Walking and talking feminist rhetorics: landmark essays and controversies 9781602351356, 9781602351363, 9781602351370, 4774834734, 160235135X, 1602351368, 1602351376

Table of contents :
Front cover......Page 1
Series page......Page 3
Title page......Page 4
Copyright page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Chronological Subject Listing of Historiographic Essays......Page 9
Kate Ronald......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Walking and Talking through the Field of Feminist Rhetorics......Page 14
Part 1. Charting the Emergence of Feminist Rhetorics......Page 24
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell......Page 28
Susan C. Jarratt......Page 39
Cheryl Glenn......Page 56
Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford1......Page 74
Krista Ratcliffe......Page 100
Part 2. Articulating and Enacting Feminist Methods and Methodologies......Page 128
Patricia Bizzell......Page 132
Susan Romano......Page 144
Vicki Tolar Collins (Burton)......Page 165
Hui Wu......Page 189
Jessica Enoch......Page 203
Mary Queen......Page 222
Part 3. Exploring Gendered Sites, Genres, and Styles of Rhetoric......Page 240
Jane Donawerth......Page 244
Susan Zaeske......Page 255
Shirley Wilson Logan......Page 275
Nan Johnson......Page 295
Carol Mattingly......Page 312
Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn......Page 334
Part 4. Examining Controversies: Four Case Studies......Page 354
Debating Disciplinary Directions: Recovery versus Retheorizing......Page 356
Barbara Biesecker......Page 358
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell......Page 376
Samuel R. Evans......Page 381
Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin......Page 383
Celeste Michelle Condit......Page 402
Debating Causality: Women and the Demise of Rhetorical Education......Page 419
Robert J. Connors......Page 421
Roxanne Mountford......Page 453
Barbara Hebert......Page 460
Xin Liu Gale......Page 463
Cheryl Glenn......Page 483
Susan C. Jarratt......Page 486
Selected Bibliography......Page 490
Works Cited......Page 494
Index......Page 498
About the Editors......Page 504
Back cover......Page 505

Citation preview

Rhetoric and Composition

In Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics, Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan “have presented the field of feminist rhetorics . . . with an important and timely collection of primary scholarly work, the first collection of late twentieth and twenty-first century published scholarship in this field that they claim is here to stay. Feminist rhetorics, they assert, is ‘no longer a promising possibility or a nascent area of study but has, in fact, arrived.’ I agree with them, and I applaud their bold yet careful stance in framing this ‘walk through’ feminist rhetorics.” — Kate Ronald, “Foreword” Contributors include Barbara Biesecker, Patricia Bizzell, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Vicki Tolar Collins (Burton), Celeste. M. Condit, Robert Connors, Jane Donawerth, Bonnie J. Dow, ​Lisa Ede, Jessica Enoch, Sonja K. Foss, Xin Liu Gale, Cheryl Glenn, Cindy. L. Griffin, Susan Jarratt, Nan Johnson, Shirley Wilson Logan, Andrea Lunsford, Carol Mattingly, Roxanne Mountford, Mary Queen, Krista Ratcliffe, Susan Romano, Mary B. Tonn, Hui Wu, and Susan Zaeske. Lindal Buchanan is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University. Kathleen J. Ryan is Associate Professor of English and the Director of Composition at the University of Montana.

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition

Edited by Patricia Sullivan, Catherine Hobbs, Thomas Rickert and Jennifer Bay

LANDMARK ESSAYS & CONTROVERSIES

816 Robinson Street West Lafayette, IN 47906 http://www.parlorpress.com S A N: 2 5 4 – 8 8 7 9 ISBN 978-1-60235-137-0

BUCHANAN & RYAN

WALKING & TALKING FEMINIST RHETORICS

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies gathers significant, oft-cited scholarship about feminism and rhetoric into one convenient volume. Essays examine the formation of the vibrant and growing field of feminist rhetoric; feminist historiographic research methods and methodologies; and women’s distinct sites, genres, and styles of rhetoric. The book’s most innovative and pedagogically useful feature is its presentation of controversies in the form of case studies, each consisting of exchanges between or among scholars about significant questions. These debates have shaped the field’s past and continue to influence its present and future directions. The collection provides both students and teachers with an accessible introduction to and comprehensive overview of the intersections of feminisms and rhetorics.

PARLOR PRESS

WALKING AND TALKING FEMINIST RHETORICS LANDMARK ESSAYS AND CONTROVERSIES

EDITED BY

LINDAL BUCHANAN & KATHLEEN J. RYAN

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition

Series Editors: Catherine Hobbs, Patricia Sullivan, Thomas Rickert, and Jennifer Bay

The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions Janice Lauer

Hutton has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written literacy theory and research.

Other Books in the Series Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre, edited by Lori Ostergaard, Jeff Ludwig, and Jim Nugent (2009) Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics, edited by Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley (2009)

Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence. Revised and Expanded Edition, by Richard Leo Enos (2008) Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis, edited by Michelle F. Eble and Lynée Lewis Gaillet (2008) Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching in Troubled Times by Lynn Z. Bloom (2008) 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition, by Brent Henze, Jack Selzer, and Wendy Sharer (2008) The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration, edited by Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman (2008) Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics, edited by Debra Frank Dew and Alice Horning (2007) Networked Process: Dissolving Boundaries of Process and Post-Process, by Helen Foster (2007) Composing a Community: A History of Writing Across the Curriculum, edited by Susan H. McLeod and Margot Iris Soven (2006) Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, edited by Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo (2004). Winner of the WPA Best Book Award for 2004–2005. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (Expanded Edition) by James A. Berlin (2003)

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics Landmark Essays and Controversies

Edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan

Parlor Press

West Lafayette, Indiana www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906 © 2010 by Parlor Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buchanan, Lindal, 1958Walking and talking feminist rhetorics : landmark essays and controversies / edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60235-135-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-136-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 9781-60235-137-0 (adobe ebook) 1. Rhetoric--History. 2. Feminist literary criticism. 3. Feminism and literature. 4. Women’s studies. 5. Speeches, addresses, etc.--Women authors. 6. Women--Language. 7. Rhetorical criticism. I. Ryan, Kathleen J., 1968- II. Title. PN183.B828 2010 808’.0082--dc22 2009053935

Cover Image: “Nature Background 3” by © Hougaard Malan. Istockphoto.com Cover design by David Blakesley Printed on acid-free paper.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, hardcover, and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [email protected].

Contents Chronological Subject Listing of Historiographic Essays   viii Foreword: Talking the Talk/Walking the Walk: The Path of Feminist Rhetorics   ix Kate Ronald Acknowledgments   xi Introduction: Walking and Talking through the Field of Feminist Rhetorics   xiii

Part 1. Charting the Emergence of Feminist Rhetorics   3 Introduction to Man Cannot Speak for Her   7 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric   18 Susan C. Jarratt sex, lies, and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric   35 Cheryl Glenn Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism   53 Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford Bathsheba’s Dilemma: Defining, Discovering, and Defending AngloAmerican Feminist Theories of Rhetoric(s)   79 Krista Ratcliffe

Part 2. Articulating and Enacting Feminist Methods and Methodologies   107 Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?   111 Patricia Bizzell

The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Feminist Historiography   123 Susan Romano v

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The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Methodology   144 Vicki Tolar Collins (Burton) Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks   168 Hui Wu Survival Stories: Feminist Historiographic Approaches to Chicana Rhetorics of Sterilization Abuse   182 Jessica Enoch Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World   201 Mary Queen

Part 3. Exploring Gendered Sites, Genres, and Styles of Rhetoric   219 Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women   223 Jane Donawerth

The “Promiscuous Audience” Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman’s Rights Movement   234 Susan Zaeske Black Women on the Speaker’s Platform (1832–1899)   254 Shirley Wilson Logan Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America   274 Nan Johnson Woman’s Temple, Women’s Fountains: The Erasure of Public Memory   291 Carol Mattingly “Feminine Style” and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards   313 Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn

Part 4. Examining Controversies: Four Case Studies   333 Case Study 1: Debating Disciplinary Directions: Recovery versus Retheorizing   335 Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric   337 Barbara Biesecker

Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either   355 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

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Case Study 2: Debating the Aims of Discourse: Persuasive versus Invitational Rhetoric   360 Samuel R. Evans Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric   362 Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin In Praise of Eloquent Diversity: Gender and Rhetoric as Public Persuasion   381 Celeste Michelle Condit Case Study 3: Debating Causality: Women and the Demise of Rhetorical Education   398 Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric   400 Robert J. Connors Feminization of Rhetoric?   432 Roxanne Mountford Case Study 4: Debating Ethos: Traditional versus Feminist Research Methods   439 Barbara Hebert Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus   442 Xin Liu Gale Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography   462 Cheryl Glenn Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again   465 Susan C. Jarratt Selected Bibliography   469 Works Cited   473 Index   477 About the Editors   483

Chronological Subject Listing of Historiographic Essays sex, lies, and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric   35 Cheryl Glenn The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Feminist Historiography   123 Susan Romano Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women   223 Jane Donawerth The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Methodology   144 Vicki Tolar Collins (Burton) The “Promiscuous Audience” Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman’s Rights Movement   234 Susan Zaeske Introduction to Man Cannot Speak for Her   7 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell Black Women on the Speaker’s Platform (1832–1899)   254 Shirley Wilson Logan Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric   400 Robert J. Connors Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America   274 Nan Johnson Woman’s Temple, Women’s Fountains: The Erasure of Public Memory   291 Carol Mattingly “Feminine Style” and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards   313 Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn Survival Stories: Feminist Historiographic Approaches to Chicana Rhetorics of Sterilization Abuse   182 Jessica Enoch Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World   201 Mary Queen viii

