“Dear Mr. Blackwell, How He Has Helped!”: Toward an Anatomy of Ally Rhetoric

ABSTRACT

This article draws on archival research to examine the career of one of the nineteenth-century’s most prominent advocates of woman’s rights, Henry B. Blackwell. Responding to recent calls by feminist historians of rhetoric for studies reexamining collaboration, coalition, and alliance, I engage with and draw on what a wide range of rhetorical scholars and feminist theorists have suggested about how individuals use language to form alliances and foster change to consider why Blackwell’s earliest efforts to speak as an ally were counterproductive and why his later efforts—speaking alongside his wife, Lucy Stone; writing editorials for The Woman’s Journal, and speaking after Stone’s death—might be seen as gesturing toward an anatomy of ally rhetoric.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Stone and Blackwell’s June 1853-April 1855 letters are archived in Boxes 80–81 of the Lucy Stone Papers, 1759–1960, among the Blackwell Family Papers housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Microfilm scans of the letters are available on Reel 63. An edited selection of the couple’s letters is available in Wheeler’s (1981a) Loving Warriors. For a more in-depth discussion of Stone and Blackwell’s romantic letters, please see Hanly (2019).

2. Feminist scholars’ interest in alliance emerged in the early 1990s, in response to the critique of mainstream academic feminism, and has continued through the present, especially among those concerned with intersectionality and digital feminist activism (Albrecht and Brewer 1990; Alcoff 1991; Baer 2016; Braidotti 1996; Carrillo Rowe 2018; Daniels 2009; Everett 2010; Gajjala 1999; Harvey and Fisher 2015; Hesford 2015; Higgs 2015; Light 1995; Lugones 2003; Piano 2002; Queen 2008; Scharff, Smith-Prei, and Stehle 2016; Tuzcu 2016). The “men in feminism” debate originated in the 1980s and continued through the early 2000s, eventually morphing into a discussion of whether male feminists should focus their energies on “masculinist studies” (Awkward 1996; Boone and Cadden 1990; Brooks 1985; hooks 1984, 1994; Ikard 2007; Jaggar 1988; Jardine and Smith 1987; Klocke 2016; Murphy 2004; Robson 1996; Shail 2004; Smith 1994; Thomas 2007). The “men in feminism” debate was also taken up by scholars in Composition in the 1990s, with some echoing Ohman’s (1987, 187) calls for “caution … listening, and [a willingness to] fade into the wallpaper” (Flynn 1989; McAndrew 1996; Sosnoski 1989) and others endorsing Connors’s (1996) view that the best way for male scholars to support feminist aims is by raising consciousness of the social construction of masculinity (Bizzaro 2005; Breeze 2007; Edwards 2008). These conversations have overlapped with discussions of alliance and pedagogy in composition studies, where most publications on teaching as an ally have addressed that question in terms of how allyship has been theorized in the LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter movements (Ellsworth 1989; Fox 2002; Gonçalves 2005; King 2012; Orner 1992; Powell and Kelly 2017; Schilb 1985; Winkler 1996).

3. Southard has, with her research on the late nineteenth-century socialist feminist rhetor Harriot Stanton Blatch, extended the field’s thinking about the dynamics of “speaking about and for others” and how “organizations and leaders [are able to] work together toward social change” (2014, 130). Lemons has provided additional insights into these dynamics via an analysis of how Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois “moved across racial boundaries to argue for a gender coalition with white suffragists” (2009, 22). Meanwhile, Hoganson has contributed to this ongoing conversation about “coalition building and forming meaningful alliances” by examining the motivations behind suffrage activists’ anti-imperialist arguments and their failure to form productive alliances with Filipino women who had come to the United States to advocate against imperialism (2001, 26). Doherty has discussed the rhetorical strategies utilized by the early-twentieth century Women’s Trade Union League leader, Rose Schneiderman, “for the purposes of building a women’s … coalition across differences” (2004, 142). And Dorsey has addressed how Theodore Roosevelt staked out a complex position as an ally in the fight for woman’s rights (2013, 447–8).

4. The lone historian of rhetoric to discuss Blackwell has been Lindal Buchanan, who suggests that Blackwell’s brother, Sam, who married Stone’s best friend and the country’s first ordained female minister, Antoinette Brown, was a more supportive collaborator than Henry because he more readily provided domestic and material support for his wife’s rhetorical career. Buchanan goes on to acknowledge in an endnote, however, that Henry was eventually able to become more of a “productive collaborator” (Buchanan 2005, 143–46, 181–82). The only other publications focused on Blackwell have been by historians: Wheeler’s (1981c) “Woman’s Suffrage’s Gray-Bearded Champion Comes to Montana, 1889,” which offers an account of a trip that Blackwell made without the then-ailing Stone to speak to legislators in North Dakota, Montana, and Washington, and Quanquin’s (2006) “Innovation as Moral Victory,” which examines Blackwell’s efforts to develop a beet sugar business he hoped would reduce the need for slave labor in the West Indies. Also, please note that my use of the term “anatomy” here and in the article’s title references what the OED provides as the word’s “tropical” definition – “The dissection or dividing of anything material or immaterial, for the purpose of examining its parts; detailed examination, analysis” (“Anatomy,” 2018) – which may be familiar to readers due to its use in the titles of Richard Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

