Recovery and Criticism in Women’s Public Address Studies

This post is something of a rough stone rolling—but I’m just glad to be rolling at this point. Anyway, looking forward to your thoughts on this next installment. The end ventures a bit down the rabbit hole, but I’m hoping with a few more rewrites I’ll start to find some clarity.

**Also, a little help: Should I use woman's or women's when describing rights, public address, rhetor, etc....?

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Recovery and Criticism in Women’s Public Address Studies

As is true of much historical scholarship, recovery plays a key role in woman’s public address history. Feminist scholars have made huge strides in bringing to light the absconded discourses of many women, and in doing so, have not only increased academic knowledge of woman rhetors, but have likewise increased an understanding of how historical women have participated in rhetorical performance. The result has been the accumulation of a substantial amount of literature on women’s rhetoric. In this literature review I have two purposes: the first is to categorize the literature on historical women’s public address into two overarching categories based on topical content to demonstrate that working class women have been ignored as a topic of study. The second purpose is to attempt to articulate a theoretical account for why the literature has largely ignored working class women. I do this by explaining a dialectical relationship characterized by recovery and criticism.

Historical Women’s Rhetoric

The scholarship on historical women’s rhetoric can be divided into two broad categories, both of which overlook working class women’s rhetoric.[1] The first grouping of scholarship consists of the study of women who agitated primarily for a social issue such as temperance or abolition, and in doing so asserted their rights as women, thus arguing secondarily for woman’s rights. The second grouping contains scholarship that studies woman’s rhetoric as primarily the struggle for woman’s rights, including woman’s suffrage and universal equality. In either grouping, the women studied are examples of women advocating on behalf of themselves, on behalf of otherwise marginalized groups, and on behalf of policies they viewed as conducive to a more just society.

The first grouping of literature can be characterized as the study of the beginning of women’s rights rhetoric. Woman rhetors in this group of scholarship were found to engage in woman’s rights as they were incidentally excluded from organizations that advocated for causes for which many woman reformers sympathized, such as abolition and temperance. Contemporary understandings of feminist rhetoric first emerge from the study of these women, and tend to focus exclusively on middle class reformers. One of the key rhetorical strategies of these early leaders was to “piggyback on existing sentiment.”[2] Namely, that because women could not publicly advocate on behalf of themselves without being anti-feminine, they were forced to work through existing avenues of social reform. Zaeske notes, consequently, that early reformers used “a rhetoric of gendered morality that emphasized the special nature of female benevolence.”[3] Additionally, Campbell has noted how the nature of female rhetoric created a double-bind on female rhetors. The result of this double-bind meant that early feminists had to use remarkable rhetorical ingenuity in inventing their arguments, but at the same time, their inventional skill subverted their ability to create rhetorical works that were entirely coherent.[4] In her study of Mary Wolstonecraft, Angelina Grimke and Margaret Fuller, Huxman notes that “all three women reaped key rhetorical advantages in their convergence of woman’s rights with their respective causes” by “exploit[ing] the logical persuasiveness of analogous reasoning.”[5] Furthermore, these three early women exhibited masculine approaches to persuasion, an especially necessary adaptation, as they were appealing to largely masculine organizations and audiences. Other early reformers that have been studied include Angelina Grimke’s sister, Sarah, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley, and Judith Sargent Murray.[6] These early female reformers paved the way for women who would argue primarily for woman’s rights.

The second grouping of literature approaches the study of women who were primarily woman’s rights activists, an activity generally distinguished by their push for woman’s suffrage. Perhaps the earliest work in this area is a study of Anna Howard Shaw.[7] Since that time, the study of women’s rhetoric has grown substantially. In this grouping of literature, scholars have examined the speeches of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth (?), and Susan B. Anthony, to name a few.[8] However, with the exception of Truth, each of these women came from middle class sensibilities and is largely concerned with middle class women. However, this isn’t to say they were ignorant of the laboring class.  Dow has noted in her study of the feminist newspaper Revolution that Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were sensitive to the plight of the working classes. Anthony, especially, was aware that workingwomen had been ignored in the woman’s movement. Dow explains the focus “on middle and upper class women, primarily because such women had the time, resources, and education to pursue reform.”[9] However, Bagley’s own rhetoric highlights how this misunderstanding of the capabilities of laborers is misleading both to the understanding of lower class women’s rhetoric, as well as the suppression of proletarian narratives generally. But Dow’s explanation is not unique. As Rancière has argued, leftist intellectuals since Marx have consistently viewed the working classes as the already proletarianized at the expense of seeing them as individual people with literary talents and philosophical ideas and ideals of their own.[10] This comment speaks to the erasure that occurs at the intersections of recovery and criticism that have characterized rhetorical studies.