Foreword Talking the Talk/Walking the Walk: The Path of Feminist Rhetorics Kate Ronald I’ve spent a most pleasant few weeks reading this collection and a decidedly frustrating morning trying to find the origin of a phrase that haunted me as I read. Lindal Buchanan and Katie Ryan have presented the field of feminist rhetorics (as well as composition and rhetoric, women’s rhetoric(s), women’s studies and just plain rhetoric—just to complicate the terrain we travel a bit more) with an important and timely collection of primary scholarly work, the first collection of late twentieth and twenty-first century published scholarship in this field that they claim is here to stay. Feminist rhetorics, they assert, is “no longer a promising possibility or a nascent area of study but has, in fact, arrived.” I agree with them, and I applaud their bold yet careful stance in framing this “walk through” feminist rhetorics. First, putting this collection together was clearly no walk in the park. Although Buchanan and Ryan use meandering metaphors to describe both their choices and the paths they hope their readers will take, the authors and stances they collect here require the reader to spend more time at certain stops than others, and I’m particularly grateful for the editors’ candor in admitting that “the essays gathered here do not delineate a hierarchy of scholars, a chronology of events and ideas, a stable or fixed body of knowledge, or the parameters of feminist rhetorics. They simply reflect our walk through this metaphorical field and record our journey to this point in time.” I frankly don’t see how they managed to make the difficult choices I know that they faced. After all, “landmarks” can be individual, personal as well as communal, public. And yet, in their careful introductions to these essays, particularly the case studies of “controversies” in the field, Buchanan and Ryan frame this research in ways that are bold, new, and indeed present a field that has arrived, that wants more to look forward than backward. In other words, they retrace our paths—walking familiar ground—but as we amble, we hear new talk about what the journey might mean and where it might lead. ix

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Reading Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics, though, I just couldn’t get the lines about “talking the talk” vs. “walking the walk” out of my head. It’s usually phrased as “Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk.” Or more pejoratively, “Sure, he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?” (I use “he” deliberately because I’m confident that this maxim is decidedly male. In fact the OED tells me that it’s been in use since 1921, and its contexts include wrestling and prison sentences.) Like the maxim “Talk is cheap,” to “talk the talk” means that you are able to talk theoretically—or “talk a good game”—about how something is/should be done; but if you can “walk the walk,” you know what you’re talking about. In other words, walking denotes firsthand, practical experience, and moreover, it means connecting that practice to theory. It strikes me that feminist rhetoricians almost always do both, by necessity. Denied the right to speak historically, as the scholars collected here show, feminist rhetors more often than not devised theory from practice, not the other way around. Determined to chart new ground, as the essays here also show, feminist researchers and teachers insist on the consequences of theory. And, as the editors of this collection show in both their opening definitions of feminist rhetoric and in their listing of strands they see in the collection, theorizing practice, holding theorists accountable for practice and practitioners for theory, remains the ground of all we do. Feminist rhetoricians, it occurs to me, might be one group that also turns this expression around to insist that someone who can walk the walk must also talk the talk. One more expression kept running around in my head as I read Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics. It’s most commonly associated in rhetoric, composition, literacy, and education with another liberatory project, the book that Myles Horton and Paulo Freire “talked” into being: We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations in Education and Social Change (1990). That book was dedicated, as is this one, to the collaborative enterprise of dismantling oppressive structures of power and creating new methods of inquiry and pedagogy. But the phrase comes originally from a poem by Antonio Machado, a twentieth century Spanish poet (1875– 1939). The full lines are: “Searcher, there is no road/We make the road by walking” (sometimes translated as “Wanderer, Traveler” or as “Wayfarer, there is no road”). I would argue that Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen Ryan, along with all their collaborators, both current and past, have walked us onto a new road, our steps a little surer, all the while holding themselves to the promise of continuing the journey and the conversation.

Works Cited Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. Machado, Antonio. Selected Poems. Trans. Alvin S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Acknowledgments We are grateful for the assistance of many friends and colleagues on this project. Nancy Myers, Rebecca Jones, Paul Butler, and Carol Mattingly provided us with guidance, encouragement, and feedback at various stages; their contributions inspired us to express ideas more clearly, fully, and convincingly. We also appreciate Kate Ronald’s wit and wisdom in writing a foreword that gives us new ways to explore the metaphors that shape this book. Additionally, we’d like to thank Old Dominion University for its help, particularly for funding research assistant Xiang Li. Xiang gathered and then “translated” the collection’s many essays into the required format, a time-consuming process with many technical complications; she overcame them all with diligence, enthusiasm, and imagination. Thanks, too, to Ana Timofte, who compiled the works cited list for the volume. Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics would not have been possible without the generosity of publishers and authors who graciously waived or reduced permission fees. Further, many writers worked with us to condense essays when the collection grew too long. Finally, our colleagues at Parlor Press have been a pleasure to work with: we appreciate the support of series editors Thomas Rickert and Jennifer Bay as well as David Blakesley’s eternal readiness to answer questions throughout the review and publication process. Thank you.

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Introduction Walking and Talking through the Field of Feminist Rhetorics Having passed through the familiar and patriarchal territory of exclusionary rhetoric, we are moving into a frontier—the rhetorics of the future that await our exploration, our settlements, and our mapping. —Cheryl Glenn, “sex, lies, and manuscript” In response to Cheryl Glenn’s call to explore new rhetorical frontiers, feminist scholars have left familiar terrain and begun to produce the inclusionary “rhetorics of the future” envisioned above. Historiographers, rhetoricians, and theorists have challenged established tradition(s) and canon(s) and, in the process, created a unique interdisciplinary field of study—feminist rhetorics. What do we mean by feminist rhetorics? We use the term as an umbrella of sorts to encompass the many projects and purposes of ongoing work in the field. First, feminist rhetorics describes an intellectual project dedicated to recognizing and revising systems and structures broadly linked to the oppression of women. Second, it includes a theoretical mandate, namely, exploring the shaping powers of language, gender ideology, and society; the location of subject(s) within these formations; and the ways these constructs inform the production, circulation, and interpretation of rhetorical texts. Third, it constitutes a practice, a scholarly endeavor capable of transforming the discipline of rhetoric through gender analysis, critique, and reformulation. This feminist practice entails identifying and examining women rhetors and women’s rhetorics, making claims for their importance and contributions to the discipline, and, in so doing, regendering rhetorical histories and traditions. Fourth, it consists of a body of scholarship recording the field’s intellectual, theoretical, and practical pursuits. Fifth, the term encompasses a community of teacher/scholars with shared interests in the intersections of gender and rhetoric. Sixth, it describes a political agenda directed toward promoting gender equity within the academy and society. In other words, the rhetorical work of this community of feminist teacher/scholars—in the classroom, at conferences, in publications, xiii

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through outreach—encourages others to think, believe, and act in ways that promote equal treatment and opportunities for women. The field of feminist rhetorics, then, is both broad and deep. One of our goals in creating Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies is to demonstrate that the field is no longer just a promising possibility or a nascent area of study but has, in fact, arrived. As we undertook the tasks of selecting and arranging significant work in feminist rhetorics, we were mindful of Nedra Reynolds’ admonition to choose guiding metaphors with care, especially when describing the efforts and accomplishments of pathfinders and explorers (an apt description of the scholars and women rhetors included in this volume). Spatial metaphors, such as Glenn’s figuration of feminist historiography as a mapping of new territories, are inspiring for their depiction of trailblazers making new discoveries, so it’s not surprising that Glenn’s (re)mapping metaphor has been taken up in many other works, including Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric.” Other spatial tropes have also proven fruitful, for instance, Gloria Anzaldùa’s border-crossing metaphor, which emphasizes movement and “resistance to territoriality or containerization” (Reynolds 36). It, too, has been widely adopted by feminist rhetorical scholars, as is evident, for instance, in an essay in this volume, Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford’s “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism.” However, the tropes that, ultimately, proved most helpful to us in framing our project were walking and talking. The walking metaphor derives from Reynolds’s Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Differences and connotes “continual improvisation, a type of performance that continually privileges, transforms or abandons the spatial elements in the constructed order”; it also signifies agency, for “walkers can pause, cross, turn, linger, doubleback and otherwise have control of their actions” (69). We especially liked how the walking metaphor valorized intellectual flexibility and openness as well as the reflexivity and curiosity necessary in interdisciplinary studies. Further, it helped us to envision our project as a journey into the metaphorical field (or meadow) of feminist rhetorics. There were no established paths to follow, so we made our own way, directing our steps toward regions that enticed us. We frequently paused, zigzagged, or circled back to examine things more closely—sometimes together, sometimes apart—and when we resumed our travels, carried part of what we’ve seen within us. Although this edited collection necessarily reflects our particular journeys, we are confident it acknowledges many of the terrain’s most important landmarks. If walking allowed us to explore the field of feminist rhetorics, then talking enabled us to understand what we’d seen. Discussion was essential to our effort because the landscape we traversed was forever in transition and often seemed to change before our eyes. The talking metaphor, therefore, emerged naturally from our exchanges, which helped us process our observations and develop a richer and fuller sense of the field together than we could have apart. We also appreciated the insights and contributions of Samuel R. Evans and Barbara Hebert, doctoral students in rhetoric at Old Dominion University, who wrote introductions to Case

