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New Feminist
Perspectives
on Embodiment
Edited by Clara Fischer
and Luna Dolezal
Breaking Feminist Waves

Series Editors
Alison Stone
Philosophy and Religion
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK

Linda Martín Alcoff

Department of Philosophy
Hunter College
New York, NY, USA
“This series promises to invite feminist thinkers from a variety of
­disciplinary backgrounds to think theoretically about feminism’s history
and future work that needs to be done. I look forward to incorporating
titles from this series into my women’s and gender studies teaching.”
—Alison Piepmeier, Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
Program, The College of Charleston
For the last twenty years, feminist theory has been presented as a series
of ascending waves. This picture has had the effect of deemphasizing the
diversity of past scholarship as well as constraining the way we under-
stand and frame new work. The aim of this series is to attract original
scholars who will offer unique interpretations of past scholarship and
unearth neglected contributions to feminist theory. By breaking free
from the constraints of the image of waves, this series will be able to
provide a wider forum for dialogue and engage historical and interdisci-
plinary work to open up feminist theory to new audiences and markets.
LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter
College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, USA. Her
most recent books include Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self;
The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (co-edited with Eva Kittay);
Identity Politics Reconsidered (co-edited with Moya, Mohanty and
Hames-Garcia); and Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy.
ALISON STONE is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster
University, UK. She is the author of Petrified Intelligence: Nature in
Hegel’s Philosophy; Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference;
An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy; and Feminism, Psychoanalysis,
and Maternal Subjectivity; and the editor of The Edinburgh Critical
History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14794
Clara Fischer • Luna Dolezal
Editors

New Feminist
Perspectives on
Embodiment
Editors
Clara Fischer Luna Dolezal
University College Dublin University of Exeter
Dublin, Ireland Exeter, UK

Breaking Feminist Waves

ISBN 978-3-319-72352-5    ISBN 978-3-319-72353-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72353-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961344

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
i­nstitutional affiliations.

Cover image: “Two Muslim Girls Wearing the Pink Hijab Scarf” by Kazuya Akimoto

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

The editors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Society for Women
in Philosophy, Ireland (SWIPI). The idea for this book arose originally
from the 2014 SWIPI conference ‘Women’s Bodies’ which took place in
Dublin, Ireland and was funded by the Irish Research Council and hosted
by University College Dublin. We are grateful to Professor Maria
Baghramian for her continued support and ongoing mentorship. We
would also like to thank the authors, our editors at Palgrave Macmillan,
and the anonymous reviewers who gave their time to provide feedback on
the chapters and manuscript.

v
 Contents

1 Contested Terrains: New Feminist Perspectives

on Embodiment   1
Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal

Part I Normative Bodies, Ethics, and Vulnerability  15

2 A Genealogy of Women’s (Un)Ethical Bodies  17

Gail Weiss

3 The Normal Body: Female Bodies in Changing Contexts

of Normalization and Optimization  37
Julia Jansen and Maren Wehrle

4 How Do We Respond? Embodied Vulnerability and Forms

of Responsiveness  57
Danielle Petherbridge

vii
viii Contents

Part II New Directions in Feminist Theory  81

5 Revisiting Feminist Matters in the Post-­Linguistic Turn:

John Dewey, New Materialisms, and Contemporary
Feminist Thought  83
Clara Fischer

6 Feminist and Transgender Tensions: An Inquiry into

History, Methodological Paradigms, and Embodiment 103
Lanei M. Rodemeyer

7 Expressing the World: Merleau-Ponty and Feminist

Debates on Nature/Culture   125
Kathleen Lennon

Part III Sex, Violence, and Public Policy 145

8 Are Women’s Lives (Fully) Grievable? Gendered Framing

and Sexual Violence 147
Dianna Taylor

9 Sex Trafficking, Reproductive Rights, and Sovereign

Borders: A Transnational Struggle over Women’s Bodies 167
Diana Tietjens Meyers

10 Routine Unrecognized Sexual Violence in India 183

Namrata Mitra
 Contents 
   ix

Part IV Pregnancy and Reproductive Technology 201

11 Performing Pregnant: An Aesthetic Investigation

of Pregnancy 203
EL Putnam

12 The Metaphors of Commercial Surrogacy:

Rethinking the Materiality of Hospitality
Through Pregnant Embodiment 221
Luna Dolezal

Index245
 Notes on Contributors

Luna Dolezal is Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Philosophy at the

University of Exeter, UK. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied
phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and
medical humanities. She is the author of The Body and Shame:
Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (2015) and the co-­
editor of Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (2017).
Clara Fischer is an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre for
Gender, Feminisms, and Sexualities and Co-director of the John Dewey
Research Project at University College Dublin. She is the author of
Gendered Readings of Change: A Feminist-Pragmatist Approach (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014), co-editor of Irish Feminisms: Past, Present and Future
(2015) and guest editor of a special issue of Hypatia on ‘Gender and the
Politics of Shame’ (2018). She is completing a monograph on contain-
ment and the gendered politics of shame in an Irish context, and has
research interests in the politics of emotion and embodiment, Irish femi-
nisms, gender and austerity, and feminist-pragmatism.
Julia Jansen is the Director of the Husserl Archives and Associate
Professor of Philosophy at KU Leuven. She has published widely on
Kantian and Husserlian phenomenology and on aesthetics. Her research
has focused, for some time, on issues of imagination in classical phenom-
enology and philosophy as well as in the cognitive sciences. She is the edi-
tor of the English translation of Husserl’s works under the title Husserl’s
Collected Works, co-editor of the Phaenomenologica book series and

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

co-editor of the journal Phänomenologische Forschungen. She has been

teaching phenomenological feminist philosophy since 2002.
Kathleen Lennon is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Hull, UK. Her primary research interests are in the imagination,
embodiment, expression, phenomenology (particularly the work of
Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir,) gender and old age. She is
working on the second edition of Theorising Gender and a co-authored
monograph Old Age. Recent publications include Imagination and the
Imaginary (2015).
Diana Tietjens Meyers is Professor Emerita of Philosophy, University of
Connecticut, Storrs, USA. She has held the Laurie Chair at Rutgers
University and the Ellacuría Chair of Social Ethics at Loyola University,
Chicago. She works in four main areas of philosophy—philosophy of
action, feminist ethics and aesthetics, and human rights. She has pub-
lished five monographs. The most recent of those is Victims’ Stories and
the Advancement of Human Rights (2016). Being Yourself: Essays on
Identity, Action, and Social Life (2004) is a collection of her articles and
chapters. Her most recent edited collection is Poverty, Agency, and Human
Rights (2014).
Namrata Mitra is Assistant Professor of English at Iona College,
New York, USA. She holds a PhD degree in Philosophy and Literature
from Purdue University received in 2012. Her research interests include
feminist philosophy, queer theory and postcolonial literature. Her research
examines representations of sexual violence in South Asian literature,
comparative postcolonial theories and the place of shame in nationalist
movements.
Danielle Petherbridge is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University
College Dublin, Ireland. Previously she was Irish Research Council Marie
Curie International Research Fellow at Columbia University, New York.
She works broadly in the area of continental European philosophy, includ-
ing critical theory, phenomenology, and philosophy and literature. Her
current research project, entitled Encountering the Other, provides an
examination of theories of intersubjectivity and self/other relations across
different philosophical traditions. Her book publications include: Body/
Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (2017) with Luna
Dolezal, The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth (2013), and Axel Honneth:
Critical Essays, with a Reply by Axel Honneth (2011).
 Notes on Contributors 
   xiii

Emily Lauren Putnam is a visual artist, scholar, and writer working pre-
dominately in performance art, video, sound and interactive media. Her
work draws from multiple themes and sources, including explorations of
gender and sexuality, play, materialism, and the study of place, which she
investigates through personal and cultural lenses. Her research focuses on
continental aesthetic philosophy, performance studies, digital studies and
feminist theory. She is a member of the artists’ groups Mobius (Boston)
and Bbeyond (Belfast). Originally from the United States, she now teaches
visual culture, art history and theory at the Dublin Institute of Technology
in Ireland.
Lanei M. Rodemeyer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne
University, USA. She works primarily in the areas of phenomenology, con-
tinental philosophy, the philosophy of time and feminist/gender philoso-
phy of the body. She has published a book on Husserl’s phenomenology
of inner time-­consciousness, Intersubjective Temporality: It’s About Time
(2006); another on phenomenology and theories of embodiment that
includes diaries from Lou Sullivan, a gay male trans man, Lou Sullivan
Diaries (1970–1980); and Theories of Sexual Embodiment: Making Sense of
Sensing (2017).
Dianna Taylor is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University in
Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Her research focuses on twentieth-century conti-
nental philosophy, especially the work of Michel Foucault, and contempo-
rary feminist philosophy. She is co-editor of Feminism and the Final
Foucault (2004) and Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, Agency (2007),
and is editor of Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (2010). Her current research
brings into conversation the work of Foucault and contemporary feminist
philosophers in order to theorize new ways of conceptualizing and coun-
tering the harm of sexual violence against women.
Maren Wehrle is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department
of Philosophy (Husserl Archives) at KU Leuven. Her publications include
works on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, philosophical
anthropology, feminist philosophy and cognitive psychology. Her research
focuses on issues of attention (phenomenology and cognitive psychol-
ogy), embodiment, normality and normativity. Recent publications
include: ‘Normality and Normativity in Experience’, in Doyon/Breyer:
Normativity in Perception (2015); ‘Normative Embodiment. The Role of
the Body in Foucault’s Genealogy. A Phenomenological Re-reading’, in
xiv Notes on Contributors

