An important contribution to recent scholarly projects on nineteenth-century
American women is the crucial perspective on the rhetorical contributions
of African American women speakers and writers provided by Shirley Wilson
Logan in "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourses of
Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Logan offers an extensive revision
of the canon of American public address by reinstating to the canon
African American women speakers who spoke widely before and after the
Civil War. Logan's valuable contribution is to reframe the canon from
the antebellum period to the 1890s by establishing the persistent presence
of African American women speakers throughout the important historical
events of the nineteenth century. She makes the crucial point that African
American women speakers considered their mission primarily to be that
of "uplifting" their race, a motive certainly not shared by
prominent white women speakers (such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances
E. Willard), who persistently compromised the political status of African
Americans out of fear that supporting racial equality would undercut
the success of their own causes: women's suffrage and temperance.
Logan's significant inscription of African American women into
the history of American rhetoric represents one of the most
important revisions of the canon of American public speaking since the
publication of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's A Critical Study of Early Feminist
Rhetoric: Man Cannot Speak for Her (1989). Concentrating mainly on restoring
the names and contributions of African American women to the history
of nineteenth-century rhetorical practice and on exploring the unique
rhetorical traditions that these women employed in public lives devoted to
the advancement of African Americans, Logan's project responds to
the general inadequacy of canonical accounts of the range of
rhetorical involvement of women in American life—an inadequacy that is
glaringly exposed by revisionist projects such as Campbell's and by earlier
attempts to correct the historical record, such as Lillian Day O'Connor's
Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Antebellum Reform Movement
(1954) and Doris G. Yoakum's "Women's Introduction to the American
Platform," an essay that appears in the influential canon history,
A History and Criticism of American Public Address
(1943). Although Yoakum was the first to identify the relationship between the dominance of the
"woman's sphere" ideology and cultural constraint on nineteenth-century
women's rhetorical opportunities, she does not include African American
women speakers in her treatment of the rise of women to the platform in
the decades prior to the Civil War. In her study of antebellum
women speakers, O'Connor does discuss the career of Frances Maria W.
Stewart, describing Stewart as one of the "forerunners" in women's ascent to
the podium, and she points out that Sojourner Truth is one of the most
widely known of the "second generation" of antebellum women speakers
who involved themselves in reform movements such as abolition,
women's suffrage, and temperance. (O'Connor also mentions Frances E.W.
Harper but does not treat her extensively because most of Harper's fame
was gained after the Civil War.) Campbell also includes Frances Maria
W. Stewart in Man Cannot Speak for Her, and she includes both Stewart
and Truth in her study of "early feminist-abolitionists" during the
antebellum period. In her study, which focuses on the entire nineteenth-century
rather than just on the antebellum period, Campbell also includes among
the influential women orators of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries Mary Church Terrell (the first President of the National Association
of Colored Women) and Ida B. Wells, the journalist, charter member of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and
public speaker who "launched a one-woman, anti-lynching campaign in 1892."
Until the publication of Logan's "We Are Coming"
and her earlier anthology of nineteenth-century African American women's
speeches, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century
African-American Women (1995), the African American women noted most
often in historical scholarship included Frances Maria W. Stewart,
Sojourner Truth, Frances E.W. Harper, Ida B. Well, and Mary Church Terrell.
While reiterating the importance of these historically important speakers,
Logan has added the names of several other African American women
speakers who contributed to the abolition movement, race reform, and
universal suffrage, including Sarah Parker Remond, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary (who fled to Canada to avoid the Fugitive
Slave Act), Edmonia Highgate, Lucy Wilmot Smith, Anna Julia Cooper,
Lucy Wilmot Smith, Fannie Barrier Williams, Victoria Earle Matthews,
and Lucy Craft Laney. All of these women played key roles in the latter
part of the nineteenth century in articulating "the position that racial uplift
for women would result from improved homes and improved
working conditions outside the home. They placed black women among the
chief agents in achieving these improvements. They argued, then, for uplift
of women's work and the work of racial uplift."
Logan's canon project has a particular point to make: much
as Campbell's Man Cannot Speak for Her outlines the series of
women speakers who advanced feminist causes, suffrage in particular,
Logan's discussion of the contributions of African American women to the
cause of racial uplift makes it clear that there are valuable distinctions to be
made among the political motives of nineteenth-century women who
advanced causes at the public speaking podium. Logan's central point is
that African American women who traveled the country speaking tirelessly
in town halls, churches, tent meetings, and private homes to mixed
receptions and often open hostility, did so because they were dedicated
to advancing the status and opportunities of African Americans and, in
that effort, to contributing to the moral health of the nation. Logan points
out that the recognition of the rhetorical achievements of
distinguished African American speakers such as Frances E.W. Harper, Lucy
Craft Laney, and Anna Julia Cooper in "We Are Coming"
ought not to be confused with what would comprise a complete "map" of
African American women's rhetorical activities in the nineteenth century:
The rhetorical activities of numerous other nineteenth-century
black women speakers have not been mentioned here. They spoke their
minds from platform and pulpit and went to work correcting the wrongs
they saw before them. They left no records, wrote no books, organized
no conferences, but they helped to establish a tradition of political
activism among black women. The activities of the women discussed
merely illustrate the range of issues brought to public attention by women
using oratory to effect change. . . . Throughout the nineteenth-century,
ordinary black women—unknown and well known—spoke simply to "make
the world better."
With her depiction of those "known" and "unknown" African
American women who seized rhetorical opportunities of all kinds to further
their overall goal of "ensuring for their people a future with hope,"
Logan records the names and achievements of black women who dedicated
their lives to racial uplift.
Book Review by Nan Johnson, Ohio State University
