Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1854 “Address to the Legislature of New York” and the Paradox of Social Reform Rhetoric

Abstract

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is widely regarded as one of the most important women's rights orators of the nineteenth century. She is credited with opening new rhetorical spaces for women through brilliant rhetorical appeals. In her 1854 speech to the Legislature of New York, however, her brilliant rhetorical appeals were also appeals to the racist, classist, and paternalistic biases of her white male audience. A paradox of social reform is the need to simultaneously assert difference and sameness with the dominant classes, and Cady Stanton's efforts to negotiate this paradox ultimately reinforced the social hierarchy she hoped to undermine.

Notes

¹I want to thank RR reviewers Mari Tonn and Andrew King for their indispensable feedback on previous drafts of this paper. I also want to thank Duane Roen, Maureen Daly Goggin, Paul Kei Matsuda, Sharon Crowley, and Judy Holiday for their invaluable contributions to the multiple stages of invention and revision that it took to get to this version.

²I do not mean to imply, of course, that “feminist historian” and “historian of rhetoric” are mutually exclusive.

³Although I am focusing on Cady Stanton because she is so widely recognized by contemporary scholars for her rhetorical ability, Carol Mattingly suggests that some of the more influential women during the nineteenth century are now less well recognized than they perhaps should be. For example, she writes that Amelia Bloomer was one of the more visible women in debates over temperance, suffrage, and women's dress; and better recognized women like Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were referred to in newspaper reports as “her assistants” (40).

⁴There is some question about whether Cady Stanton actually delivered the address in front of the New York Legislature or not. According to Ann D. Gordon, Cady Stanton's speech was adopted by the women's rights convention taking place in Albany at the same time the legislature was meeting and that the text was printed and distributed to the legislators (240). However, most other texts, including Cady Stanton's own reminiscences, claim that she made the speech to the legislators in person (80 Years 187–89).

⁵Karlyn Kohrs Campbell believes that a major issue for women's rights reformers was whether women were fundamentally the same as men in that they were all human beings or fundamentally different from men on biological or cultural grounds (1:87). I argue, however, that the sameness/difference paradox actually requires that they do both.

⁶In 80 Years and More, Cady Stanton relates reading her father the speech before she went to Albany. She claims he was so moved by her description of the plight of women that he helped locate additional evidence to help support her case. Griffith contends, however, that Cady Stanton misrepresented the meeting with her father that night and generally covered up her ongoing rift with her socially conservative father to legitimize her feminist activism (82).

⁷Susanna Kelly Engbers begins her article with an example of the kind of ridicule Cady Stanton would have faced as a result of her speech to the legislature.

⁸The link between Custom's oppression and men's responsibilities for redressing it would have been even more apparent in the spoken version because her audience would not know there was a paragraph break.

⁹Although I do not have room in this paper to draw out the full implications, Cady Stanton's message also rested on an appeal to the paternalism that is so evident in separate-spheres ideology. Further research could certainly address the paradoxical situation whereby Cady Stanton and other woman's rights activists essentially made the appeal to their male interlocutors that only powerful men could save the “weaker sex” from degradation. I am indebted to Judy Holiday for bringing this to my attention.

¹⁰Sue Davis argues that Cady Stanton's legacy as a racist has been mischaracterized as a weakness in her political philosophy. Davis does not deny Cady Stanton's racism but rather seeks to complicate it and contextualize it as a product of her time and place as much as a fundamental flaw of her nature.

¹¹In On Rhetoric, Aristotle calls this type of argument an appeal to “friendliness” (philia). For Aristotle friendliness is “wanting for someone what one thinks are good things for him” (124). He argues that people are friendly to those for which “the same things are good and bad and who have the same friends and enemies” and to people who “have the same enemies … and who hate those they themselves hate and who are hated by those they hate” (125). However, Aristotle implies that speakers choose to make appeals to friendliness rather than having them arise as a byproduct of other appeals.

¹²My thanks to the reviewers for compelling me to clarify this point. Although certainly used in other places, I take the term “moral class” from Rebecca Moore Howard's “The Ethics of Plagiarism” in The Ethics of Writing Instruction (84). Howard argues that educated classes in the nineteenth century believed themselves to be, by virtue of their intellectual development, of a higher moral class than the uneducated masses. I particularly like Howard's use of the term because of the resonances of morality with socio-economic class, which may be mutually exclusive but which was often not conceived of separately in the nineteenth century. That is, although moral class can and should be distinguished from socio-economic class, it is not hard to imagine that in the minds of many nineteenth-century reformers and their audiences, they were closely aligned.