ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Conceptualizing And Evaluating Dissociation From An Informal Logical Perspective

• by: Konishi Takuzo - Tokai University

1. Introduction
Dissociation is one of the two major schemes of argumentation proposed by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. While association has already been scrutinized through analysis of such aspects as causal and analogical arguments, in-depth investigation into the nature of dissociation has been limited to work done by M. A. van Rees and this author. This article examines issues in conceptualizing and evaluating dissociation. More specifically, it proposes that Trudy Govier’s notion of “logical core” helps to both elucidate the conception of, and evaluate the adequacy of conceptual differentiation in regards to dissociation. Building on this foundation, this paper will attempt to address several issues surrounding dissociation. Section 2 of this article briefly outlines the notion of dissociation. Section 3 clarifies the concept of the “logical core” and theorizes that it helps to evaluate dissociation. Section 4 presents and responds to various implications. Section 5 offers conclusions and recommendations for further research.

2. Dissociation reconceptualized
Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca have started an investigation into dissociation as one of the two major argumentation schemes, the other being association. In association, an arguer assembles what are thought to be different entities into a single entity; examples include causal arguments, analogical arguments, and arguments from authority. Dissociation, on the other hand, is a type of argumentation scheme in which an arguer disassembles what was originally thought to be a single entity into two different entities by introducing criteria for differentiation (1969, p. 190). These criteria are normative as well as conceptual; as such, they establish a hierarchy between the dissociated entities, placing one above the other. Using dissociation, the arguer attempts to create a new world vision by establishing a conceptual demarcation in what is believed to be a single entity. If the audience is persuaded to accept the vision offered through this dissociation, a new reality is established. Based upon Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca and van Rees (2005), this author conceptualizes dissociation as a scheme of argument as follows:
(1)
1. X is accepted as a single entity.
2. X, assumed to be a single entity, is actually subdivided into two value-laden entities.
2.1 X is divided into two entities (X/XII and XI), based on criteria for differentiation.
2.2 The subdivided X (X/XII and XI) is placed in a hierarchy according to the value embedded in the criteria for differentiation.
3. Although X is believed to be a unified entity, it can be divided into X/XII and XI, with one being more important than the other (from 1, 2)[i].

Critical questions usually accompany an argumentation scheme. The fact that the following critical questions arise from the concept of dissociation is a strong sign that dissociation is not merely a technique used in argumentation, but a product of the practice of argumentation.

(2)
1. Is the original X generally accepted as a single entity?
2. Is the conceptual distinction between the two subdivided entities clear? In other words, do the criteria for differentiation form a conceptual distinction?
3. Is the value hierarchy which is set up among the subdivided entities tenable?
4. According to the value hierarchy, is one subcomponent more important than the other?

The above scheme and critical questions give rise to three discussion points. Firstly, both the conception of dissociation and the critical questions refute the line of reasoning which claims that dissociation is not an argumentation scheme. Bart Garssen, as quoted by Rob Grootendorst (1999, p. 288), states that dissociation is neither a scheme of argument nor a specific type of argumentation, since acceptance of the premise does not increase adherence to a conclusion, but rather ends in its denial[ii]. Since his position denies that dissociation is a scheme of argumentation, it requires some consideration.

