Carrie Chapman Catt's Speech "The Crisis," A Metaphorical Call for Women's Rights

Carrie Chapman Catt

“I believe that a crisis has come,” said suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, as she spoke in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 7, 1916, “which, if recognized and the opportunity seized with vigor, enthusiasm and will, means the final victory of our great cause in the very near future.”

“Victory.” “Great cause.” Chapman Catt gave a militaristic speech in wartime, and her militaristic metaphors carried forth her call for women’s rights, democracy, and economic wisdom. She did not just give a political call, however; no, it was a symbolic battle.

How do metaphors work in speeches? A metaphor directly equates two things, for example, “life is a rose.” Unlike similes (“life is like a rose”), metaphors change how we think. When we talk about a table’s legs, we literally forget that a table isn’t a person, doesn’t really have legs, and does not actually stand on legs, or anything else, for that matter. Instead, the metaphor shapes how we think about tables. So, with women’s rights, there wasn’t literally a crisis, not in the sense that Europe was in a crisis, and no bombs were bursting around the suffragists’ demonstrations. Instead, Chapman Catt’s metaphors created symbolic power. And, in the long run, what kind of power is greater?

Indeed, Chapman Catt insisted in warlike manner, “our victory hangs within our grasp.” She talked about a “long drawn out struggle” and “cruel hostility.” Chapman Catt began by reviewing women’s practical wartime contributions, and ended with a symbolic but militaristic call for women’s struggles. Chapman Catt’s military metaphors – “crisis,” “struggle,” “cruel hostility,” stressed the fight for women’s rights.

So, in 1916, World War I was ravaging Europe, while the United States remained at peace. With the world thinking of war – they called it the Great War, for they never imagined that an even worse war was coming – Chapman Catt’s metaphors drew women’s rights from the global conflict.

So, while casting her eyes on the war’s social and economic effects, Chapman Catt recognized that the war would overturn the social order and create a new world.

Woman working in British
airplane factory, 1914

Citing unnamed authorities, she agreed that the war would “lead to social and political revolution throughout the entire world.” She predicted “that the war presages a total change in the status of women.”

To emphasize her point, Chapman Catt reminded her audience of the war’s economic cost in money and human lives. With the men at war, women began to fill traditional men’s roles. In sad contrast, as Chapman Catt pointed out, men who could have contributed economically were, instead, destroyed on the battlefield. Many of the survivors would, she continued. “go to their homes, blind, crippled and incapacitated to do the work they once performed.” In the meantime, she noted that the war forced women into the workplace, growing crops and building bombs, while also giving “tender and skilled care to the wounded.”

With the war bringing women’s economic contributions forward, what choice would the world have, Chapman Catt asked, then to recognize their work?

“The economic axiom, denied and evaded for centuries, will be blazoned on every factory, counting house and shop: ‘Equal pay for equal work’; and common justice will slowly, but surely enforce that law.”

And thus, as the war ripped the traditional economic system to bits, Chapman Catt stated that the violence of warfare would soon release women from their symbolic (and sometimes more literal) enslavement:

“So it happens that above the roar of cannon, the scream of shrapnel and the whirr of aeroplanes, one who listens may hear the cracking of the fetters which have long bound the European woman to outworn conventions.”

Not just freedom, she said, but “cracking of the fetters.” Building on that symbolic but potent connection, Chapman Catt ended by calling, not only for “emancipation,” but for a “bugle call” to lead women as they march toward freedom. The military metaphor had, in her speech, now become a real battle, emerging from the war’s horrors, and bringing liberty to women who fought for their freedom:

“The Political emancipation of our sex calls you: Women of America, arise! Are you content that others shall pay the price of your liberty? Women in schools and counting houses, in shops and on the farm, women in the home with babes at their breasts and women engaged in public careers will hear. The veins of American women are not filled with milk and water. They are neither cowards nor slackers. They will come. They only await the bugle call to learn that the final battle is on.”

Like the fighting men in Europe, American women were, she said, “neither cowards nor slackers.” Instead, they prepared for “the final battle” to begin. Thus, her prescient discussion of the war’s political and economic effects had now culminated in full-grown military metaphors.

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From disaster, Chapman Catt had drawn hope. She expected “that the war will be followed by a mighty, oncoming wave of democracy.” Her reason was that “the conflict has been one of governments, of kings and Czars, Kaisers and Emperors; not of peoples.”

Overall, Chapman Catt and her metaphors tied her themes together brilliantly. Yes, the Great War had brought women into economic roles that men had previously served. The men answered the call to fight. The women answered their call to serve. The war disrupted the economic institutions that the traditionalists mistakenly thought they were preserving. As the war ended, the fight for women’s rights would just begin. The Great War was a war of slaughter. The metaphorical war of American women was a fight of freedom. Symbols helped create the new reality.

Now, Chapman Catt led various women’s organizations, and we remember her today as the founder of the League of Women Voters. One of her predictions came true: the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed only a few years later, recognized women’s right to vote. In that sense, her optimistic belief that the war would lead to more democracy had some truth. Unfortunately, the war was also followed by a tariff war, the Great Depression, economic upheavals, and the rise of worldwide dictatorships. Another war, even more evil than the first, would soon ravage the world. Indeed, the second war was delayed only by the need to raise a new generation of soldiers to replace the ones who died the first time. And I, for one, saddened by the rise of Donald Trump and his movement of resentment and reaction, remain unconvinced that the nation ever learned the lessons that Carrie Chapman Catt so eloquently taught.

by William D. Harpine   

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Research Note: Many outstanding scholars have written about metaphors, but, as I wrote, I was particularly thinking about I. A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric. And many thanks, once again, to AmericanRhetoric.com, co-founded by my graduate school classmate and book editor, the late Martin J. Medhurst, for publishing the text of this important speech.