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Study 2 and 4 respectively. Our collective efforts ensured that an assortment of “voices, perspectives, and representations” were incorporated into the project, a feminist objective that was important to us (Hawisher and Selfe 112). The walking and talking metaphors further suggest that our particular path through the field of feminist rhetorics necessarily differs from the ones that others might take or make. Our account of the journey (as represented by the selection and arrangement of material in Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics) is, therefore, partial, encompassing aspects of rather than the entire field. We acknowledge this limitation at the outset. Due to space constraints, we could not attend equally to every area of feminist rhetorical scholarship, so this collection necessarily reflects our own concerns and locations. We have selected work that focuses on historical and contemporary women rhetors and women’s rhetorics, chiefly in the West; on gender bias within the discipline as well as the changes that occur when bias is acknowledged and contested; on research methods and methodologies capable of recuperating forgotten or devalued rhetors; and on the distinct rhetorical sites, means, and manners employed by women. What is less well represented than we would like is feminist scholarship on gender and rhetorical education; on the impact of culture, nation, and ethnicity on women’s rhetorics; on transnational feminisms and global communications; and on gendered rhetorics in digital environments. Our selected bibliography acknowledges work in these areas to suggest starting points for those interested in learning more about them. Moreover, the essays gathered here do not delineate a hierarchy of scholars, a chronology of events and ideas, a stable or fixed body of knowledge, or the parameters of feminist rhetorics. They simply reflect our walk through this metaphorical field and record our journey to this point in time. Our journey is ongoing, so we invite readers to amble and ruminate alongside us, whether this constitutes their first or fortieth foray into feminist rhetorics. Before detailing the contents of Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics, a brief overview of the rhetorical situation that produced the field is in order. As has been well documented by Gerda Lerner and Marilyn French among others, patriarchal structures and institutions developed some ten to twelve thousand years ago, producing a gender hierarchy that effectively controlled women’s reproductive bodies and proscribed their participation in public spaces. This hierarchy had an enormous impact on the emergent discipline of rhetoric (in the West), which flourished 2,500 years ago when Athens became a democracy and granted male citizens a voice in determining the direction of the city/state. It soon became apparent that those who spoke well might convince others of the existence of problems or the best means of resolving them, thereby not only shaping the course of political events but also acquiring power in the process. The resultant demand for instruction in the arts of public speaking produced teachers and, ultimately, the discipline of rhetoric. At the time of its inception and for most of its history, the presumed student, teacher, practitioner, and theorist of rhetoric has been male, so the discipline’s pedagogies and precepts evolved to meet his needs. Consequently, the discipline was founded and developed with elite male speakers as the prototype. As Robert Connors ob-

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serves, “rhetoric was the domain of men, particularly of men of property. The continuing discipline of rhetoric was shaped by male rituals, male contests, male ideals, and masculine agendas. Women were definitively excluded from all that rhetoric implied” (“Gender Influences” 24). As a result, the traditional rhetorical tradition—spanning Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine to Campbell, Blair, and Burke—was saturated with gendered biases and assumptions (Bizzell, “Editing” 110). Scriptural, social, and ideological constraints limited women’s discursive opportunties, constraints that ranged from Saint Paul’s injunctions against female preaching to the cult of true womanhood. Although excluded from public forums of influence and power and ignored by the discipline itself, women, nevertheless, thought about, studied, and practiced rhetoric, indirectly for much of western history and, incrementally over the past 350 years, more directly. Scholarly efforts to excavate this history began with Doris Yoakum’s “Women’s Introduction to the American Platform” (1943) and Lillian O’Connor’s Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement (1954), both of which made early cases for the existence and significance of pre-Civil War women’s speeches on woman’s rights, abolition, temperance, and moral reform. However, it is Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (1989)—a two-volume work that detailed the distinctive rhetorical style and accomplishments of nineteenth-century women rhetors and recovered their work—that conventionally marks the beginning of contemporary feminist scholarship on women rhetors and women’s rhetorics. Since the publication of this milestone, a near avalanche of feminist research has appeared and profoundly altered the discipline of rhetoric. Why? Once its prototypical elite male speaker was replaced by a woman, the discipline required deep revision in order to accommodate the constraints and particular strategies of a new constituency. In fact, incorporating women into the traditional rhetorical tradition “require[d] not merely the readjustment of existing scholarly priorities, but a whole new set of priorities” (Bizzell, “Editing” 113). Feminist historiographers developed research methods and methodologies capable of recovering women rhetors of whom little record remains. Further, feminist scholars discovered women’s rhetorics in formerly disregarded sites and genres and, in the process, broadened what counted as rhetoric and as evidence, necessary moves as the standards “traditionally used to value rhetors simply did not always apply well to women” (Mattingly, “Telling” 105). In short, feminist researchers not only questioned established rhetorical categories, definitions, criteria, principles, and practices but also identified gender biases that slighted the full range and inventiveness of marginalized rhetors. The field of feminist rhetorics has emerged from these investigations. Although initially centered on women in the United States, scholars have begun to branch out and examine women’s rhetorics in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and other global regions and ethnic locations. This expansion signals feminist rhetoric’s vitality, as does the number of field-specific organizations, conferences, publications, publishers, and teaching materials now in existence.

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Feminist rhetorics incorporates scholarship in women’s studies, history, philosophy, law, anthropology, communication, and English, but the latter two disciplines, in particular, have produced important organizations for those investigating the nexus of gender and rhetoric. In English, the most significant is the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (the Coalition), a group that meets yearly at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Dues-paying members stay in touch year round via a list-serve and newsletter, Peitho. Meanwhile, the Organization for Research on Women and Communication (ORWAC) provides a similar gathering place for feminist scholars in communications. ORWAC meets yearly at the Western States Communication Association Conference and maintains contact through the biannual ORWAC Newsletter. Both disciplines sponsor national and regional conferences that provide feminist scholars with presentation and networking opportunities. The Coalition, for instance, sponsors the biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, and many major conferences in English studies regularly include panels, presentations, and workshops on feminist rhetorics, including the CCCC, Rhetoric Society of America Conference, International Society for the History of Rhetoric Conference, and National Communication Association Conference. Important regional venues include the Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference and the Western, Southern, and Central States Communication Association Conferences. Publishing opportunities in the field have also multiplied, with a number of journals welcoming work in feminist rhetorics. The longest running focused journal is Women’s Studies in Communication, which has been in operation since 1977 and is sponsored by ORWAC. The Coalition hopes to follow suit and develop Peitho into a journal dedicated to feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition. General journals in communications and English studies also welcome work in feminist rhetorics, including College English, College Composition and Communication, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, Rhetorica, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Finally, a number of academic presses publish scholarly monographs and collections in feminist rhetorics. The most active is arguably Southern Illinois University Press (SIUP). SIUP regularly produces rhetoric and composition texts written from a feminist perspective and also sponsors the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan. Since its inception in 2002, this series has published many noteworthy books in the field of feminist rhetorics (see the selected bibliography). A growing body of resources for courses in feminist rhetorics and rhetorical history has also appeared although some critical needs remain, chief among them being a collection of landmark scholarship in the field. Granted, useful compilations of research in feminism and composition are available (e.g., Jarratt and Worsham’s Feminism and Composition: In Other Words, Kirsch and her collaborators’ Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, Phelps and Emig’s Feminist Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric), but they include little on women’s rhetorics. Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays

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and Controversies responds to this gap, gathering significant work on gender, feminism, and rhetoric responsible for creating a new area of study and reshaping the discipline as a whole. As editors of this collection, we have read and reread a great many books and articles about women and rhetoric over the past two years and—through the processes of analyzing and synthesizing, selecting and arranging, introducing and explicating this material—have developed a kairotic sense of the field’s major lines of inquiry and areas of controversy. In the course of our efforts, we have identified five major strands in the work of feminist rhetorical scholars: • Reclaiming forgotten or disparaged women rhetors and rhetoricians and making convincing cases for their contributions and accomplishments. An example of this type of research is Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women, an interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century black women’s literate practices and rhetorical efforts to protest racial injustice and promote racial uplift. •

Examining the interrelationships among context, location, and rhetoric and tracing how these shape women’s discursive options, strategies, and choices. For instance, in A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck, Suzanne Bordelon first situates the educator within the Progressive Era; then details her interconnected theories of rhetoric, citizenship, and equality; and, finally, traces their application in Buck’s classroom, theatrical, and suffrage activities. Bordelon places Buck’s rhetoric within surrounding systems of power, gender, politics, economics, and education and shows how they mutually inform and illuminate one another.

• Searching for gender bias and, when it is found, retheorizing (or regendering) rhetorical traditions. Lindal Buchanan’s Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors illustrates this approach, replacing the male orator at the center of the fifth rhetorical canon with a woman and speculating on the changes that gender makes to the theory and practice of delivery. • Interrogating foundational disciplinary concepts—such as rhetorical space, argument, genre, and style—in order to expand and, when necessary, redefine the realm of rhetoric. The 1996 special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy illustrates this approach. Because many “feminists contend[ed] that argument as a process [was] steeped in adversarial assumptions and gendered expectations,” this journal issue examined alternative approaches and conceptions in order to “open up studies of argumentation” (Palczewski 164, 168). Feminists undertake this sort of critical scrutiny and conceptual reframing in order to generate novel approaches to established disciplinary precepts and practices. • Challenging traditional knowledge-making paradigms and research practices (including criteria, methods, and methodologies) when they prove inadequate for investi-

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gating women rhetors and women’s rhetorics and developing inventive and robust alternatives. In “A Lover’s Discourse: Diotima, Logos, and Desire,” C. Jan Swearingen interrogates questionable applications of evidentiary criteria, which are often used to support textual (re)constructions of figures like Socrates, Jesus and Moses and to impede the recovery of women rhetors (28). Through skillful interpretation and application, Swearingen transforms Diotima from a shadowy figure in Plato’s Symposium to a feminist priestess and healer who teaches Socrates about “love, discourse, and birth” (26, 28). Swearingen’s critical (re)readings of historiographic methodology and recovery of Diotima thus illustrate an important goal of feminist research. This list of research concerns is not comprehensive, but it does provide a starting point for distinguishing among the various approaches to feminist rhetorics represented in this sourcebook. What is more, these lines of inquiry guided the organization and arrangement of our project. Part 1. Charting the Emergence of Feminist Rhetorics presents five early essays that created a foundation for the field by challenging women’s exclusion from rhetorical history and theory. Additionally, they introduced some key concerns and knowledge-making paradigms that emerged as scholars began to challenge gendered assumptions within the rhetorical tradition. In Part 2. Articulating and Enacting Feminist Methods and Methodologies, six essays examine distinctive issues in feminist rhetorical scholarship. Of particular concern are the ethical, interpretive, and methodological questions that researchers confront when recovering women rhetors of whom there is little trace or when examining unconventional rhetorics. The six essays in Part 3. Exploring Gendered Sites, Genres, and Styles of Rhetoric address areas little studied within the traditional discipline of rhetoric. Private conversation as well as bricks and mortar become the available means of persuasion employed by women to shape public life and assert the value of their collective efforts. Finally, Part 4. Examining Controversies: Four Case Studies presents exchanges between or among scholars on matters that not only shaped the field’s past but also inform its present and future directions. Case Study 1 considers whether feminist scholarship best proceeds by integrating women rhetors into the established canon of public speakers or by retheorizing the discipline through the lens of gender. Case Study 2 concerns the nature of persuasive discourse and debates whether it constitutes a gendered form of violence or means to power. Case Study 3 examines how nineteenth-century women’s entry into American colleges influenced rhetorical education while Case Study 4 explores credibility and ethics in feminist historiography. The book concludes with a selected bibliography of feminist rhetorical studies, identifying anthologies, edited collections, special journal issues, and significant monographs for those interested in further study. The discipline of rhetoric—which consists of the study, practice, and theorizing of public discourse—developed in response to the Athenian context and has survived due to its ability to adapt to social, ideological, political, economic, and technological changes. Thanks to the efforts of feminist rhetorical scholars, rhetoric is being reshaped once more, this time in

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order to accommodate gender and incorporate women rhetors who have existed but have been largely ignored throughout history. As you read the essays in this volume and learn about researchers’ efforts to recover the forgotten and retheorize the discipline, we hope that your walk through the field of feminist rhetorics will be rich and rewarding. We encourage you to create your own path and to “pause, cross, turn, linger, [or] double-back” to contemplate what you find along the way (Reynolds 69). And when you are ready, we invite you to add your voice to the field’s continuing conversations about women, language, and power.

