(DOWNLOAD) "Any Questions? the Gendered Dimensions of the Political Platform." by Nineteenth-Century Prose ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Any Questions? the Gendered Dimensions of the Political Platform.
- Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Release Date : January 22, 2002
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 212 KB
Description
Through a comparison of the political performance and reception of the Chartist Mary Ann Walker and the social reformer Josephine Butler, this article considers how changes in the organization of public meetings in the mid-Victorian decades helped to make female oratory more acceptable to audiences. Objections to women assuming the role of public speaker were not based simply on a desire to exclude women from the political sphere, but derived from a reluctance to allow women to face public interrogation. Most Chartists welcomed the token presence and even the voices of women on the platform but were loath to expose women to questions and heckles from the audience. Denied the opportunity to defend their speech or to engage with detractors, women were unable to assume the full duties of the Chartist delegate. By contrast with the rowdy nature of Chartist assemblies, with the proximity of speaker and audience, public meetings, from the 1850s onwards, resembled more closely the format of the public lecture or reading where speakers were not required to take questions. The women who began to speak out on a range of social and moral questions did so within very controlled and disciplined auditoriums where the speaker was distanced and protected from the audience. Women like Josephine Butler were not simply beneficiaries of changes in the public sphere, but rather were themselves advocates of a mode of public discussion that emphasised the authority of the speaker and the passivity of the audience. **********
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