Passion and Prayers 1
Running Head: PASSION AND PRAYERS
Passion and Prayers:
An Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies Used in the
Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw’s Sermons and Suffrage Speeches
Dacia Charlesworth, Ph.D.
Director, University Honors Program
Associate Professor, Department of Communication
Robert Morris University
6001 University Blvd.
Moon Township, PA 15108 charlesworth@rmu.edu
412.262.8282

Passion and Prayers 2
Abstract
This essay examines the rhetorical strategies used by the Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw as both a
Methodist minister and an orator within the woman’s suffrage movement. Four of Shaw’s most popular speeches are analyzed (two suffrage speeches and two sermons) by combining feminist rhetorical criticism and narrative criticism. Findings indicate that Shaw’s rhetorical strategies as a minister included adding her own commentary to narrative events, making connections between the lives of women who lived in the past to women who live in the present, inviting her audience to identify with the characters in the narratives by relating the events in the character’s lives to their own, and making women’s experiences seem valuable. The strategies Shaw used as a minister are also found in her suffrage speeches. Shaw’s use of rhetorical strategies lent her a vast amount of credibility and these strategies are perhaps the main reason Shaw was such an accomplished orator within the woman’s suffrage movement.

Passion and Prayers 3
Passion and Prayers:
An Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies Used in the
Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw’s Sermons and Suffrage Speeches
The Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw was, and remains, a significant— but overlooked— historical figure. Shaw was born in England, but her parents immigrated to Michigan when she was a young child. Rebuking the trends of the time, Shaw studied at Albion College (where the college’s Women’s Center bears her name) and then went on to earn two degrees from Boston
University—one in theology in 1878 and the other in medicine in 1886, and became the first female minister to be ordained by the Methodist Church (Campbell, 1989). Reviewing all of
Shaw’s accomplishments, it seems that she was able to succeed by performing two roles that were usually reserved for men: Orator and Minister.
As an orator, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell notes that those involved with the woman’s suffrage cause generally acknowledged “that Shaw won more people for equal suffrage than any other advocate” (1989, p. 159). Shaw was dubbed the movement’s orator:
For forty years Shaw protested existing social conditions and proclaimed equal rights for women in every American state and in most European countries. She spoke to the English, the Swedes, and the Germans; she addressed leading American colleges and universities; she presided at packed meetings in Carnage Hall and Cooper Union; and she pleaded with numerous congressional committees and state legislatures. She delivered several hundred speeches a year, and often spoke as many as eight times a day, often for temperance but mostly for woman suffrage. (Campbell, 1989, pp. 159, 409)
She also served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association for 11 years
(Shaw, 1915).
In her role as a minister, Shaw served as the National Superintendent of franchise for the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union from 1886-1892, and served as the minister for several

Passion and Prayers 4 parishes—sometimes three at a time (Shaw, 1915). Shaw was also the chairperson of the
Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense during World War I and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross from Congress for her work with this committee.
Clearly, Shaw accomplished a great deal in her life. Yet, historians downplay or even negate her role within U.S. history. Some historians have even gone so far as to write that
Shaw’s “mental ability apparently was moderate in spite of her two degrees” (Riegel, 1963, p.
179), that “her mind seems to be slow in reacting; she had little originality and exhibited almost no sense of humor” (Riegel, 1963, p. 179), and that “men admired Shaw least of all. Leading feminists usually had at least a few male supporters; Dr. Shaw, however, seems to have had none” (O’Neill, 1989, pp. 121-122). Rhetorical critics, however, have examined Shaw’s impact on the woman’s suffrage movement and generally acknowledge her to be a successful orator.
What historians and rhetorical critics alike have yet to focus on, however, is Shaw’s role as a minister. While Shaw’s role within the suffrage movement is substantial, classifying her only as a suffrage orator negates her other prominent public role as a minister and overlooks an important opportunity to research the rhetorical strategies she used as a speaker in both contexts.
In an effort to direct attention to and stress the importance of Shaw’s role as a minister, I examine the styles and strategies Shaw utilized as a minister and as an advocate for woman’s suffrage. I first delineate the process of rhetorical criticism and discuss the values of its pluralistic nature. Next, I identify the rhetorical methods to be utilized for this study. Third, I analyze four of Shaw’s sermons and suffrage speeches. Finally, I draw conclusions as to the significance of Shaw’s role as a minister.
The first step a rhetorical critic should engage in is formulating a research question or series of questions. In this case, the analysis will be guided using the following questions: What