The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (2016); and as editor
(together with S. Luft) of the Husserl Handbook, published in 2017 by
Metzler (Stuttgart).
Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University,
Washington, DC, Executive Co-director of the Society for Phenomenology
and Existential Philosophy, and General Secretary of the International
Merleau-Ponty Circle. She is the author of Existential Ambiguities:
Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty (Indiana University Press, forthcoming),
Refiguring the Ordinary (2008), and Body Images: Embodiment as
Intercorporeality 1999), and has edited/co-edited several volumes on phe-
nomenology and embodiment. Her research and publications bring phe-
nomenology into conversation with contemporary work in feminist
theory, critical race theory, and disability studies to address the social,
political and ethical implications of non-normative bodily experiences.
 CHAPTER 1

Contested Terrains: New Feminist

Perspectives on Embodiment

Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal

Feminist theory and philosophy has evinced an ongoing scholarly interest

in the body and embodiment. Corporeal feminism, as it has been called by
some,1 theorizes the effects of patriarchal power structures on the female
body, and hence, on women’s subjectivity and social position. As we prog-
ress into the twenty-first century, despite several decades of feminist activ-
ism and scholarship, women’s bodies continue to be sites of control and
contention both materially and symbolically. Issues such as reproductive
rights and technologies, sexual violence, objectification and normaliza-
tion, motherhood, sexuality, and sex trafficking, among others, continue
to be pressing concerns for women’s bodies in our contemporary milieu,
arguably exacerbated in a neoliberal world, where bodies are instrumental-
ized as sites of human capital and biopolitical forces increasingly focus on
controlling the minutiae of embodied life.2
New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment engages with these themes
by building on the strong tradition of feminist thought focused on wom-
en’s bodies, and by making novel contributions that reflect feminists’

C. Fischer (*)
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
L. Dolezal
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Fischer, L. Dolezal (eds.), New Feminist
Perspectives on Embodiment, Breaking Feminist Waves,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72353-2_1
2 C. FISCHER AND L. DOLEZAL

concerns—both theoretically and empirically (with implications for

­policy-­making)—about gender and embodiment in the current context
and beyond. The collection brings together essays from a variety of femi-
nist scholars, who deploy diverse philosophical approaches, including
phenomenology, pragmatism, and new materialisms, in order to reflect
philosophically on the question of the status of women’s bodies in the
present day.
Given the feminist canonical engagement of the theme of embodiment,
one might ask what, precisely, is new about New Feminist Perspectives of
Embodiment? After all, there is a plethora of feminist texts on the topic,
and a number of feminist theorists have charted and exposed the problem-
atic history of the body, including the gendered body, in Western philoso-
phy and critical thought. We view our volume as a continuation of this
important, existing feminist work, with our specific contribution lying in
an analysis of new technologies and policy issues in a globalized and neo-
liberal world, on the one hand, and the further development of feminist
thought on the body, particularly addressing the theme of vulnerability, on
the other.
With regard to the former, our volume includes a contribution from
Tietjens Meyers, who discusses the contemporary global phenomenon of
sex trafficking, which is structured by the demands of the sex industry and
complicated by often contradictory national and international asylum,
anti-trafficking, and human rights laws, having a direct impact on wom-
en’s embodiment (through the often coercive movement and exploitation
of women’s bodies via trafficking and repatriation). Chapters by Dolezal
and Putnam also highlight the pervasive medicalization and commercial-
ization of pregnancy, which may, again, play out across transnational con-
texts and in settings where women’s voices are silenced owing to
technological, medicalized alienation, or to metaphors of hospitality
engaged to sanitize economic framings of the use of women’s bodies.
The volume also offers expositions of very recent developments in fem-
inist theory, and how these might be employed to think fruitfully about
embodiment. Lennon and Fischer draw on new materialisms as a way to
theorize various dualisms, including the nature/culture dichotomy, and
question whether and how the relationship between each of these realms
should be negotiated in terms of our understanding of bodies and their
meanings. Rodemeyer raises similar points in her explication of queer the-
ory, noting an over-reliance on the discursive, which Fischer highlights as
a common critique by new materialist and affect theorists—what she terms
 CONTESTED TERRAINS: NEW FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON EMBODIMENT 3

the “new school”—of poststructuralist and postmodern theory more

­generally. Fischer, Lennon, and Rodemeyer thus engage the question of
how and to what extent the discursive has been and should be emphasized
in its relation to the body, and trace this through feminist critique and the
recent development of novel theoretical frameworks. Interestingly, they
each recommend a turn towards a complimentary, canonical body of
work, or at least towards lesson-learning across several theoretical para-
digms. In Lennon’s and in Rodemeyer’s case, this is a turn towards phe-
nomenology, with a particular focus on Merleau-Ponty by Lennon, and in
Fischer’s case, this is a turn towards pragmatism, specifically towards John
Dewey’s work. Lennon, Rodemeyer, and Fischer thus bring into conversa-
tion recent feminist thought, including new materialism and transfemi-
nism, with canonical work to develop theoretical frameworks with which
to think about the body.
Furthermore, many of the essays in the collection reflect a recent preoc-
cupation with vulnerability in feminist scholarship, as the vulnerable body
has been theorized and reconceptualized as an important starting point
for understanding the ontological foundations of the human condition. In
contrast to the mind/body dualism that has dominated the Western philo-
sophical tradition—leading to a shunning of the inherent fleshiness,
dependence, and vulnerability that characterizes ordinary human life—
feminist theory seeks to overcome the continuing amnesia in Western phi-
losophy about the fact that we have all been birthed from women’s bodies,
and that our existence is necessarily characterized by long periods of physi-
cal dependency, weakness, and bodily vulnerability, usually managed by
the hands of female caregivers. The traditional denial of our fleshy exis-
tence in the Western intellectual tradition, along with its gendered foun-
dations, has led to a concomitant “flight from vulnerability,” which, as
Debra Bergoffen argues, has been particularly damaging for conceptions
of women’s embodiment.3 Women have been traditionally associated with
the flesh, nature, and the body, and as a result, they have been denigrated,
objectified, and afforded less social, political, and moral value than their
male counterparts. Vulnerability as a concept in feminist theory offers pos-
sibilities for how we might ground an ethics and politics that does not
deny our embodiment, but rather makes it central.4 As embodied subjects,
we are always sites of vulnerability, not just to biological forces, which
might render us sick or incapacitated, and not just vulnerable in relation to
others, who have the capacity to wound or to care, but crucially we are
also vulnerable to sociopolitical forces, where power relations “have an
immediate hold upon” the body to use Foucault’s characterization.5
4 C. FISCHER AND L. DOLEZAL

Attempting to understand our status as vulnerable subjects, in its mul-

tiple manifestations, has become a central theme of feminist thought and
its significance is made manifest in this volume. For instance, Petherbridge’s
contribution discusses how embodied relationality and vulnerability
between subjects designates both relations of power and possibilities for
care through mutual embodied openness, and how these tensions might
form the basis of an ethics of responsiveness. This is also a topic explored
in Weiss’ chapter, where she argues that considering the vulnerable body
offers opportunities for ethical responses arising from positive experiences
of corporeal agency. Taylor elaborates upon vulnerability in the context of
sexual violence, and explores the implications of vulnerability, conceptual-
ized as an embodied openness to others, as gendered and carrying with it
the possibility of sexual harm. In Mitra’s contribution, this focus on the
vulnerable, gendered body is extended to an examination of embodied
trauma, as she sets out how sexual violence and its effects are frequently
denied in legal and public discourse, contra the lived experience of
survivors.
As Judith Butler describes it, embodied vulnerability arises from our
exposure to each other, but also to “social conditions and institutions,”6
which means, in late capitalist societies, a vulnerability structured and
exacerbated by neoliberal systems and logics. Hence, a second related and
recurrent theme of this volume is neoliberalism itself, as well as its norma-
tive construction and exploitation of gendered bodies as sociopolitically
vulnerable to each other in the marketplace. What happens to women’s
bodies that are individualized, commodified, and commercialized? What
are the effects of neoliberalism on public policies concerning sex traffick-
ing and the prevention of sexual violence, for instance, in a context where
gendered bodies are objects for profit-making? How does the capitalist
imperative of neoliberalism intersect with gender oppression, but also with
global disparities of wealth? How have feminist theorists taken account of
the neoliberal structuring of norms concerning embodiment in light of
class and gender differences, and in light of trans* experiences?
These questions are addressed in various ways throughout the essays in
this volume. For example, Jansen and Wehrle’s contribution directly dis-
cusses how neoliberalism emphasizes individual agency and choice for
women, while this is underscored by an injunction for self-optimalization
that is in fact rooted in pernicious processes of normalization. Dolezal’s
chapter examines how the neoliberal tendency to frame many aspects
of embodied life in economic terms, according to a market agenda, has
 CONTESTED TERRAINS: NEW FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON EMBODIMENT 5

