distinct but related efforts as those for
birth control and improving the conditions of
women workers. Each work is complete; each is
annotated to identify individuals and to
provide historical information likely to be
unfamiliar to contemporary readers. Collec-
tively, these works are a documentary history
of what became the social movement for woman's
rights/ woman suffrage.

More important, these are the movement's
key rhetorical works. Through these works
scholars can see the processes by which the
movement came into existence, its ideology
developed and conflicts arose, its arguments
were laid out, evidence was marshaled and
presented, opposing views were answered,
obstacles were transcended, and appeals were
adapted to varied audiences. In other words,
these works form the core of the persuasive
message of early feminism. They are the basis
for describing the challenges women faced and
for evaluating the resourcefulness with which
women deployed the available means of persua-
sion to encompass and transcend the obstacles
they confronted.

I refer to early activists as feminists
only in the sense that they worked to improve
the conditions of women. To themselves, they
were woman's rights advocates or suffragists;
in the United States, only their opponents
called them "suffragettes." In Great Britain,
by contrast, the radicals of the Women's
Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline
and Christabel Pankhurst, adopted this epithet
as their own.

Early woman's rights activists faced many
rhetorical challenges, some of which were
unique. Most fundamentally, they struggled
for the right to use the power of rhetoric--
for the right to act in the public sphere by
speaking, organizing, publishing newspapers,
and lobbying. Women justified their right to
rhetorical activism on several grounds. A
major source of their ideology was natural
rights philosophy, a body of belief refined in
the Enlightenment and summed up in the

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