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics

Part 1. Charting the Emergence of Feminist Rhetorics It is true that considering women as active participants in the history of rhetoric will alter our accounting of our history and may even compel us to adjust our understanding of what rhetoric itself means. Yet, we should embrace, not resist, rival and innovative considerations. —Richard Enos Richard Enos makes an insightful point regarding the potential impact of feminist perspectives on the traditional rhetorical tradition, namely that they may change—in fact, have changed—the discipline as a whole. Feminist scholars’ attention to women on the margins has transformed rhetoric’s single-minded focus on discourses of power. Further, their distinct vantage point has heightened awareness of, first, the ways that women’s standpoints disrupt long standing assumptions conflating privileged, elite, male experience with universal experience and, second, the potential contributions of postmodern theory to rhetoric. As a result, feminist scholarship has altered not only the subjects, genres, styles, and sites of rhetorical inquiry but also the research methods used to study them. The five readings in this section present the sometimes divergent, sometimes overlapping paths that feminist historiographers, theorists, and rhetoricians first took to interrogate women’s exclusion from rhetorical histories and traditions. Presented chronologically in their order of publication, they introduce the distinct research questions and knowledge-making paradigms that arose as scholars examined the intersections of feminism(s) and rhetoric(s), questioned the gendered assumptions embedded within the discipline, and recuperated women’s historical and contemporary rhetorical contributions. In other words, these essays represent the torrent of feminist scholarship that appeared between the late 1980s to the mid 1990s and trace the emergence of the field of feminist rhetorics. The first reading is excerpted from Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak For Her (1989), a landmark two-volume study of the early woman’s rights movement. Volume 1 presents Campbell’s analysis of nineteenth-century women’s rhetorical contributions while volume 2 anthologizes a selection of their neglected speeches. The first book-length feminist reclamation of women rhetors and rhetorics, Campbell is committed to “rescu[ing] the works of great women speakers from the oblivion to which most have been consigned” (15). She, there3

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fore, promotes an informed understanding of gendered rhetorics and advocates incorporating women into the male-dominant rhetorical canon. More specifically, Campbell identifies the formidable gender constraints that confronted nineteenth-century women rhetors—for instance, the expectation that they exhibit such “feminine” qualities as domesticity and subservience, both of which were antithetical to the demands of public speaking. To compensate for defying dominant gender norms, women developed a strategic feminine style of rhetoric that enabled them to negotiate public work and private expectations. Campbell’s work articulates perspectives, motives, and methods that continue to inform discussion in the field. Susan Jarratt’s essay “Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric” (1990) likewise seeks to “create histories aimed at a more just future” (191). Jarratt reflects on her earlier call for feminist scholars to prioritize regendering rhetorical theory over recovering women’s rhetorical history. Revising her stance, she explains how feminist standpoint theory and Gayatri Spivak’s postmodern theory of representation suggest the necessity of pursuing both objectives at once. The essay presents a well-theorized discussion of the issues confronting feminist scholars and concludes by anticipating how their work will impact the design and content of courses in rhetorical history, a topic that continues to garner attention as Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie’s recent edited collection Teaching Rhetorica (2006) indicates. Cheryl Glenn’s “sex, lies and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric” (1994) earned the Richard Braddock Award for best article in College Composition and Communication, recognition that, for many, signaled the arrival of feminist rhetorics. Glenn speaks, broadly, of the need for feminists to revise rhetorical history and remap the discipline and, specifically, of Aspasia of Miletus, a resident of fifth-century BCE Athens known only through second-hand accounts. Marked as an outsider because of her non-citizen status and as sexually suspect because of her intimate relationship with Pericles, Aspasia is recovered as a rhetorician. In the process, Glenn models how feminist historiographers can recuperate a woman’s rhetorical legacy when, as is so often the case, only traces of it remain; she also refutes arguments that interpret a paucity of evidence as proof of women’s rhetorical inactivity. This essay has generated considerable controversy and conversation regarding ethics and methods of feminist historiography, as Case Study 4 details. In this section’s fourth essay, Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford employ Gloria Anzaldúa’s metaphor of border crossing in order to consider the impact of feminism on the discipline. “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism” (1995) examines the five canons of rhetoric—consisting of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery— and their conventional heuristic value in speech making. After tracing the canons’ formation in Greece and Rome, Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford explore how traditional conceptions of the canons change when (re)considered in light of women’s rhetorical practices and experiences. Their essay, like many others in this collection, talks back to patriarchal privileging of agonistic, linear discourse; to the denigration of composing strategies and language traits gendered as “feminine”; and to the discipline’s grounding in genres, media, and methods developed

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exclusively for male elites. Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford not only make a persuasive case for gendered revisions of foundational rhetorical precepts in order to meet contemporary needs and interests but also demonstrate that feminism and rhetoric have much to offer each other. The final reading is excerpted from Krista Ratcliffe’s Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich (1995). Ratcliffe opens with the dilemma confronting Bathsheba Everdene, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, who bemoans having only “the language of men” to express “the feelings of a woman” (1). Bathsheba’s dilemma encapsulates Ratcliffe’s objective—redressing disciplinary genderblindness through studying women’s rhetorical theorizing. After reviewing four interrelated methodologies for challenging a genderblind rhetorical tradition (recovering, rereading, extrapolating, and conceptualizing), she establishes the exigency, terms, and nature of her own study (the subject of the essay included in this section). Within the book’s larger framework, Ratcliffe ultimately extrapolates Virginia Woolf’s, Mary Daly’s, and Adrienne Rich’s rhetorical perspectives from their “essays, diaries, letters, and poems” (28), and, in the process, discovering, defining, and defending Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric that present possibilities for resolving Bathsheba’s dilemma. Collectively, the feminist scholars in this section have called attention to the barriers that women historically confronted when crafting rhetorical performances in resistant social contexts. They have also (re)read male-centered texts and traditions and explained why it is important to recognize, challenge, and rethink genderblind perspectives. After all, as Jarratt observes, “If the Western intellectual tradition is not only a product of men, but constituted by masculinity, then transformation comes not only from women finding women authors but also from a gendered rereading of [. . .] masculine rhetoric” (“Feminist Rereadings” 2). Finally, these scholars have inspired others to rewrite rhetorical histories, tenets, and traditions, a legacy that has produced a distinct field of study, feminist rhetorics, and the (re)construction of a more equitable, inclusive discipline.

Introduction to Man Cannot Speak for Her* Karlyn Kohrs Campbell Men have an ancient and honorable rhetorical history. Their speeches and writings, from antiquity to the present, are studied and analyzed by historians and rhetoricians. Public persuasion has been a conscious part of the Western male’s heritage from ancient Greece to the present. This is not an insignificant matter. For centuries, the ability to persuade others has been part of Western man’s standard of excellence in many areas, even of citizenship itself. Moreover, speaking and writing eloquently has long been the goal of the humanistic tradition in education. Women have no parallel rhetorical history. Indeed, for much of their history women have been prohibited from speaking, a prohibition reinforced by such powerful cultural authorities as Homer, Aristotle, and Scripture. In the Odyssey, for example, Telemachus scolds his mother Penelope and tells her, “Public speech [mythos] shall be men’s concern” (Homer 1980, 9).1 In the Politics, Aristotle approvingly quotes the words, “Silence is a woman’s glory” (1923, 1.13.12602a.30), and the epistles of Paul enjoin women to keep silent. As a result, when women began to speak outside the home on moral issues and on matters of public policy, they faced obstacles unknown to men. Further, once they began to speak, their words often were not preserved, with the result that many rhetorical acts by women are gone forever; many others can be found only in manuscript collections or rare, out-of-print publications. Even when reprinted, they frequently are treated as historical artifacts from which excerpts can be drawn rather than as artistic works that must be seen whole in order to be understood and appreciated. As a rhetorical critic I want to restore one segment of the history of women, namely the rhetoric of the early woman’s rights movement that emerged in the United States in the 1830s, that became a movement focused primarily on woman suffrage after the Civil War, and whose force dissipated in the mid-1920s. I refer to this as the early movement in contrast to contemporary feminism. This project is a rhetorical study, which means that all of the documents analyzed [. . .] are works through which woman’s rights advocates sought to persuade others of the rightness of *  From Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. Vol. 1. Greenwood Press, 1989. 1-16. © 1989 by K.K. Campbell. Reprinted with permission of the copyright holder. Note: This essay has been condensed. 7

