Woman’s Suffrage as Rhetorical Dilemma: Jane Addams’s First Plunge into Arguing on Behalf of Women

A suffragist in college, Jane Addams came to believe that suffrage was irrelevant to her larger goal of advancing the nation’s social morality. The paper explores how and why Addams finally re-embraced women’s suffrage, provides a rhetorical analysis of her 1897 speech before the Massachusetts Suffrage Association, and contrasts the social reform strategies of Susan B. Anthony and Addams as seen in their differing arguments for suffrage