“Labor is Noble and Holy”: Ironic Inclusion and Exclusion in the Knights of Labor, 1885-1890

Abstract

During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor united most workers regardless of craft or trade. They also organized African American workers and women. This essay uncovers how the Knights maintained unity by analyzing speeches given at their annual conventions from 1885-1890. Leaders defined male Knights as chivalric, self-sacrificing, and battle-tested. After identifying the elements of the rhetoric of knighthood, I then explain how the rhetoric offered only ironic inclusion to white women and excluded Chinese and Eastern European immigrants. This argument builds rhetorical scholarship on inclusion and exclusion in social movements by theorizing its partial and ironic modes.

Notes

1 I want to offer sincere thanks to RR reviewers Belinda Stillion Southard and the anonymous reviewer for their feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Keohane

Jennifer Keohane is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design at the University of Baltimore in Baltimore, Maryland. Her research explores gender and labor organizing in the United States and has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Women’s Studies in Communication. She is also the author of Communist Rhetoric and Feminist Voices in Cold War America. She can be reached at[email protected].