Abstract
This essay argues that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Howard Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt discursively enacted different stages in the evolution of a rhetorical vision for woman's rights. Through close examination of the rhetorical choices in the “classic speeches” of these three rhetors: Stanton's “The Solitude of Self” (1892), Shaw's “The Fundamental Principle of a Republic” (1915), and Catt's “The Crisis” (1916), it invites scholars to recognize the value of comparative critique in preserving the “complex tapestry” of the early woman's rights movement. This analysis claims that a compelling rhetorical vision of woman's rights emerged as each rhetor assumed one of the required leadership roles of social movements (prophet, charismatic, and pragmatist), co-opted an existing cause (existentialism, Methodism, and social Darwinism) to support key elements of a woman's rights philosophy, and adopted a familiar persona that appealed to a different primary audience (universal audience, general public, suffrage rank and file).
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Susan Schultz Huxma
Dr. Susan Schultz Huxman is an associate professor of Communication in the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University.