American Literature, 500 word essay, No Plagiarism and due by Nov 10,2020
This assignment is designed to give you practice reading and summarizing secondary source material. When academics and literary scholars conduct their research and write up their findings, they rely on their ability to read and understand what others have written about their topic, and to synthesize and condense the main points of those arguments into their own words. Writing a summary of a scholarly article about of the readings from our course will help you develop this vital skill, as well as hone the Content Knowledge associated with the
Course Objectives
.
SKILLS TO ACQUIRE
The Summary Writing Assignment will help you master several important skills necessary to performing writing tasks in college and engaging with ideas and values that are foundational to a well-rounded university education.
• Identify literary genres, major writers, and important schools of thought in American literature from the pre-colonial era to the end of the 18th century.
• Summarize, interpret, and analyze literary texts in relation to a specific argumentative thesis.
• Utilize and extend the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills developed in ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102.
• Identify the cultural factors that shaped American literature and define the common concerns and values of humanity as expressed through literature.
TASKS TO COMPLETE
• Choose one article from any of the
ENGL 2131 recommended reading list 2019
from Units 2-5 and compose a 500-word summary.
• Include a bibliographical citation (MLA) at the beginning of the summary for your article of choice.
• Compose a short statement (usually more than one sentence) explaining the author’s thesis in the article.
• Identify all the sub-points that support the author’s thesis; also, identify the key ideas and terms from all major sections of the article, with a sense of conclusion at the end.
• This assignment is worth 99 points and will count 10 % of your total grade for the course.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR FINDING YOUR ARTICLE IN GALILEO
From your course navigation bar, click on the Library tab and select the GALILEO link—click on “Browse by Subject”—click on “Literature, Language, and Literary Criticism”—click on “Academic Search Complete”—and then enter in the search button at the top of the screen the author’s last name and the title (ie., Schweitzer John Winthrop’s “Model” of American Affiliation). The article will usually appear at the top of the list. Click on the article entry and the full details of the article will appear on your screen. The articles are available in “pdf. full text” or “HTML.” which will appear on the left-hand side of the page. Click on “pdf.” and the original text of the article will appear for you; the “HTML” text will be the same text but not as it appeared originally in print. You can read and summarize from your screen or download it to your computer and read it later or print it out and summarize it from a printed copy.
SUBMITTING YOUR SUMMARY
Open the Assignment folder for the Summary Writing Assignment and attach your final document by the assignment due date. Be sure to save the assignment in , x, or RTF format. Your instructor must be able to open your submission in order for you to receive credit. Save your file with your last name, first initial and “Summary Writing Assignment” (i.e., JonesP-Summary Writing Assignment )
Lisa Shawn Hogan 3
Lisa Shawn Hogan is jointly appointed in the Departments of Communication Arts & Sciences and
Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She has written several articles on the rhetoric of
the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. All correspondence can be made at lhogan@psu.edu.
Lisa Shawn Hogan
Wisdom, Goodness and Power:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the
History of Woman Suffrage
In the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
her co-authors crafted a rhetorical history that not only celebrated Stanton’s role in the
suffrage movement, but also promoted her broader, more radical vision of complete gender
equality. In the context of a movement divided over strategy, Stanton and her editors made
the case not just for the vote, but for expanding the role of women in all realms of Ameri-
can social and political life. Documenting the contributions of women since the Revolu-
tion, the History advocated the full political and legal “sovereignty” of women by showing
how their wisdom, goodness, and power had contributed to the nation’s progress.
[W]e hope to rouse new thoughts in minds prepared to receive
them.
—History of Woman Suffrage (1881)
On December 23, 1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffrage movement’s 77-year-old founding mother, delivered a speech recalling the heroic sacrifices of
women at the time of the nation’s birth. Entitled “Our Foremothers,” the address
urged two-hundred members of New York City’s Woman Suffrage League not only
to remember the accomplishments of Revolutionary-era women like Mercy Otis
Warren and Abigail Adams, but also to continue the fight they started. “They struggled
bravely for the material necessities of our young civilization,” Stanton stated, and
she called upon her audience in New York to continue the struggle: “Let us be faith-
ful in proclaiming the moral necessities of the time in which we live, demanding
equal rights for all our people, men and women, of every color and nationality.”1
Women’s history was very much on Stanton’s mind as she spoke to the Woman
Suffrage League. She had just completed her most ambitious project yet, the first
4 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. Now she was back delivering
speeches to suffrage conventions, and she took every opportunity to promote the
volumes. “There too,” she said in reference to the History, “you can read of many
heroic deeds of women.”2
Stanton began collecting documents for the History of Woman Suffrage as early
as 1875.3 She did not begin working on the project full time until 1880, however,
when she retired from James Redpath’s lyceum circuit.4 The History was an ambi-
tious project that ultimately resulted in six volumes—each nearly a thousand pages—
and took more than three decades to complete. Stanton joined with suffragists Susan
B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage to edit the first three volumes, while the final
three volumes were completed by Anthony and Ida Husted Harper after Stanton’s
death.5 Most historians agree that Stanton wrote the lengthy introductions to each of
the first three volumes and most of the interpretive headnotes to the individual docu-
ments.6 Stanton’s contributions to the History are readily identifiable by her distinc-
tive style and by the many passages she borrowed from her previous writings and
speeches. Her detailed letters to outside contributors provide further evidence that
she did much of the editorial work herself.7
Although roughly chronological, the first three volumes of the History had no
clear organizational structure. Volumes one and three (1848–1861 and 1876–1885
respectively) included chapters devoted to the suffrage campaign in particular states,
enumerating women’s successes across the country. The chapter on New York, for
example, described the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and included the original
call in the Seneca County Courier, along with the Declaration of Sentiments and
Resolutions. Yet even that loose, state-by-state structure was disrupted by brief bio-
graphical sketches of famous women, written by the activists themselves or by other
suffragists in the movement. In many cases the editors digressed from the chronol-
ogy altogether. A chapter written by Gage, “Preceding Causes,” for example, moved
awkwardly from the Protestant Reformation in Europe to Colonial America, then
concluded with a discussion of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement. Pro-
duced hurriedly under deadline, the volumes had no index and only brief chapter
titles in the table of contents. Volume two, roughly covering the Civil War through
Reconstruction (1861–1876), was the most disorganized of the three, with chapter
headings defined by broad themes such as “Trials and Decisions,” “National Con-
ventions,” and “Congressional Action.” Seemingly, the first three volumes of the
History represented a disparate archive of documents from the women’s rights
struggle, including regional and national convention announcements, speeches, reso-
lutions, financial statements, congressional debates, Supreme Court decisions, press
releases, newspaper clippings, biographies, reminiscences, and magazine articles.
Whatever the work’s shortcomings, the History of Woman Suffrage remained
Lisa Shawn Hogan 5
the definitive source on the suffrage struggle for more than a century. As historian
Aileen Kraditor has written, the volumes contain a “treasure-house of suffrage in-
formation,”8 and according to Nancy Isenberg, our understanding of the suffrage
movement today has largely been “inherited” from the History.9 Yet, surprisingly,
few have analyzed the rhetorical purposes and character of the History. While much
has been written about Stanton’s speeches and writings,10 scholars only recently
have begun to recognize the History as a rhetorical document. In her recent book on
Stanton’s Woman’s Bible, for example, historian Kathi Kern noted that the History of
Woman Suffrage was more than just an archive of documents; it also constructed a
narrative history of the suffrage crusade that emphasized Stanton’s role as its found-
ing mother.11 Likewise, historian Nancy Isenberg has written that the “History ex-
plains the origins of things, providing an allegorical interpretation of the past.” More
than a “documentary,” Isenberg concludes that the History constructed a “master
narrative” that positioned Stanton herself as “the heir and founder of the suffrage
campaign.”12
This essay suggests another way of reading the “master narrative” of a History
of Woman Suffrage. Noting the broad historical reach of the History and the “les-
sons” taught by its biographical and historical sketches, this essay shows how the
History not only celebrated Stanton’s role in the suffrage movement, but also pro-
moted her broader, more radical vision of complete gender equality. In selecting and
editing documents for the History, Stanton and her collaborators took sides in a
debate over strategy that had divided the suffrage movement. But more than that,
they told a version of women’s history that made the case, in William Blackstone’s
terms, for the full political and legal “sovereignty” of women.13 Demonstrating the
“wisdom, goodness and power” of women,14 the History made the case not just for
the vote, but for the role of women in nineteenth-century America. Documenting the
contributions of women since the American Revolution, it linked women’s rights to
the revolutionary founders and helped set a new agenda for the women’s rights move-
ment. In the process, the History provided both the inspiration and an “arsenal of
facts” for later generations of women’s rights activists.15
Stanton’s Rhetorical Archive: Politics and Controversy
Contemporary scholars have long recognized that the writing of history is in-
herently rhetorical. “[H]istory writing,” as Susan Jaratt has argued, “is an interpre-
tive act and has to do with the construction of a narrative by a writer located in time,
place, and institution.”16 As Jacquelyn Down Hill has suggested, historians do more
than simply preserve the past when they sort through the “tangled threads of memory
and history.” They also create “new futures.” 17 By including or excluding certain
6 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
documents and interpretations of events, history-writing both “reflects and creates
relations of power.”18 Indeed, as historian Joan Scott has noted, those writing history
often “consider themselves involved in a highly political effort to challenge prevail-
ing authority.”19
Stanton certainly understood the rhetorical implications of history writing. In
a diary entry of 1880, she noted a need for a record of the movement: “We are trying
to collect everything that pertains to our cause, to exhume what women have done,
and to rescue all the facts from being forgotten.”20 Yet she also recognized the power
of such an archive to provoke new ideas and to guide the direction of the suffrage
movement. As Stanton wrote in the introduction to the first volume, “we hope to
rouse new thoughts in minds prepared to receive them.”21
At the start of the project, the task of documenting the history of the woman’s
right movement seemed overwhelming. In her memoir, Eighty Years and More,
Stanton recalled her horror as she first realized the magnitude of the project:
I had never thought that the publication of a book required the consideration of such endless
details. We stood appalled before the mass of material, growing higher and higher with every mail,
and the thought of all the reading involved made us feel as if our life work lay before us. Six weeks of
steady labor all day, and often until midnight, made no visible decrease in the pile of documents.22
Editing the biographical sketches and other essays contributed by outside au-
thors proved the biggest challenge. “Oh, what dreadful manuscripts some women
send us,” Stanton recalled in her diary. “It is enough to destroy old eyes.” Yet con-
vinced of the importance of the task, Stanton threw her full energies into the project.
