Link to speech: http://www.nationalcenter.org/AnthonySuffrage.html
In the year 1873, Susan B. Anthony
was unjustly arrested and fined for voting in the presidential elections of the
previous year in the US. In order to express her feelings of anger and convey
her ideals of gender equality to the rest of the population she wrote a speech.
Through her speech, she manages to convey the message that women should also be
allowed to vote in an effective manner that reaches her intended branch of the
population. She accomplishes her goal by using a complex diction, which not
only allows her to reach out to the more educated section of the population but
also makes her speech more effective by making her look more educated, which
gives her ethos. Overall, Anthony manages to create a tone and mood that is
extremely serious and credible, which ultimately makes her speech extremely
effective.
It is most likely that Anthony’s
intended audience when giving out this speech was an adult population of a
higher education section while also targeting specifically men. This can be
seen primarily in her choice of sophisticated terms which are defined by using
uncommon words, such as “ex post facto law,” “disfranchisement” and “odious
aristocracy.” Evidence for her targeting of higher education brackets of the
population can also be seen in the fact that she references things such as the
Federal Constitution and scholars such as Webster, Worcester and Bouvier. The
fact that her speech is mostly focused on using logos as a method to appeal to
the audience rather than pathos is evidence that her target audience would have
most likely been men, since an appeal to emotion would have been more effective
for women and men normally tend to find highly logical and direct messages more
convincing.
It is possible to see from Anthony’s
target audience choice that the purpose of her speech was not to encourage more
women to join the gender equality movement; rather her intention was more
directed towards the idea of providing a strong argument for the gender equality
movement that would resonate in the male population as well. To this intent she
uses direct citations from the Federal Constitution and gives a detailed
explanation of her argument, which means that she is using very strong logos to
persuade her audience. However, her choice of sophisticated words and proof of
her knowledge of scholarly figures would also make the audience perceive her as
a highly educated member of the population, which gives her a strong ethos
through the speech itself.
Despite having a lot of factual
based arguments in her speech, Anthony still manages to a tone of ire and
sorrow that delivers her message in a passionate way that can resonate with the
masses. She does this by using certain rhetorical devices which allow her to
emphasize on specific aspects of her argument. For example, when she uses the diacope
in “It was we, the people; not we the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male
citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union” she stresses on the
fact that it was not only men who established the country and that women also
played a large role in that, thus showing that they should be more equal. At
the same time, by using the personal pronoun “we” Anthony makes the audience
put themselves in the situation and think of themselves as the ones who are rejecting;
which in this case are the ones who are put in the wrong throughout the speech.
This would make the audience feel bad about themselves, which creates a tone of
sorrow throughout the text, especially due to the early positioning of this
statement in the speech.
Anthony also portrays some anger
through her speech which also leads to it being more powerful. When she says “it
is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of
liberty” she creates a juxtaposition of the “blessings of liberty” and not just
a mockery, but a “downright mockery.” By juxtaposing these two ideas, she
creates a stark contrast between them, which allows people to more clearly comprehend
her point; that women are not entirely free unless they can vote. The use of
the word “downright” right before “mockery” also gives a strong emphasis to
this negative word. The fact that these words are also placed towards the
beginning of the sentence set a tone of ire for the rest of the sentence, which
allows this important part of the speech, which contains an allusion to the
right to vote at the end when she refers to “the ballot” (which is also further
emphasized by a pause), to come across effectively and get her point across.
She also further creates a tone of
ire with a deliberate accusation towards the higher class population of that
time, which were likely to be part of the target audience as well, since these
people would tend to have higher levels of education. Towards the end of her
fourth paragraph, Anthony says:
an oligarchy of wealth, where the right govern the poor. An
oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an
oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules over the African, might be endured;
but this oligarchy of sex, which makes fathers, brothers, husband, sons, the
oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every
household—which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries
dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
In this part of her speech, Anthony
uses an anaphora by repeating the word “oligarchy” and changing the word after
it; however, this is also combined with a climax (as in this context the “oligarchy
of sex” would sound as more important than the rest, since it is the main topic
of the speech, and thus the oligarchies are stated in an order that rises in
importance) and a parallelism (due to the similar grammatical structure used
immediately after each oligarchy) in order to strongly emphasize the idea that
a sexual dictatorship is one of the worst things that can exist. By adding the
conjunction “but” right before the “oligarchy of sex,” Anthony not only
indicates that this case is different to the rest, but also produces a short
pause that would give emphasis to what she says next. She then further
emphasizes her point of the oligarchy of sex by using a metanoia and
re-explaining her already-longer-than-the-rest explanation of the “oligarchy of
sex.” Lastly she uses a list of three with three negative attributes that the “oligarchy
of sex” brings forward at the very end when she says “carries dissension,
discord and rebellion into every home of the nation” in order to further emphasize
her point. By using the anaphora combined with the climax, Anthony creates a
mood of ire by rising the relevance of the subject each time, thus starting
from the audiences possibly uninterested starting mood and bringing them up
with her speech. These other rhetorical devices used right after take advantage
of this tone of ire that has been created and manage to transmit the message in
a more effective way, thus getting it across much more effectively.
It is also important to note that
the structure of Anthony’s speech makes the speech less ambiguous and allows
her message to come across with clarity to the largest amount of people
possible. Her introduction at the beginning sets the context of her speech and
she then proceeds to present her main point of evidence for her argument, which
is the citation from the Constitution. She then proceeds to develop her ideas
in an effective way and closes with the rhetorical question which she says is “the
only question left to be settled now [is]: Are women persons?” which she then
proceeds to implicitly respond to, thus closing her speech by giving the
impression that there is nothing else to cover and that she has therefore
covered all of her points. This structure makes her speech extremely effective,
since it allows people to follow a natural flow and thus not get lost in her
thoughts. The conclusion is also extremely effective for the reasons previously
stated. The speech is also rather short, which ensures that people will be able
to keep their attention focused.
This speech is perhaps one of the best
masterpieces ever written in the English language. The masterful use of
rhetorical devices and an organized structure to convey her message in an
effective way make the speech extremely powerful. The fact that Anthony was
also able to target members of the male part of the population also makes this
speech through her use of heavy logos also makes this speech even more
effective. It is truly a wonder.
