The rhetorical ritual of citizenship: Women's voting as public performance, 1868-1875

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 93, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 1-26

  Ray, Angela G ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Appropriation; Citizenship; Rhetorical ritual; Voting; Woman suffrage

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248547429     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630701326845     Document Type: Article

References (206)

1. Robert J. Dinkin, ed., Election Day: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 81-82, 91-94;
2. Richard Jensen, "Armies, Admen, and Crusaders: Types of Presidential Election Campaigns," History Teacher 2, no. 2 (January 1969): 34-43;
3. Carolyn Marvin and Peter Simonson, "Voting Alone: The Decline of Bodily Mass Communication and Public Sensationalism in Presidential Elections," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (June 2004): 127-50. For an account of voting experiences by a mid-nineteenth-century male voter, see the excerpt by George Templeton Strong reprinted in Dinkin, 82-84.
4. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 128;
5. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988), 174;
6. David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 49;
7. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964; rpt., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 3.
8. Bruce E. Gronbeck notes the "consummatory benefits" of elections; Gronbeck, "The Functions of Presidential Campaigning," Communication Monographs 45 (November 1978): 268.
9. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 12, 76;
10. Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), xiv;
11. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 157-58.
12. On the power of ritual form, see, e.g., Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 58;
13. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 45;
14. and Barbara G. Myerhoff, "A Death in Due Time: Construction of Self and Culture in Ritual Drama," in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 151.
15. On a speaker's being the proof of a verbal argument, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, eds., Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action (Falls Church, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1978), 9.
16. W. B. Worthen, "Disciplines of the Text/Sites of Performance," TDR 39, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 13-28;
17. John J. MacAloon, "Introduction: Cultural Performances, Culture Theory," in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, ed. MacAloon, 8;
18. Richard Bauman, "Performance," in International Encyclopedia of Communications, vol. 3, ed. Erik Barnouw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 262-66;
19. see also Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), esp. xv-xxiii, 171-226, 228-29, 283-91.
20. Kirt W. Fuoss, Striking Performances/Performing Strikes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), xiii.
21. See Henry Bial, ed., The Performance Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 77;
22. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 9-11. In political ritual, the response is typically a sense of commitment to political institutions; see Bell, Ritual, 128-35.
23. For Catherine Bell's criticism of scholars' overemphasis on the instrumentality of ritual, see Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 40-43. The adjectival qualifier rhetorical, delineating a subset of ritual, is presented as a response to this legitimate concern.
24. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 6, 32.
25. See Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, 3; Fuoss, Striking Performances, 88;
26. and Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146.
27. On alternative conceptions of justice that exist alongside and provide a source of resistance to authorized law, see Jules Lobel, "Losers, Fools, and Prophets: Justice as Struggle," Cornell Law Review 80 (1995): 1348.
28. Ellen Carol DuBois, "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s," in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 23.
29. Lucy Stone and her mother-in-law, Hannah Blackwell, presented themselves at the polls in Roseville in 1868 based on this premise; "Woman Suffrage in New Jersey," Revolution, November 12, 1868, p. 300.
30. See also Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, '"The Petticoat Electors': Women's Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807," Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 159-93.
31. "Woman Suffrage in South Carolina," Revolution, April 20, 1871, p. 9; "Important," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 22, 1871, p. 5;
32. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 29,1871, pp. 132-33;
33. Benjamin Quarles, "Frederick Douglass and the Woman's Rights Movement," Journal of Negro History 25, no. 1 (January 1940): 35;
34. Nancy A. Hewitt, "Recasting Women's Votes: Community, State, and Nation in the Suffrage Campaign," paper presented at the conference Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, Rochester, NY, March 2006.
35. History of Woman Suffrage (hereafter cited as HWS), 6 vols.: vols. 1-3, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, vol. 4 ed. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, and vols. 5-6 ed. Ida Husted Harper (1881-1922), 2: 400-401, 756-66;
36. Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 160-63;
37. SaraM. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 123-24;
38. Alleen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (1965; rpt, New York: Norton, 1981), 3-4;
39. Ellen Carol DuBois, "Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States," Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (December 1987): 836-62;
40. DuBois, "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands," 19-40; Andrea Moore Kerr, "White Women's Rights, Black Men's Wrongs, Free Love, Blackmail, and the Formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association," in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995), 61-79;
41. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 38-42.
