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” (or “disinterested”)
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 in honor of July 4th)
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? From what other groups does it divide
itself? What constitutes the “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).
• Imitation, 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
From “Independence” to “Sentiments”: some definitions
•
attitude, prevailing opinion
•
18th-century association of “sentiment” with taste and distinction
•
influence of faculty psychology -- separate “seats” for understanding,
imagination, passion, and will
•
19th-century association of sentiment with passion, sometimes excessive, but also
associated with conviction and action: a framework for understanding
•
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 (1636-1963), Yale (1701-1969), Princeton
(College of New Jersey, 1746-1969), many others
Legal and economic barriers detailed in the Declaration
A few women step into the public, violate “separate
spheres” limitations
•
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, 18151902
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 Anti-Slavery
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: Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage
• 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: ETHOS OF THE
HISTORIANS
• From social connection to political action
• Writing process - experience and inexperience: “helpless and hopeless as
if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine” (240)
• “humiliating fact”: they reluctantly turn to “masculine productions”
• Other documents “too tame and pacific for the inauguration of a rebellion
such as the world had never seen before” – beyond reform
• Solving the genre problem: rhetoric of imitation/parody
THE PROBLEM OF SPEAKING FOR OTHERS
• “They knew women had wrongs, but how to state them was the difficulty”
(240).
• No experience of “coarser forms of tyranny”
• Research: “a protracted search . . . through statute books, church usages,
and the customs of society” (241)
“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).
Do you think the ethos created by the history gives
readers a positive impression of the cause of
women’s suffrage?
For readers at the time of publication (late 19 th-early 20th centuries)-•A. Yes
•B. No
•C. It’s more complicated.
Do you think the ethos created by the history gives
readers a positive impression of the cause of
women’s suffrage?
For readers now-•A. Yes
•B. No
•C. It’s more complicated
PARALLEL STRUCTURE
•
Introduction/invitation
•
Philosophical principles
•
List of injuries, but with the addition of social, cultural, and psychological factors
• Many professions and education denied to women
• Moral double standard
• Subordinate position in religion
• Destruction of self-respect
•
How will their work be perceived? How will it be pursued?
“We anticipate misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule . . . We shall circulate tracts,
petition, enlist the pulpit and the press . . . A series of Conventions”
POLITICAL, LEGAL, AND ECONOMIC COMPARISON
1776
1848
•
Dissolve the bands
•
Assume a different position
•
Alter former systems of government
•
Demand the equal station; refuse
allegiance to existing government
•
Tyranny of king over colony
•
Tyranny of man over woman
•
Laws
•
Laws
•
Representation
•
Right to elective franchise
•
Imposing taxes without consent
•
Taken all right of property, even
wages she earns; taxes on single
women’s property
•
“Civil death” in marriage
ECHOING THE LANGUAGE OF THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
“in the course of human events”
“laws of nature and of nature’s God”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are
created equal.”
“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries . . . “
----Law of nature: the pursuit of ‘true and substantial happiness” (R1)
Woman is man’s equal (R3)
DIFFERENCES
•
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
•
Stop exercising a moral double standard: “same amount of virtue, delicacy,
and refinement of behavior” required of men as of women
•
“enlightenment” as consciousness:
“He has endeavored . . . to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen
her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life”
(243)
women should be enlightened in regard to laws (R4) (“no longer publish their
degradation . . . Ignorance”)
woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt
customs . . . Move in the “enlarged sphere” assigned by the Creator (R8,
244)
Women’s duty to secure the franchise (R9)
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”
CONCLUSIONS
• Genre: Drawing on the authority of a founding document of the
republic, the authors of “Declaration of Sentiments” mark the inaugural
force of their movement: world-changing rather than reforming
• Ethos: Reading the History alongside the Declaration of Sentiments
reveals middle-class women’s efforts to include a wider group of
women in their vision of reform.
• Enlightenment and reform: In the Declaration of Sentiments the
critical analysis of social, cultural, and psychological circumstances
contributing to women’s political disenfranchisement extends the
philosophical categories of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
A DIFFERENT THESIS ABOUT ETHOS
•
Despite the inclusion of men (both black and white) and the attempts to speak to the
conditions of women of other circumstances, race and class exclusions appear in the
Declaration of Sentiments.
•
“He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded
men—both natives and foreigners.”
•
“the condition of married women under the Common Law, was nearly as degraded as that
of the slave on the Southern plantation”
Troubled legacy of 19th-century women’s movement
• “”Ridicule”; “jibes and jeers of the nation”; withdrawal of names
• 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?
FOR NEXT WEEK . . .
• Another 19th-century social movement: abolition
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. An American Slave
Written by Himself (1845)
• The ethos of a former slave, abolitionist, black intellectual,
autobiographer
• Background for Douglass’ speech: “What to the Slave is the 4 th
of July?”
• Reading suggestions: skip the intro. but read letters