In her diary, she anticipated the joy she would feel upon completion of the project:
“When it is completed I shall feel as happy as when delivered of a male child.”23
To help with the editing, Stanton enlisted the assistance of Susan B. Anthony
and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Stanton and Anthony had remained political partners for
over three decades and had rallied together after the suffrage movement split in
1869.24 Gage, too, was a likely collaborator. In the fall of 1852, Gage had delivered
a rousing speech on women’s history before the National Woman’s Rights Conven-
tion in Syracuse, New York.25 She later would go on to publish a controversial cri-
tique of organized religion’s attitude toward women, Woman, Church and State.26
Often at odds with the mainstream movement, Gage’s unconventional views fit well
with Stanton’s broader view of the women’s rights struggle.27
Stanton recognized the potentially controversial nature of the History of Woman
Suffrage, and she was quick to defend her project against critics who complained
about its biases. Two years before she even published the first volume, Stanton jus-
tified her subjective approach to history in an article in Gage’s suffrage newspaper,
the National Citizen and Ballot Box. “[W]e who have made the history,” she wrote,
Lisa Shawn Hogan 7
“are best fitted to write it.”28 In the first volume of the History, Stanton again re-
sponded to her critics, this time answering charges that it was too soon for a suffrage
history. “In giving the inception and progress of this agitation,” Stanton responded,
“we who have undertaken the task have been moved by the consideration that many
of our co-workers have already fallen asleep, and that in a few years all who could
tell the story will have passed away.”29
Lucy Stone—president of the rival American Woman Suffrage Association
(AWSA)—was among those who Stanton thought had “fallen asleep.” In November
of 1869, Stone founded the AWSA as a way to distance herself from Stanton and
Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Stone complained that
Stanton was stirring up new controversies and losing sight of the most important
goal: the electoral franchise. As historian Ellen Carol DuBois explained, Stone be-
lieved that the NWSA was too “heterogeneous” and “confounding woman suffrage
with sexual and economic issues.”30 For her part, Stanton complained that Stone’s
“social conservatism” was holding back women.31
The rivalry intensified when Stanton, at the insistence of her daughter, Harriot
Stanton Blatch, requested that Stone provide a biographical sketch for the History.
Stone refused, at first justifying her decision by saying that such a history was pre-
mature. In a letter to Stanton in August of 1876, Stone wrote that there “will come a
time when this greatest of all the world movements will have its history and then it
can be written.” Stone concluded that she did not “wish to have any hand” in Stanton’s
history.32 Later, in another letter to Stanton, Stone went even further, writing that
she would not “furnish a biographical sketch and I hope you will not make one.”
Addressing more directly the split within the suffrage movement, Stone expressed
her concern that “any ‘wing’ of suffragists should attempt to write the history of the
other.”33 In a letter to fellow suffragist Harriet Robinson, Susan B. Anthony lamented
Stone’s refusal to cooperate and complained about her “narrow pig headedness.” In
Anthony’s view, Stone had “repelled everybody’s efforts to establish a cooperation
among all the suffragists in a most dogged manner.”34 The conflict between the two
organizations would continue for more than two decades.
In the context of these divisions and rivalries within the women’s movement,
the History of Woman Suffrage inevitably became a rhetorical history. It did not
merely “record” or “document” the history of woman suffrage, but rather promoted
Stanton’s own agenda for moving the women’s movement beyond the narrow con-
fines of agitation for the vote. The editors of the History made no claims to histori-
cal objectivity. As Stanton herself summarized her attitude in the first volume, “there
is an interest in history written from a subjective point of view that may compensate
the reader in this case for any seeming egotism or partiality he may discover.”35
Glossing over the disagreements between the two rival organizations, Stanton ad-
8 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
vanced her own contributions and her own ideas, including her view that the women’s
rights movement should push for equality in all realms of life.
In the introduction to the first volume of the History, Stanton quoted famed
eighteenth-century legal scholar William Blackstone on the requirements of “sover-
eignty,” or full citizenship in a democratic state. “The elements of sovereignty,”
Blackstone had written, were “wisdom, goodness and power.” Stanton then explained
why she believed that women already possessed those virtues: “Conceding to woman
wisdom and goodness, as they are not strictly masculine virtues, and substituting
moral power for physical force, we have the necessary elements of government for
most of life’s emergencies.” In the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suf-
frage, Stanton and her co-editors further documented that women possessed the “el-
ements of sovereignty” with almost three thousand pages detailing their contribu-
tions to history. In telling this story, the History sometimes reinforced conventional
stereotypes, assuring readers that women’s rights activists posed no threat to prevail-
ing conceptions of femininity and respectability. In the final analysis, however, the
History promoted the same broad agenda of social and political reform that Stanton
promoted in all of her speeches and writings. In recalling the historical contribu-
tions of women, the History of Woman Suffrage made the case not just for the vote
but for complete gender equality in both the private and the public spheres.
Civic Wisdom and the Revolutionary Heritage
“Throughout history,” as Kathleen Hall Jamieson has written, “women have
been identified as bodies not minds, wombs not brains.”36 The very idea of a wise
woman seemed an oxymoron: women were praised for their motherly intuition and
moral reasoning in the private sphere of domesticity, but never for their civic wis-
dom. “Those who chose to exercise their intellects in public life,” Jamieson ex-
plained, “upended the natural order, endangered the family, and called into question
whether they were really women.”37 Biographies and histories written by women in
the nineteenth-century reflected this “double bind.” Even as they became “public
speakers and social commentators,” women of the Victorian era insisted that they
were still exercising their “conventional roles as mothers.”38 The portrait of the fe-
male activist of the nineteenth-century was that of a “wise mother called reluctantly
from her domestic duties to the podium only because her female sympathy impels
her to speak out for the helpless and weak.”39 As Nan Johnson has suggested, the
only appropriate public role for women in the nineteenth century was that of a ma-
ternal figure who exercised a “healthy moral influence over domestic life.”40
In some ways, the History of Woman Suffrage actually reaffirmed this conven-
tional view by assuring readers that women’s rights activists throughout history had
Lisa Shawn Hogan 9
not neglected their familial responsibilities. In her chapter on the Colonial and Revo-
lutionary periods, for example, Gage repeatedly referred to the “feminine” roles of
the earliest women’s rights activists, suggesting that their activism grew naturally
out of their interests as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters.41 Gage even described
the earliest women’s rights activists in America as “Revolutionary Mothers” who
fought principally to protect their families.42 Portraying these activists as “happy
wives and faithful mothers, who in a higher development, demanded the rights and
privileges” of men, the History countered critical portraits of women’s rights activ-
ists as “sour old maids,” “childless women,” or “divorced wives.”43 The History
suggested that women became social reformers not out of political ambition, but
because they naturally had “souls large enough to feel the wrongs of others.”44
At the same time, the History of Woman Suffrage suggested that women pos-
sessed as much “common-sense” and “good judgment” as men,45 and that their
political activism was all the more remarkable because they had to juggle their pub-
lic lives with their domestic duties. In describing Gage’s role at the Woman’s Rights
Convention of 1851 in Akron, for example, Stanton offered the following praise of
her colleague’s remarkable success, both as a homemaker and a suffrage leader:
When we consider that Mrs. Gage had led the usual arduous domestic life, of wife, mother, and
housekeeper, in a new country, overburdened with the care and anxiety incident to a large family,
reading and gathering information in short intervals, taken from the hours of rest of excessive toil,
it is remarkable, that she should have presided over the Convention, in the easy manner she is said
to have done, and should have given so graceful and appropriate an extemporaneous speech, on
taking the chair.46
Beyond the skills and stamina to participate in public life, the women profiled
in the History of Woman Suffrage possessed the political insight and patriotism nec-
essary for full citizenship. Since the Revolutionary War years, the History suggested,
women with “freedom surging in their veins” had been “active, determined, and
self-sacrificing” in their service to their country. Moreover, the “deep political in-
sights” of women such as Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams, and Hannah
Lee Corbin had contributed significantly to the ideological heritage of the nation. In
a chapter written by Gage, the History even implied that Mercy Ottis Warren had
coined some of the phrases that Jefferson used in the Declaration of Independence.47
Warren, Gage wrote, was the “first one who based the struggle upon ‘inherent rights,’
a phrase afterward made the corner-stone of political authority.”48 Similarly, Gage
praised Abigail Smith Adams, insisting that her “political insight was worthy of
remark.”49 For over a century, Gage concluded, women had been “continually rais-
ing their voices against political tyranny, and demanding for themselves equality of
opportunity in every department of life.”50 The History thus portrayed “full sover-
10 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
eignty” for women as a natural extension of the nation’s revolutionary ideals, as well
as something that women had earned through their contributions to history. Since
the Revolution, the History concluded, American women had demonstrated both the
“highest morality” and the “purest wisdom.”51
The History of Woman Suffrage thus redefined women’s activism in American
history. Celebrating women’s patriotism, civic responsibility, and political acumen,
the History demonstrated that women had earned full political sovereignty, not just
the vote. The History did not disparage women’s conventional roles as mothers and
wives, but rather presented political activism as a natural extension of those roles.
Women, the History suggested, were not only wise enough to exercise full political
sovereignty, but had earned those rights throughout American history.
The Good Woman Speaking Well
Although the History of Woman Suffrage ostensibly told the story of the suf-
frage campaign, it situated that effort within a broader context of social reform. The
biographical sketches and reminiscences from activists themselves addressed a va-
riety of issues, including abolition, temperance, prison reform, and co-education. In
addition, the volumes took on many of the most controversial issues of the day,
including dress reform and the status of women in the Christian church. By telling
the stories of women who spoke out publicly on a broad range of issues, the History
not only illustrated the wisdom and historical contributions of women, but also the
courage, skill, and moral virtue they displayed from the public platform. Countering
the prevailing belief that women compromised their moral virtue by participating in
politics, the History told the story of women who proved their civic virtue by speak-
ing out in public.
