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Abstract
Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been celebrated for her astute rhetorical contributions to woman's rights advocacy and highly criticized for her racist and elitist sentiments about citizenship and the franchise. Although there appears to be a discontinuity between Cady Stanton's commitment to (sexual) equality and her racism/elitism, this tension is reconciled through a consideration of the ways her early rhetoric embodies, revitalizes, and resists a liberal enlightenment idiom of difference. Responding to immediate exigencies of nineteenth-century politics and an enduring tension between universality and biological difference in liberal political theory, Cady Stanton articulates a view of sexual and racial difference that is extracorporeal.
Acknowledgements
She would like to thank Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Daniel Smith, Shevaun Watson, Tasha Dubriwny, John Louis Lucaites, and the two anonymous reviewers for their crucial insights that aided in the development of this essay
Notes
1. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
2. Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” The Sciences, 33 (1993): 20–24.
3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; New York: Routledge, 1999).
4. Nathan Stormer, “A Vexing Relationship: Gender and Contemporary Rhetorical Theory,” in The Sage Handbook of Gender and Communication, ed. Bonnie J. Dow and Julia T. Wood (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), 247–62.
5. John M. Sloop, “‘A Van with a Bar and a Bed’: Ritualized Gender Norms in the John/Joan Case,” Text and Performance Quarterly 20 (2000): 130–49. See also John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).
6. Shannon L. Holland, “The Dangers of Playing Dress-Up: Popular Representations of Jessica Lynch and the Controversy Regarding Women in Combat,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 27–50.
7. Holland, “Dangers of Playing Dress-Up,” 33, 46.
8. See Nicola Evans, “Games of Hide and Seek: Race, Gender, and Drag in The Crying Game and The Birdcage,” Text and Performance Quarterly 18 (1998): 199–216; Brenda Cooper, “Boys Don't Cry and Female Masculinity: Reclaiming a Life and Dismantling the Politics of Normative Heterosexuality,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 44–63; and Helene A. Shugart, “Parody as Subversive Performance: Denaturalizing Gender and Reconstituting Desire in Ellen,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (2001): 95–113.
9. See Angela G. Ray, “The Rhetorical Ritual of Citizenship: Women's Voting as Public Performance, 1868–1875,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 1–26; Maegan Parker, “Desiring Citizenship: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Wells/Willard Controversy,” Women's Studies in Communication 31 (2008): 56–78; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti–Woman Suffrage Postcards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 365–94. Kristan Poirot, “Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism,” Women's Studies in Communication 32 (2009): 263–92.
10. James Jasinski, “Instumentalism [sic], Contextualism, and Interpretation in Rhetorical Criticism,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 196–7.
11. Jasinski, “Instumentalism,” 200.
12. Jasinski, “Instumentalism,” 212–14; John M. Murphy, “Critical Rhetoric as Political Discourse,” Argumentation and Advocacy 32 (1995): 11.
13. Murphy, “Critical Rhetoric as Political Discourse,” 11.
14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). For examples of those who follow his lead, see Laqueur, Making Sex, 1990; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Butler, Gender Trouble; Sloop, Disciplining Gender.
15. William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 143. See also Beth M. Waggenspack, The Search for Self-Sovereignty: The Oratory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 89. For comparison to Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir, see Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 9.
16. Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7.
17. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger Press, 1989), 133.
18. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “This Is the Negro's Hour,” in The Selected Paper of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840–1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 564.
19. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 71.
20. See, Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 1–86; bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1981), 119–58; and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7–8.
21. Alice S. Rossi, “A Feminist Friendship: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995), 51. See also Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 14, 59–63.
22. Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 142. See also Nathan Stormer, “Embodied Humanism: Performative Argument for Natural Rights in ‘The Solitude of Self,’” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 55.
23. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union, 147. See also Kathi Kern, Mrs. Cady Stanton's Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 55; Laura L. Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1980–1935 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 35.
24. Kern, Mrs. Cady Stanton's Bible, 55.
25. Limiting the texts to these dates facilitates a focus on the immediate rhetorical situation as well as a more expansive context of sexual identity politics. In particular, 1870 was an obvious year to end with since it was not only the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, enfranchising black men, but not women; it was also the year that Cady Stanton and Anthony temporarily shifted their focus away from winning the ballot via a US Constitutional amendment and toward developing strategies aimed at using the judiciary to enfranchise women.
26. Barbara A. White, “The Lives of Nineteenth-Century American Women,” review of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873, NWSA Journal 15 (2003): 137. Lorna Chessum, “Race and Gender in the United States of America,” review of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840–1866, Gender & History 12 (2000): 229. It is also important to note that Gordon was one of two editors of the microfilm edition of the larger archive, The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, allowing her to have an exceptional understanding of both Cady Stanton's and Anthony's careers.