concrete consequences for how the discourses surrounding commercial

reproductive technologies, such as gestational surrogacy, are formulated.
Through her discussion of metaphor, Dolezal demonstrates that the ide-
ologies of neoliberalism have seeped into ordinary language, becoming so
pervasive that they shape our ethical intuitions and, hence, what we feel
should be socially and legally permissible. In her discussion of sexual vio-
lence, Taylor draws out neoliberalism’s individuating technique of assign-
ing personal responsibility to women for reducing or eliminating their
own risk, and highlights the attendant construction of deserving and
undeserving victims in a neoliberal framing focused on women’s personal
behaviour. Relatedly, Tietjens Meyers explores sex trafficking and the lack
of protection of women’s human rights in an analysis of the (forced)
movement of women across transnational, economic disparities.
Through a diversity of theoretical approaches, themes, and topics, the
various essays in this collection demonstrate that feminist enquiries into
our status as embodied subjects are far from being resolved, nor is the
conversation about embodiment coming to an end. While it is arguably
well-trodden ground in feminist thought, investigating the status of the
gendered body remains a pressing issue not just in academic theory, but in
medicine, law, popular culture, and politics, where gendered bodies con-
tinue to be a battleground when considering issues of recent and recurrent
significance, such as sexual violence and reproductive rights. New Feminist
Perspectives on Embodiment arises from the 2014 conference “Women’s
Bodies,” which was organized by the Society for Women in Philosophy
Ireland. The rich intellectual contributions of conference participants not
only provided some of the content of this volume,7 but also demonstrated
to the Editors the persistent relevance of the theme of embodiment within
feminist scholarship.

New Feminist Perspectives in This Volume

New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment is divided into four thematic
sections: “Normative Bodies, Ethics, and Vulnerability,” “New Directions
in Feminist Theory,” “Sex, Violence, and Public Policy,” and “Pregnancy
and Reproductive Technology,” which emphasize different aspects of
women’s experience of embodiment and the theoretical questions and
approaches which enframe them.
The essays in Part 1, “Normative Bodies, Ethics, and Vulnerability,”
serve, in part, to introduce some of the key philosophical paradigms which
6 C. FISCHER AND L. DOLEZAL

have dominated scholarship regarding women’s bodies within Western

thought, especially with respect to theorizations of ethics, ideas about nor-
mality and deviance, and recent feminist discussions of vulnerability as an
ontological category that is intrinsically linked to human embodiment. Gail
Weiss, in Chap. 2, opens the collection, exploring in detail the philosophi-
cal significance of female embodiment, especially in relation to the invisible
“ideal” of the white, youthful, able male body that dominates the Western
intellectual tradition. Drawing from philosophical thought that spans cen-
turies, from Aristotle to Plato and from Beauvoir to Fanon, Weiss offers an
invaluable overview of dominant philosophical ideas about embodiment
that are so pervasive that they have become naturalized. Through her exe-
gesis, Weiss demonstrates that the hegemony of consciousness/mind/rea-
son as the source of moral agency and, hence, ethical practice continues to
dominate Western philosophy. Weiss explains that it is only in relatively
recent thought, particularly within feminism, that the body is portrayed as
the ground of ethical obligation, rather than an obstacle to ethics and
morality. Drawing on new feminist work regarding vulnerability, Weiss
argues that considering the vulnerable body offers opportunities for ethical
responses arising from positive experiences of corporeal agency. By high-
lighting some of the key themes and questions that have dominated femi-
nist theory regarding embodiment, Weiss’ chapter provides as an important
conceptual framework for the chapters that follow.
In Chap. 3, Julia Jansen and Maren Wehrle explore the tensions
between the “body as subject” and the “body as object,” particularly in
relation to female embodied experience under neoliberalism. They begin
their discussion of our experience of being and having bodies as one that
is fundamentally characterized by vulnerability, being “finite, exposed, and
dependent on others and external forces.” Our vulnerability renders us
open to the world and its possibilities, but also susceptible to normalizing
and disciplining forces, which can have pernicious effects, particularly, as
their chapter demonstrates, on how women experience their own bodies.
Through a careful phenomenological analysis of the embodied experience
of the “normal”—a concept that continues to be hugely problematic when
considering the social and political positioning of women’s bodies—Jansen
and Wehrle demonstrate that normality is not only implicated in what we
might consider “optimal” bodily functioning, but is crucially a product of
dominant ideologies and biopolitical forces. Drawing on the phenomeno-
logical insights of Edmund Husserl’s and Michel Foucault’s writing on
discipline, biopolitics, and governmentality, Jansen and Wehrle’s chapter
 CONTESTED TERRAINS: NEW FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON EMBODIMENT 7

provides an important conceptual frame through which we might

understand how women experience their bodies as sites of agency, power,
and autonomy, but at the same time, are subject to the normalizing and
disciplining sociocultural and political forces of their dominant milieu.
While neoliberalism emphasizes individual agency and choice, this chapter
makes the important point that the neoliberal emphasis on self-optimal-
ization is in fact rooted in pernicious processes of normalization.
Danielle Petherbridge’s chapter (Chap. 4) returns us to the themes of
vulnerability and ethics with respect to embodiment. Petherbridge engages
with recent feminist scholarship on vulnerability in order to explore how,
as intersubjective and embodied subjects, vulnerability is fundamental to
social relations and how we develop as subjects. Engaging with feminist
thinkers such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero, Petherbridge uses
the fictional work of the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, particularly
The Lives of Animals and Waiting for the Barbarians, to explore the intri-
cacies of embodied vulnerability and its relationship to ethics and politics.
As embodied vulnerability can provoke responses of both care and wound-
ing, Petherbridge’s aim is to address a pressing question when considering
the utility of the concept of vulnerability within ethical discourses, namely:
How are we to adequately respond to vulnerability? Using Coetzee’s fic-
tional landscapes as illustrative, Petherbridge reflects on how embodied
relationality between subjects designates both relations of power and
­possibilities for care through mutual embodied openness and how these
tensions might form the basis of an ethics of responsiveness. Weaving
together reflections that span the ontological, ethical, and political dimen-
sions of vulnerability, Petherbridge’s chapter adds important insights to
recent feminist scholarship on vulnerability and embodiment.
Essays in Part 2, “New Directions in Feminist Theory,” focus on recent
and emerging scholarship in feminist thought, with a particular emphasis
on new materialisms and the formulation of transfeminism in light of the
recent explosion in critical and theoretical trans scholarship. Each of these
essays also engages canonical philosophical work, mainly pragmatism and
phenomenology, to develop theories that reach across theoretical
paradigms.
Clara Fischer’s chapter (Chap. 5) engages recent feminist theorizing on
the body by identifying a “new school” of post-linguistic turn feminism
made up of affect theory and new materialism. In her analysis of this
school’s turn towards materiality and embodied affect, she specifically
focuses on the confluences between John Dewey’s pragmatism, and Karen
8 C. FISCHER AND L. DOLEZAL

Barad’s and Stacy Alaimo’s new materialism in an exposition of each

thinker’s naturalist ontology. Among others, Fischer traces the concepts of
“transaction,” “transcorporeality,” and “intra-action” across pragmatist
and new materialist terrains, highlighting important convergences between
pragmatism and new materialism, and, ultimately, arguing that pragma-
tism can constitute a valuable resource for contemporary feminists inter-
ested in the recent turn towards materiality.
In Chap. 6, Lanei M. Rodemeyer delineates four major paradigms in
feminism and philosophy, namely the sex/gender dichotomy, queer the-
ory, phenomenology, and transfeminism. The purpose of such a delinea-
tion lies, for Rodemeyer, in the need to draw out biases and shortcomings
in specific theories, which feminism has historically undertaken with regard
to supposedly neutral, but actually masculinist, philosophies. Rodemeyer
begins by noting the somewhat troubled history of the relationship
between feminism and transgender theory and practice—what she terms
“feminist and transgender tensions”—and explains that “when we carry
out analyses of gender and embodiment, the paradigms we employ can
determine our outcomes – often in exclusive ways.” It is precisely to avoid
such pitfalls when theorizing embodiment that Rodemeyer sets out her
four-fold categorization, exploring questions of essentialism and social
constructionism, and the relationship between these as certain theories
prioritize discursiveness or the body as a ground for analysis in and of
itself. Rodemeyer presents transfeminism as a paradigm that draws on
intersectionality to challenge “both simple identity politics and those posi-
tions that present the erasure of identity as an ultimate goal.” In the end,
Rodemeyer makes the case for a combination of approaches with which to
think about embodiment in light of transgender experiences, arguing that
this could ameliorate shortcomings in respective paradigms and thus pro-
vide a fruitful approach for theorists of the present.
Kathleen Lennon’s chapter (Chap. 7) explores the recent movement
towards new materialism in feminist theory. Lennon explores the conten-
tious conceptual history of the nature/culture dichotomy, especially when
considering feminism’s fraught relationship to the natural sciences, where
biological “facts” have been historically constructed to align with patri-
archal ideologies regarding the social roles of men and women. Lennon
brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied subjectivity into
dialogue with recent debates in feminist theory regarding our dependence
on the materiality of embodiment and the subsequent implications for gen-
der theory. Lennon mobilizes Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of embodied
 CONTESTED TERRAINS: NEW FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON EMBODIMENT 9