The laws, customs, and mores of the nineteenth century defined women al-
most exclusively in terms of their morality and Christian virtue. Women, as Beth
Waggenspack has explained, were celebrated as the “repository of life-giving mater-
nity”; they “possessed intuition and refinement” and were “morally and spiritually
superior to man.” Men, on the other hand, were thought naturally superior in the
skills necessary for participation in politics, such as logical reasoning and platform
eloquence.52 As historian Linda Kerber has explained, the “woman’s sphere” served
as a “metaphor for complex power relations in social and economic contexts.”53 In
the nineteenth century, religion and morality dictated that women be restricted to the
domestic sphere.54 As Barbara Welter has explained, American women were ex-
pected to be “Defenders of the Faith.”55
In the History of Woman Suffrage, Stanton and her colleagues told the stories
of many famous women who challenged these conventional gender roles. These
Lisa Shawn Hogan 11
women possessed all the skills, talents, and civic wisdom of their male counterparts
in the public arena, and many had achieved true “eloquence.” Yet they still held on to
the moral virtues traditionally associated with women, and they never compromised
their femininity in fighting for their causes. In discussing the abolitionist movement
of the 1830s and 1840s, for example, Stanton used the word “eloquent” or “elo-
quence” three times on the first page alone to describe female abolitionists. Yet she
also assured readers that female abolitionists had not compromised their morality or
their femininity by speaking out in public. Indeed, the History documented how
some women had achieved “eloquence,” in part at least, by exploiting their beauty
and feminine charms, thereby countering the prevailing view that speaking in public
made women masculine, unattractive, or “unwomanly.” In effect, the History of Woman
Suffrage thus feminized the ideal orator—Quintillian’s “good man skilled at speak-
ing.” It showed how women could be “eloquent” and maintain their feminine vir-
tues.
The History’s portrait of abolitionist Angelina Grimké provided one case-in-
point. Not only did Angelina and her sister Sarah both display “glowing eloquence,”
according to the History, but they were “women of the purest moral character.”56
“Angelina, especially,” Stanton wrote, “possessed a rare gift of eloquence, a calm
power of persuasion, a magnetic influence over those that listened to her, which
carried conviction to hearts that nothing before had reached.”57 Stanton praised
Angelina’s “serene, commanding eloquence” as “a wonderful gift, which enchained
attention, disarmed prejudice, and carried her hearers with her.”58 According to
Stanton, there “was no more effective or eloquent speaker in the cause than Angelina
Grimké,”59 yet she never sacrificed her moral virtue or femininity by participating
in politics. Possessing “the eloquence of a broken heart,”60 Grimké “never lost one
of her purely feminine qualities,”61 Stanton concluded. Men succumbed “readily to
the power and magic of her words;” she was, in other words, eloquent.62 But she
remained feminine; an “attractive woman” with “fine dark eyes,” and her skin was
as “delicate as the lily-of-the valley.”63
The History’s biographical sketch of Stanton’s friend and mentor, Lucretia
Coffin Mott, likewise celebrated both her “eloquence” and femininity. As a speaker,
the History noted, Mott was “calm” and “clear,” and she exhibited the “good com-
mon sense” of the most eloquent speakers of the day.64 Yet she also remained a
woman of “refined” and “great personal beauty,” and she exhibited “sweetness and
charity” in everything she did.65 According to the History, Mott’s “manners were
gentle and self-possessed,” and she exhibited all of the “virtues of the true woman.”66
The “name Lucretia Mott,” the History concluded, “represents more fully than any
other in the nineteenth-century, the sum of all womanly virtues.”67
The portrait of women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose, contributed by suffrag-
12 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
ist L.E. Barnard, provided one last example of how the History celebrated both tra-
ditional eloquence and feminine virtues and beauty. Quoting an account of one of
Rose’s speeches from the Boston Investigator, the History described Rose as “an
excellent lecturer, liberal, eloquent, witty, and we must add, decidedly handsome,”
and her speeches were both “pointed” and “logical.” Possessing both “intellect” and
“beauty,”68 Rose was able to “charm” her audiences with her oratory. In a later chap-
ter, the editors of the History reinforced Barnard’s portrait of Rose with an account
from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that described her role in the Akron suffrage con-
vention of 1851. Rose was a “lady of great beauty” and “animation,” the paper re-
ported, and she had an “effective” delivery. As such, the Plain Dealer concluded, her
speaking style was “favorable to both the speaker and the cause.”69
As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has reminded us, “the ability to persuade others”
has long been “a part of Western man’s standard of excellence in many areas, even of
citizenship itself.”70 In the History of Woman Suffrage, Stanton and her co-editors
made the case for female citizenship, in part, by emphasizing the eloquence of women
throughout history. At the same time, Stanton and her collaborators challenged the
prevailing view that speaking in public robbed women of their moral virtue and
feminine charms. Holding up portraits of women who excelled on the public plat-
form but retained their femininity, the History recalled an honorable tradition of
women speaking in public, even as it suggested that some women exploited their
beauty and femininity to win over audiences. By assuring readers that women could
both speak in the public sphere and remain “womanly,” the History feminized the
ideal speaker of the classical rhetorical tradition and demonstrated how women had
met Blackstone’s second test of political “sovereignty.”
The Power of Women in History
Stanton and her co-editors understood the politics involved in writing a suf-
frage history. Using the History of Woman Suffrage to “rouse new thoughts in minds
prepared to hear them,”71 they aimed not only to document women’s courage and
determination in the past, but also to create a “precious heritage for coming genera-
tions” of women.72 Hoping to inspire and empower later generations, Stanton glossed
over the divisions within the movement and called upon the next generation of women
to pick up where Stanton and her colleagues left off. That meant more than bringing
the campaign for woman suffrage to a successful conclusion; it meant continuing
the fight for equal rights and against sex discrimination in all realms of private and
public life. “All thoughtful readers must close these volumes with a deeper sense of
self-reliance and independence that belong by nature to women,” Stanton wrote in
the third volume of the History, “enabling her to rise above such multifarious perse-
Lisa Shawn Hogan 13
cutions as she has encountered, and with persistent self-assertion to maintain her
rights.”73
As historian Linda Kerber has noted, the late nineteenth century was the “high-
water mark of women’s public influence: through voluntary organizations, lobby-
ing, trade unions, professional education, and professional activity.”74 For Stanton
and her co-editors, women’s achievements in these areas were no less significant
than the political victories of suffrage activists, and Stanton herself emphasized how
each woman’s triumphs—no matter how small—contributed to the larger cause and
was worthy of celebration. “[W]e would suggest,” she wrote, “that as each brick in a
magnificent structure might have no special value alone on the road-side, yet, in
combination with many others, its size position, quality, becomes of vital conse-
quence.” In “any great reform,” she concluded, there were people and events that,
while seemingly “of little value themselves,” contribute to the greater cause and
were therefore “worthy of mention—even important to the completion of the his-
torical record.”75 For Stanton and her editors, women working on school boards,
entering male-dominated professions, or graduating from major universities were
no less important to the “historical record” than women speaking at suffrage con-
ventions. For the editors of the History, any public achievement by women was wor-
thy of inclusion. The History of Woman Suffrage was, at bottom, a history of women
exercising power together.
Glossing over the disputes that had divided the suffragists themselves, the edi-
tors of the History said little about the AWSA or the split that divided the movement
in 1869. Out of the nearly 3000 pages in the first three volumes of the History, only
106 pages—a single chapter—were devoted to the AWSA.76 The split might not
have been mentioned at all had not Stanton’s own daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch,
insisted that the AWSA be recognized and volunteered to prepare the chapter her-
self.77 Acknowledging the AWSA only in passing, Stanton herself downplayed the
significance of the split in the larger scheme of things: “Viewing the enfranchise-
ment of woman as the most important demand of the century, we have felt no temp-
tation to linger over individual differences.”78 In a letter to fellow suffragist Eliza-
beth Buffum Chase in 1879, Stanton even admitted that she had deliberately
downplayed the divisions in order to create a more positive historical legacy: “We do
not desire to give the world unimportant bickerings, and thus mar our grand move-
ment in the eyes of future generations, but make a fair history of all that has been
well done, and throw the veil of charity over the remainder.”79
In a variety of more subtle ways, however, the History of Woman Suffrage did,
in fact, promote a feminist agenda that reached well beyond the vote. As the suffrage
movement became dominated by a new generation of younger, more conservative
activists in the 1880s, the History reminded them of the sacrifices of pioneers like
14 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
Stanton herself. It also situated the suffrage struggle within a longer historical tradi-
tion of women fighting for equal rights. In the second volume, for example, the
History praised Union women who disguised themselves as men in order to fight in
the Civil War. Lamenting that “no national recognition has been accorded the grand
women who did faithful service in the late war,” the History recorded the “noble
deeds” of a few such women, noting that their “patriotism…shone forth as fervently
and spontaneously as did that of man.” Presumably correcting the historical record
of the war, the History concluded that many women “fought in the ranks during the
war, impelled by the same patriotic motives which led their fathers, husbands, and
brothers.”80 In the same volume, the History also celebrated the legendary Civil War
nurse, Clara Barton, both as a caregiver to wounded soldiers and as a “national
advocate and leader” who demonstrated “remarkable executive ability” and “firm
integrity.” In dramatic, vivid language, the History praised Barton for her physical
stamina and remarkable courage, even as it acknowledged that she came out of the
war unscathed: “[T]hrough summer without shade, and winter without shelter, often
weak, but never so far disabled as to retire from the field; always under fire in severe
battles; her clothing pierced with bullets and torn by shot, exposed at all times, but
never wounded.”81
Beyond such obvious heroes, the History of Woman Suffrage celebrated the
lives of a number of highly controversial women, typically disavowed by suffragists.
Anne Hutchinson, the radical Puritan woman who was banished from the Massa-
chusetts Bay Colony for challenging the religious beliefs of the male clergy in 1637,
for example, drew Stanton’s praise for her “courage, moral heroism, and conscien-
tious devotion to great principles.”82 Noting that mainstream historical accounts
written by men had described Hutchinson as a woman of “haughty and fierce car-
riage” with a “very voluble tongue,”83 Stanton instead celebrated Hutchinson’s “com-
manding intellect” and her political and social “influence” on the role of women in
the church.84 Similarly, Stanton and her collaborators revised the biographical por-
trait of Mary Wollstonecraft, who in her own day had been branded a “hyena in
petticoats” for her unconventional views on gender and marriage. In standing up to
the “violent abuse” she received during her own lifetime, Wollstonecraft had dem-
onstrated the conviction and courage of a great leader, according to the History, and
throughout her life she had always exhibited “the highest morality and purest wis-
dom.”85
Two other women seem even more surprising choices for inclusion in the His-
tory of Woman Suffrage: Frances Wright and Victoria Woodhull. Wright, identified
most often with atheism and the free love movement of the 1830s,86 was condemned
in her own day as a sacrilegious heretic. In the History, however, she was praised for
her “extraordinary powers of mind” and for courageously standing up to her “bitter
Lisa Shawn Hogan 15
opponents” with grace and dignity. 87 Even more controversial was the spiritualist
and suffragist Victoria Woodhull who, in 1872, became the first women to run for
president in the United States. Twice divorced and an advocate of free love, Woodhull
challenged the sexual mores of her time and advocated controversial reforms in the
newspaper she published with her sister, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. Woodhull’s
views on sexual freedom were so controversial that Lucy Stone’s daughter observed
that “no woman is regarded with so much abhorrence by almost all decent people.”88
Although the History did not include a biography of Woodhull’s scandalous life, it
did include the complete text of Woodhull’s suffrage address before the Judiciary
Committee of the House of Representatives in 1871, thus preserving her place in the
history of the movement. 89
In sum, Stanton and her editors crafted a history of women exercising power,
not just in the suffrage crusade, but in all walks of life, including the male domains
of politics and war. In the process, they did not sanitize the history by ignoring
controversial women. To the contrary, they celebrated women who had advocated
controversial and unpopular ideas. In effect, the History endorsed a broader women’s
rights agenda that was willing to address issues beyond the elective franchise.