27. For Gordon's description of selection, see Gordon, Selected Papers, 1:xxxiii; and Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), xxx. For positive reviews of Gordon's selection and editing process, see Lois W. Banner, untitled review of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, Journal of American History 85 (1998): 229–30; White, “Lives of Nineteenth-Century American Women,” 139; and Chessum, “Race and Gender in the United,” 229.
28. The sample is further justified by the fact that evidence of these claims can be found in Cady Stanton's larger corpus. In fact, her most notable philosophical statement and rhetorical masterpiece, “The Solitude of Self,” also evidences my central claim that Cady Stanton theorizes an extracorporeal identity in both response to and accordance with liberal enlightenment political theory. As is well known among feminist rhetorical scholars, Cady Stanton oftentimes composed speeches for Susan B. Anthony. Not surprisingly, one finds additional evidence for my claims in Anthony's rhetoric. See, for example, Susan B. Anthony, “Address by SBA on Educating the Sexes Together,” in Selected Papers, 1:334–8. In this address, Anthony not only discusses the question of sex difference in a way that is entirely consistent with Cady Stanton's remarks, but she also makes gestures toward an argument that is more fully developed in Cady Stanton's “The Solitude of Self.” In Anthony's words, “There is no fundamental difference between the soul of man and the woman … Every woman is born into the world alone and goes out of the world alone.” Anthony, “Educating the Sexes,” 335.
29. Laqueur, Making Sex, 149.
30. Laqueur, Making Sex, 10.
31. Laqueur, Making Sex, 34.
32. Laqueur, Making Sex, 149.
33. Laqueur, Making Sex, 153.
34. Laqueur, Making Sex, 151–52.
35. Linda Nicholson, “Interpreting Gender,” Signs 20 (1994): 85.
36. Palczewski, “Male Madonna,” 375–76. See also Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 28.
37. Laqueur, Making Sex, 155; Nicholson, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage, 85.
38. Laqueur, Making Sex, 155.
39. Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 3.
40. Laqueur, Making Sex, 156–57; Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 3; Nicholson, “Interpreting Gender,” 83–85. See also Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
41. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 94–101.
42. Laqueur, Making Sex, 157.
43. Laqueur, Making Sex, 152; Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 4.
44. Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage, 43–74.
45. One of the first ways women's roles as citizens was articulated was in terms of “republican motherhood” where women's duties primarily included educating their sons to be good citizens. For discussions of republican motherhood, see Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in American (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1989), 57–66; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 265–88; and Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 5–6, 20–22. As women became more involved in anti-slavery movements, more roles were perceived as acceptable, and the history of women's anti-slavery petitions, in particular, serve as a good case in the development of women's political identities. For analysis of women's petitions, see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For general descriptions/analyses of the relationship between liberal theory and women's changing political identities or identities as citizens, see Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 10–12, 106–19; Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1985), 17–46; Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage, 52–74; and Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 22–65.
46. Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 14 (emphasis added). See also Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Femininity and Feminism: To Be or Not to Be a Woman,” Communication Quarterly 31 (1983): 102.
47. Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 6, 103.
48. Evans, Born for Liberty, 94.
49. Donovan, Feminist Theory, 5.
50. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS on Woman's Rights” in Selected Papers, 1:99.
51. Donovan, Feminist Theory, 2.
52. Donovan, Feminist Theory, 5.
53. Cady Stanton, “Address on Woman's Rights,” 98. For explications of similar performative strategies in early woman's rights rhetoric, see Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 17–69; Suzanne M. Daughton, “The Fine Texture of Enactment: Iconcity as Empowerment in Angelina Grimke's Pennsylvania Hall Address,” Women's Studies in Communication 18 (1995): 19–43; and Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, 115–23.
54. See Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS on Woman's Rights,” 104; Cady Stanton, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton for Congress,” in Selected Papers, 1:593; Cady Stanton, “To the Women of the Republic,” in Selected Papers, 1:483; Cady Stanton, “Universal Suffrage,” in Selected Papers 1:551; Cady Stanton, “Manhood Suffrage,” in Selected Papers, 2:194; and Cady Stanton, “Speech by ECS in Burlington, Kansas,” in Selected Papers, 2:98.
55. Cady Stanton, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton for Congress,” 593–94.
56. Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 133.
57. Cady Stanton, “Paper by ECS for the Yearly Meeting of the Friends of Human Progress,” in Selected Papers, 1:344.
58. Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS on Woman's Rights,” 108.
59. Cady Stanton, “Constitutional Convention,” in Selected Papers, 2:84. For a similar use of Hamilton, see Cady Stanton, “John Stuart Mill,” in Selected Papers, 2:262.
60. Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 143 (emphasis added).
61. For examples of Cady Stanton's championing of education, see Cady Stanton, “Douglass and Johnson,” in Selected Papers, 1:577; and Cady Stanton, “Miss Becker on the Difference in Sex,” in Selected Papers, 2:180.
62. Wollstonecraft writes, “‘Moralists’ have unanimously agreed, that unless virtue bye nursed by liberty, it will never attain due strength—and what they say of man I extend to mankind, insisting, that in all cases morals must be fixed on immutable principles; and that being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obey any authority but that of reason.” Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Sandy, UT: Quiet Vision Publishing, 2003), 157. For analysis of Wollstonecraft's views on education and reason, see Donovan, Feminist Theory, 8–11.
63. Donovan, Feminist Theory, 8.
64. Arguably, Cady Stanton was influenced by (and benefited from) a number of widely read reformers, like Judith Sargent Murray and Mary Wollstonecraft, who also advocated female classical education. As Elizabeth Galewski makes clear, however, it was not just those who we now would label “feminists” who advocated for female education; in fact, a number of promoters of women's intellectual capacity grounded their arguments not in appeals to sex equality, but in distinct sexual and political difference. Echoing Linda Kerber, Galewski writes, “[M]ore desirable than a frivolous beauty … was a knowledgeable republican mother who could pass on the fledgling nation's values to her sons and daughters” (emphasis added). See Elizabeth Galewski, “The Strange Case for Women's Capacity to Reason: Judith Sargent Murray's Use of Irony in ‘On the Equality of the Sexes’ (1790),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 92. Ironically, then, the efficacy of Cady Stanton's arguments surrounding women's capacity to reason as evidence of woman's and man's ontological similarity may have benefited from earlier arguments that articulated women's reason in terms of men's and women's different roles as citizens.
65. Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 61. See also Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 159–78; Kern, Mrs. Cady Stanton's Bible, 106–16; and Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism & Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 174–79.
66. Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS to the Legislature of New York,” in Selected Papers, 1:241–42.
67. Cady Stanton, “This Is the Negro's Hour,” in Selected Papers, 1:564.
68. Cady Stanton, “Manhood Suffrage,” 195–96.
69. See Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 159–78; Kern, Mrs. Cady Stanton's Bible, 106–16; and Dubois, Feminism & Suffrage, 174–79.
70. Cady Stanton, “Manhood Suffrage,” 194. See also Cady Stanton, “The Sixteenth Ammendment,” in Selected Papers, 2:237.
71. Stormer, “Embodied Humanism,” 55.
72. Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS to the Eighth National Woman's Rights Convention,” in Selected Papers, 1:369; Cady Stanton, “Appeal by ECS,” in Selected Papers, 1:285. See also Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS to the Legislature of New York,” 244; Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS on Woman's Rights,” 96.
73. Cady Stanton, “Miss Becker on the Difference in Sex,” 178.
74. Cady Stanton, “Manhood Suffrage,” 195.
75. For other appeals to fair representation, see Cady Stanton, “Sixteenth Ammendment,” 237; Cady Stanton, “Universal Suffrage,” 550–51; and Cady Stanton, “Stand by Your Guns, Mr Julian,” in Selected Papers, 2:202.
76. Cady Stanton, “Manhood Suffrage,” 194. See also Cady Stanton, “Miss Becker on the Difference,” 182.
77. Cady Stanton, “Manhood Suffrage,” 197.
78. Cady Stanton, “Miss Becker on the Difference,” 181.
79. Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS on Woman's Rights,” 104–5.
80. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 32.
81. For a view that suggests Cady Stanton's thoughts on sex is an entirely social phenomenon, see Rossi, “Feminist Friendship,” 51.
82. Cady Stanton, “Address by ECS on Woman's Rights,” 102.
83. Cady Stanton, “Mrs. Swisshelm,” in Selected Papers, 1:184–85.
84. Cady Stanton, “Miss Becker on the Difference,” 177.
85. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 157, 158.
86. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 158.
87. Cady Stanton, “Stand by Your Guns, Mr. Julian,” 202.
88. Cady Stanton, “Paper by ECS for the Yearly Meeting of the Friends of Human Progress,” 342.
89. Cady Stanton, “‘I Have All the Rights I Want,’” in Selected Papers, 1:402.
90. Cady Stanton, “Woman's Dress,” in Selected Papers, 2:253.
91. Laqueur, Making Sex, 154.
92. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 71; Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 137–38; Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 66–99.
93. Marilley, Woman Suffrage, 159.
94. E. Michele Ramsey, “Addressing Issues of Context in Historical Women's Public Address,” Women's Studies in Communication 27 (2004): 354.
95. Ramsey, “Addressing Issues of Context,” 353.