Campbell Class Discussion

Historical/Archival Question – Option Two

The first two timelines start in 1776 with Abigail Adams’ letters to her husband. The third timeline begins in 1637 when Anne Hutchinson is convicted of sedition. The other event chronicled before 1776 is the founding of the Quakers, a group who supported abolition and suffrage movements, in 1652. Looking at the starting points of the timelines raises the question: what should we consider to be the beginning of the suffrage movement, and is there even a definite beginning?

The Women and Social Movements website is grouped by topic rather than chronologically. I think the most interesting thing about this is that it shows that many groups and movements happened concurrently. With a timeline, sometimes there is a tendency to make it appear that one event happened after another, but organizing information by topic helps to give us an idea of how many diverse groups worked together to help further women’s rights and civil rights as a whole.

These timelines show how women tried to help the abolitionist movement and how they were limited from doing so. For example, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were not allowed to speak at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. It is interesting to think that women were trying to help other causes before their own. By being limited from helping others, they were prompted to take up their cause as a first concern. This helps to show that social movements are not isolated events.

Reading Response

Campbell points out that speaking was characterized by masculine qualities because it was “competitive, energized by the desire to win a case or persuade others to ones point of view” (295). When women spoke publicly, they proved that they had the abilities that men had “to function in the public sphere” (295). In addition to proving themselves as speakers, women also had to try to include aspects of femininity in their rhetoric in order to show that speaking did not threaten to detract from their female qualities. Campbell also notes that in order to persuade other women to do anything, female speakers and writers first had to combat “the traditional concept of womanhood, which emphasized passivity, submissiveness, and patience” (297). But, adding to the contradictory challenges women authors faced, they had to challenge the limitations of these qualities without losing their own femininity. It is important to consider the contradictions that women had to address in their rhetoric because women may have been forced to structure their rhetoric in certain ways to accommodate these expectations.