Passion and Prayers 5 rhetorical strategies did Shaw use as a minister? Did these strategies “carry over” to her suffrage speeches? If so, did these strategies help or hinder her credibility as a speaker? After the research question or questions have been generated, the next step a critic must complete is deciding upon a method to use for analysis of the rhetorical artifacts. For this study, the rhetorical artifacts will consist of two of Shaw’s most popular sermons and two of Shaw’s most popular suffrage speeches.
Given the various methods of criticism available to the rhetorical critic, it is best for the critic to assume the stance of a pluralist. That is, one who does not rely on a specific method at all times and is able to consider using a plethora of rhetorical methods. Since rhetorical artifacts are so diverse, it is best for the critic to wait until a research question has been developed before selecting a method. Some individuals may claim that the notion of being a pluralist is too idealistic and exists only in theory and not in practice. I disagree with this claim and feel that a successful rhetorical critic will be able to use various forms of criticism when analyzing artifacts.
Pauline Kael expands upon this claim and asserts:
I believe we respond most and best to work in any art form [and to other experience as well] if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic. But this does not mean a scrambling and confusion of systems.
Eclecticism is the selection of the best standards and principles from various systems of ideas. It requires more orderliness to be a pluralist than to apply a single theory…criticism is exciting because you must use everything you are and everything you know that is relevant. (as cited in Brock & Scott, 1980, p. 138)
To follow Kael’s argument, a rhetorical critic would not be engaging in “good” criticism if she or he always called upon the Neo-Aristotelian model of criticism. Since criticism is conducted just as much for the critic as for the critic’s audience, the critic is expected to benefit from the analysis as well. Plus, a critic who only relies upon one type of criticism will certainly experience an instance when she or he encounters an artifact that cannot be critiqued from that

Passion and Prayers 6 particular mode. Thus, since the research questions a critic will ask will never be the same, a critic should not rely on one model to try and answer the questions posed. Having discussed the steps a rhetorical critic should follow and the pluralist nature of rhetorical criticism, I now identify and describe the methods to be used for this analysis.
To analyze Shaw’s strategies as a minister and a suffragist, one may think that feminist criticism would be the most appropriate method to use. While this method is appropriate for this analysis, after closely examining the artifacts, I determined that feminist rhetorical criticism should be used in conjunction with narrative criticism. This is not to suggest that just because
Anna Howard Shaw was a feminist, one must conduct a feminist analysis or that a feminist method of criticism is the only method to be utilized when analyzing feminist texts; rather, given the assumptions undergirding feminist criticism, this method seems best suited to answer the questions generated by this project.
The assumptions of feminist criticism include the belief that women are oppressed by patriarchy, that women’s experiences are different from men’s, and that women’s perspectives are not currently incorporated into our culture (Foss, 1996, pp. 166-167). Certainly Shaw believed that women were oppressed by patriarchy, which is why she struggled to obtain the right to vote for herself and other women—she viewed the ballot as a tool for liberation. Shaw’s experiences, and thus her speaking strategies, will perhaps differ greatly from men’s and the strategies that Shaw employed are not incorporated into our culture or, perhaps even more distressing, the culture of the woman’s movement as she is, for the most part, a forgotten historical figure. These three assumptions, therefore, seem to coalesce with Shaw’s beliefs and experiences. Feminist criticism, as described by Sonja Foss, involves two basic steps: “(1) analysis of the construction of gender in the artifact studied; and (2) exploration of what the

Passion and Prayers 7 artifact suggests about how the patriarchy is constructed and maintained or how it can be challenged and transformed” (1996, pp. 169-170).
I also chose to use narrative criticism because of the assumptions postulated in this method. Narrative criticism falls under what Walter Fisher has deemed the “narrative paradigm.” According to Fisher, the narrative paradigm sees people as storytellers—authors and co-authors who creatively read and evaluate the texts of life and literature. It envisions existing institutions as providing ‘plots’ that are always in the process of re-creation rather than as scripts; it stresse[s] that people are full participants in the making of messages, whether they are agents (authors) or audience members (co-authors).”
(Fisher, 1985, p. 86)
Within this paradigm, Fisher has also identified five presuppositions that structure the narrative paradigm, they are:
(1) humans are essentially storytellers; (2) the paradigmatic mode of human decision-making and communication is ‘good reasons’ which vary in form among communication situations, genres, and media; (3) the production and practice of good reasons is ruled by matters of history, biography, culture, and character…;
(4) rationality is determined by the nature of persons as narrative beings—their inherent awareness of narrative probability , what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity , whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives … [and]
(5) the world is a set of stories which must be chosen among to live the good life in a process of continual recreation. (Fisher, 1984, p. 8)
As a minister, Shaw certainly told stories to her congregation and her audience would have judged her stories based on her narrative’s coherence and fidelity. Also, as a minister, Shaw would select from numerous stories to tell her congregation, and the stories she chose to narrate were perhaps read so that her congregation could, as Fisher writes, “live the good life in a process of continual recreation.” Thus, Shaw adhered to Fisher’s conceptualization of the true storyteller and, as such, the true storyteller’s “contribution to public dialogue is to impart knowledge, like a teacher, or wisdom, like a sage” (Fisher, 1984, p. 13). As a minister, Shaw

Passion and Prayers 8 had the opportunity to impart both knowledge and wisdom through the narratives used in her sermons.
As a rhetorical method, practitioners of narrative criticism view narratives as, frame[s] upon experience, [that] function as an argument to view and understand the world in a particular way, and by analyzing th[e] narrative, the critic can understand the argument being made about the likelihood that it will be successful in gaining adherence for the perspective it presents. (Foss, 1996, p.
400)
The narrative critic is to survey the narratives she or he is evaluating and try to code it for eight features identified by Sonja Foss. These features include: Setting (What is the setting or the scene of the narrative), Characters (Who are the main characters? Are they predictable or unpredictable?), Narrator (Is the narrative presented directly to the audience or is mediated by the narrator? Does the narrator engage in commentary? How reliable is the narrator?), Events
(What are the major and minor events of the story?), Temporal Relations (Do events occur during a brief amount of time or over a period of years?), Causal Relations (What cause-andeffect relationships are established?), Audience (Who is the audience to which the narrative is addressed? Is the audience a participant in the events recounted? What seems to be the narrator’s evaluation of the audience’s knowledge, personality, and abilities?), and Theme (What is the major theme of the narrative? Is the theme articulated through events, characters, or setting? How obvious is the theme?) (Foss, 1996, pp. 402-405). After the critic has coded for the eight features in the narrative or narratives, she or he must determine which of these elements seem most significant in terms of the research question she or he is asking (Foss, 1996, p. 405).
It is then that the critic is able to answer the research question.
Because the research question for this particular analysis seeks to examine the strategies
Shaw used when delivering her sermons and suffrage speeches, the methods to be utilized

Passion and Prayers 9 include narrative and feminist criticism. I have discussed the methods to be drawn from for this analysis. I now proceed by analyzing Shaw’s sermons and suffrage speeches.
Shaw’s sermon entitled “The Path is Plain” was probably first preached on September 30,
1877. Shaw wrote this sermon so that she would be granted a license to preach from the presiding elder (Farmer & Hunter, 1990, p. 22). This sermon begins with the following scripture from the Bible: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life”
(Shaw, 1990, p. 22). Shaw then elaborates on this passage and tells of the events that transpire between Moses and his followers. In sum, Moses’ followers, having grown tired of wandering, begin complaining to Moses: “Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt—to die in the wilderness, for there is no bread here, neither is there any water, and our souls [loathe] this…light bread” (Shaw, 1990, p. 23). In response to these complaints, God is said to have sent fiery serpents among the people; the Hebrews were bitten by these serpents and were dying.
Moses, sick at the loss of his people, prayed to God for forgiveness; he asked God to realize that his followers recognized that they sinned when they spoke against Moses. God then instructed
Moses to make a fiery serpent and put it on a pole and have those who were bitten by the serpents look upon the pole so that they might live. Moses did so and those bitten lived.
What becomes central to this narrative is its theme: “Good triumphs over evil.” This theme is articulated by the events in the narrative: the people are evil for complaining about
Moses, but Moses, who is good, is able to save his people from the serpent’s evil bite. This theme is also articulated by the rhetor’s (Shaw) commentary. After she tells this story she then implicates her audience by comparing how Moses’ followers were encouraged to look at the pole

