A Right to Speak: Constitutive Rhetorics, National Politics, and United States Women in the 1830s

FAIN: FT-51312-03

Alisse Theodore
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1015)

This project introduces documents that compose women’s earliest collective, national political activism in the U. S. and uses this material to begin a study of the ways U.S. women were transformed into national political actors as a group for the first time. I examine women’s 1830s antiremoval and antislavery activism through the lens of rhetorical theory, seeking to account for the ways language calls groups into being; animates problems, situations, and world views; and finally, or concurrently, constitutes power and agency. As a study of transformative articulations of women’s political power, A Right to Speak recovers women’s history as it explores the ways language makes redistributions of power possible.