American Literature, 500 word essay, No Plagiarism and due by Nov 10,2020

JFSR 29.2 (2013) �–24

RELIGION AND (DIS)ABILITY IN EARLY FEMINISM

Meredith Minister

In a society where women were denied social and religious equality with men on the basis of their perceived lack of physi- cal, intellectual, and moral ability, early women’s rights activists argued for gender equality by contending that women and men have equal capabilities. Although this argument of equal gender capability became the foundation for the women’s movement, it assumed an ideology of ability present within nineteenth-century health reform movements—an ideology which marginalizes peo- ple with disabilities. This article uses intersectional analyses to explore the speeches and images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth in order to demonstrate how religious ideolo- gies of ability permeated the women’s movement and were even maintained across race and class divides. Although this analysis reveals the problematic anthropology that grounded the women’s movement, it concludes with a call to develop alternative anthro- pologies, which sustain the equality of men and women without marginalizing persons with disabilities.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in important political and social changes that provided women with opportunities not present in the Victo- rian age. Women such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul led the early petition for women’s suffrage. In the 1960s, so-called second- wave feminists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem picked up the mantle and galvanized a generation to work for women’s abortion and labor rights. Al- though these women made it possible for other women to sit in Congress, run for president, and educate young people, black feminists have called for an ex- ploration of the racist and classist underbelly of the feminist movement—tales told from the perspective of those left on the margins—as mostly white, edu- cated feminists pursued gender equality. Their calls have yielded important nu- ances to the victorious tale of “women’s” liberation but the work is not yet done.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.26

Just as black feminists such as bell hooks and members of the Combahee River Collective have pointed out that the early women’s movement often deployed racist and classist rhetoric, so too feminist disability theorists suggest that femi- nists must explore the rhetoric of ability in their historical and contemporary sources. Feminist disability theory calls for intersectional analyses that extend beyond the triad of sex, race, and class as feminists explore who continues to pay the price for feminist arguments that seek gender equality without regard for social exclusions other than gender (and, now, race and class).

The recent emergence of feminist disability theory draws on the insights of feminist scholarship and disability studies to suggest that women’s rights have historically been denied on the basis that women lack the ability of men. Women are, under this logic, assumed to be inferior to men because women lack the physical strength or mental acumen of men. While feminist disabil- ity theorists such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argue simultaneously for the rights of women and people with disabilities by suggesting that strength should not be a measure of rights or personhood, early feminists in the nineteenth century adopted a line of argumentation that contended that women are just as able-bodied as men. Moreover, these early feminists drew on Christian un- derstandings of the nature of God and humans to develop their case for the equal abilities of men and women. In brief, early feminists attempted to use the master’s theologically buttressed hierarchy of ability to dismantle patriarchy. Using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, however, assumed the normativity of able-bodiedness and, thus, sustained the marginalization of any- one categorized as disabled.

This article explores images and speeches of the first-wave feminist move- ment through the lenses of disability theory and religious studies. Analyzing these sources, I contend that the rhetoric used by first-wave feminists chal- lenged religious understandings of female inferiority by sustaining religious dis- courses that accepted the superiority of able-bodiedness.1 By drawing attention to the manner in which first-wave feminists used rhetoric of ability, I hope to challenge contemporary feminists to analyze critically how the assumption of the superiority of able-bodiedness in feminist discourse undermines feminist critiques of social exclusion. Furthermore, I hope to challenge theologians to attend to the problematic theological anthropologies on which the early fem- inists grounded their arguments for gender equality and develop alternative anthropologies that sustain gender equality without marginalizing people with disabilities.

In order to develop this argument, I offer an analysis of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth, who, though socially differentiated according to

1 While it is important to note that ideologies of ability also undergirded nineteenth-century arguments for racial equality, this article focuses on the ideologies of ability undergirding the femi- nist movement.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism �

race, class, and physical ability (due to Truth’s disabled hand), both make reli- giously founded arguments for gender equality that assume the superiority of ability. The first part of this article considers Stanton and Truth within the con- text of the physical health movement at the end of the nineteenth century. The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of rapid social change, much of which resulted from the end of the Civil War in 186� and the nationwide abolition of slavery. Although I will refer to some of these events in my analysis, I cannot adequately contextualize either Stanton or Truth within the confines of this article and I refer you to Nell Irvin Painter’s biography of Truth, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, and Lori Ginzberg’s biography of Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, for more information on these women in re- lation to their context.2 Rather than attempting a detailed contextualization of Stanton and Truth, the first section of this article explores the nineteenth-cen- tury physical health movement as an important religious ideology of the nine- teenth century in which the women’s movement developed. Understanding the physical health movement in general and the particular religious movements that emerged from it in the form of Muscular Christianity and New Thought provides the background for the second part of the article, which analyzes the rhetoric of ability first in speeches given by Stanton and Truth and then in pho- tos and paintings of Stanton and Truth. The analysis of the speeches and images of Stanton and Truth concludes with a call for scholars to attend to the rhetoric of ability within their historical and contemporary sources in order to avoid perpetuating the marginalization of disability.

