Advocating for Women's Right

Advocacy for Women Rights

In two different ways, Susan B. Anthony and Shirley Chisholm talk about

women’s rights in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in their writings.

While Anthony uses a rational appeal to advocate the women’s voting right, Chisholm

defends women’s rights to equal opportunities by using an emotional tone and objective

language. Chisholm’s experience as the first black woman in Congress makes her a

strong feminist. The determination of Anthony as an abolitionist and a feminist advocate

gives her credibility in the war on behalf of her fellow women.

In the first essay, “Woman Wants Bread, not the Ballot” by Susan B.

Anthony, the author tries to convince her audience that women’s voting rights are a

prerequisite to the change of the women’s working conditions. Anthony presents her

claim stating that if women could choose, they wouldn’t take the subordinate positions

and the inferior pay. Anthony believes that if the “disfranchised” class does not want to

vote it is because they are “not philosophers, not educated to think for themselves, but

simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes”(81).

To support this claim, she gives an example of the “monster bread meetings” where

starving workingmen in the English factories used to gather to get bread. As John Bright

tried to inform them that what they needed was the franchise, they shouted

back, just as American women in her time did, “it is not vote that we need, it is bread”.

This example shows how ignorance of those men kept them from claiming what actually

was their alienable right, to caste a ballot.

One can read concession in this work by the fact that after the “household suffrage” bill

of 1867 passed, even the opponents to this last one began to support educational reform

in England and thinking of the “ignorant, degraded working men”...