A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF FOUR PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES ON WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN, 1870-1897
- Author
- KAPLAN-TUCKEL, BARBARA
- Physical Description
- 227 pages
- Additional Creators
- Pennsylvania State University
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- Summary
- The purpose of this study was to discover what patterns in argument, if any, existed in four debates on women's suffrage legislation in the nineteenth-century British House of Commons.
The debates selected for analysis were: (1) Jacob Bright's Women's Disabilities Bill of 1870, (2) William Forsyth's Women's Disabilities Bill of 1875, (3) Sir Albert Rollit's Parliamentary Franchise (Extension to Women) Bill of 1892, and (4) F. Faithfull-Begg's Parliamentary Franchise (Extension to Women) Bill of 1897. On these four occasions women's suffrage legislation either came close to securing a second-reading debate or passed the second-reading stage of debate.
Stephen Toulmin's framework for analyzing argumentation in Western societies served as a tool for examining each speaker's discourse in each debate.
A consistent rhetorical pattern emerged in anti-suffrage arguments between 1870 and 1897. Speakers maintained that females occupied socio-political status that was fundamentally and naturally different from the status occupied by men. Anti-suffragist parliamentarians who spoke in these four debates argued that a divinely inspired duality is the basis for prescribing separate criteria for the roles and the qualities of two sorts of social groups. By linking the role of citizen to political traits associated with the male sex, anti-suffragists challenged the principle of taxation-equals-representation as a principle that logically guaranteed full citizenship even for propertied women.
There were few strong rhetorical patterns in suffragist argumentation across the four debates. One reason for this lack of coherence is that speakers tended to rely too heavily on lines of argument from established reform discourse in the invention of their arguments. Reform rhetoric contained an almost exclusive reliance on property ownership as the basis for judging electoral fitness. Commitment to this premise made it difficult for suffragists to understand that the qualities of women as persons had to be forthrightly defended as part of the long-term rhetorical strategy.
Only two speakers in the 1897 debate challenged the principle that females occupied socio-political status that was fundamentally and naturally different from the status occupied by men. - Other Subject(s)
- Dissertation Note
- Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University 1982.
- Note
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-07, Section: A, page: 2154.
- Part Of
- Dissertation Abstracts International
43-07A
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