Medical Discovery as Suffrage Justification in Mary Putnam Jacobi’s 1894 New York Campaign Rhetoric

Advances in the History of Rhetoric Sep 2016

Medical Discovery as Suffrage Justification in Mary Putnam Jacobi’s 1894 New York Campaign Rhetoric

Carolyn Skinner

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the suffrage rhetoric of nineteenth-century American physician Mary Putnam Jacobi. As a medical researcher, Putnam Jacobi believed that women’s participation in scientific research and their use of scientific arguments would improve the public’s perception of women, making woman suffrage more likely. As science grew in influence around the turn of the century, deploying its persuasive resources became an important part of both men’s and women’s social-issue rhetoric. This analysis of Putnam Jacobi’s suffrage rhetoric identifies two science-inflected arguments: first, she asserted that scientific findings had already prompted governments to be more inclusive, creating a science-driven model of social reform; second, she contended that women had met all the qualifications to vote, offering an empirical-evidence argument for suffrage.

Journal: Advances in the History of Rhetoric
Published: 2016-09-01
DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2016.1155511
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Topics: multimodality

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