Passion and Prayers 10 and save themselves from evil by returning to God but had to do so of their own free will to the idea that her congregation must also turn to God, but of their own free will as well:
…there was no human or possible cure except in obedience to [God’s] command so must every man work out his own [soul’s] salvation. No one can do it for him…. The [remedy] was simple and easily comprehended by all and within the reach of all. So is salvation placed within the attainment of every individual of the human family?” (Shaw, 1990, pp. 27-28)
Shaw stresses that just as the individuals in the scripture were required to make their own choice, so is her congregation.
In terms of the audience, Shaw expects them to be familiar with the story of Moses and his followers. She states, “All doubtless are familiar with the history of the Hebrews while in bondage in the land of Egypt, of their deliverance by Moses and their wanderings in the wilderness” (Shaw, 1990, p. 22). Shaw’s assumption that her audience would know the story makes sense, as her audience is hearing a sermon and is mostly churchgoers. This audience, while not a direct participant in Shaw’s narrative, is directly implicated by the suggestion that unless they freely allow God into their lives a metaphoric fiery serpent could bite them too. The theme of this narrative is clear and becomes even more obvious once Shaw begins to offer her own commentary. As do most sermons, this narrative contains a moral that the audience is expected to understand and internalize.
In regard to the feminist dimensions of this text, this text does not seem to have an overt feminist agenda. If one did not know the author was a woman before reading the text, she or he may not be able to identify the author as a woman. For the most part, however, this text does offer a non-gendered subject position. Shaw is careful to use “human” rather than “man” in some places although she does use the generic “he” quite often; I must reiterate, though, that this text was written in 1877. In this sermon, Shaw seems to invite the audience to identify with

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Moses’ followers, offers her own commentary or interpretation of the scripture, and attempts to use gender neutral language.
Shaw’s second sermon to be analyzed, “The Heavenly Vision,” was delivered many times as it was listed on all her lecture brochures with “Sunday” written in brackets before it.
She delivered this sermon from local pulpits on Sunday mornings while she was on suffrage campaigns (as cited in Linkugel & Solomon, 1991, p. 115). One of the prominent narratives featured in this sermon is Shaw’s telling of Paul’s vision that transformed him from a persecutor of the disciples of the Lord to a prisoner of the Lord Jesus Christ. Again, as in the first sermon, what becomes important in this narrative is the theme: “All reformers have a vision of truth and it is the desire of God that they preach this truth to others.” This theme is articulated primarily by the events in Paul’s life; however, another dimension is added when Shaw offers her own commentary as narrator. Before detailing Paul’s vision, Shaw notes that, “In the scripture from which the text is taken [Paul’s vision] we recognize a universal law which has been the experience of every one of us” (Shaw, 1991, p. 117). At the end of the description she adds,
“Permit me to use this vision, which is so familiar to us all, as a type of that which must appear to every one of us who is able to do anything for God and humanity” (Shaw, 1991, p. 118).
After she has established that Paul’s experience is universal and that members of the congregation perhaps have also had a similar vision, she outlines the types of visions women may have. These visions include political freedom (“she saw how the avarice and ambition of one class with power made him forget the rights of another”), social freedom (“Another [woman] has come hither, who, gazing about her, saw men brutalized by the rum fiend, the very life of a nation threatened, and the power of the liquor traffic, with its hand on the helm of the state, guiding her with sails full spread straight upon the rocks of dire destruction”), and a vision of

