Woman of the People

Running head: WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE 1

Woman of the People: The Transformation of Susan B. Anthony

and the Post-Civil War Woman’s Rights Narrative

William R. Upchurch

Graduate Student

Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne


Abstract

This paper provides a rhetorical analysis of Susan B. Anthony’s “Women Want Bread, Not the

Ballot” speech. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989a) and others have characterized Anthony as an

organizer and master of the forensic style. This speech, however, exhibits characteristics of the

deliberative genre, and through it Anthony constitutes working-class women as voters through

their participation in the rising industrial economy. Anthony’s fusion of woman suffrage and

labor issues marks her as a proto-populist leader whose style presages that of future populist

rhetors. This paper suggests that a broader reading of Anthony’s rhetoric complicates our

understanding of Anthony’s strengths as a rhetor and her role in the post-Civil War woman’s

rights movement.


Woman of the People: The Transformation of Susan B. Anthony and the Post-Civil War

Woman’s Rights Narrative

Susan B. Anthony is today the most iconic nineteenth-century woman’s rights leader

thanks to her appearance on a silver dollar coin and a “trail of dedicated protégés [who recorded]

her contributions in honorific biographies” (Dubois & Stanton, 1975, p. 1). Despite her regard

among modern scholars and in the popular mind, she is often described as merely a “great

organizer,” “business manager,” or, as Ellen Carol DuBois (1975) claims, less “individualistic

and intellectual” than her friend and collaborator Elizabeth Cady Stanton (p. 1). Anthony's career

as a traveling speaker was short-lived and took place at a time when she and Stanton had been

marginalized as “radicals” by the more moderate woman suffrage activists of the American

Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). It is for these reasons, I believe, that the interplay

between her two great speeches of the period has been largely ignored by critics of the

movement.

These speeches, delivered in the early 1870s, are considered by many to be her greatest

rhetorical acts.1 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989a) refers to “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to

Vote?” as “a persuasive masterpiece,” and compares it to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s "Letter

from Birmingham Jail" and Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union address (p. 108). The second

speech, “Women Want Bread, Not the Ballot,” deserves equal attention for its elucidation of key

transformative elements present in the development of the woman’s rights movement and

Anthony’s role within it.

This paper features a look at the less popular of these two speeches—the "Bread" speech.

The speech is an important departure for Anthony as well as the woman suffrage movement. For

Anthony, it marked the culmination of a period of turmoil, failure, and rejection that left her


emotionally exhausted, if resolute. The constitutional claims of the early woman’s rights

movement, epitomized in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s earlier arguments for the vote, had been

temporarily subsumed into the larger American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an

organization dedicated to extending constitutional rights to women and blacks.2 During the fight

over the Fifteenth Amendment, however, Republican politicians and key AERA activists came to

believe that the woman’s rights claims had then been defeated.3 Frustrated, isolated from former

allies, and realizing a new strategy was needed if the movement was to avoid being lost in the

historic tides of what was termed “the negro’s hour,”4 Anthony contrived to register and vote in

the 1872 election. She was enacting a revolutionary ideology labeled the New Departure, which

was made possible by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the arguments of Virginia

and Francis Minor. She was subsequently arrested, which led to her trial as a defendant (a

notable situation, as all legal challenges over woman suffrage had thus far been made by women

as plaintiffs). Virginia Minor was one such plaintiff. She, along with her husband, took her case

to the Supreme Court around the same time.5 The failure of the courts to recognize the rights of

both Minor and Anthony put to rest the legal claims of women under the Constitution and its

fifteen amendments.

Through a rhetorical analysis of Anthony's "Crime" and "Bread" speeches, this paper

argues that Anthony's rhetoric transformed to constitute different audiences in different ways.6

To this end, I will first set up the rhetorical situation in which Anthony spoke. Then I will

chronicle her shift from the forensic address of “Crime” to the more deliberative mode of

“Bread.” Next I will demonstrate how she utilized a new mode of address in the latter to engage

her new audience with arguments from expedience. I will also show how in “Bread” Anthony

challenged gender norms and uses a gender-neutral perspective to constitute working women as


full citizens. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this new conception of Anthony, including

how the speech complicates our understanding of both Anthony’s legacy as a woman’s rights

advocate and the characterization of the post-Civil War woman’s rights movement. Last, this

study allows us to characterize Anthony as an early labor leader and to read the text as a “proto-

populist” appeal. I will argue that the growing number of wage-earning women, mostly shut out

of the emerging labor and populist movements, gave her an audience beyond that of the white,

upper class women she previously addressed.

