Women in the (White) house: Communicat rhetoric and womanhood Stay home. Keep the house. Make babies. America needs you.
My chapter looks at the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Taft, and Benjamin Harrison.
It sounds sexist now, but according to Leslie Harris, a UWM associate professor of communication, that was the standard message that Progressiveera presidents delivered to American women – when they bothered to address women at all.
Of course, women couldn’t vote nationally. There were still cultural expectations that women got married and became mothers. At the same time, the country was changing dramatically. Women, especially of different races and classes, were working outside the home. Even though these expectations of traditional motherhood continued, many women didn’t do that because they couldn’t. They needed to work or they needed to be doing other things outside of the home.
What did life look like for women at the time?
The suffrage movement was also happening throughout this time period … but it did not have a lot of momentum during a good part of the Progressive Era.
Leslie Harris
Harris recently contributed a chapter to Reading the Presidency: Advances in Presidential Rhetoric (2019, eds. S. J. Heidt and M. E. Stuckey) detailing how presidents at the turn of the 20th century used their rhetoric to reinforce women’s roles. She sat down to talk about her research, how rhetoric has changed in the last 100 years, and how it hasn’t.
Why didn’t presidents mention women at all? Was the attitude “women can’t vote; why do we need to talk about them?” I think it was more, women are really important to the nation, but they’re important in the role that they do. Their role is to raise future citizens and take care of the home, and keep the familial home a welcoming place for men who are outside the home. The home became a pillar on which the entire nation was built. Women were really important, but they were important if they did the right thing.
What does your chapter cover?
What did these presidents say when they actually mentioned women?
In that chapter, I am looking at presidential rhetoric focused on the Progressive era and asking, how do we make sense of women’s absence from presidential rhetoric during this time period?
There were a few examples where women are represented really clearly. Theodore Roosevelt is a good example of this. He publicly argued that we need to prevent what he called ‘race suicide.’
And women were very much absent. They were occasionally represented (in speeches), but it was quite rare. I use ‘home’ as a way of thinking about women’s representation and role in civic society as it’s represented by the presidency, and I make the argument that there’s a special relationship between the literal, familial home and the national home. That relationship orders the way women are understood in public life, because their role as citizens is to nurture the familial home to enable success in the national home.
His concern was that white women – the right type of women, for him – were not having enough children and were not invested in the home, and instead there were too many immigrants who were having children.
12 • IN FOCUS • April, 2020
This time period also saw the passage of the Slave Trafficking Act, also known as the Mann Act. This one was signed by Taft. There was a fear that white women were being stolen from their safe country homes to be trafficked and forced into prostitution.
