Page 27 →Two “To Strive by Their Example”
Invoking Exemplary Women in Public Speech
In September 1833, Maria W. Stewart gave her last public speech to a mixed-gender audience in Boston. Stewart lamented having to fend off the many “fiery darts of the devil,” let loose by those aiming to silence her Black female voice. Posing the rhetorical question, “What if I am a woman?” Stewart sharply defended her right to speak. She built her argument, in part, by identifying exemplary women from Israelite Queen Esther to Egyptian prophetesses, then declaring, “If such women as are here described have once existed, be no longer astonished, then, my brethren and friends, that God at this eventful period should raise up your own females to strive by their example, both in public and private, to assist those who are endeavoring to stop the strong current of prejudice that flows so profusely against us at present.”1 Stewart’s invocation of female exemplars in this speech illustrates a powerful yet poorly understood rhetorical strategy of Black women speakers pursuing a place in public discourse and preserving space in public memory. Although Stewart used exemplars to criticize audience members who would limit Black women’s agency, including these women in her speech also contributed to a public record of women’s historical significance. Stewart performed community memory work by adding more women to a “storehouse of memory” from which future Black women could draw inspiration.
This chapter examines how Black American women speakers strategically deployed exemplary women in their public speeches and thereby engaged in memory work centering the needs and deeds of Black women. To Page 28 →showcase their rhetorical choices and their implications for memory, I take a contextually oriented thematic approach to highlight how the rhetorical choices of Black women speakers changed from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Specifically, I examine the different types of female exemplars invoked by those women, how the exemplars function rhetorically, and how changing audiences and circumstances constrained the women’s choices. Black women’s rhetorical strategies appear to have shifted gradually during this period in response to their degree of access to public discourse, the evolving and intersecting constraints of race and gender norms, and the insidious adaptations of White supremacy in the United States. In the antebellum period, when Black women’s public words were beginning to be recorded, they invoked historical and biblical women of all racial identities to assert themselves within White- and male-dominated spaces. During Reconstruction and beyond, Black women drew from among their own ranks to provide evidence of their good character and accomplishments and to preserve memories of Black women for future generations. The strategy of publicly deploying Black women exemplars, in particular, constituted a significant form of community memory work, whereby Black women rhetors began to build a storehouse of Black women’s memories. Black American women were able to make savvy use of exemplars, in part, because doing so was a familiar practice to US audiences. That familiarity also made exemplars effective vehicles for smuggling radical ideas into conservative spaces, thereby enhancing the potential for future activism.
Teachers and public figures have used exemplary individuals to instruct pupils and audiences for generations, yet the rhetorical implications of this commonplace practice have not been fully investigated. Furthermore, when it is theorized, exemplarity is typically approached as a pedagogical or religious practice rather than a rhetorical strategy, although it has both persuasive and publicly salient features. This chapter shows how Black American women have used exemplars as a deliberate rhetorical strategy to insert Black women insistently into public memory and offer evidence of past action and capacity for future action. As a rhetorical strategy, the use of exemplars also constitutes an important tool for both critical and community memory work. Stewart’s 1833 speech illustrates how exemplars can be deployed critically, to challenge patriarchal memories that erase the contributions of women. In other instances, we can observe exemplars used in service to the Black community, especially when Black women are identified as virtuous models. Synthesizing scholarship on exemplarity and imitation with Black feminist perspectives, I examine public speeches by Page 29 →women such as Stewart, Mary V. Cook, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sojourner Truth that cite historical and contemporary women as examples. These speakers invoked exemplary women from Scripture, secular histories, and, later, from their own ranks of “race women” to gain a hearing from diverse audiences, bolster their ethos, defuse resistance to challenging ideas, and invite audiences to identify with others unlike themselves. I argue that, while their use of exemplars performed these rhetorical functions, it also performed community and critical memory work by reinforcing the relationships of Black women across time, adding Black women to a growing storehouse of memory, and inserting Black women into the public record. Such work equipped Black women of the present and future to negotiate intersecting oppressions, work toward racial uplift, critique White feminism, and enact advocacy and activism.
Exemplars as a Black Feminist Rhetorical Strategy
In this chapter, I read the specific discursive strategy of exemplars within the broader contextual fields of Black women’s memory work and the Black feminist tradition, as well as scholarship on exemplars and imitation. The women whose words I discuss in this chapter lived before the wider uptake of the term “feminist” by Black women. Yet the ways in which these Black women speakers deployed exemplars resonate with the Black feminist tradition, as articulated by contemporary scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins, Brittney Cooper, and Jennifer Nash.2 In the words of Regis Mann paraphrasing Ann DuCille, “nineteenth-century black women activists always reached up, anticipating contemporary black feminist concerns around the politics of intersectionality, understanding the experiential as epistemological, [and] building coalition across racial and gender lines.”3 These historical women, to various degrees, manifested commitments to Black feminist ideas, as described by Nash, by centering “analyses of racialized sexisms” and foregrounding “black women as intellectual producers, as creative agents, as political subjects, and as ‘freedom dreamers’ even as the content and contours of those dreams vary.”4 As Nash furthermore noted, Black feminists engage actively with accounts of the past. Black feminist theory is invested in “a rich and political counterhistory, one that draws on memory—personal, collective, or embodied—to demand an ethical reckoning with past and present.”5 Black women speakers’ use of exemplars both centers Black women’s actions and invites a critical engagement with the past.
Exemplars became a rich rhetorical resource for Black American women struggling to influence audiences, collect memories, and advocate Page 30 →for social change under the severe constraints of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speaking as they were from precarious social positions, Black American women used exemplars to negotiate racist and sexist structures with creativity and moral clarity. They deployed female exemplars not only to teach virtue or right action but also to accomplish specific rhetorical goals, such as defending the right of women to speak publicly or gaining recognition for women’s work in the Black church. These specific rhetorical goals dovetailed with Black women’s memory work writ large, as the repeated citation of female agents—especially Black female agents, in the later speeches examined here—built a storehouse of memory from which future generations could draw inspiration. By drawing attention to Black female agents of the past, these rhetors themselves became the “agents of knowledge” that Patricia Hill Collins described.6
To gain purchase for their arguments in the face of intersecting racism and sexism, Black women often couched their claims within conservative discourses, such as the ideals of True Womanhood and the politics of respectability. Barbara Welter described how the nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood” revered an ideal woman who exhibited the virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.7 Although Welter’s analysis focuses on the mid-nineteenth century, Black feminist literary critics have shown that the ideology of True Womanhood affected Black women throughout that century and into the 1920s. Because the “true woman” was assumed to be White, Black women occupied a precarious, even impossible, position in relation to virtuous womanhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Predominant racist stereotypes of Black women rendered them as sexually deviant and therefore perpetually available for exploitation by White men.8 To protect themselves and to counter these stereotypes, Black women developed specific strategies for self-representation. These strategies have been described by scholars as the “politics of silence”; the “culture of dissemblance”; and, most famously, the “politics of respectability.”9 Although the first two strategies were more directly concerned with preserving Black women’s sexual virtue and autonomy, the politics of respectability came to apply to more publicly visible appearances and actions. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham developed the concept of a politics of respectability to explain Black women’s activism in religious contexts. She argued that this politics “emphasized reform of individual behavior and attitudes as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations.”10 Invoking praiseworthy Page 31 →exemplary women enabled Black women to negotiate constraining discourses and ideologies, but doing so often also meant relying on ideals of respectability and Christian virtue.
