Front matter

Debating Women

Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945

Woods, Carly S. Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945.

Chapter 1

“The First Girls’ Debating Club”: Creating a Legacy at Oberlin College,

1835—1935

8 <P a he first college women’s debating society in the United States de-

veloped in the context of a grand nineteenth-century experiment.

In 1833, it was “generally frowned upon’ for institutions of higher learning to admit students of color, and a “somewhat shocking departure” to admit women students, yet in Oberlin, Ohio, the founders of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute did both.’ Oberlin’s women students then set themselves apart by pursuing spaces for the sustained practice of argumentation and debate. Brief accounts of Oberlin’s pioneer debating society circulate in a variety of academic texts, including feminist anthologies,* public address textbooks,’ rhetoric and composition histories,* and feminist rhetorical scholarship,’ as well as in books aimed at a more popular readership, such as biographies,° twentieth-century power feminist bestsellers,” and historical romance novels.* Each iteration of the Oberlin case provides a tantalizing tidbit that anchors broader discussions about nineteenth-century gender politics, especially prohibitions against women’s speech.

I Woods, Carly S. Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945. 9 E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.14321/j.ctv3cOtrt. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

The honor of the first women’s debating society is at times bestowed upon Oberlin’s Young Ladies’ Association, an institutionally authorized organization founded in 1835.’ Open to all of Oberlin’s women students, the Young Ladies’ Association formed to aid the intellectual growth of its students beyond the classroom, primarily in matters of literature and religion. The group later changed its name to the Young Ladies’ Literary Society, and then to the Ladies’ Literary Society. The term “ladies” gradually fell out of fashion for Oberlin students, as it did with many U.S. women’s clubs.” Postbellum debaters reportedly wanted this change because they saw “ladies” as antiquated and thus more accurate for the generations that had come before than for the new woman of the late nineteenth century. In 1878, they agreed to change the name again to become known as the LLS: an acronym standing not for Ladies’ Literary Society, as one might presume, but for an adopted motto, Litterae Laborum Solomen (translated as “literature is comfort from troubles”).” As members graduated and moved on, the LLS became a storied institution in its own right. At various points, members, alumnae, and admirers repeated with pride the tenuous claim that the LLS was the first ever women’s society, full stop. They gradually revised that claim to call it either the first college women’s society or the “first women’s debate society in the country.” Celebration of the society reached its pinnacle in 1935, when generations of LLS members returned to Oberlin’s campus for the club’s centennial jubilee.

However, this is just one version of the origin story. A more popular rendering focuses on a different debating club—one in which brave and persistent women traveled to new, precarious spaces for argument. In this version of the story, Oberlin’s women students were told that they could be audience members but could not take part as speakers in classroom debates. Frustrated with this injustice in coeducation, Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown (later known as Antoinette Brown Blackwell) pushed beyond authorized spaces, risking discipline and impropriety to form a secret debating society in the woods behind the college.'? More detailed accounts of this story report that in the colder months, Stone and Brown’s debating club met in the house of a black woman who lived in the town. The secret debating society was called “the first debating club ever formed among college girls.”"* Thus, the LLS and the secret debating

There are several reasons why this conflation may have happened. First, Stone and Brown were both members of the LLS when their secret debating society in the woods was founded. Second, though the LLS is often called a debating society, it is a matter of dispute as to whether the activities of the society required women to participate in written or oral argumentation. The very idea that Stone, Brown, and others would seek refuge in their secret debating society suggests that the LLS was not providing the training in oratory that they desired for their post-Oberlin careers.” Stone and Brown kindled a lifelong friendship during their time at Oberlin but are better known for their later careers: Stone became a renowned lecturer, abolitionist, and suffragist, and Brown was a pioneering woman minister, reformer, and author.

