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10 introduction R The story of American women’s efforts to obtain the vote begins in the colonial period when individual women requested suffrage. In 1647, Margaret Brent requested a “place and voyce” in the assembly of colonial Maryland when she was appointed the governor’s executor and heir.1 More than a century later, Lydia Chapin Taft, a wealthy Massachusetts landowner’s widow, was permitted to vote at a town meeting as her husband’s proxy.2 And, in 1776, Abigail Adams begged her husband John Adams, a member of the Continental Congress, to “Remember the Ladies” in the code of laws the Congress was drafting for the new nation.3 Most scholars agree, however, that a more collective effort to obtain woman suffrage did not emerge until the 1840s; during that exciting decade, antislavery and temperance reformers banded together to assert women’s right to participate in the public sphere as a way of furthering their reformist goals. Early arguments for woman suffrage were made within the context of broader appeals to recognize social, civil, and religious rights for women, including greater property rights for married women, the right to their earnings, the right to enter into contracts, the right to divorce, and the right to custody of their children. Early woman’s rights reformers were inspired by the same natural rights philosophy that had motivated the nation’s founders and by a desire to extend to women and African Americans the rights that most white men already enjoyed in the democratic polity. Like African Americans, though without the brutalities of enslavement , white women in antebellum America were “fettered” by their subordinate legal status. Nineteenth-century gender ideology focused primarily on middle-class white Americans and constructed woman as a dependent (feme covert) who relied on male relatives for protection, rather than as an individual subject and citizen. These middle-class white men and women were understood to have distinct skills and aptitudes for separate spheres of activity: rational and competitive men deployed these qualities in the public, political sphere; emotional and moral women could use their finer sensibilities to govern the private, domestic sphere. Early reformers made several radical assertions that fundamentally challenged this declaring sentiments 11 gender framework: that God had created men and women as equals; that females should receive the same education as males; that women had a natural right to participate in the public sphere as citizens, voters, and even holders of political office, especially because government decisions directly affected the domestic sphere; and, that the nation was violating its founding principles both by not possessing the “consent of the governed” and by tolerating taxation without representation. In the antebellum period and later, these arguments, made in public lectures, at conventions, and through petitions to legislatures, were quite threatening. Even Lucretia Mott, woman’s rights orator and co-organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention, worried that reformers might be asking for too much, too soon, by including women’s enfranchisement in the list of resolutions in their “Declaration of Sentiments.”4 The message of woman’s rights became only more threatening when women asserted it publicly through oratory. To use republican oratorical traditions was, by definition, to participate in the political processes and institutions of the United States, something women were not yet empowered to do. Oratory was understood in nineteenth-century America as a means of both securing and exercising political rights. When a woman, therefore, addressed a “promiscuous” (mixed sex) audience on a political topic, she implicitly claimed her fitness for both citizenship and the franchise. However, nineteenth-century U.S. culture defined the model orator—the independent thinking individual who expressed an opinion and spoke to persuade others of the wisdom of that opinion—as male. “Quite simply,” rhetorical historian Karlyn Kohrs Campbell writes,“in nineteenth-century America, femininity and rhetorical action were seen as mutually exclusive. No ‘true woman’ could be a public persuader.”5 Although women had preached in America since the mid-eighteenth century, they were mostly excluded from the oratorical realm, particularly the realm of political oratory.6 Women’s public speaking, according to opponents, “threatened [the] female character with widespread and permanent injury—the vine usurps the role of the elm.”7 Critics regarded standing up in public and demanding the attention of an audience to assert an opinion and argue a position as unwomanly, exceeding the female “sphere.” Because of inherited beliefs about the unwomanliness of public...

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