Throughout her career Stanton seemed proud that she was on the leading edge of
reform and the History of Woman Suffrage was no doubt part of that agenda. As she
reflected in her autobiography at the end of her life, “[T]he trouble was not what I
said, but that I said it too soon, and before the people were ready to hear it. It may be,
however, that I helped them get ready; who knows?”90
Conclusion
As the suffrage movement evolved toward the turn of the century, many suf-
fragists advocated female enfranchisement as a means of preserving the status quo.
These suffragists argued that women needed the right to vote in order to protect their
homes and the traditional family.91 Arguments from expediency—the pragmatic belief
that woman suffrage would benefit society as a whole—dominated the discourse of
the era.92 In some measure, this accounts for the fact that, by 1890, suffrage was no
longer viewed as a radical idea. Suffrage had become “respectable and dull,” as
historian Olivia Coolidge has noted. “It preached largely to the converted.…Suffrage
had reached a dead stop.”93 Historian Eleanor Flexner has referred to this period as
the “doldrums” of the movement.94
As she began work on the History of Woman Suffrage, Stanton voiced concern
that the suffrage movement’s narrow platform was actually holding back women. In
a diary entry on 18 November 1880, she wrote, “I think indeed that we have sat quite
long enough on a limb of the Republican tree singing ‘suffrage, if you please,’ like
16 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
so many insignificant humming birds, and that I am ready for any change of method
that will undermine a solid male dynasty.”95 In 1889 Stanton even complained about
the growing conservatism of her long-time collaborator, Susan B. Anthony. In a
diary entry on 9 January 1889, she wrote, “I tell her [Susan B. Anthony] that I get
more radical as I grow older, while she seems to get more conservative.”96
By celebrating women’s “wisdom, goodness and power,” the History of Woman
Suffrage implicitly argued for a broader, more radical feminist vision. Going beyond
the story of the suffrage campaign, it documented how women had contributed to
the nation’s progress since the Revolution and made the case for complete equality
in all realms of social, legal, and political life. By broadening both the historical and
ideological scope of the fight for women’s rights, the History showed how women
had earned the right to full “sovereignty” and citizenship. As the editors themselves
put it in the very first volume, the History was not the story of the suffrage struggle
alone. Rather, it chronicled the history of the “most momentous reform that has yet
been launched on the world—the first organized protest against the injustice which
has brooded over the character and destiny of one-half the human race.”97
Notes
1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Our Foremothers,” in The Woman’s Tribune (Washington, D.C.),
31 December 1892, 261.
2. Stanton, “Our Foremothers,” 261.
3. Susan B. Anthony to Matilda Joslyn Gage, 3 November 1875, The Selected Papers of Eliza-
beth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3, National Protection for National Citizens, ed. Ann
Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 208–209. Stanton began requesting
documents in the summer of 1875.
4. For a history of lyceum speaking see Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the
Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Lisa S.
Strange, “Dress Reform and the Feminine Ideal: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the ‘Coming Girl,’”
Southern Communication Journal 68 (2002): 1–13; and Lisa S. Hogan and J. Michael Hogan, “Femi-
nine Virtue and Practical Wisdom: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s ‘Our Boys,’” Rhetoric and Public Affairs
6 (2003): 415–436.
5. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (India-
napolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902; reprint edition, New York: Arno and the New York Times, 1969); Ida
Husted Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5 (New York: J. J. Little and Ives, 1922; reprint
edition, New York: Arno and the New York Times, 1969); Ida Husted Harper, ed., History of Woman
Suffrage, vol. 6 (New York: J. J. Little and Ives, 1922; reprint edition, New York: Arno and the New
York Times, 1969).
6. Lois Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Women’s Rights (Boston: Little, Brown,
& Co., 1980), 146; Mari Jo Buhl and Paul Buhl, ed., The Concise History of Woman Suffrage (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1979), xvii-xix; Alma Lutz, Created Equal (New York: John Day Publish-
ing, 1940), 245.
7. See, for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, 29 September
1876, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3, National Protec-
tion for National Citizens, ed. Ann Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003),
264–265. Since most historians maintain that Stanton authored most of the lengthy descriptions and
Lisa Shawn Hogan 17
biographical sketches herself, I refer to her name when I am quoting material from the volumes,
unless the text is attributed to another author.
8. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York:
Norton, 1981), xiii. Most historical accounts of the Suffrage Movement use the History of Woman
Suffrage as the definitive account of the women’s rights struggle. See Eleanor Flexner, Century of
Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 1995); Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984); Joan Hoff, Law, Gender and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women
(New York: New York University Press, 1991); Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman, A History of
Women In America (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1978); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Con-
sciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
and Lois Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Women’s Rights (New York: John Day Pub-
lishing, 1940).
9. Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum American (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998), 2.
10. See, for example, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Stanton’s ‘The Solitude of Self’: A Rationale
for Feminism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 304–312; Hogan and Hogan, “Feminine Vir-
tue and Practical Wisdom”; Sally J. Perkins, “The Myth of the Matriarchy: Annulling Patriarchy through
the Regeneration of Time,” Communication Studies 42 (1991): 371–382; Angela Ray, “Representing
Working Class in Early U.S. Feminist Media: The Case of Hester Vaughn,” Women’s Studies in Com-
munication 26 (2003): 1–26; Martha Solomon, “Autobiographies as Rhetorical Narratives: Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Anna Howard Shaw as ‘New Woman,’” Communication Studies 42 (1991): 83–92;
Strange, “Dress Reform and the Feminine Ideal”; Lisa S. Strange and Robert S. Brown, “The Bicycle,
Women’s Rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 31
(2002): 609–626; and Lisa S. Strange, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible and the Roots of
Feminist Theology,” Gender Issues 17 (1999): 15–36.
11. Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 19.
12. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 3.
13. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 20.
14. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 20.
15. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, ed., History of Woman
Suffrage, vol. 1 (New York: Fowler and Wells Publishers, 1881; reprint edition, New York: Arno and
the New York Times, 1969), 7.
16. Susan Jaratt, “Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric,” Pre/Text 11
(1990): 190.
17. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘You Must Remember This’: Autobiography as Social Critique,”
Journal of American History 85 (1998): 441, 453.
18. Joan Scott, “History in Crisis? The Other Side of the Story,” American Historical Review
94 (1989): 680–692.
19. Joan Scott, “Women’s History.” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 43.
20. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, diary entry, 27 December 1880, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Re-
vealed in her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences, vol. 2, ed. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton
Blatch (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 181.
21. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 24.
22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 1898; reprint, (Boston: Northeastern Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 326.
23. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, diary entry, 30 September 1885, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Re-
vealed in her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, vol. 2, ed. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton
Blatch (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 226.
24. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1981), 3–4.
25. Leila R. Brammer, Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-
Century American Feminist (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), xii.
18 Gender Issues / Spring 2006
26. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State, (1893; reprint, New York: Arno Press,
1972).
27. Leila Brammer argues that Gage wrote some of the chapters in the History herself, includ-
ing “Preceding Causes,” “Women and Newspapers,” and “Woman, Church and State” in volume 1.
Brammer, 14.
28. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Our History,” The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3, National Protection for National Citizens, ed. Ann Gordon (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 424.
29. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 7.
30. Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s
Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 197.
31. Ellen Carol DuBois, “On Labor and Free Love: Two Unpublished Speeches of Elizabeth
Cady Stanton,” Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (1975): 264.
32. Lucy Stone to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 3 August 1876, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3, 249.
33. Lutz, Created Equal, 245.
34. Susan B. Anthony to Harriet Hanson Robinson, 12 August 1879, The Selected Papers of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3, 469.
35. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 8.
36. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 53.
37. Jamieson, Beyond the Double Bind, 17.
38. Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 116.
39. Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space, 113.
40. Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space, 118.
41. See, for example, Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 41.
42. See, for example, Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 33.
43. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 68.
44. Stanton et al., ibid.
45. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 102, 68.
46. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 113–114.
47. The History’s account of women of in the revolutionary era shaped the writing of women’s
history for over a century. See, James H. Hutson, “Women in the Era of the American Revolution: The
Historian as Suffragist,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 32 (1975): 290–303.
48. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 31.
49. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 33.
50. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 34.
51. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 34.
52. Beth Waggenspack, The Search for Self-Sovereignty: The Oratory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 41.
53. Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of
Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 28.
54. Elaine J. Lawless, “Piety and Motherhood: Reproductive Images and Maternal Strategies
for the Woman Preacher,” The Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 469–478.
55. Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth-Century (Ath-
ens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 129.
56. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 52.
57. Stanton, “Angelina Grimké,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 399.
58. Stanton, “Angelina Grimké,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 399.
59. Stanton, “Angelina Grimké,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 394–395.
60. Stanton, “Angelina Grimké,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 395.
61. Stanton, “Angelina Grimké,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 396.
62. Stanton, “Angelina Grimké,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 402.
Lisa Shawn Hogan 19
63. Stanton, “Angelina Grimké,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 394, 392,
398.
64. Stanton, “Lucretia Coffin Mott,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 426.
65. Stanton, “Lucretia Coffin Mott,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 410,
428.
66. Stanton, “Lucretia Coffin Mott,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 428,
430.
67. Stanton, “Lucretia Coffin Mott,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 430.
68. L. E. Barnard, “Ernestine Rose,” in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 98.
69. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 145.
70. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist
Rhetoric, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger Press, 1989), 1.
71. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 24.
72. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, iv.
73. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, v.
74. Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of
Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75 (1988): 27.