Though the story of this early debating society is in wide circulation, previous accounts do not attempt to reconcile the competing versions of the origin story, nor do they account for how Oberlin’s women debaters have been remembered beyond that initial period of clandestine debating.” Rather than focusing on one club or the other, we must widen our scope to understand debating women at Oberlin over the 1oo-year period between 1835 (the year the Young Ladies’ Association was created) and 1935 (the year the centennial jubilee was held). I do this by offering a close reading of archival materials, including society minutes, correspondence, and various published narratives from members, alumnae, and scholars. I begin with the story of the sanctioned and secret societies, exploring details generally omitted in the more widely circulated anecdotes, and then move beyond these origin stories to examine the interplay of history and memory in the activities of subsequent generations of LLS members. Crucial to Oberlin’s argument culture, I argue, were two prevailing themes: the importance of securing spaces for argument, and the sense of belonging fostered when debating women reflected on their legacies as members of the society by imagining the debaters who had come before and would come after them.

22 Chapter One Gender, Race, and Degrees of Publicity

Oberlin was established as a colony and a college imbued with Christian principles. The Oberlin Collegiate Institute differed from other institutions of higher learning in the 1830s due to its unique admission policies, dedication to manual labor, rootedness in the religious reform tradition, and moral stance on slavery. It was not a school for the elite. Faculty and students alike lived and ate simply. Their daily routines included studying, praying, and working. Meals in the boarding hall consisted of Graham brown bread, milk, and vegetables such as the shelled corn grown on the campus." The majority of early attendees were the children of poor farmers from New England and Ohio who were galvanized by the knowledge that Oberlin’s motto of “learning and labor’ meant that they could pay their educational expenses by completing a daily schedule of farm and domestic tasks.’

Oberlin students had to possess good moral and intellectual character, be willing to perform manual labor, and abide by the rules of the university, which included regular public prayer and the complete avoidance of alcohol and gambling. There was no formal admissions process; potential students sent letters making the case for their eligibility or had friends and family members testify on their behalf. For example, when Silas R. Badeau wrote to Oberlin requesting admission for his daughter, he marshaled many of the themes that defined the College at the time, explaining: “we are unable to sustain her at any but a Manual Labour Institution. And though away from Parents, she will be surrounded by religious influence instead of worldly. And again we sympathize with the Oppressed and those who have no comforter, and we wish our Child to be with those who do so preeminently, manifesting it by their works.” This final comment was a reference to Oberlin’s commitment to abolitionism. The institution is rightly revered as a leader in nineteenth-century interracial education, although the decision to play that role was not as unanimous or straightforward as it may seem. According to former Oberlin archivist Roland Baumann, it was a “combination of financial need, chance opportunity, and the colonists’ religious sense of obligation” that ultimately propelled Oberlin toward admitting people of color.” After much contentious debate, in 1835 the Oberlin trustees approved

Progressive gender ideology, however, was not the primary inspiration for the admission of women students. Although the college professed a desire to “brin[|g] within the reach of the misjudged and neglected sex, all the instructive privileges which hitherto have unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs,” those expecting gender equality would have been sorely disappointed.” As Lori D. Ginzburg reminds us, Oberlin’s dedication to coeducation was motivated out of an evangelical reform ideology that connected feminine virtues and Christian virtues. As such, the goal was never equality of the sexes; it was to enable the piety, submission, and quiet grace attributed to women to remedy the excesses of a “male sphere” gone awry.” Women students at the college could anticipate “washing the men’s clothing, caring for their rooms, serving them at table, listening to their orations, but themselves remaining respectfully silent in public assemblages.” If they listed goals beyond the roles of wife and mother, Oberlin’s women students typically aimed to go into teaching or missionary work.”