Physical Health, Muscular Christianity, and New Thought

Although often overlooked in relation to the emergence of the women’s movement, the physical health movement had a significant impact on how peo- ple in the nineteenth century thought about embodiment, health, and illness. Both Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would have been surrounded by the optimism that suggested that physical health was simply a matter of per- sonal motivation and will power. The corollary to this optimism, however, is that deviators from physical perfection were understood to lack willpower and, therefore, to be socially marginalized. Indeed, as Martha Verbrugge suggests, contemporary citizens of the United States need look no further than our own national obsession with health in order to understand the nineteenth-century obsession with making good decisions such as exercising and eating right. Ver- brugge argues that “between the 1820s and 1860s[,] . . . Americans’ fatalism gave way to the belief that physical well-being was possible. In concert with the perfectionist philosophy and social reforms of antebellum times, optimism about

2 Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Lori Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.28

health swept the Northeast. . . . The resemblance between the zealous crusade of the mid-nineteenth century and present-day America is unmistakable.”3 Her argument could be further buttressed by current attempts to correlate health and security in the attempt to construct obesity as a form of terrorism. Before physical bodies deemed imperfect were viewed as a threat to the nation-state, however, bodies identified as imperfect were constructed as threats to religious, spiritual, and moral well-being. This section explores the physical health move- ment in general as well as two religious movements—Muscular Christianity and New Thought—that deployed ideologies of health in order to mark moral and spiritual integrity.

The physical health movement developed in the early nineteenth century as more laypeople became interested in scientific and medical discourses. The products of early health reformers Sylvester Graham and James Harvey Kel- logg continue to be celebrated daily in the consumption of graham crackers (Graham’s response to the nutritional deficiencies of white bread) and break- fast cereal (Kellogg’s alternative to meat-based breakfasts). Although graham crackers and breakfast cereals seem harmless enough, Graham, Kellogg, and other health reformers developed a pervasive ideology of health that not only marginalized any individual perceived to be unhealthy but also considered lack of health as a threat to the social order. As James Whorton describes, “health reform movements must be understood as hygienic ideologies, idea systems that identify correct personal hygiene as the necessary foundation for most, even all, human progress.”4 Humanness is, according to the health reformers, delineated according to a scale of progress and progress cannot be achieved apart from physical fitness. In the ideologies of Graham and Kellogg, progress is understood to be natural and those deemed not physically fit simply need to obey the laws of nature in order to improve themselves and become meaningful (productive) participants in a progressive society.

The assumption behind this health obsession was that human beings can control their bodies such that the absence of health signals a failure. Whether this failure occurred as a result of eating the “wrong” foods or taking part in the “wrong” activities too often and the “right” activities not often enough mat- ters little. The point is that because the health reformers believed that health, disease, and debility can be controlled, these reformers made the claim that unhealthy people only have themselves to blame as they failed to take advantage of the controls—diet, exercise, and even prayer as the Muscular Christians and

3 Martha Verbrugge, Able-Bodied Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 4. For contemporary attempts to correlate obesity and security, consider how the rhetoric of war is deployed against obesity. See Charlotte Biltekoff, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post-9/11 U.S. Life,” American Studies 48, no. 3 (Fall 200�): 29–48.

4 James Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton University, 1982), 4.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 9

proponents of New Thought advocated—offered them. This individualistic ide- ology not only organized individuals according to their perceived level of health and wellness but also made individuals personally responsible for their place on the social and theological hierarchy. The individualism of the ideology of abil- ity, therefore, locates the responsibility for social marginalization on the indi- vidual who has been marginalized.� As Whorton notes in reference to the health reformers, “hygienic ideologists have consistently blamed people rather than the organization of the social system for the ills of society, and consequently their utopias have been familiar structures, purified versions of the status quo.”6 The problem, according to health reformers, was not that society marginalized anyone perceived to be unhealthy but, rather, that disease existed. The cure, therefore, was not the admission that health and disease were two aspects of physicality but rather for “diseased” individuals to get healthy. Under this ideol- ogy, both social life and moral life depended on health.�

This understanding of morality and health grounded the Muscular Chris- tian movement, which drew on the work of the health reformers to argue for the development of manly strength in order to combat the supposed feminine debility that had infiltrated Protestant Christianity. Although the term Muscular Christianity was first used in England as a description of the novels of Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, who argued that the Anglican Church was too effeminate and needed an influx of masculinity, it quickly became a moniker for a movement emerging within the United States.8 This movement proffered an interpretation of the Christian faith that mandated that men develop their strength via diet and exercise in order to ward off the unmanly effects of Victo- rian genteel overcivilization.