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their cause. In the broadest sense, rhetoric is the study of the means by which symbols can be used to appeal to others, to persuade. The potential for persuasion exists in the shared symbolic and socioeconomic experience of persuaders (rhetors) and audiences; specific rhetorical acts attempt to exploit that shared experience and channel it in certain directions. Rhetoric is one of the oldest disciplines in the Western tradition. From its beginnings in ancient Greece, it has been a practical art, one that assesses a persuader’s efforts in light of the resources available on a specific occasion in relation to a particular audience and in order to achieve a certain kind of end. As a result, rhetorical analysis has focused on invention, the rhetor’s skill in selecting and adapting those resources available in language, in cultural values, and in shared experience in order to influence others. The aim of the rhetorical critic is enlightenment—an understanding of the ways symbols can be used by analyzing the ways they were used in a particular time and place and the ways such usage appealed or might have appealed to other human beings—then or now. Rhetorical critics attempt to function as surrogates for audiences, both of the past and of the present. Based on their general knowledge of rhetorical literature and criticism, and based on familiarity with the rhetoric of a movement and its historical milieu, critics attempt to show how a rhetorical act has the potential to teach, to delight, to move, to flatter, to alienate, or to hearten. The potential to engage another is the aesthetic or symbolic power of a piece of persuasive discourse. Such assessments are related to a work’s actual effects. However, many rhetorical works fail to achieve their ends for reasons that have little to do with their style or content. In a social movement advocating controversial changes, failure to achieve specific goals will be common, no matter how able and creative the advocates, whether male or female. For example, a woman might urge legal changes to give a wife a right to her own earnings, but in a single speech to men opposed to the very idea of a woman speaking, she cannot succeed in practical terms, even though her speech is powerful and noteworthy. If she were extremely skillful, she might increase awareness of the plight of married women and arouse sympathy for them among some members of the audience. As a result, critics must judge whether the choices made by rhetors were skillful responses to the problems they confronted, not whether the changes they urged were enacted. Nevertheless, where evidence of impact exists, it will be noted, although such evidence is not a reliable measure of rhetorical skill, because it, too, can be the product of extrinsic factors. Selecting appropriate terminology to refer to women in the early movement has proved something of a problem, because the meanings of some key terms have changed. I call the activists of the earlier movement feminists only in the sense that they worked to advance the cause of women. To themselves, they were woman’s rights advocates (working for the rights of woman) or suffragists (working for woman suffrage), and for the most part, I shall retain these labels. In the United States, only their opponents called them “suffragettes,” whereas in Great Britain, the radical wing of the movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, adopted this epithet as their own. The term “feminism”

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existed in the mid-nineteenth century, but it meant only “having the qualities of a female.” In the 1890s the term came into use, primarily by anti-suffragists, to refer negatively to woman’s rights activists, that is, those committed to the legal, economic, and social equality of women. After the turn of the century, the term became more acceptable, and mainstream suffragists used the term but redefined it (Shaw 1918, in Linkugel 1960, 2:667-83; Cott 1987, 3-50); early in this century more radical feminists in the National Woman’s Party claimed it as their own. As this study will demonstrate, women in the early movement differed over goals; my use of “feminism” here is inclusive and catholic, referring to all those who worked for the legal, economic, and political advancement of women, beginning in the 1830s. [. . .]

Movement History Woman’s rights agitation was in large measure a byproduct of women’s efforts in other reform movements. Women seeking to end slavery, to attack the evils of alcohol abuse, and to improve the plight of prostitutes found themselves excluded from male reform organizations and attacked for involving themselves in concerns outside the home. A distinctive woman’s rights movement began when women reformers recognized that they had to work for their own rights before they could be effective in other reform efforts. Many early woman’s rights advocates began as abolitionists, but because they were excluded from participation in male anti-slavery societies, they formed female anti-slavery societies and ultimately [. . .] began to press for their own rights in order to be more effective in the abolitionist struggle (Hersh 1978). Both Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton dated the beginnings of the woman’s rights movement from 1840, the year when five female delegates from U.S. anti-slavery societies, one of whom was Coffin Mott, were refused seating at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The outrage they felt at the debate that culminated in the denial of women’s participation in the convention fueled their decision to call a woman’s rights convention, a decision that eventuated in the Seneca Falls, New York, convention of 1848. [. . . The] struggle to abolish slavery was [. . .] closely related to the earliest efforts for woman’s rights, and [. . .] female abolitionists’ speeches show them struggling to find ways to cope with proscriptions against speaking [. . .]. Woman’s rights activism took an organized form at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton made her first speech, and the movement’s manifesto, the “Declaration of Sentiments,” was introduced and ratified. Local, regional, and national woman’s rights conventions were held until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. During the war, women activists bent all their efforts toward supporting the Union cause, primarily through work on the Sanitary Commission, and toward abolishing slavery, primarily through the Woman’s National Loyal League. Because of their important contributions, women expected to be rewarded with suffrage. Instead, they were told that their dreams were to be deferred. Woman suffrage was so controversial that it was feared it would take suffrage for Afro-American males down to defeat. As a result, in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time

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introduced the word “male” into the U.S. Constitution. Bitterness and frustration caused the movement to split into rival organizations in 1869. However, a final effort was made to obtain suffrage through the courts. Based on the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment had defined citizenship, and that citizenship implied suffrage, in 1872 Susan B. Anthony and other women registered and voted, or attempted to do so. In 1875, however, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, making a separate federal amendment necessary. During this period a major impetus toward woman suffrage came from an unexpected source—the temperance movement. This reform effort, like abolitionism, was a major source of woman’s rights advocates. The struggle against the evils of alcohol abuse caught fire in 1874, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded. Per capita consumption of alcohol by Americans in the 1820s is estimated to have been three times that of 1980, and by 1909, Americans spent almost as much on alcohol as they did on all food products and nonalcoholic beverages combined. In the 1820s, hard liquor was inexpensive, cheaper than beer, wine, milk, coffee, or tea; only water was cheaper, and it was often polluted. Consumption of alcoholic beverages had been an integral part of U.S. life since colonial times, and alcoholic beverages were thought to be nutritious and healthful. Such traditions and beliefs, combined with low cost, increased consumption (Rorabaugh 1980; Lender and Martin 1983). In 1870, there were some 100,000 saloons in the country, approximately one for every fifty inhabitants (Giele 1961, 41). Women were vulnerable to the effects of alcohol abuse. Although some women became drunkards, primarily due to the high alcohol content of patent medicines, alcoholism among males was the major problem. Women married to drunkards were at the mercy of their husbands. As late as 1900, in thirty-seven states a woman had no rights to her children, and all her possessions and earnings belonged to her husband (Bordin 1981, 7). Temperance was an acceptable outlet for the reformist energies of women during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike earlier woman’s rights and woman suffrage advocacy, which implied at least a redefinition of woman’s sphere, temperance work could be done by a “true woman.” Because brothels were often attached to saloons, alcohol was perceived as an inducement to immorality as well as a social and economic threat to the home. Women who struggled against its use were affirming their piety, purity, and domesticity. Because the sale and consumption of alcohol was associated with immorality, and because temperance work implied no change in woman’s traditional role, churches that opposed other reforms supported temperance activities. WCTU branches often grew out of existing churchwomen’s organizations. As a result, temperance efforts exacted fewer social costs from women than did work for other woman’s rights. Although the WCTU accepted traditional concepts of womanhood, it came to argue that woman’s distinctive influence should be extended outside the home via the vote. Consequently, woman suffrage became acceptable to more conservative women (and men), who had rejected it before, when presented as a means for woman to protect her domestic sphere from abuses related to alcohol.

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In 1890, the rival suffrage organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Although 1890 was the year Wyoming became the first state to give women the right to vote, in the period around the turn of the century women activists made little progress. Anti-suffrage activity was at its height, and movement leadership was in transition as the initiators died and a younger generation took over. With the rise of the Progressive movement, particularly in the West, the climate for woman’s rights improved. Women such as the Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw traveled throughout the nation speaking in support of woman suffrage. In 1915, the skilled administrator Carrie Chapman Catt assumed leadership of NAWSA, developing a “Winning Plan” to maximize pressure on Congress to pass a suffrage amendment. Finally, Alice Paul and her cohorts in the National Woman’s Party (NWP) paraded, picketed, and demonstrated in order to draw attention to the issue and to keep it at the top of the congressional agenda. These efforts, energized by the pressures of World War I, led to passage of an amendment and its ratification on August 26, 1920. For the first time, all U.S. women were eligible to vote in the 1920 elections. Sadly, that achievement meant less than women activists had hoped. Few women voted, and in a short time it became clear that women did not form a distinct voting bloc or constituency. The limited meaning of woman suffrage was manifest in 1925 when an amendment prohibiting child labor failed to gain ratification, and that event symbolizes the end of the early movement. Many causes contributed to the demise of the movement. In the “Red scare” of the 1920s, women activists were attacked for their support of progressive causes, including the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Activists also hastened their own end by bitterly dividing over the equal rights amendment, introduced in 1923 at the behest of the National Woman’s Party. On the one hand, the NWP took an inflexible and absolute natural rights position, rejecting any special legal consideration for women. In opposition, the League of Women Voters, descendant of NAWSA, and women trade unionists, among others, fought to retain protective legislation, which would have been imperiled by such an amendment. Conflict over similar issues and over the ERA persists among U.S. women, underlining the links between the earlier movement and contemporary feminist concerns.

This Study [. . .] I have analyzed and anthologized discourse that appeared at critical moments in this movement and that represents particular issues or groups within the movement. But, although some of these works have great historical significance, all of them were selected for their rhetorical significance, in order to reveal the variety and creativity of woman’s rights advocacy. In this sense, the works anthologized and analyzed are persuasive masterworks of the early movement. As such, they contributed to the development and survival of that movement, and they represent skillful human artistry in the face of nearly insuperable rhetorical obstacles. [. . .]