5. The four phases were discerned inductively, based on what drafts of speeches and editorials, unpublished autobiographical writing, newspaper clippings, and letters in the Blackwell Family Papers, as well as mentions of Blackwell’s activities in The Woman’s Journal, indicate about his rhetorical activities at various stages of his career. The coherence and salience of the phases is supported by their corresponding with distinct periods in which his rhetorical activities were clearly oriented toward different forms of speaking or writing. The speeches and writings that I analyze were determined partly by the availability of primary sources. While the archival evidence indicates that Blackwell wrote many more speeches, letters, columns, and pamphlets than were preserved, the speeches analyzed here were among the highest-profile addresses of his career. The editorials discussed represent approximately two-thirds of the columns I was able to locate and were selected based on their relevance to noteworthy patterns in Blackwell’s choices of topics.

6. In their offering themselves up, via verbal and non-verbal means of signification, to facilitate a dialogic encounter where “everyone involved gains a greater understanding of the issue in its subtlety, richness, and complexity,” and as a model for their audience’s consideration of “an alternative” modality of speaking and relating grounded in “affirmation and respect,” the couple’s approach to ally rhetoric as assignation might be seen as anticipating Foss and Griffin’s proposal for an invitational rhetoric (1995, 5, 16–17), as well as Marilyn Cooper’s conception of “responsible rhetorical agency” being enacted via an “embodied practice” of meeting kairotically with others and “acknowledging and honoring” them “as responsive beings” (2011, 422, 435, 441). For further discussion of the continuing importance of embodiment to the study of feminist rhetorics, see Johnson et al. (2015). For an overview of embodiment’s emergence as a concern among scholars studying social movement rhetorics, see Marvin (2006); Cox and Foust (2008).

7. While I, at several points, cite testimonials from Blackwell’s 1909 memorial service as evidence that his rhetorical strategies impacted how others thought about the woman’s cause, I recognize that, because of the nature of that rhetorical occasion, these are not sufficient to establish that Blackwell’s approaches to ally rhetoric influenced others. Ultimately, however, my intent is not to argue for the significance of these practices based on what Biesecker refers to as a “logic of influence,” but rather to work toward a more nuanced sense of how they function ethically and materially as potentially constructive representational practices within particular contexts (1989, 110). For further evidence of the impact of the example that the couple set during their joint lectures, see Wheeler’s discussion of the couple’s speaking tours in Loving Warriors (1981a, 213–20) and McKenna’s discussion of their reception during the 1867 Kansas state suffrage campaign (1970, 14–15). Moreover, in addition to the already-discussed New York Times editorial, two articles in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, the Blackwell family’s hometown newspaper, might also be regarded as attesting to the significance of the February 8 joint lecture. On January 29, a blurb pointed out that Stone’s tax manifesto had been signed “Lucy Stone” and asked “What has become of her husband, Mr. Blackwell?” (“Lucy Stone – Is She Divorced?,” 1858). In the January 30 issue, another column described Stone and Blackwell disparagingly as “strong-minded individuals” who would never “find their way to an appropriate and becoming position in domestic life” (“Lucy Stone’s Bogus Sale,” 1858). These articles evidence the degree to which the couple’s opponents regarded their embodied example of a companionate marriage as a threat.

8. Recently, rhetorical scholars have begun to “articulate” articulation theory to Deleuze and Guattari’s and Latour and Weibel’s thinking about assemblages, which Byron Hawk describes as being “enacted through the manifold assignments of the objects gathered and the human, interpretive involvement in this disclosing of a world – the expression of voices, differences, and complexities [that] clearly emerge through the agency of both human and non-human actors” (2011, 89). For an example of a recent publication that draws on this more expansive notion of assemblages to examine how “new social movements” form alliances, see Harding et al. (2018).

9. Eisenberg might be seen as moving in this direction with his observations about how ambiguity can be used to facilitate a “unified diversity” within collectivities (1984, 230), and Ceccarelli (1998) might be credited with coming close when, referencing recent articles by Rowland and Strain (1994) and Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci (1991), on Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, respectively, she describes a form of polysemy in which authors intentionally present contradictory themes in order to encourage audiences to reflect on the complexity and “hermeneutic depth” of the issues being depicted (Ceccarelli 1998, 407–8).