Undergraduate Communication Research Conference

Public Woman: Women's Rhetoric from the 19th Amendment to the 2020 Presidential Campaign

The 30th anniversary of the Undergraduate Communication Research Conference offers a fitting moment to reflect on history -- of the discipline, of communication, of women's activism. Women's historic public advocacy offers insights into contemporary challenges; just as suffragists had to navigate the accusation they were "public women" (a synonym for prostitute), contemporary public women have to respond to accusations they are nasty or hypersexual. And, just as women's advocacy has changed across time so, too, has the way the discipline of communication researches advocacy evolved. Whom we study, how we study them, and the questions we ask as researchers have been expanded by attention to intersectionality: the way race, class, citizenship, sexuality, and sex intersect.

The 1913 D.C. woman suffrage parade; the 1917-1919 pickets, protests, and arrests of the Silent Sentinels; and the 1919 Prison Special are complex discursive and presentational arguments in which women enacted their citizenship while simultaneously exposing their vulnerability to the state and to ostensible male protectors. The National Woman’s Party’s rhetorical actions in parades, pickets, and imprisonment constitute eloquent verbal and visual responses to the complex set of arguments levied against suffrage.