The ideology of a Muscular Christian was not only based on an idea of the inherent goodness of nature but also grounded in an understanding of God, one who made nature good. Illness and physical imperfection were, according to this logic, a result not only of deviation from the natural order but also the divine order. As Clifford Putney notes, “instead of just being a tool for labor,

� Ideologies of ability and ideologies of class may have this in common as they both seek to place blame for a socially constructed hierarchy on those at the lower end of the hierarchy. The notion that someone can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is an example of blaming the mar- ginalized individual for their marginalization.

6 Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, �. � This rhetoric can be seen not only in literature from the late nineteenth century but also

in contemporary literature about health and wellness. For a study that traces the development of health ideologies and their relation to Christian theologies in US history, see R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

8 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880– 1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 11–2�. For more on Muscular Christianity in England, see also the essays in Donald Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (New York: Cambridge, 1994).

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.210

the body was viewed by Muscular Christians as a tool for good, an agent to be used on behalf of social progress and world uplift.”9 God, as creator of the natural order, buttressed this order and, therefore, desired that people follow the divinely authorized order with the goal of achieving health and wholeness. Illness, obesity, and debility are deemed, therefore, not only contrary to nature but also a sin against God. Through this rhetoric, bodies deemed imperfect became threats to the religious, spiritual, and moral order.

The Muscular Christians identified with Christ as a carpenter—the ultimate manly man. As a rugged hypermale, Christ became a symbol for the rugged in- dividualism of Muscular Christians. As a song contained in the 1910 hymnbook Manly Songs for Christian Men states, “Send the call for manly workers over the world today. For the cause of Christ demands them who will not that call obey?”10 Muscular Christianity was a movement that sought to answer this call for “manly workers”—a call initially theorized long before the hymnbook was printed. The desire for manly workers values physical health and strength as a means to an end—economic productivity. The good news the Muscular Chris- tians preached did indeed promise health, but this health gospel was not discon- nected from a gospel that preached economic prosperity. Indeed, the gospel of health was intimately intertwined with the gospel of wealth, and manly men, according to the Muscular Christians, were needed in order to preserve health and economic vitality.

How were men to respond to Christ’s need for manly workers? To start, men could develop their bodies by making them more physically fit. The devel- opment in the 18�0s of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) created a space for men to develop their muscles toward the goal of serving Christ, thereby injecting a healing dose of manliness into a church life understood to be overly effeminate. Physical fitness, as the YMCA conceived it, was impor- tant not only for the development of the body but also for the development of the mind. As Yale professor Eugene Richards contended, “the corruption of the body by sloth and effeminate luxury was followed by a mental decline, just as softness and weakness of mind . . . have always gone hand in hand with enervated, enfeebled bodies.”11 Physical incapacity was, according to this logic, indicative of not only a physical deficiency but also an intellectual deficiency. Moreover, physical and intellectual incapacity inevitably gave way to a moral in- capacity that threatened Christianity. As Putney states, “many nineteenth-cen- tury reformers, first in England, then in America, expressed faith in the power

9 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 2. 10 Grant Colfax Tullar and I. H. Meredith, eds., Manly Songs for Christian Men (New York

and Chicago: Tullar-Meredith Co., 1910), the quotation is taken from the cover. For more on how Muscular Christians viewed Christ, see Putney, Muscular Christianity, ��, 92–93.

11 Eugene Richards, “The Physical Element in Education,” Popular Science Monthly 4� (189�): 4�6.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 11

of strenuous activity to overcome the perceived moral defects of urbanization, cultural pluralism, and white-collar work.”12 While the YMCA initially offered Bible studies and men’s discussion groups, it used gyms to lure athletic men who would not come to a Bible study while simultaneously mandating that men who did come to Bible studies also use the gym. For the YMCA, the gym and the Bible study, sports and religion, were inextricably intertwined. The ideol- ogy behind the development of the YMCA, thereby, tied Christian identity to physical fitness, creating a religious hierarchy in which physical capability was indicative of godliness.

By using capability to indicate godliness, Muscular Christianity drew on an assumed hierarchy of ability that reified gender roles and established the mas- culinity of Christianity. For those who perceived Christianity to be for women, Muscular Christians responded by offering an interpretation of Christianity in which the perceived effeminacies of spirituality were overtaken by the per- ceived manliness of physical strength. Jesus, not Mary, became the paradigmatic human being for Protestant Muscular Christians and capability, not ethereal spirituality, became the marker of religiosity. Muscular Christianity reified the physical health movement into a pervasive system that used markers of physical fitness to establish male superiority not only in society but also in church. As I argue later in the article, Stanton and Truth challenged the gender hierarchy purported by Muscular Christians while continuing the movement’s approach of using markers of physical health to establish religious and social hierarchies.

New Thought—in its focus on spirituality and the mind—may appear to be the opposite of the overtly physical Muscular Christianity. Yet, like Muscular Christianity, New Thought was also influenced by the physical health move- ment. Although proponents of New Thought often spoke of the power of the mind, that power was ultimately directed toward improving the body. Consider, for example, Prentice Mulford’s claim that “a physical body can be retained so long as the spirit desires its use, and that this body, instead of decreasing in strength and vigor as the years go on, will increase and its youth will be perpet- ual.”13 Although Mulford claimed that the body was the servant of the spirit, the effect was the preservation and, indeed, perfection of the body. The emphasis on the spirit in New Thought served, in other words, as the vehicle to trans- form the body. Muscular Christians used the body to affect the spirit while New Thought used the mind to affect the body, but both movements demonstrated a link between spirituality and embodiment—between godliness and physical perfection. In both movements, the ideology of ability purported by the health reformers was given divine authority.