Although the use of exemplars and their connection with rhetoric stretches back millennia, the exemplar has not often been considered as a rhetorical strategy for doing memory work. Teachers of rhetoric in the ancient Western world, such as Isocrates, Aristotle, and Quintilian, primarily used exemplars as a pedagogical tool to train students of rhetoric to develop good character and good habits of mind. The exemplar took on a decidedly religious bent during the Renaissance and early modern period, where it was used by writers of diplomatic letters, literary texts, religious works, and historical treatises.11 The idea of exemplarity fell out of favor during the modern period, as it came to be negatively associated with imitation and connotations of crude copying. However, it persevered in practice. As Jennifer A. Herdt explained, although “exemplarity did recede from theoretical consideration with the rise of modern moral philosophy,” exemplars themselves “never ceased to play an important role in ordinary life.”12 One need only observe the persistent popularity of biography collections and series over the past two millennia—from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans to Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies to the Bobbs-Merrill Company’s Childhood of Famous Americans series—to understand the enduring significance of exemplarity.
My understanding of exemplarity acknowledges its historical origins, especially the exemplar’s connection with rhetoric, and reframes the concept to focus on its role in memory work. I approach exemplarity as a rhetorical strategy through which participants in public discourse remember, reconstruct, and often revise the stories of actual, historical persons to deploy them for particular persuasive purposes. My conceptualization relies on literary scholar Timothy Hampton’s definition of the exemplar as “a kind of textual node or point of juncture, where a given author’s interpretation of the past overlaps with the desire to form and fashion readers.”13 Hampton’s case studies derive from Renaissance practices of exemplarity, yet his characterization highlights persistent features of the practice—specifically, its textuality, instrumentality, and interpretive nature—that are relevant for the analysis in this chapter. Most important, Hampton’s definition describes exemplars as an “interpretation of the past” crafted with the goal of influencing people in the present. Although, historically, exemplars have been used primarily to shape people’s character, I argue that they also Page 32 →function to “form and fashion” audiences’ understanding of the past. Exemplars incorporated into public speeches thus perform public memory work by presenting certain individuals as worthy of remembrance and emulation.
My treatment of exemplars as a tool for memory work is further informed by interdisciplinary scholarship on exemplars, including rhetoric scholar Kirt Wilson’s essay on the “racial politics of imitation,” and Africana Studies scholar Christel N. Temple’s concept of Black “hero dynamics.”14 Whereas scholarship on exemplarity from the fields of rhetoric, literature, philosophy, and education elucidates its form and function, Wilson’s and Temple’s works attend specifically to the racial dynamics of imitation and heroic narrative. Taken together, their scholarship illuminates how exemplars function and what makes them uniquely compelling for Black women speakers undertaking public memory work during this time period. First, exemplars possess an inherent ambiguity that can be used strategically by rhetors from marginalized groups to covertly advocate social transformation. Exemplars are, thus, an important rhetorical resource for rhetors seeking to persuade more powerful individuals while mitigating the risks of potential punishment. Second, exemplars invite imitation of particular, contingent virtues rather than abstract, general principles, which encourages thoughtful emulation rather than uncritical copying by listeners. Finally, exemplars possess a distinctive rhetorical power when deployed by African Americans, because of their role within a reclaimed Black practice of imitation and an African-centered philosophy of heroism.
In the first place, the rhetorical power of exemplars derives, in part, from their inherent ambiguity. Because they draw on the complex and ambiguous materials of human lives, exemplars contain the possibility for multiple—and sometimes conflicting—interpretations by listeners. As Samuel McCormick has argued, exemplars constitute a “linguistic device for introducing ambiguity into any given rhetorical situation, and in so doing open up possibilities for political judgment and social transformation.”15 McCormick’s reading of exemplars as a “strategic resource of ambiguity” relies on Leah Ceccarelli’s theorization of polysemy. According to Ceccarelli, strategic ambiguity is a type of polysemy—or multiple meanings—used deliberately by a rhetor to elicit a positive response from two different audiences whose interpretations might conflict.16
The strategic ambiguity of exemplars makes them especially valuable to rhetors speaking from severely constrained social locations. Exemplars offer two intertwined advantages to such rhetors: First, they shield those individuals from powerful figures by appearing to uphold hierarchy and Page 33 →social convention; and, second, they enable rhetors to covertly advocate for new or controversial ideas among those with ears to hear. In his analysis of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 letter to the Queen of France, for instance, Mc-Cormick noted that exemplars have allowed women to speak despite the constraints of gendered decorum and social position. McCormick argued that Christine de Pizan’s “rhetoric of exemplary figures enables her to confront the queen with potentially offensive advice, without in turn violating established codes of deference.”17 The exemplar’s strategic ambiguity, Mc-Cormick explained, supplies its rhetorical power for marginalized speakers, “enabling its practitioners to contest, without directly challenging, established figures of authority.”18 Ceccarelli went even further in her conclusions about strategic ambiguity, saying that sometimes this rhetorical choice supplies “the only way for rhetors and audiences to critique an oppressive regime without inviting suppression, imprisonment, or death.”19 Carefully chosen exemplars can mean avoiding censure or worse, especially for rhetors in precarious positions.
Relatedly, the strategic ambiguity of exemplars enables rhetors to present new or controversial ideas while also appearing to maintain the status quo. When taken at face value, the exemplar exhibits a rather conservative rhetorical form that advocates accepted virtues and rejects recognized vices. Also, exemplars can certainly be one-dimensional and simplistic, as in the apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree or a narrative about Martin Luther King Jr. that represents him as a colorblind sponsor of unity. However, invoking exemplary lives in their fullness and complexity, or other strategically ambiguous ways, has the potential to open interpretation to different meanings.20 In many cases, rhetors use exemplars because they are committed to both reinforcing elements of the status quo and introducing more liberatory ideas. The letter of Christine de Pizan to the Queen of France, for instance, features discourse that is “undecidably split between the demands of duty and the urge to revolt, the legitimation of established authority and its unrelenting critique.”21 The ambiguous exemplar becomes an appealing rhetorical strategy for rhetors like Christine de Pizan who appear simultaneously obligated to the status quo and to social transformation. In other cases, exemplars operate more like a Trojan horse, a seemingly benign offering to the gods of convention that disguises the weapons of critique within. Opponents cannot necessarily discern whether rhetors are actually committed to the status quo or simply paying it lip service. In either case, exemplars are being used strategically to navigate restrictive social structures while creating space for new ideas and new memories. Page 34 →This feature of exemplars is especially useful to individuals engaging in critical memory work, who seek to dislodge dominant memories protected by powerful people.
