Ascending the Rostrum: Hannah Mather Crocker and Women’s Political Oratory

• Published in: The Journal of politics 2012-10, Vol.74 (4), p.977-991
• Main Author: Botting, Eileen Hunt
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; American War of Independence; Archives; Bill of rights; Boston, Massachusetts; Countermovements; Crocker, Hannah Mather; Crocker, Hannah Mather (1752-1829); Females; Femininity; Feminism; Fraternal organizations; Freedom of association; Freedom of speech; Industry; Men; Oratory; Peacetime; Political movements; Political speech; Political speeches; Public speaking; Rhetoric; Role prescriptions; Social conformity; Speech; Strategic resources; Treaties; U.S.A; War; Women and politics; Women's rights; Womens Rights; Womens rights movements; Womens studies
• ISSN: 0022-3816; 1468-2508
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022381612000497

Although Hannah Mather Crocker (1752–1829) apparently presented a prescription against women’s political oratory in her Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818), she provided philosophical and historical challenges to this conventional rule of early nineteenth-century feminine propriety elsewhere in the first American treatise on women’s rights. By analyzing new archival findings of two of her oratorical works from the early 1810s—her 1813 “Fast Sermon” against the War of 1812 and her 1814 “Address” to the advisory board of the School of Industry for poor girls in Boston’s North End—I argue that Crocker also provided a personal challenge to this conventional rule. In philosophically, historically, and personally redefining women’s political oratory as compatible with feminine propriety—during the postrevolutionary backlash against women’s rights—Crocker helped pave the way for the strategic use of the constitutional rights of speech and association in the nineteenth-century American women’s rights movement and beyond.