subjectivity in a co-constitutive relation with the world to collapse the

binary of nature/culture, and hence to unsettle the question of biological
sexed difference. With Merleau-Ponty’s framework, Lennon demonstrates
that nature can be conceived as a process with “non-determining sources
which are both material and cultural,” in relation to which subjects are
always engaged in “creative transition.”
In Part 3, “Sex, Violence, and Public Policy,” chapters address impor-
tant questions regarding sexual violence against women, questions which
continue to be pertinent given the pervasiveness of such violence, as
recently highlighted by the #MeToo social media campaign set up in
response to allegations of mass sexual harassment and assault.8 Related to
this are implications for public policies, both on the issues of sexual vio-
lence and sex trafficking, which unfold in complex legal, social, and politi-
cal contexts that often render harms of a gendered, sexual nature invisible
as harms as such.
In her chapter (Chap. 8), Dianna Taylor uses the Steubenville case, in
which a young woman was gang-raped, to prompt questions concerning
the liveability and attendant grievability of women’s lives in the context of
ambivalent responses to women’s experiences of sexual violence. Drawing
on Butler’s concepts of precariousness, precarity, and framing, Taylor elab-
orates gender as a frame that entails women’s disproportionate exposure
to injury, in as far as “women achieve recognition only as subordinate,
devalued, and therefore not fully liveable lives,” and inhabit a specific
embodiment that amplifies exposure and precarity in normalizing, depo-
liticized conditions. This much is borne out, for Taylor, by the determin-
istic and fatalistic acceptance of sexual violence as a “natural” part of
human existence, and the effects this has on recognizing sexual violence as
violence at all. While pointing to the widespread ambivalent social response
to sexual violence as evidence for the inability to recognize women’s lives
as fully grievable, Taylor nonetheless ends her chapter on an optimistic
note, highlighting the possibility of change, given the need for the con-
stant (re)iteration of frames, which can thus be altered.
Diana Tietjens Meyers identifies, in Chap. 9, a maligning of the human
rights, including reproductive rights, of women who have been trafficked
from poorer countries to work in the sex industry in more affluent coun-
tries. Meyers highlights an inherent tension between what she calls a “law
enforcement gestalt” and the protection of women’s human rights, which
renders the United States incapable of living up to its human rights obliga-
tions as set out in the Palermo Protocol, among others. Not only does the
10 C. FISCHER AND L. DOLEZAL

US emphasis on law enforcement “funnel” trafficked women “into the

criminal law apparatus” (which sets the bar for residency and visa require-
ments much higher than the standard asylum process), but it also endan-
gers women and their families given the risk of re-trafficking following
repatriation. Added to this is the legal requirement of having to be catego-
rized as “severely trafficked” to obtain benefits along the lines of refugees,
which, as Meyers points out, is onerous on trafficked women, as it requires
having to prove complete non-complicity, even non-agency, in the traf-
ficking process. As feminists have noted, many trafficked women engage
traffickers to seek better opportunities in wealthier countries, and may
subsequently find that traffickers use fraud and violence to coerce them
into the sex industry. Meyers notes, however, that US law requires women
to show that they were subject to deception and kidnapping by traffickers
at the point of origin. Ultimately, Meyers notes that the current approach
to sex trafficking in affluent countries “compound[s] the dishonour done”
to sex trafficking victims’ “humanity, adding insult to injury.”
In Chap. 10, Namrata Mitra outlines how gendered scripts of honour,
shame, and nationalism in South Asia ensure that routine violence against
women is rendered invisible, both legally and in the public sphere as such.
Mitra draws on Susan Brison’s work on trauma and the impact this has on
one’s sense of self, and elaborates upon Pratiksha Baxi’s discussion of
courtroom practices in sexual violence cases, which often erase trauma
narratives entirely. By utilizing Judith Butler’s concept of “framing,” and
her distinction between “recognition” and “recognizability,” Mitra estab-
lishes that “how a survivor of sexual violence is recognized is not based on
harms of the violence, such as trauma, persisting within the survivor’s
body,” but is governed, rather, by “the norms of gender, sexuality, shame,
honour, communal and national identity” that “forge the frames of recog-
nizability through which someone is recognized as a survivor.” Mitra then
provides an insightful, brief genealogy of how such norms, including
“nationalist fantasies imprinted on women’s bodies,” have resulted in the
erasure of sexual violence in the public sphere or in its sole, patriarchal
interpretation. Mitra closes her chapter by noting the important feminist
resistance against routine sexual violence. She points to literature and to
the activism of Meira Paibi (“Torch Bearers,” a group of feminist activists
who staged a daring protest in response to the gang-rape of a Manipuri
woman) to highlight the possibility and urgency of “disrupt[ing] the con-
tinuous reproduction of the dominant frames of sexual violence.”
 CONTESTED TERRAINS: NEW FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON EMBODIMENT 11

The essays in Part 4, “Pregnancy and Reproductive Technology,” turn

to explore one of the enduring material concerns of female embodiment,
that of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. EL Putnam’s chapter
(Chap. 11) discusses the performances and artistic practices of pregnant
artists, such as Marni Kotak and Sandy Huckleberry, to shed light on
patriarchal constructions and norms of reproduction and maternity. By
drawing on Iris Marion Young’s phenomenology of pregnancy and related
critiques of the deployment of alienating, antenatal technology that medi-
calizes birthing and reproduction, Putnam highlights the resultant mar-
ginality of women’s embodied subjectivity. Yet, for Putnam, the central
problematic in this context is not technology itself, as she finds, following
an elaboration of Heidegger’s conceptualization of technology in terms of
Gestell (enframing), but that the specific uses of technology and their
embeddedness in religious, political, and scientific discourses need to be
questioned. To this end, Putnam examines religious iconography, particu-
larly the figure of the Virgin Mary, to trace “the alienation of mothers-to-
­be from the embodied and phenomenological aspects of pregnancy” in
the history of Western art. Ultimately, Putnam argues that a reading of
pregnancy as “aesthetic experience” can redirect our attention from a
­teleological conception focused on the production of children towards an
experiential reconfiguration of the intersubjective relationship between
“the pregnant woman, the foetus, and others.”
Luna Dolezal’s chapter (Chap. 12) tackles the question of the ethicality
of contemporary commercial surrogacy, a global practice that relies cen-
trally on female embodiment. Dolezal demonstrates that the metaphoric
landscape of contemporary commercial surrogacy practices is dominated
by an economic rationality (wombs are rented, bodies are property, women
are compensated). However, at the same time, concepts with a long philo-
sophical history, such as the gift and hospitality, are invoked in order to
mitigate the pecuniary aspects of surrogacy. Invoking hospitality in dis-
courses about commercial surrogacy is, Dolezal argues, an attempt to
make commercial transnational surrogacy, a practice mired in controversy
and charges of exploitation and dehumanization, more palatable and alle-
viate questions about its potentially dubious ethicality. Dolezal examines
the recent philosophical history of hospitality in the work of Levinas and
Derrida, demonstrating that it is a concept with considerable gendered
dimensions, where women are seen as the condition of the possibility of
hospitality for autonomous male subjects, a reasoning that justifies and
12 C. FISCHER AND L. DOLEZAL

mirrors the power relations inherent to many transnational commercial

surrogacy practices, where underprivileged women in developing coun-
tries provide the service of gestating a child for women with significantly
more social and economic power. To problematize this conception of hos-
pitality, Dolezal turns to recent feminist theory on maternity and gestation
which reappropriate and reconceptualize the idea of hospitality in the con-
text of female embodiment, particularly the recent work of Irina
Aristarkhova. Aristarkhova’s reconception of hospitality through “the
matrix” problematizes the idea that women’s pregnant flesh can merely
be an indifferent vessel for the other, but instead that women’s bodies are
the constitutional ground for kinship, subjectivity, and human relational-
ity. Through problematizing the metaphors and concepts which underpin
and, in some sense, justify commercial surrogacy practices, Dolezal’s chap-
ter is an important contribution to contemporary debates surrounding the
global medical marketplace for assisted reproductive technologies—a mar-
ketplace where many potential injustices fall on women’s shoulders.
While each of the chapters in this volume offers a novel approach or
perspective, the overall aim of this collection is to scrutinize and uncover
some of the taken-for-granted assumptions and norms that govern how
bodies are experienced, perceived, valued, and thought about in the
current context. Each of the essays uniquely addresses how women’s
­
embodiment still constitutes contested terrain, thereby critically examin-
ing a variety of contemporary social and political issues that materially
affect women. To be sure, the collection does not engage all of the impor-
tant questions regarding gendered embodiment in contemporary times,
with topics such as religious expression, disability, and aesthetic surgery, to
name just a few, falling outside of the scope of the work presented here.
However, with original contributions from established and emerging fem-
inist theorists, the volume adds another important set of voices to the
ongoing feminist conversation about the material, social, and cultural sta-
tus of the gendered body in the present day.

Notes
1. Liz Frost. “Theorizing the Young Woman in the Body,” Body and Society
11, no. 1 (2005): 65.
2. For example, see: Alison Phipps. The Politics of the Body: Gender in a
Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014).
 CONTESTED TERRAINS: NEW FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON EMBODIMENT 13

3. Debra Bergoffen, “The Flight from Vulnerability,” in Dem Erleben Auf Der
Spur: Feminismus Und Die Philosophie Des Leibes, eds. Hilge Landweer and
Isabella Marcinski, 137–51, (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), 137.
4. See: Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence,
(London: Verso, 2004).
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by
Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 25.
6. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso,
2016), 33.
7. In particular, see chapters from Dolezal, Fischer, Meyers, Putnam, Taylor,
and Weiss.
8. Khomami, Nadia, “#MeToo: how a hashtag became a rallying cry against
sexual harassment,” The Guardian, 20th October 2017: https://www.the-
guardian.com/world/2017/oct/20/women-worldwide-use-hashtag-metoo-
against-sexual-harassment.

