence of women's education, making an argument consistent with what historians have called 'republican womanhood', namely, that education would make women better suited to wed and to raise civic-minded, republican children. Harrington concluded her speech by proposing that her fellow students improve their minds and their oratory to 'gain the approbation of those who censure us; & to make even satirists confess, that we act with propriety'. 1 On the surface at least, her speech reassured auditors that educated women remained safely within the bounds of 'woman's sphere' and that their oratory would be eminently respectable.But if the content of Harrington's speech sounds familiar, the context of its delivery suggests that we need to re-examine the longstanding historical presumption that, on the whole, social custom forbade women from public speaking during the early decades of the new nation. 2 Harrington's was an explicitly public speech, delivered before an audience of both men and women. Far from being exceptional, most young white women in the greater north-eastern United States shared Harrington's experience as a public speaker: 3 girls spoke regularly at school 'exhibitions' from Maryland to Maine at least twice a year, no matter how rudimentary the school's curriculum. Moreover, her speech is one of several dozen by young women that were published in books, magazines and newspapers from the 1780s through the early 1800s. The ubiquity of such evidence suggests that republican motherhood was by no means the only model for women seeking to define their roles in the post-revolutionary era.This essay argues that the standard mode of education of the 1790s and early 1800s, which emphasised oral recitation and performance, taught girls that educated and well-spoken women had an important role to play in American culture. This role was not primarily domestic or 'private'. By depicting skilled speech as a necessary C