ERIC Number: EJ763792
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007-Feb
Pages: 26
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0033-5630
EISSN: N/A
The Rhetorical Ritual of Citizenship: Women's Voting as Public Performance, 1868-1875
Ray, Angela G.
Quarterly Journal of Speech, v93 n1 p1-26 Feb 2007
During the Reconstruction era, hundreds of disenfranchised women throughout the United States attempted to register and to vote, performing a participatory argument in an ongoing public controversy about the parameters of the polity. As rhetorical rituals, these women's voting efforts displayed an alternative social order and illuminated the normative practices of citizenship as profoundly gendered. Whereas suffragists' legal rationales for direct action laid claim to citizenship as a universalist category, the intelligibility of the rituals relied on the specificity of cultural conventions. These public performances thus dramatically showcased the power and the limitations of appropriation as a strategy of protest. (Contains 88 notes.)
Descriptors: United States History, Females, Voting, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Social Influences, Social Change, Social Bias, Gender Bias, Cultural Influences, Activism
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United States
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A