The House of My Sojourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority

3. The Path—Then

3 The Path—Then At length the door in the rear opened and a neat foot was placed upon the platform. —Elizabeth Oakes Smith I am in the Capitol, climbing the stairs out of the basement to the Rotunda. Once I enter the Rotunda, I actually cross the threshold of the house of rhetoric. In this house, the Portrait Monument is my cairn. I use it to locate a trailhead and start following the stepping-stones that women set down in the course of their moving toward the Capitol. Eventually, the course they set enabled others to arrive in 1921 to celebrate Susan B. Anthony’s birthday.1 I want to find the porch leading to the house of rhetoric because this will allow me to see where women entered the house and how they were received. The question of how reverberates back to Sojourner Truth’s question—how to tell what time o’ night it is. Telling time means deciphering separate but interrelated movements: one of women actively gaining access, the other denying their authority. So following where the Portrait Monument cairn leads, and taking the dedication page of the first volume of The History of Woman Suffrage2 as my cue, I begin with Frances Wright. This chapter starts with a dedicated name, then goes up the steps and through a rear door where Wright gained entrée into the house and made her way toward the center. As she did, many women followed her, including Lucy Stone, who forged a new direction after seeing a statue, The Greek Slave, a turn that prompted the movement’s purpose for the next fifty years. When Frances (“Fanny”) (D’Arusmont) Wright (1792–1852) stepped onto the platform in New Harmony Hall on July 4, 1828, to address a small utopian community in Indiana, she created a new beginning—a “first” of sorts—for women and public speaking in the United States.3 Years later the notable feminist writer Elizabeth Oakes Smith gives an account of the only time she saw and heard Fanny Wright speak: “It was a cold winter’s night. There might have been fifty or more persons present who presently began to shuffle and call. It was so much The Path—Then / 75 more gross and noisy than anything I had ever encountered that I grew quite distressed . At length the door in the rear opened and a neat foot was placed upon the platform.”4 With this description, we observe Frances Wright after she gains access to the house. The movement of her feet on the interior décor of the house—the platform—signifies upward activity. To explain how her authority shifts down, I use the trope antonomasia and epithet that I described in the last chapter. To refresh, antonomasia literally means “naming instead.” Very often it is a belittling name, like “Chainsaw Drew,” which was used to replace the proper name of Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard in 350 years.5 Extend antonomasia and it is an epithet—like referring to the Portrait Monument in 1921 as “Three Ladies in a Bathtub” or in 1997 as an “ugly thing.” The trope seizes the proper name, rotates it in a deprecating manner, and turns down the woman’s authority, marking her entry in the house as out-of-bounds. The selection of epithets specifies how far a woman has moved beyond her function as well as how far her stumble—the correction—down the stairs may go.6 A woman speaking in the center of town, on a national holiday, and in front of an audience was unfathomable in American cities such as Philadelphia, but not in New Harmony. In fact, this utopian community invited her to speak on, ironically enough, Independence Day, the Fourth of July. In this way, this very special community opens the door into the house of rhetoric. Perfect, too, because the opening gives Frances Wright immediate access to epideictic oratory, a genre reserved for the greatest rhetoricians, reaching all the way back to Isocrates . Finally, slipping in through the rear door is perfect because Wright is able to speak not just before women, as women before had done, but before men and women—a mixed audience.7 On Main Street USA, the front door to the house of rhetoric was slammed shut, locked up good and tight, even ten years after Wright sneaked in through the back of the house. In York, Pennsylvania, Wright was permitted to...