SOURCE: Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Style and Content in the Rhetoric of Early Afro-American Feminists.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (November 1986): 434-45.

[In the following excerpt from a rhetorical analysis of the speeches of Sojourner Truth, Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, Campbell points out that Wells-Barnett's style shares many aspects of similar speeches by other reformers but that she disdained traditional “feminine” modes of rhetoric.]

Afro-American women, in addition to the special problems arising out of slavery, historically faced the same problems as all other women. Married, they were dead civilly; unmarried, they were dependents with few possibilities for self support; regardless of marital and socio-economic status, they were oppressed by the cult of true womanhood, which declared that true women were pure, pious, domestic, and submissive.¹ As a result, even free Afro-Americans in the North prior to the Civil War confronted the same proscriptions against speaking in public as their middle-class white counterparts, and when they spoke, they were censured.²

It is not surprising, then, that Afro-American women's rhetoric from the 1830s to 1925, the period usually accepted as that of the earlier United States feminist movement, should present problems for the rhetorical critic. Sometimes these Afro-American women rhetors can be viewed as part of the tradition of early women's rhetoric, sometimes they differ from that tradition in style, sometimes in content.³ I shall argue that a simultaneous analysis and synthesis is thus necessary in order to understand these similarities and differences, and I shall illustrate convergences and divergences through speeches made by Sojourner Truth, by Ida B. Wells, and by Mary Church Terrell. …

IDA B. WELLS

Many Afro-American women were involved in efforts for woman suffrage, because they saw the vote as a means to fight for their own cause, particularly against segregationist legislation that denied Afro-Americans continued participation in or entry into American life. Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell were part of this group. Wells, for example, founded the first Afro-American woman suffrage club, and Church Terrell spoke at National American Woman Suffrage Association Conventions and at the International Council of Women in Berlin between 1898 and 1905.⁴ However, their primary concerns were the problems of Afro-Americans, especially the practice of lynching. The conjunction between the concerns of Afro-American and white women is clearest in their common cause on the issue of lynching.

Ida B. Wells's speech, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” delivered in 1892, stands as a counterpoint to two more frequently studied rhetorical events.⁵ On December 22, 1886, Henry Grady, a prominent white southern journalist delivered a speech on “The New South” to the New England Society of New York City at its annual banquet.⁶ Wells referred to Grady's speech and made explicit the fact that her speech was intended to be a dramatic refutation of the picture of the South that Grady had painted. Three years after Wells began her anti-lynching campaign, Booker T. Washington was invited to address the opening of the Cotton States' Exposition at Atlanta, Georgia, on September 18, 1895.⁷ Washington addressed a mixed audience of white and Afro-Americans and articulated the view that southerners of both races could cooperate in all things economic while remaining socially separated. His gradualist views were in contrast to those of W. E. B. Du Bois, who demanded full legal equality and economic opportunity. Wells's speech makes clear that she sided with Du Bois and, like him, she was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In fact, Wells's calls for economic boycotts and armed self-defense would have been congenial to Black Power advocates of the 1960s.

Wells's speech is important as a historical document and as the initiating event in what became a social movement; as a rhetorical work, it is noteworthy in three respects. First, as in her writings, she used evidence and argument in highly sophisticated ways, ways that prevented members of the audience from dismissing her claims as biased or untrue. Second, the speech was an insightful and sophisticated analysis of the interrelationship of sex, race, and class. Third, in contrast to the rhetorical acts of other women, this speech contained no stylistic markers indicating attempts by a woman speaker to appear “womanly” in what is perceived as a male role—that of rhetor.

Wells's use of evidence and argument had to overcome severe obstacles. She had to refute the cultural history of sexism that made the cry of rape (of a white woman) adequate justification for violence against Afro-Americans.⁸ She had to show that lynchings were frequent and that rape was not even alleged in a majority of cases. She had to draw this evidence from unimpeachable sources, and she had to use the statements of whites to reveal the real motives behind these acts.

The evidence Wells presented was part of a carefully constructed case. Initially, she argued: “White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.” Some seventeen relatively detailed examples were presented in support of this claim. The detailed examples allowed her audience to weigh the evidence and consider its plausibility, and the fact that much of it came from the public press, in some cases from white southern newspapers, added to the credibility of her accounts. She left her audience in no doubt that real human beings were caught in lethal dilemmas again and again throughout the South, and emotional response was prompted by the argument of these details rather than by exhortation.