Taking the Public Stage

As noted in the introduction, Anthony is often remembered as the organizational leader of

the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), with Stanton as its fiery intellectual. A

broader reading of the history of the post-AERA period as well as Anthony’s rhetoric shows that

this narrative is perhaps incomplete. While Anthony did work to organize conventions, rent halls,

raise funds, and encourage participation in both the abolition and woman’s rights movements,

her speeches and actions in the years between 1870 and 1880 are worth closer examination in

order to fully appreciate her role in the woman’s rights movement. Multiple catalytic events

helped galvanize Anthony into action.7 Using these events to illustrate historical context gives a

growing sense of the pressures and disappointments Anthony experienced at the time she

adopted the Minors’ arguments. Lloyd Bitzer (1968) says that “rhetorical works belong to a class

of things which obtain their character from the circumstances of the historic context in which

they occur” (p. 3). Anthony acted as though there would never be a better time to make an

argument for woman’s voting rights as citizens of the United States. Her experience as an

organizer prompted her to decisive action. Decades of failure, however, had also trained her to

expect resistance. Belinda Stillion Southard (2006) argues that Anthony “[understood] the


heightened challenge presented to her as part of the process toward social change” (p. 5). I have

identified three catalytic events from 1869 that, taken as a whole, provide insight into Anthony’s

emergence as an orator on the national stage: a division in the woman’s rights movement, the

failure of her newspaper, and a new line of argument opened up by a pair of activists from

Missouri.

The first significant event was the schism in the woman suffrage movement that led to

the formation of two competing organizations, the NWSA and the AWSA. Tensions had been

rising within the AERA over the primacy of black voting rights over those of women for years.

During a speaking tour of Kansas in 1867, Anthony and Stanton made the controversial decision

to ally themselves with George Francis Train, a pro-slavery, pro-woman suffrage Democrat. The

Republican Party, traditionally the party that paid the most attention to woman suffrage

arguments, had abandoned its support of women for reasons of political expedience. They

believed support for a woman suffrage amendment to the Kansas constitution threatened the

passage of the black suffrage amendment. Influential East Coast movement leaders quickly

followed suit, raising the cry of “the negro’s hour” and counseling patience to women. Anthony

and Stanton had come to believe that the two rights were linked by the same principles and thus

should be conferred by universal suffrage laws. Any other outcome was unacceptable. Few

others agreed, however, and as the campaigns wore on it became clear that Anthony and Stanton

would have to either abandon their principles or blaze their own trail. The first entry in

Anthony’s diary for 1868 illuminates their decision: “All the old friends, with scarce an

exception, are sure we are wrong. Only time can tell, but I believe we are right and hence bound

to succeed” (Harper, 1898a, p. 295).


The following week, the first issue of The Revolution was published. Stanton, as editor,

set the tone for the paper by attacking Republicans and anyone else who “insisted that woman

must stand back and wait until another class should be enfranchised” (Harper, 1898a, p. 323).

The next year saw increasingly hostile reactions to Anthony and Stanton's usual circuit of

meetings, as some made calls for their expulsion from some of the very societies and

associations they had helped create over the past 25 years. As a result, on May 15, 1869, a group

of representatives to the AERA decided to form the NWSA. The membership was all female,

and dedicated to advancing the rights of women throughout society, not just on the matter of

suffrage. The Revolution was the voice of the NWSA for a short time, but due to several factors

it would not remain in print for long (Harper, 1898a).

The failure of The Revolution was the second catalytic event that spurred Anthony’s

transformation. While technically still published into 1870, the paper was troubled from the start,

and the end became clear by mid-1869. George Francis Train had ceased supporting the paper on

account of his arrest on charges of inciting rebellion in England (a humorous anecdote has

Train’s accusers using copies of The Revolution he was carrying as evidence against him,

without bothering to read their contents). Having lost their primary source of funding before a

critical mass of subscribers and advertisers could be developed, the paper found itself in hard

times. Anthony once again proved her talent and influence by raising private investment and

soliciting contributions to keep the paper running, leaving her little time to contribute to it

editorially. Her detractors delighted in these struggles, and taunted Anthony and Stanton publicly

in editorials while trying privately to coax them back into the mainstream movement. These twin

reactions infuriated Anthony and furthered her resolve to succeed even in the face of mounting

debt and dwindling hope. She feared that failure would be ammunition for enemies of woman’s


rights. The following letter sent to a cousin reveals the incredible pressure Anthony felt on behalf

of her cause:

My paper must not, shall not go down . . . I know you will save me from giving

the world a chance to say, “There is a woman’s rights failure; even the best of

women can’t manage business.” If I could only die, and thereby fail honorably, I

would say “amen,” but to live and fail—it would be too terrible to bear. (Harper,

1898a, p. 354)

Despite the fact that she worked “like a whole plantation of slaves” the paper could not be saved

(Harper, 1989a, p. 356). It stumbled along until mid-1870 when Anthony was forced to sell it for

$1 while retaining $10,000 in debt accrued during its short run. To add insult to injury, AWSA

had just started publishing the Woman’s Journal, which was immensely popular, and in which

Anthony’s estranged friends and colleagues of a quarter-century of struggle attacked her and

Stanton’s radicalism (Harper, 1898a).

The final event that precipitated Anthony’s shift in strategy and role in the movement was

the presentation of six resolutions on woman’s constitutional voting rights by Francis and

Virginia Minor at a meeting of the Missouri Woman Suffrage Association on October 6, 1869.

Anthony was in attendance at this meeting, and she printed the resolutions in The Revolution. So

taken was Stanton with this argument for women’s legal right to vote that she printed and

distributed 10,000 extra copies of the issue at great expense. Here was a chance for Anthony to

turn the tables on those who had recently inserted the word “male” into the Constitution for the

first time, because the Minors’ argument was grounded in the language of the very same

Fourteenth Amendment. She began to substitute some of the natural rights language in her

speeches and letters with the arguments put forth in these resolutions.8


Historians and critics have interpreted her mastery of these arguments—and their

prevalence given her increasingly full schedule of speeches—in such a way as to pigeonhole

them as “emblematic of her public discourse” (Stillion Southard, 2006, p. 9). Stillion Southard

(2006) characterizes Anthony’s public discourse as upholding a “traditional rhetor-audience

relationship,” “formal,” and “overtly logical” (p. 12). I will argue in this essay that these

characterizations are appropriate when considering Anthony’s appeals to a particular audience—

lawmakers and potential jurors—and that, outside the context of the law, she strategically

positioned herself as a woman’s rights leader moving in a radical new direction.

Changing Audiences, Changing Aim

Contemporaneous to the development, expression, and enactment of her belief that she

was a citizen with full voting rights, Anthony traveled the country giving another kind of speech

altogether. “Women Want Bread, Not the Ballot” was, according to Anthony biographer Ida

Husted Harper (1898b), “delivered in most of the large cities of the United States between 1870

and 1880” (p. 996). This speech is a departure from “Crime” and broadens our view of Anthony

as a rhetorical and historical figure in the woman’s rights movement. This speech is different

from “Crime” in several important ways. First, she directly addressed the socio-cultural

foundation of the arguments against woman’s equality. Second, the speech targets working

women as a primary audience. In it, Anthony utilizes aspects of the “feminine style” such as

consciousness raising, linguistic “scaffolds,” and conversational speech to constitute wage-

earning women as actors in the public sphere.9 Furthermore, these strategies presaged the

rhetorical style exhibited by many populist and labor leaders in the following decades (Tonn,

1996). Finally, it makes a deliberative appeal as opposed to a forensic one, more explicitly

encouraging women to act on their own behalf.


Anthony’s elucidation of the socio-cultural legacy that bolstered the continued denial of

woman’s rights served to differentiate “Bread” from “Crime.” Anthony turned the tables on the

gender norms of the day in her speech, providing her the opportunity to forge a bold new

approach to the argument for woman’s rights. These norms were primarily drawn from what has

been called the Cult of True Womanhood, or cult of domesticity, which emphasized the four

virtues of womanhood: purity, piety, domesticity, and submission. These virtues—all acting

primarily in the private sphere—were born of the religious, agrarian society of early America.10

They also promoted a limited womanhood ideal available primarily to wealthier, white women

who could afford to remain “domesticated.” So, as more women entered the workforce at the

vanguard of industrialism these ideals were at odds with the presence of women in the public

sphere. Women who entered the workforce were increasingly affected by laws and taxation,

allowing Anthony’s cry of “no taxation without representation” to gain force. "No taxation

without representation" provided Anthony with a powerful and deeply ingrained cultural ideal to

wield as a weapon in making her legal case. For her to effectively wield that weapon, she had to

first help women to view themselves as actors in the public sphere.11 Anthony’s appeals in

“Bread” served a constitutive function aimed squarely at her audience of working women.

Anthony subtly attempted to further undermine gender norms, and further separate

herself from the arguments of AWSA and the Woman’s Journal, by playing against the

assumption that women were morally superior to men. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1983) has said

that “it is difficult to find a rhetorical act in the early movement in which women are not treated

as naturally distinctive and superior in some respect” (p. 102). “Bread” is just such an act.

During the speech, Anthony plainly states, “I believe that by nature men are no more unjust than


women” (Harper, 1898b, p. 1,001). She follows with a set of examples that use gender reversal

to clearly illustrate some of the injustices women endure under the current marriage laws.

