Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of (...) reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness allows us to see how having it does not eo ipso render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 anti-suffragist manifesto “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterisation is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal. (shrink)

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design—how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders—for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are articles, letters, and editorials on women's suffrage that were published between 1909 and 1912 in Canadian periodicals. In particular, the author analyzes noun phrases with which suffrage-skeptical women are addressed, (...) relying on the theory of constitutive rhetoric to highlight the interpellative force with which the audience design of this public political debate operates. (shrink)

This essay presents the normative foundation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s constructivist theory of justice in three steps. First, I show that for Du Bois the public sphere in Anglo-European modern states consists of a dialectical interplay between reasonable persons and illiberal rogues. Second, under these nonideal circumstances, the ideal of autonomy grounds reasonable persons’ deliberative openness, an attitude of public moral regard for others which is necessary for constructing the terms of political rule. Though deliberative openness is the essential vehicle (...) of construction, reasonable persons only have a pragmatic political obligation to forge ties of deliberative reciprocity with likeminded persons whom they trust will listen and not harm them. Finally, I present Du Bois’s defense of black suffragists’ support of the 19th Amendment to illustrate pragmatic political obligation in action. I sketch successful democratic engagement that reconstitutes a nonideal public sphere. (shrink)

From 1909 onward, the Canadian suffrage debate was heavily influenced by reports on suffrage militancy from Great Britain and the United States. Militancy played an influential role in Canadian suffrage history not through its practice–there was no Canadian militant campaign–but through an ongoing discussion of its meaning. Using Anne Freadman's notions of genre and uptake, this paper analyzes the discursive uptake of suffrage militancy—from news reports on front pages, to commentary on women's pages, to reviews of Emmeline Pankhurst's Canadian speaking (...) engagements. The Canadian debate about militancy is a fertile site for drawing out the roles of genre and uptake in the political positioning of both suffragists and suffrage sceptics. Talk about militancy serves as a way to regulate the uptake of this particular genre of political action, whereby both sides tended to share the optimistic view that Canadian suffragists where not yet in need of militancy. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the woman's page in the *Grain Growers' Guide,* edited between 1912 and 1917 by Francis Marion Beynon. I approach this material with questions that have become prominent in rhetorical studies of women's writing. How were women called forth to speak, and what were their motivations to participate in public debate? How did woman's page editors shape the conditions under which they themselves and other women could articulate their concerns? I show that suffragist editor Francis Marion Beynon (...) created situations in which she and other women could speak publicly and politically about issues such as women's suffrage. (shrink)

This essay investigates how British women in the Balkan military zone of WWI wrote on the sanitary crisis, which demonstrated itself in epidemics. It researches how these narratives figured in developing and strengthening their agendas which were part of their cultural and personal background. The military crisis was a way for the British women to prove their worth in the theatres of war, as a prerequisite for obtaining suffrage. The health crisis in the war-stricken Balkans was the main danger of (...) life for these women, and dying in an epidemic was viewed as the closest thing to dying in a battle, which in turn endorsed the possibility of obtaining suffrage. (shrink)