Her argument revealed the terrible double standard: “[I]t is not the crime but the class,” she said, referring to the fact that when the victims were Afro-American women, no protection was afforded, no avenging was needed. Once again, her proof was a series of six dramatic examples intended to show that there was no concern to protect Afro-American women or female children or to punish those who assaulted them. Hence, if the reason for lynching was not the protection of white womanhood, some other motive was at work. Wells argued that lynching was done to control Afro-Americans—lynching was political, with the allegation of rape used as justification. She first pointed to the other forms of control that were then widespread throughout the South, the “Jim Crow” laws that had been passed since the 1875 Civil Rights Act had been declared unconstitutional in 1883.⁹ Wells noted that, despite these other forms of control, lynching had increased. Here she used evidence gathered by a northern white newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, to document with statistics the extent of the problem and the fact that, in only one-third of the cases, was rape even alleged.

She then cited two editorials from white newspapers in Memphis. The first quotation embodied the mythology of the bestial Afro-American rapist, despite the fact that no incidents supporting that mythology had occurred in the city of Memphis, the source of the editorial. The second editorial made explicit the intent to coerce submission through violence. It was a classic statement of the view that “uppity Negroes” should be punished violently.

Wells went on to describe the 1892 lynching in Memphis about which she had written and for which her life had been threatened. This particular lynching, occasioned by economic competition, became a paradigmatic case of lynching throughout the South. Wells concluded by stating that all who disapproved of lynching and remained silent became accessories, because lynch mobs would not persist if their members knew that the forces of law and order would be used against them. Throughout this argument there was a strong appeal to fundamental values of fairness, to the right to trial by jury, and to the right to full and careful investigation of crimes, appeals that added weight to her accusation that silent bystanders were guilty of complicity.

Wells concluded that, given the legal protection or redress, Afro-Americans had to turn to self-help. They had to learn the facts of such cases for themselves in order to judge what the truth was. Such cases called for investigative reporting such as her own. They had to use economic boycotts to demand appropriate legal action against lynchers, and they needed to arm themselves to act in self-defense to prevent mob violence. Here, too, examples were used, including that of Memphis where a boycott in response to the 1892 lynching had had some effect, although not enough to force action against the lynchers, all of whose names were known. Two examples where lynchings were prevented by armed self-defense were noted but not detailed. Wells ended by proposing that these three solutions in concert could solve the problem, that is, stamp out lynch law.

Wells made a carefully constructed case that rested on kinds of evidence that made the problem vivid, demonstrated its scope, supported the speaker's analysis of its causes, and suggested the futility of alternative solutions. Wells understood the kind of problem she faced. Given the general acceptance of the mythology that lynching was caused by sexual assaults on white women, Wells knew that her audience would find it hard to believe her. The evidence was carefully selected to prevent such a response. Hearers and readers encountered case after case that challenged that casual assumption. They learned the statistical facts from a white northern newspaper. They heard the mythology and the political coercion out of the mouths of the editors of newspapers in the very town from which Wells had been driven. Wells was calling into question her audience's prior beliefs and opening their minds to future evidence.

The soundness, indeed the power of Wells's analysis of the relationship of sex, race, and class in the phenomenon of lynching, is attested to by the fact that her conclusions recurred in the resolutions, declarations, and speeches of southern white women. What follows is not a story of interracial cooperation, but of the convergence of the concerns of Afro-American and white women.

In response to the lynching of an Afro-American farm laborer named George Hughes, a Texas suffragist named Jessie Daniel Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) in 1930.¹⁰ The goals of this all-white group were to find practical ways to prevent lynchings, to convince southern white women that lynching posed a threat to their own interests, and to use the women so persuaded to arouse public opinion against this crime. Regarding the ASWPL's beginnings, Ames wrote:

We began our work under adverse conditions. The year 1930 was not a propitious one in which to open an attack on this problem of lynching. Fear of the future and a definite hopelessness in the present prevailed throughout the country. In the South nerves were especially on edge in regard to the race question. Politicians, avid for votes, were stirring up racial antagonisms which had lain more or less dormant since the high year of the Ku Klux Klan. Fear of “social equality” and demands for “jobs for white men before Negroes” were breeding secret organizations to uphold white supremacy. Lynchings had reached a new high level by that November of 1930. Publicity given to the crimes out of which so many lynchings are alleged to grow confirmed lynchers and their sympathizers that the mob provided white women the only protection of which they could be sure.¹¹

