What Hath She Wrought? Woman's Rights and the Nineteenth-Century Lyceum

Proposing an agenda for future scholarship meshing nineteenth-century popular media and social reform, this essay offers a historical foundation for studies of the relationships between the midcentury lyceum lecture circuit and the organized movement for woman's rights. Although lectures or debates about woman's rights constituted a small proportion of lyceum offerings, advocates considered the lyceum a significant medium for their public advocacy. Conventions of popular, commercial lecturing meant that reformist rhetoric produced in lyceum venues mixed discourses of assimilation and transformation.