Passion and Prayers 12 what is to be learned (“And this vision has driven her out from the seclusion of her own quiet life that she may give this great truth [education] to the world, to womanhood everywhere) (Shaw,
1991, p. 119).
By describing these visions, Shaw is able to lend credence to women participating in politics, social issues, and education because these women are acting upon their visions and serving God, just as Paul was. The audience for this sermon is, again, expected to be familiar with the Biblical references: “Permit me to use this vision which is so familiar to us all” (Shaw,
1991, p. 118). This audience is placed in a role similar to the audience addressed in “The Path is
Plain,” they are not addressed directly but they are given an impetus to change their lives. In this case, it is women who are granted permission to rebuke traditional feminine roles and take part in politics, social issues, and education. The theme of this narrative becomes quite clear when
Shaw makes the connection between Paul’s vision and the vision of female reformers.
This sermon also places women’s experiences in a privileged position or, at the very least, introduces the audience to the notion that women may actually have visions. Shaw’s comparison of women’s visions to Paul’s vision suggests that, just as Paul is, these women are worthy of note and/or emulation. Shaw combines male and female characteristics to create strong, intelligent characters (male characteristics) who are not working for themselves but for the benefit of others, especially God (female characteristics). As in the other sermon, Shaw offers her own commentary and interprets the Biblical scripture. She also attempts to get women to identify with Paul so that they will act upon their vision and serve God; and she advocates and celebrates women occupying a traditional male role: reformer.
Upon reviewing two of Shaw’s sermons, it seems that the strategies Shaw utilized include offering personal commentary, making connections for the audience between past events and

Passion and Prayers 13 current conditions (known as narrative fidelity) and, in one sermon at least, made women’s experiences seem valuable and equal to one man’s: St. Paul. I turn now to an analysis of two of
Shaw’s suffrage speeches to see if these same strategies are employed in another context.
The first suffrage speech analyzed is entitled, “God’s Women.” This speech was one of
Shaw’s standard lectures (Linkugel & Solomon, 1991, p. 131). In this speech, Shaw combines several “mini” stories about Biblical women to form one “meta” story. Shaw uses the format of a personal narrative and tells the audience of a time when she was listening to a lecture being delivered before an Institute of Sacred Theology. The speaker, a Bishop, was telling the male students what they might permit females to do. He claimed that women can speak in prayer and class-meetings but may not become ministers or dispense sacraments. He then stated that women who use Deborah as an example of one woman being granted power by God are incorrect in doing so because God had made a mistake. Shaw takes issue with this and reminds her audience of what Deborah did:
This woman found a country greatly disturbed, a country where the judges had been taking bribes, a country where the people were utterly demoralized, where they dared not walk on their highways because of thieves and robbers…. During the forty years of her reign as judge of Israel the whole condition of things was revolutionized. We are told that she judged all the people in righteousness, and the people had peace for forty years. Just think of forty years peace! We have never known such a period since that day.
(Shaw, 1991, p. 133)
With this example, Shaw clearly defines Deborah as one of God’s women. She also notes that the Bishop told his audience that Miriam was not one of God’s women either. Shaw, in turn, offers her own interpretation of Miriam’s contributions to humanity. She describes how Miriam helped Moses become the leader of Israel and how, with her two brothers, became a leader as well.