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I offer this two-volume study to call into question what has become the canon of public address in the United States, a canon that excludes virtually all works by women (Campbell 1985). It is my hope that the analyses of this volume and the texts in volume II will prompt re-examination of U.S. rhetorical literature and the inclusion of some of these works in courses that survey the history of rhetoric and that explore artistic excellence in speaking. In addition to making texts available and correcting rhetorical history, still another goal of this project is to make it clear that the rhetoric of women must be studied if we are to understand human symbolization in all its variety and to identify touchstones that illustrate the peaks of human symbolic creativity. Rhetorical invention is rarely originality of argument, but rather the selection and adaptation of materials to the occasion, the purpose, and the audience. Early feminist rhetors rose to inventive heights as they sought to overcome the special obstacles they confronted because they were women, and because they were attempting to alter traditional conceptions of gender roles. The relationship between rhetoric and feminism is pertinent to all facets of this study, and the remainder of this chapter explores that special relationship.

Struggling for the Right to Speak Early woman’s rights activists were constrained to be particularly creative because they faced barriers unknown to men. They were a group virtually unique in rhetorical history because a central element in woman’s oppression was the denial of her right to speak (Lipking 1983). Quite simply, in nineteenth-century America, femininity and rhetorical action were seen as mutually exclusive. No “true woman” could be a public persuader. The concept of “true womanhood” (Welter 1976), or the “woman belle ideal” (Scott 1970), defined females as “other,” as suited only for a limited repertoire of gender-based roles, and as the repository of cherished but commercially useless spiritual and human values. These attitudes arose in response to the urbanization and industrialization of the nineteenth century, which separated home and work. As the cult of domesticity was codified in the United States in the early part of the century, two distinct subcultures emerged. Man’s place was the world outside the home, the public realm of politics and finance; man’s nature was thought to be lustful, amoral, competitive, and ambitious. Woman’s place was home, a haven from amoral capitalism and dirty politics, where “the heart was,” where the spiritual and emotional needs of husband and children were met by a “ministering angel.” Woman’s nature was pure, pious, domestic, and submissive (Welter 1976, 21). She was to remain entirely in the private sphere of the home, eschewing any appearance of individuality, leadership, or aggressiveness. Her purity depended on her domesticity; the woman who was compelled by economic need or slavery to work away from her own hearth was tainted. However, woman’s alleged moral superiority (Cott 1977, 120, 146–48, 170) generated a conflict out of which the woman’s rights movement emerged.

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As defined, woman’s role contained a contradiction that became apparent as women responded to what they saw as great moral wrongs. Despite their allegedly greater moral sensitivity, women were censured for their efforts against the evils of prostitution and slavery (Berg 1978; Hersh 1978). Women who formed moral reform and abolitionist societies, and who made speeches, held conventions, and published newspapers, entered the public sphere and thereby lost their claims to purity and piety. What became the woman’s rights/woman suffrage movement arose out of this contradiction. Women encountered profound resistance to their efforts for moral reform because rhetorical action of any sort was, as defined by gender roles, a masculine activity. Speakers had to be expert and authoritative; women were submissive. Speakers ventured into the public sphere (the courtroom, the legislature, the pulpit, or the lecture platform); woman’s domain was domestic. Speakers called attention to themselves, took stands aggressively, initiated action, and affirmed their expertise; “true women” were retiring and modest, their influence was indirect, and they had no expertise or authority. Because they were thought naturally incapable of reasoning, women were considered unsuited to engage in or to guide public deliberation. The public realm was competitive, driven by ambition; it was a sphere in which the desire to succeed could only be inhibited by humane concerns and spiritual values. Similarly, speaking was competitive, energized by the desire to win a case or persuade others to one’s point of view. These were viewed as exclusively masculine traits related to man’s allegedly lustful, ruthless, competitive, amoral, and ambitious nature. Activities requiring such qualities were thought to “unsex” women. The extent of the problem is illustrated by the story of educational pioneer Emma Hart Willard (Scott 1978; Willard 1819). Encouraged by Governor De Witt Clinton in 1819 to present “A Plan for Improving Female Education” to the New York Legislature, Hart Willard presented her proposal to legislators, but carefully remained seated to avoid any hint that she was delivering a speech. In her biography of this influential educator, Alma Lutz writes: “Although this [oral presentation] was very unconventional for a woman, she did not hesitate, so great was her enthusiasm for her Plan. . . . She impressed them not as the much-scorned female politician, but as a noble woman inspired by a great ideal” (Lutz 1931, 28). In other words, a woman who spoke displayed her “masculinity”; that is, she demonstrated that she possessed qualities traditionally ascribed only to males. When a woman spoke, she enacted her equality, that is, she herself was proof that she was as able as her male counterparts to function in the public sphere. That a woman speaking is such proof explains the outraged reactions to women addressing “promiscuous” audiences of men and women, sharing a platform with male speakers, debating, and preaching, even on such clearly moral issues as slavery, prostitution, and alcohol abuse. The hostility women experienced in reform efforts led them to found female reform organizations and to initiate a movement for woman’s rights, at base a movement claiming woman’s right to engage in public moral action.

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Biology, or rather ignorance of biology, was used to buttress arguments limiting woman’s role and excluding her from higher education and political activity. On average, women were smaller than men. As a result, it was assumed that they had smaller brains, and that therefore their brains presumably were too small to sustain the rational deliberation required in politics and business. Moreover, their smaller, and hence more delicate and excitable, nerves could not withstand the pressures of public debate or the marketplace. Menarche, the onset of menstruation, was viewed as a physical cataclysm that rendered women unfit for normal activity. For example, Harvard medical professor Dr. Edward Clarke (1873) argued against higher education for women on the grounds that the blood needed to sustain development of the ovaries and womb would be diverted to the brain, which he believed was a major cause of serious illness. Because of the conceptions of their nature and the taboos that were part of the cult of domesticity, women who spoke publicly confronted extraordinary obstacles. For example, abolitionist Abby Kelley [Foster] faced such continuous and merciless persecution that she earned the title “our Joan of Arc” among her co-workers. Lucy Stone later described Kelley’s career as “long, unrelieved, moral torture.” . . . Because she often traveled alone, or (worse) with male agents, she was vilified as a “bad” woman. . . . She was further reviled when she continued to appear in public while pregnant. (Hersh 1978, 42–43) On the one hand, a woman had to meet all the usual requirements of speakers, demonstrating expertise, authority, and rationality in order to show her competence and make herself credible to audiences. However, if that was all she did, she was likely to be judged masculine, unwomanly, aggressive, and cold. As a result, women speakers sometimes searched for ways to legitimate such “unwomanly” behavior and for ways to incorporate evidence of femininity into ordinary rhetorical action. In other instances, their own defiance and outrage overwhelmed their efforts at adaptation. In still other cases, rhetors found womanly ways of persuasion that were self-contradictory, and hence ultimately damaging to their cause. Yet on occasion, extraordinarily skilled women persuaders found symbolic means of responding to these contradictory expectations, and produced masterpieces. The problems women faced as speakers are a recurring theme of this book, a theme that remains relevant for contemporary women who still must struggle to cope with these contradictory expectations, albeit in somewhat modified forms.

Feminine Style Analysis of persuasion by women indicates that many strategically adopted what might be called a feminine style to cope with the conflicting demands of the podium. That style emerged out of their experiences as women and was adapted to the attitudes and experiences

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of female audiences. However, it was not, and is not today, a style exclusive to women, either as speakers or as audiences. Deprived of formal education and confined to the home, a woman learned the crafts of housewifery and motherhood—cooking, cleaning, canning, sewing, childbearing, childrearing, and the like—from other women through a supervised internship combining expert advice with trial and error. These processes are common to all craft-learning, including carpentry, horse training and plumbing, but craft-related skills cannot be expressed in universal laws; one must learn to apply them contingently, depending upon conditions and materials (McMillan 1982). Learning to adapt to variation is essential to mastery of a craft and the highly skilled craftsperson is alert to variation, aware of a host of alternatives, and able to read cues related to specific conditions. If the process of craft-learning is applied to the rhetorical situation (and rhetoric itself is a craft), it produces discourse with certain characteristics. Such discourse will be personal in tone (crafts are learned face-to-face from a mentor), relying heavily on personal experience, anecdotes, and other examples. It will tend to be structured inductively (crafts are learned bit by bit, instance by instance, from which generalizations emerge). It will invite audience participation, including the process of testing generalizations or principles against the experiences of the audience. Audience members will be addressed as peers, with recognition of authority based on experience (more skilled craftspeople are more experienced), and efforts will be made to create identification with the experiences of the audience and those described by the speaker. The goal of such rhetoric is empowerment, a term contemporary feminists have used to refer to the process of persuading listeners that they can act effectively in the world, that they can be “agents of change” (Bitzer 1968). Given the traditional concept of womanhood, which emphasized passivity, submissiveness, and patience, persuading women that they could act was a precondition for other kinds of persuasive efforts.3 Many of the qualities of the style just described are also part of the small-group phenomenon known as consciousness-raising, associated with contemporary feminism as well as other social movements, which is a communicative style that can be incorporated into speaking or prose writing (Farrell 1979). Because oppressed groups tend to develop passive personality traits, consciousness-raising is an attractive communication style to people working for social change. Whether in a small group, from the podium, or on the page, consciousness-raising invites audience members to participate in the persuasive process—it empowers them. It is a highly appealing form of discourse, particularly if identification between advocate and audience is facilitated by common values and shared experience. Based on this description, it should be obvious that while there is nothing inevitably or necessarily female about this rhetorical style, it has been congenial to women because of the acculturation of female speakers and audiences.4 It can be called “feminine” in this context because it reflects the learning experiences of women who were speakers and audiences in this