Designed to provide an education that surpassed the best seminaries and academies of the time, the Ladies’ Course (also called the “Literary Course”) was a four-year curriculum that allowed women and men to be in the classroom together. However, it “omitted the more rigorous subjects” such as advanced mathematics in favor of more coursework in poetry and history. The 1838 catalogue for the Ladies’ Course reveals that students were taught “Whately’s Logic and Rhetoric” in their second year of study, though their coursework encouraged them to write and not speak their arguments.” Graduates of the Ladies’ Course earned diplomas, not degrees. Not until 1837 did three women students matriculate to the baccalaureate program. Each of these students—Mary Caroline Rudd, Elizabeth Prall, and Mary Hosford—was also a member of the

Young Ladies’ Association. However, even enrollment in the degree-granting program (which had been called the “Gentlemen’s” or “Classical Course”) did not afford women students the opportunity to perform public orations.

This regulation of women’s speech exemplifies feminist rhetorician Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's observation that “quite simply, in nineteenth-century America, femininity and rhetorical action were seen as mutually exclusive. No ‘true woman’ could be a public persuader.”* Of course, some U.S. girls and women had actually enjoyed considerably more freedom to learn and perform oratory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.” Yet the cult of true womanhood, an ideology associated with white, upper and middle class femininity, took hold in the 1820s and was very much alive in the early years of coeducation at Oberlin.*

Navigating public activities was particularly vexing for women students at a coeducational religious institution. Oberlin historian and LLS alumna Frances Hosford observes that under this ideology of separate spheres, women who wanted to partake in the benefits of public speech would face opposition on multiple fronts: “the religious called it unscriptural for a woman, the cultured thought it unseemly, the cynical found in it material for their bitter sneers, the evil-minded felt free to make a woman orator the target of vulgarity.” Oberlin’s women students were, in theory, forbidden from speaking in front of mixed-gender audiences and from speaking in church. In practice, this was difficult to negotiate and enforce.” Oberlin’s early graduates were therefore governed by access to different degrees of publicity, enforced by subtle and somewhat arbitrary directives on the basis of gender and sex.

Oberlin’s commencement ceremony displayed the institution's divided commitments to women’s education and feminine propriety. Graduates of the non-degree-granting Literary Course were invited to read their graduation essays aloud, because their ceremony involved, in theory, an audience of other women students. Women graduates of the Classical Course were prohibited from reading their essays because that degree was coeducational, and they would share the stage with men graduates (who were, of course, permitted not only to read their essays, but to give orations). A professor of rhetoric (a man) read the women’s essays at the

Woods, Carly S. Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.14321/j.ctv3cOtrt. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor ceremony. In practice, men friends and family members were in the audiences at both commencement exercises, making the strict regulation of women’s public speech before mixed audiences difficult and discretionary. For example, this distinction was in place in 1847, when Antoinette Brown was permitted to read her essay, “Original Investigation Necessary to the Right Development of Mind,” because she received a diploma from the Literary Course. That same year, her beloved friend Lucy Stone, a graduate of the Classical Course, was asked to hand her essay over to James A. Thome, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Stone refused to write the essay in protest.”

Thirty-six years later, Stone finally appeared upon her alma mater’s stage as the sole woman invited to give a keynote address at Oberlin College’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. By that time, she was an illustrious orator and a distinguished alumna who relished the opportunity to speak publicly in front of a mixed audience at Oberlin. In her speech, “Oberlin and Woman,” she praised the institution for its many progressive achievements, claiming that the “highest glory” was in establishing coeducation. However, she made certain to note that Oberlin had done her no favors when it came to cultivating her oratorical skills. Doing some rhetorical finger-wagging of her own, Stone recalled the rigid rules that defined her time at the college, stating, “custom, which held women to silence in public places, sat with the Faculty and with the Ladies’ Board, and shook its minatory finger at the daring girls who wanted the discipline of rhetorical exercises and discussions, and to read their own essays at Commencement.”** During her tenure at the school, Oberlin’s debating societies afforded opportunities for the kinds of rhetorical education that Stone desired.