A second key feature of rhetorical exemplars concerns audience uptake: They invite audiences to reflect on and emulate contingent, particular virtues rather than universal ideals. Rhetoric scholars have noted that the form of reasoning required by exemplars—reasoning by example—fosters such reflection. The work of Aristotle has heavily influenced this line of thought and inspired a lively debate among rhetoric scholars about how reasoning from examples works.22 This debate questions whether the “example” is a form of inductive reasoning and, if so, how it serves to mediate between universal ideas and particular circumstances. John Arthos has argued that the instability of the concept of the example stems from the gap between phronesis and episteme in ancient thought.23 Phronesis refers to practical wisdom gained through action, whereas episteme refers to certain knowledge. Arthos noted that, because of the gap between these two concepts, scholars of argument have equivocated on the nature of the rhetorical example: Is it “a species of generalization . . . an illustration for clarity and forcefulness . . . the source of models or standards from which particular cases may be judged, or . . . a means to argue analogously”?24 Arthos suggested that rhetorical example is, in fact, none of these. Rather, the example enables individuals to reason from particular to particular without the intervention of universal principles. As he put it, “When we argue from particular to particular we are not always working implicitly through a rule, but remain in the sideways movement from one example to the next. We use example precisely when the movement to and from the general is blocked, and deliberation must find a conclusion in the space of interruption.”25 Relying on the mental process of reasoning by example, then, exemplars can invite reflection on particular virtues rather than just universal values.
By encouraging engagement with the particularities of individual lives, exemplars can cultivate critical emulation rather than uncritical copying.26 Moral exemplars—from a one-dimensional Joan of Arc to a sanitized Rosa Parks—have long been deployed to advance universal ideals, undergird absolutist moral structures, and secure allegiance to the status quo. Although ubiquitous, such an approach is not inevitable. Instead, exemplars can provide what McCormick has described as a “powerful resource for awakening the judging faculties of their audiences.”27 Some philosophers, such as Pieter Vos, consider this more complex approach to exemplars to be “modern,” but cases such as the letter of Christine de Pizan suggest that the Page 35 →perspective predates modernity.28 As Vos explained, “in this modern understanding moral exemplars are not seen as just ideals, i.e. as perfect examples of general truths they exemplify, but as real persons who embody virtues (and vices) and live out particular values in the midst of the moral complexity of their lives.”29 The ambiguity and complexity of exemplars can invite listeners to emulate their virtues or actions critically rather than carelessly. Philosophers interested in virtue ethics and character education, in particular, have emphasized how such a reflective response enables audiences to develop habits of judgment and thoughtful deliberation and, in some cases, tools for social transformation.30 The audience is not conscripted into “mere imitation” or simple copying but urged to thoughtfully integrate certain virtues and actions into their own lives.31 The function of critical engagement applies also to how audiences are invited to consider new interpretations of the past.
Although any rhetor can use exemplars as a rhetorical strategy, they possess particular power for Black women speakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kirt Wilson has shown that nineteenth-century Black rhetors such as Frederick Douglass rejected racist stereotypes that represented Black imitation as derivative and morally sterile and instead reclaimed the practice as productive for Black Americans. Wilson observed that the very idea of imitation was deeply racialized in the postemancipation United States, as White intellectuals held that Black imitation was a “primitive” expression of their inferior abilities, whereas Black intellectuals such as Douglass claimed that imitation was a “constructive” practice.32 Wilson argued that late nineteenth-century African Americans such as Douglass enacted a distinctive Black mimesis that constituted “a threat to white ideals” and an “engine” to “transform the U.S.”33 In other words, Black mimesis of this period could invite the kind of critical engagement and social transformation discussed earlier. Wilson’s work demonstrates the power of imitation for Black Americans, which parallels the rhetorical power of exemplars for marginalized rhetors. Just as the exemplar’s strategic ambiguity provides a means of covert resistance, the practice of Black imitation “provided some immediate protection from the hostile tendencies of European Americans” and “created a space from which blacks could resist oppression.”34 Christel N. Temple’s concept of hero dynamics posits that both the invocation of exemplars (what she calls “heroes”) and the imitation of exemplars are central to Black cultural mythology.35 Temple explained that the “postenslavement, African-centered philosophy of heroism [is] defined organically from diasporic experiences with survivalist impact, Page 36 →achievement against the odds, and the extension of human capacity beyond the ordinary.”36 Temple traced what she characterizes as an “Ebonic use of heroes” back to figures such as Maria W. Stewart, who fashioned whatever exemplars were at her disposal into vehicles for inspiration and empowerment.37 Neither Wilson nor Temple explicitly used the term “exemplar,” but their arguments closely align with the way in which I have conceptualized it as a rhetorical tool for memory work. Their theories also underscore the significance of exemplars as an important historically and culturally situated strategy for Black women.
Exemplars in Black Women’s Public Speech
Although Black American women used a variety of strategies to fill their storehouse of memory, public address became a particularly significant means during this period of increasing activism. Beginning with groundbreaking speakers such as Maria W. Stewart, Black women addressed audiences exhibiting a variety of racial, gender, and religious identities. Their own backgrounds, social positions, educational statuses, rhetorical styles, and purposes differed. Among the many public speeches given by Black women between the antebellum period and the New Negro Movement, I identified seventeen that intentionally engage female exemplars.38 These speakers invoked exemplary women both in passing and through more sustained narratives. They listed groups of women and focused on individual lives. They cited familiar women such as Mary Magdalene, as well as more obscure figures such as Abigail Mathews. They mentioned women from ancient times such as the Hebrew judge Deborah and heroic Spartan mothers, and they cited their contemporaries. They identified women by name and described their lives but left them unnamed.
Four notable categories of exemplary women appeared in these speeches: biblical women, non-biblical historical women, White American female contemporaries, and Black American women. Organizing the analysis into these categories illuminates how these speakers strategically deployed certain exemplars to achieve their rhetorical goals within a particular context and for a particular audience. For instance, earlier in the period, speakers cited biblical women, both because doing so enhanced their credibility with religious audiences through the performance of Christian piety and because those exemplars were easily accessible to people with limited education. This memory work was primarily critical. Later in the period, as more Black American women were recognized as public figures, speakers turned their attention to praiseworthy peers. Many of these speeches advanced Page 37 →ideas radical in their time (and, in some cases, even for the twenty-first century), such as the right of Black women to speak publicly or to preach in churches. The increased attention to Black female exemplars reflects both critical memory work that sought to insert these women into the nation’s history and community memory work that aimed to show Black women the contributions of their foremothers. Female exemplars provided distinct rhetorical advantages in these constrained contexts, as vehicles for generative ambiguity and contingent virtues. The following analysis illustrates how the speakers deployed these exemplars as worthy of imitation in ways that both upheld and challenged existing discourses about Black womanhood. By deploying female exemplars in this way, Black women speakers also argued—mostly implicitly but sometimes explicitly—that they and their Black sisters were worthy of remembrance.