42. The Minors' early arguments can be traced in the pages of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's newspaper, the Revolution: "Woman's Suffrage Convention in St. Louis-Ideas to Be Fought, Not Men," October 14, 1869, p. 235;
43. "St. Louis," October 14, 1869, p. 236;
44. "Principles, Not Policy," October 21, 1869, pp. 248-49;
45. Francis Minor, "Make the Trial," October 21, 1869, p. 250; "The St. Louis Convention," October 21, 1869, pp. 250-51;
46. "Mrs. Francis Minor," October 28, 1869, pp. 258-59; "The St. Louis Resolutions," October 28, 1869, p. 259; "A Good Determination," December 23, 1869, p. 395;
47. Francis Minor, "Fundamental Rights," January 20, 1870, pp. 38-39. See also Angela G. Ray and Cindy Koenig Richards, "Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor," Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): forthcoming.
48. The contours of this rhetorical style are detailed in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Angela G. Ray, '"No Longer by Your Leave': The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments on Women's Rhetoric," in A Rhetorical History of the United States, vol. 4, Public Debate in the Civil War Era, ed. David Zarefsky and Michael C. Leff (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming).
49. Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 161.
50. In 1870 Stanton presented the constitutional arguments before a congressional committee; HWS 2: 313-44.
51. For examples of discussion of the strategy in the Woman's Journal, both pro and con, see "Are Women Not Already Legally Enfranchised?" February 26, 1870, p. 60;
52. "Mr. Riddle's Speech," February 18, 1871, p. 53; "The 'New Declaration of Independence,'" March 18, 1871, p. 84;
53. Mary A. Livermore, "Editorial Correspondence," April 22,1871, p. 124; "Are Not Women Enfranchised?" April 29, 1871, p. 133;
54. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "A Parallel Case," October 7, 1871, p. 313;
55. Warrington, "Right of Women to Vote under the XIVth and XVth Amendments," October 14, 1871, p. 321;
56. and William Lloyd Garrison, "Mr. Garrison on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments," December 9, 1871, p. 391.
57. The Woman's Journal published Matilda Joslyn Gage's instructional "catechism," comprising forty-six questions and answers. Questions included "What persons are citizens of the United States?" "Is a woman a person?" "Is it a crime to be a woman?" "What is the Supreme Law of the land?" and "Are those persons who, under color of law, forbid woman the ballot, law-keepers, or law-breakers?" Gage, "Woman's Rights Catechism," Woman's Journal, September 2, 1871, pp. 274-75.
58. Some individuals who attempted to vote and encouraged others to do so were allied with both organizations. Catherine Fish Stebbins of Detroit, for example, was active in both the NWSA and the AWSA, as was her husband, Giles B. Stebbins. The Stebbinses belonged to an "independent" state suffrage society in Michigan; HWS 3: 515.
59. U.S. Congress, Senate, Memorial of Victoria C. Woodhull, Praying the Passage of a Law Carrying into Execution the Right Vested by the Constitution in Citizens of the United States to Vote, without Regard to Sex, 41st Cong., 3d sess., S. Mis. Doc. 16 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1870);
60. U.S. Congress, House, Victoria C. Woodhull, Reports of the Committee on the Judiciary, 41st Cong., 3d sess., H. Rpt. 22, pts. 1 and 2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1871);
61. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998), 318-19;
62. Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 28-33.
63. Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874).
64. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robert J. Dinkin, Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995);
65. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 172-221, tables A.17-A.20.
66. Ann D. Gordon recently published a list of known efforts by women to vote between 1868 and 1873, the date of Susan B. Anthony's conviction for illegal voting; Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 645-54.
67. See An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, on the Charge of Illegal Voting, at the Presidential Election in Nov. 1872, and on the Trial of Beverly W. Jones, Edwin T. Marsh and William B. Hall, the Inspectors of Election by Whom Her Vote Was Received (Rochester, NY: Daily Democrat and Chronicle Book Print, 1874);
68. and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 1, A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (New York: Praeger, 1989), 105-19.
69. Cf. Susan Zaeske, "Signatures of Citizenship: The Rhetoric of Women's Antislavery Petitions," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 2 (May 2002): 147-68.
70. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 22, 1871, pp. 124-25; "Notes about Women," Revolution, May 11, 1871, p. 4;
71. "How Some Ohio Ladies Attempted to Vote," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 29,1871, p. 4;
72. Susan B. Anthony, "Don't Neglect to Vote," Revolution, June 22, 1871, p. 6.
73. "Voting of Vineland Women," Revolution, November 19,1868, p. 307; HWS 3: 522-23. A list of the women who voted in a separate box in Vineland in 1868 has been transcribed by Susan Ditmire, "Women Who Voted in Vineland, November 3, 1868," http://www.usgennet.org/ usa/nj/county/cumberland/vinevote/listname.htm, posted January 25, 2000, accessed October 24, 2006.
74. Such women included Marilla Ricker, later admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia; Carrie S. Burnham, who would be the first woman admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania; Mary Ann Shadd Gary, who in 1869 had been the first woman to enroll at Howard University Law School; and Belva Bennett Lockwood, who in 1879 would become the first woman admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. On Ricker, see HWS 2: 586-87; 3: 106, 378, 812.
75. On Burnham, see "Voting and Rioting," Philadelphia Inquirer, October 11, 1871, p. 2; HWS 2: 600-601; HWS 3: 6, 444;
76. and Elizabeth K. Maurer, "The Sphere of Carrie Burnham Kilgore," Temple Law Review 65, no. 3 (1992): 827-56.
77. On Gary, see Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Gary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 195-97;
78. and Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 38-39.
79. On Lockwood, see Gordon, Selected Papers 2: 650;
80. and Belva A. Lockwood, "My Efforts to Become a Lawyer," Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, February 1888, pp. 215-29. In 1884 Lockwood would be the first viable female candidate for the U.S. presidency; when Victoria Claflin Woodhull was nominated in 1872, she had not reached the constitutionally mandated age of thirty-five.
81. In Illinois, Catherine Van Valkenburg Waite, who, along with her daughter, Helen, attempted to register in 1871 in Hyde Park, was the wife of Judge Charles B. Waite. He had sat on the platform at the St. Louis suffrage meeting in 1869 when the Minors first presented their constitutional arguments. See "Court Reports," Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1871, p. 4;
82. "The Law Courts," Chicago Tribune, November 30, 1871, p. 2;
83. "Ladies, You Can't Vote," Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1872, p. 4; HWS 2: 601; and HWS 3: 571-72.
84. Judge Waite's appearance on the St. Louis platform in 1869, along with Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe, is noted in "St. Louis Convention," 250. Other women who attempted to vote employed attorneys to accompany them to the polls, and some individuals or suffrage societies solicited legal counsel in preparation for organized voting efforts. See "Notes about Women," Revolution, May 11, 1871, p. 4;
85. and Ellen M. Harris, "Woman's Rights in Maryland," Woman's Journal, June 21, 1873, p. 194.
86. DuBois, "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands," 24.
87. On Stebbins, see "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 15, 1871, pp. 116-17; "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, November 22, 1873, p. 373.
88. In 1873 a correspondent wrote from South Newbury, Ohio, that "some men propose not to vote until a mother's, wife's or sister's is taken"; L. M. Greene, "Ladies-Offer Your Votes," Woman's Journal, October 18, 1873, p. 331.
89. In Washington Territory, sisters Mary Olney Brown of White River and Charlotte Olney French of Grand Mound both attempted to vote, Brown in 1869 and French in 1870. Brown was accompanied at the polls by her husband, daughter, and son-in-law; HWS 3: 780-86;
90. see also Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 40-41.
91. In Hammonton, New Jersey, two mother-daughter pairs were among the fifteen women who attended the polls in 1871; "Correspondence," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 1, 1871, p. 5. Also in 1871, Ellen Rand Van Valkenburg tried to register in Santa Cruz, California, and her sister-in-law and niece attempted registration in Illinois; HWS 2:600;
92. Ellen R. Van Valkenburg v. Albert Brown, 43 Cal. 43 (1872).
93. Frisken, Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution, 28-33;
94. Gordon, Selected Papers 2: 524-29.
95. On Stebbins's voting efforts, see "Good News from Detroit," Revolution, April 6, 1871, p. 9;
96. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 15, 1871, pp. 116-17;
97. "Woman Suffrage in Michigan," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 15, 1871, pp. 4-5;
98. "Notes about Women," Revolution, April 20, 1871, p. 5;
99. Catharine A. F. Stebbins, "Letter from Michigan," Woman's Journal, November 2,1872, p. 352;
100. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, November 22,1873, p. 373; HWS 3: 523-25;
101. and Rachel Brett Harley and Betty MacDowell, Michigan Women: Firsts and Founders, vol. 2 (Lansing: Michigan Women's Studies Association, 1995), 104-5.
102. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 15, 1871, pp. 116-17.
103. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 66-68.
104. On Truth, see Narrative of Sojourner Truth; a Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century; with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her "Book of Life" (Battle Creek, MI, 1878; rpt, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 231-32.
105. On Gary, see Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 195-97;
106. and TerborgPenn, African American Women, 38-39.
107. On Meriwether, see Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, Recollections of 92 Years, 1824-1916 (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1958; rpt., McLean, VA: EPM Publications, 1994), 205.
108. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 22, 1871, pp. 124-25.
109. Cf. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, "The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron," Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 74-86;
110. and Campbell, '"The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron' Revisited," Communication Studies 50 (1999): 138-42. Whereas efforts to expand the franchise are typically understood as a reformist impulse, examples such as Reconstruction-era women's voting efforts suggest that reform and revolution constitute a continuum rather than a dichotomy.
111. Quoted in "Mount Vernon Women Again," Revolution, October 15, 1868, pp. 237.
112. In the Minor v. Happersett opinion, the Supreme Court stated that citizenship meant "membership of a nation, and nothing more" (166).
113. There were exceptions. In 1871 the Woman's Journal reported an item from the Sentinel of Raleigh, North Carolina, claiming that two hundred African American women dressed in men's clothes had voted at the direction of a white railroad magnate; "According to the Raleigh (N. C.) Sentinel..." Woman's Journal, August 12, 1871, p. 250. In New York, the vote of one person dressed as a woman was accepted, according to the Woman's Journal, because the person was known to be a man; "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, December 9,1871, pp. 388-89.
114. Further, it is possible that Dr. Mary Walker, who participated in voting efforts in Washington, D.C., dressed in trousers on this occasion, as she did on others. See "Determined to Vote," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 29, 1871, p. 4;
115. and Carol Mattingly, Appropriate(ing) Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 91-100.
116. Unidentified Detroit newspaper quoted in "Woman Suffrage in Michigan," 4.
117. See Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 43-74.
118. One report, for example, noted that "every one behaved with the politeness which gentlemen always manifest in the presence of ladies"; "Woman Suffrage in New Jersey," Revolution, November 12, 1868, p. 300.
119. "Editorial Notes," New York Independent, March 10, 1870, p. 4.
120. Celia Burleigh, "People Worth Knowing-No. 4: The Sisters Grirnke," Woman's Journal, July 23, 1870, p. 232.
121. Burleigh's anecdote represents the Grimkes' ritual performance as a manifestation of the class-inflected cultural conceit that Brooklyn clergyman Henry Ward Beecher had invoked before the AWSA in May 1871: "Did you ever see a crowd of men, the rudest in the world, who, when a lady walked among them, did not open spontaneously and let her pass through as if she was an angel?"; HWS 2: 775. Two decades before, the author and lyceum lecturer Elizabeth Oakes Smith had similarly offered a hypothetical scene depicting women as a moral force and a transformational power: "I am firmly persuaded were a ballot box provided for women, and they seen vote in hand approaching, in their becoming smiles and decorous manners, the men would soon follow our example, and each one be seen with a rose bud in his button-hole, and behaving as orderly at the polls as he would do at Church"; Elizabeth Oakes Smith, "The Dignity of Labor " [1850s], MS p. 40, in Box 2, Papers of Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith, Accession #38-707, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville.
122. "Editorial Notes," New York Independent, March 10, 1870, p. 4;
123. Hyde Park Journal quoted in "Women Voters at Hyde Park," Woman's Journal, March 18, 1871, p. 85.
124. See also "Editorial Notes," New York Independent, March 17, 1870, p. 4.
125. The potential impact of the efforts of patriotic voting women was articulated clearly in 1868, when the Revolution compared three women's failed effort to vote in Mount Vernon, New York, with "Bull Run and Bunker Hill" but noted that "sublime results followed both in due time"; "Mount Vernon Women Again," 236-37.
