Abstract

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is widely regarded as one of the most important women's rights orators of the nineteenth century. She is credited with opening new rhetorical spaces for women through brilliant rhetorical appeals. In her 1854 speech to the Legislature of New York, however, her brilliant rhetorical appeals were also appeals to the racist, classist, and paternalistic biases of her white male audience. A paradox of social reform is the need to simultaneously assert difference and sameness with the dominant classes, and Cady Stanton's efforts to negotiate this paradox ultimately reinforced the social hierarchy she hoped to undermine.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2010-03-18
DOI
10.1080/07350191003613419
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (4)

  1. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  3. Rhetoric Review
  4. Advances in the History of Rhetoric

References (20) · 1 in this index

  1. On Rhetoric
  2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman's Rights
  3. Philosophy and Rhetoric
  4. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors
  5. Campbell
Show all 20 →
  1. 80 Years and More: Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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  3. Man Cannot Speak for Her, Volume 2: Key Texts of the Early Feminists
  4. The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women's Rights and the American Politica…
  5. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches
  6. 10.1086/493221
    Signs  
  7. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  8. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: In the School of Anti…
  9. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  10. The History of Woman Suffrage
  11. The Ethics of Writing Instruction
  12. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition
  13. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America
  14. Campbell
  15. The Search for Self Sovereignty: The Oratory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton