Declarations in Dialogue
Rhetoric in 19th-century U.S.
Social Movements
Social movements
• Aim for inclusion rather than total political upheaval: reform
rather than revolution
• Argue for the application of liberatory principles to an excluded
group
• Challenge one principle of “publics” -- that participants enter
“unmarked”
The “public sphere,” public spaces, and social
movements
• Excluded groups meet in “safe spaces” to exchange ideas,
consolidate goals, prepare arguments (Seneca Falls):
counterpublics
• Members of excluded groups challenge “the public” in
“promiscuous” spaces (Douglass speaking at Corinthian Hall on
the 4th--actually the 5th)
Questions for rhetorical analysis
• How do Enlightenment principles (natural rights; human
equality; social contract/government by consent) enter into
19th-century social movement rhetoric?
• How do speakers from disenfranchised groups establish ethos
(the character of the speaker in the text)?
• A problem of identification and division: How will the group
define itself for the public/polis that has excluded it? What
counts as “human”? What should count as “human”?
• How will the individual speaker or writer represent the group:
the problem of speaking for others?
• What genres best serve the purposes of the disenfranchised?
What modes of argument? Styles?
Genre: “Declaration of Sentiments”
• Imitation: “After much delay, one of the circle took up the
Declaration of 1776, and read it aloud with much spirit and
emphasis, and it was at once decided to adopt the historic
document, with some slight changes” (241).
• Parody?
– "parody … is imitation, not always at the expense of the
parodied text” (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody)
– The “D of S” implies a critique, but at the same time
legitimates the original; preserves the tone of high
seriousness and the rhetorical purpose
Genre: “Declaration of Sentiments”
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attitude, prevailing opinion
feeling: influence of faculty psychology -- separate “seats” for reason,
emotion, imagination, will
gendered associations
18th-century association of “sentiment” with taste and distinction
19th-century association of sentiment with passion, sometimes
excessive, but also associated with conviction and action
“While they had felt the insults incident to sex, in may ways, as every
proud, thinking woman must, in the laws, religion, and literature of the
world, and in the invidious and degrading sentiments and customs of
all nations . . . they had souls large enough to feel the wrongs of
others” (241).
Implications for using ethos, logos, and pathos
as tools of analysis
• Pathos (emotion) should not be treated instrumentally: as
though the rhetor added on emotion to a logical skeleton of
argument. Formal logic is the domain of philosophy.
• Pathos (sentiment, feeling) us a response to experience and a
way of apprehending the experiences of others
• Pathos originates or constitutes rather than embellishes
• Rhetors in 19th-century social movements construct ethos so as
to dramatize the process by which experience forces a critical
analysis of the social order and leads to an argument for
change.
Women in post-Revolutionary U.S.
Separate spheres ideology influential in legal, social, and
professional realms for middle-class women
Restrictions on education:
• Troy Female Seminary, 1821
• Oberlin College, 1833 - admitted women and African Americans
• No women allowed: Harvard (1636), Yale (1701), Princeton
(College of New Jersey, 1746), many others
Legal and economic barriers detailed in the Declaration
A few women step into the public, violate
“separate spheres” limitations
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Francis (Fanny) Wright, 1820s
-opponent of slavery;
advocate of education for
women and slaves; the first
woman to lecture publicly
before a mixed audience
when she delivered an
Independence Day speech at
New Harmony in 1828
Maria W. Miller Stewart,
African American -- 1830s
public sermons
Sarah and Angelina Grimké,
1830s -- renounced their
plantation upbringing
James Akin, 1829 lithograph
Library of Congress
How do women move
into the public?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
1815-1902
Father a lawyer
Educated at prep school and
Troy Female Seminary
Married 47 years; 7 children
Early experiences
• Marriage to Henry Stanton in May, 1840
• Honeymoon trip to London to attend the World AntiSlavery Society Convention
• Met Lucretia Mott, Quaker minister
• Women voted off the main floor of the convention
Leaders and movements
• Associations with men
• Class privilege (Stanton read her father’s law
books, married an abolitionist lawyer)
• Travel
• Associations with women/mentors: Mott
• Use forms of association already available to
them (tea party)
History of Woman Suffrage
• Authored by participants in an on-going movement (19th
amendment passed in 1920)
• Three volumes, 1876-86; fourth volume, 1902; final two
published in 1922; 4,000 pages
• History as a persuasive genre; Anthony planned to distribute
volumes for free
• Thousands of letters sent to participants to check accuracy of
memory
• Petition campaigns, letters, speeches, newspaper articles,
government records
Seneca Falls Convention
• 19-20 July 1848
• Seneca Falls, New York
Preparing the convention
• From social connection to political action
• Writing process - experience and inexperience: “helpless and
hopeless” they reluctantly, to “masculine productions”
• Solving the genre problem: rhetoric of imitation/parody
• Their conception of the project: “the inauguration of a rebellion”
The problem of speaking for others
• No experience of “coarser forms of tyranny”
• “insults incident to sex” in laws, religion, literature
• “they had souls large enough to feel the wrongs of others”
1776
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Dissolve the bands
Alter former systems of
government
Tyranny of king over colony
Laws
Representation
Imposing taxes without consent
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Taking away charters
1848
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Assume a different position
Demand the equal station to
which they are entitled
Tyranny of man over woman
Laws
Right to elective franchise
Taken all right of property, even
wages she earns; taxes on
single women’s property
“Civil death” in marriage
Many professions and
education denied to women
Moral double standard
Subordinate position in religion
Destruction of self-respect
Resolutions
• 1776: free and independent state
• 1848:
a. Abolition of laws restricting happiness; recognition of
equality; identity of “race” (kind); equality of participation in
religion (“self-evident truth”; “divinely implanted principles of
human nature”)
Resolutions cont.
• B. Participation in public sphere: men should encourage
women to speak and teach in religious assemblies; recognize
the hypocrisy of admiring women on stage but condemning
women on the platform
• C. Stop exercising a moral double standard: “same amount of
virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior” required of men as
of women
• D. In support of the “enlightenment” of women: regarding laws,
the subordination of station in life; recognition of “enlarged
sphere” assigned by the Creator
Ethos of Declarations
• Righteous indignation
• Wrongs bind the group together in opposition
• 1776: “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes
and our sacred honor”; use of 1st-person plural pronouns
throughout
• 1848: internal and external divisions: “women of this country
ought to be enlightened”; franchise carried by small majority
• List of wrongs speaks of “woman” in the 3rd person -- the victim
of wrongs; “we” refers to the action of the writers/organizers
• Mott’s final resolution calls on the efforts of “men and women”
The women’s choice of genre
• Drawing on the authority of a venerated document
• The performance of inauguration
• Imitating the instrument of nation-formation could
backfire, creating a sense of violation; not a perfect
fit for the purpose of reform
• A choice not to mark a gender difference through
style
For next week . . .
• Another 19th-century social movement:
abolition
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass. An American Slave Written
by Himself (1845)
Good luck on the mid-term!
Troubled legacy of 19th-century women’s
movement
• Post-Civil War conflicts: 14th (citizenship, due process, equal
protection) and 15th (vote for men of all races) amendments
• Racism in late century women’s groups
• 19th amendment passed in 1920
• Has the vision of the D. of S. been realized?