12 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 4�; see 64–�2 for more about the development of the YMCA.

13 Prentice Mulford, “Immortality in the Flesh,” in The Gift of the Spirit (New York: Cosimo, 200�, 1913), 1�8.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.212

While Muscular Christianity purported to transform its adherents into manly men with the goal of serving Christ, New Thought purported not to transform its adherents into manly men but into a picture of perfection and productiv- ity—white and upper class—that would ultimately serve spirituality. Adherents to the school of New Thought had different views regarding the equality of men and women but the emphasis on physical perfection served to maintain race, class, and, at times, gender hierarchies. As R. Marie Griffith states,

But where Satter sees these debates [quarrels in New Thought over mind, matter, and spirit] as a gendered power struggle between white middle-class men and women, a more powerful undercurrent may have been one in which status-conscious women and men joined forces to urge their fellow citizens to rise and grasp hold of the felt destiny of their civilization, realizing the potential inherent in self-mastery to promote the new and perfect race.14

Where Muscular Christianity used physical health to establish male superiority and godliness, New Thought used physical health to establish white, upper-class (and, at times, male) superiority and godliness. Both Muscular Christianity and New Thought, therefore, assumed an ideology of ability in order to establish a cultural and spiritual hierarchy between men and women, upper and lower class, black and white.

The use of physical health ideologies to maintain not only established gen- der roles (in Muscular Christianity) but also established hierarchies of race and class (in New Thought) is significant for my analysis of Stanton and Truth, whose very different social locations suggest different relationships with these social movements. On the one hand, Stanton, as an upper-class white woman, would grow fond of New Thought and ultimately find it more helpful than other Chris- tian traditions in establishing gender equality.1� Truth, on the other hand, found neither Muscular Christianity’s attempt to reify maleness nor New Thought’s attempt to reify race and class hierarchies acceptable. Truth was, however, con- vinced by the central claim of the physical health movement that strength and productivity were more desirable (and more human) than weakness. The next section explores this rhetoric of ability in select speeches and images of Stanton and Truth with particular attention to the theological grounds that both women employed to justify their preference for ability.

14 Griffith, Born Again Bodies, 109. 1� Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 60–62.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 13

Rhetoric of Ability in Speeches of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized a gathering at Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss the place of women within civil society. Although there had been much women’s rights activism prior to the meeting at Seneca Falls, this meeting has become the legendary beginnings of the women’s rights move- ment and, especially, the women’s suffrage movement. At this meeting, Stanton gave her first of many public addresses on women’s rights in which she argued for gender equality by demonstrating the capacities of women. Although Stan- ton’s addresses over the next fifty years increasingly located the source of the assumed incapacity of women in certain Christian doctrines such as original sin, in this address Stanton focused on how God created women to be just as capable as men.

While movements such as Muscular Christianity took for granted cultural assumptions that women lacked the physical and intellectual capability of men, Stanton’s address at Seneca Falls argued that men and women are equally ca- pable. Stanton began with women’s supposed intellectual inferiority and stated, “when woman, instead of being taxed to endow colleges where she is forbidden to enter . . . shall educate herself . . . [she will improve] the talents God has given her.”16 According to Stanton, even though women had been denied access to education, they were not created with an intellectual inferiority and must be given a fair trial. Stanton’s argument implied that women might have been intel- lectually inferior but, if so, only because they had been excluded from systems of education. Although Stanton realized that intellectual capacity is dependent on cultural factors such as education, Stanton also assumed that the improve- ment of an innate God-given intellectual capacity would make women more fit to participate in society. Cultural factors to that point had prevented women from fully participating in society, and women must respond by responsibly ful- filling their intellectual potential, as men had in the past. Moreover, until such intellectual potential was realized, Stanton questioned whether women ought to have a public role. Intellectual ability, therefore, created a foundation for civic engagement.

Second, Stanton challenged the assumption that women are morally in- ferior to men by invoking the lack of moral principle among (male) lawyers, physicians, and politicians. With this invocation, Stanton suggested that men, although not created morally inferior, had denigrated themselves through “false education” and become morally inferior to women. In response, Stanton con- tended that “God’s commands rest upon man as well as woman.”1� Moral capa-

16 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address Delivered at Seneca Falls,” July 19, 1848, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Correspondences, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Schocken, 1981), 29.