Biblical Women
Women from the Hebrew scripture or Christian New Testament constituted a small but significant group of exemplars. Of the seventeen speeches surveyed, four of them cited such women.39 Whereas Shadd (1858) mentioned sisters Mary and Martha of Bethany only in passing, Mary V. Cook’s speech invokes twenty-seven exemplary religious women.40 Mary Magdalene was mentioned by three of the four speakers—Stewart (1833), Truth (1867), and Cook (1887)—as a witness to the resurrection of Christ.41 Although their speeches were given over a span of more than fifty years, all three women were deeply religious, addressed mixed-gender audiences, and made a case for women’s right to speak and work on behalf of the Gospel.
Sojourner Truth, in her characteristically concise and clever manner, used Mary Magdalene as an example of women’s devotion to Jesus. Drawing a bitingly humorous contrast between the men and the women healed by Jesus, Truth told the story of the man from whom Jesus cast out some especially awful demons. The demons were ultimately directed into a herd of pigs that promptly threw themselves off a cliff to their deaths. Truth reasoned:
If a woman did have seven devils, see how lively she was when they were cast out, how much she loved Jesus, how she followed Him. When the devils were gone out of the man, he wanted to follow Jesus, too, but Jesus told him to go home, and didn’t seem to want to have him round. And when the men went to look for Jesus at the sepulchre they didn’t stop long enough to find out whether he was there or not; but Mary Page 38 →stood there and waited, and said to Him, thinking it was the gardener, “Tell me where they have laid Him and I will carry Him away.” See what a spirit there is. Just so let women be true to this object, and the truth will reign triumphant.42
In this passage, Truth held up Mary Madgalene as an example of how enthusiastically women could follow Jesus. She praised the devoted, patient, and persistent “spirit” of Mary, exhibited in her willingness to wait at Jesus’s tomb longer than the male disciples. The way in which Truth invoked Mary through narrative demonstrates the power of exemplars to illustrate contingent virtues. In this story, Truth used the word “spirit” to esoterically reference rather than explicitly name Mary’s virtues: The audience was required to use their own judgment to infer the lesson. Furthermore, by noting that Jesus welcomed Mary’s company but spurned that of the healed man, Truth implied that Jesus preferred the company of the more devoted female disciples. This interpretation of Jesus’s disposition toward Mary Magdalene functions critically through strategic ambiguity to present her simultaneously as a model of feminine piety and devotion and an embodied critique of patriarchal Christianity. Truth’s Mary both upholds traditional gender ideals and illustrates their subversion.43
In contrast to Truth’s singular reference, speeches by Maria W. Stewart and Mary V. Cook invoke numerous biblical women, including Queen Esther, the judge Deborah, Mary Magdalene, and the unnamed woman of Samaria whom Jesus met at the well. Cook, in particular, was directly addressing the 1887 American Baptist Convention on the subject of “Women’s Place in the Work of the Denomination.” Stewart and Cook would have faced similar hostility from their audiences, although to different degrees. By enumerating lists of admirable biblical women, Stewart and Cook—especially Cook—engaged in a form of accumulatio, which Richard Lanham defined as “heaping up praise or accusation to emphasize or summarize points or inferences already made.”44 The numerous biblical exemplars collectively provide authoritative evidence that women had done pious and praiseworthy things, and they supply models for religious Black women who aspire to continue the work. In this sense, they uphold certain pillars of the Cult of True Womanhood, including piety, submissiveness, and domesticity.
However, Stewart and Cook did not simply uphold these pillars; they subtly shifted them to destabilize the patriarchal foundation on which their churches had been built. They refigured the memories of women of the Page 39 →past to create space for Black women of their present. Like Christine de Pizan, Stewart and Cook drew upon the lives of women whom their audiences already admired so that new ideas and virtues could be introduced through them. Stewart, for instance, cited biblical women as a means of demonstrating her own piety and purity when her very act of speaking in public to “promiscuous” audiences would have thrown both into question. Stewart began the speech by recalling an encounter with the divine. In this “spiritual interrogation,” Stewart imagined herself sitting at the feet of Jesus, who asked her, “[A]re you able to drink of that cup that I have drank of?”45 This opening passage bolsters Stewart’s ethos as a messenger called by God. Undergirding the credibility argument here is Stewart’s implicit claim that Jesus—the most revered male person in the Christian tradition—invited her to imitate him in his sacrifice and suffering. Stopping just short of comparing herself with Christ, Stewart then shifted to a more palatable set of exemplars for herself: Biblical women such as Deborah, Esther, and Mary Magdalene. Stewart clearly represented these women as actors in their own right, yet all were prompted by God to act. In this way, she contextualized their seemingly radical actions within a higher submissiveness to God, thereby adhering to that ideal of True Womanhood. Stewart’s characterization of biblical women as accountable primarily to God also cleverly bypasses the human men—disciples, preachers, and lay leaders—who strove to maintain their role in a superfluous managerial class mediating women’s relationships with the Divine.46 The speech later applies this reasoning more broadly, to all women of the “sable race” whom God might “raise up” as messengers.47 Black women, the address explicitly says, should follow the example of women such as Deborah and Esther in submitting to God’s call to speak loudly and take on a leadership role. In Stewart’s critical remembrance of biblical figures, women are called to submit to God, not to men.
Like Stewart before her, Cook listed biblical female exemplars to argue that women had a long tradition of doing—and being publicly recognized for—religious work. Whereas Stewart selected only a handful of familiar exemplars, Cook cited an impressive twenty-seven individuals, from the first woman, Eve, to lesser known supporters of the early church such as Phoebe and Joanna.48 Cook began with a rhetorical question similar to Stewart’s, inquiring, “Who is to wipe these iniquities from our land if it be not christian [sic] women?”49 Keeping close to the domestic sphere, Cook rejected public solutions such as the ballot, political positions, and law, arguing that the best path to reform lay in “woman’s unswerving devotion to a pure and undefiled christianity [sic].”50 She explicitly noted that she would “establish Page 40 →this truth” by recounting “history as its light comes to us from the pages of the Bible.”51 Identifying this shared authoritative text as her source of evidence would have enhanced her credibility with her devout listeners. Cook then commenced her litany of the “wives, mothers and daughters of the Holy Scriptures” to demonstrate such devotion.52 Cook cited these women in service of an overall critique of the male-dominated formal structures of her denomination. Yet, in accounting for their lives, she also selectively noted those qualities that aligned most closely with late nineteenth-century feminine ideals.
