Maria W. Stewart

It is interesting that in the biographical portion on Maria W. Steward her race is not mentioned except by implication. And yet, the fact that she was black, female and speaking in public is incredibly powerful. Even more than a white woman, her path would have been barred. And, according to the biography, she gave up because of the barriers presented by her audiences - but she had audiences. She spoke to men and women, black and white, at a time when few women spoke publicly at all.

In the "Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall," Stewart rails against the unfairness of even those with an abolitionist bent, for they will not stand by their convictions by allowing black women to rise above the station of servant, no matter their references or skills. "[I]t was not the custom" (110), was the pitiful excuse given. How could she not grow discouraged at the unwillingness of so-called well-meaning whites to put their money where their mouths were?

It is not that Stewart finds anything wrong with service as an occupation, but the essential limitation on blacks. Just as the white women ask for equality to white men, so should black men and women have those opportunities to better themselves morally and intellectually. She uses scripture to back up her arguments as well as personal pleas from her own experiences.

And yet, history obscured her contributions, giving the Grimke sisters the claim to be the first women to orate in public to mixed audiences. Then, as now, it comes down to who is given the space, the credibility and the venue for expression. And given is the right word, for those who must fight for the space, fight to be believed and fight to be heard are often left with little time or energy for the message they wished to express in the first place.

Sarah Grimke

The selection Available Means provides from Sarah Grimke is a letter in reply to a letter from her brother-in-law ("Letter to Theodore Weld"). Although his original letter is not provided, its contents can be inferred from the arguments that she makes. This technique is perhaps more necessary when large amounts of time might separate correspondence, but it also allows her to reframe his arguments to suit her own purposes.

She writes at times as if she agrees with him, as if the interpretation that he gave was certainly not the one his wife claimed he meant, but something better. Sarah's words seem unagitated even when she claims that "the ministry as now organized is utterly at variance with the ministry Christ established, tends to perpetuate schism and disunion, and therefore must be destroyed" (115). And, of course, the current organization of any ministry of her time was a hierarchy of men.

Grimke is entirely reasonable in her arguments that the cause of women's rights do not infringe upon the cause of abolition. "I cannot see why minds may not be exercised on more than one point without injury to any" (117). The problem that Grimke refuses to address is that of division within the ranks. The more causes are added to any group, the smaller the group will be. Ideally, human rights should include both gender equality and the abolition of slavery, but when the abolitionists required a larger constituency, they were forced to sacrifice the less popular cause of women's rights.

And, by doing so, they buried women's rights for a greater good. It seems that this sort of attitude continues even to the current day, when women's rights advocates are shut down because their problems aren't as vital as other causes. 'Why should we bother with these silly women and their pet causes? They should be content with what they have, because there are others who suffer more.'

Even when women have the franchise and the right to hold office, the legislature of the United States has nothing like gender parity. Is this because of some innate inability of the female to hold office or the fact that the culture has still not shifted to include women's rights and gay's rights and the rights of those called 'other' as fundamental human rights?

Angelina Grimke Weld

The editors of Available Means saw fit to include from Angelina Grimke Weld, sister to Sarah and wife to the writer of the letter to which Sarah Grimke replied, a speech that cries to be read aloud, "Address at Pennsylvania Hall." And it is not just threat of the mob reported to be outside, nor the incredible fact that the very next day the hall in which she spoke burned down. No, it is her rhetoric. She uses of scripture not only to prove her cause of abolition but to encourage her audience to its support. She agilely responds to the noise and threat of the mob, incorporating its actions into her words.

Grimke Weld decries the actions of the mob as being illogical and unfitting to argument. Even if the hall were leveled "[would that be] any evidence that we are wrong, or that slavery is a good and wholesome institution?" (121). She recognizes that their tactics are meant to frighten good people from their consciences, not to persuade by means of reason. And with threatened people in front of her, she attempts both to soothe their fear and rouse their actions. The attacks only prove that what they are doing is working.

She also has a clear vision for how women can contribute to the abolitionist cause. "Men may settle this and other questions at the ballot-box, but you have no such right; it is only through petitions that you can reach the Legislature. It is therefore peculiarly your duty to petition" (123). She could be seen even as giving a little dig for the fact that women cannot vote, but rather than dwelling on that as a deficiency, she gives women a special job. And she builds up the impact of such petitions, both to encourage the women to send them and to give the women some sense of empowerment.

And yet, what power do petitions truly have? Perhaps in Grimke Weld's day they held more power than they seem to now. It seems that current day petitions are less about legislative issues and more about wants and needs. How often does a change.org petition produce a legislative impact? How many years have Idahoans tried to add the words that would include more humans in our human rights amendment? Why is the religious freedom to discriminate enshrined in a law that is supposed to be separate from church?

Seneca Falls Convention

It is difficult for me to imagine a time when the simple phrase, "all men and women are created equal," would have been utterly shocking. Not that I believe that there are not still people who disagree with that statement, but it is no longer an uncommon idea. Despite threats and excoriation from the media, many women signed the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions." And, in doing so, they went on record as demanding the vote as a natural right of woman.