One premise of dissociation, however, is that X is accepted as a unified entity, as offered in (1)-1 above. Additionally, the conclusion of dissociation is that although X is believed to be a unified entity, it can be divided into the less important XI and the more important X/XII, as seen in (1)-3. With an although clause in the conclusion of a dissociation, the acceptance of the above premise (1)-1 helps the audience adhere to that conclusion. A conclusion with an although clause, as shown in (1)-3, requires the acceptance of X as a single entity in its premise. Without an although clause, however, the acceptance of X as a single entity is irrelevant to the conclusion, since its acceptance does not promote adherence to the conclusion, as Garssen rightly claims. As a result, the although clause is without support, and the dissociation will be logically weak. This reconceptualization of dissociation denies Garssens’s position that dissociation is not a scheme of argumentation, and thus the presumption strongly favors the notion that dissociation is a scheme of argumentation. In light of this reconceptualization, scholars taking the position that dissociation is merely a technique of argumentation must first conceptualize ‘technique’ and advance a different line of support for why dissociation is a technique of argumentation.
Secondly, dissociation, like causal reasoning and analogy, can serve as a type of reasoning for use in argument. In other words, an arguer can offer a value-laden, conceptual distinction without actually making an argument. Ralph H. Johnson (2003), for example, questioned whether my previous article had wrongly regarded Johnson and Blair’s article (1980/1996) as an extended argument, without criticizing my main claim that they had used dissociation to differentiate informal logic from formal deductive logic and standard inductive logic. If Johnson is correct and I was examining dissociative reasoning rather than dissociative arguments, my article may have unfairly evaluated the dissociation they offered. The lesson to be learned is that the type of discourse must be determined before the dissociation can be evaluated appropriately. This is because if we treat non-argumentative discourse as argument, we will probably fail to evaluate the discourse fairly.
Finally, although dissociation is presented here as a scheme of argument or reasoning for subdividing a single entity into two, this does not exclude the possibility of dividing it into three or more. We can conceptually classify the world, for example, into ‘apparent’, ‘ real’, and ‘surreal’ worlds; if we succeed in this attempt, then the dissociation has, in fact, functioned to subdivide a single entity into three[iii]. Although these are key issues meriting further investigation, this article does not directly inquire into them, being limited to conceptual differentiation in dissociation. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Responding To Objections

• by: Ralph H. Johnson - University of Windsor

1. Background: The Intuition
One important aspect of our argumentative practice is responding to objections. There is a commonly expressed intuition about arguments to the effect that a good argument is one that can withstand strong objections. The idea can be found in such theorists as Perelman (1969), Johnstone Jr. (1978) and Meiland who puts the idea this way in his College Thinking: “The fundamental idea behind all argumentation is this: a possible reason that survives serious objections is a good reason for accepting the belief in question” (1981, p. 26). I will phrase the intuition this way: one key indicator that an argument is a good argument is that it can withstand serious objections. A series of comments follows.

Comment 1. This intuition makes it clear that an argument is an object that wants a response; it is out there in what Govier and I call argumentative space (Johnson, 1997; Govier, 1999). An argument may thus be viewed is an invitation … not just to draw an inference (Pinto, 2001), but perhaps equally as an invitation to respond with appropriate reasons that indicate why one will not accept the invitation. The arguer hopes for such responses. Why? Because these may help further clarify the issue and the arguer’s reasoning about it; and because they provide the arguer with a test of that argument (Johnson 2000, p. 161).
Comment 2. If it is correct to say that the arguer has indeed invited responses, then it seems the arguer has thereby incurred an obligation to respond to those responses. We need to clarify the nature and the source of the arguer’s (and respondent’s) obligations – I call them dialectical obligations. What is the nature and the source of such obligations?
Comment 3. This intuition also implicitly invokes a distinction between strong and weak objection. The test of the argument is a strong objection. The stronger the objection, the better the test. But exactly what makes for a strong objection? Indeed, just what is an objection? Govier (1999) takes up this question which has been largely left unaddressed in the scholarly literature. I don’t entirely agree with her position, for reasons I take up in the next comment. The point to be noted here is that Govier deserves credit for having raised this important question, which has received scant attention in the scholarly literature.
Comment 4. Though the intuition has been pitched in terms of an objection, its sense would be preserved if instead we were to substitute the word “criticism.” An argument is a good one if it can withstand strong criticism. But this leads directly to a question alluded to in the previous comment: Is there is a difference between an objection and a criticism? While my research indicates that theorists – Govier among them – tend to use these terms interchangeably, I believe that there is a distinction that can usefully be drawn but will not take up that issue here.[i]
Comment 5. It is obvious that the way the above intuition is a facon de parler. An argument cannot respond to an objection. Only an arguer can respond to an objection. What’s behind this intuition is that if the arguer can respond to an objection without having to change the argument in any essential respect, then the objection was weak and there is reason to think that the original argument was a itself a strong one. But what are the possible responses to an objection, and what constraints govern them? I shall say more about this shortly. Reflection on this intuition has brought to the fore the following series of important questions:

What is the nature and the source of our dialectical obligations?
What exactly is an objection?
What make for a strong objection?
Is there is a difference between a criticism and an objection?
What are the possible responses to an objection, and what factors determine the strength of a response to an objection?

Final Comment: For thousands of years, arguers have been engaged in practice of argumentation and must have dealt – if only at an intuitive or implicit level – with such questions. The strange thing is that there is very little in the scholarly literature about them. In this paper, I attempt to develop some conceptual apparatus for helping us to understand better one fundamental aspect of our argumentative practice which has thus far not been adequately studied: responding to an objection. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Who Is Afraid Of Emotion In Argument?

• by: Harald Wohlrapp - Universität Hamburg

Introduction
The relationship between emotion and argument can be found confusing. Normally we always feel something as we keep living and also as we are arguing and discussing. Does this matter for the course and the outcome of our argumentation? Does it interfere? Whenever we accept or refuse an argument or a conclusion emotion may have a certain influence. We all know that the judgement about a sentence as being right or wrong can be accompanied by something like a feeling of rightness or wrongness. Is this kind of feeling important for acceptance, is it essen­tial for it or is it the final grind of our intellectual understanding? Let me distinguish three pos­sible ways in which emotion can play a role for argumentation: Emotion instead of Argu­ment, Emotion as Argument, and Emotion in Argument.
For introduction I will present a few considerations about emotion instead of argument. We should be aware that this role is extremely important: During the past 1 ½ decades the world has seen seve­ral (more or less) democratic states waging war against several other (more or less) democratic states. Acceptance for a war waged by a democratic state has to be based on the reasoned consensus of the population majority; it has to be won by argument; and, as we all know, it was mainly won by arousal of emotion: 1990 it was pity with Kuwaiti premature babies, 1999 pity with Albanian refugees, 2001 anger about Afghanistan’s government, 2005 fear of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. At present the so called Atomic crisis with Iran is again a triggering of emotions against a state which counts as an “evil” state and could as such eventually be attacked in the end. As far as the mani­pulation of emotions via mass media is concerned the political class of today has learned its lesson from Hitler’s propaganda minister, Mr. Goebbels. This powerful and sophisticated playing on emotions is a fact which can cause sorrow and fear for the future of democracy on the globe. It is a shame and a danger that it works even in most important issues. Yet it poses no major theore­ti­cal problem. The theoretical problem arises when emotion interferes in a clearly argument­a­tive process.
In the following paper I will present some considerations about that problem. I will be concerned with the second and third of the above mentioned ways: In section 1. emotion as argument shall be tackled and in section 2. emotion in argument (or accompanying argument). Of course every treat­ment of the problem depends on what “argumentation” and what “e­mo­tion” means. Therefore one has to do (or to pick up) some conceptual work. As to “argu­men­ta­tion” I will very shortly sketch the approach which I have been developing with my research group in Ham­burg for 15 years. Concerning “emotion” I will mainly propose a difference bet­ween “raw emotion” and “elaborated emotion”. The first section will go into this difference, its motivation and its consequences. The result will be that raw emotion can never function as a real argument whereas elaborated can, if it is judged to be appropriate. The second section will take up some aspects of the general relationship between emotion and argument. Here I will consider the emotional quality of every orientation and then muse about the possibility that the ”unrefu­ted­ness” of a thesis on one hand and the insight into its meaning on the other can fall apart. As far as this maybe due to emotions viz. emotional attachments, the whole sy­stem of orientation and its continuation are at stake. This is where the ”principle of transsubjectivity” enters the stage.

