Women in the (White) house: Communication professor examines presidential rhetoric and womanhood

Stay home. Keep the house. Make babies. America needs you.

It sounds sexist now, but according to Leslie Harris, a UWM associate professor of communication, that was the standard message that Progressiveera presidents delivered to American women – when they bothered to address women at all.

Harris recently contributed a chapter to Reading the Presidency: Advances in Presidential Rhetoric (2019, eds. S. J. Heidt and M. E. Stuckey) detailing how presidents at the turn of the 20 th century used their rhetoric to reinforce women’s roles. She sat down to talk about her research, how rhetoric has changed in the last 100 years, and how it hasn’t.

Leslie Harris

What does your chapter cover?

In that chapter, I am looking at presidential rhetoric focused on the Progressive era and asking, how do we make sense of women’s absence from presidential rhetoric during this time period?

And women were very much absent. They were occasionally represented (in speeches), but it was quite rare. I use ‘home’ as a way of thinking about women’s representation and role in civic society as it’s represented by the presidency, and I make the argument that there’s a special relationship between the literal, familial home and the national home. That relationship orders the way women are understood in public life, because their role as citizens is to nurture the familial home to enable success in the national home. My chapter looks at the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Taft, and Benjamin Harrison.

What did life look like for women at the time?

Of course, women couldn’t vote nationally. There were still cultural expectations that women got married and became mothers. At the same time, the country was changing dramatically. Women, especially of different races and classes, were working outside the home. Even though these expectations of traditional motherhood continued, many women didn’t do that because they couldn’t. They needed to work or they needed to be doing other things outside of the home.

The suffrage movement was also happening throughout this time period … but it did not have a lot of momentum during a good part of the Progressive Era.

President Theodore Roosevelt

Why didn’t presidents mention women at all? Was the attitude “women can’t vote; why do we need to talk about them?”

I think it was more, women are really important to the nation, but they’re important in the role that they do. Their role is to raise future citizens and take care of the home, and keep the familial home a welcoming place for men who are outside the home. The home became a pillar on which the entire nation was built. Women were really important, but they were important if they did the right thing.

President William Howard Taft

What did these presidents say when they actually mentioned women?

There were a few examples where women are represented really clearly. Theodore Roosevelt is a good example of this. He publicly argued that we need to prevent what he called ‘race suicide.’

His concern was that white women – the right type of women, for him – were not having enough children and were not invested in the home, and instead there were too many immigrants who were having children.

This time period also saw the passage of the Slave Trafficking Act, also known as the Mann Act. This one was signed by Taft. There was a fear that white women were being stolen from their safe country homes to be trafficked and forced into prostitution.

That’s just one example of how presidents, when they addressed women … gave a call to the nation to protect women. If women aren’t protected, they aren’t able to do their job of having babies.

I suspect that part of it is that we still have cultural expectations of what a good woman is. Those cultural expectations don’t map cleanly onto our expectation of what the presidency is.

President Woodrow Wilson

Today, these attitudes strike us as horribly sexist. How did women at the time respond to this rhetoric?

This was normal. It’s not that presidents are doing anything unusual; instead, they reflected the norms of their culture, and through those speeches, they are able to reinforce those cultural norms. There’s actually evidence that a lot of women just adored Theodore Roosevelt because he exalted women’s role. A lot of women felt that he was privileging their importance to the nation. They felt “seen.”

President Benjamin Harrison

Obviously presidential rhetoric has changed in the last hundred years, as we see now with women running for office, but do you see any similarities between then and now?

Of course, there are still remnants of rhetoric from the 19th and 20th century that we see continuing today. I’m not aware of male candidates being asked what’s going to happen to their kids while they’re being politicians, for example. These cultural expectations around gender roles don’t change overnight and it’s been 100 years since women have gotten suffrage, but we’ve never had a woman as president, and we still have a lot of expectations around womanhood, home, and the role women have in family life.

I suspect that part of it is that we still have cultural expectations of what a good woman is. Those cultural expectations don’t map cleanly onto our expectation of what the presidency is.

You do see that play out in national politics. At least 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, Republican women running for office were drawing on traditional tropes of womanhood. It would be common to see a woman in the Republican party – Sarah Palin is a great example – acting in that public role through the lens of motherhood in order to justify their role in public life.

What do you hope people learn from your chapter?

Even when presidents are not talking about women, it’s important to look at what’s underneath the language and how that implicates race and gender in complicated ways.

There are plenty of examples of presidents who wouldn’t mention women at all, but when they’re talking about “the home,” they’re definitely talking about race, gender, and national identity in ways that are supposed to prescribe how people are to exist in our public spaces.

I think the important thing is to recognize that race and gender are present, even when they appear to be absent.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science