Monday, March 9, 2015

Emancipating Myself from My Own Emancipation!

At the time of Emma Goldman's "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation",  women had been "emancipated" meaning that they could own land, work, and basically function without the support or permission of a man. Although legally women could participate in society as individuals instead of as an auxiliary part of a man's family, society had not changed enough for women to fully integrate into the "man's world." 

For much of her discourse, she uses vituperation and blames government, business owners, and husbands for the problems with women's emancipation. Placing blame on several different entities seems to contradict what the founding fathers had done with the declaration – place the blame on one figure – and, in theory, would not have as strong of an impact on the target audience. But I see this as a part of Goldman's great use of Pathos. 

Each of the culpable parties has one thing in common: at the time, they would have all been men. So what she does is continue to blame one party for the problem while showing how far its roots actually reach. Not only is the fault assigned to a specific party, but that party has a face for each person who comes in contact with the discourse. 

This also shows another angle of her rhetorical appeal. She uses a type of metonymy (I can’t remember or find the actual word) that allows her to talk about the larger problem while still focusing on the specific details that draw emotional responses. She wants to blame men but breaks them down into business owners, government, etc. Similarly, she employs many adjectives to increase this response. By coupling adjectives with nouns – “human in the truest sense”, “artificial barriers”, “greater freedom” – she paints a picture that actually contradicts the noun in itself. What women as a whole already has, is turned into what they actually need. The examples above show that women are actually not human, the barriers don’t actually exist, and that they actually don’t have freedom.


It wasn’t until the end of the discourse that I actually identified the audience: women! She says, “It begins in woman’s soul.” What Goldman is trying to do here is not change the way that men see and understand women, but the way that women see and understand themselves. If she can convince women to change the way they act and participate in society, society will have to accommodate for them.

1 comment:

  1. Great summary of some of the things we talked about today, and a great analysis. Although I didn't explicitly state it in my post I too found things quite contrary to the approach that the founding fathers used in the Declaration of Independance. I think that this goes to show that true rhetoricians adhere to karios and their audience more than anything else, or in the famous words or modern day LDS missionaries "Teach people not lessons!"... or at least that is what I always think of. I also think that Emma Goldmans efforts here are effective at not putting the blame all into one source because it causes her audience to banned together, and with nothing/no one else, which would lead to the actions she would hope for in her audience.

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