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period, and because, as a less authoritative and aggressive style, it was a less confrontational violation of taboos against public speaking by women. Because the very act of speaking publicly violated concepts of womanhood, the rhetoric of early woman’s rights advocates always had at least two dimensions—presentation of their grievances and justification of woman’s right to function in the public sphere, to speak with authority in any area of human life. From the beginnings of the movement, women justified their demands based on what Aileen Kraditor (1965, 43–74) calls the argument from justice and the argument from expediency. The argument from justice was drawn from natural rights philosophy and affirmed the personhood of women and their right to all the civil and political privileges of citizenship.5 It was a demand for rights affirming that, at least in law and politics, there were no differences between the sexes. By contrast, the argument from expediency presumed that women and men were fundamentally different, so that it would be beneficial, that is, desirable and prudent, to give women rights because of the effect on society. For example, it was argued that if women were educated, they would be better able to fulfill their obligations as wives and mothers; if married women had the right to sue, to enter into contracts, to control their earnings, and to own property, they would be able to protect themselves and their children against profligate husbands, or to fulfill their duties to their children in widowhood. If women were allowed to vote, they would bring to bear on politics their purity, piety, and domestic concerns, and thus purify government and make it more responsive to the needs of the home. Most woman’s rights advocates mixed these arguments, often in a somewhat self-contradictory way. In the earliest period, natural rights arguments predominated, but most advocates still assumed that women were naturally better suited to motherhood and that the aim of a woman’s life was wifehood and motherhood. However, even in that period, some argued chiefly from the benefits that increased opportunities or rights would produce for woman’s traditional qualities and duties—education would make women more virtuous, increased economic rights for married women would produce better mothers. In the 1870s, arguments from expediency predominated, with emphasis on the societal benefits of the woman’s ballot, particularly in fighting the evils of alcohol. Yet as time passed, those who argued from benefits frequently incorporated arguments from natural rights into their rhetoric, and in this later period there were speakers, such as Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who argued almost exclusively from the natural rights position (Linkugel 1963). Natural rights arguments were perceived as less feminine. “True women” were unselfish— their efforts were for others, particularly their husbands and children. Women who claimed their rights were seen as selfish, as wanting to abandon their traditional womanly roles to enter the sphere of men, and this made such arguments and advocates particularly unappealing to many women (Camhi 1973, 113). Arguments from benefits were “feminine” in part because they presupposed the qualities of “true womanhood” and in part because they appeared unselfish. Women who argued from expediency did not seek rights for their own sake but only

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for the good that could be done with them for others. This argument achieved its fullest development in the WCTU’s support for woman suffrage as a means to protect the home against the abuses of alcohol. The obstacles early women persuaders faced persist, although in altered forms, in the present. As a result, my goals in this project are simultaneously scholarly and feminist. As a scholar, I wish to rescue the works of great women speakers from the oblivion to which most have been consigned; above all, I wish to show that the artistry of this rhetoric generated enduring monuments to human thought and creativity. Because early feminists faced obstacles whose residues still haunt contemporary women, their rhetorical efforts are a rich source of illumination. As a feminist, I believe that [these works . . .] represent a particularly abundant mother lode of rhetorical creativity from which contemporary women speakers and activists may draw examples and inspiration.

Notes Translations of this line vary, but all render mythos similarly: “Talking must be men’s concern” (1946, 34); “Speech shall be for men” (1935, 11); “Speech shall be the men’s care” (1932, 11); and “Speech is man’s matter” (1897 rpt.1967, 20). [. . .] 3 Passivity, modesty, patience, and submissiveness were integral parts of “true womanhood,” concepts reinforced by nineteenth-century women’s total lack of economic, social, legal, or political power. The impact of such attitudes is apparent in more contemporary studies of women’s self-concepts (McClelland 1964). Freeman (1971) cites a study done in the 1950s in which women were asked to pick adjectives to describe themselves: they selected “uncertain, anxious, nervous, hasty, careless, fearful, childish, helpless, sorry, timid, clumsy, stupid, silly, domestic, understanding, tender, sympathetic, pure, generous, affectionate, loving, moral, kind, grateful, and patient” (165). Many of these qualities are at odds with a sense of being capable of effective action. 4 Unlike Farrell (1979, 917n), I do not presume that “feminine” style is rooted in biological differences. 5 Natural rights philosophy grew out of ancient and medieval doctrines of natural law that were modified by an emphasis on the individual in the seventeenth century. Fundamentally, natural rights philosophy took the view that individuals had rights no government could abridge or deny. As a result, the function of government was to protect such rights, requiring plebiscites to determine the consent of the governed and revolution if the government failed in its proper functions. [. . .] 1

Works Cited Aristotle’s Politics. 1923. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berg, Barbara. 1978. The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism, The Woman and the City, 1800–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Bitzer, Lloyd. 1968. The Rhetorical Situation. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1: 1–14. Bordin, Ruth. 1981. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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Camhi, Jane Jerome. 1973. Women Against Women: Antisuffragism, 1880–1920. Ph.D. diss., Tufts University. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs.1985. The Communication Classroom: A Chilly Climate for Women? ACA Bulletin no. 51: 68–72. Clarke, Edward H. 1873. Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for the Girls. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co. Cott, Nancy. 1977. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cott, Nancy. 1987. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Farrell, Thomas J. 1979. The Female and Male Modes of Rhetoric. College English 40: 909–21. Freeman, Jo. 1971. The Building of the Gilded Cage. The Second Wave: A Magazine of the New Feminism 1: 7–9, 33–39. Freeman, Jo. 1975. The Politics of Women’s Liberation. New York: Longman. Giele, Janet Zollinger. 1961. Social Change in the Feminine Role: A Comparison of Woman’s Suffrage and Woman’s Temperance, 1870–1920. Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College. Hersh, Blanche Glassman. 1978. The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Homer. Odyssey. 1980. Trans. Walter Shewring. New York: Oxford University Press. Kraditor, Aileen. 1965; rpt.1981. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 1890–1920. New York: W.W. Norton. Lender, Mark Edward and James Kirby. 1983. Drinking in America. New York: Free Press. Linkugel, Wilmer A. 1960. The speeches of Anna Howard Shaw, Collected and Edited with Introduction and Notes. 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin. Linkugel, Wilmer A. 1963. The Woman Suffrage Argument of Anna Howard Shaw. Quarterly Journal of Speech 49: 165–74. Lipking, Lawrence. 1983. Aristotle’s Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment. Critical Inquiry 10: 61–81. Lutz, Alma. 1931. Emma Willard: Pioneer Educator of American Women. Boston: Beacon Press. McClelland, David C. 1964. Wanted: A New Self-Image for Women. In The Woman in America ed. Robert Jay Lifton, 173–92. Boston: Beacon Press. McMillan, Carol. 1982. Woman, Reason and Nature: Some Philosophical Problems with Feminism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorabaugh, W. J. 1980. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. Scott, Ann Firor. 1970. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, Ann Firor. 1978. What, Then, is the American: This New Woman? Journal of American History 65: 679–703. Welter, Barbara. 1976. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press. Willard, Emma. 1819, rpt. 1893. A Plan for Improving Female Education. In Woman and Higher Education ed. Anna Callender Brackett, 1–46. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric* Susan C. Jarratt The past is made of meanings, actions, and events far more eclectic and various than any hegemonic culture would be eager to tolerate were the past to become present, or, and this is the real worry, were it to become actively a source of inspiration for the future. Thus for its own protection, such a culture is impelled to create out of its variegated history a much narrower but also differently varying “significant” past, by selecting only certain meanings and events for emphasis and celebration; isolating others for the purposes of revilement and stigmatization; neglecting or excluding others; and diluting or converting the rest into non–threatening forms. —Joan Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination

If, in one respect, the function of history expresses the position of one generation in relation to preceding ones by stating, “I can’t be that,” it always affects the statement of a no less dangerous complement, forcing a society to confess, “I am other than what I would wish to be, and I am determined by what I deny.” It attests to an autonomy and a dependence whose proportions vary according to the social settings and political situations in which they are elaborated. —Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History Long ago, this issue of PRE/TEXT was proposed to engage a question about ethics and historiography. At that time, I was troubled by the prospect that the revitalized project of historicizing rhetoric might take shape as a scientific or positivistic “research” practice. Some of us were arguing over whether an historical account should strive for objectivity, could discover the *  Pre/Text 11 (1990): 189-209. Note: This essay has been condensed. 19

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unknown and make it known; or, on the other hand, whether history-writing had more to do with making than finding, with selection and narration than report.1 De Certeau voices this concern as an absence of theory: “in history as in other fields, one day or another a practice without theory will necessarily drift into the dogmatism of ‘eternal values’ or into an apology for a ‘timelessness’ ” (57). I believe those of us who work in the history of rhetoric—a growing number—have come some distance in the last few years from a relatively unreflective historical practice to a reflective one. The conference on Writing Histories of Rhetoric held in October 1989 in Arlington, Texas (proceedings of which will be published at some point) and Stephen North’s description of historical practice as a series of confrontations between alternative narratives (78–90) are signs of wider and wider agreement that history-writing is an interpretive act and has to do with the construction of a narrative by a writer located in time, place, institution. My concern now is quite different. I am writing here “as a woman,” describing historywriting as a social practice that contributes to a radical critique of dominant discourses on gender.2 The question here is how feminists writing histories of rhetoric can take up the challenge posed in the two epigraphs: to create histories aimed at a more just future. Certainly a gendering of history requires the kind of historiographical revision currently under way in rhetoric; turning away from an “Edmund Hillary” approach to history—one encounters it because it’s there—a feminist historiography points the way to a different set of subjects for historical inquiry and questions the narrative logic operative in traditional histories. But acknowledging that histories are socially constructed narratives is no guarantee of a particular ideological valence or of an ethical practice. It only prevents a certain kind of scientistic blindness to the ways choices get made within institutions. How can feminist practices in the history of rhetoric become an active source of inspiration for the future, as Cocks proposes? How can they best elicit the recognition of which de Certeau writes: “ ‘I am other than what I would wish to be’ ”? The mode of discourse I use for exploring these questions might be termed “normative ethics”: i.e., I am proposing an ethical way of acting, to be argued about, refuted, or taken up by other members of my social group. I am not engaging in a metaethical discourse, establishing a definition of “ethics” or carrying out a philosophical exploration about ethics as a category of thought. Ethical decisions are understood in anthropological or sociological terms to express communal values—what the sophists called nomoi—always susceptible to reformulation. Such reformulation is central to feminism, a transformative social practice contested from outside and from within. Those internal contestations, so consuming at this historical moment, will later become the focus of this discussion. Having some time in the past proposed a practice of history-writing based on the rhetoric of the first sophists, I have enjoyed very much hearing ideas from colleagues about how that work connects with other historiography, both feminist and other.3 I found in the two works cited above, as well as in my readings of feminist utopian novels, a way of seeing history that looks backward and forward. Joan Cocks speaks of a forward-looking history-writing and de-

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scribes the way hegemonic histories work ideologically to narrow and control historical understanding.4 De Certeau outlines the simultaneous working of determination and agency; I like the element of danger in his account. Histories are powerful; much is at stake in their writing, and in writing about their writing. The point of a feminist excursion into ethics and historiography will be to speculate about how current differences within feminist theory might direct heterogeneous practices of history-writing in rhetoric toward the aims suggested by the opening epigraphs. The inquiry begins with some reflections on two kinds of historical work: histories about women who spoke and wrote in the past and histories that concern themselves not solely or even at all with women but with the category of gender.