1� Ibid., 30.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.214

bility, like intellectual capability, was a gift of God according to this statement. Unlike her argument for intellectual capability, which suggested that men may be intellectually superior due to their increased access to education, Stanton fully rejected the claim that men are morally superior by calling attention to the moral failings of men; according to Stanton, it was not men who were morally superior but women. Again, Stanton recognized the power of cultural shaping in her suggestion that public institutions had made men more morally corrupt than women but that morality was not only something that was shaped accord- ing to these public institutions. Rather, she assumed that both women and men have a God-given morality that public institutions had corrupted in the case of men. Women, in this case, had maintained an innate ability—moral reason- ing—that had been culturally conditioned out of men. To Stanton, then, women were more able to exercise morality than men. An ability or lack thereof again determined whether one should participate in the public square.

Finally, regarding the physical superiority of men, Stanton returned to the same strategy as she employed regarding the intellectual superiority of men. Namely, she claimed that if women are physically inferior, it is not because they were created physically weaker but because they had not been given the same physical opportunities as men. Stanton stated, “we cannot say what the woman would be physically, if the girl were allowed all the freedom of the boy in romping, climbing, swimming, playing whoop and ball.”18 As she did with the argument for intellectual superiority, Stanton allowed for the possibility that women were at that point physically inferior but denied that women were cre- ated as such. God created women and men with equal physical potential and Stanton believed that it is the realization of this innate physical ability that read- ies a human being for society. While men had been given more opportunity to develop their physical potential, women could be equally as physically able if given the same opportunities as men. Stanton, thus, attempted to respond to arguments that God created men as more capable than women by establishing the abilities of women. For Stanton, access to civic engagement was dependent upon abilities both naturally endowed and socially cultivated.

With these arguments, Stanton argued for gender equality on the basis of women’s capabilities and thereby assumed ability as a mark that makes one person more human than another. A more intellectually, morally, or physically capable human being is, according to Stanton, more valuable than a less able- bodied human being. In other words, ability, or the lack thereof, should deter- mine worthiness for civic engagement. Several Stanton scholars have noted her racism and classism, especially in her later years, so the finding of ableism as another aspect of her rhetoric may not come as especially surprising to anyone familiar with contemporary scholarship on Stanton.19 Perhaps Stanton’s able-

18 Ibid. 19 See, for example, Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, 92–134.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 1�

ism is simply another mark of her privileged and bourgeois location in society. Although this interpretation is tempting, I suggest that ideologies of ability per- vaded society beyond the upper class.

In order to establish the pervasiveness of nineteenth-century ideologies of ability, I turn to another example in the figure of Sojourner Truth. Unlike Stan- ton, who appears to have been arguing against gender equality while maintain- ing inequalities based on class and race, Truth identified the problematic nature of inequalities based on gender, race, and class. Following the end of chattel slavery, black women continued to be associated with the roles of reproducer and object of sexual violence. Truth offered an alternative to these roles by creating what contemporary black feminists identify as another stereotype of black women: the strong black woman.20 As a strong black woman, Truth re- fused to allow the women’s movement to be about upper-class white women. Despite the important steps she took toward gender, race, and class equality, Truth maintained that human beings who are less productive are not equal to those who are more productive. Indeed, we may suppose that Truth’s argument for race and class equality was based solely on her identity. If this were the case, we would also expect Truth to argue for the equality of people with disabilities based on her own experience with a disabled hand. Truth, however, followed Stanton’s argument and grounded gender and racial equality in a hierarchy of ability.21

Three years after the gathering at Seneca Falls, in 18�1, the women’s rights movement was gaining momentum and a convention was scheduled to be held in Akron, Ohio. While the keynote at this convention was given by Frances Gage, the words of Sojourner Truth captured the crowd and have subsequently been etched in history texts and collective imagination often under the title “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” According to records of the speech, Truth invoked her bodily capabilities (“Look at me. Look at my arm”), referred to her strength and need for food (“I can eat as much as a man”), and used biblical interpretation to argue for women’s rights.22 In this speech, Truth’s references to her black,

20 Although womanists identify many patterns regarding the perception of black women, they consistently identify the stereotypes of black woman as mammy and black woman as sexually devi- ant. M. Shawn Copeland connects these stereotypes, “On the one hand, black women were consid- ered lascivious whores; yet their putative depravity made them good ‘breeders’ ” (Enfleshing Free- dom: Body, Race, and Being [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010], 36–3�). For more on these stereotypes in contemporary America, see Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

21 For more information on rhetorics of race, gender, and ability in Sojourner Truth’s speeches and images, see Meredith Minister, “Female, Black, and Able: Representations of Sojourner Truth and Theories of Embodiment,” Disability Studies Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Winter 2012), which makes a case for the benefit of intersectional analysis including disability in historical studies.

22 For reprints of this speech as well as explanatory commentary, see Painter, Sojourner Truth, 12�; and Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 101. There are two extant versions

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.216

female body challenged religious discourses that regarded women as weak and susceptible to temptation and cultural discourses on “true womanhood.” In re- sponse to these assumptions, Truth argued first that black women were just as much women as white women and second that black women represented the strength of all women, a strength that equalized men and women.