75. Stanton et. al., “Preface,” History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 8.
76. See, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, ed., History of
Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (New York: Fowler and Wells Publishers, 1882; reprint edition, New York:
Arno and the New York Times, 1969), 756–862.
77. Lutz, Created Equal 249.
78. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 7.
79. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Elizabeth Buffum Chase, 12 November 1879, The Selected
Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3, 482.
80. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 1, 18.
81. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 24.
82. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 24.
83. Flexner, Century of Struggle, 10.
84. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 206.
85. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 34.
86. Flexner, Century of Struggle, 27.
87. Stanton et al, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 42.
88. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous
Victoria Woodhull. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 285.
89. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 444.
90. Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 216.
91. Steven Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illi-
nois, 1850–1920. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 13.
92. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement.
93. Olivia Coolidge, Women’s Rights: The Suffrage Movement in America, 1848–1920 (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1966), 96. It should be noted that historians disagree on the exact date that the
suffrage movement began to stagnate. Flexner defined 1890 to 1910 as the “doldrums,” while Coolidge
marked 1884 to 1910 as the slow period in the movement. See Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle.
94. Flexner, 248.
95. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, diary entry of 18 November 1880, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as
Revealed in her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, vol. 2, 179.
96. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, diary entry of 9 January 1889, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as
Revealed in her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, vol. 2, 254.
97. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 8.
JFSR 29.2 (2013) �–24
RELIGION AND (DIS)ABILITY IN EARLY FEMINISM
Meredith Minister
In a society where women were denied social and religious
equality with men on the basis of their perceived lack of physi-
cal, intellectual, and moral ability, early women’s rights activists
argued for gender equality by contending that women and men
have equal capabilities. Although this argument of equal gender
capability became the foundation for the women’s movement, it
assumed an ideology of ability present within nineteenth-century
health reform movements—an ideology which marginalizes peo-
ple with disabilities. This article uses intersectional analyses to
explore the speeches and images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Sojourner Truth in order to demonstrate how religious ideolo-
gies of ability permeated the women’s movement and were even
maintained across race and class divides. Although this analysis
reveals the problematic anthropology that grounded the women’s
movement, it concludes with a call to develop alternative anthro-
pologies, which sustain the equality of men and women without
marginalizing persons with disabilities.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in important political and
social changes that provided women with opportunities not present in the Victo-
rian age. Women such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice
Paul led the early petition for women’s suffrage. In the 1960s, so-called second-
wave feminists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem picked up the mantle
and galvanized a generation to work for women’s abortion and labor rights. Al-
though these women made it possible for other women to sit in Congress, run
for president, and educate young people, black feminists have called for an ex-
ploration of the racist and classist underbelly of the feminist movement—tales
told from the perspective of those left on the margins—as mostly white, edu-
cated feminists pursued gender equality. Their calls have yielded important nu-
ances to the victorious tale of “women’s” liberation but the work is not yet done.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.26
Just as black feminists such as bell hooks and members of the Combahee River
Collective have pointed out that the early women’s movement often deployed
racist and classist rhetoric, so too feminist disability theorists suggest that femi-
nists must explore the rhetoric of ability in their historical and contemporary
sources. Feminist disability theory calls for intersectional analyses that extend
beyond the triad of sex, race, and class as feminists explore who continues to pay
the price for feminist arguments that seek gender equality without regard for
social exclusions other than gender (and, now, race and class).
The recent emergence of feminist disability theory draws on the insights
of feminist scholarship and disability studies to suggest that women’s rights
have historically been denied on the basis that women lack the ability of men.
Women are, under this logic, assumed to be inferior to men because women
lack the physical strength or mental acumen of men. While feminist disabil-
ity theorists such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argue simultaneously for the
rights of women and people with disabilities by suggesting that strength should
not be a measure of rights or personhood, early feminists in the nineteenth
century adopted a line of argumentation that contended that women are just
as able-bodied as men. Moreover, these early feminists drew on Christian un-
derstandings of the nature of God and humans to develop their case for the
equal abilities of men and women. In brief, early feminists attempted to use
the master’s theologically buttressed hierarchy of ability to dismantle patriarchy.
Using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, however, assumed the
normativity of able-bodiedness and, thus, sustained the marginalization of any-
one categorized as disabled.
This article explores images and speeches of the first-wave feminist move-
ment through the lenses of disability theory and religious studies. Analyzing
these sources, I contend that the rhetoric used by first-wave feminists chal-
lenged religious understandings of female inferiority by sustaining religious dis-
courses that accepted the superiority of able-bodiedness.1 By drawing attention
to the manner in which first-wave feminists used rhetoric of ability, I hope to
challenge contemporary feminists to analyze critically how the assumption of
the superiority of able-bodiedness in feminist discourse undermines feminist
critiques of social exclusion. Furthermore, I hope to challenge theologians to
attend to the problematic theological anthropologies on which the early fem-
inists grounded their arguments for gender equality and develop alternative
anthropologies that sustain gender equality without marginalizing people with
disabilities.
In order to develop this argument, I offer an analysis of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Sojourner Truth, who, though socially differentiated according to
1 While it is important to note that ideologies of ability also undergirded nineteenth-century
arguments for racial equality, this article focuses on the ideologies of ability undergirding the femi-
nist movement.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism �
race, class, and physical ability (due to Truth’s disabled hand), both make reli-
giously founded arguments for gender equality that assume the superiority of
ability. The first part of this article considers Stanton and Truth within the con-
text of the physical health movement at the end of the nineteenth century. The
second half of the nineteenth century was a time of rapid social change, much
of which resulted from the end of the Civil War in 186� and the nationwide
abolition of slavery. Although I will refer to some of these events in my analysis,
I cannot adequately contextualize either Stanton or Truth within the confines of
this article and I refer you to Nell Irvin Painter’s biography of Truth, Sojourner
Truth: A Life, A Symbol, and Lori Ginzberg’s biography of Stanton, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton: An American Life, for more information on these women in re-
lation to their context.2 Rather than attempting a detailed contextualization of
Stanton and Truth, the first section of this article explores the nineteenth-cen-
tury physical health movement as an important religious ideology of the nine-
teenth century in which the women’s movement developed. Understanding the
physical health movement in general and the particular religious movements
that emerged from it in the form of Muscular Christianity and New Thought
provides the background for the second part of the article, which analyzes the
rhetoric of ability first in speeches given by Stanton and Truth and then in pho-
tos and paintings of Stanton and Truth. The analysis of the speeches and images
of Stanton and Truth concludes with a call for scholars to attend to the rhetoric
of ability within their historical and contemporary sources in order to avoid
perpetuating the marginalization of disability.
Physical Health, Muscular Christianity, and New Thought
Although often overlooked in relation to the emergence of the women’s
movement, the physical health movement had a significant impact on how peo-
ple in the nineteenth century thought about embodiment, health, and illness.
Both Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would have been surrounded
by the optimism that suggested that physical health was simply a matter of per-
sonal motivation and will power. The corollary to this optimism, however, is
that deviators from physical perfection were understood to lack willpower and,
therefore, to be socially marginalized. Indeed, as Martha Verbrugge suggests,
contemporary citizens of the United States need look no further than our own
national obsession with health in order to understand the nineteenth-century
obsession with making good decisions such as exercising and eating right. Ver-
brugge argues that “between the 1820s and 1860s[,] . . . Americans’ fatalism
gave way to the belief that physical well-being was possible. In concert with the
perfectionist philosophy and social reforms of antebellum times, optimism about
2 Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and
Lori Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.28
health swept the Northeast. . . . The resemblance between the zealous crusade
of the mid-nineteenth century and present-day America is unmistakable.”3 Her
argument could be further buttressed by current attempts to correlate health
and security in the attempt to construct obesity as a form of terrorism. Before
physical bodies deemed imperfect were viewed as a threat to the nation-state,
however, bodies identified as imperfect were constructed as threats to religious,
spiritual, and moral well-being. This section explores the physical health move-
ment in general as well as two religious movements—Muscular Christianity and
New Thought—that deployed ideologies of health in order to mark moral and
spiritual integrity.
The physical health movement developed in the early nineteenth century
as more laypeople became interested in scientific and medical discourses. The
products of early health reformers Sylvester Graham and James Harvey Kel-
logg continue to be celebrated daily in the consumption of graham crackers
(Graham’s response to the nutritional deficiencies of white bread) and break-
fast cereal (Kellogg’s alternative to meat-based breakfasts). Although graham
crackers and breakfast cereals seem harmless enough, Graham, Kellogg, and
other health reformers developed a pervasive ideology of health that not only
marginalized any individual perceived to be unhealthy but also considered lack
of health as a threat to the social order. As James Whorton describes, “health
reform movements must be understood as hygienic ideologies, idea systems
that identify correct personal hygiene as the necessary foundation for most,
even all, human progress.”4 Humanness is, according to the health reformers,
delineated according to a scale of progress and progress cannot be achieved
apart from physical fitness. In the ideologies of Graham and Kellogg, progress
is understood to be natural and those deemed not physically fit simply need to
obey the laws of nature in order to improve themselves and become meaningful
(productive) participants in a progressive society.
The assumption behind this health obsession was that human beings can
control their bodies such that the absence of health signals a failure. Whether
this failure occurred as a result of eating the “wrong” foods or taking part in
the “wrong” activities too often and the “right” activities not often enough mat-
ters little. The point is that because the health reformers believed that health,
disease, and debility can be controlled, these reformers made the claim that
unhealthy people only have themselves to blame as they failed to take advantage
of the controls—diet, exercise, and even prayer as the Muscular Christians and
3 Martha Verbrugge, Able-Bodied Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
4. For contemporary attempts to correlate obesity and security, consider how the rhetoric of war is
deployed against obesity. See Charlotte Biltekoff, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post-9/11 U.S.
Life,” American Studies 48, no. 3 (Fall 200�): 29–48.
4 James Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University, 1982), 4.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 9
proponents of New Thought advocated—offered them. This individualistic ide-
ology not only organized individuals according to their perceived level of health
and wellness but also made individuals personally responsible for their place on
the social and theological hierarchy. The individualism of the ideology of abil-
ity, therefore, locates the responsibility for social marginalization on the indi-
vidual who has been marginalized.� As Whorton notes in reference to the health
reformers, “hygienic ideologists have consistently blamed people rather than
the organization of the social system for the ills of society, and consequently
their utopias have been familiar structures, purified versions of the status quo.”6
The problem, according to health reformers, was not that society marginalized
anyone perceived to be unhealthy but, rather, that disease existed. The cure,
therefore, was not the admission that health and disease were two aspects of
physicality but rather for “diseased” individuals to get healthy. Under this ideol-
ogy, both social life and moral life depended on health.�
This understanding of morality and health grounded the Muscular Chris-
tian movement, which drew on the work of the health reformers to argue for
the development of manly strength in order to combat the supposed feminine
debility that had infiltrated Protestant Christianity. Although the term Muscular
Christianity was first used in England as a description of the novels of Thomas
Hughes and Charles Kingsley, who argued that the Anglican Church was too
effeminate and needed an influx of masculinity, it quickly became a moniker
for a movement emerging within the United States.8 This movement proffered
an interpretation of the Christian faith that mandated that men develop their
strength via diet and exercise in order to ward off the unmanly effects of Victo-
rian genteel overcivilization.
The ideology of a Muscular Christian was not only based on an idea of the
inherent goodness of nature but also grounded in an understanding of God,
one who made nature good. Illness and physical imperfection were, according
to this logic, a result not only of deviation from the natural order but also the
divine order. As Clifford Putney notes, “instead of just being a tool for labor,
� Ideologies of ability and ideologies of class may have this in common as they both seek to
place blame for a socially constructed hierarchy on those at the lower end of the hierarchy. The
notion that someone can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is an example of blaming the mar-
ginalized individual for their marginalization.
6 Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, �.
� This rhetoric can be seen not only in literature from the late nineteenth century but also
in contemporary literature about health and wellness. For a study that traces the development of
health ideologies and their relation to Christian theologies in US history, see R. Marie Griffith, Born
Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004).
8 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–
1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 11–2�. For more on Muscular Christianity
in England, see also the essays in Donald Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian
Age (New York: Cambridge, 1994).
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.210
the body was viewed by Muscular Christians as a tool for good, an agent to
be used on behalf of social progress and world uplift.”9 God, as creator of the
natural order, buttressed this order and, therefore, desired that people follow
the divinely authorized order with the goal of achieving health and wholeness.
Illness, obesity, and debility are deemed, therefore, not only contrary to nature
but also a sin against God. Through this rhetoric, bodies deemed imperfect
became threats to the religious, spiritual, and moral order.
The Muscular Christians identified with Christ as a carpenter—the ultimate
manly man. As a rugged hypermale, Christ became a symbol for the rugged in-
dividualism of Muscular Christians. As a song contained in the 1910 hymnbook
Manly Songs for Christian Men states, “Send the call for manly workers over
the world today. For the cause of Christ demands them who will not that call
obey?”10 Muscular Christianity was a movement that sought to answer this call
for “manly workers”—a call initially theorized long before the hymnbook was
printed. The desire for manly workers values physical health and strength as a
means to an end—economic productivity. The good news the Muscular Chris-
tians preached did indeed promise health, but this health gospel was not discon-
nected from a gospel that preached economic prosperity. Indeed, the gospel of
health was intimately intertwined with the gospel of wealth, and manly men,
according to the Muscular Christians, were needed in order to preserve health
and economic vitality.
How were men to respond to Christ’s need for manly workers? To start,
men could develop their bodies by making them more physically fit. The devel-
opment in the 18�0s of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) created
a space for men to develop their muscles toward the goal of serving Christ,
thereby injecting a healing dose of manliness into a church life understood to
be overly effeminate. Physical fitness, as the YMCA conceived it, was impor-
tant not only for the development of the body but also for the development
of the mind. As Yale professor Eugene Richards contended, “the corruption
of the body by sloth and effeminate luxury was followed by a mental decline,
just as softness and weakness of mind . . . have always gone hand in hand with
enervated, enfeebled bodies.”11 Physical incapacity was, according to this logic,
indicative of not only a physical deficiency but also an intellectual deficiency.
Moreover, physical and intellectual incapacity inevitably gave way to a moral in-
capacity that threatened Christianity. As Putney states, “many nineteenth-cen-
tury reformers, first in England, then in America, expressed faith in the power
9 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 2.
10 Grant Colfax Tullar and I. H. Meredith, eds., Manly Songs for Christian Men (New York
and Chicago: Tullar-Meredith Co., 1910), the quotation is taken from the cover. For more on how
Muscular Christians viewed Christ, see Putney, Muscular Christianity, ��, 92–93.
11 Eugene Richards, “The Physical Element in Education,” Popular Science Monthly 4�
(189�): 4�6.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 11
of strenuous activity to overcome the perceived moral defects of urbanization,
cultural pluralism, and white-collar work.”12 While the YMCA initially offered
Bible studies and men’s discussion groups, it used gyms to lure athletic men
who would not come to a Bible study while simultaneously mandating that men
who did come to Bible studies also use the gym. For the YMCA, the gym and
the Bible study, sports and religion, were inextricably intertwined. The ideol-
ogy behind the development of the YMCA, thereby, tied Christian identity to
physical fitness, creating a religious hierarchy in which physical capability was
indicative of godliness.
By using capability to indicate godliness, Muscular Christianity drew on an
assumed hierarchy of ability that reified gender roles and established the mas-
culinity of Christianity. For those who perceived Christianity to be for women,
Muscular Christians responded by offering an interpretation of Christianity
in which the perceived effeminacies of spirituality were overtaken by the per-
ceived manliness of physical strength. Jesus, not Mary, became the paradigmatic
human being for Protestant Muscular Christians and capability, not ethereal
spirituality, became the marker of religiosity. Muscular Christianity reified the
physical health movement into a pervasive system that used markers of physical
fitness to establish male superiority not only in society but also in church. As I
argue later in the article, Stanton and Truth challenged the gender hierarchy
purported by Muscular Christians while continuing the movement’s approach
of using markers of physical health to establish religious and social hierarchies.
New Thought—in its focus on spirituality and the mind—may appear to
be the opposite of the overtly physical Muscular Christianity. Yet, like Muscular
Christianity, New Thought was also influenced by the physical health move-
ment. Although proponents of New Thought often spoke of the power of the
mind, that power was ultimately directed toward improving the body. Consider,
for example, Prentice Mulford’s claim that “a physical body can be retained
so long as the spirit desires its use, and that this body, instead of decreasing in
strength and vigor as the years go on, will increase and its youth will be perpet-
ual.”13 Although Mulford claimed that the body was the servant of the spirit, the
effect was the preservation and, indeed, perfection of the body. The emphasis
on the spirit in New Thought served, in other words, as the vehicle to trans-
form the body. Muscular Christians used the body to affect the spirit while New
Thought used the mind to affect the body, but both movements demonstrated
a link between spirituality and embodiment—between godliness and physical
perfection. In both movements, the ideology of ability purported by the health
reformers was given divine authority.
12 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 4�; see 64–�2 for more about the development of the
YMCA.
13 Prentice Mulford, “Immortality in the Flesh,” in The Gift of the Spirit (New York: Cosimo,
200�, 1913), 1�8.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.212
While Muscular Christianity purported to transform its adherents into manly
men with the goal of serving Christ, New Thought purported not to transform
its adherents into manly men but into a picture of perfection and productiv-
ity—white and upper class—that would ultimately serve spirituality. Adherents
to the school of New Thought had different views regarding the equality of men
and women but the emphasis on physical perfection served to maintain race,
class, and, at times, gender hierarchies. As R. Marie Griffith states,
But where Satter sees these debates [quarrels in New Thought over
mind, matter, and spirit] as a gendered power struggle between white
middle-class men and women, a more powerful undercurrent may have
been one in which status-conscious women and men joined forces to
urge their fellow citizens to rise and grasp hold of the felt destiny of their
civilization, realizing the potential inherent in self-mastery to promote
the new and perfect race.14
Where Muscular Christianity used physical health to establish male superiority
and godliness, New Thought used physical health to establish white, upper-class
(and, at times, male) superiority and godliness. Both Muscular Christianity and
New Thought, therefore, assumed an ideology of ability in order to establish
a cultural and spiritual hierarchy between men and women, upper and lower
class, black and white.
The use of physical health ideologies to maintain not only established gen-
der roles (in Muscular Christianity) but also established hierarchies of race and
class (in New Thought) is significant for my analysis of Stanton and Truth, whose
very different social locations suggest different relationships with these social
movements. On the one hand, Stanton, as an upper-class white woman, would
grow fond of New Thought and ultimately find it more helpful than other Chris-
tian traditions in establishing gender equality.1� Truth, on the other hand, found
neither Muscular Christianity’s attempt to reify maleness nor New Thought’s
attempt to reify race and class hierarchies acceptable. Truth was, however, con-
vinced by the central claim of the physical health movement that strength and
productivity were more desirable (and more human) than weakness. The next
section explores this rhetoric of ability in select speeches and images of Stanton
and Truth with particular attention to the theological grounds that both women
employed to justify their preference for ability.
14 Griffith, Born Again Bodies, 109.
1� Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 60–62.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 13
Rhetoric of Ability in Speeches of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Sojourner Truth
In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized a gathering at Seneca Falls,
New York, to discuss the place of women within civil society. Although there
had been much women’s rights activism prior to the meeting at Seneca Falls,
this meeting has become the legendary beginnings of the women’s rights move-
ment and, especially, the women’s suffrage movement. At this meeting, Stanton
gave her first of many public addresses on women’s rights in which she argued
for gender equality by demonstrating the capacities of women. Although Stan-
ton’s addresses over the next fifty years increasingly located the source of the
assumed incapacity of women in certain Christian doctrines such as original
sin, in this address Stanton focused on how God created women to be just as
capable as men.
While movements such as Muscular Christianity took for granted cultural
assumptions that women lacked the physical and intellectual capability of men,
Stanton’s address at Seneca Falls argued that men and women are equally ca-
pable. Stanton began with women’s supposed intellectual inferiority and stated,
“when woman, instead of being taxed to endow colleges where she is forbidden
to enter . . . shall educate herself . . . [she will improve] the talents God has
given her.”16 According to Stanton, even though women had been denied access
to education, they were not created with an intellectual inferiority and must be
given a fair trial. Stanton’s argument implied that women might have been intel-
lectually inferior but, if so, only because they had been excluded from systems
of education. Although Stanton realized that intellectual capacity is dependent
on cultural factors such as education, Stanton also assumed that the improve-
ment of an innate God-given intellectual capacity would make women more fit
to participate in society. Cultural factors to that point had prevented women
from fully participating in society, and women must respond by responsibly ful-
filling their intellectual potential, as men had in the past. Moreover, until such
intellectual potential was realized, Stanton questioned whether women ought to
have a public role. Intellectual ability, therefore, created a foundation for civic
engagement.
Second, Stanton challenged the assumption that women are morally in-
ferior to men by invoking the lack of moral principle among (male) lawyers,
physicians, and politicians. With this invocation, Stanton suggested that men,
although not created morally inferior, had denigrated themselves through “false
education” and become morally inferior to women. In response, Stanton con-
tended that “God’s commands rest upon man as well as woman.”1� Moral capa-
16 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address Delivered at Seneca Falls,” July 19, 1848, in Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Correspondences, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois
(New York: Schocken, 1981), 29.
1� Ibid., 30.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.214
bility, like intellectual capability, was a gift of God according to this statement.
Unlike her argument for intellectual capability, which suggested that men may
be intellectually superior due to their increased access to education, Stanton
fully rejected the claim that men are morally superior by calling attention to the
moral failings of men; according to Stanton, it was not men who were morally
superior but women. Again, Stanton recognized the power of cultural shaping
in her suggestion that public institutions had made men more morally corrupt
than women but that morality was not only something that was shaped accord-
ing to these public institutions. Rather, she assumed that both women and men
have a God-given morality that public institutions had corrupted in the case
of men. Women, in this case, had maintained an innate ability—moral reason-
ing—that had been culturally conditioned out of men. To Stanton, then, women
were more able to exercise morality than men. An ability or lack thereof again
determined whether one should participate in the public square.
Finally, regarding the physical superiority of men, Stanton returned to the
same strategy as she employed regarding the intellectual superiority of men.
Namely, she claimed that if women are physically inferior, it is not because
they were created physically weaker but because they had not been given the
same physical opportunities as men. Stanton stated, “we cannot say what the
woman would be physically, if the girl were allowed all the freedom of the boy
in romping, climbing, swimming, playing whoop and ball.”18 As she did with the
argument for intellectual superiority, Stanton allowed for the possibility that
women were at that point physically inferior but denied that women were cre-
ated as such. God created women and men with equal physical potential and
Stanton believed that it is the realization of this innate physical ability that read-
ies a human being for society. While men had been given more opportunity to
develop their physical potential, women could be equally as physically able if
given the same opportunities as men. Stanton, thus, attempted to respond to
arguments that God created men as more capable than women by establishing
the abilities of women. For Stanton, access to civic engagement was dependent
upon abilities both naturally endowed and socially cultivated.
With these arguments, Stanton argued for gender equality on the basis
of women’s capabilities and thereby assumed ability as a mark that makes one
person more human than another. A more intellectually, morally, or physically
capable human being is, according to Stanton, more valuable than a less able-
bodied human being. In other words, ability, or the lack thereof, should deter-
mine worthiness for civic engagement. Several Stanton scholars have noted her
racism and classism, especially in her later years, so the finding of ableism as
another aspect of her rhetoric may not come as especially surprising to anyone
familiar with contemporary scholarship on Stanton.19 Perhaps Stanton’s able-
18 Ibid.
19 See, for example, Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, 92–134.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 1�
ism is simply another mark of her privileged and bourgeois location in society.
Although this interpretation is tempting, I suggest that ideologies of ability per-
vaded society beyond the upper class.
In order to establish the pervasiveness of nineteenth-century ideologies of
ability, I turn to another example in the figure of Sojourner Truth. Unlike Stan-
ton, who appears to have been arguing against gender equality while maintain-
ing inequalities based on class and race, Truth identified the problematic nature
of inequalities based on gender, race, and class. Following the end of chattel
slavery, black women continued to be associated with the roles of reproducer
and object of sexual violence. Truth offered an alternative to these roles by
creating what contemporary black feminists identify as another stereotype of
black women: the strong black woman.20 As a strong black woman, Truth re-
fused to allow the women’s movement to be about upper-class white women.
Despite the important steps she took toward gender, race, and class equality,
Truth maintained that human beings who are less productive are not equal to
those who are more productive. Indeed, we may suppose that Truth’s argument
for race and class equality was based solely on her identity. If this were the case,
we would also expect Truth to argue for the equality of people with disabilities
based on her own experience with a disabled hand. Truth, however, followed
Stanton’s argument and grounded gender and racial equality in a hierarchy of
ability.21
Three years after the gathering at Seneca Falls, in 18�1, the women’s rights
movement was gaining momentum and a convention was scheduled to be held
in Akron, Ohio. While the keynote at this convention was given by Frances
Gage, the words of Sojourner Truth captured the crowd and have subsequently
been etched in history texts and collective imagination often under the title
“Ar’n’t I a Woman?” According to records of the speech, Truth invoked her
bodily capabilities (“Look at me. Look at my arm”), referred to her strength and
need for food (“I can eat as much as a man”), and used biblical interpretation
to argue for women’s rights.22 In this speech, Truth’s references to her black,
20 Although womanists identify many patterns regarding the perception of black women, they
consistently identify the stereotypes of black woman as mammy and black woman as sexually devi-
ant. M. Shawn Copeland connects these stereotypes, “On the one hand, black women were consid-
ered lascivious whores; yet their putative depravity made them good ‘breeders’ ” (Enfleshing Free-
dom: Body, Race, and Being [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010], 36–3�). For more on these stereotypes
in contemporary America, see Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black
Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
21 For more information on rhetorics of race, gender, and ability in Sojourner Truth’s speeches
and images, see Meredith Minister, “Female, Black, and Able: Representations of Sojourner Truth
and Theories of Embodiment,” Disability Studies Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Winter 2012), which makes a
case for the benefit of intersectional analysis including disability in historical studies.
22 For reprints of this speech as well as explanatory commentary, see Painter, Sojourner Truth,
12�; and Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 101. There are two extant versions
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.216
female body challenged religious discourses that regarded women as weak and
susceptible to temptation and cultural discourses on “true womanhood.” In re-
sponse to these assumptions, Truth argued first that black women were just as
much women as white women and second that black women represented the
strength of all women, a strength that equalized men and women.
As Truth constructed her own body as a part of the emerging feminist dis-
course, she constructed historical female bodies as another part of this emerging
discourse, thereby turning biblical interpretations on their head. Rather than
accept Eve’s sin as an argument against women’s equality, Truth stated, “I have
heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman
upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right again.”23 According to Truth,
if the first woman turned the world upside down, then it was women’s responsi-
bility, not men’s, to set it right again. The first sin was, for Truth, not an occasion
for female suppression but for female strength. Truth’s tack against the use of
the fall to argue for women’s inferiority, therefore, differed from Stanton’s cri-
tique of the argument that women were created inferior. Unlike Stanton, Truth
did not deny the accusation but, rather, turned the accusation on its head by
suggesting that if women did indeed ruin the world, then women might be able
to fix it.24 The first sin did not suggest women’s weakness but women’s strength.
Moreover, not only should women be given this chance to “set [the world] right
again,” according to Truth, but women already had. Truth stated: “And how
came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who
bore him. Man, where is your part?”2� In this statement, Truth overturned cen-
turies of theological speculation by suggesting that a woman—Mary—played
the key role in the enactment of redemption. Perhaps more important for her
nineteenth-century context, Truth circumvented debates between white men
and women regarding the masculinity or femininity of Christ by claiming that
of this speech: one was written shortly after the address in the June 21, 18�1, Salem Bugle, the other
was written by Frances Gage, one of the presiders at the Convention. The second version is included
in Truth’s Book of Life. While several readers of Sojourner Truth, including Piepmeier and Painter,
suggest that the Bugle version is more accurate to what actually occurred, the inclusion of Gage’s
version in Truth’s Book of Life demonstrates the importance of that later version for the construction
of Truth’s public persona and perhaps even for Truth herself.
23 Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” in Painter, Sojourner Truth, 12�; and Piepmeier, Out in
Public, 101.
24 Such a strategy for argumentation is an example of what Rosita deAnn Matthews calls
“power from the periphery,” as Truth refused to accept the framework for the argument that mar-
ginalized her and, instead, employed alternative ground rules. See Rosita deAnn Matthews, “Using
Power from the Periphery: An Alternative Theological Model for Survival in Systems,” in A Trou-
bling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie Townes (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 1993), 92–106.
2� Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” in Painter, Sojourner Truth, 12�; and Piepmeier, Out in Public, 101.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 1�
the act of redemptive importance was not the death of Christ but the entrance
of Christ into the world.26
Truth’s attention to her strength and ability demonstrated her pride in her
black female body while simultaneously negating Truth’s lack of ability due to a
hand injury sustained while she was enslaved. By directing attention toward her
capacity and “passing” as able-bodied, Truth perpetuated cultural and religious
ideologies that assumed the superiority of ability. Although Truth challenged
aspects of the women’s movement that denied her full humanity on the basis of
either race or class, she maintained an anthropology that marginalized some ac-
cording to a scale of ability, and by “passing” as able-bodied, she placed herself
on the top of this hierarchy.
Both Stanton’s 1848 address in Seneca Falls and Truth’s 18�1 address in
Akron, therefore, argued for women’s equality on the basis of women’s capabili-
ties. This line of argumentation challenged cultural and religious discourses that
perceived women to be inferior to men, but this challenge itself was predicated
on cultural and religious discourses that assumed the superiority of able-bod-
iedness. The next section suggests that this rhetorical strategy not only operated
in the speeches given by first-wave feminists but was also in the photographs
and paintings the movement produced.
Rhetoric of Ability in Pictures and Paintings of Sojourner Truth and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The artistic medium of photography was invented in 1839 and immediately
flourished. This new so-called realistic artistic medium allowed for relatively
quick and easy visual reproductions of real life. Despite the common assump-
tion that photographs allow the viewer unmediated access to the viewed, pho-
tographs, rather, construct the viewed within certain sets of cultural notions and
expectations.2� This section focuses on photographic representations of Stanton
and Truth, paying particular attention to cultural assumptions regarding gen-
der and ability. I suggest that one painting of Truth, in particular, amplifies a
significant aspect of Truth’s representation in the photographs. Through this
analysis, I contend that representations of both Truth and Stanton buttressed
their spoken arguments by attempting to establish the equality of women via
women’s capabilities.
Photos of Stanton were carefully arranged to establish her as a capable
yet feminine woman. These photos established Stanton’s capability by often
26 For more information on the debates between white men and women regarding the gender
of Christ, see Putney, Muscular Christianity, 8.
2� Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popu-
lar Photography,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul Longmore and
Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33�–36.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.218
portraying her surrounded by books or working with her colleague and friend
Susan B. Anthony (figure 1). Photographic representations of Stanton enforced
Stanton’s spoken arguments for the intellectual capability of women by display-
ing Stanton herself as intellectually capable.
Although many photographs attempted to demonstrate Stanton’s intel-
lectuality ability, other photographs portrayed Stanton in more traditionally
feminine roles. These representations meant to suggest that Stanton’s feminism
and radical politics should not be considered a threat to common nineteenth-
century ways of life as Stanton maintained her feminism alongside more tradi-
tionally feminine expectations. These photographs of Stanton with her children
and grandchildren and even one that appeared in an 1899 advertisement for
“fairy soap” suggested that Stanton the feminist was also Stanton the traditional
woman (figure 2). Photographic representations of Stanton, therefore, repre-
sented her as a capable but not deviant woman and, through this representa-
tion, attempted to garner public support for women’s rights.
Like those of Stanton, photographic representations of Truth also portrayed
Figure 1. Stanton and Anthony at work (ca. 1890s). Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division, LC-USZ61-�91.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 19
her as a capable yet feminine woman. Truth’s representation as a member of
“the cult of true womanhood” is more striking given the cultural assumption
that black women lacked the feminine qualities of white women and could not,
therefore, really be true women. Truth’s photographic representations not only
suggested that women could be capable and still feminine (as do Stanton’s rep-
resentations) but also that black women were indeed women. Although Truth’s
strategy for establishing the “true womanhood” of black women differed in her
18�1 speech and her photographs, representations of Truth in both contexts
demonstrated her ability and femininity.
Most of the extant photos of Truth come from a series of photos taken
for her cartes-de-visite in 1864. These cards were a new cheap form of photo-
graphic memorabilia that often provided a fund-raising mechanism for public
figures who often sold these cards at public events. Under the photos on Truth’s
cartes-de-visite, the caption states, “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”
This caption suggests that Truth conceived the picture as a shadow that pro-
vided financial support for her substance, a statement that demonstrates some
ambiguity for Truth in selling these representations.28
The invocation of the so-called cult of true womanhood occurs in different ways
28 Painter, Sojourner Truth, 18�.
Figure 2. Stanton with her daughter Harriot (18�6). Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4896�.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.220
in photographs of Stanton and in photographs of Truth. Photographs of Stanton, as
we saw, usually invoked this cult via motherly roles. Portraits of Truth invoked wom-
anhood by portraying Truth with objects representative of feminine gentility such
as knitting needles, flowers, and a book (figure 3). By portraying her black female
body as a member of the cult of true womanhood, this representation challenged
cultural representations of black womanhood that simultaneously equated black
women with motherhood while denying them authority in the domestic sphere.
Although Truth’s cartes-de-visite were designed to challenge the predomi-
nant cultural understanding of black womanhood, they simultaneously sustained
the cultural discourse on disability by directing attention away from Truth’s dis-
abled and disfigured hand. In most of the early photographs, Truth’s hand ap-
peared to grasp the knitting string, but in an 18�0 image, Truth grasped her
disabled hand with her left, covering the disfigurement. As attempts to redirect
attention away from or hide her disability, Truth’s photos sustained the cultural
discourse that stigmatized disability.
Figure 3. One of Truth’s favorite cartes-de-visite. Unidentified
photographer, 1864. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
LC-DIG-ppmsca-089�8.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 21
These “corrections” and attempts to hide her disability are magnified in a
painting of Truth in which Truth’s hand appears without disfigurement (figure 4).
The primary object of the painting is not Truth’s right hand so its “corrected”
presence raises a key question: Was Truth’s hand intentionally “corrected” or
was she depicted as she had come to be known in her public persona—with-
out disability? Either way, the manner in which Truth was represented in the
painting sustained the cultural discourse that stigmatized disability and did so
in a more striking manner than Truth’s photos. The medium of paint, in this
case, created an opportunity to heighten the “corrections” already begun in the
photographs.
As I have suggested, these photographic representations of Stanton and
Truth served different purposes, but what is common to the representations
of Stanton and Truth is the attempt to establish women’s equality with men by
depicting the capability of women. As the speeches of Stanton and Truth argued
for women’s equality by establishing the capability of women, the images of
Stanton and Truth also suggested that women—black and white—were just as
capable as men. In both word and image, Stanton and Truth assumed the supe-
riority of ability and argued for women’s equality based on this assumption.
Figure 4. Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln. Frank Courter, 1893. Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-1622�.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.222
Many of the assumptions made in the physical health movement can be
seen in the speeches given by both Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton as well as in images of them. From Truth’s claim that women were just
as capable to perform hard labor as men to Stanton’s suggestion that women
would be just as physically capable as men if they were given ample opportuni-
ties for physical exercise, both Truth and Stanton revealed the pervasiveness
of the physical health movement as well as the gender ideals it reified. Nei-
ther Truth nor Stanton questioned the physical health movement’s claim that
physical and moral health should be achieved by exercising the body. They did,
however, reject the Muscular Christian claim that men are more able-bodied
than women. In fact, some of their arguments developed in direct opposition to
the Muscular Christian claim that God needed “manly workers” by suggesting
that God created both men and women to be productive workers (and, indeed,
that women—in spite of their exclusion from the public workforce—may have
been doing a better job than men). While the two were united against the use of
physical health to maintain male superiority, they differed on the use of physical
health to maintain race and class ideologies—a difference that became more
pervasive in Stanton’s later years.
Stanton and Truth did not develop ideologies of ability but they did find these
ideologies useful toward their ultimate goal of gender equality. As Stanton and
Truth used the arguments made by the health reformers, the physical health
movement became the foundation for the women’s movement. Although Stan-
ton and Truth both adopted physical health ideologies in response to the Mus-
cular Christian attempt to associate manly strength with godliness, only Truth
offered an indirect response to the burgeoning use of the physical health move-
ment to develop the racist and classist strands of New Thought. Stanton, con-
versely, would increasingly find New Thought’s association of physical perfec-
tion and spirituality more convincing as she worked toward a gender equality
that excluded racial minorities and working-class women.29
While we may suggest that Truth dismissed the racist and classist ideologies
of New Thought because she was on the underside of these hierarchies, this ar-
gument fails to account for Truth’s acceptance of the ideology of ability despite
being on the underside of the hierarchy that physical health rhetoric created.
Personal identity may, therefore, play a role in responding to cultural ideolo-
gies that marginalize and exclude, but a marginalized personal identity does not
always create a challenge to the marginalizing ideology. As Truth’s case demon-
strates, cultural ideologies may be pervasive enough to prevent protest—even
by those who do not benefit from the cultural ideology. The feminist theory
of internalized oppression—the process by which a member of a marginalized
29 See Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, 60–63, 116–21.
Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 23
group actively maintains the oppressive ideology that marginalizes them—pres-
ents itself here, not in the form of a female who actively maintains patriarchy,
but in the form of a woman with a disability actively maintaining an ideology of
ability.
Both Stanton and Truth are heroines whose work helped create a society
that is more gender equal today than it was 1�0 years ago. But we must be care-
ful not to idolize our heroines or their ideologies. Other scholars have pointed
out Stanton’s racism and classism and this article has demonstrated the perva-
sive ideology of ability that both Stanton and Truth maintained. When contem-
porary feminists idolize Stanton and Truth, we risk perpetuating their ideology
of ability. Yet not idolizing them means recognizing flaws not only in the hero-
ines of the feminist movement but, more pervasively, in the arguments they
constructed for gender equality. Questioning the foundations of gender equal-
ity is, indeed, a challenging enterprise. Despite this challenge, contemporary
feminists must deal with the ideology of ability in order to develop alternatives
to a model of human being that is based on productivity and thereby establish
not only a foundation for gender equality but also a foundation for recognizing
the dignity of all persons. Failing to deal with this history and continuing to reify
the ideologies of the founders of the women’s movement further marginalizes
those with disabilities. Moreover, failing to deal with this history of ableism puts
the feminist movement at risk as it continues to market an exclusive gender
equality, which disability studies, as race studies before it, has proved to be
unsustainable. Disability studies cannot be an add-on to already existing femi-
nist theories but must, rather, transform feminist theory itself. As this article
suggests, one of the central questions raised by considering feminist arguments
for gender equality through the lens of disability studies regards the nature of
human being—What does it mean to be human?
The use of ideologies of ability to establish women’s rights by early feminists
maintained a particular understanding of anthropology based on productivity.
According to this understanding of what it means to be human, people who pro-
duce more are more valuable than those who produce less. Both Stanton and
Truth developed these anthropologies in conversation with Christian theologies
of creation and redemption. For Stanton, God created all human beings to be
intellectually, physically, and morally productive while, for Truth, redemption
is an ongoing act that demands the continuing productivity of people—and es-
pecially women—toward the goal of reform or “setting the world right again.”
Because this productive model of human being serves to marginalize disability,
contemporary feminists—especially feminist theologians—must develop alter-
native anthropologies that sustain the equality of men and women without pre-
supposing a hierarchy of ability.
The pervasive role of religious and theological notions in the early women’s
movement and in continuing cultural ideas of what it means to be human sug-
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.224
gests that we need feminist theologians to continue to understand the relation-
ship between cultural exclusions—including but not limited to gender—and
the religious ideals on which those cultural exclusions are based. If, as Truth
pointed out, women are excluded from society because of their supposed role
in bringing sin into the world, then how do theological anthropologies of pro-
ductivity serve to marginalize those with disability? In response to this analysis,
just as the early feminist movement developed alternatives to theologies that ex-
cluded women, contemporary feminists must develop alternatives to theologies
that exclude persons with disabilities. Theologies may serve to sustain cultural
exclusions but, as the liberation theology tradition recognizes, theologies may
also serve to challenge cultural exclusions. Molly Haslam’s work developing a
theological anthropology based on her work with persons with profound intel-
lectual disabilities is a welcome start down this path as she engages both in
analyses of theologies that exclude persons with disabilities and in suggesting
an alternative. Sharon Betcher also stands as an important pioneer in this field
as she identifies the importance of understandings of God—and, in particu-
lar, notions of the Spirit—in developing inclusive anthropologies.30 Haslam and
Betcher’s contributions create a foundation for the continuation of the feminist
movement in light of the critique of disability studies that feminists have built
their arguments for gender equality at the expense of persons with disabilities.
Without the continued analysis of feminist rhetoric of ability and the develop-
ment of alternative theologies and anthropologies such as those of Betcher and
Haslam, gender equality will never be achieved. Indeed, the feminist move-
ment will continue to engage in the struggle of identity politics through which
benefits for one group are achieved not at the expense of patriarchy but at the
expense of those who have already been marginalized.
30 See Molly Haslam, A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability: Human Being as Mu-
tuality and Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); and Sharon Betcher, Spirit and
the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress, 200�).
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