1. Emotion as argument
The central question of this section is whether an emotion which is appealed to or which appears in an argumentative dialogue can function as a genuine argument.
(Intellectual) common sense usually excludes this possibility because emotion and argument are counterparts. Argumentation is verbal, public and rational, whereas emotion is sensual, private and irrational. There is a dualism between the two which is a component of the dualism between mind and body. Their messages are heterogeneous or even incommensurable. Despite this they happen to conflict with each other from time to time and then the dualism becomes an antagonism and calls for a hierarchy. Traditionally, of course, argument is superior to emotion, but this has lately been questi­oned in the humanities and for some authors the answer seems at least to be open (Goleman (1995)). Whether or not an emotion can function as a real argument has, however, not been de­cided so far. In order to approach this specific question let us have a closer look and take up some ex­amples. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Warranting Spiritual Reclamation In Chicana Literature

• by: Karen Rasmussen - California State University, Long Beach

“I am . . . a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds” (Anzaldua 1981, p. 205), “an American to Mexicans[,]/ a Mexican to Americans[,]/ a handy token/ sliding back and forth/ between the fringes of both worlds” (Mora 1985, p. 60). The life world described by Gloria Anzaldua and Pat Mora abounds in contradiction and complexity, for it is a borderlands situated at intersections among cultures. Anzaldua (1987) describes the Chicana, a woman of the American Southwest who straddles multiple cultures, as a mestiza carrying “five races on [her] back” (p.194) who manages tensions rooted in ethnicity, gender, and language (Flores 1996). Potentially mired in despair because she has “so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes [she] feels like . . . [she is] no one” (Anzaldua 1987, p. 63), she also can embrace a richness rife with complexity (Anzaldua 1981), thereby meeting the challenges of a liminal life.[i]

Chicana literature reflects this exigence as it simultaneously articulates an antidote to fragmentation and alienation. That Chicanas should address spirituality hardly is surprising, since religion, the “bridging, bonding process at the heart of things,” tends to “the wounds of breaking worlds” (Keller 1986, p. 47). The Catholicism that grounds religious practice in Chicana/o communities, however, privileges an image of women as “suffering, humble, and passive” (Leal 1983, p. 232). Viramontes (1985) explains the impact of this tradition:
We are raised to care for [ ] . . . to stick together, for the family unit is our only source of safety. Outside our home there lies a dominant culture that is foreign to us . . . and labels us illegal alien. But what may be seen as a nurturing, close unit may also become suffocating, manipulative, and sadly victimizing (p. 35).
This potential suppression stems from a religious tradition rooted in two patriarchal systems.

Catholicism, with its doctrine of apostolic succession, elevates the masculine. Similarly, Aztec culture stripped once-powerful goddesses of their positive import as it demonized the feminine (Anzaldua 1987). In both systems, then, “the male as warrior, . . . priest, and . . . progenitor . . . exercises power over women who are yielding, . . . submissive, . . . pure[,] and inaccessible.” The Aztecs associated the feminine with “fecundity and with death” while Christianity contrasted the “Holy Virgin” with “Eve the temptress” (Seator 1984, p. 27). Nevertheless, the indigenous and the Eurocentric also can ground a re-visioned spirituality through an Aztec legacy of powerful goddesses and the Christian tradition in which Mary’s “forgiveness, mercy, compassion, and reconciliation” signal her strength (Rodriguez 1996, p. 25).
This essay’s purpose is to illuminate the arguments Chicanas make as they advance a feminized spirituality. My thesis is that such re-vision is communal, sexual, and material. I first provide an orientation to the female figures who recur in literature of the late 20th century and then detail the way writers use these icons in warranting a re-vision of the spiritual.

