Marietta Holley, Alice Duer Miller, the Rhetoric of Suffrage Humor, and the Changing Notions of Womanhood, 1848-1920

Generally when people think of the suffrage movement, they conjure up serious images of impassioned speeches, violent protests, and intense congressional lobbying. However, there was another side to the movement and that was laughter. This dissertation investigates suffrage humor as a rhetorical act: the strategic use of laughter to restrain people from engaging in certain behaviors, to reinforce certain perceptions or beliefs, to undermine opposing views, and to unify like-minded individuals. Laughter was a rhetorical tool both for the movement and against it as both sides fought to gain the middle ground and claim common sense as their own. Guiding the debate about votes for women was the public struggle over the ideals of True Womanhood. The years of the fight over suffrage, 1848-1920, were years of great upheaval in United States, a time of questioning and re-evaluating long-held assumptions and cherished notions of what it meant to be a woman. Therefore, the evolution of the use of humor by pro-suffragists and the rhetorical strategies they employed reflects the progress of twentieth-century notions of womanhood. Suffrage humor, as it moved from ineffectual pleas for simple justice to popular domestic arguments to aggressive, mocking satire illustrates the much larger battle over woman's proper place in society. In the end, suffrage humorists were successful because their conception of what constitutes the best role for women was fluid enough to evolve alongside the audience's perceptions. Pro-suffrage humorists constantly reframed the suffrage argument to reflect the current boundaries of woman's proper place. The rhetoric of suffrage humor, therefore, evolved as conceptions of womanhood evolved, moving from appeals for parity to arguments of social and political expediency. The audience willingly accepted the notion of women as politically and socially active yet still feminine and domestic, able to clean up politics and their kitchen floors. Even further, suffrage humor, having built a foundation of consensus, moved from Marietta Holley's rhetoric of conciliation and moderation, stressing conformity to the values of True Womanhood, to Alice Duer Miller's rhetoric of aggression and punishment, rejecting gender distinctions and refusing to conform to any model of acceptable womanhood