126. "Determined to Vote." See also HWS 2: 587-99; Gordon, Selected Papers 2: 649-50;
127. "The Women Suffragists Are Astir All over the Country," Revolution, April 20, 1871, p. 9;
128. "Notes about Women," Revolution, April 27, 1871, pp. 4-5;
129. "Why Is It?" Woman's Journal, April 29, 1871, p. 130;
130. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 29, 1871, pp. 132-33;
131. "A Judicial Decision," Revolution, November 25, 1871, p. 3.
132. At least two other groups of voters were racially mixed: in 1868 in Vineland, New Jersey, and in 1871 in Portland, Oregon. See E. A. Kingsbury, "Voting of Vineland Women," Revolution, November 19, 1868, pp. 307-8;
133. Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 85;
134. and Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 37, 38.
135. See, e.g., "Women in Council," Revolution, September 24,1868, pp. 180-81;
136. "Mount Vernon Women Again," 236-37;
137. "What Women Are Doing," Revolution, October 1, 1868, p. 205;
138. "Good News from Detroit";
139. "Notes about Women," Revolution, May 11, 1871, p. 4;
140. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, August 26, 1871, pp. 268-69;
141. "Voting and Rioting"; Helen Marion Walton, "A Woman at the Polls," Revolution, December 9,1871, p. 11;
142. "Women TaxPayers" Woman's Journal, April 13, 1872, p. 119;
143. Abby H. Smith, "Women Who Want to Vote," Woman's Journal, May 31,1873, p. 170;
144. "Smith, the Woman and Tax-Payer," Woman's Journal, December 6, 1873, p. 387.
145. "Women Tax-Payers."
146. Mary Ann Shadd Gary, for instance, wrote of supportive comments made by male bystanders when she attempted to register in Washington, D.C.; Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Gary, 195-96.
147. Mary Olney Brown also described supportive, albeit racist, remarks from bystanders; HWS 3: 784.
148. Cf. Ellen Donkin, "Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography for Eighteenth-Century British Theater," in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 279;
149. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 96.
150. Cf. Butler, Excitable Speech, 5.
151. Wallon, "Woman at the Polls."
152. See, e.g., "A Woman at the Register's Office," Revolution, November 19, 1868, p. 308;
153. and "Women at the Polls," Harper's Weekly, November 25, 1871, p. 1109.
154. "Correspondence"; Parker Pillsbury, "Two Good Things in Vineland," Revolution, March 26, 1868, p. 178.
155. "Voting and Rioting." For other examples of conversations, see "Woman at the Register's Office," 308-9; and Walton, "Woman at the Polls."
156. Burnham's subsequent court case attempted to redefine the ritual performance. In her version of events, she had performed as a legal voter and was swindled. See Maurer, "Sphere of Carrie Burnham Kilgore," 833-37.
157. HWS 2: 586;
158. "Women Voting," Revolution, November 11, 1869, p. 300;
159. "Political," Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1871, p. 2;
160. Livermore, "Editorial Correspondence";
161. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 22, 1871, pp. 124-25;
162. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, September 2, 1871, p. 277;
163. "Ladies, You Can't Vote."
164. "Women at the Polls"; HWS 3: 824; "Concerning Women," "Woman's Journal, December 12, 1872, p. 377;
165. Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, 11.
166. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 64-65.
167. Detroit Post quoted in "The First Woman Ballot," "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 22, 1871, p. 1.
168. See, e.g., Parker Pillsbury, "A Whole Rainbow of Promise," Revolution, April 30, 1868, p. 257;
169. "Women Voting in This State," Revolution, May 25, 1871, p. 9.
170. "Women Voting in Michigan," Revolution, April 13, 1871, p. 11.
171. The concept of place as used here invokes Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870-1875 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), esp. 12-15.
172. In Charleston, South Carolina, Kit Green and Stephen Shepard, managers of election, were convicted of "neglect of duty and violation of the law"; "Woman Suffrage in South Carolina." Peter Hill, alderman in Detroit, Michigan, was "discountenanc[ed]" by the Detroit Board of City Canvassers; "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, November 23,1872, p. 373.
173. Beverly W. Jones, Edwin T. Marsh, and William B. Hall, inspectors of election in Rochester, New York, were convicted and fined for receiving the votes of Anthony and other women; Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, 7-12, 85-93, 124-25, 148-50.