1. Spiritual Foremothers
Chicanas utilize an array of female images of the divine. Central to what Castillo (1994) labels a Xicanista consciousness is the integration of Christian and native thought which reconfigures the spiritual for ordinary women. Mesoamerican and Eurocentric cosmologies thus merge in a perspective rooted in Chicana her-story, a story populated by Mesoamerican goddesses, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the bruja/ curandera.
Marcos (1995) contends that a “bi-polar duality” featuring “complementary” pairs “such as life and death, good and evil, . . . earth and sky” permeates Mesoamerican thought (p. 29). Because these binaries are fluid, fluctuating, and equal, Aztecs maintained balance by embracing opposites. Chicanas utilize the imagery of Aztec goddesses whose defining characteristic is the balanced duality necessary for harmony.
Dubbed “Serpent Skirt,” Coatlicue boasts “a human . . . or serpent . . . head, a necklace of human hearts, a skirt of twisted serpents[,] and taloned feet.” Simultaneously awe-inspiring and fearsome, she is “the earthmother who conceived all celestial beings. . . . Goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue gives and takes away life; she is the incarnation of cosmic processes” (Anzaldua 1987, pp. 26, 46). Tlazoteotl is “the patron of dust, filth, [and] adulterers/ promiscuous women” who wears unspun cotton and carries a broom, symbols of her power to create and cleanse (Rebolledo 1995, p. 50). A multifaceted goddess, she can change at will from seductress to redeemer. Tonantzin, who is both “our mother and mother of gods” (Castillo 1994, p. 111), has the power to “judge, create and destroy” (Rebolledo 1995, p. 52). Linked to the moon, as is Mary, she is goddess of crops and the land; hence, her association with the Virgin of Guadalupe hardly is surprising. When Mary appeared at Tepeyac, a hill close to Mexico City that was sacred to Tonantzin, the Catholic Church seized the opportunity to promote Catholicism through a familiar figure void of the power and balance characteristic of Aztec goddesses (Dicochea 2004). The church thus “desexed” Guadalupe by taking the “serpent/sexuality out of her” (Anzaldua 1987, p. 27). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – The Role Of A Third Party In Argumentative Discourse

• by: Vesel Memedi - South East European University

1. The Character of “audience” in argumentative discourse
The role of the audience in argumentation has been studied since the time of Aristotle, when he discussed “the various types of human character in relation to the emotions and moral states, to the several periods of life and the varieties of fortune” (Aristotle, Book II, pp. 131-32). The very division of modes of persuasion into ethos, pathos and logos implied that the arguments had to be fashioned in such a way that they would appeal to the audience to be persuaded. According to Ede (1984), Aristotle’s insights concerning persuasion and the behaviour of people in groups effectively swayed ensuing research on audience analysis in speech communication.
The term “audience” means different things to different scholars. According to Park (1982), an “audience” is the person or group of people to whom we try to adapt our speech or our writing. Writers aim at an audience and assess, define, internalize, construe, represent, imagine, characterize, invent, and evoke it (1982: 248). According to Park, all these verbs tell us that the audience can play different roles, depending on the situation. For Bitzer (1968) an “audience” is a defined presence outside the discourse with certain beliefs, attitudes, and relationships to the speaker or writer and to the situation that require the discourse to have certain characteristics in response. According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), an “audience” is defined “as the ensemble of those whom the speaker wishes to influence by his argumentation” (p.19).
Many scholars of various disciplines like Bakhtin (1986), Bitzer (1968), and Burke (1950) all pointed to the fact that discourses are always addressed to an audience. This idea that argumentation is always addressed to an audience is crucial to the rhetorical approach of the argumentation theorists Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca who claimed that all argumentation must be planned in relation to an audience: “A speech must be heard, as a book must be read” (p.40).
In order to determine what audience a discourse is directed at, one need to establish who the persons the speaker wishes to influence are: to whom is the claim presented? Is this particular group restricted to those who listen to the arguer’s speech or to those who read the argument? The answer to these questions varies from situation to situation. In some cases, a protagonist prepares an argument only for a group of persons who will actually be present during the presentation of his argument. This group of persons may then be the only one to whom the arguer directs the argument. In other cases, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca claim, the audience is more a mental image of the speaker than a group of people who are physically present to listen to a speech. It is important to bear in mind that the picture that speakers (or writers) have formed of their audience is always a construction of their own making.
It is thus possible to compose an argument for a wider group of persons than those physically present. A politician may, for instance, present a speech in a certain place but hope and expect that the media will report it more widely. In this case, the audience includes but is not confined to the members of this audience that is present during the speech. Sometimes a protagonist composes an argument and presents it to a particular group of people, but intends the argument to affect a section of that group only. In all these cases, the audience is not the person or group that actually hears or reads the argument, but consists of those persons for whom the argument is meant.[i]