Bibliography
Bergoffen, Debra. 2016. The Flight from Vulnerability. In Dem Erleben Auf Der
Spur: Feminismus Und Die Philosophie Des Leibes, ed. Hilge Landweer and
Isabella Marcinski, 137–151. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.
London: Verso.
———. 2016. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Frost, Liz. 2005. Theorizing the Young Woman in the Body. Body and Society
11 (1) 63–85.
Khomami, Nadia. 2017. #MeToo: How a Hashtag Became a Rallying Cry Against
Sexual Harassment. The Guardian, October 20. https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2017/oct/20/women-worldwide-use-hashtag-metoo-
against-sexual-harassment
Phipps, Alison. 2014. The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and
Neoconservative Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
 PART I

Normative Bodies, Ethics,

and Vulnerability
 CHAPTER 2

A Genealogy of Women’s (Un)Ethical Bodies

Gail Weiss

I begin with a fairly brief historical survey of the largely negative depiction
of bodies more generally, and women’s bodies in particular, within the
philosophical tradition, starting with the ancient philosophers, continu-
ing in the modern period, and well into the twentieth century. In the
latter half of the discussion, I provide a critical analysis of contemporary
feminist ethics of embodiment that I find particularly promising in
addressing the positive role gendered bodies actually can and do play in
ethical theory and practice. My starting point is a passage from Elizabeth
Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, a formative text in
my own thinking about the body and an indispensable resource for any-
one who seeks to address the difficult, yet truly exciting and provocative
issues that arise as soon as one begins to take seriously the philosophical
significance of women’s bodies:

If women are to develop autonomous modes of self-understanding and

positions from which to challenge male knowledge and paradigms, the spe-
cific nature and integration (or perhaps lack of it) of the female body and
female subjectivity and its similarities to and differences from men’s bodies
and identities need to be articulated. The specificity of bodies must be

G. Weiss (*)
George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

© The Author(s) 2018 17

C. Fischer, L. Dolezal (eds.), New Feminist
Perspectives on Embodiment, Breaking Feminist Waves,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72353-2_2
18 G. WEISS

understood in its historical rather than simply its biological concreteness.

Indeed, there is no body as such: there are only bodies – male or female,
black, brown, white, large or small – and the gradations in between. Bodies
can be represented or understood not as entities in themselves or simply on
a linear continuum with its polar extremes occupied by male or female bod-
ies (with the various gradations of “intersexed” individuals in between) but
as a field....1

And, she continues:

There are always only specific types of body, concrete in their determina-
tions, with a particular sex, race, and physiognomy. When one body (in the
West, the white, youthful, able, male body) takes on the function of model
or ideal, the human body, for all other types of body, its domination may be
undermined through a defiant affirmation of a multiplicity, a field of differ-
ences, of other kinds of bodies and subjectivities. A number of ideal types of
body must be posited to ensure the production, projection, and striving for
ideal images and body types to which each individual, in his or her distinct
way, may aspire. Only when the relation between mind and body is ade-
quately retheorized can we understand the contributions of the body to the
production of knowledge systems, regimes of representation, cultural pro-
duction, and socioeconomic exchange.2

My own goal is to contribute to this arduous labor of retheorizing the

(gendered and racialized) distinction between mind and body, and ulti-
mately, to move beyond the false dichotomy that posits them as antino-
mies, doomed to a struggle that neither on its own can ever win. Let us
begin, then, at the beginning, by turning to the history of philosophy, a
history that has, for centuries, perpetuated and reinforced an allegedly
sexually and racially undifferentiated or “neutral” (yet nonetheless hierar-
chical) distinction between mind and body, a distinction that has privi-
leged the experiences and reflections, dare we say, the fantasies and the
illusions, of certain bodies, specifically white, male, able bodies, over all
others.

Part 1: The Body as a Threat to Ethics

If we ask the question, what does the body have to do with ethics, we
quickly realize that many different answers, albeit mostly negative ones,
have been provided to it over the centuries. Indeed, the body’s needs,
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 Whereas, The Independent Greenback party, and other
associations more or less effective, have been unable, hitherto, to
make a formidable opposition to old party organizations; and
Whereas, The limiting of the legal-tender quality of the
greenbacks, the changing of currency bonds into coin bonds, the
demonetization of the silver dollar, the exempting of bonds from
taxation, the contraction of the circulating medium, the proposed
forced resumption of specie payments, and the prodigal waste of the
public lands, were crimes against the people; and, as far as possible,
the results of these criminal acts must be counteracted by judicious
legislation:
Therefore, We assemble in national convention and make a
declaration of our principles, and invite all patriotic citizens to unite
in an effort to secure financial reform and industrial emancipation.
The organization shall be known as the “National Party,” and under
this name we will perfect, without delay, national, state, and local
associations, to secure the election to office of such men only as will
pledge themselves to do all in their power to establish these
principles:
First. It is the exclusive function of the general government to coin
and create money and regulate its value. All bank issues designed to
circulate as money should be suppressed. The circulating medium,
whether of metal or paper, shall be issued by the government, and
made a full legal-tender for all debts, duties, and taxes in the United
States, at its stamped value.
Second. There shall be no privileged class of creditors. Official
salaries, pensions, bonds, and all other debts and obligations, public
and private, shall be discharged in the legal-tender money of the
United States strictly according to the stipulations of the laws under
which they were contracted.
Third. The coinage of silver shall be placed on the same footing as
that of gold.
Fourth. Congress shall provide said money adequate to the full
employment of labor, the equitable distribution of its products, and
the requirement of business, fixing a minimum amount per capita of
the population as near as may be, and otherwise regulating its value
by wise and equitable provisions of law, so that the rate of interest
will secure to labor its just reward.
Fifth. It is inconsistent with the genius of popular government that
any species of private property should be exempt from bearing its
proper share of the public burdens. Government bonds and money
should be taxed precisely as other property, and a graduated income
tax should be levied for the support of the government and the
payment of its debts.
Sixth. Public lands are the common property of the whole people,
and should not be sold to speculators nor granted to railroads or
other corporations, but should be donated to actual settlers, in
limited quantities.
Seventh. The government should, by general enactments,
encourage the development of our agricultural, mineral, mechanical,
manufacturing, and commercial resources, to the end that labor may
be fully and profitably employed; but no monopolies should be
legalized.
Eighth. All useless offices should be abolished, the most rigid
economy favored in every branch of the public service, and severe
punishment inflicted upon public officers who betray the trusts
reposed in them.
Ninth. As educated labor has devised means for multiplying
productions by inventions and discoveries, and as their use requires
the exercise of mind as well as body, such legislation should be had
that the number of hours of daily toil will be reduced, giving to the
working classes more leisure for mental improvement and their
several enjoyments, and saving them from premature decay and
death.
Tenth. The adoption of an American monetary system, as
proposed herein, will harmonize all differences in regard to tariff and
federal taxation, reduce and equalize the cost of transportation by
land and water, distribute equitably the joint earnings of capital and
labor, secure to the producers of wealth the results of their labor and
skill, and muster out of service the vast army of idlers, who, under
the existing system, grow rich upon the earnings of others, that every
man and woman may, by their own efforts, secure a competency, so
that overgrown fortunes and extreme poverty will be seldom found
within the limits of our republic.
Eleventh. Both national and state governments should establish
bureaus of labor and industrial statistics, clothed with the power of
gathering and publishing the same.
Twelfth. That the contract system of employing labor in our
prisons and reformatory institutions works great injustice to our
mechanics and artisans, and should be prohibited.
Thirteenth. The importation of servile labor into the United States
from China is a problem of the most serious importance, and we
recommend legislation looking to its suppression.
Fourteenth. We believe in the supremacy of law over and above all
perishable material, and in the necessity of a party of united people
that will rise above old party lines and prejudices. We will not
affiliate in any degree with any of the old parties, but, in all cases and
localities, will organize anew, as united National men—nominate for
office and official positions only such persons as are clearly believers
in and identified with this our sacred cause; and, irrespective of
creed, color, place of birth, or past condition of political or other
servitude, vote only for men who entirely abandon old party lines
and organizations.

1879.—National Liberal Platform.

Cincinnati, Ohio, September 14.

1. Total separation of Church and State, to be guaranteed by
amendment of the United States constitution; including the
equitable taxation of church property, secularization of the public
schools, abrogation of Sabbatarian laws, abolition of chaplaincies,
prohibition of public appropriations for religious purposes, and all
measures necessary to the same general end.
2. National protection for national citizens in their equal civil,
political, and religious rights, to be guaranteed by amendment of the
United States constitution and afforded through the United States
courts.
 3. Universal education, the basis of universal suffrage in this
secular Republic, to be guaranteed by amendment of the United
States constitution, requiring every state to maintain a thoroughly
secularized public school system, and to permit no child within its
limits to grow up without a good elementary education.

1880.—Independent Republican Principles.