As Truth constructed her own body as a part of the emerging feminist dis- course, she constructed historical female bodies as another part of this emerging discourse, thereby turning biblical interpretations on their head. Rather than accept Eve’s sin as an argument against women’s equality, Truth stated, “I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right again.”23 According to Truth, if the first woman turned the world upside down, then it was women’s responsi- bility, not men’s, to set it right again. The first sin was, for Truth, not an occasion for female suppression but for female strength. Truth’s tack against the use of the fall to argue for women’s inferiority, therefore, differed from Stanton’s cri- tique of the argument that women were created inferior. Unlike Stanton, Truth did not deny the accusation but, rather, turned the accusation on its head by suggesting that if women did indeed ruin the world, then women might be able to fix it.24 The first sin did not suggest women’s weakness but women’s strength. Moreover, not only should women be given this chance to “set [the world] right again,” according to Truth, but women already had. Truth stated: “And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?”2� In this statement, Truth overturned cen- turies of theological speculation by suggesting that a woman—Mary—played the key role in the enactment of redemption. Perhaps more important for her nineteenth-century context, Truth circumvented debates between white men and women regarding the masculinity or femininity of Christ by claiming that

of this speech: one was written shortly after the address in the June 21, 18�1, Salem Bugle, the other was written by Frances Gage, one of the presiders at the Convention. The second version is included in Truth’s Book of Life. While several readers of Sojourner Truth, including Piepmeier and Painter, suggest that the Bugle version is more accurate to what actually occurred, the inclusion of Gage’s version in Truth’s Book of Life demonstrates the importance of that later version for the construction of Truth’s public persona and perhaps even for Truth herself.

23 Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” in Painter, Sojourner Truth, 12�; and Piepmeier, Out in Public, 101.

24 Such a strategy for argumentation is an example of what Rosita deAnn Matthews calls “power from the periphery,” as Truth refused to accept the framework for the argument that mar- ginalized her and, instead, employed alternative ground rules. See Rosita deAnn Matthews, “Using Power from the Periphery: An Alternative Theological Model for Survival in Systems,” in A Trou- bling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 92–106.

2� Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” in Painter, Sojourner Truth, 12�; and Piepmeier, Out in Public, 101.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 1�

the act of redemptive importance was not the death of Christ but the entrance of Christ into the world.26

Truth’s attention to her strength and ability demonstrated her pride in her black female body while simultaneously negating Truth’s lack of ability due to a hand injury sustained while she was enslaved. By directing attention toward her capacity and “passing” as able-bodied, Truth perpetuated cultural and religious ideologies that assumed the superiority of ability. Although Truth challenged aspects of the women’s movement that denied her full humanity on the basis of either race or class, she maintained an anthropology that marginalized some ac- cording to a scale of ability, and by “passing” as able-bodied, she placed herself on the top of this hierarchy.

Both Stanton’s 1848 address in Seneca Falls and Truth’s 18�1 address in Akron, therefore, argued for women’s equality on the basis of women’s capabili- ties. This line of argumentation challenged cultural and religious discourses that perceived women to be inferior to men, but this challenge itself was predicated on cultural and religious discourses that assumed the superiority of able-bod- iedness. The next section suggests that this rhetorical strategy not only operated in the speeches given by first-wave feminists but was also in the photographs and paintings the movement produced.

Rhetoric of Ability in Pictures and Paintings of Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The artistic medium of photography was invented in 1839 and immediately flourished. This new so-called realistic artistic medium allowed for relatively quick and easy visual reproductions of real life. Despite the common assump- tion that photographs allow the viewer unmediated access to the viewed, pho- tographs, rather, construct the viewed within certain sets of cultural notions and expectations.2� This section focuses on photographic representations of Stanton and Truth, paying particular attention to cultural assumptions regarding gen- der and ability. I suggest that one painting of Truth, in particular, amplifies a significant aspect of Truth’s representation in the photographs. Through this analysis, I contend that representations of both Truth and Stanton buttressed their spoken arguments by attempting to establish the equality of women via women’s capabilities.

Photos of Stanton were carefully arranged to establish her as a capable yet feminine woman. These photos established Stanton’s capability by often

26 For more information on the debates between white men and women regarding the gender of Christ, see Putney, Muscular Christianity, 8.

2� Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popu- lar Photography,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33�–36.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.218

portraying her surrounded by books or working with her colleague and friend Susan B. Anthony (figure 1). Photographic representations of Stanton enforced Stanton’s spoken arguments for the intellectual capability of women by display- ing Stanton herself as intellectually capable.

Although many photographs attempted to demonstrate Stanton’s intel- lectuality ability, other photographs portrayed Stanton in more traditionally feminine roles. These representations meant to suggest that Stanton’s feminism and radical politics should not be considered a threat to common nineteenth- century ways of life as Stanton maintained her feminism alongside more tradi- tionally feminine expectations. These photographs of Stanton with her children and grandchildren and even one that appeared in an 1899 advertisement for “fairy soap” suggested that Stanton the feminist was also Stanton the traditional woman (figure 2). Photographic representations of Stanton, therefore, repre- sented her as a capable but not deviant woman and, through this representa- tion, attempted to garner public support for women’s rights.