The approach of the ASWPL was obviously rhetorical; indeed, they did not support federal anti-lynching legislation. After one year's work, the leaders decided that, given public opinion, more information on the causes of lynching was needed, and they directed their research efforts toward responding to the typical questions and objections raised by their audiences. Like their earlier counterparts, these women rhetors aroused hostility. Ames reported that in some states, keen resentment was expressed “against women assuming leadership in an open educational program to eradicate lynching, on the grounds that it reflected upon the judgment and the gallantry of the Southern men who had fought and survived the War Between the States. The best way to take care of this, the women believed, was not to argue, but to increase the number of women willing to undertake to speak against lynching.”¹² Women like Ames gathered information, but still faced obstacles. In Ames's words, “We were confronted by the delicate problem of how to use them [the facts] to convince our audiences instead of alienating them,” since women who lived where lynching had been committed would be in the audience and since some of the men affiliated with those women might have been members of a lynch mob. Moreover, she wrote, “We knew that they believed the stories which had appeared in the press. Yet, we must ask them to accept for truth what we said even though we contradicted the stories of men whom they loved and trusted.”¹³

The ASWPL developed three claims. The first, and the most important, rejected the major justification for lynching: that only the threat of immediate retribution stood between the white women of the South and the lust of the Afro-American rapist. Like Wells and the NAACP, the ASWPL attacked this false claim with facts: Rape was overwhelmingly an intraracial event; in only a small percentage of lynchings was the victim even alleged to have made a sexual assault.¹⁴ The claim that lynching was necessary to protect white women, they argued, was used to mask the economic exploitation and sadism out of which mob violence really sprang.

The second claim was that publicity about lynching throughout the world brought contempt upon the United States and upon the Christian religion. From the outset of Wells's campaign against lynching, Americans were sensitive to criticism from abroad, and the ASWPL warned that the reputation gained from lynching created “a fertile field for … communistic doctrines subversive of American democracy at home” and frustrated missionary efforts abroad.

The third claim insisted that lynching discredited legal processes and undermined respect for officers of the law, lessening the ability of established authority to maintain law and order. According to the original ASWPL anti-lynching resolution: “Instead of deterring irresponsible and criminal classes from further crime, as it is argued, lynching tends inevitably to destroy all respect for law and order.”¹⁵

The ASWPL recognized that lynching had its roots in the very nature of white supremacy. At the annual meeting in 1934, the members adopted this resolution:

We declare as our deliberate conclusion that the crime of lynching is a logical result in every community that pursued the policy of humiliation and degradation of a part of its citizenship because of accident of birth; that exploits and intimidates the weaker element … for economic gain; that refuses equal educational opportunity to one portion of its children; that segregates arbitrarily a whole race in unsanitary, ugly sections; … and finally that denies a voice in the control of government to any fit and proper citizen because of race.¹⁶

The information gathered and the arguments made by the ASWPL were not new, but their speeches and literature simplified and reiterated the work of other reformers and made it comprehensible to the relatively uneducated and palatable to the people of the rural South. However, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall concluded:

Most significantly it shaped its rhetoric in accord with specifically feminine interests and assumptions. … Lynching, they maintained, far from offering white women an indispensable shield against sexual assault, in fact made them pawns in a deadly masculine conflict and hedged them about with an exaggerated myth of female vulnerability and dependence. … In the context of a period and a region profoundly inhospitable to feminist protest, they articulated and acted upon a sense of group identity, registering a significant, if muted, protest against the cultural shibboleths of their time. In all these endeavors, ASWPL members held proudly to the image of the southern lady, while at the same time seeking to remake that image according to their own definition of responsible womanhood. In this sense, Jessie Daniel Ames led a revolt against chivalry that was part of a long process of both sexual and racial emancipation.¹⁷

The ASWPL was not, as I have noted, a case of interracial cooperation, but of an issue over which the concerns of Afro-Americans and white women converged. As Dowd Hall recognized in the title of her book, the women of the ASWPL were revolting against chivalry, against the constraints placed on southern white women by the “woman-belle ideal.” They were also horrified by mob violence and refused to allow conceptions of white womanhood to be used to rationalize such conduct. That their analysis coincided with that made earlier by Wells testifies to Wells's understanding of the dynamics of sexism and racism.