I. Independent Republicans adhere to the republican principles of

national supremacy, sound finances, and civil service reform,
expressed in the Republican platform of 1876, in the letter of
acceptance of President Hayes, and in his message of 1879; and they
seek the realization of those principles in practical laws and their
efficient administration. This requires,
1. The continuance on the statute book of laws protecting the
rights of voters at national elections. But national supremacy affords
no pretext for interference with the local rights of communities; and
the development of the south from its present defective civilization
can be secured only under constitutional methods, such as those of
President Hayes.
2. The passage of laws which shall deprive greenbacks of their
legal-tender quality, as a first step toward their ultimate withdrawal
and cancellation, and shall maintain all coins made legal tender at
such weight and fineness as will enable them to be used without
discount in the commercial transactions of the world.
3. The repeal of the acts which limit the terms of office of certain
government officials to four years; the repeal of the tenure-of-office
acts, which limit the power of the executive to remove for cause; the
establishment of a permanent civil service commission, or equivalent
measures to ascertain, by open competition, and certify to the
President or other appointing power the fitness of applicants for
nomination or appointment to all non-political offices.
II. Independent Republicans believe that local issues should be
independent of party. The words Republican and Democrat should
have no weight in determining whether a school or city shall be
administered on business principles by capable men. With a view to
this, legislation is asked which shall prescribe for the voting for local
and for state officers upon separate ballots.
III. Independent Republicans assert that a political party is a co-
operation of voters to secure the practical enactment into legislation
of political convictions set forth as its platform. Every voter accepting
that platform is a member of that party; any representative of that
party opposing the principles or evading the promises of its platform
forfeits the support of its voters. No voter should be held by the
action or nomination of any caucus or convention of his party against
his private judgment. It is his duty to vote against bad measures and
unfit men, as the only means of obtaining good ones; and if his party
no longer represents its professed principles in its practical
workings, it is his duty to vote against it.
IV. Independent Republicans seek good nominations through
participation in the primaries and through the defeat of bad
nominees; they will labor for the defeat of any local Republican
candidate, and, in co-operation with those holding like views
elsewhere, for the defeat of any general Republican candidate whom
they do not deem fit.

1880. Republican Platform.

Chicago, Illinois, June 2.

The Republican party, in national convention assembled, at the
end of twenty years since the Federal government was first
committed to its charge, submits to the people of the United States
its brief report of its administration:
It suppressed a rebellion which had armed nearly a million of men
to subvert the national authority. It reconstructed the union of the
states with freedom, instead of slavery, as its corner-stone. It
transformed four million of human beings from the likeness of things
to the rank of citizens. It relieved Congress from the infamous work
of hunting fugitive slaves, and charged it to see that slavery does not
exist.
It has raised the value of our paper currency from thirty-eight per
cent. to the par of gold. It has restored, upon a solid basis, payment
in coin for all the national obligations, and has given us a currency
absolutely good and equal in every part of our extended country. It
has lifted the credit of the nation from the point where six per cent.
bonds sold at eighty-six to that where four per cent. bonds are
eagerly sought at a premium.
Under its administration railways have increased from 31,000
miles in 1860, to more than 82,000 miles in 1879.
Our foreign trade has increased from $700,000,000 to
$1,150,000,000 in the same time; and our exports, which were
$20,000,000 less than our imports in 1860, were $264,000,000
more than our imports in 1879.
Without resorting to loans, it has, since the war closed, defrayed
the ordinary expenses of government, besides the accruing interest
on the public debt, and disbursed, annually, over $30,000,000 for
soldiers’ pensions. It has paid $888,000,000 of the public debt, and,
by refunding the balance at lower rates, has reduced the annual
interest charge from nearly $151,000,000 to less than $89,000,000.
All the industries of the country have revived, labor is in demand,
wages have increased, and throughout the entire country there is
evidence of a coming prosperity greater than we have ever enjoyed.
Upon this record, the Republican party asks for the continued
confidence and support of the people; and this convention submits
for their approval the following statement of the principles and
purposes which will continue to guide and inspire its efforts:
1. We affirm that the work of the last twenty years has been such as
to commend itself to the favor of the nation, and that the fruits of the
costly victories which we have achieved, through immense
difficulties, should be preserved; that the peace regained should be
cherished; that the dissevered Union, now happily restored, should
be perpetuated, and that the liberties secured to this generation
should be transmitted, undiminished, to future generations; that the
order established and the credit acquired should never be impaired;
that the pensions promised should be paid; that the debt so much
reduced should be extinguished by the full payment of every dollar
thereof; that the reviving industries should be further promoted; and
that the commerce, already so great, should be steadily encouraged.
 2. The constitution of the United States is a supreme law, and not a
mere contract; out of confederate states it made a sovereign nation.
Some powers are denied to the nation, while others are denied to
states; but the boundary between the powers delegated and those
reserved is to be determined by the national and not by the state
tribunals.
3. The work of popular education is one left to the care of the
several states, but it is the duty of the national government to aid
that work to the extent of its constitutional ability. The intelligence of
the nation is but the aggregate of the intelligence in the several
states; and the destiny of the nation must be guided, not by the
genius of any one state, but by the average genius of all.
4. The constitution wisely forbids Congress to make any law
respecting an establishment of religion; but it is idle to hope that the
nation can be protected against the influences of sectarianism while
each state is exposed to its domination. We, therefore, recommend
that the constitution be so amended as to lay the same prohibition
upon the legislature of each state, to forbid the appropriation of
public funds to the support of sectarian schools.
5. We reaffirm the belief, avowed in 1876, that the duties levied for
the purpose of revenue should so discriminate as to favor American
labor; that no further grant of the public domain should be made to
any railway or other corporation; that slavery having perished in the
states, its twin barbarity—polygamy—must die in the territories; that
everywhere the protection accorded to citizens of American birth
must be secured to citizens by American adoption. That we esteem it
the duty of Congress to develop and improve our water-courses and
harbors, but insist that further subsidies to private persons or
corporations must cease. That the obligations of the republic to the
men who preserved its integrity in the day of battle are undiminished
by the lapse of fifteen years since their final victory—to do them
perpetual honor is, and shall forever be, the grateful privilege and
sacred duty of the American people.
6. Since the authority to regulate immigration and intercourse
between the United States and foreign nations rests with the
Congress of the United States and its treaty-making powers, the
Republican party, regarding the unrestricted immigration of the
Chinese as an evil of great magnitude, invoke the exercise of that
power to restrain and limit that immigration by the enactment of
such just, humane, and reasonable provisions as will produce that
result.
That the purity and patriotism which characterized the early career
of Rutherford B. Hayes in peace and war, and which guided the
thoughts of our immediate predecessors to select him for a
presidential candidate, have continued to inspire him in his career as
chief executive, and that history will accord to his administration the
honors which are due to an efficient, just, and courteous discharge of
the public business, and will honor his interposition between the
people and proposed partisan laws.
8. We charge upon the Democratic party the habitual sacrifice of
patriotism and justice to a supreme and insatiable lust for office and
patronage. That to obtain possession of the national and state
governments, and the control of place and position, they have
obstructed all efforts to promote the purity and to conserve the
freedom of suffrage; have devised fraudulent certifications and
returns; have labored to unseat lawfully-elected members of
Congress, to secure, at all hazards, the vote of a majority of the states
in the House of Representatives; have endeavored to occupy, by force
and fraud the places of trust given to others by the people of Maine,
and rescued by the courageous action of Maine’s patriotic sons; have,
by methods vicious in principle and tyrannical in practice, attached
partisan legislation to appropriation bills, upon whose passage the
very movements of government depend; have crushed the rights of
the individual; have advocated the principle and sought the favor of
rebellion against the nation, and have endeavored to obliterate the
sacred memories of the war, and to overcome its inestimably
valuable results of nationality, personal freedom, and individual
equality. Equal, steady, and complete enforcement of the laws, and
protection of all our citizens in the enjoyment of all privileges and
immunities guaranteed by the constitution, are the first duties of the
nation. The danger of a solid south can only be averted by the faithful
performance of every promise which the nation made to the citizen.
The execution of the laws, and the punishment of all those who
violate them, are the only safe methods by which an enduring peace
can be secured, and genuine prosperity established throughout the
south. Whatever promises the nation makes, the nation must
perform; and the nation can not with safety relegate this duty to the
states. The solid south must be divided by the peaceful agencies of
the ballot, and all opinions must there find free expression; and to
this end honest voters must be protected against terrorism, violence,
or fraud. And we affirm it to be the duty and the purpose of the
Republican party to use all legitimate means to restore all the states
of this Union to the most perfect harmony which may be practicable;
and we submit to the practical, sensible people of the United States
to say whether it would not be dangerous to the dearest interests of
our country, at this time to surrender the administration of the
national government to a party which seeks to overthrow the existing
policy, under which we are so prosperous, and thus bring distrust
and confusion where there is now order, confidence, and hope.
9. The Republican party, adhering to a principle affirmed by its
last national convention, of respect for the constitutional rule
covering appointments to office, adopts the declaration of President
Hayes, that the reform of the civil service should be thorough,
radical, and complete. To this end it demands the co-operation of the
legislative with the executive department of the government, and
that Congress shall so legislate that fitness, ascertained by proper
practical tests, shall admit to the public service; and that the power
of removal for cause, with due responsibility for the good conduct of
subordinates, shall accompany the power of appointment.