The First Literary Society for U.S. College Women

On July 21, 1835, approximately ten women met in the lower hall of the campus seminary to create a society aimed at the intellectual and moral improvement of its members.” Men had organized the Oberlin Lyceum in 1834, though it was active for only two years before participation waned.” By contrast, the women’s group had a presence on Oberlin’s campus from

1835 to 1952. In the autumn of 1835 and beyond, meetings for both men’s and women’s clubs took place in different areas of the newly constructed Ladies’ Hall. The men’s lyceum occupied an assembly room on the second floor of the building, while the women occupied the attic. The women members scaled several flights of stairs in order to gather in a dark space memorable only for its austerity. The room was long and narrow with a “bare unfinished floor, backless oaken benches, and a lighting system composed of candles.”* Though they had to converse by the flickering of candlelight, the students did not want for heat in their meeting space. Oberlin’s men gifted them a stove, perhaps due to some residual guilt that their fellow students had to climb those extra stairs to gather in a less-than-welcoming (yet undoubtedly treasured) space.“ With the stove came the need for cleaning up, and the club’s vice president was reportedly tasked with maintaining the tidiness of their tiny room.”

It is in this space that the Young Ladies’ Association (hereafter referenced by its later name, the LLS) began as a forum to discuss literature and religion, and its focus on individual improvement in these areas distinguished the group from other reform societies on campus at the time. Records of the earliest activities of the society are no longer available (perhaps they were lost in a fire, if they were indeed kept at all), so information about the LLS in the 1830s is drawn from stories passed down through generations of alumnae and references to the club in college documents. For example, when trustees John Keep and William Dawes left for the United Kingdom in 1839 to pursue financial support for the college from British philanthropists, the students prepared a formal description of their organization. The document lends insight into the activities of the society, revealing that each member of the organization “writes and communicates to us her thoughts on some important and interesting subject. We hold correspondence with many distinguished & pious ladies of our own and other lands and with some who have left for pagan shores, by this means we collect much valuable information and often have our spirits refreshed.”* Note that the description is written as modestly as can be, with an emphasis on the group’s piety. In this carefully crafted public document, the focus is on written communication instead of oral argumentation (the extent to which they actually participated in oral argumentation in their meetings is discussed later).

A crucial distinction between the LLS and the secret debating society is that the former operated as a non-exclusive, non-secret organization from its inception. In fact, the openness of Oberlin’s literary societies was a source of general pride on campus, as heralded by this 1858 Oberlin Evangelist article: “the literary Societies (of Oberlin) move on harmoniously, are not secret, and neither now nor ever, have they been, as too often in some other Colleges, prolific centres of jealousies and plots against the government of the College.”” The LLS operated in full view of the Ladies’ Board of Managers, a regulatory body that oversaw the activities of all women students on campus. The board was composed of the women spouses of Oberlin’s men faculty and trustees (there were no women faculty or trustees at the time), who “had the narrow horizon of home women who have never known enlarging studies or experience in the outside world.” Marianne Parker Dascomb, member of the Ladies’ Board of Managers and first Principal of the Female Department, was listed as an honorary member of the LLS when it was founded. Over the years, the Ladies’ Board maintained strict supervision of the group. Dascomb and other members of the board visited meetings periodically, and faculty were invited to read prayers or lecture to the group. Gendered decorum was a consideration at every step, and the Ladies’ Board readily intervened whenever the group was seen as pushing the boundaries of femininity too far. For example, a frenzy of interest coalesced around the idea that the society should publish a newspaper. Members contacted an editor, had a publishing contract drawn up, and even decided that the new publication would be called the “Oberlin Ladies’ Banner.” When the Ladies’ Board heard of the plan, its members expressed that they “totally disapproved,” and the idea was swiftly squelched.*”

Records of LLS meetings were preserved beginning in 1846, and the minute books provide a sense of the society's constitution, business, and agenda.“ On May 6, 1846, the group adopted a constitution stipulating that membership was open to any “young lady” willing to abide by the rules of the society.*” Moreover, all members were required to attend the society's weekly meetings. Those who were tardy or absent without a good excuse were subject to the hardly insignificant fine of 614 cents. New officers were elected each month to the roles of president, vice president, recording secretary, corresponding secretary, treasurer, and critic.