Wells's speech was a well-made case. It was also a cogent analysis of the interrelationship of sex and race. However, in striking contrast to most other early feminist rhetoric, Wells's speech contains few indicators or markers of “femininity” or “womanliness.” There was and is a “feminine style” or a mode of address that is consistent with traditional norms of femininity. Such a style has certain characteristics. They include modes of accommodation used by oppressed groups to adapt to their oppressors and means of persuasion responsive to the special conditions and experiences of the oppressed. The most elegant example of this mode of discourse is found in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.¹⁸

Structurally, “feminine” rhetoric is inductive, even circuitous, moving from example to example, and is usually grounded in personal experience. In most instances, personal experience is tested against the pronouncements of male authorities (who can be used for making accusations and indictments that would be impermissible from a woman) and buttressed by limited amounts of statistical evidence demonstrating that personal experience is not atypical. Because of their “natural piety,” women may appeal to biblical authority. Metaphors and figurative analogies are frequent, as these prompt participation from the audience, which generates self-persuasion. Rhetorical questions, seeking audience assent to what is shared or obvious, are frequently used. Consistent with their allegedly poetic and emotional natures, women tend to adopt associative, dramatic, and narrative modes of development, as opposed to deductive forms of organization. The tone tends to be personal and somewhat tentative, rather than objective or authoritative. The persona tends to be traditionally feminine, like that of teacher, mediator, or layperson, rather than that of expert, leader, preacher, or judge. Strategically, women who use this style will seek ways to reconcile femininity with the traditional “masculinity” of public discourse. A “womanly” speaker tends to plead, to appeal to the sentiments of the audience, to “court” the audience by being “seductive.”

While peculiarly adapted to the conditions of women, this mode of discourse is suitable for both male and female audiences.¹⁹ The style that is “feminine” has many of the characteristics of the “consciousness raising” that has been a central part of the contemporary feminism.²⁰ Generally, women have perceived themselves in ways that precluded them from functioning as audiences or agents of change.²¹ At its best, “feminine” style can be empowering, a way of speaking to those who work in crafts taught largely through personal experience, who are usually separated from one another, and whose concerns are excluded from the channels of public discourse. In other words, it can be a way to address women consistent with traditional female experience and modes of learning. It is also a style that invites female audiences to act, to draw their own conclusions and make their own decisions, in contrast to a traditionally “masculine” style that approaches the audience as inferiors to be told what is right or to be led.²²

What is astonishing about Wells's speech is that, with the exception of her reliance on the example, almost none of these stylistic markers appear. The language of the speech was blunt, as for example, when she quoted what she had written: “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” As indicated above, the structure was deductive. The tone is authoritative, at times, even sarcastic. Her claims were clearly stated, and although the Memphis example came from her personal experience, she did not present it as her personal experience—it was a paradigmatic case to be examined objectively. The analogies were literal, and metaphors were not used. The single exception was a comparison of Afro-American men to Samsons tempted by white Delilahs! Wells spoke as an authority and as a leader who could determine the right courses of action, as illustrated by her conclusion. She spoke impersonally; the pronoun “I” appeared only when she asserted her claims. She used white male newspaper editors as authorities, but only in ways that were damaging to them. She was willing to speak the accusations, to make the indictments, in her own voice. The speech is replete with such assertions as, “There is little difference between the Ante-bellum and the New South.” Quite simply, there is nothing in this speech to indicate that it was given by a woman, and as such, it is an astonishing rhetorical work, for this period or for any other.²³

Notes

1. Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976).

2. The similarity of the conditions faced by white and Afro-American women at the outset of U.S. women's rhetorical history is illustrated by the case of Maria W. Stewart, an Afro-American, who was the first U.S. woman to give a public lecture. See Maria W. [Miller] Stewart, “Why Sit Ye Here and Die,” in Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Woman ed. Judith Fetterley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 65-9. That speech, as well as her farewell address of 1833, give strong indications of the hostility she faced. Material from her farewell can be found in Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), pp. 157-58. The text of another speech, “African Rights and Liberty,” delivered on February 27, 1833, in the African Masonic Hall of Boston, is found in Outspoken Women ed. Judith Anderson (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1984), pp. 169-73.

