Campbell Class Discussion

All four timelines are very different even though they are structured around the same movement- Women's Suffrage. While looking at the first time line Laurie Mann's Timeline of Women's Suffrage in the United States, the beginning seemed identical to the One Hundred Years of Suffrage timeline. Both begin in 1776 with Abigail Adams'  Remember the Ladies letter to John Adams. Although quickly distinguishing the two is the structure of  Laurie Mann's Timeline of Women's Suffrage in the United States. Mann organizes her timeline by themes for each chunk of time that passes. Her timeline also includes the deaths of important women within the suffrage movement. Although this time line includes dates for many of the important points during the movement, Mann's details of each event are not very specific. The timeline ends in 1923. 

The second time line "One Hundred Years Towards Suffrage" (Hosted by NAWSA) begins at the same time as Mann's, as I stated before. What distinguishes this time line from the others is the fact that this one is organized by 3 sections of dates. Most of the information included in this timeline is based on literature and speeches made during the Women's Suffrage time period. It resembles Mann's time line in the fact that there is not much elaboration on each event and does not go into much depth when it comes to discussing how the government played a part in Women's Suffrage.

 

"History and the American Suffragist Movement" begins earlier than the previous two timelines. Beginning at 1637 with Annie Hutchinson this timeline is already showing that it's going to go into more detail. The information included in this time line is a mix of the first two time lines, including literature as well as government influence in the movement. This timeline ends with the Ohio Legislature case Hawk v. Smith and includes more government and state actions than the previous two. 

The last and probably most informational of the three timelines is the Women and Social Movements in the United States timeline. This timeline begins in 1774 with the Edenton Ladies Patriotic Guild. This timeline is very detailed and paints a different kind of analysis of the Women's Suffrage movement through the use of social movements (big or small) and not so much individuals. In this timeline I got the sense that they want us to know that the Suffrage movement was a collective stand with women towards equality. One other notable difference from this timeline compared to others was the fact that it spans all the way to 1992 and possible even beyond. Could this signal that women are still fighting for certain rights today? 

Reading Response 

Campbell wants us to discover the ways in which women wrote at the time of the early Women's rights movement. She calls this the "feminist style" and claims that it was adopted to "cope with the conflicting demands of the podium" (Campbell 296). The podium she is referring to is the oral podium that women at the beginning of the movement tried to fulfill through speeches. Although their aim to educate through oratory word was rejected by men who deemed a women who met all the speech requirements as "Masculine, and Unwomanly" (Campbell 296). Some of the qualities that Campbell describes in her introduction include relying on personal experiences, antidotes, and a personal tone (Campbell 297). She also claims that to get a fuller sense of feminist text we must remember that women learned to do things with out a formal education and usually though error, thus they learned to "adopt variations" to hone in on their desired craft of writing (Campbell 297).