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Article Excerpt
Women's rights agitation began humbly with a convention held in a small church in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The suffrage movement emerged as an extension of other reform movements when women came to understand their vulnerability to the effects of alcohol and abuse, and their limited influence in the public domain. Constraints on women's access to public forums and public speech at the time led to private "parlor talks" sponsored by the Female Anti-slavery Society. Interest grew, necessitating larger meeting spaces, and women soon began speaking publicly in meeting halls and churches for the cause of suffrage (Campbell, 1989a). These early women's rights meetings typically opened with prayer, greetings, and another important ritual--singing.
Singing is an important element of any social movement. Scholars have studied music and song in social movements in terms of both their typical form and functions (see, e.g., Denisoff, 1983; Eyerman & Jamison, 1998; Greenway, 1970; Irvine & Kirkpatrick, 1971; Kizer, 1983; Knupp, 1981; Kosokoff & Carmichael, 1970; Mohrmann, 1976; Rosen, 1972; Thomas, 1974). These studies have led many to conclude that protest music is largely an in-group activity that primarily serves to build the ego of the membership rather than to persuade opposition or recruit new members. Ego development and solidarity were particularly salient goals for women in the early stages of the suffrage movement because cultural gender roles limited their economic, political, and social status and thus stifled their voices. Singing may have helped strengthen members' self-confidence and created the identification and unity necessary to undertake the fight for suffrage. If songs enhance ego development and discursive identity formation among members of social movements, then it is especially important to see how songs constituted "women" of the suffrage movement.
The "Cult of True Womanhood"
Women faced severe rhetorical barriers during the early years of the movement, including the absence of a right to the public platform, or, in the language of the times, the right to address "promiscuous [mixed-sex] audiences" (Zeaske, 1995) and to engage in direct persuasion. According to Campbell (1989a), "femininity and rhetorical action were seen as mutually exclusive. No 'true woman' could be a public persuader" (p. 9). Since the public sphere, the "natural" place for men, was dominated by the "lustful, amoral, competitive, and ambitious" male nature, the only sphere of influence deemed appropriate for women was the private domain of home (Campbell, 1989a, p. 10). This proscription was designed, so suffrage opponents argued, to protect women from the corruption of public life and to ensure that the four tenets of the "Cult of True Womanhood"--piousness, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity--were not tainted (Cott, 1987, 1997; Welter, 1966). Although not all women of this period were domestic, submissive, pious, or pure, the image of the ideal or "true" woman influenced social and cultural gender expectations.
Each of the four virtues of "womanhood" was inextricably linked to "home," "motherhood," and guilt for those failing short of the ideal. Rhetorical barriers and opportunities for suffragists each emerged from the social framing of the definition of "woman" in the four pillars of the Cult. First, notions of piety bound women to selfless sacrifice, compassion, and charity and effectively precluded their participation in societal functions deemed impure. The appropriate sphere of influence for pious women included home, religion, and family. Like piety, the Cult regarded sexual purity as an essential female characteristic. After marriage, purity remained a source of power for those women who remained sexually modest and reserved. Purity thus elevated the status of women's moral authority and social power, while any social reform threatened this "treasure."
The third tenet of the Cult, submission, required women's obedience and deference to men. In contrast to the imperative that women remain sexually pure until marriage by resisting advances of suitors, women were expected to submit to their spouses sexually and in all other respects after matrimony. In addition to passivity and dependence, women were expected to work silently and obey their husbands to demonstrate their affection, nurturance, and their lack of personal ambition. Given her perceived frail, pure, pious nature, according to the Cult, the ideal locus for woman was the home. The final tenet, domestic virtue, was predicated on marriage and childbearing, which were seen as the ultimate purposes of a woman's life and the basis of her moral authority, submissiveness, and economic dependence.
Since identity and self-esteem for women of the period relied on the four pillars of the Cult, examining the music of the suffrage movement and its portrayal of women using the characteristics of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity can shed insight into the relationship between the ideal identity and the "self" sought by suffrage movement members. While many aspects of the suffrage movement have been examined, including public address (Campbell, 1989a; Cathcart, 1972; Huxman, 2000; Japp, 1985; Linkugel, 1962, 1963; Miller, 1999), audience construction (Welter, 1966; Zeaske, 1995), parades (Borda, 2002; Moore, 1997), petitions (Zaeske, 2002), cartoons (Dow, 2002), and dress reform (Torrens, 1997), suffrage songs have not been analyzed by rhetorical scholars to understand their contribution to the movement, the persuasive limitations of suffrage music, or contextual challenges in the use of the music by women seeking the ballot. Most significant for this study, suffrage songs may either reify or challenge the ideals depicted by the Cult; songs may thereby serve to sustain existing discursive identities for women or to develop new ones.
Throughout the movement, women suffragists strove to uphold the seemingly contradictory goals of broadening their citizenship rights while simultaneously maintaining cultural gender expectations concerning their separate social sphere. To succeed, suffrage advocates concluded, they had to call for political change, specifically the right to vote, while concomitantly assuaging fears that this change would damage the moral, spiritual, and domestic virtues attributed to women. Given the economic, political, and social constraints on women in the late 1800 s and early 1900 s, tools of influence available to movement members were few. Music offered one accessible vehicle through which to protest. As Kizer (1983) notes, music can be particularly useful in social movements because "even when spoken protest is not feasible, people sing expressions of discontent, sometimes disguised, against social injustice. Music is irrepressible, inexpensive, and memorable" (p. 8).