Committees were devised with specific tasks to research in order to guide discussion and collective decision-making.

But did members actually debate at LLS meetings, such that the society deserves the title of first college women’s debating club? According to the minutes, meetings often included collective singing, the reading of essays, and discussion of a controversial question or resolution. This final task generally involved two participants (called “disputants”), who were assigned to the affirmative and negative side of the question. It also included “remarks from a critic’—one of the students who provided feedback—or was opened up for commentary from anyone in the society. A meeting held on June 5, 1846, is typical of the period. It began with a roll call, followed by singing, prayer, and then more singing. Louisa Lovell read an essay, “A Glance at the Present State of the World.” A “discussion” then ensued on the question, “is it the duty of Christians in the USA to go on foreign missions while there are three million heathens in our own country?” Elizabeth Wakely argued in favor of the affirmative side, while Lucy Stone took the negative. Other propositions featured at meetings during this period similarly highlight the conservative and religious focus of the society: “Ought this institution to be devoted exclusively to the education of pious young persons?,”® “Would it be for the advantage of the country to have a national costume established by law?,”” and “Resolved, that it was expedient to form a new missionary society.””* While these topics certainly seem to lend themselves to oral argumentation, LLS minutes of this period do not provide information about the content of their exchanges, nor was a vote recorded (if the society put it to a vote at all). One account suggests that while discussions were plentiful during the early years of the LLS, the first oration was not performed until 1874.” However, another club publication maintains, “orations and debates had long prevailed in the private meetings of the societies.”™

Early LLS discussions seem to be based upon the oral presentation of two competing perspectives that members prepared in advance and in writing. In so doing, Oberlin women were likely attempting to maintain a distinction that may appear arbitrary to the contemporary reader.” However, their meetings would certainly have allowed for some experimentation before that time. Frances J. Hosford speculates that the meetings must have entailed “a written discussion and not a free debate” but can’t

Woods, Carly S. Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.14321/j.ctv3cOtrt. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor help but wonder whether the line was ever crossed. Especially in the case of the defiant Lucy Stone, Hosford queries, “did she follow her text always, or did her facile thought and speech sometimes leap unbidden into the thick of the fight?” I surmise the LLS chose to call their activities “discussions” instead of “orations” or “debates” in their records in order to avoid rousing the suspicions of the Ladies’ Board. As detailed in the next section, Stone, Brown, and others decided to move beyond the surveilled space of the LLS in order to create their own opportunity to engage in unbridled oral argumentation.

The First Debating Society for U.S. College Women

The first rule of the secret debating club was, apparently, “you do not talk about the secret debating club.” How else can we account for the fact that many of the details surrounding the story of Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown’s society remain elusive? Its clandestine nature meant that there are no grand accounts of its activities. The group lacked the formality and institutional oversight that characterized the LLS. There are no meeting minutes. In fact, the first public mention of the secret club came more than forty-five years later, in 1892, when the nationwide U.S. women’s club movement had gained considerable momentum. Around that time, Stone and Brown sought to remember the details of the club in order to promote the claim that they founded the first women’s debating society.

Lucy Stone first came to Oberlin from her home in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, in 1843. Her father disapproved of Stone’s plan to go to college and initially refused to support her financially. As a result, she was not able to enroll at Oberlin until she was twenty-five years old, having saved up years of teaching wages to support her studies. Stone also took advantage of Oberlin’s commitment to learning and labor. She paid her expenses during her first year by teaching in Oberlin’s Preparatory Department for 12% cents per day and cleaning the boarding halls for 3 cents per hour (she reportedly propped up her Greek book so she could study while washing the dishes).”

Stone also found employment working in the village of Oberlin. The abolitionist view of the college prevailed among the villagers, and many

Woods, Carly S. Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.14321/j.ctv3cOtrt. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor people of color found a welcoming home in Oberlin in the 1840s. Oberlin’s schools, and some churches, were integrated, and people of color made up a significant portion of the overall population.” Historian J. Brent Morris argues that the village was “one of the most important communities in the abolitionist movement . . . because of the unique circumstances in its early years that gathered an unprecedented multiracial and cohesive abolitionist population in the Ohio wilderness that maintained a fever pitch of reform agitation throughout the antebellum period.”” Moreover, it was a crucial stop on the Underground Railroad—the last before reaching Canada. Stone earned money by teaching African American adults, many of them formerly enslaved, at the Liberty School. By day, the space served as a school where students learned literacy skills; by night, it was a meeting place for people to share stories and testify about the horrors of slavery.”

On campus and in the wider community, abolitionism was rooted in the Church and the Constitution, which made Lucy Stone’s identification as a radical Garrisonian a liability. She regularly felt the watchful eye of the Ladies’ Board upon her. As she pushed gendered boundaries ranging from speaking in public to refusing to wear a bonnet in church (due to headaches), Stone ironically acquired some rhetorical practice in pleading her case before the board. Luckily, in Antoinette Brown, Stone found a kindred spirit who was also dedicated to a career in public life. Brown sought to become a minister at a time when it was unheard-of for women to do so. She arrived on campus in 1846, and was able to complete Oberlin’s Literary Course at an accelerated pace due to her prior schooling. Both friends graduated in 1847. Stone and Brown had an intimate friendship that began at Oberlin and thrived throughout their lifetimes. They referred to each other as “sisters” and, fittingly, became sisters-in-law when they later married the Blackwell brothers, Henry and Samuel.”

The secret debating society was likely founded in 1846 or 1847, when both Stone and Brown were in residence at Oberlin and thinking ahead about their future paths.” It is around this time that both students also found the activities of the LLS lacking, as Stone’s prospective career as anti-slavery lecturer and Brown’s as a preacher came into focus.” In particular, Stone’s resolve to gain rhetorical skills at Oberlin redoubled.

In 1846 alone, she checked out Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres from the Oberlin College Library,” delivered her first public speech, “Why Do We Rejoice Today?,” to the “Disenfranchised Americans of Oberlin, Ohio” as they celebrated West Indian Independence Day,” and was deeply inspired by the passionate lectures and debates of Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Foster, who visited Oberlin twice that year.”

The fullest account of the secret debating society deserves lengthy quotation, as it details the events that led to the creation of the group:

The young men had to hold debates as part of their work in rhetoric, and the young women were required to be present, for an hour and a half every week, in order to help form an audience for the boys, but were not allowed to take part. Lucy was intending to lecture and Antoinette to preach. Both wished for practice in public speaking. They asked Professor Thome, the head of that department, to let them debate. He was a man of liberal views—a Southerner who had freed his slaves—and he consented. Tradition says that the debate was exceptionally brilliant. More persons than usual came in to listen, attracted by curiosity. But the Ladies’ Board immediately got busy, St. Paul was invoked, and the college authorities forbade any repetition of the experiment. A few of the young women, led by Lucy, organized the first debating society ever formed among college girls. At first they held their meetings secretly in the woods, with sentinels on the watch to give warning of intruders. When the weather grew colder, Lucy asked an old colored woman who owned a small house, the mother of one of her colored pupils, to let them have the use of her parlor. At first she was doubtful, fearing that the meetings might be a cover for flirtation; but when she found that the debating society was made up of girls only, she decided that it must be an innocent affair, and gave her consent. Her house was on the outskirts of the town, and the girls came one or two at a time, so as not to attract attention. Lucy opened the first formal meeting with the following statement: ‘We shall leave this college with the reputation of a thorough collegiate course, yet not one of us has received any rhetorical or elocutionary training. Not one of us could state a question or argue it in successful debate. For this reason I have proposed the formation of this association.’”°

The opening of the book is shown; the full text loads in the reader.

Loading the full text…

Debating Women

About this book

Front matter

Chapter 1

The end

Debating Women

About this book

Front matter

Chapter 1

The end

Related books

From the same collection, nearest in year