Susan B. Anthony’s Extemporaneous Speaking for Woman Suffrage

ABSTRACT

Susan B. Anthony’s public career serves as both a case study within and a reflection of extemporaneous speaking culture in the nineteenth century. This essay argues that Anthony’s rhetorical influence in the fight for woman suffrage is best explained through her mastery of extemporaneous speaking within a culture that taught and valued the practice. This essay analyzes Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking in the 1870s and 1880s. Beyond gaining a better understanding of the role extemporaneous speaking played in Anthony’s suffrage advocacy, this essay illustrates how rhetorical scholars might analyze the fragmentary texts that record and report on extemporaneous speaking and reflects on the implication of studying those fragmentary texts for expanding the canon of scholarship on women.

KEYWORDS:

• Delivery
• extemporaneous speaking
• fragmentary texts
• invention
• suffrage rhetoric
• Susan B. Anthony

Notes

See Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s indispensable analysis in Man Cannot Speak for Her. See also Koenig Richards; Hull; Brigance; Harrington-Lueker; and Farrell.

Harper’s work is an explicitly interested text, largely dictated by Anthony. After completing the biography, Harper burned thousands of Anthony’s papers so that her work would be the only “authorized” history. Copies or manuscripts of Anthony’s speeches may have existed (though Anthony’s never mentions it in letters we still have through Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s archive), but we no longer have those documents (Sherr 287). In this essay, I have used the Project Gutenberg digital edition of Harper’s biography. Page numbers in the digital edition correspond directly to page numbers of the 1899 print edition.

For the sake of clarity, the newspaper articles cited in this essay are referenced by their titles in the in-text citations and Works Cited list. Each of these articles is marked as part of the microfilm collection and listed with its reel and slides number in the Works Cited list. For more on the microfilm edition, see Holland and Gordon, Guide and Index to the Microfilm Edition.

The Burned-Over District was known for millennial religious movements during the Second Great Awakening and social reform movements in the decades before the Civil War. See Cross; Barkun; Altschuler and Saltzgaber; and Wellman. See Bormann for a discussion of the area’s rhetorical culture (144–195).

Eleanor Flexner provides detailed accounts of Anthony’s involvement with the cause. Additional details about Anthony’s work and education can be found in recent biographies of her life by Barry, Biography; Kern; Lutz; and Barry’s chapter in Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925. Additional information is available in Stanton’s autobiographies (Stanton et al.; Stanton and Parker) and in the extensive historical work on Stanton’s life (Banner; Griffith; Gornick; DuBois and Smith.

Microfilm, reels 1-6. These reels contain the entirety of The Revolution, and each issue contains one lengthy excerpt from Wollstonecraft.

Slagell offers a thorough discussion of the argumentative strategies of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

The Granger movement was a recruiting base for woman suffrage. The organization included men and women who banded together to fight the grain transport prices instituted by monopoly rail organization. The organization was largely successful and demonstrated the power of local organizations working together to make significant nationwide changes. Frequently, the organization provided educational and social opportunities for its members (Montgomery 109).