Notes
Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Several feminist historians have begun to appreciate the continuity of women’s participation in organization-based political activity after suffrage, and I am indebted to their work. These historians have argued that, although the Nineteenth Amendment “is the most obvious benchmark in the history of women in politics in the United States, . . . it is a problematic one” because focusing on the electoral arena means viewing women’s political activity and their participation in civic discourse “through the conventional lens where male behavior sets the norm” (Cott, “Across” ). Traditionally, historian Nancy Cott explains,narratives of feminism and women’s activism in America claim that “after the achievement of the vote, the large coalition movement among women disintegrated; now insiders rather than outsiders, women (ironically) lost influence within the political process”(“Across”).Cott’s work undermines these narratives of decline by positing a greater continuity in women’s political activism and efficacy , particularly through women’s continued involvement in diverse voluntary associations.Membership in these associations,which were designed largely,although not exclusively, for civic betterment, burgeoned in the period following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and remained strong into mid-century. Historian Susan Ware has also done much to chart women’s activism in the s. 2. The names of these two organizations have changed during their lifetimes. As I elaborate in chapter , I use the name “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom” to refer to the organization that was initially called the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace. I use the name “League of Women Voters” to refer to the organization that was known as the League of Women Voters of the United States from until , when its name was changed to the National League of Women Voters. 3. A selection of anthologies includes Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s two-volume Man Cannot Speak for Her; Jane Donawerth’s Rhetorical Theory by Women Before ; Catherine Hobbs’s Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write; Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition; Carol Mattingly’s Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader; Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric; and Molly Wertheimer’s Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Book-length studies include Anne Ruggles Gere’s Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, –; Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance; Shirley Wilson Logan’s “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women; Carol Mattingly’s Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric; Krista Ratcliffe’s Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition(s): Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. 1. BEFORE SUFFRAGE: RHETORICAL PRACTICES OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT 1. See,for example,Blair; Deutsch; Foster; Gere; Haarsager; Hewitt; Higginbotham; Logan; T. Martin; Mattingly; Rogow; Royster; and A. Scott. 2. The organizations I discuss here do not represent an exclusive list,by any means,of the networks in which women across the nation participated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two large networks that space prevents me from discussing at length,for instance,are faith-based organizations women founded within different Protestant denominations beginning in the early nineteenth century and the National Congress of Mothers (later the National Congress of Parents and Teachers [PTA]),founded in .For more information on these and other organizations, see Sklar; and Skocpol. 3. For more information on the history of women’s clubs and organizations before the nineteenth century, see Baker; Blair; T. Martin; and A. Scott. 4. During the mid-nineteenth century,Hobbs explains, “female academies,seminaries ,and normal and training schools appeared,along with the prestigious women’s colleges ” (). 5. For a discussion of the restrictions on women’s rhetorical education in colleges and universities in the nineteenth century, see Ricks; and Simmons. 6. Controlling media was particularly important for African American women who were active in abolition work. Mary Ann Shad Cary, an African American abolitionist who helped African American immigrants settle in Canada prior to the Civil War, established the Provincial Freeman, through which she could publish and circulate her antislavery ideas (Royster ). Jacqueline Jones Royster explains that,among African American activists, such publication practices “have constituted a counterforce to the more dominant ‘official’ voices that define the public agenda in a manner that usually excluded African American interests...
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