Cook’s use of exemplars both to shore up traditional feminine virtues and to challenge assumptions about women’s abilities results in complicated portraits. On the one hand, she reads the restrictive gender roles of the late nineteenth-century United States into the stories of biblical women. The same Sarah who laughed derisively at God’s promise of a son in her old age was said to have possessed “reverence for her husband,” “devotion to her son,” and “faithfulness to duty.” She was furthermore “beautiful, chaste, modest and industrious.”53 Other Old Testament women exhibited similar qualities: “We cannot forget the maternal tenderness of Hagar, the well kept promise of Hannah, the filial devotion of Jepthah’s daughter, nor the queenly patriotism of Esther.”54 Each of these women was remembered for a virtue that she exhibited in a specific feminine role, such as mother (Hagar and Hannah), daughter (Jepthah’s daughter), and wife (Esther). Women of the New Testament were praised for showing to Jesus “those personal kindnesses which our Lord ever appreciated,” including the hospitality of sisters Mary and Martha and the loyalty of the Samaritan woman.55
On the other hand, Cook’s address also proffers a critique of the many limitations placed on women, especially in religious communities. Although Cook’s address elevates qualities firmly within the ideals of True Womanhood, the overall message of her address is more radical, as she calls for women to imagine themselves as leaders like Deborah.56 Similar to Stewart, Cook needled biblical men, saying, for instance, that Deborah’s husband apparently “took no part whatever in the work of God,” whereas she led men and women alike. Furthermore, Deborah was called by God to show and tell her people that God would raise up whomever God pleased, regardless of sex: “He recognizes in His followers neither male nor female, heeding neither the ‘weakness’ of one, nor the strength of the other.”57 The transcription of the speech from the convention minutes denotes “weakness” in quotation marks, suggesting that Cook believed that such a description of women ought to be questioned. In another example of challenging Page 41 →women’s roles, Huldah took on the traditionally masculine study of the law “to better prepare herself for the work of Him Who had called her.”58 Women of the New Testament are identified as “co-workers” with the apostle Paul. After providing these many examples of biblical women working as equals with men, Cook argued that it was “not [C]hristianity which disparages the intellect of woman and scorns her ability for doing good” but “custom” that limited them.59 Citing dozens of female exemplars from the Christian scriptures enabled Cook to explicitly praise widely accepted “feminine” qualities as well as identify nonnormative virtues and forms of religious leadership. This strategy encourages her audience to envision specific, multidimensional women who embodied diverse virtues and abilities rather than one-dimensional saints to be placed on protective pedestals. By bringing them to her audience’s consciousness in this way, she ensured that the women who were added to her community’s storehouse of memory exhibited complex characteristics that could be adapted by future generations whose needs were yet unknown.
Historical Women
A second, smaller category of exemplary women were drawn not from the pages of the Bible but from history books.60 These exemplars appeared in legends, the ancient world, and existing collections of “women worthies.”61 Most speakers seemed to have relied on such exemplars to demonstrate female achievements even in the face of restrictive social norms. Drawing on John Adams’s 1790 collection of biographical sketches in her 1833 speech, for instance, Stewart cited an unnamed “a young lady of Bologne” who in the thirteenth century “joined the accomplishments of a woman to all the knowledge of a man” and whose eloquence was so powerful that “her beauty was only admired when her tongue was silent.”62 In 1887, Cook praised women who worked to educate girls and women, including Mademoiselle de Sainte-Beuve and Mary Lyons, as well as writers such as Sappho and Hannah More.63 Described in some detail, the work of these women provided evidence for Cook’s claims throughout this address about what women could accomplish and, therefore, should be empowered to do. Cook claimed that the “rare talents” of female authors afford “the strongest evidence that God created her for society.”64 Cook, notably, even reached beyond Western cultural traditions to draw an analogy between two reported virgins who bore key religious leaders: Mary, the mother of Christ; and Maha-Mahai, mother of the Buddha.65 Cook’s fellow Baptist Lucy Wilmot Smith admiringly named French thinker Germaine de Staël, “the Page 42 →philosopher whom all women delight to mention.”66 Speaking a year before Cook at the 1886 denominational convention, Smith used de Staël as “proof of [woman’s] capabilities” and, in particular, her “right of having something to do.”67 Victoria Earle Matthews, in her 1897 speech “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” briefly invoked the brave “Spartan mothers” to help her audience understand the great heroism of African-American mothers.68
As in the case of biblical exemplars, historical women provide evidence of how women have successfully achieved traditionally masculine feats while exhibiting traditionally feminine characteristics. The lives of actual (and, in fewer cases, mythical) people supply rhetors with a persuasive means of strategically synthesizing seemingly divergent virtues such as beauty and bravery. Examples such as the Virgin Mary and the virgin mother of Buddha comfortably uphold the ideals of purity, and figures such as the “young lady of Bologne” emphasize feminine beauty. However, these same women also illustrate unconventional qualities such as “intelligence and skill,” “eloquence,” and “heroism.”69 These virtues subtly pull historical women from the domestic sphere into the public arena, thus marking them as worthy of remembrance and recognition. Exemplars enabled Black American women, whose social position was far from secure, to advance new ideas alongside old values. By naming specific, embodied historical women, these rhetors were able to harness the complexity of human life in service of their rhetorical goals. Although non-biblical historical exemplars appeared only sparingly, they served in those instances to illustrate the accomplishments of women across races and to enhance the rhetors’ credibility by displaying their historical knowledge for skeptical audiences. Including these accomplished women in their speeches subtly criticized the gendered constraints that made their accomplishments noteworthy, and it also further augmented the storehouse of memory for women in their communities.
White Contemporaries
Just as biblical and historical exemplars enabled these rhetors to gain credibility with their male listeners of different races, citing White women contemporaries helped them to build connections with White listeners of different genders. This strategy was critically important for Black women when addressing White audiences, yet it was also used by speakers when addressing Black audiences. Many of the women speakers surveyed here Page 43 →addressed audiences diverse in race and gender, with several addressing audiences dominated by men or White women. Speakers including Mary Cook (1887), Mary Church Terrell (1898), Lucy Craft Laney (1899), and Beatrice Morrow Cannady (1928) specifically praised White women activists and suffragists. Notably, Cook, Laney, and Cannady all addressed primarily African-American audiences with both men and women in attendance. Terrell addressed primarily White women at the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.70 As with other categories of exemplars, White women were briefly named as well as extensively described.
Cook’s speech to fellow Black Baptists mentioned a handful of White contemporaries in her voluminous array of exemplary women. For instance, Cook included Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances Willard in a list of female authors who used their talents on behalf of the abolitionist cause. Like Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Stowe “gave vent to the fullness of [her soul] in beautiful lines of poetry and prose.”71 Willard was named alongside Harper as one of the “noble advocates” of temperance.72 These examples function much as Cook’s references to biblical and historical women do: as evidence of Cook’s claims about women’s capacities. Perhaps because of her Black audience, Cook could afford to mention only a few particularly significant White female contemporaries who would have been recognized by the male religious leaders in her audience. Furthermore, mentioning only White women tied to causes of which her audience would approve—abolitionism and temperance—rather than, say, the more radical cause of suffrage, enabled Cook to praise activists while remaining within women’s traditional purview of art and home.
Laney, addressing the Hampton Negro Conference in 1899, an annual gathering of Southern Black leaders discussing a range of subjects, spoke alongside prominent figures such as Victoria Earle Matthews, the Reverend Francis Grimke, and George Washington Carver. Although the purpose of this convention would have been different from the denominational gathering at which Cook spoke, the two Southern Black audiences likely had overlapping ideological commitments. Laney, whose subject was “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman,” opened her speech by grounding her position in reference to the past—specifically, to “our first mission school—slavery.”73 After mentioning a few African-American exemplars in her introduction, she later turned to specific exemplars to convince her audience of “the good that can be done for humanity” by public lecturers. This Page 44 →list included White women Lucy Stone, Mary Livermore, Frances Willard, and Julia Ward Howe.74 Notably, this list also included Harper, who was one of the best-known authors and lecturers of the late nineteenth century.