1880.—National (Greenback) Platform,

Chicago, Illinois, June 9.

The civil government should guarantee the divine right of every
laborer to the results of his toil, thus enabling the producers of
wealth to provide themselves with the means for physical comfort,
and facilities for mental, social, and moral culture; and we condemn,
as unworthy of our civilization, the barbarism which imposes upon
wealth-producers a state of drudgery as the price of a bare animal
existence. Notwithstanding the enormous increase of productive
power by the universal introduction of labor-saving machinery and
the discovery of new agents for the increase of wealth, the task of the
laborer is scarcely lightened, the hours of toil are but little shortened,
and few producers are lifted from poverty into comfort and
pecuniary independence. The associated monopolies, the
international syndicates, and other income classes demand dear
money, cheap labor, and a strong government, and, hence, a weak
people. Corporate control of the volume of money has been the
means of dividing society into hostile classes, of an unjust
distribution of the products of labor, and of building up monopolies
of associated capital, endowed with power to confiscate private
property. It has kept money scarce; and the scarcity of money
enforces debt-trade, and public and corporate loans; debt engenders
usury, and usury ends in the bankruptcy of the borrower. Other
results are—deranged markets, uncertainty in manufacturing
enterprises and agriculture, precarious and intermittent employment
for the laborer, industrial war, increasing pauperism and crime, and
the consequent intimidation and disfranchisement of the producer,
and a rapid declension into corporate feudalism. Therefore, we
declare—
First. That the right to make and issue money is a sovereign
power, to be maintained by the people for their common benefit. The
delegation of this right to corporations is a surrender of the central
attribute of sovereignty, void of constitutional sanction, and
conferring upon a subordinate and irresponsible power an absolute
dominion over industry and commerce. All money, whether metallic
or paper, should be issued, and its volume controlled, by the
government, and not by or through banking corporations; and, when
so issued, should be a full legal tender for all debts, public and
private.
Second. That the bonds of the United States should not be
refunded, but paid as rapidly as practicable, according to contract.
To enable the government to meet these obligations, legal-tender
currency should be substituted for the notes of the national banks,
the national banking system abolished, and the unlimited coinage of
silver, as well as gold, established by law.
Third. That labor should be so protected by national and state
authority as to equalize its burdens and insure a just distribution of
its results. The eight hour law of Congress should be enforced, the
sanitary condition of industrial establishments placed under the rigid
control, the competition of contract convict labor abolished, a bureau
of labor statistics established, factories, mines, and workshops
inspected, the employment of children under fourteen years of age
forbidden, and wages paid in cash.
Fourth. Slavery being simply cheap labor, and cheap labor being
simply slavery, the importation and presence of Chinese serfs
necessarily tends to brutalize and degrade American labor; therefore,
immediate steps should be taken to abrogate the Burlingame treaty.
Fifth. Railroad land grants forfeited by reason of non-fulfillment of
contract should be immediately reclaimed by the government, and,
henceforth, the public domain reserved exclusively as homes for
actual settlers.
Sixth. It is the duty of Congress to regulate inter-state commerce.
All lines of communication and transportation should be brought
under such legislative control as shall secure moderate, fair, and
uniform rates for passenger and freight traffic.
Seventh. We denounce as destructive to property and dangerous to
liberty the action of the old parties in fostering and sustaining
gigantic land, railroad, and money corporations, and monopolies
invested with and exercising powers belonging to the government,
and yet not responsible to it for the manner of their exercise.
Eighth. That the constitution, in giving Congress the power to
borrow money, to declare war, to raise and support armies, to
provide and maintain a navy, never intended that the men who
loaned their money for an interest-consideration should be preferred
to the soldiers and sailors who periled their lives and shed their
blood on land and sea in defense of their country; and we condemn
the cruel class legislation of the Republican party, which, while
professing great gratitude to the soldier, has most unjustly
discriminated against him and in favor of the bondholder.
Ninth. All property should bear its just proportion of taxation, and
we demand a graduated income tax.
Tenth. We denounce as dangerous the efforts everywhere manifest
to restrict the right of suffrage.
Eleventh. We are opposed to an increase of the standing army in
time of peace, and the insidious scheme to establish an enormous
military power under the guise of militia laws.
 Twelfth. We demand absolute democratic rules for the
government of Congress, placing all representatives of the people
upon an equal footing, and taking away from committees a veto
power greater than that of the President.
Thirteenth. We demand a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people, instead of a government of the bondholder, by the
bondholder, and for the bondholder; and we denounce every attempt
to stir up sectional strife as an effort to conceal monstrous crimes
against the people.
Fourteenth. In the furtherance of these ends we ask the co-
operation of all fair-minded people. We have no quarrel with
individuals, wage no war on classes, but only against vicious
institutions. We are not content to endure further discipline from our
present actual rulers, who, having dominion over money, over
transportation, over land and labor, over the press and the
machinery of government, wield unwarrantable power over our
institutions and over life and property.

1880.—Prohibition Reform Platform,

Cleveland, Ohio, June 17.

The prohibition Reform party of the United States, organized, in
the name of the people, to revive, enforce, and perpetuate in the
government the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence,
submit, for the suffrage of all good citizens, the following platform of
national reforms and measures:
In the examination and discussion of the temperance question, it
has been proven, and is an accepted truth, that alcoholic drinks,
whether fermented, brewed, or distilled, are poisonous to the healthy
human body, the drinking of which is not only needless but hurtful,
necessarily tending to form intemperate habits, increasing greatly
the number, severity, and fatal termination of diseases, weakening
and deranging the intellect, polluting the affections, hardening the
heart and corrupting the morals, depriving many of reason and still
more of its healthful exercise, and annually bringing down large
numbers to untimely graves, producing, in the children of many who
drink, a predisposition to intemperance, insanity, and various bodily
and mental diseases, causing diminution of strength, feebleness of
vision, fickleness of purpose, and premature old age, and inducing,
in all future generations, deterioration of moral and physical
character. Alcoholic drinks are thus the implacable foe of man as an
individual.
First. The legalized importation, manufacture, and sale of
intoxicating drinks ministers to their use, and teaches the erroneous
and destructive sentiment that such use is right, thus tending to
produce and perpetuate the above mentioned evils.
Second. To the home it is an enemy—proving itself to be a
disturber and destroyer of its peace, prosperity, and happiness;
taking from it the earnings of the husband; depriving the dependent
wife and children of essential food, clothing, and education; bringing
into it profanity, abuse, and violence; setting at naught the vows of
the marriage altar; breaking up the family and sundering the
children from the parents, and thus destroying one of the most
beneficent institutions of our Creator, and removing the sure
foundation of good government, national prosperity, and welfare.
Third. To the community it is equally an enemy—producing vice,
demoralization, and wickedness; its places of sale being resorts of
gaming, lewdness, and debauchery, and the hiding-place of those
who prey upon society; counteracting the efficacy of religious effort,
and of all means of intellectual elevation, moral purity, social
happiness, and the eternal good of mankind, without rendering any
counteracting or compensating benefits; being in its influence and
effect evil and only evil, and that continually.
Fourth. To the state it is equally an enemy—legislative inquiries,
judicial investigations, and official reports of all penal, reformatory,
and dependent institutions showing that the manufacture and sale of
such beverages is the promoting cause of intemperance, crime, and
pauperism, and of demands upon public and private charity,
imposing the larger part of taxation, paralyzing thrift, industry,
manufactures, and commercial life, which, but for it, would be
unnecessary; disturbing the peace of streets and highways; filling
prisons and poor-houses; corrupting politics, legislation, and the
execution of the laws; shortening lives; diminishing health, industry,
and productive power in manufactures and art; and is manifestly
unjust as well as injurious to the community upon which it is
imposed, and is contrary to all just views of civil liberty, as well as a
violation of the fundamental maxim of our common law, to use your
own property or liberty so as not to injure others.
Fifth. It is neither right nor politic for the state to afford legal
protection to any traffic or any system which tends to waste the
resources, to corrupt the social habits, and to destroy the health and
lives of the people; that the importation, manufacture, and sale of
intoxicating beverages is proven to be inimical to the true interests of
the individual home, community, and state, and destructive to the
order and welfare of society, and ought, therefore, to be classed
among crimes to be prohibited.
Sixth. In this time of profound peace at home and abroad, the
entire separation of the general government from the drink-traffic,
and its prohibition in the District of Columbia, territories, and in all
places and ways over which, under the constitution, Congress has
control and power, is a political issue of the first importance to the
peace and prosperity of the nation. There can be no stable peace and
protection to personal liberty, life, or property, until secured by
national or state constitutional provisions, enforced by adequate
laws.
Seventh. All legitimate industries require deliverance from the
taxation and loss which the liquor traffic imposes upon them; and
financial or other legislation could not accomplish so much to
increase production and cause a demand for labor, and, as a result,
for the comforts of living, as the suppression of this traffic would
bring to thousands of homes as one of its blessings.
Eighth. The administration of the government and the execution of
the laws are through political parties; and we arraign the Republican
party, which has been in continuous power in the nation for twenty
years, as being false to duty, as false to loudly-proclaimed principles
of equal justice to all and special favors to none, and of protection to
the weak and dependent, insensible to the mischief which the trade
in liquor has constantly inflicted upon industry, trade, commerce,
and the social happiness of the people; that 5,652 distilleries, 3,830
breweries, and 175,266 places for the sale of these poisonous liquors,
involving an annual waste to the nation of one million five hundred
thousand dollars, and the sacrifice of one hundred thousand lives,
have, under its legislation, grown up and been fostered as a
legitimate source of revenue; that during its history, six territories
have been organized and five states been admitted into the Union,
with constitutions provided and approved by Congress, but the
prohibition of this debasing and destructive traffic has not been
provided, nor even the people given, at the time of admission, power
to forbid it in any one of them. Its history further shows, that not in a
single instance has an original prohibitory law been passed by any
state that was controlled by it, while in four states, so governed, the
laws found on its advent to power have been repealed. At its national
convention in 1872, it declared, as part of its party faith, that “it
disapproves of the resort to unconstitutional laws for the purpose of
removing evils, by interference with rights not surrendered by the
people to either the state or national government,” which, the author
of this plank says, was adopted by the platform committee with the
full and implicit understanding that its purpose was the
discountenancing of all so-called temperance, prohibitory, and
Sunday laws.
Ninth. We arraign, also, the Democratic party as unfaithful and
unworthy of reliance on this question; for, although not clothed with
power, but occupying the relation of an opposition party during
twenty years past, strong in numbers and organization, it has allied
itself with liquor-traffickers, and become, in all the states of the
Union, their special political defenders, and in its national
convention in 1876, as an article of its political faith, declared against
prohibition and just laws in restraint of the trade in drink, by saying
it was opposed to what it was pleased to call “all sumptuary laws.”
The National party has been dumb on this question.
Tenth. Drink-traffickers, having the history and experience of all
ages, climes, and conditions of men, declaring their business
destructive of all good—finding no support in the Bible, morals, or
reason—appeal to misapplied law for their justification, and intrench
themselves behind the evil elements of political party for defense,
party tactics and party inertia become battling forces, protecting this
evil.
Eleventh. In view of the foregoing facts and history, we cordially
invite all voters, without regard to former party affiliations, to unite
with us in the use of the ballot for the abolition of the drinking
system, under the authority of our national and state governments.
We also demand, as a right, that women, having the privileges of
citizens in other respects, be clothed with the ballot for their
protection, and as a rightful means for the proper settlement of the
liquor question.
Twelfth. To remove the apprehension of some who allege that a
loss of public revenue would follow the suppression of the direct
trade, we confidently point to the experience of governments abroad
and at home, which shows that thrift and revenue from the
consumption of legitimate manufactures and commerce have so
largely followed the abolition of drink as to fully supply all loss of
liquor taxes.
Thirteenth. We recognize the good providence of Almighty God,
who has preserved and prospered us as a nation; and, asking for His
Spirit to guide us to ultimate success, we all look for it, relying upon
His omnipotent arm.

