First-Wave Feminist Rhetoric

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The first wave of American feminism began in the early 1800’s and ran through the 1920’s. These early suffragists/woman’s rights advocates had an enormous task in front of them: they had to not only create space in patriarchal ideology for their views, but also to construct their arguments using the discourse of the oppressor in hopes of persuading those with the power to enact change (men) that change was needed. Carrie Chapman Catt accurately described the great difficulty in enacting change in the most dominant ideology (patriarchy) the United States has ever known: “The world rarely inquires into the origin of a universal belief. It proceeds upon the theory that ‘whatever is, is right,’ and the very fact of the universality of any belief is accepted as a sufficient guarantee of its truth. Such belief becomes blind faith” (Campbell 471).
          First-wave heroines like Catt and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (pictured) fought bitterly against the blind faith in patriarchy, particularly those aspects of the ideology that degraded and demeaned women. At the famous Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Stanton spoke the powerful words that provided the inspiration for the title of this presentation: “Woman is the idol of man’s lust, the mere creature of his varying whims and will” (Campbell 44). Women were helplessly at the mercy of their husbands, as the laws of the time gave men complete control over their wives and daughters.
          Thanks to the likes of Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, those laws have been abolished. However, a study of the rhetoric of two of the most popular PC games from 1996 suggests that the patriarchal notion of women as idols of lust remains. Applying Kenneth Burke’s ideas about identification helps reveal this.