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Alice Hamilton: the Making of a Feminist-Pragmatist Rhetor

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Alice Hamilton: the Making of a Feminist-Pragmatist Rhetor Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Theses Department of Communication 1-12-2006 Alice Hamilton: The Making of a Feminist-Pragmatist Rhetor Vicki J. McCoy Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation McCoy, Vicki J., "Alice Hamilton: The Making of a Feminist-Pragmatist Rhetor." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2006. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses/5 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DR. ALICE HAMILTON: THE MAKING OF A FEMINIST-PRAGMATIST RHETOR by VICKI J. MCCOY Under the Direction of James F. Darsey ABSTRACT Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), the leading American figure in industrial medicine during the early to mid-1900s, left behind a body of rhetoric that is important in the history of American feminist discourse and American public address. Her discourse is the exemplary of feminist-pragmatist rhetoric, a genre of cross-gender communication developed by New Women associated with Hull House and the University of Chicago between 1892 and 1918. Hamilton’s rhetoric illuminates a key event in the history of the American rhetorical tradition—the emergence of the modern woman from her late- Victorian beginnings through her Progressive self-transformation. This study is approached as a rhetorical biography. It tracks Hamilton’s evolution from “reticent scientist” to outspoken feminist-pragmatist by examining family, educational, peer and social influences on her development; and through critical analysis of her speeches, technical writing, books, and popular and specialty magazine articles over a 36-year period, from 1907 to 1943. INDEX WORDS: Alice Hamilton, feminist-pragmatist rhetoric, Progressive Era, social reform, industrial poisons, Hull House, feminist oratory. DR. ALICE HAMILTON; THE MAKING OF A FEMINIST-PRAGMATIST RHETOR By VICKI J. MCCOY A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2005 Copyright by Vicki J. McCoy 2005 DR. ALICE HAMILTON; THE MAKING OF A FEMINIST-PRAGMATIST RHETOR by VICKI J. MCCOY Major Professor: James Darsey Committee: David Cheshier Mary Stuckey Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University December 2005 iv This thesis is dedicated to the courageous women of Hull House, whose lives continue to inspire me. v Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………… 1 The “New Woman”: A Neglected Figure in the History of American Public Address…………………………………………………………... 1 Alice Hamilton: Exemplar of the Feminist-Pragmatist New Woman… 4 Chapter 1 - Alice Hamilton: A New Woman’s Story…………………………… 8 A “Rooted and Grounded” Freedom: Late-Victorian Childhood and Early Education………………………………………………………… 8 Studying Medicine at the Turn of the Century at Home and Abroad…. 15 American Feminism Gives Birth to a New Woman................................. 26 Chapter 2 – Hull House and the Chicago School of Pragmatism……………….. 35 Alice Hamilton’s Introduction to Jane Addams and Hull House……... 35 Hull House and Feminist-Pragmatism………………………………… 39 Chapter 3 – The Emergence of the Citizen-Orator………………………………. 44 1897-1907: Early Experiences with the Rhetoric of Reform………….. 44 1908-1938: Exploring the Dangerous Trades………………………….. 59 1915-1919: World War I as Transformation…………………………... 66 Answering the Call of the Rhetorical Situation………………………... 73 Feminist-Pragmatist Rhetoric as a Genre Study………………………. 80 Chapter 4 – In Her Own Voice: A Generic Analysis of the Rhetoric of Alice Hamilton……………………………………………………… 87 Balance…………………………………………………………………... 87 Transcendence………………………………………………………….... 106 vi Multiple Logics…………………………………………………………….. 131 Perfectionism………………………………………………………………. 160 Balance, Transcendence, Multiple Logics, and Perfectionism in Constellation……………………………………………………………….. 178 Chapter 5 – (Conclusion) Listening to Alice Hamilton: Implications of Feminist-Pragmatist Rhetoric for American Public Address………….. 191 Rediscovering Alice Hamilton, a Significant but Neglected Turn-of-the- Century Rhetor……………………………………………………………… 193 Hamilton as Exemplar of the Feminist-Pragmatist Genre………………… 205 Learning from Alice Hamilton……………………………………………... 207 References………………………………………………………………………........ 