Practicing Citizenship

The approximately one thousand public speeches given by women at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition offer a rich archive and abundant opportunity for the rhetoric scholar Kristy Maddux to evaluate the consequential nature of women's public speech in the 1890s relative to their contemporary disfranchisement. The event deserves such close examination; as she points out, no previous exposition or other mass event of the nineteenth century saw women asserting their right to representation in the public sphere to as large an immediate audience or so broadly. The moment is also important, Maddux tells us. The 1890s progressivism bore the indelible marks of a new generation of women reformers and professionals insisting on larger public roles for women in the governance of civil society, if not of the state. Despite the steep increase in women's organizing during this decade, the 1890s and the first few years of the twentieth century are often referred to as the “doldrums” in histories of woman suffrage, for the lack of concrete gains achieved in that campaign. In her speech—the last to be made at the World's Congress of Representative Women at the exhibition—Susan B. Anthony expressed her fear and frustration that, ironically, the explosion of women's reform-minded club work could distract from the only reform that could guarantee women's influence in all areas of public life—woman suffrage. Maddux views Anthony's concern, along with much of women's history scholarship, as missing an important point. She asks us to adopt “a more expansive definition of citizenship that enables us to see women's efforts at collective self-governance outside the androcentric realms of law and institutional politics” (p. 20). Doing so, she argues, reveals women's speeches at the exposition as a “practice” of citizenship—rather than merely potential “evidence for” citizenship. Maddux groups women's speeches at the fair into four types of citizenship practices: deliberative democracy, economic participation, organized womanhood, and racial uplift—all revealing “marginalized people innovating outside the traditional structures of power” (p. 3). In the end, the best direction of Maddux's analysis might have led, paradoxically, back to suffrage, given her assertion that the “practices of citizenship” exhibited in 1893 enriched women's “voting when it finally came” (p. 153). But Maddux's is not a diachronic analysis, and instead of tracking the exhibition's consequences and effects, she strenuously defends her methodological decision to maintain a static analytical focus on the speech events at the exhibition, considered both individually and collectively. The result is a close and nuanced reading. And, although many historians of this exposition can easily take issue with Maddux's particular interpretations of specific rhetorical strategies—my heart skipped a beat a few times when I read her analysis of May French-Sheldon's deployment of civilizational discourse and views on colonialism—Maddux still raises worthwhile questions about our assumptions regarding citizenship as practiced by the disfranchised, so provides us with yet another entrée into the historical significance of this event for women

Art history · Citizenship · Exhibition · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Progressivism · Public sphere · Rhetoric · Scholarship · Sociology · Suffrage · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law