If from the beginning women had maintained the right to rule not only themselves

but men also, the latter today doubtless would be occupying the subordinate

places…widowers would be doomed to a “life interest of one-third of the family

estate;” husbands would “owe service” to their wives, so that every one of you

men would be begging your good wives, “Please be so kind as to ‘give me’ ten

cents for a cigar.” (Harper, 1898b, p. 1,001)

By using a strategy in which she places men into women’s traditional roles and vice versa, she

both demonstrates her claim and uses humor to disarm her male audience so they can internalize

her point.12 Later in the speech, she makes a counterclaim that functions as an extension of the

numeric arguments made in this speech and in "Crime.":

Who can doubt that when the representative women of thought and culture, who

are today the moral backbone of our nation, sit in counsel with the best men of the

country, higher conditions will be the result? (Harper, 1898b, p. 1,002)

Anthony’s use of numeric representation served to remind the women in her audience that they

were part of a broader community, and helped them to imagine other women as their

representatives even if they couldn’t envision themselves as rising above their station.

The generic shift in the speeches, from forensic to deliberative, is illuminative. Key

differences in the two genres help to explain the shift: “forensic addresses are always linked to

specific events” as they seek to inform audiences about something that has happened, and are

primarily judicial or legalistic (Campbell, 1989a, p. 117). Deliberative rhetoric, on the other

hand, seeks to “set forth a ‘public’ idea before a general audience [and is] on a continuum


ranging from a ‘call to understanding’ to a ‘call to action’” (Mezo, 1997, p. 164). After the

conclusions of her trial and Minor v. Happersett, Anthony recognized the limitations of the legal

argument as well as the doldrums that the mainstream movement was going through. So, she did

as she always did: “she does not take pause…she does not take time to consider the injustice

handed down…she does not flinch…she [simply] accepted the challenge” (Stillion Southard,

2006, p. 4). The appeal of AWSA and the Woman’s Journal to the upper class white women that

made up Anthony’s traditional audience may have spurred her to question her rhetorical

strategies and role in the movement at their most fundamental level. With the question of

abolition settled by the Civil War and the failure of Stanton’s “radical” ideas to attract support,

Anthony conceived working women as a new audience and their situation as a new topos for

infusing some of her arguments. Both required her to change to a deliberative form in order to

address this new audience.

Anthony's "Bread" exhibits traits of the deliberative form throughout the speech. The

opening line begins with a declaration of its intent, a “call to understanding”:

My purpose tonight is to demonstrate the great historical fact that

disfranchisement is…degradation. Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the

page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded

class of labor. (Harper, 1898b, p. 996)

This immediately invites her audience to see themselves as she sees them: a class of workers

degraded by their lack of a vote. She then goes on to present several examples of this principle,

as well as the converse idea that gaining the ballot provides immediate relief for the degraded

class. She illustrates this not only by talking about recently enfranchised mineworkers in England

but also poor white male laborers in early America and “[t]he vast numbers of wage-earning men


coming from Europe to this country” (Harper, 1898b, p. 999). Her focus on the future benefits

of present action is consistent with the deliberative form.

Anthony then “sets forth a ‘public’ idea before a general audience” by confronting the

notions of labor and capital, and the non-economic forces that determine their proper balance.

She says:

The law of capital is to extort the greatest amount of work for the least amount of

money; the rule of labor is to do the smallest amount of work for the largest

amount of money. Hence there is, and in the nature of things must continue to be,

antagonism between the two classes; therefore, neither should be left wholly at

the mercy of the other…There never was, there never can be, a monopoly so

fraught with injustice, tyranny and degradation as this monopoly of sex, of all

men over all women. (Harper, 1898b, p. 1,000)

She spends no time justifying women’s participation in the workforce, but simply argues that

they currently exist as an inferior class of laborer. In “Is It a Crime” she observes that women

have lived in a “condition of servitude” in the private sphere of marriage. Here, she extends that

argument into the public sphere, including in her constitutive aims the young, unmarried women

who made up the majority of the female industrial workforce.

She ends the speech with a “call to action,” once again aimed at this audience of working

women.

If men possessing the power of the ballot are driven to desperate means to gain

their ends, what shall be done by disfranchised women? Denied the

ballot…[women] must tamely submit to wrong or rise in rebellion against the

powers that be.