Beatrice Morrow Cannady’s audience at the 1928 annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles would have had similar demographics and concerns, although likely with a heavier concentration of northern and western Black elites. Cannady’s audience included more White listeners, some of whom were NAACP officers and leaders. Most of Cannady’s speech focuses on the role of Black women as leaders, teachers and “spiritual conservators of the race.” However, the speech begins by praising Mary White Ovington, a White woman who helped to found the NAACP and who, in 1928, served as the organization’s board chairperson.75 Before introducing her by name, Cannady tied Ovington closely to the NAACP, calling her its “founder and mother” and the organization her “only child.” Extending the maternal metaphor, the speech reasons, “[W]hile this woman is biologically white—yet her long years of laboring for and with the Negro entering so fully into the things that affect his life in America that she has become psychologically a Negro.”76 Cannady furthermore claimed that recognizing Ovington reflected well on their organization, saying, “we do ourselves and the Association honor when we honor our beautiful and beloved Mary White Ovington.” Ovington is praised simultaneously for exhibiting the feminine ideals of motherhood and service and for being unusually aligned with the African-American experience. Most contemporary language and approaches to race would not describe someone as “biologically” raced or characterize a White woman as “psychologically” Black. Yet in 1928, when most White women throughout the United States—and especially in Southern locales where groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy held sway—would have rejected identification with Black Americans, this claim advances an ideal of racial solidarity long espoused by the NAACP. Cannady praised Ovington for her commitment to supporting Black people and communities. This idea is evident in the speech’s conclusion, in which Cannady commended an “interracial program” through which “there will grow up a strong sisterhood between white and colored women which will be the safest protection of the ideals for which the NAACP stands.”77 Whereas earlier speakers tended primarily to invoke White woman suffrage activists, Cannady spoke after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which afforded her the opportunity to focus on an individual more meaningful to the NAACP.78
Page 45 →In these addresses, Black women highlighted the activism of their White female contemporaries rather than specific virtues. Some of these exemplars are praised as noble or beautiful, yet the focus remains on their work on social reform causes such as abolition, temperance, and racial equality. As Christel N. Temple noted of Stewart’s use of heroes, Black women rhetors transformed “European women into models for Black progress without featuring their European-ness as a condition to be emulated.”79 These activists were public figures, known for their work in areas that had recently become, for the most part, socially acceptable for women. For instance, Cook named Stowe not primarily for the political effects of her work but for the way she expressed her emotion through her art.80 Rhetors harnessed the power of strategic ambiguity within exemplars when they named public women whose activism hewed close to women’s sphere of hearth and home. Furthermore, by praising White women activists, Black women rhetors signaled to their White and/or male listeners that they all admired the same qualities, which created a foundation for identification and joint action. Such memory work enabled future activism.
Black Women
Black American women constituted the largest and most significant category of exemplars, cited in eleven of the seventeen speeches I surveyed.81 References to Black women appear to have increased between the antebellum period and the interwar period, likely because of expanded educational opportunities for Black women and greater numbers of Black women in the public eye. However, the main rhetorical functions of these exemplars remain consistent. Examining this important category of exemplars reveals a variety of rhetorical functions, all apparently designed to address the expectations of a particular audience and moment. Speakers cited these women to praise diverse attributes, actions, and accomplishments rather than strictly to adhere to the ideals of True Womanhood. Publicly naming Black women enabled rhetors not only to achieve their immediate rhetorical goals but also, more significantly, to build a storehouse of memory on which future women in their communities could draw. Repeatedly praising exemplary figures in public address keeps them in the minds of listeners and produces a shared record that can, ideally, be accessed by future generations. This mission was especially vital to Black women of the nineteenth century, who had little access to Black histories, to the extent that even educated women of the time believed that they had no history.82 It is in examining Black women exemplars that Black women’s community memory Page 46 →work becomes most evident. Speeches to Black audiences—especially those dominated by Black women—tended to undertake the community memory work focused on self-improvement, pride, and uplift. Publicly remembering Black women also participates in what Christel N. Temple calls “ancestor acknowledgment,” a feature of Black cultural mythology.83 In contrast, appeals to biblical, historical, and/or White female exemplars served more of a critical function as Black women rhetors addressed audiences that included Black men and White people who needed to be both appeased and persuaded. Speeches to such audiences performed critical memory work that sought to supplant or at least dislodge White and/or male-oriented narratives about the past. Some addresses accomplished both forms of memory work simultaneously.
Speakers invoked Black female exemplars past and present, famous and obscure, with sustained examination and passing attention. Three speeches mention Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a familiar public figure who was also then active on the lecture circuit.84 Notably, Harper herself was the only speaker to mention contemporary Harriet Tubman, who, in the twenty-first century, is arguably the most widely recognized Black American woman of the nineteenth century.85 Three speakers each mentioned poet Phillis Wheatley and activist Sojourner Truth, two of the few famous Black women of the past.86 Other figures, such as Abigail Mathews, a Black cofounder of the Ladies’ Literary Society of New York, would have been familiar only to the immediate audience.87 Some women who were presented as exemplars are not even named, merely described. Some speeches simply name the individual women, whereas others, such as Rosetta Douglass Sprague’s 1900 tribute to her mother Anna Murray Douglass, focus extensively on a single person. Black women speakers presented their fellow Black women as exemplars to exhort their fellow “race women” to self-improvement and action, to shore up community bonds and enhance community pride, and to preserve memories for future generations of their community. Addressing primarily other Black women—as Jennings, Davidson, Sprague, and Bethune did—freed some of these rhetors from the rhetorical constraints of Whiteness and maleness. Therefore, Black women’s use of peer exemplars in such contexts centered on their own community’s needs and priorities.