70 years passed before women gained the right to vote. Is that a horribly long time, or an amazingly short time? In the grand scheme of things, it is an amazingly short period of time, but it is also a lifetime. More than a lifetime for some. It is doubtful that many, if any, of the women who attended the convention lived to see women getting the right to vote.

Even today, it is difficult to point out the wrongs done to an oppressed class without taking an accusatory tone. This document does not shy away, however, from direct accusations. "This history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.... To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world" (139). The writers of the document allow no wiggle room. The words to follow apply to all mankind. They proceed to list facts, beginning with the lack of franchise and explicitly spelling out what that means. Just as the founders of America protested taxation without representation, so too do the women protest that they have no say, not only in taxation, but in any law to which they must submit.

The women do not stop at a list of grievances. Instead, they also offer solutions, in the form of resolutions. Some of them point out hypocritical existing standards, such as those that prevent women from speaking in public while allowing them to perform in a concert. Others speak more broadly on the rights and responsibilities which should be accorded to women and men. In the introduction to the Declaration, the editors note that it was Frederick Douglass who convinced the women to include the resolution demanding enfranchisement. That this impetus came from a man only reinforces the sentiment of the last resolution that calls for work from both men and women to accomplish their goals.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth didn't need to learn to read or write to be a powerful rhetorician. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel that she would have been even more formidable had she been able to wield the pen or read the words that others recorded her as saying. The power of writing and reading can allow women to control their own stories, rather than being defined to history by the words of others.

The speech attributed to Truth, "Aren't I a Woman," was transcribed as if it were spoken in a Southern, uneducated dialect. The editors of Available Means included a translation of that transcription that removes the aspects of the dialect that were unlikely to have been spoken by Truth, a native of New York state. It is possible that Truth affected a certain dialect in order to all the more confound people's expectations by conforming to some obvious ones. She might have thought it more powerful to speak unexpected words in an expected way. Or, the transcriber may have just been trying to make her sound like a stereotype, to differentiate her from others even as the speech fights to include her in that broad category of woman.

Just as Fuller pointed out that no one questions the ability of a woman to work hard if they are a slave, Truth boasts of her ability to work as hard as a man, eat as much as a man and yet remain, indelibly, a woman. By being so different from her audience, she forces them to find a wider definition of womanhood, even if only for that moment that she stood before them.

Since Truth's argument against the idea that women shouldn't have rights because Christ was not a woman was so powerful, it is a shame that the transcription misses the content of her next argument regarding Eve. "Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him" (145). Truth turns the argument on its head with these words. No one would argue the tradition that Christ was born from the virgin Mary, but it took a woman to bring that fact to its logical exclusion of men from the son of God.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was another woman to point out the inequities between women of color and white women, women of privilege and poor women. While the white women were asking for the vote, Harper was asking for wrongs to be righted in "We Are All Bound Up Together."

She begins by using a personal story to illustrate a plight of all women under the current legal system. The death of her husband left her and her children completely destitute, because he had been in debt, and she could hold no property. Creditors took everything from her but a hairbrush, presumably because they could find no value in taking it, rather than out of their nonexistent pity. This exclusion of woman from the right to property was not limited in affecting women of color, but rather was a universal that all in her audience could relate to.

Watkins Harper challenges the idea that enfranchisement is the ultimate goal for women. "I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life" (149). She points out that it is not the vote itself, but the character of those voting, that determines how those votes will turn out, recognizing that a democracy is slow to change through franchise alone.

I particularly like the turn Watkins Harper takes from talking of rights, such as those to vote or hold property, to wrongs that need righting. Wrongs that are being done against women and men of color by the privileged classes above them. Wrongs that harm not only those who are the direct recipients of the wrongs, but also the society that allows such wrongs to exist. I am surprised that there is no reference to the section of scripture that compares Jesus to the naked and the hungry. As we do unto the least of our society, so we do unto Jesus.

She is also the first rhetor to bring up a concept that I saw coming up again and again in different forms. "The man said if I was black I ought to behave myself. I knew that if he was white he was not behaving himself. Are there not wrongs to be righted?" (150). Here, she points out how the oppressed class is supposed to apologize to their oppressors, whether the oppressors are in the wrong or not. Simply for existing, the oppressed are expected to apologize - no, not simply for existing, but existing where the oppressors can see them, must interact with them. A wrong to be righted indeed.

Susan B. Anthony

The document that the editors of Available Means chose for Susan B. Anthony is from her trial, The United States of America v. Susan B. Anthony. This is the first court document in the book, and, I would think, the first example of a woman being able to record the injustices of a system that denies women the rights given to male citizens, of being tried by a jury of their peers. Although Anthony was not allowed to speak in her own defense at trial, she manages to speak at the sentencing.

I don't understand how it could have made sense to say that women should be tried by juries consisting solely of men. If women were denied the rights to vote, then how could any man that could vote be at all considered her peer? It would almost seem that the real point of keeping women from the vote was nothing more than preventing her from bettering her own situation.