Like those of Stanton, photographic representations of Truth also portrayed

Figure 1. Stanton and Anthony at work (ca. 1890s). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ61-�91.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 19

her as a capable yet feminine woman. Truth’s representation as a member of “the cult of true womanhood” is more striking given the cultural assumption that black women lacked the feminine qualities of white women and could not, therefore, really be true women. Truth’s photographic representations not only suggested that women could be capable and still feminine (as do Stanton’s rep- resentations) but also that black women were indeed women. Although Truth’s strategy for establishing the “true womanhood” of black women differed in her 18�1 speech and her photographs, representations of Truth in both contexts demonstrated her ability and femininity.

Most of the extant photos of Truth come from a series of photos taken for her cartes-de-visite in 1864. These cards were a new cheap form of photo- graphic memorabilia that often provided a fund-raising mechanism for public figures who often sold these cards at public events. Under the photos on Truth’s cartes-de-visite, the caption states, “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” This caption suggests that Truth conceived the picture as a shadow that pro- vided financial support for her substance, a statement that demonstrates some ambiguity for Truth in selling these representations.28

The invocation of the so-called cult of true womanhood occurs in different ways

28 Painter, Sojourner Truth, 18�.

Figure 2. Stanton with her daughter Harriot (18�6). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4896�.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.220

in photographs of Stanton and in photographs of Truth. Photographs of Stanton, as we saw, usually invoked this cult via motherly roles. Portraits of Truth invoked wom- anhood by portraying Truth with objects representative of feminine gentility such as knitting needles, flowers, and a book (figure 3). By portraying her black female body as a member of the cult of true womanhood, this representation challenged cultural representations of black womanhood that simultaneously equated black women with motherhood while denying them authority in the domestic sphere.

Although Truth’s cartes-de-visite were designed to challenge the predomi- nant cultural understanding of black womanhood, they simultaneously sustained the cultural discourse on disability by directing attention away from Truth’s dis- abled and disfigured hand. In most of the early photographs, Truth’s hand ap- peared to grasp the knitting string, but in an 18�0 image, Truth grasped her disabled hand with her left, covering the disfigurement. As attempts to redirect attention away from or hide her disability, Truth’s photos sustained the cultural discourse that stigmatized disability.

Figure 3. One of Truth’s favorite cartes-de-visite. Unidentified photographer, 1864. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-089�8.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 21

These “corrections” and attempts to hide her disability are magnified in a painting of Truth in which Truth’s hand appears without disfigurement (figure 4). The primary object of the painting is not Truth’s right hand so its “corrected” presence raises a key question: Was Truth’s hand intentionally “corrected” or was she depicted as she had come to be known in her public persona—with- out disability? Either way, the manner in which Truth was represented in the painting sustained the cultural discourse that stigmatized disability and did so in a more striking manner than Truth’s photos. The medium of paint, in this case, created an opportunity to heighten the “corrections” already begun in the photographs.

As I have suggested, these photographic representations of Stanton and Truth served different purposes, but what is common to the representations

of Stanton and Truth is the attempt to establish women’s equality with men by depicting the capability of women. As the speeches of Stanton and Truth argued for women’s equality by establishing the capability of women, the images of Stanton and Truth also suggested that women—black and white—were just as capable as men. In both word and image, Stanton and Truth assumed the supe- riority of ability and argued for women’s equality based on this assumption.

Figure 4. Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln. Frank Courter, 1893. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-1622�.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.222

Many of the assumptions made in the physical health movement can be seen in the speeches given by both Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stan- ton as well as in images of them. From Truth’s claim that women were just as capable to perform hard labor as men to Stanton’s suggestion that women would be just as physically capable as men if they were given ample opportuni- ties for physical exercise, both Truth and Stanton revealed the pervasiveness of the physical health movement as well as the gender ideals it reified. Nei- ther Truth nor Stanton questioned the physical health movement’s claim that physical and moral health should be achieved by exercising the body. They did, however, reject the Muscular Christian claim that men are more able-bodied than women. In fact, some of their arguments developed in direct opposition to the Muscular Christian claim that God needed “manly workers” by suggesting that God created both men and women to be productive workers (and, indeed, that women—in spite of their exclusion from the public workforce—may have been doing a better job than men). While the two were united against the use of physical health to maintain male superiority, they differed on the use of physical health to maintain race and class ideologies—a difference that became more pervasive in Stanton’s later years.