Although separated by half a century, speeches by Elizabeth Jennings and Olivia Davidson both cite Black women to urge their Black female audiences to “improvement.” In 1837, Jennings addressed an audience of educated Black women assembled at the third anniversary meeting of Page 47 →the Ladies’ Literary Society of New York, which was founded in 1834 by African-American women Henrietta R. Ray, Abigail A. Mathews, and Sarah Elston.88 Jennings exhorted her listeners to “exert all our powers” to “improve” their minds. In doing so, she had to challenge assumptions that Black minds were “unsusceptible to improvement.”89 Echoing Stewart’s rhetorical question strategy, Jennings invoked society founder Mathews to empower listeners to act. “My sisters, allow me to ask the question, shall we bring this reproach upon ourselves?” Jennings asked. “Doubtless you answer no, we will strive to avoid it. But hark! methinks I hear the well-known voice of Abigail A. Matthews [sic], saying you can avoid it. Why sleep thus? Awake and slumber no more—arise, put on your armor, ye daughters of America, and start forth in the field of improvement.”90 Likewise addressing educated Black women, although fifty years later and in the South rather than the North, Olivia Davidson also invoked an exemplar to urge listeners to “improve” their condition and that of their communities. Davidson’s 1886 speech to the Alabama State Teachers’ Association in Selma espoused a philosophy of self-improvement guided by the politics of respectability and, significant to this analysis, good role models. Davidson reminded her listeners to use “every opportunity for inspiring” others to improvement, saying, “By your own example in dress and daily habits as well as by precepts show them how to clothe and care for themselves according to hygienic laws.”91 The speech concludes with an example of an unnamed teacher who “went into one of the worst communities” to befriend and help girls. Her “two years’ earnest, patient work” resulted in a “spirit of improvement” in the community.92 In keeping with her thinking about emulation, Davidson noted that this teacher also organized a reading club “among the more thoughtful and intelligent” of these girls “and read to them or told them about the lives of noble women and other things that would still further arouse their ambition to become good women.”93 Davidson not only cited an exemplar but also urged her “sister teachers” to build moral modeling into their educational efforts.94
Other speeches illustrate how invoking Black women of the past and present helped to cultivate community pride and strengthen community bonds. Mary McLeod Bethune’s 1926 address to the Fifteenth Biennial Convention of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in Oakland, California, for instance, names two women who had led that organization: Mary B. Talbert and Hallie Quinn Brown. Speaking as the then-president of the NACW, Bethune recognized the two former presidents for their organizational leadership and legacy. Bethune pronounced Page 48 →that Talbert’s “considerate soul . . . will ever be cherished in the amber of our memories for her part in leading the National Association of Colored Women to claim and preserve the Douglass Home.”95 Likewise, of Brown, Bethune said, “We can never forget Hallie Q. Brown for the constructive genius she displayed in proposing the Scholarship Fund to the National Association of Colored Women.”96 Bethune recognized both women as worthy of remembrance because of their leadership on specific projects that were near and dear to the hearts of NACW members. Both projects, notably, required foresight, stewardship, and activism on behalf of not just current NACW members but future Black women. Bethune’s use of first-person plural pronouns emphasized the importance of collectively remembering women such as Talbert and Brown, as she asserted that “we can never forget them,” and they would be “cherished in the amber of our memories.”97 Although Bethune here used fairly conventional epideictic language, she did so to remember women who were not typically the subjects of conventional epideictic discourse. Her community memory work strengthened the bonds among the Black women present in her audience and reminded them of their bonds with Black women past and future.
Simply recording the names of these Black women in public speeches has the potential to preserve them for future generations; offering detailed descriptions of their lives enriches the memories thus preserved. Rosetta Douglass Sprague provided such a detailed account in her spoken tribute to her mother, Anna Murray Douglass, at the eponymous Washington, DC, branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. More so than the other speeches to fellow Black women, Sprague’s address elevates specific praiseworthy virtues by drawing on examples from her mother’s life. Sprague began by linking her mother to her father, Frederick Douglass, calling them “two travelers . . . two lives that have indelibly impressed themselves upon my memory.”98 However, she quickly shifted her focus to her mother, noting that the story of her father “has been told—you all know it.” Sprague claimed that Frederick Douglass’s story was “made possible by the unswerving loyalty of Anna Murray, to whose memory this paper is written.”99 Throughout the address, Sprague portrayed her mother as the sine qua non of her father’s success. This speech echoes the rhetoric of other middle-class Black American women of the period by praising certain domestic, feminine virtues both inside and outside the home. For instance, listeners heard of Anna Murray Douglass’s reputation as “a thorough and competent housekeeper,” a woman of “industrial and economical habits,” a “faithful ally” to her husband, and a “self-sacrificing” and “untiring worker” Page 49 →in more public causes such as temperance.100 Anna Murray Douglass exhibited traditional feminine virtues while also being a “recognized co-worker” in antislavery societies around Boston who was fit to be seated with the likes of White abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison.101 However, Sprague’s multidimensional portrait also reveals her mother’s complexity and resistance to convention, admitting that she was “strong in her likes and dislikes” and “not well versed in the polite etiquette of the drawing room.”102 Detailed descriptions of exemplars such as Sprague’s of Anna Murray Douglass provide listeners access to contingent virtues embodied in complex individuals rather than inaccessible saints. Such detail also enriches the storehouse of memories of Black women by providing a rare sustained “glimpse” into one complicated life.103
In subtle contrast to the women who addressed their Black peers, rhetors who addressed other audiences struck a more critical posture when deploying exemplars. These speakers could not assume that their White and/or male audiences found them trustworthy or even cared about Black women’s lives at all. Thus, some speakers used exemplary Black women to supply evidence of their capabilities and character, to establish such women as worthy of remembrance, and in some cases even to offer a critique of White perspectives. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1866 address to the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention illustrates all of these goals of critical memory work through its concluding reference to Harriet Tubman. At the time, Harper was one of very few Black women visible on woman suffrage convention platforms; her audience was predominantly White women. Her speech, commonly titled “We Are All Bound Up Together,” attempts to forge what Shirley Wilson Logan described as a “community of interests” while also clearly articulating the divergent experiences of Black women and White women.104 Harper concluded the speech with an extended reflection on her contemporary Harriet Tubman, whom she identified only as “Moses.” Activating the Black Christian symbolism of the Exodus story, Harper explained that Tubman earned her moniker because she had “gone down into the Egypt of slavery and brought out hundreds of our people into liberty.”105 Harper continued by highlighting her own recent encounter with Tubman: “The last time I saw that woman, her hands were swollen. That woman who had led one of Montgomery’s most successful expeditions, who was brave enough and secretive enough to act as a scout for the American army, had her hands all swollen from a conflict with a brutal conductor, who undertook to eject her from her place. That woman, whose courage and bravery won a recognition from our army and Page 50 →from every black man in the land, is excluded from every thoroughfare of travel.”106
Harper’s words present Tubman as an exemplar of bold action—brave, courageous, yet discreet. Her example provides evidence of Black women’s capacity for such action and serves as a source of inspiration to all women. Yet this Tubman’s heroism coexists with her experience as a survivor.107 By juxtaposing Tubman’s traditionally masculine virtues with her embodied experience as a Black woman subjected to abuse, Harper dramatized the racist hypocrisy of postbellum White Americans. Extending her denunciation of the mistreatment of Black Union soldiers after the Civil War, Harper’s reference to Tubman serves as an example of how even exemplary Black women continue to be mistreated in everyday life. At the same time, Tubman remains an exemplar of heroic survival for Black listeners, present or future.108
Harper’s critique of Whiteness, especially of White womanhood, emerges clearly in the subsequent conclusion. After the passage about Tubman, Harper continued, “Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America. (Applause)”109 Harper pointedly and deliberately placed this passage at the conclusion of her speech, making clear to her White female audience their need to confront the realities of non-White women. Ending as she did with this judgment of White women, Harper used Tubman not only as an exemplar for her Black listeners but for all listeners and, in fact, to draw a sharp contrast between Tubman’s bravery and White women’s “selfishness.” Tubman is a woman of heroic substance; White women are surrounded by “airy nothings.” This passage performs multiple functions of critical memory work: it establishes a Black woman in the White historical record, it presents a Black woman as worthy of remembrance, it provides evidence of Black women’s praiseworthy qualities, and it advances a critique of Whiteness.