1880.—Democratic Platform,

Cincinnati, Ohio, June 22.

The Democrats of the United States, in convention assembled,
declare:
First. We pledge ourselves anew to the constitutional doctrines
and traditions of the Democratic party, as illustrated by the teachings
and examples of a long line of Democratic statesmen and patriots,
and embodied in the platform of the last national convention of the
party.
Second. Opposition to centralization, and to that dangerous spirit
of encroachment which tends to consolidate the powers of all the
departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of
government, a real despotism; no sumptuary laws; separation of the
church and state for the good of each; common schools fostered and
protected.
Third. Home rule; honest money, consisting of gold and silver, and
paper, convertible into coin on demand; the strict maintenance of
the public faith; state and national; and a tariff for revenue only; the
subordination of the military to the civil power; and a general and
thorough reform of the civil service.
Fourth. The right to a free ballot is a right preservative of all rights;
and must and shall be maintained in every part of the United States.
Fifth. The existing administration is the representative of
conspiracy only; and its claim of right to surround the ballot-boxes
with troops and deputy marshals, to intimidate and obstruct the
elections, and the unprecedented use of the veto to maintain its
corrupt and despotic power, insults the people and imperils their
institutions. We execrate the course of this administration in making
places in the civil service a reward for political crime; and demand a
reform, by statute, which shall make it forever impossible for a
defeated candidate to bribe his way to the seat of a usurper by
billeting villains upon the people.
Sixth. The great fraud of 1876–7, by which, upon a false count of
the electoral votes of two states, the candidate defeated at the polls
was declared to be President, and, for the first time in American
history, the will of the people was set aside under a threat of military
violence, struck a deadly blow at our system of representative
government. The Democratic party, to preserve the country from the
horrors of a civil war, submitted for the time, in the firm and
patriotic belief that the people would punish the crime in 1880. This
issue precedes and dwarfs every other. It imposes a more sacred duty
upon the people of the Union than ever addressed the consciences of
a nation of freemen.
Seventh. The resolution of Samuel J. Tilden, not again to be a
candidate for the exalted place to which he was elected by a majority
of his countrymen, and from which he was excluded by the leaders of
the Republican party, is received by the Democrats of the United
States with deep sensibility; and they declare their confidence in his
wisdom, patriotism, and integrity unshaken by the assaults of the
common enemy; and they further assure him that he is followed into
the retirement he has chosen for himself by the sympathy and
respect of his fellow-citizens, who regard him as one who, by
elevating the standard of the public morality, and adorning and
purifying the public service, merits the lasting gratitude of his
country and his party.
 Eighth. Free ships, and a living chance for American commerce
upon the seas; and on the land, no discrimination in favor of
transportation lines, corporations, or monopolies.
Ninth. Amendments of the Burlingame treaty; no more Chinese
immigration, except for travel, education, and foreign commerce,
and, therein, carefully guarded.
Tenth. Public money and public credit for public purposes solely,
and public land for actual settlers.
Eleventh. The Democratic party is the friend of labor and the
laboring man, and pledges itself to protect him alike against the
cormorants and the commune.
Twelfth. We congratulate the country upon the honesty and thrift
of a Democratic Congress, which has reduced the public expenditure
$10,000,000 a year; upon the continuation of prosperity at home
and the national honor abroad; and, above all, upon the promise of
such a change in the administration of the government as shall
insure a genuine and lasting reform in every department of the
public service.
 Virginia Republican.

[Adopted August 11.]

Whereas, It is proper that when the people assemble in convention
they should avow distinctly the principles of government on which
they stand; now, therefore, be it,
Resolved, That we, the Republicans of Virginia, hereby make a
declaration of our allegiance and adhesion to the principles of the
Republican party of the country, and our determination to stand
squarely by the organization of the Republican party of Virginia,
always defending it against the assaults of all persons or parties
whatsoever.
Second. That amongst the principles of the Republican party none
is of more vital importance to the welfare and interest of the country
in all its parts than that which pertains to the sanctity of Government
contracts. It therefore becomes the special duty and province of the
Republican party of Virginia to guard and protect the credit of our
time-honored State, which has been besmirched with repudiation, or
received with distrust, by the gross mismanagement of various
factions of the Democratic party, which have controlled the
legislation of the State.
Third. That the Republican party of Virginia hereby pledges itself
to redeem the State from the discredit that now hangs over her in
regard to her just obligations for moneys loaned her for constructing
her internal improvements and charitable institutions, which,
permeating every quarter of the State, bring benefits of far greater
value than their cost to our whole people, and we in the most solemn
form pledge the Republican party of the State to the full payment of
the whole debt of the State, less the one-third set aside as justly
falling on West Virginia; that the industries of the country should be
fostered through protective laws, so as to develop our own resources,
employ our own labor, create a home market, enhance values, and
promote the happiness and prosperity of the people.
Fourth. That the public school system of Virginia is the creature of
the Republican party, and we demand that every dollar the
Constitution dedicates to it shall be sacredly applied thereto as a
means of educating the children of the State, without regard to
condition or race.
Fifth. That the elective franchise as an equal right should be based
on manhood qualification, and that we favor the repeal of the
requirements of the prepayment of the capitation tax as a
prerequisite to the franchise as opposed to the Constitution of the
United States, and in violation of the condition whereby the State
was re-admitted as a member of our Constitutional Union, as well as
against the spirit of the Constitution; but demand the imposition of
the capitation tax as a source of revenue for the support of the public
schools without its disfranchising effects.
Sixth. That we favor the repeal of the disqualification for the
elective franchise by a conviction of petty larceny, and of the
infamous laws which place it in the power of a single justice of the
peace (ofttimes being more corrupt than the criminal before him) to
disfranchise his fellow man.
Seventh. Finally, that we urge the repeal of the barbarous law
permitting the imposition of stripes as degrading and inhuman,
contrary to the genius of a true and enlightened people, and a relic of
barbarism.
[The Convention considered it inexpedient to nominate candidates
for State officers.]

Virginia Readjuster.

[Adopted June 2.]

First. We recognize our obligation to support the institution for the
deaf, dumb and blind, the lunatic asylum, the public free schools and
the Government out of the revenues of the State; and we deprecate
and denounce that policy of ring rule and subordinated sovereignty
which for years borrowed money out of banks at high rates of
interest for the discharge of these paramount trusts, while our
revenues were left the prey of commercial exchanges, available to the
State only at the option of speculators and syndicates.
Second. We reassert our purpose to settle and adjust our State
obligations on the principles of the “Bill to re-establish public credit,”