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Shaw then goes on to examine the women the Bishop has dubbed “God’s women.” The first woman is Ruth. Shaw notes that Ruth is to be lauded because she got along with her mother-in-law but that we should not admire the way she secured a husband—Ruth waited until her future husband, Boaz, was drunk and then laid down with him. After this Boaz felt that he had to marry her. Rachel is another one of “God’s women.” Shaw does not wish to celebrate
Rachel’s subservience to men, her attractiveness, or her weeping over children she never had.
Next, Shaw examines the last of “God’s women”: Mary. She notes that she is not sure which Mary the Bishop is referring to:
If he means the Mary out of whom the seven devils were cast, I should agree with him, for when seven devils have been cast out of a woman she must be something of a saint…. If it was the Mary who washed the feet of Christ and wiped them with the hairs of her head, in token of penitence, I again agree with him, for that kind of penitence shows us she had been lifted up very close to the Divine. There was the Mary who sat at the feet of the Lord learning theology of Him…. Then there was another Mary, and she is the Mary whom I have taken as my example in my profession. This was the Mary who stood by the tomb of the Lord, and there at the mouth of the open tomb she received the first divine commission from the
Divine One Himself to go out into the world and preach the gospel of a risen
Lord…. If it was the Mary who was his mother, the Bishop has brought forward the wrong Mary to prove his case. What does the Bible tell us? In the fullness of time God needed for the world a Redeemer. How should He give the Redeemer to the world? He gave the Redeemer to the world by choosing out of the world a woman to become the mother of the Savior of the race. God and woman gave to the world its Redeemer. (Shaw, 1991, p. 136)
After considering the women the Bishop considers “God’s women,” Shaw introduces her own
Biblical heroine. Shaw admires Vashti, who disobeyed her husband and was driven from her palace because of it. Certainly, her audience would not expect this choice. Shaw states:
I selected Vashti from among them all because she did disobey her husband—a woman away back in the centuries, who recognized the dictates of her own selfrespect; a woman who refused to become the puppet of a king and of his drunken courtiers; a woman ready to give up a throne, a husband, and a kingdom rather than do an ignominious thing; such a woman is God’s woman, husband or no husband. I wish the world were full of Vashtis [sic] to-day, standing by the right of their individual self-respect. (Shaw, 1991, p. 137)

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The major theme of Shaw’s “meta” story seems to be that God’s servants can be Biblical women who are and are not celebrated by the church. As with the sermons, Shaw focuses on the events in the lives of these characters and asks her audience to, at the most, identify with Vashti,
Deborah, and Miriam or, at the very least, acknowledge their contributions.
In terms of constructing gender, Shaw does an exquisite job of demonstrating what qualities are revered in women by the church (e.g., subservience). Shaw, an educated and freethinking woman, does not revere these same qualities. By deconstructing the reasons Ruth and
Rachel are held in high esteem and then explaining why these women should not be held up as examples, Shaw presents a direct challenge to patriarchy, in this case the church. She also presents her audience with an alternative image: Vashti. Shaw illustrates how “good” women are constructed and also claims that these Biblical women (Deborah, Miriam, the two Marys, and
Vashti) have valuable experiences and are worthy of emulation. Shaw’s strategies in this speech include inventing her own “ideal” woman, making connections between the lives of women who lived in the past to women who live in Shaw’s present, making women’s experiences seem valuable, and subverting the church’s notion of what constitutes a “good” woman or “God’s women.”
The next speech to be analyzed, “The Fate of the Republics,” was Shaw’s most famous lecture; it was one of the first speeches she composed about woman suffrage and she delivered it hundreds of times over the course of several decades (Linkugel & Solomon, 1991, p. 139). In sum, this speech claims that republics may have been strong and successful in regard to industry and business (traits associated with men) but Shaw points out that the reason all republics fall is because of the lack of morality (a trait associated with women). Shaw claims, therefore, that for the United States to succeed, women must play a greater role in our republic.

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Although there are several narratives in this speech, one clearly represents Shaw’s theme, which is “American women are not represented or appreciated.” Shaw begins by telling her audience that:
I have traveled in many countries, and in every one, save in these United States, I have seen stately monuments erected in grateful memory of the patriotic services of women. We had a faint hope of at least a part in one, when we learned that a national monument to the Pilgrims was to be unveiled at Plymouth,
Massachusetts. On the great day, scores of women gathered to witness the ceremonies. We were told that this government had taught nations of the world the great principle that ‘taxation without representation is tyranny.’ We were also told that in this country under God the people rule, and yet the constitution of every state in the Union, declared that it was males, and not the people who rule…. After many other statements of a similar character, which are true in spirit, but had never been practiced by any nation, the monument was unveiled, and our hearts sank with intense disappointment when we read the inscription,
‘Erected by a grateful country in honor of the Pilgrim Fathers.’ We had again witnessed the evidence of a country’s easy forgetfulness of its debt to women.
(Shaw, 1991, p. 144)
Shaw is able to present her narrative commentary because she attended this event. She also compares her experience at the dedication of the memorial to her viewing of the painting that depicts the Pilgrim’s landing. While both men and women are shown in the picture, Shaw notes that the title, “The Landing of the Forefathers,” effectively removes any of the importance of the
Foremothers (Shaw, 1991, p. 144).
In both cases, Shaw calls attention to the ways in which men have systematically ignored women’s contributions to this country. She reminds her audience that women, along with men, should be praised. While Shaw’s audience may not be direct participants in the actions she describes, as Americans they have the option of recognizing the contributions women have made in the past and the present. Thus, members of her audience should support the right for women to vote and remedy the situation of women not being represented.