Likewise addressing primarily White female audiences, Hallie Quinn Brown, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell cited Black women to achieve similar rhetorical purposes. Including Black women’s examples of virtuous action in their speeches expanded White women’s knowledge of this oft-ignored group and secured a place for their memory in White records that were more accessible to future generations. Brown and Cooper, Page 51 →two of only six Black speakers at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago, cited both Black women past and present in their brief addresses, which I also discuss in chapter 3. Brown mentioned the skills and accomplishments of fellow lecturers Harper and Cooper, sculptor Edmonia Lewis, Phillis Wheatley, singer Amanda Smith, and Sojourner Truth. Using her characteristically mellifluous language, she attributed to them memorable monikers such as “authors of distinction” (Harper and Cooper), “genius” (Lewis), “the African poetess” (Wheatley), “the ‘singing pilgrim’ of the race” (Smith), and “black sybil” (Truth).110 These monikers, combined with further description, do not praise one-dimensional “feminine” virtues but place these Black women alongside others worthy of remembrance, both male and female. Brown’s reference to Harper is representative: “our own Frances Harper, who championed the cause of the oppressed in the early anti-slavery days, sang with lips and tongue touched by a live coal.”111 The last phrase alludes to biblical descriptions of Old Testament prophets, fashioning Harper as not only a skilled poet but also a prophet. By following that statement with a passage from one of Harper’s poems, Brown provided further evidence of her claim. Most notably, Brown emphasized these women’s exemplary contributions to the advancement of Black Americans generally and Black women, in particular. Like Harper before her, Brown concluded her speech with an admonition to White women, in Brown’s case to “talk not of the negro woman’s incapacity, of her inferiority,” but rather to “clasp hands with the less fortunate black woman of America.”112
Mary Church Terrell’s 1898 speech “The Progress of Colored Women,” which she delivered at the fiftieth anniversary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, DC, identifies exemplars to challenge negative accounts of Black women and provide evidence of their progress. Terrell described the work of six Black women in some detail, but she identified only Phillis Wheatley by name, perhaps because she was speaking to a primarily White woman’s suffrage organization that would be most familiar with Wheatley.113 Terrell’s speech begins with an intersectional analysis of Black women’s achievements in the face of oppression. Her opening passage states: “Not only are colored women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are almost everywhere baffled and mocked because of their race. Not only because they are women, but because they are colored women, are discouragement and disappointment meeting them at every turn.” In Terrell’s analysis, the present persecution emerged from past oppression, and it was exacerbated by “those who would maliciously misrepresent” Black women. Terrell Page 52 →claimed that such “foul aspersions upon the character of colored women” were cast “especially by the direct descendants of those who in years past were responsible for the moral degradation of their female slaves.” By highlighting White hypocrisy, Terrell emphasized the significance of an accurate rendering of the past. She then provided this accurate rendering by referring to several Black women who had distinguished themselves despite the concerted efforts of some White people to malign their character and intelligence. Terrell cited two women who each served as “national superintendent” of a temperance organization, one woman who owned a cotton mill in Alabama, one woman who ran the largest ice plant in Nova Scotia, Phillis Wheatley, a sculptor (likely Edmonia Lewis), and a student of the French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Terrell chose only to name Wheatley, whose name and work were more likely to be recognized. Terrell presented these women not as exemplars of True Womanhood but as evidence of—and potentially inspiration for—the distinctive potential of Black Womanhood. Her intersectional approach to exemplars performed critical memory work by confronting her White female audience with evidence that directly contradicted the predominant White accounts of Black women’s past and present.
Rhetorical Strategy and Memory Storehouse
The rhetorical strategy of exemplarity stands at the intersection of past and future, citing lives lived to influence lives yet to be lived. This temporal orientation also makes the exemplar a generative starting point from which to explore rhetorical memory work. Like public memory, rhetorics of exemplarity are determined by present concerns, dependent on past accounts, and driven by a desire to build a different future. Although they have most often been understood as a conventional strategy for reproducing the status quo, they also have the capacity to do more complex work, especially when utilized by historically marginalized rhetors. Exemplars must draw from the life stories of actual persons and are therefore tethered to the material, historical record. Exemplars must engage with the raw materials of an individual human life and are therefore inherently complex, contingent, and ambiguous.
The first great power of the exemplar as a rhetorical strategy resides in its ambiguity. As Kenneth Burke reminded us, “Instead of considering it our task to ‘dispose of’ ambiguity, we rather consider it our task to study and clarify the resources of ambiguity.”114 Exemplars serve as resources of ambiguity because they can simultaneously appear to uphold and to Page 53 →question the status quo. Marginalized rhetors such as Black American women could activate the conventional function of exemplars to establish their credibility in the face of hostile or indifferent audiences while introducing subtle criticisms of those audiences and their ideologies and social structures. By citing biblical exemplars, for instance, pioneering rhetors like Maria W. Stewart could demonstrate their own piety and display their deep biblical knowledge while also advancing controversial claims about women’s right to speak in public.
The second power of exemplars is their ability to make particular, contingent virtues accessible to audiences. Rather than simply exhorting audiences to adopt universal, abstract virtues, rhetors can deploy exemplary figures to ground virtues in lived, embodied experience. Regardless of whether the exemplars invoked actually possessed certain characteristics, rhetors can point to specific experiences or stories within a person’s life to illustrate how they exhibited virtues that might be emulated by listeners. This feature is particularly important for marginalized rhetors speaking to audiences with relatively more power, such as Black women addressing Black men, White women, or White men. By presenting individuals through narratives that illustrate widely admired virtues, Black women could sidestep resistance that might come from audiences that would otherwise reject identification with Black female exemplars out of hand. Audiences of Black men or White women—let alone White men—suffering from a lack of imagination might be “blocked,” to use Arthos’s word, from identifying with Black women in a general sense. However, it might be possible for them to move “sideways . . . from one example to the next” and thereby indirectly create solidarity with others whose experiences they previously saw as completely foreign.115
Black women activated strategic ambiguity and particular virtues when they deployed exemplars to address dominant audiences. These rhetorical functions proved especially subversive when they cited Black female ex-emplars—or heroes, to use Temple’s preferred language. Doing so enabled them to develop their own ethos by demonstrating their alignment with certain feminine ideals such as purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity. It provided evidence of Black women’s past accomplishments and supplied materials for inspiring future action. When deployed before audiences with greater privilege, exemplars performed critical memory work. Although Black women used exemplars in complicated and sometimes conservative ways, this rhetorical strategy enabled them to gain traction for their more radical ideas—indeed, to argue for their very right to speak at all.
Page 54 →Beyond speaking to dominant audiences, collecting and naming or describing exemplary Black women enabled these rhetors to build a public archive of individuals worthy of remembrance. They contributed to a storehouse of memory that, as Pierre Nora said, might be “capable of lying dormant for long periods only to be suddenly reawakened,” the “forgetting kept in reserve” described by Paul Ricoeur.116 Or, to use a more elevated metaphor from Emma-Lee Amponsah’s conceptualization of Black Cultural Memory, “an open-ended cloud that treasures memories of shared and interconnected histories.”117 They built this storehouse for their communities in the present; their communities in the future; and, eventually, for a future society prepared to appreciate the lives of Black women forebears.