Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity.

• Author: Griffin, Cindy L.
• Position: Book Review

Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity. By Susan Zaeske. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; pp. xiii + 253. $49.9.5; $19.95 paper.

Scholars interested in historical conceptualizations and negotiations of citizenship, antislavery rhetorics, the development of women's political identity, or the rhetorical maneuvers used to silence women in the 19th century will be quite pleased with Zaeske's Signatures of Citizenship. Carefully researched and thoroughly documented, Zaeske meticulously traces the progression and evolution of four decades of petitions sent to Congress by women opposing slavery. Zaeske offers scholars of argument, identity, and history an important look at the ways women, through their antislavery petitioning, began to define themselves as citizens and to claim a public political voice. Equally important is that Zaeske traces the ways political leaders either rejected or supported those claims to citizenship and the ways that these responses called forth new definitions of citizenship and rights on the part of women and their antislavery supporters. The book is detailed and carefully written and readers benefit from Zaeske's passion and writing style, reproductions of the actual petitions and political cartoons, and the important lessons in American History that Signatures of Citizenship documents.

After an important first chapter in which Zaeske details the meanings and nuances of the word "petition," Signatures of Citizenship describes the limited political opportunities available to white women in the 1830s (Chapter 2). Zaeske explains that prior to 1831, male abolitionists sent thousands of signatures to Congress on petitions opposing slavery. However, significant numbers of signatures by women did not begin to show up on petitions until that year. This first petitioning campaign began as a result of a meeting called by the Society of Friends in Philadelphia, in 1831, to discuss the "propriety" of petitioning Congress. Securing 2,312 signatures on their first petition, the women knew that their attempts to engage in political action "may be considered intrusive." They framed the petition from a submissive stance: "we approach you unarmed; our only banner is Peace." Already rhetorically sophisticated, they did not claim the identity of "citizen"; instead, they headed the petition "from the Females of the State of Pennsylvania" and attached a humble and...