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In this speech, just as in “God’s Women,” Shaw utilizes her own experiences to comment on the social conditions of women. Shaw also makes connections between women of the past and women of the present. Sadly, it seems as if the conditions have not changed much for woman’s rights when Shaw delivered this speech. Shaw again implicates her audience and gives them an impetus to change: Women have contributed as much to this nation as any other population and should be allowed to vote. Shaw also demonstrates how women’s experiences and contributions have been written out of history and, with her narrative, attempts to fill in just some of the blanks regarding women’s history.
Having completed the analysis of these four speeches, I now answer the following research questions that have guided this study: What rhetorical strategies did Shaw use as a minister? Did these strategies carry over to her speeches for suffrage? If so, did these strategies help or hinder her credibility as a speaker?
First of all, Shaw’s strategies as a minister included adding her own commentary to narrative events, making connections between the lives of women who lived in the past with women who live in the present, inviting her audience to identify with the characters in the narratives by relating the events in the character’s lives to their own, and making women’s experiences seem valuable.
Secondly, these strategies did in fact carry over to Shaw’s suffrage speeches, or at least the ones analyzed in this study, which were the two most popular suffrage speeches Shaw delivered. In the suffrage speeches, Shaw continued to be a very visible narrator and offered her own interpretation of events to her audience. She connected the experiences of women in her audience to the experiences of women featured in the Bible and who survived the harsh conditions faced by Pilgrims. Shaw almost always invited the audience to identify with a

Passion and Prayers 18 religious character or characters, and while the Pilgrims are not explicit religious figures, they do hold a sacred place in the history of the United States.
Thirdly, these characteristics lent Shaw a vast amount of credibility; by equating the work of a female social reformer to the work of St. Paul, for example, Shaw successfully discredited the claim that women have no right in the field of politics, social reform, or education. Because
Shaw was a minister, she proved to be a reliable narrator mostly because of her ability to clearly and wittily cite the Bible, a very credible source. It was because she knew the Bible so well that
Shaw could offer an alternative view of what it means to be a “good woman” and also reminded her audience that there were some women whose experiences were extremely valuable and whose lives are worthy of emulation. Also, the very fact that Shaw was a minister lent credence to the suffrage movement itself. At one time Shaw considered removing the “Rev.” from in front of her name but Henry P. Blackwell, Lucy Stone’s spouse, pointed out that the “Rev.” in front of
Anna Howard Shaw is “worth a great deal to our cause” (Linkugel, 1963, p. 172).
Anna Howard Shaw was, in and of herself, a great figure in the woman suffrage movement. Yet, it is important to remember that Shaw’s impact should not be limited to the primary orator of the woman’s suffrage movement, but also as one of the movement’s ministers.
By combining feminist and narrative criticism, the analyses of Shaw’s speeches yielded more well-formed results. For example, we now understand that perhaps one reason for Shaw being such an accomplished orator in the suffrage movement is most likely due to the skills she developed as a minister; especially her skill in citing and relating to stories found in the Bible.
Moreover, this analysis certainly serves as an example as to why a rhetorical critic should adopt a pluralist stance.

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For a woman who grew up in a time when women were discouraged from seeking an education, speaking in public, or even speaking their minds, Shaw’s life becomes even more impressive, and more significant. She was not only an activist of woman’s rights, she was a champion for human rights. And for that, we are all indebted to her—especially those women who seize upon their right to vote. Shaw passed away the second of July in 1919. Although she saw the 19 th
Amendment adopted it was not ratified before she died. Tragically, one of the individuals who did the most to secure a woman’s right to vote in the U.S. was never able to vote in a national election. As we continue to remember the great sons and daughters of Michigan, it is my sincere hope that Shaw will be remembered for her work within the suffrage movement as well as the pulpit.

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References
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