Women’s crusades against saloons, brothels and gambling- dens,

emptying kegs and bottles into the streets, breaking doors and windows

and burning houses, all go to prove that disfranchisement, the denial of

lawful means to gain desired ends, may drive even women to violations of

law and order. (Harper, 1898b, p. 1,003)

This description of radical temperance activities serves two purposes: it provides female laborers

with a model for how women can take public action even in their degraded state, and it also

serves as a warning to those in power, whom she addresses with the following closing lines:

Hence to secure both national and “domestic tranquility,” to “establish justice,” to

carry out the spirit of our Constitution, put into the hands of all women, as you

have into those of all men, the ballot, that symbol of perfect equality, that right

protective of all other rights. (Harper, 1898b, p. 1,003)

Here, Anthony goes back to “the ballot” as a rhetorical image, reminding the working women in

her audience that they stand to gain some thing they can “put into [their] hands.” This isn’t a

fight about concepts, but about the reality of their lives. Through her speech the ballot becomes

the wage of democracy, and women deserve it as surely as they deserve their weekly pay.

The presence of the “consciousness raising” strategy throughout the “Bread” speech is

also illustrative of her shift to a more deliberative form. This rhetorical strategy is

“inductive…combines the narrator’s personal experience with historical research [and whose]

conclusions are illustrated by examples which symbolize the experience of all women [in order

to arouse] intense reactions and identification” (Campbell, 1983, p. 105). It is yet another “call to

understanding,” aiding her in constituting working class women as actors in the public sphere.


For instance, Anthony tells her audience a story of speaking to the president of a woman’s collar

laundry union in New York:

“Do you not think if you had been 500 carpenters or 500 masons, you would have

succeeded?” “Certainly,” she said, and then she told me of 200 bricklayers who

had the year before been on strike and gained every point with their employers.

“What could have made the difference? Their 200 were but a fraction of that

trade, while your 500 absolutely controlled yours.” Finally she said, “It was

because the editors ridiculed and denounced us.” “Did they ridicule and denounce

the bricklayers?” “No.” “What did they say about you?” “Why, that our wages

were good enough now, better than those of any other workingwomen except

teachers; and if we weren’t satisfied, we had better go and get married.” “What

the do you think made this difference?” After studying over the question awhile

she concluded, “It must have been because our employers bribed the editors.”

“Couldn’t the employers of the bricklayers have bribed the editors?” She had

never thought of that. (Harper, 1898b, p. 999)

This story involves the audience in a “conversation” through its question and answer structure,

inviting them to put themselves in the place of the union president. It also creates identification

by illustrating two conditions, at least one of which almost any woman in the audience would

have experienced: wage disparity, and ridicule and condescension by men. Reported speech and

simulated dialogue are linguistic “scaffolds” that appear several other times throughout the

speech, such as when Anthony pins anticipated rebuttals on the crowd by changing from “men

say…” to “you say…” halfway through a list of counterarguments. Mari Boor Tonn (1996)

explains that these scaffolds use “narrative and inductive structures to free [audiences] from


ingrained and oppressive social premises [in order to] create empathy, generate self-persuasion,

and foster judgment and decisive action as listeners deduce the story’s moral and draw

connections between the tale and other circumstances” (p. 11). Anthony took her arguments

directly to women across the country, and did so in a rhetorically inventive way that does not fit

into previous notions of her strengths and choices as a rhetor.

“Bread’s” primary audience also differentiates it from “Crime” and helps demonstrate

Anthony’s persuasive range. Her time on the lyceum circuit gave her the opportunity to address a

new audience: working women across the country. Though most working women would not

have attended her speeches themselves, verbal and written accounts of the speech circulated

throughout. Anthony intersperses her speech with leading questions designed to reach the ears of

working women, such as this from the beginning of the speech:

You remember the old adage, “Beggars must not be choosers;” they must take

what they can get or nothing! That is exactly the position of women in the world

of work today; they cannot choose. If they could, do you for a moment believe

they would take the subordinate places and the inferior pay? (Harper, 1898b, p.

996)

Questions such as these serve to demonstrate to working women that they are complicit in

devaluing their place in the public sphere. Anthony further addresses this audience through

admonishments about their passivity and lack of intellect, such as when she says, “the rank and

file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept,

unquestioned, whatever comes.” Mari Boor Tonn (1996) argues that such chiding

“reflects…irritation [but also] provides a measure against which [an oppressed class] can

develop a sense of self” (p. 10). Anthony recognizes and demonstrates to her audience that their


failure to imagine the power of the vote is in part responsible for their current state of

degradation. The repeated use of this strategy throughout the speech indicates Anthony’s

awareness that the constitutive challenges of addressing working women were different from

those she had used in the past.

Her choices are characteristic of what has been termed a “feminine style” of political

communication that aims to empower women through more egalitarian strategies and to help

“foster [their] growth toward the capacity for independent action” (Dow & Tonn, 1993, p. 297).

This strategy represented a striking shift for Anthony, whose previous work had been targeted

primarily at middle- and upper-class whites. The immediate audience for “Crime,” for example,

was the potential jurors, registrars, judges, and other judicial workers in the two counties in

which Anthony’s trial was held. These would all have been privileged white males. In terms of

the broader movements, this audience is largely the same as that of previous legal addresses and

petitions.13 Cindy Koenig Richards has argued that the speech “called on citizens to unify

American political practice, precepts, and law…by endorsing women’s right to vote” (Richards,

2009, p. 6). In this way, even though “Crime” was born from a revolutionary enactment and ends

with a revolutionary call, it is still a plea for the men in power to understand and enforce the

rights of women as Anthony envisioned them. Her contemporaneous shift away from logical,

forensic arguments aimed at a legal audience can be viewed as preparation to move on in the

event of ultimate failure—the rejection of woman’s citizenship rights by the Supreme Court.14

We can perceive her frustration with the legal debate, as “she declares with revolutionary flair,

‘We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote’” (Stillion Southard,

2006, p. 10). In “Bread,” on the other hand, Anthony adjusts her tone and strategies to connect

with her new audience.


Anthony’s attempt to invigorate the woman’s rights movement by fusing it with nascent

populist and labor movements helped shape the political landscape during the latter part of the

nineteenth century. Unfortunately, as happened in Kansas in 1867 and again in the 1890s, adding

woman suffrage to movements such as Populism and temperance only made them more

vulnerable to defeat (Burkholder, 1989). The more moderate stance adopted by AWSA was

equally unsuccessful, however. It wasn’t until the AWSA and the NWSA merged in 1890 that

the long march to woman suffrage would enter its final stretch, culminating with the Nineteenth

Amendment in 1920.

Conclusion: Proactive Proto-Populism

“Bread” was a rhetorical reformation that hinted at how Anthony would spend the next

three decades: attempting to fuse woman suffrage with the populist and labor movements, and to

control the historical record of the woman’s movement.15 She had attempted to work with labor

interests such as the National Labor Union since the end of the Civil War, but the collaboration

didn’t last. In 1869 she was accused of strike-breaking at a union meeting because she

encouraged women to fill vital printing trades while male workers (the only ones allowed into

the union) were on strike, ending the alliance. During the following decade, she took her

message directly to her audiences in meeting halls around the country with "Bread." By

incorporating the language of labor rights into her well publicized and widely attended speeches,

she encouraged her audience to think of her in a new light—as a labor leader concerned with the

realities of working women. This was in stark contrast to the conceptual argument of natural

rights used by the AWSA in pushing for a legal remedy. Anthony was determined to personally

bring her radical, broad-based message of woman’s rights to those who could no longer read it in

The Revolution. The failure of that newspaper, partially because of the success of the Woman’s


Journal, had opened the lyceum circuit to Anthony in the first place. The opportunity to

refashion herself and potentially spread her brand of woman’s rights to an even larger audience

than the AWSA must have reenergized Anthony after the disappointments she faced at the end of

the prior decade.

When cast in the light of recent arguments about populist rhetoric, Anthony’s rhetorical

shift marks her as a proto-populist rhetor and a unique voice among woman’s rights advocates

during the 1870s. Michael J. Lee (2006) argues that populism is not a movement, but an

argumentative frame containing “the consistencies and contours of a sustained political language

with roots located in the nation’s Founding” (p. 357). He identifies four themes in the “rhetorical

form of populist argument [which] are a vocabulary at once of stark pessimism and collective

hope [that] highlights the eternal virtue of the Founders’ vision yet distrusts its current form”

(Lee, 2006, p. 358). Because of the particular constraints Anthony confronted as a female rhetor,

no matter how celebrated, her speeches never blossomed into full-blown populism. She never

went so far as to constitute an “enemy” against which the “people” should struggle, for example,

instead arguing that it was the lack of the ballot that was responsible for the ills of women in

America. However, her brilliant use of the “feminine style” to fuse the deliberative form with

natural rights arguments and historical precedent clearly fulfills the general definition of populist

rhetoric offered by Lee (2006).

“Bread” also complicates the conventional view of the woman’s rights movement during

this period. Anthony’s proto-populist form contradicts Charles Conrad’s (1981) characterization

of post-Civil War woman’s rights rhetoric, demonstrating how she adapted the best arguments

for suffrage to new audiences and new circumstances. Conrad asserts that the rhetoric of the

woman’s movement during this period changed in two ways:


(1) assertive expressions of women’s experiences were replaced by reactions to

the charges made by anti-movement rhetors (2) demands for recognition of the

essential humanness of women were supplanted by calls for practical political

action. (Conrad, 1981, p. 286)

While his evidence for these claims is strong when examining the rhetoric of AWSA and The

Woman’s Journal, it fails to account for Anthony’s voice. Neither “Is It a Crime” nor “Bread”

responds to “charges made by anti-movement rhetors,” though in the former Anthony does

attempt to refute the actions taken by anti-suffrage registrants and police officers. Both have as

their core the argument that failing to give women the ballot is a continuing blight on the

Republic. The second claim is similarly difficult to fit into either of Anthony’s major speeches of

the period. Encouraging women to vote and encouraging registrars and judges to allow it wasn’t

“practical political action,” it was revolutionary. The act was meant to provoke “the

establishment” into either recognizing woman’s right to vote or denying it, thus exposing the

hypocrisy of those who claimed to uphold the illusion of a fully democratic America.

Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith (1969) suggest that whatever the outcome, Anthony

would win. Either women would gain the ballot, or if not, “[the confrontation would] provoke

the response that confirms its presuppositions, gratifies the adherents of those presuppositions,

and turns the power-enforced victory of the establishment into a symbolic victory for its

opponents” (Scott & Smith, 1969, p. 8). Women would be forced to confront the depths of their

own oppression. Similarly, Anthony was very much concerned with making the case that women

are equally as human, and valuable, as men. She argued for the personhood of women directly in

“Is It a Crime” in order to make the case that several constitutions already granted women the

right to vote. In “Bread,” she made more expedient arguments: that women are degraded as long


as they are denied the ballot, that America’s potential would remain unfulfilled until they are

granted it, and that society would benefit from a larger pool of individuals with full rights and

protections under the law.

I have attempted to demonstrate how Anthony’s rhetoric in the 1870s complicates our

understanding of both her contributions to the woman’s rights movement as well as the

movement itself. Her speech in defense of illegal voting and her extra-rhetorical work in

organizing and fundraising have been well analyzed and properly placed within the woman’s

rights narrative. However, when we add her other major speech of the period to the mix a new

picture emerges. It is a picture of a master rhetorician unleashed by historical catalysts who

attempted to save the woman’s rights movement from losing its way in its darkest hour. By using

elements of the “feminine style” in her discourse with working class women, Anthony

transformed her historical and philosophical arguments for woman suffrage into a deliberative

call to action. Through her work with women’s labor organizations and her campaign in Kansas,

Anthony came to understand that as women’s role in the public sphere expanded,

disenfranchisement became an even greater injustice.16 This insight led her to adopt tactics that

caused friction within the woman’s movement, eventually leading to a schism and the formation

of the NWSA. Rather than weakening the movement, however, Anthony provided vital

intellectual and physical energy at a time when the movement could easily have become

moribund.


References

Bitzer, L. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1, 1-14.

Burkholder, T. R. (1989). Kansas populism, woman suffrage, and the agrarian myth: A case

study in the limits of mythic transcendence. Communication Studies, 40, 292-307.

Campbell, K. E., McCammon, H. J. (2001). Winning the vote in the west: The political successes

of the women's suffrage movements, 1866-1919. Gender and Society, 15, 55-82.

Campbell, K. K. (1983). Femininity and feminism: To be or not to be a woman. Communication

Quarterly, 31, 101-108.

Campbell, K. K. (1989a). Man cannot speak for her: Vol. I: A critical study of early feminist

rhetoric. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Campbell, K. K. (1989b). Man cannot speak for her: Vol. II: Key texts of the early feminists.

Westport, CT: Praeger.

Charland, M. (1987). Constitutive rhetoric: The case of the peuple Quebecois. Quarterly Journal

of Speech, 73, 133-150.

Conrad, C. (1981). The transformation of the “old feminist” movement. Quarterly Journal of

Speech, 67, 284-97.

Darsey, J. (1991). From “gay is good” to the scourge of AIDS: The evolution of gay liberation

rhetoric, 1977-1990. Communication Studies, 42, 43-66.

Dow, B. J., Mari B. T. (1993). Feminine style and political judgment in the rhetoric of Ann

Richards. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79, 286-302.

DuBois, E., Stanton, E. C. (1975). On labor and free love: Two unpublished speeches of

Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Signs, 1, 257-268.


Gregg, R. B. (1971). The ego-function of the rhetoric of protest. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 4, 71-

91.

Harper, I. H. (1898a). Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Vol. 1. Salem: Ayer Company.

Harper, I. H. (1898b). Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Vol. 2. Salem: Ayer Company.

Lee, M. J. (2006). The populist chameleon: The People’s Party, Huey Long, George Wallace,

and the populist argumentative frame. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92, 355-378.