214 1 Introduction The “New Woman”: A Neglected Figure in the History of American Public Address In 1984, when Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989a, 1989b) published her ground- breaking, critical study, Man Cannot Speak For Her, her stated purpose was to contribute to the creation of a history of women’s rhetoric, specifically the rhetoric of the early woman’s rights movement in the United States. Campbell pointed out in the introduction to her work that, unlike men in Western society, whose public persuasion has been studied since the ancient Greeks, women have no parallel rhetorical history. She attributed this lack to the historical suppression of women’s voices by powerful cultural forces, in evidence as early as the eighth century BC in Homer’s Odyssey, and to the devaluing and marginalizing of women’s rhetoric in modern times. The suppression was long successful because of the weight of the cultural authority behind it, including even the Scriptures, where the Apostle Paul exhorts women to keep silent. This devaluing and marginalizing have resulted in a failure to preserve the words of many early female rhetors who defied tradition and spoke publicly on moral and public policy issues, and, for those rhetorical acts by women that have survived, a failure to treat these works as an essential part of the tradition of American public address. Twenty years after the publication of Campbell’s study, and hundreds of thousands of words of rhetorical criticism later, it appears that there is still much work left to do in building a female rhetorical history and incorporating that tradition into existing histories of American public discourse. Judith Allen (2003) complains that in 2 texts on Progressive history, for example, feminism is either scarcely mentioned or its contribution to Progressive political philosophy is marginalized. A revival of interest in the rhetoric of Progressive Era activist and feminist-pragmatist Jane Addams (see Burgchardt, 2003; Elshtain, 2002a, 2002b), Jennifer Borda’s (2003) essay on the Progressive identity of the woman’s suffrage movement, and Allen’s (2003) own piece on the non-fiction writing and the lectures of Progressive feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman are all encouraging signs that more stones are being added in the creation of the monument to the female rhetorical tradition that Campbell envisioned and that women deserve. The Progressive Era is a particularly rich place to look for new stones for that monument. It was during this period, from about 1870 to the 1920s, that a “New Woman” emerged from what might at first glance appear to be the dying embers of the first wave of feminism in America. The New Woman was a member of the privileged first generation of “college” women. She pioneered in the professions and social reform, and she claimed her right to a career outside the home and to a public voice (Sicherman, 1984; Smith-Rosenberg, 1985). In fact, the challenges of life in the large, over-crowded, ethnically diverse cities that sprang up at the turn-of-the-century in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in America provided not only employment opportunities for the reform-minded New Woman, but also the exigencies for her to take part in the reinvigoration of the public sphere that characterized the Progressive Era (Hogan, 2003). As Hogan (2003) explains, “Virtually all Progressives shared an abiding concern with public opinion and its role in the democratic process,” and “feared that, in an increasingly complex world, powerful special interests had supplanted the ‘voice of the people.’” 3 “Whatever their other differences,” he writes, “they all agreed on the need to reinvent the public sphere” (p. xiii). New Women social workers, physicians, public health specialists, lawyers, educators, and those associated with the settlement-house movement spoke powerfully, often, and to diverse audiences on issues relating to social and economic justice and to the health and welfare of women, children and immigrants. While the New Woman was well aware that no man could “speak for her,” as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (cited in Campbell, 1989b, p. 42) had so eloquently pointed out at the first woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, neither could the women of any previous generation. The New Woman sought and found her own public voice, one that was consonant with her role as a transitional woman whose life bridged two centuries, the nineteenth and twentieth, and two eras, the late-Victorian and the Progressive. The rhetoric of the New Woman has been largely overlooked, in American public address generally and in the history of Progressivism specifically. It merits more intensive scrutiny because the New Woman’s public discourse is the rhetorical representation of a watershed moment in American feminist history--the first manifestation of today’s modern woman. Critical examination
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