»Wir geben uns der zuversichtlichen Hoffnung hin […] und bitten daher«. Zur Rekonstruktion von Agency in Petitionen der Ersten Frauenbewegung

Until today, petitions represent important texts that make political civic participation very easy. In the 19th century, the actors of the first women’s movement used this opportunity to bring their concerns to the Reichstag and thus gain a public-political voice, as political participation had previously been denied to them. Based on a brief description of the history of the right to petition and the text form of petitions, the article examines how the actors of the first women’s movement linguistically presented their demands, claimed agency, and at the same time addressed the lack of power to act. Three types of linguistic agency constructions are employed: reconstructive agency, related to the past; performative agency, related to the act of bringing forth agency, which is produced by writing the petitions; and imagined agency, related to the future. The speech act of demanding/requesting constitutes a significant element of agency constructions. The demands/requests were primarily formulated by the actors/protagonists as indirect speech acts in a very defensive manner, and they are also part of complex arguments that, in some cases, justified the demands in great detail.