17th Annual Student Research Conference
Interdisciplinary
"Is it A Crime for a Citizen to Vote": How Human Rights Worked Within the Woman's Suffrage Movement
Shannon M. Clarkin
Dr. Natalie Alexander, Dr. Keri Bodensteiner, and Dr. Chad Mohler, Faculty Mentors
Women argued for their rights during the woman's suffrage movement in many ways. The human rights argument was popular with Enlightenment thinkers, and then continued in popularity for woman's rights thought with the work of John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft. The human rights argument makes claims that there are certain experiences and actions that all people have and should be entitled to, for example all people are capable of reason, and as the suffragists argued all people should be entitled to the right to vote. I am doing a rhetorical analysis of various speeches, as well as primary and secondary texts to examine how the human rights argument was used, to what audience it appealed, as well as how these arguments functioned in the movement as a whole
Keywords: woman's suffrage, human rights
Topic(s):Interdisciplinary
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: 44-4
Location: VH 1408
Time: 4:30