While #writinginpublic is the way I generally get feedback on work in progress, yesterday I did it the old fashioned way. I traveled to my alma mater to speak with graduate students in the UCLA History of Women & Sexuality Emphasis and the History Department U.S. Field. about my project the digital history of the History of Woman Suffrage, produced with the assistance of Pat Carlson, Michelle Eldrige, and Nathalie Duval of Alexander Street Press, Laura Bunyard at Rosemont College, and Thomas Dublin co-editor of Women and Social Movements.
It was wonderful to return to the place where I first fell in love with history, and even better to meet the bright graduate students who gave me some great feedback about the project. I’ve been inside this piece for so long that I found it really helpful to hear what they found most exciting about the preliminary results.
Beyond Separate Spheres
In terms of knocking down accepted historiographies, the results around sphere seemed most well received. Woman’s sphere is such an entrenched concept in the historiography of women’s history that the fact that female authors in the History of Woman Suffrage used sphere less than the male authors did is more than a little surprising.*
The male authors weren't prescribing woman's sphere, as the Rev Samuel Johnson put it in an 1856 letter man "must clear himself of this senseless twaddle about "woman's sphere."
However, as male allies attempted to address one of the strongest arguments against woman's rights, what students of nineteenth century US white women's history have come to know as "separate spheres," they took various tacks. In an 1870 speech given by George William Curtis he accedes to the notion of spheres while discounting their import: "Here, at this moment, in this audience, I have no doubt there is many a man who is exclaiming with fervor - "Home, the heaven-appointed sphere of woman." Very well. I don't deny it, but how do you know it? How can you know it?" The speech of Reverend James Freeman Clarke to the New England Women's Rights Convention, May 27, 1859 offers a strategic shift in spheres: The accusation is "you want to take woman out of her sphere." Not at all, we wish to give her a sphere."
Female authored items were also less likely to contain sex than items authored by males.* The patterns of usage around sex were also fascinating. Male authors wrote or spoke about the male sex and the female sex, and the distinctions of sex, while female authors generally describing women in terms of sex at all (female sex for example appears only once in their items, most frequent patterns are our sex and own sex) and used the phrase irrespective of sex as frequently as they did distinctions of sex.
How then did the female authored items talk about women? Digging around I hit upon position as a way that female authors were talking about what we would now describe as gender roles.*** While not as strongly overused by female authors as sex and sphere are by the male authors, the results were still quite interesting. Women "demand[ed] their true position" decried the "dark depths of their position" and argued against woman's "inferior position."
Woman Suffrage but Women's Rights
The second result I shared that seemed to intrigue people was diachronic shifts in terms used to refer to female people. The historiography of suffrage generally runs along these lines, a broad movement for the rights of woman narrowed to a political demand for women's suffrage. While we all know that the now-jarringly ungrammatical term "woman suffrage" was the most common way that the right to vote was demanded, the story proves more complicated than the one we tell as women appears at far greater frequency than women in the History of Woman Suffrage. While woman deserves suffrage it was as women that they demand rights.
The only volume in the History of Woman Suffrage in which woman's rights appears more than woman suffrage is the first volume. Looking only at these two patterns makes it difficult to get at how rights continue to appear in the History of Woman Suffrage. However, looking at words that appear to the right or left of right or rights offered some insights.
At times these took the form of demands for a universal human right or equal rights as in Sojourner Truth "women shall have their rights - not rights from you or the British Suffragist Caroline Ashurst Biggs "women shall have the same rights as men." However, often these uses referred to specific rights, suffrage of course, but also quite frequently what we know as married women's property rights, as in the FORM OF APPEAL AND PETITION CIRCULATED IN THE STATE OF NEW
YORK DURING THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF 1859, "under our present laws married women have no right to the wages they earn?"
In this last example we start to see how female persons do appear in items authored by women. Looking at adjectives that preceded women
Women's marital status is the most prominent description for the first four volumes married women, revealing the bias within the History of Woman Suffrage for one particular strand of the movement for woman's rights, but also the very strong overlaps during the antebellum period of suffrage with other efforts to secure rights for women such a married women's property rights. The changes in adjectives modifying women help to reveal which women were deserving of the rights of woman. The diachronic shifts we see in the chart above reflect the changing political contexts within which women worked to secure both rights and suffrage. In the larger historical context of the period (volumes III-IV) when many groups agitated for enfranchisement. Voting then becomes understood less as a right inalienable to humans (man or woman) and more as a privilege extended to members of certain groups (women).
All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave
The last result I shared came from very preliminary investigations into the first installment of the Black Woman Suffragists Database that Alexander Street Press is publishing as part of Women and Social Movements based on the path breaking work done by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Three findings highlighted just how little discursive space there was for the authors to speak as "colored women." Using a subset of female authored items from the History of Woman Suffrage from authors who were also tagged as abolitionists along with documents by seven black woman suffragists I ran some analyses based on words used more frequently by each group. Sojourner Truth alone appears in both sets of documents. The History of Woman Suffrage documents are 96% attributed to white female authors.
These very preliminary results suggested some interesting divergences. Black woman suffragists were more likely to speak in the personal voice, using I and My or the gender neutral they or their, while the female authors in History of Woman Suffrage were more likely to use gendered pronouns, and they were more likely to speak of ungendered groups of people and human as opposed to women, woman, men.
That Black woman suffragists were more likely to use terms that referred to race was not a surprise given the well-acknowledged racism of the movement for woman suffrage, but the visualizations of the data made it stunningly clear how absent discourses of race were in the subset of items by the female authors in History of Woman Suffrage
Bodies that Matter
In an effort to get at black women's voices in the small set of documents I had, I began looking at gendered pronouns, and was immediately struck by the embodied discourse that emerged.
These corporeal references by black suffragists intrigued me. From semantic content analysis I confirmed that overall there were more references to "the body" in their documents. I was reminded of the infamous invocation of Sojourner Truth allegedly baring her arm as she proclaimed "Ain't I a Woman?" in Matilda Joslyn Gage's report of her 1850 speech found in Volume 1 of the History of Woman Suffrage. The Black Woman Suffragists Database contains the other contemporaneous account of Truth's words, and I was struck by how they differed. While Gage describes Truth as an "almost Amazon form" the account in the abolitionist Anti-Slavery Bugle stressed her "powerful form." While Gage focused on physical aspects of Truth, the Bugle wrote of her "earnest gesture" and her "strong and truthful tones." Returning to semantic content analysis I also confirmed that indicators of "strength" and the "body" were more present in the Black Woman Suffragists Database documents I analyzed.
Computational analysis of sources led me back to a historical question, how much does the embodied rhetoric reflect the influence of abolitionist rhetoric, which often stressed the corporeal horrors of slavery. These preliminary results raised an even bigger question about the linkages between bodies and minds and the minds that matter most that I look forward to exploring more in a larger number of sources.
* LL 40.804
**LL29.626
***LL 3.494
No comments:
Post a Comment