Annarose Fitzgerald
Dr. Romano
ENGL 540
30 March 2009
Project Proposal: Written Rhetoric of Suffrage and Labor Issues for the “Average” Woman of the Late Nineteenth Century
Why is this project important? Why am I invested in this?
While working for a women’s labor research institute in college, I was continuously frustrated with the lack of cooperation between different groups of women, all of whom were fighting for the most important and urgent cause. My job at the Cornell Institute for Women and Work revolved around convincing people to take time out of their schedules to attend, speak at, and sponsor our conferences, as well as give us interviews for research projects. I was surprised at how much resistance I met with when seeking out other women with a stake in such issues as maternity leave, sexual harassment policy, and other agendas that I’d thought would be relevant and important to their lives. The two biggest problems I found were: a) Being already invested in a “more important” cause which was either irrelevant to or at odds with ours, and b) Being so overwhelmed with work, school, parenting, and other demands of their lives that anything else was just too much. Ultimately, though, the biggest changes come once the average women who don’t consider themselves activists see the issue as something worth their time.
As Carol Mattingly points out in her conclusion to Woman’s Rights in Woman’s Wrongs: Temperance Women at Mid-Century, temperance activist Frances Willard had been calling feminist leaders to appeal to the “average woman” a century before (163). By looking at two large-scale conversations regarding the nineteenth century women’s movement, labor and suffrage, I want to learn more about the history of this disjointedness within the women’s movement. I am choosing the late nineteenth century (1870-1915) because this is an era in which both movements met with momentous gains and setbacks. What would happen if we looked at the coverage in more mainstream publications that “average” women read, who were interested in these issues but also lived as mothers, wives, and workers without having the time to see and hear phenomenal speakers or attend women’s rights conventions? What kinds of messages were these women receiving about their stake in voting rights and in the workforce? Was there anything that might have drawn them in, or turned them off from either of these movements? When looking closely at the written rhetoric from these years, would we find clues as to why the suffrage movement had been called “the doldrums” at this time period, when it had been in full swing decades before? And, why did the progress for women in labor seem temporary, stalling after the world wars? Would women reading about these movements have seen them as integral parts together, or as completely separate causes? How did press coverage for the suffrage and the labor movement configure the relationship between women’s rights and the progress of the United States as a whole as the country moved into the twentieth century?
Scope and Sources
For the purpose of do-ability, I am going to limit my focus to coverage on women factory workers, primarily in the industrial areas of the Northeast region, and suffrage movement activity in those regions. From previous research, I am under the impression that there would be a class difference in those involved in the workers’ rights movement and those working towards suffrage. However, middle and upper class female philanthropists were also interested women factory workers as a charitable cause, and they were reading women’s interest propaganda.
For primary sources, I will use the Gerritsen Collection to access issues of Woman’s Journal, a publication which Lucy Stone founded in Boston in 1870, and that absorbed a few different suffragist and feminist magazines. Additionally, I may also incorporate The American Magazine (New York, 1889-96), as well as The Club Worker (New York, 1899-1915). As my question(s) above get more defined, I may also incorporate some anti-suffragist publications, such as The Reply and The Woman’s Protest Against Woman Suffrage. From glancing at the articles in these publications, I gather that they are read by women active in the voting and labor rights movement, as well as those with an interest in change for women who may not have had the time or resources to work towards this. In other words, they appear to appeal to the “average” woman. I am in the process of gathering my secondary sources, which are listed in my bibliography in progress at the end of this proposal.
1) Deciding which articles from the primary sources to work with
2) Doing close readings of these articles that could be used in a paper
3) Reading secondary sources to help inform and define my own critical framework, and to get a more solid grasp on the historical context.
4) Getting an interesting and workable thesis that can become a paper for the CCCCs conference
By the deadline for the CCCCs proposal, I would like to have decided which primary sources to work with and have started close readings. I would also like to have a solid biography of secondary resources, even if I haven’t ploughed through all of them yet. I think it would be most productive to begin with the actual texts first, then working the contemporary theory around them once I’ve sorted through my own ideas. My finished project by the end of this class will be a CCCCs proposal with a solid thesis, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as a few pieces of close readings I can use as building blocks for a larger paper.
Tentative Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Kohrs-Campbell, Karolyn. Man Cannot Speak for Her: Volume I. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1989.
Good for the history of the ideas woman rhetors were circulating throughout the nineteenth century, would be interesting to see how the written rhetoric in the press affects the ideas in speeches being given at momentous conventions.
Kraditor, Aileen. Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American
Feminism. Chicago: Quandrangle Books, 1968.
Good source for historical context, and for wanting to place my research in the
trajectory of the nineteenth century feminist movement as a whole
Lewis, Susan Ingalls. “Business or Labor? Blurred Boundaries in the Careers of Self-
Employed Needlewomen in Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany.” Famine and
Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Beth Harris. Aldershot,
England: Ashgate, 2005. 141-55.
Not sure if I’ll use this yet. I’m waiting on this from ILL, but it may provide a
useful piece of historical context.
Mattingly, Carol. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth Century Temperence Rhetoric.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
While she focuses on the temperance movement, I find her focus on the “average”
woman useful, and she does make the point that temperance was often a way to
get at other women’s rights issues—maybe some articles on the temperance movement in my primary sources would point to this?
Ray, Angela G. “What Hath She Wrought? Women’s Rights in the Nineteenth Century
Lyceum.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9.2 (Summer 2006): 183-213.
Useful for getting a sense of what messages were being promoted in the lyceums,
and comparing it to what women were getting from the press. This may be a little
early for what I want to look at though…
Slagell, Amy R. “The Rhetorical Structure of Frances E. Willard’s Campaign for Woman
Suffrage, 1876-1896.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4.1 (Spring 2001): 1-23.
Fits my time period, and would be useful to see how/if the press was representing
Willard’s messages.
Vogel, Lise. “Their Own Work: Two Documents from the Nineteenth-Century Labor
Movement.” Signs 1.3 (Spring 1976): 787-802.
Gives a good history of the origins of the women’s labor movement in the
Massachusetts textile mills in the 1840s/50s