From this illustration, therefore, we may infer that the term “audience” refers not just to the intended or actual listeners or readers of a discourse, but to all those whose image, ideas, or actions influence a speaker or writer during the process of composition (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). Here we are talking about a set of implied or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers or listeners. Ede and Lunsford (1984) call speeches for the two types of audience as “audience addressed” (physically present), and “audience invoked” (intended). Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004) recognize something similar when they talk about the “official antagonist and the listeners or readers who are the real target group” (p. 99). According to these authors, we have an audience that is directly addressed, or the actual audience, and an audience that is appealed to, or the intended audience.
In short, an argument is not always addressing one, single audience. Different understandings of an argument may address various audiences. According to Crosswhite (1996), “any argument must affect one or more audiences resulting in new ways of understanding and experiencing” (p.139). For Crosswhite, “influences run in all directions” (p.140). Recognizing the audience not only as a group of people who are physically addressed, but also as a group of people who are the real target group beyond those who are physically present listening or reading a particular speech or text, is of paramount importance for the analyst because of problems that might arise in reconstructing a particular argumentative discourse. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Arguments For Popular Audiences: Early U.S. Woman’s Rights Advocacy In The Lyceum Lectures Of Elizabeth Oakes Smith

• by: Angela G. Ray - Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, controversies roiled the United States. In the aftermath of the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the California Gold Rush, Americans debated the recently named doctrine of manifest destiny. In books, journals, and public speeches, abolitionists and proslavery advocates challenged and defended the morality and legitimacy of slavery and its extension into western territories; nativist Protestants expressed fears of European immigrants, particularly Catholics from Ireland and Germany; and temperance activists continued their decades-long efforts to control or abolish intoxicating liquors. At a time of profound change in transportation and communication technologies, in patterns of migration, and in customs of work and leisure, Americans also argued about gender roles. This paper explicates one site for the production of arguments about gender, the popular public lecture, and illuminates the rhetorical challenges faced by those who rejected a necessary correlation between biological sex and individual capacity.
Although many women and men had long advocated women’s equal access to education, their right to control property, and their right to speak publicly about moral causes, it was at a public meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 that a more formal, more coherent movement on behalf of American women began. This new woman’s rights movement emerged directly from the organized efforts for the abolition of slavery, as abolitionist women had repeatedly found themselves restricted from public action owing to their sex. Adherents of the new woman’s rights movement called for women’s legal, political, religious, educational, occupational, and social equality with men.