174. For an example of a challenge to a board of election, see "Woman Suffrage in Connecticut," Woman's Journal, April 19, 1873, p. 125.
175. On the filing of court cases, see Susan B. Anthony, "Woman's Rights," in Johnson's New Universal Cyclopaedia: A Scientific and Popular Treasury of Useful Knowledge, ed. Frederick A. P. Barnard and Arnold Guyot, vol. 4 (New York: Alvin J. Johnson and Son, 1877), 1479. Ellen Rand Van Valkenburg of California, Catharine Van Valkenburg Waite of Illinois, Sarah R. Huntington of Connecticut, and Carrie S. Burnham of Pennsylvania sued election inspectors. In Washington, D.C., a group of seventy women, led by Sarah Andrews Spencer and Sarah E. Webster, sued in district court and then filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Missouri in 1872 Virginia Minor joined with her husband to sue registrar Reese Happersett, beginning the case that resulted in the 1875 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
176. Anthony's case was made the test. She was tried in June 1873 in U.S. circuit court, found guilty, and fined. She announced in court that she would never pay the fine, and she kept her promise. That fall she went to the polls again but this time was denied registration. See Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony;
177. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, November 15,1873, p. 365;
178. and Jane M. Friedman, America's First Woman Lawyer: The Biography of Myra Bradwell (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), 184.
179. Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, 88.
180. Norma Basch, "Reconstitutions: History, Gender, and the Fourteenth Amendment," in The Constitutional Bases of Political and Social Change in the United States, ed. Shlomo Slonim (New York: Praeger, 1990), 175.
181. Gender first emerged as a relevant category in the U.S. Supreme Court in Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1872), decided in 1873.
182. The denial of a necessary correlation between U.S. citizenship and individual voting rights remains legally potent in the twenty-first century; see Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).
183. Phelan writes similarly of Anita Hill's testimony during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991: "The unmarked frame of political power was thrown into high relief. Suddenly all the world seemed to see that white men with economic privilege run thingsand more importantly, that this may not be the only possible way to run things"; Phelan, Unmarked, 177.
184. Cf. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 10.
185. "Woman Suffrage in Connecticut," Woman's Journal, April 19, 1873, p. 125.
186. "Correspondence."
187. Pillsbury, "Two Good Things in Vineland"; Greene, "Ladies-Offer Your Votes"; Walton, "Woman at the Polls."
188. "Notes and News," Woman's Journal, April 22, 1871, pp. 124-25.
189. See also E. Louisa Mather, "Woman Suffrage in Connecticut," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 22, 1871, p. 12; and "Women Tax-Payers."
190. Kingsbury, "Voting of Vineland Women" 307-8; Parker Pillsbury, "Voters of Vineland" Revolution, November 18,1869, p. 314;
191. "Editorial Notes," New York Independent, March 17, 1870, p. 4;
192. "Women Voters at Hyde Park."
193. Pillsbury, "Voters of Vineland";
194. "Woman Suffrage in New Jersey," Woman's Journal, November 19, 1870, pp. 364-65;
195. "Editorial Notes," Neve York Independent, March 17, 1870, p. 4.
196. On the antitheatrical prejudice, see, e.g., Fuoss, Striking Performances, 95;
197. Dwight Conquergood, "Performance Theory, Hmong Shamans, and Cultural Politics," in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Reinelt and Roach, 57;
198. and Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
199. Stuart Hall, Race: The Floating Signifier, videorecording, produced, directed, and edited by Sut Jhally (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1996);
200. Leah Ceccarelli, "Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 395-415.
201. "What is a person?" asked Gage. "A person is an individual human being consisting of body and soul"; Gage, "Woman's Rights Catechism," 274. Maintaining this point to its logical conclusions, Francis Minor responded affirmatively to a question from a U.S. Supreme Court justice who asked whether children had a right to vote; "Woman Suffrage," New York Times, February 10, 1875, p. 8.
202. Cf. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, "Femininity or Feminism: To Be or Not to Be a Woman," Communication Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 101-8.
203. "Voting and Rioting."
204. Marie Howland, "The Right Thing to Be Done," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, April 22, 1871, p. 3.
205. Keyssar, Right to Vote.
206. Gordon, Selected Papers 2: 524-25.