Stanton and Truth did not develop ideologies of ability but they did find these ideologies useful toward their ultimate goal of gender equality. As Stanton and Truth used the arguments made by the health reformers, the physical health movement became the foundation for the women’s movement. Although Stan- ton and Truth both adopted physical health ideologies in response to the Mus- cular Christian attempt to associate manly strength with godliness, only Truth offered an indirect response to the burgeoning use of the physical health move- ment to develop the racist and classist strands of New Thought. Stanton, con- versely, would increasingly find New Thought’s association of physical perfec- tion and spirituality more convincing as she worked toward a gender equality that excluded racial minorities and working-class women.29

While we may suggest that Truth dismissed the racist and classist ideologies of New Thought because she was on the underside of these hierarchies, this ar- gument fails to account for Truth’s acceptance of the ideology of ability despite being on the underside of the hierarchy that physical health rhetoric created. Personal identity may, therefore, play a role in responding to cultural ideolo- gies that marginalize and exclude, but a marginalized personal identity does not always create a challenge to the marginalizing ideology. As Truth’s case demon- strates, cultural ideologies may be pervasive enough to prevent protest—even by those who do not benefit from the cultural ideology. The feminist theory of internalized oppression—the process by which a member of a marginalized

29 See Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, 60–63, 116–21.

Minister: Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism 23

group actively maintains the oppressive ideology that marginalizes them—pres- ents itself here, not in the form of a female who actively maintains patriarchy, but in the form of a woman with a disability actively maintaining an ideology of ability.

Both Stanton and Truth are heroines whose work helped create a society that is more gender equal today than it was 1�0 years ago. But we must be care- ful not to idolize our heroines or their ideologies. Other scholars have pointed out Stanton’s racism and classism and this article has demonstrated the perva- sive ideology of ability that both Stanton and Truth maintained. When contem- porary feminists idolize Stanton and Truth, we risk perpetuating their ideology of ability. Yet not idolizing them means recognizing flaws not only in the hero- ines of the feminist movement but, more pervasively, in the arguments they constructed for gender equality. Questioning the foundations of gender equal- ity is, indeed, a challenging enterprise. Despite this challenge, contemporary feminists must deal with the ideology of ability in order to develop alternatives to a model of human being that is based on productivity and thereby establish not only a foundation for gender equality but also a foundation for recognizing the dignity of all persons. Failing to deal with this history and continuing to reify the ideologies of the founders of the women’s movement further marginalizes those with disabilities. Moreover, failing to deal with this history of ableism puts the feminist movement at risk as it continues to market an exclusive gender equality, which disability studies, as race studies before it, has proved to be unsustainable. Disability studies cannot be an add-on to already existing femi- nist theories but must, rather, transform feminist theory itself. As this article suggests, one of the central questions raised by considering feminist arguments for gender equality through the lens of disability studies regards the nature of human being—What does it mean to be human?

The use of ideologies of ability to establish women’s rights by early feminists maintained a particular understanding of anthropology based on productivity. According to this understanding of what it means to be human, people who pro- duce more are more valuable than those who produce less. Both Stanton and Truth developed these anthropologies in conversation with Christian theologies of creation and redemption. For Stanton, God created all human beings to be intellectually, physically, and morally productive while, for Truth, redemption is an ongoing act that demands the continuing productivity of people—and es- pecially women—toward the goal of reform or “setting the world right again.” Because this productive model of human being serves to marginalize disability, contemporary feminists—especially feminist theologians—must develop alter- native anthropologies that sustain the equality of men and women without pre- supposing a hierarchy of ability.

The pervasive role of religious and theological notions in the early women’s movement and in continuing cultural ideas of what it means to be human sug-

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29.224

gests that we need feminist theologians to continue to understand the relation- ship between cultural exclusions—including but not limited to gender—and the religious ideals on which those cultural exclusions are based. If, as Truth pointed out, women are excluded from society because of their supposed role in bringing sin into the world, then how do theological anthropologies of pro- ductivity serve to marginalize those with disability? In response to this analysis, just as the early feminist movement developed alternatives to theologies that ex- cluded women, contemporary feminists must develop alternatives to theologies that exclude persons with disabilities. Theologies may serve to sustain cultural exclusions but, as the liberation theology tradition recognizes, theologies may also serve to challenge cultural exclusions. Molly Haslam’s work developing a theological anthropology based on her work with persons with profound intel- lectual disabilities is a welcome start down this path as she engages both in analyses of theologies that exclude persons with disabilities and in suggesting an alternative. Sharon Betcher also stands as an important pioneer in this field as she identifies the importance of understandings of God—and, in particu- lar, notions of the Spirit—in developing inclusive anthropologies.30 Haslam and Betcher’s contributions create a foundation for the continuation of the feminist movement in light of the critique of disability studies that feminists have built their arguments for gender equality at the expense of persons with disabilities. Without the continued analysis of feminist rhetoric of ability and the develop- ment of alternative theologies and anthropologies such as those of Betcher and Haslam, gender equality will never be achieved. Indeed, the feminist move- ment will continue to engage in the struggle of identity politics through which benefits for one group are achieved not at the expense of patriarchy but at the expense of those who have already been marginalized.

30 See Molly Haslam, A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability: Human Being as Mu- tuality and Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); and Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress, 200�).

Copyright of Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Indiana University Press) is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.