Lutz, A. (1959). Susan B. Anthony. Boston: Beacon Press.

Mezo, R. E. (1997). An adaptation of Aristotle: A note on the types of oratory.” Rhetoric Review, 16,

164-165.

Ray, A. G., Richards, C. K. (2007). Inventing citizens, imagining gender justice: The suffrage

rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 93, 375 – 402.

Richards, C. K. (2009). Susan B. Anthony: “Is it a crime for a U.S. citizen to vote?” Unpublished

manuscript, Northwestern University.

Scott, R. L., Smith, D. K. (1969). The rhetoric of confrontation. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 55,

1-8.

Stillion Southard, Belinda. (2006). Susan B. Anthony: Militant identity through personal discourse.

Paper presented at the meeting of the Susan B. Anthony & the Struggle for Equal Rights

Women’s History Conference, Rochester, New York.

Tonn, M. B. (1996). Militant motherhood: Labor’s Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. Quarterly Journal

of Speech, 82, 1-21.

Welter, B. (1966). The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860. American Quarterly, 18, 151-174.

Zaeske, S. (2002). Signatures of citizenship: The rhetoric of women’s anti-slavery petitions.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88, 147-168.


Footnotes

1 I use the following versions of the speeches throughout the paper: “Is It a Crime for a U.S.

Citizen to Vote?” from Campbell (1989b, pp. 279-290) and “Women Want Bread, Not the Ballot!” from

Harper (1898b, pp. 996-1,003).

2 These constitutional claims centered around natural rights arguments, which stated that women

were persons and therefore held the same rights as men under the U.S. Constitution.

3 Many Republicans and key AERA activists believed that tying woman’s rights arguments in

with those of the newly freed slaves would sink the prospect of gaining either, so they abandoned the

former in order to ensure passage of the Fifteenth Amendment.

4 This phrase was used by abolitionist leaders such as Wendell Philips to argue the case for

excluding woman suffrage from discussions of protecting the voting rights of former slaves after the Civil

War. Particularly stinging to Anthony were the strident assertions of Frederick Douglass that voting rights

for blacks should be the only matter put before Congress or the states. The subsequent rift led to charges

of racism against key members of the woman’s movement, including Susan B. Anthony.

5 As Ray and Richards (2007) argue, “sex and marital status made it impossible for her to bring

suit by herself in a Missouri court” (p. 380).

6 This paper embraces the constitutive understanding of rhetoric argued in Charland (1987).

7 This paper adopts the notion of “catalytic events” to accentuate the driving contextual forces

surrounding Anthony’s speeches from Darsey (1991). The four identifying characteristics of catalytic

events are that they “are historical rather than rhetorical…are nontactical…achieve tremendous

significance for the movement and precede rhetorical responses that constitute demonstrably discrete,

internally homogenous rhetorical eras” (p. 43). Because I am attempting to contextualize a single rhetor’s

strategic shifts rather than examine a broader trend in rhetorical history, I pay little attention to the final

characteristic beyond describing those shifts as “rhetorical responses” to certain events.

8 For more on the Minors’ resolutions, see Ray and Richards (2007).


9 For more on the “feminine style” and consciousness raising, see Campbell (1983) and Dow and

Tonn (1993).

10 For an analysis of the Cult of True Womanhood and its effects on the early woman’s rights

movement, see Welter (1966).

11 For a discussion on the constitutive effects of women’s anti-slavery petitioning, see Zaeske

(2002). I believe Anthony’s rhetoric here attempts to build upon that constitutive function.

12 This deflection also allows Anthony to avoid rekindling the divorce debate, which would have

had disastrous results on the reception of her speech. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a vocal advocate for

liberalizing divorce laws to protect women, but her arguments were met by accusations of promoting a

“free love” philosophy. It was still a powerful argument in the mid-1870s that would have overshadowed

the rest of Anthony’s speech in press coverage, and likely resulted in a reversal of her generally lauded

status as a traveling speaker during the period.

13 Anthony was well aware that her actions and speeches surrounding her crime of voting would

reach a national audience; likewise her touring speech aimed at working women. It is the shift in her

primary audiences that help shape their generic character.

14 This indeed happened, though not with Anthony’s case. In Minor v. Happersett (1874) the

Supreme Court denied that citizenship automatically conferred voting rights and that the Federal

government had the duty to regulate state voting standards.

15 Anthony and Stanton started writing and editing what would become the six-volume History of

Woman Suffrage in the late 1870s, publishing the first three volumes in 1887.

16 Her appeals also presaged the role of women in populist movements in western states, where

suffrage took hold much earlier than in the east. For more on this, see Campbell and McCammon (2001).

Documents

Woman of the People