In the court proceedings, the judge does, in fact, negate the jury not-of-her-peers by ordering a directed verdict. No one argued that she was not a woman, and no one argued that she did not vote. Therefore, by reason of her very sex, she was pronounced guilty. It seems like madness to me, but there are still places where a woman can be judged guilty for performing a task that she is quite capable of, such as driving in certain countries, simply by virtue of her sex.

I found it interesting that, after argument with the voter registration officials, she was allowed to register to vote. It would seem that there would be less publicity in simply denying her the register than allowing it and then practically challenging her to exercise the right she took. Would it have been legal for her to be registered as long as she did not vote?

Anthony took the right to vote, claiming it as her citizen's right. It ended up being more of a publicity stunt than an actual driver of change, but it was still a daring, even noble, gesture. However, Anthony's views on who should get the vote were less than noble. Just as the abolitionists of Grimke's time argued against the inclusion of women's rights in the abolitionist cause, so did Anthony argue against the inclusion of Blacks in her quest for women's enfranchisement. How do we deal with the reprehensible views of those we might otherwise call our heroes? It is easy to say that these views were a product of her time and dismiss those views that do not conform to modern sensibilities. But is that the right thing to do? Should all of Anthony's work be dismissed because of her exclusionary tactics?

Every movement for rights seems to be cutting out any "extreme" element that would prevent it from gaining wide acceptance. Wide acceptance is required in order for the goals of the movement to be reached. So, the abolitionists cannot concern themselves with the rights of women, the white women cannot concern themselves with the vote for persons of color, and here in Idaho the rights of people who wish to discriminate on the basis of their religious beliefs are placed above the rights of those so discriminated against. All because of a lack of wide acceptance of the idea put forth in the Seneca Falls Convention, that all men and women are created equal.

Sarah Winnemucca

From the provided selection from Life Among the Paiutes, the situation that Sarah Winnemucca found herself in is clearly illustrated. She is a representative of the government, and must be its voice among her people. However, she is powerless to affect any of the decisions coming from that government, which causes her people to distrust and ignore her.

In just a few pages, horrors are detailed. The government requires her people to move in the middle of winter, hauled in wagons like cattle and, upon arrival, treated not even as well as cattle would be, for cattle would be cared for to insure that they survived the winter. Sarah's people were treated as if the less of them survived, the better.

I think the title of the work itself is telling, for Winnemucca does not claim to be of the Paiutes, but merely among them. She takes the place of an observer rather than a participant. As a rhetorical strategy, it helps to make the reader feel more empathy for her, since they, too, would not be Paiute for the most part. And the more the reader identifies with the narrator, the more they might be willing to accept what she writes as truth.

She challenges her audience to live by the Christian values that they identify with. Repeatedly, she points out that any who seem to be helping her people are not doing it out of charity, but for money. "They did not come because they loved us, or because they were Christians. No; they were just like all civilized people; they came to take us up there because they were to be paid for it" (162). At the same time that she wants to draw attention to the plight of her people, she also does not want to alienate her audience. That does not stop her from pointing out these hypocrisies, but what concessions might she have made in her writing in order to try and get some message through? Must all those who suffer compromise in their communications in order to ensure that some will listen without becoming defensive?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In the biographical section on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the editors cite Linda Kerber's Toward an Intellectual History of Women when they write "Her definition is unique and groundbreaking because all previous formulations of individualism make the implicit assumption that the individual is male (Kerber 201)" (171). This detail makes me remember going to see Peter S. Beagle on The Last Unicorn Tour last November. At the end of the prize drawings, he told an anecdote about starting that book. He wrote about a unicorn in a lilac wood, and she was all alone. His unicorn was the very first female unicorn. There remain many implicit assumptions about the sex of the characters and creatures that inhabit our imaginations and our worlds. When I get bitten by mosquitoes, I find myself calling them male even though I know that it is the female mosquitoes that drink blood.

In "The Solitude of Self" Stanton begins by listing the ways in which women as individual citizens should have the education to enable her to handle the duties and privileges of citizenship. Woman must be allowed to develop in order to support herself. No two people are alike, but we are all created equal. The idea still seems radical. I struggle to wrap my mind around the idea of equality. What does it mean for all people to be created equal? To be created equal in a literal sense would be impossible unless all people were alike. Equality in this sense must relate to our relations under the law.

And being equal under the law would play into the women's suffrage ideas - that women have a right, as citizens, to be tried by juries of their peers, rather than juries composed of men to whom all women were legally inferior by dint of not being able to vote. It is incredible that such powerful rhetoric calling for equality could then turn around and call some women less equal than others.

Whether men protect women or restrict them, Stanton argues that each woman is, in and of herself, alone. At the moment of death, we are all alone. In the extremities of our suffering, in the arms of our fellow human beings, that soul, that self, is still alone. She does not contend that women (or men) would be better off without human connection, but rather that despite any human connection, "each soul lives alone forever" (177). And, being alone, no other person can take responsibility for the soul of another. No man should be taking total responsibility for a woman, nor woman for a man.

Stanton did not live to see American women gain the legal right to vote. This piece was written 10 years before her death, and I wonder if she knew, then, that she would never see the change that she sought and fought for in her life.