Recovery and Criticism           

In this section of my review of the scholarly literature on woman’s public addresses, I aim to explain why issues of class have been largely suppressed by historical and contemporary understandings of feminist rhetoric. This explanation revolves around the tension resulting from recovery and criticism. Before continuing, it is important to better explain what I mean by recovery and criticism, and how I see them functioning as a dialectical tension.

By recovery, I refer to the process of excavating from the recesses of history texts for their submission to a canon. By criticism, I refer to the critique of discourse to excavate meaning from a text. The two function together. Recovery allows for the criticism of a text, and criticism allows for the recovery of meaning from a text. However, in any scholarship, one is emphasized over the other—but the tension is always there. On the recovery side, lower class woman’s rhetoric is ignored due to issues of access. In striking a rather fatalistic note, Campbell says, “no matter what contemporary scholars do, the historical record will remain profoundly distorted, skewed toward those lucky enough to be literate, educated, and middle or upper class and whose works appeared in mainstream outlets with wider circulation.”[11] This speaks to the other tension, criticism, which might be properly understood as 1) an effect of canonization and 2) as an affection for specific rhetorical tools. First, though Campbell’s insight into the difficulty of finding non-middle/upper class texts is certainly true, to what extent have these difficulties in the study of women’s rhetoric been compounded by the constraints of canonization? In other words, in its attempts to unearth and halt the continued male bias in public address studies by busting the male-dominated public address canon, feminist scholarship has inadvertently created its own woman’s public address canon, competitive to the male canon, that contains its own bias, ultimately blinding itself to the rhetoric of working class women.[12] Secondly, Campbell’s words also illustrate how lower class women’s rhetoric is suppressed because rhetorical tools are always directed toward speaking agents, whereas lower class women are viewed as voiceless (illiterate, uneducated, proletarian).

Unlike the study of well-hashed rhetorical discourses, I suggest recovery has been much more central and difficult in the study of early women’s public address than in other historical scholarship for perhaps two abstract reasons that ultimately function to obscure working class rhetoric. First, recovery in contemporary, feminist rhetorical studies is often the result of a critical analysis. By this, I mean recovery is secondary to the analysis. Secondly, whereas recovery is secondary in mainstream historical scholarship, in feminist studies recovery is largely the purpose of the rhetorical study. This purpose is compounded by the problem that criticism of early feminist discourses is understood as incompatible with male-dominated rhetoric.[13] From these two abstractions, recovery and criticism, emerges a dialectical tension that has ultimately suppressed rhetorical studies of lower class women. Essentially, the dialectical tension of recovery and criticism has opened up a chasm through which lower class women’s rhetoric has fallen. It helps to explain why studies of woman rhetors continue to be dominated by middle class representations, despite the presence of texts written by lower class women. While recovery is used to enact criticism, and criticism is used to enact recovery, the great masses of workers fall in between. In this sense, the tension has created an ambiguity that can be exploited to advance knowledge of working class women. As James Arnt Aune has noted, the contradiction comes to participate as “key points of ambiguity in an unfolding argument that open the advocate up to strong refutation by an ideological opponent and that help an argument move forward in historical time by providing opportunities for work by other advocates within the same tradition.”[14] As Aune’s description suggests, the widely available, and anecdotal references to Sarah Bagley, provide an opportunity for exploiting the contradiction and moving forward the understanding of woman’s rhetoric.

Sarah Bagley and Recovery & Criticism           

Studying Sarah G. Bagley’s rhetoric is one way to ameliorate middle-class paternalism expressed toward the working classes that has ultimately resulted in the concealment of much working class rhetoric—not because those rhetorics do not exist, but because working class rhetoric is obscured by the tension manifested in the recovery::criticism dialectic. At this point, it is important to understand where Bagley’s rhetoric fits in the current grouping of the literature, although Bagley’s rhetoric ultimately initiates a third grouping characterized by class distinctions.           