Rhetorical Arguments of the Suffrage Movement
Before moving to analysis of the songs, a brief review of the rhetorical arguments used by suffragists is necessary to contextualize lyrical arguments. Feminist rhetorical critics have identified two conflicting lines of argument that dominated the rhetoric of the first wave of feminism from 1843 through 1925: arguments from natural rights and arguments from expediency (Campbell, 1983, 1989a; Conrad, 1981; Giele, 1995; Kraditor, 1968, 1981; Marilley, 1996). Arguments from natural rights closely align with modern liberal feminism (Donovan, 1989; Gamble, 2000), which is based on the notion that women and men are fundamentally indistinguishable and therefore entitled to equal rights and justice under the law. Many of the early suffragists argued for voting rights based on the Declaration of Independence, natural rights, citizenship, and founding principles of equality.
In contrast, expediency arguments emphasized the differences between men and women and enabled suffragists to claim that women should vote so they could serve the nation and protect home and hearth. According to this reasoning, women's unique talents would benefit society in the formation of social reforms and justify their access to the vote as a prudent and useful tool for the nation at large based on distinct differences between the sexes. Such historical and contemporary arguments are grounded in the Cult of True Womanhood and the notion of distinct spheres of influence for men and women.
Suffrage advocates utilized both natural rights and expediency arguments throughout the movement. Campbell (1989a) claims that natural rights arguments prevailed during the early period of the movement and that public address arguments shifted largely to expediency claims around 1870, particularly as suffrage claims became entwined with the fight for temperance (p. 15). Campbell (1983) characterizes the dichotomy between these arguments as an ideological conflict posed by the concepts of "personhood" and "womanhood." Symbolically, the "true woman," who embodied piety, purity, submission, and domesticity, gained her identity in relation to others rather than as an individual citizen worthy of rights. Thus, expediency arguments affirmed "womanhood" by focusing on the differences between men and women and on rooting women's moral superiority and power in a broadened yet still domestically focused sphere. In contrast, natural rights arguments claimed "personhood" regardless of gender, thereby limiting the distinctions between women and men and redefining each woman as an individual whose identity is not bound to domestic roles of wife and mother. The ideological conflict in the tension between "personhood" and "womanhood" is central to this study of how suffrage music facilitated identity negotiation and developed ways for movement members to confront this tension in the (re)formation of their identities.
Methodology
Relying upon feminist theory and social movement theory, this study maps rhetorical representations of "woman" in the song lyrics (Crew, 2001; Healy, 1974; Wolff, 1998) and melodies (Smithsonian, 2001; Wolff, 1998) of the woman suffrage movement to identify rhetorical patterns. To analyze representations of woman in musical discourse in relation to a timeline of the lifecycle of the movement (Campbell, 1989; Griffin, 1952; Kraditor, 1968, 1981; Stewart, Smith, & Denton, 2001), I used a feminist perspective and the constructs of Welter's theory of the "Cult of True Womanhood," suffrage arguments from natural rights and expediency (Campbell, 1989; Giele, 1995; Kraditor, 1968, 1981), and cultural identity formation theory (Barker, 2000; Barker, 2002; Barker & Galasinski, 2001; Frith, 1996b; Gauntlett, 2002; Hall, 1985; Hall, 1997; Hall & DuGay, 1996) to identify shifts in portrayals of "woman" in the lyrics of the movement. Additionally, to enrich our understanding of the music and assess the extent to which lyrics and score operated congruently or incongruently to shape meaning, I analyzed musical scores of songs using Langer's "Illusion of Life" approach (Sellnow, 1991; Sellnow & Sellnow, 2001).
Langer's (1953, 1957) Illusion of Life theory argues that music conveys meaning and emotion through aesthetic symbolism, and that music's dynamic structure depicts feeling through patterns of intensity and release similar to the intensity-release rhythm of human experiences. Further, Langer claims that unlike discursive communication, which relies on verbal and mathematical symbols with comparatively fixed associations, music also produces meaning through nondiscursive elements or "significant forms" that are "felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function" and that have relatively less fixed, universal associations (Langer, 1953, p. 32). Extending Langer's theory of aesthetic symbolism or "Illusion of Life" perspective, Sellnow and Sellnow (2001) argue that to identify the conceptual significance of the discursive message (virtual experience [1]), the rhetorical critic must first analyze the lyrics and then analyze the musical score to assess the relative tension and release patterns and the emotion(s) melodically provoked (virtual time [2]). Next, the critic must evaluate the relationship between the score and the lyrics to determine whether the messages encoded by each are congruent or incongruent with one another (see Appendix A). When lyrics and score operate congruently, they reinforce one another and intensify, clarify, or make the meaning more poignant. Incongruent lyrics and score, however, transform the meaning of the song and may signal satiric or parodic messages.
Both lyrics and musical scores of songs from the movement inform my analysis of the rhetorical use and meaning of suffrage music. Because of technological limitations on recording devices...
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