Copyright © 2025 by William D. Harpine

Image of Carrie Chapman Catt: Joint Suffrage Procession Committee, 

public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of woman working in factory, University of British Columbia, 

public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sojourner Truth in 1867: Keep the Thing Stirring!

Sojourner Truth

“I feel,” said Sojourner Truth, “that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have a right to have just as much as a man.”

On May 9, 1867, Sojourner Truth, a former slave and famous abolitionist speaker, pressed for women’s economic rights in a metaphor-filled speech. She was speaking at the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, held at the Church of the Puritans in New York City. She spoke in metaphors to accentuate women's rights.

As she spoke, such metaphors as weeding the garden, riding horses, and healing a knife wound expressed the path toward economic equality. Metaphors, which link seemingly unrelated concepts, strike to our deepest feelings. Sojourner Truth’s speech about justice for women surely seemed radical in 1867. Yet, the problems of justice and freedom that she described in 1867 still plague the United States, indeed the world, even to this day. Indeed, just last year, the Pew Foundation found that, “even as women have continued to outpace men in educational attainment, the pay gap has been stuck in a holding pattern since 2002, ranging from 80 to 85 cents to the dollar.”

As she began, standing to applause, Sojourner Truth compared the oppression of women to the recent abolition of slavery:

“My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don’t know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field—the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed.”

That was a metaphor.  Any gardener, then or now, knows that it is never enough to pull the leaves. Only when the weed has been destroyed, as Sojourner Truth said, “root and branch,” do we know that it will never grow back. Now that chattel slavery had been abolished, Sojourner Truth argued that it was time to push for women’s rights. She made her next point with a metaphor about ice fishing. A New Yorker, she knew that ice fishing requires one not only to break the ice, but to keep stirring to prevent the pond from freezing over again:

“I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.”

Church of the Pilgrims

The speaker had already warned that the audience might not be happy about everything he had to say. The end of the Civil War and the destruction of legalized slavery was a massive blow for freedom. It was, she said, not enough: not until women achieved the same rights as men. 

And, she said, it was not enough to talk about men’s rights:

“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women,” Sojourner Truth stated as she pushed for women’s rights. 

“Stir” continued the idea of “stirring” the ice. As a true agitator, Sojourner Truth sought to continue agitation until women, including freed women, had the same rights as men. Otherwise, she pointed out, women’s lot will not have improved at all:

“… and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”

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A master, of course, demands work without pay. That is not only a moral fault, but also an economic incentive. That is why it made sense when Sojourner Truth recounted the metaphorical chains that still held women to unequal pay for equal work:

“I suppose I am kept here because something remains for me to do, I suppose I am yet to help to break the chain. I have done a great deal of work; as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay; so with the German women.”

That is, just like a modern feminist, Sojourner Truth pointed out that women “did not get as much pay.” The problem that she alleged was that while, people viewed the end of slavery as a great triumph, they felt content—too content—to rest without fighting all injustice. Still comparing the oppression of women to slavery, she said:

“You [presumably speaking to men in the audience] have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.”

It will feel all the better? Sojourner Truth harshly told the nation to get over their pain, to understand that everything would be better if the nation could heal: again, the speaker’s metaphor drove home a deeper reality. Yes, it hurts to give up power, but, yes again, a nation that heals will be better off. “It will feel all the better,” she said.

Finally, noting that nobody at the conference had been singing, Sojourner Truth said:

“I am going to talk several times while I am here; so now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here.”

After singing the old standard, “We Are Going Home,” she reminded the audience that, before they get to heaven, “first do all we have to do here.”

As the audience listened to her sing, Sojourner Truth had already compared the unequal treatment of women to chattel slavery, spoken against the bonds that unjustly restrict women, and propounded metaphors about everyday life: cracking the ice, breaking chains, turning loose of the reins of injustice, and healing the cuts. She reduced the problem to basic economics: equal pay for equal work. Anything less was trickle-down slavery. And she sang.

The ultimate evil of slavery, of course, is that masters force enslaved Americans to work under conditions of unfathomable cruelty, with no control over their destiny, and without compensation. The institution of slavery continued for centuries because masters gained such a huge economic advantage from unpaid labor. Slavery’s wickedness was a moral failing, but economic gain was its obvious cause. 

In her 1867 speech, Sojourner Truth pointed out the continuing injustice that occurred when women are oppressed economically. Her metaphors brought the injustice to life.

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Research note:

1. It is often surprisingly hard to get accurate texts of even the most famous speeches. Sojourner Truth’s 1851 Akron, Ohio speech, “Aren’t I a Woman?” is more famous. However, communication scholars have known for many years that the published text of “Aren’t I a Woman?” is not accurate. Sojourner Truth’s 1867 speech, which I discuss in this blog post, was recorded by a shorthand reporter, and so the text probably comes reasonably close to what she said and gives us a better idea of her actual speaking style.

2. Scholars have given many excellent discussions of the role of metaphors in rhetoric. In his ground-breaking book, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, I. A. Richards argues that all language is basically metaphorical. For example, when we talk about “the leg of the table,” we know perfectly well that tables don’t really have legs. It’s a metaphor. Richards showed that metaphors can carry literal and emotional meaning. Anyway, for people who want to learn more about metaphors and rhetoric, Richards’ book is probably a good place to start. 

by William D. Harpine

Copyright © 2024, William D. Harpine

Image of Sojourner Truth, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of the The Church of the Pilgrims, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons