Declarations in Dialogue

1. Declarations in Dialogue Rhetoric in 19th-century U.S. Social Movements

2. 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”

3. 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)

4. 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?

5. 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

6. Genre: “Declaration of Sentiments” • 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).

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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)

13. 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

14. Seneca Falls Convention • 19-20 July 1848 • Seneca Falls, New York

15. 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”

16. 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”

17. Dissolve the bands Alter former systems of government Tyranny of king over colony Laws Representation Imposing taxes without consent Taking away charters 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 1776 1848

18. 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”)

19. 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

20. 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”

21. 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

22. 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!

23. 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?