Arguments both for and against an expansion of American women’s opportunities circulated in the media of the time – in newspapers and magazines, in conversations and sermons and legislative addresses, in poems and novels and popular lectures. Opposing arguments were powerful, often expressed by individuals with considerable cultural and economic capital. For example, in the early 1850s a prolific Methodist clergyman, Daniel Wise, published an advice manual for young women, clearly articulating a common belief in gendered realms of action. He wrote, “Everything has its appointed sphere, within which alone it can flourish. Men and women have theirs . . . . Man is fitted for the storms of public life . . . . Woman is formed for the calm of home” ([185-], pp. 91-92). Wise continued with a warning to women: “She may venture . . . to invade the sphere of man, but she will encounter storms which she is utterly unfitted to meet; happiness will forsake her breast, her own sex will despise her, men will be unable to love her, and when she dies she will fill an unhonored grave” (p. 92). Similar attitudes were heard on public lecture platforms. Richard Henry Dana Sr., a Harvard-educated poet and critic, asserted in a popular lecture in the 1840s that a “law” of sex difference grounded appropriate roles for men and women and that the acceptance of women’s public action would destroy the future of humanity, creating “a race of moral and mental hybrids” (n.d., 19). Although the educational reformer Horace Mann publicly supported increased opportunities for women’s education in the 1850s, he forecast pernicious consequences if women became involved in political strife (Ray 2006, p. 191). Such examples illustrate the argumentative obstacles faced by those who would support contrary positions: not only did the premise of natural or divinely created gender roles present a refutative challenge, forcing one either to argue against nature and God or to reinterpret natural phenomena and scriptural precedent, but a woman who chose to engage in public argument on this question also faced a profound problem of reception: her act of adopting the persona of an arguer could be seen to provide evidence for her opponents’ claims. Rhetorical scholar Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has described the woman public speaker as an oxymoron, and that figure of paradox was rarely embodied as starkly as in the mid-nineteenth century (1973, 1999).

Early U.S. woman’s rights advocates faced such challenges in a variety of ways, often offering biblical evidence to refute claims of women’s inferiority or generating political arguments based on principles of liberal democracy and especially on the nation’s founding documents. Many performed femininity in conventional ways, through dress and comportment, seeking to refute the prevailing assumption that, as activist Paulina Wright Davis described it, “all women’s rights women are horrid old frights with beards and mustaches” (1852b). Rhetorical strategies varied depending on the specific purpose, the audience, and the context, of course. Early activists attempted to create movement ideologies and rally adherents to those principles, and they addressed state legislatures to present grievances and to call for legal redress (Campbell 1989, 1:1-69, 2:33-186). Woman’s rights supporters also sought to sway public opinion, to express alternative visions of gender roles, to allay fears, and to inspire new ways of thinking and acting. In the early days of the organized movement, a few woman’s rights activists traveled throughout the country – especially the Northeast and what is now called the Midwest – addressing audiences in public halls, churches, and commercial lecturing venues like lyceums and literary societies. Only a few women became popular lecturers before the Civil War, for the strength of social pressures opposing women’s speaking in public was profound. Social norms dictated that women’s voices on public platforms could be heard reading or singing the words of men, but women speaking in instructional and argumentative modes were often deemed unnatural (Ray 2006).

It was in this milieu that Elizabeth Oakes Smith began to deliver popular lectures supporting an expansion of women’s opportunities and responsibilities.[i] Oakes Smith was unusual among woman’s rights advocates of the early 1850s, having come to public advocacy not through a formal association with the abolitionist movement but as a popular poet and novelist. A native of Maine with a Puritan and Unitarian heritage, Oakes Smith was married at age sixteen to Seba Smith, a writer and newspaper editor twice her age, and she reared four sons who lived to adulthood. Oakes Smith began publishing poetry and articles in the 1820s, but it was only after Seba Smith’s failed land speculations combined with the economic panic of 1837 that she began to publish prolifically. During the 1840s she became a well-known author, and her poem The Sinless Child of 1842 was admired by Edgar Allan Poe and likely provided the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character of Little Eva in her antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Oakes Smith also published novels based on Indian folklore and spiritualist belief. In 1839 she had heard the controversial Scottish heiress and freethinker Fanny Wright lecture in New York and was captivated by Wright’s platform manner, style, and radical ideas. During the 1840s Oakes Smith was increasingly drawn to public advocacy, and from November 1850 to June 1851 Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune published a series of ten articles by Oakes Smith collectively titled Woman and Her Needs, which circulated as a pamphlet in 1851 (Belasco 2001; Nickels & Scherman 1994; Scherman 1998, 2001). Read more