            

Bagley fits primarily into the second grouping of literature. In other words, it is more historically and textually accurate to look at Bagley as primarily a labor activist. That, consciously or unconsciously, agitating for labor was a priori to women's rights agitation for Bagley (i.e., to what extent would the vote have been useful if women laborers had no time in which to exercise it?) However, this is not to say that her gender was absented (in fact, it might have found expression through absence) from her rhetoric, rather it played into a rights talk that perhaps strategically emphasized labor rights over women's rights. In this sense, and in keeping with Campbell’s definition, Bagley was a feminist because she “worked for legal, economic, and political advancement of women.”[15] In one of the few published studies of lower class women’s rhetoric, Mattina has discussed the collective rhetoric of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, of which Bagley was president and one of the founders.[16] Mattina’s work is important for understanding the collective rhetoric of early women. However, I think her study subtly continues to privilege middle class rhetorics of women as it prevents us from understanding proletarianized women as individuals. Namely, in Mattina’s successful recovery of working class rhetorics, a critique of individual rhetors is neglected. Though Mattina’s research is profoundly important, it still falls into the liberal trap that middle class women are individuals while lower classes can only be approached collectively. In fact, Mattina’s essay reflects well the pitfall of the recovery::criticism dialectic. In order to recover the rhetorics of the Lowell Mill Girls, Mattina approaches them as a collective, thus obscuring the individuals that made the movement, and removing them from the lens of critical analysis. Mattina’s work is important for highlighting the recovery::criticism tension that has otherwise obscured working class women.

            

Studying lower class women’s rhetoric is a good place to explore this tension—the relationship between recovery and critique that has absconded the laboring classes from rhetorical analysis—because of the affinities between contemporary understandings of historical women and the laboring classes. Namely, women and the laboring classes are at once understood as collectivized and homogenized (immune from critique), but at the same time suppressed (beyond recovery).[17] For example, Campbell has noted that women are non-persons, not agents, and thus a woman’s rhetoric is inherently oxymoronic.[18] Likewise, a similar rhetorical constraint occurs regarding understandings of the working class, in which they become objectified and collectivized and then only studied as such, so that individual subjects are suppressed. This affinity is compounded in the nature of working class women’s rhetoric, as these women occupy both spheres of marginalization. I suggest Bagley’s rhetoric appears to present a rupture in this otherwise smooth narrative. Within this rupture lies the possibility of better understanding reform movements generally and working class women specifically through the rhetoric of Sarah G. Bagley.

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[1] For exceptions see Anne F. Mattina, "‘Corporation Tools and Time-Slaves": Class and Gender in the Rhetoric of Antebellum Labor Reform,’ The Howard Journal of Communication 7 (1996): 151-168 and Ellen M. Ritter, "Elizabeth Morgan: Pioneer Female Labor Agitator," Communication Studies 22 (1971): 242-251. However, Morgan was a a middle-class activist who represented lower class interests, though not being a member of the working class herself. See also an unpublished M.A. Thesis by Rebecca Petersen Harper, Beginnings of Women's Public Discourse in America: Rhetorical Collectivity in the Writings of Lucy Larcom and Sarah G. Bagley (M.A. Thesis, BYU, 1998). Lastly, Linkugel (1963) mentions that “Sarah Bagley promoted woman trade unionism” (165).

[2] Susan Schultz Huxman, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, and Angelina Grimke: Symbolic Convergence and a Nascent Rehtorical Vision," Communication Quarterly 44 (1996): 22.

[3] Susan Zaeske, "The 'Promiscuous Audience' Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman's Rights Movement," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 192.

[4] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, "Gender and Genre: Loci of Invention and Contradiction in the Earliest Speeches by U.S. Women," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 479-495.

[5] Huxman, “Mary Wolstonecraft,” 22.

[6] Kristin S. Vonnegut, "Poison or Panacea?," Communication Studies 46 (1995): 73-88; Zaeske, “The Promiscuous Audience”; Elizabeth Galewski, "That Strange Case for Women's Capacity to Reason: Judith Sargent Murray's Use of Irony in 'On the Equality of Sexes' (1790)," Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 84-108.           

[7] Likugel

[8] See (provide citations for those who have studied Cady Stanton).

[9] Dow,  p. 78

[10] See Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 2003) and Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, (Temple Univrsity Press, 1991).

[11] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, "Consciousness-Raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 46.

[12] As recently as E. Michele Ramsey ("Addressing Issues of Context in Historical Women's Public Address," Women's Studies in Communication 27 (2004): 353-376) the male bias has recognized as continuing to exist within public address studies. However, Ramsey’s insightful analysis then embarks on an analysis of middle-class and upper-class women, ignoring working class texts.

[13] See Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, "Consciousness-Raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 45-64, also “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech.

[14] James Arnt Aune, Rhetoric and Marxism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994): 85.

[15] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (New York: Praeger, 1989), 3.

[16] Mattina, “Corporation Tools.”

[17] See Campbell’s Oxymoron.

[18] Something like this needs to go here: Despite Campbell’s later disavowel of the feminist style in her early QJS on feminist rhetoric, it is not so much whether Campbell’s observations were empirically present, but that they were symbolically present to such an extent that feminist scholarship was dominated by this view. Namely, it is her perception that is important here, a perception indicative of a broader intellectual current.