Rhetorical Analysis Of The Crisis By Carrie Chapman Catt

Simply by turning on the the news, on can see that the fight for women’s rights rages on: women do not have equal working conditions, rights to their own bodies, or foreign voting rights. Yet, the fight for women’s equality all began over a century ago with the push for women's suffrage. In Carrie Chapman Catt’s era, the fight women’s suffrage had been around for almost seventy years, but still women could not vote. In Catt’s speech The Crisis, she argues that the time for action is now, so they must fight. In “The Crisis,” Carrie Chapman Catt effectively uses strong emotional appeals, as well as an impactful call to action in order to convey her message.
She states bluntly that “ three and a half millions of lives have been lost” (Catt 1) from the first world war, and even more will return home “blind, crippled and incapacitated” (1). Catt then provides an anecdote from a man in West Virginia, who spoke about women's suffrage by claiming that society has “been so used to keepin' women down” it is imposiible o change its ways ( 1); however, Catt disputes this idea, saying that as an impact of the war, many women will become the sole cargivers, or husbands who manage to “return to many a wife, will eat no bread the rest of his life
She concludes that “the economic change is bound to bring political liberty” (2) to women. In addition, Catt uses this to pit women against the