Strained Sisterhood in the WCTU: The Lynching and Suffrage Rivalry between Ida B. Wells and Frances E. Willard

ABSTRACT

This article examines the 1893 lynching and suffrage rivalry between Ida B. Wells and Frances E. Willard in the WCTU and the racial tension generated between its Black and white members on sisterhood. It uses rhetorical analysis and frame theory to illustrate that Wells’s and Willard’s rhetorical conflict is disturbingly related to the present. Finally, the article argues that patriarchy is a resilient specter that haunts womanhood.

Notes

1. The author thanks RR editor Elise Hurley, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable feedback. Jessica Enoch, Jenn Fishman, Ellen Goldstein, Raja Staggers-Hakim, Christine Hamel, Antonia Malchik, and Thomas P. Miller provided thoughtful analysis to this article at its inception some years ago. Infinite gratitude to the Atlanta Writing Club’s Decatur Writing Group.

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Notes on contributors

Anita August

Anita August is an autonomous scholar in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of a novel, Gut Bucket Blues and a book Visual Imagery, Metadata, and Multimodal Literacies Across the Curriculum. Her interdisciplinary publications and presentations range across visual culture, cultural theory, creative writing, histories of rhetoric, and emerging media. She holds an MFA in creative writing from CalArts and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition from UTEP. She welcomes correspondence via e-mail at [email protected].