A Rhetoric of Inclusion and the Expansion of Movement Constituencies: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Classed Politics of Woman Suffrage

Abstract

Recently, rhetorical scholars have paid closer attention to how the politics of inclusion function in social movements and counterpublics. While these studies demonstrate how movement constituencies worked together as coalitions and alliances, they have yet to address how one group overcomes its resistance to another. To address this gap, this study turns to the rhetoric of Harriot Stanton Blatch. In the early twentieth century, Stanton Blatch successfully forged alliances between elite and working class suffragists. Yet, during the 1890s, Stanton Blatch’s appeals centered on persuading elite women to include working class women in the suffrage movement. Thus, this essay argues that Stanton Blatch advanced a rhetoric of inclusion that made visible, resisted, and rearticulated class difference toward more inclusive suffrage constituencies. This study finds that, through the process of redrawing boundaries of inclusion, a rhetor must confront the persistent and uneasy tension between inclusion and exclusion.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the RSQ editor for his careful and patient editing, along with the reviewers' investment in this essay.

Notes

1. ¹This essay refers to “elite women” as the middle and upper classes of typically educated, professional, white, and married women. These women represented most of the readers of the publications in which Stanton Blatch wrote (see Masel-Walters 107). “Working class women” refers to a range of women, typically uneducated, who worked for hourly wages without extra income at their disposal, either from marriage or inheritance. These women were usually factory, shop, or domestic workers.

2. ²Stanton Blatch’s presentation of social scientific “data” to make oppression visible is an example of Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca’s notion of presence, or what the authors consider “the displaying of certain elements on which the speaker wishes to center attention in order that they may occupy the foreground of the hearer’s consciousness” (142).

3. ³Stanton Blatch slightly misquotes Cady Stanton’s article, “Educated Suffrage Justified.” Cady Stanton’s words are: “I do not see that the ignorant classes need the suffrage more than the enlightened, but just the reverse” (348). Stanton Blatch inserted “do not” in the quotation in order to reflect her mother’s position in the context of her sentence construction.