3. The relationship between the early and contemporary feminist movements and Afro-American women is the subject of a number of important works, including Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, (New York: Random House, 1981); Tracey A. Fitzgerald, The National Council of Negro Women and the Feminist Movement, 1935-1975, The Georgetown Monograph in American Studies (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1985); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Bell Hooks, Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Howard University, 1977.

4. Church Terrell's views of woman suffrage are summarized in “The Justice of Woman Suffrage,” The Crisis, 22 (September 1912); reprinted in The Crisis, 90 (June/July 1983), p. 6. The story of Wells's life is told in Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See also Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers: Three Lives (Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1979) for brief biographies of Wells and Church Terrell, and Giddings, pp. 17-31, who recounts the stories of the early efforts of Wells and Church Terrell and links the events in their lives. Church Terrell's autobiography is cited below.

5. “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1892; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. 4-19.

6. The text of the speech comes from Proceedings of the New England Society (Year Book) 1886 as reprinted in Henry W. Grady, His Life, Writings and Speeches ed. Joel Chandler Harris (Cassell Company, 1890), pp. 83-93.

7. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Up From Slavery (New York: Doubleday Page, 1901), pp. 217-25.

8. See, particularly, “The Function and Mythology of Lynching” in Donald L. Grant, The Anti-Lynching Movement: 1883-1932 (San Francisco: R and E Associates, 1975), pp. 1-19. See also the 1901 exchange between Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views, ed. Bettina Aptheker (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977).

9. For a history of Civil Rights legislation and decisions, including the history of segregation, see Constance Baker Motley, “The Legal Status of the Negro in the United States,” in The American Negro Reference Book ed. John P. Davis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 484-521.

10. The Story of the ASWPL and of the life of its leader, Jessie Daniel Ames, is told by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). I am indebted to Dowd Hall's work for the material presented here on the ASWPL.

11. Jessie Daniel Ames, “Southern Women Look at Lynching,” pamphlet printed by the ASWPL, Atlanta, Georgia, February 1937, p. 4.

12. Ames, p. 6.

13. Ames, p. 8.

14. According to the information gathered by the ASWPL, only 16.7٪ of those lynched between 1889 and 1930 and only 16.1٪ of those lynched between 1931 and 1941 were accused of rape. See Jessie Daniel Ames, The Changing Character of Lynching, Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Atlanta, July 1942, p. 6. Cited by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘A Truly Subversive Affair’: Women Against Lynching in the Twentieth-Century South,” in Women of America: A History ed. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1978), p. 388. See also Ida B. Wells, “A Red Record,” originally published in 1895, in On Lynchings. My analysis of the major ASWPL arguments is drawn from Dowd Hall, “‘A Truly Subversive Affair,’” pp. 370-74.

15. Ames, cited by Dowd Hall, “‘A Truly Subversive Affair,’” p. 373.

16. Ames, cited by Dowd Hall, “‘A Truly Subversive Affair,’” p. 380.

17. Dowd Hall, “‘A Truly Subversive Affair,’” p. 382-83.

18. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, (New York: Harbinger, 1929).

19. For a rhetorical analysis showing how “feminine” style can be used effectively for male audiences, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Stanton's ‘The Solitude of Self’ A Rationale for Feminism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66 (1980), 304-12.

20. Consciousness-raising has played a significant role in a variety of protest movements, ranging from the use of testimony in the U.S. civil rights movement to “speaking pain” in the Maoist revolution in China. For the characteristics of consciousness-raising as a rhetorical style, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Femininity and Feminism: To Be or Not To Be A Woman,” Communication Quarterly, 31 (1983), 105-07.

21. Jo Freeman, “The Building of the Gilded Cage,” in K. K. Campbell, Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric (Belmont, CA: Wadworth, 1972), pp. 165-66, cites studies of women's self-perceptions done in the 1950s that demonstrate extremely negative self-images, including notions of passivity. Presumably contemporary feminism has begun to alter such self-perceptions.

22. Richard Nixon's first inaugural address is a cogent example of self-absorbed, masculinist rhetoric. Robert L. Scott calls attention to Nixon's excessive and inappropriate use of the pronoun “I” in “Rhetoric That Postures: An Intrinsic Reading of Richard M. Nixon's Inaugural Address,” Western Speech, 34 (1970), 47.

23. There are other examples of early women's rhetoric that contain almost no marks of “feminine” style; for example, Susan B. Anthony, “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” in An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony (Rochester, NY: Daily Democrat and Chronicle Book Print, 1874), pp. 151-78.