SOURCE: Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Style and Content in the Rhetoric of Early Afro-American Feminists.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (November 1986): 434-45.

In the following excerpt from a rhetorical analysis of the speeches of Sojourner Truth, Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, Campbell points out that Wells-Barnett's style shares many aspects of similar speeches by other reformers but that she disdained traditional “feminine” modes of rhetoric.

Afro-American women, in addition to the special problems arising out of slavery, historically faced the same problems as all other women. Married, they were dead civilly; unmarried, they were dependents with few possibilities for self support; regardless of marital and socio-economic status, they were oppressed by the cult of true womanhood, which declared that true women were pure, pious, domestic, and submissive.¹ As a result, even free Afro-Americans in the North prior to the Civil War confronted the same proscriptions against speaking in public as...