Feminist Histories of Rhetoric: Women’s History/Gendered Historiography Though Elizabeth Flynn is right in pointing out that feminism and composition/rhetoric have been slow to align themselves within English departments, feminist work in the history of rhetoric has gained an exciting momentum in the few years since it first appeared. In two of the last three College Composition and Communication Conference conventions, seven out of 36 history panels were devoted to women in the history of rhetoric. In 1988, three and one– third out of 20 panels on history of rhetoric/history of writing instruction concerned women; 6 in 1989, there were four women’s panels out of 16 history sessions. [. . .] As I began listening to conference presentations about women in rhetoric, I listened both with excitement and enthusiasm but also with sense of hesitation. Would feminist work in the history of rhetoric be limited to women’s history? Feminist historians like Joan Scott and Joan Kelly, as well as women working on curriculum transformation, are wary of developing a separate women’s canon, or of simply adding a few titles to a list constructed within a masculinist system of knowledge and value. At the Writing Histories of Rhetoric conference (October 1989), I used Joan Scott’s key article on gender in history to argue that in rhetoric as well as in other disciplines we needed not only women’s history but gendered readings of male-authored texts. Gendered analysis, unlike “women’s history,” applies feminist perspectives in periods of history when women’s issues or gender had not been taken up in texts authored by women. I’d like to present that case as I made it then and afterwards offer a critique of it.

The Case for Gendered Histories of Rhetoric over “Women’s History” Joan Wallach Scott’s essay, “Gender as a Useful Category for Analysis in History,” first appeared in American Historical Review (December 1986) and has since been reprinted in Gender and the Politics of History. I draw on Scott’s essay as a way marking a point in the development of feminist histories of rhetoric paralleling a development in feminist literary studies and other feminist histories. In rhetoric, we are recapitulating the movement from a discovery of women’s history—i.e., women in history—to a diversification of projects focused not only

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on the presence of biological women but on gender as a discursive and social category. In numerous commentaries on the recent history of American and French feminisms, a similar taxonomy has been employed, contrasting an empirically oriented American practice with a theoretically self-conscious French tradition. Toril Moi’s controversial Sexual/Textual Politics, for example, diminishes the achievements of the first American feminist literary critics, because of their privileging of unmediated women’s experience, in favor of French feminism’s engagement with the ways discourse operates to shape understandings of experience, self, and history. Among efforts to negotiate this supposed difference are works like Betsy Draine’s review article, “Refusing the Wisdom of Solomon,” which evaluates work by American feminists seeking a “cautious engagement” with European critical issues (148–49). Because feminist work in rhetoric has come rather lately into the conversation, we might be able to use these commentaries to avoid some of the conflicts of the American/French division. Rather than proceeding solely under the banner of “women’s history,” I suggest a shift in emphasis, or an expansion of the feminist project in rhetoric, to include gendered analysis as well. We should learn from feminist historians in literary studies that the relations of feminist history to “history” should not be only additive. Writing women into history “implies not only a new history of women, but also a new history” (Scott 82). Scott points out the need for theoretical synthesis of descriptive case studies. Without such theorizing, marginalization seems almost inevitable: history of rhetoric here, women’s history of rhetoric over there. In Joan Kelly’s terms, “compensatory history” is not enough (2). Gender as a category—i.e., as constitutive of social relations and as a way of signifying power—allows for more than addition: it shakes up dominant disciplinary concepts. Gender is relational: a history conceived in terms of gender as an analytic differs from “women’s history” in that it investigates the ways social categories are constituted around or in the absence of each other. With Scott, I feel we should be asking not only “Who are the neglected women rhetoricians?” but also “How does gender give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge?” (83). A feminist history sees woman’s place in human social life not only as a product of things she does but in terms of the meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interaction (Scott 91). Thus, even in the work of men within a patriarchal tradition, the category of gender is operative because of the meanings ascribed to all by gender differences. Shakespearean scholar Phyllis Rackin imagines the operation of gender visually: In androcentric culture, the female principle is negative, like the blank space that defines a positive pictorial image or like the concept of feminine gender that allows the male to define itself as masculine; it is also supplementary, like the artistic imitation that represents natural life. (34) Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, literary critics like Nancy Armstrong and Susan Morgan chart the gendering of a literary age or genre across the lines of biological sex of authors and characters. Morgan argues for the feminization of heroic virtue in some examples

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of nineteenth-century fiction, culminating her study with a vision of Henry James’s character Lambert Strether as the embodiment of this new “feminine” heroism. Historians of rhetoric might likewise investigate the relationships between gender and genre in particular historical periods. Is rhetoric a feminine supplement to philosophy in some ages and a masculine master discipline in others? Have certain figures (male or female) feminized rhetoric in their times? These are broadly stated questions awaiting more refined answers available through the practice of a gendered historiography. In supporting a feminist history built on gender as a category my intention is not to correct women’s history of rhetoric but rather to connect with it. Along with Mary Jacobus (and against a post-feminist position), I would argue for the preservation of gender-specific terms to describe historical texts. Jacobus argues, we need the term “women’s writing” if only to remind us of the social conditions under which women wrote and still write—to remind us that the conditions of their (re)production are the economic and educational disadvantages, the sexual and material organizations of society, which, rather than biology, form the crucial determinants of women’s writing. (Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism quoted in Draine 63) Though the phrase “women’s writing” calls up the specter of biological essentialism for historians committed to poststructuralist theories of textuality, feminists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have managed to position their concern for the lives and suffering of “real women” within the terms of poststructuralism (see “Displacement”). Gender as the constitution of social relations locates dominant forms of discourse—for rhetoric, politics, law, and performance—within the fuller context of what they excluded, thus providing a ground for examining discursive energies deflected into the drawing room, the nursery, the personal letter, the “literary” text. 

I am still convinced of the importance of Scott’s historiography and find in the 1990 4Cs program confirmation that feminist historical work in composition and rhetoric has moved in the direction she indicates. Panels were distributed between women’s history and gender issues, including some feminist analysis of male-authored texts in rhetoric. But I now have some reservations about sharply dividing the two practices. Any division risks separation and hierarchization—a sort of ranking like that created by the typologies of American feminism of the first two decades on which I was drawing. While works like Alison Jagger’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Linda Alcoff’s “Identity Crisis in Feminism,” and Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Woman respond to an urgent need to keep a running account of the rapid changes and proliferating arguments in feminist theory, like all typologies they have had undesirable effects. The categories offered in those accounts and elsewhere narrate an

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early feminism called cultural/radical, acknowledge a middle-stage liberal feminism seeking equal rights, and culminate in poststructural feminism, which seems to out-shine its dowdy sisters in sophistication and analytic power. Though my description is over-simplified, and none of the authors mentioned above advocates simply a renunciation of earlier feminisms in favor of poststructuralism, the narrative power of these stages creates such an effect. Despite their differences, all these pieces and many more do taxonomize feminisms. With some distance from that original talk, I have come to see that dividing histories of rhetoric carries the same risks as categorizing feminisms. In one sense, this sequence simply reports how feminist historiography has developed in the field and for individual scholars: first comes a question about women, then a perspective on gender itself as a determining factor in all historical accounts. But emphasizing the theoretical differences between these two kinds of feminist historiography can lead to the binarism that always puts one above another. Though deconstruction might be called in here as a therapeutic reading practice, a masculinist deconstruction (as many feminists have argued) creates particular problems for the feminist reader. There is, then, a need for ways to articulate multiple feminist historical practices without taxonomizing. The issue here concerns women’s identification as women with each other and with a reconstructed history without the construction of a “woman’s voice” in history out of nostalgia for lost origins. How to do a history informed by poststructural analysis of the way difference constructs language—i.e., a gendered analysis—but responsive to women’s desire to “find” themselves in history? My current thinking on the problem takes in two issues—a politics of location and the question of representation—which I will pursue in the rest of this essay, ending with some notes on teaching history.

Location as an Ethical Orientation for Feminist Historiography When “gender” totally eclipses “women” as the focus for feminist research, there is a sense of loss—loss of a common place. But searching for “identity” raises the specter of essentialism. I’ve found that the theoretical discourses formulating this association in terms of space, place, or location cross the lines of damaging taxonomies without erasing differences. The themes of location have been important from the beginning of second wave feminism, as women have described their relation to patriarchy in terms of location. They found themselves positioned at the margins, “elsewhere,” in the “space off” the centers of power (de Lauretis). While for some feminists, moving into the center has been an important agenda, others seek to explore the implications of being located at the margins. Adrienne Rich’s “Notes toward a Politics of Location” speaks eloquently of the “need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create” (212). For Rich, this sense of location is a way of taking up “the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction”: an old, familiar difference between rhetoric and the philosophy that tries to deny not only place, but time, and specific embodiment. Location means starting with the material, but it never stays simply or unreflectively in a single experience or history.

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In this long passage, Rich captures in a striking but sympathetic way my hesitation about feminist historiography settling simply into “women’s history”: I’ve been thinking a lot about the obsession with origins. It seems a way of stopping time in its tracks. The sacred Neolithic triangles, the Minoan vases with staring eyes and breasts, the female figurines of Anatolia—weren’t they concrete evidence of a kind, like Sappho’s fragments, for earlier womanaffirming cultures, cultures that enjoyed centuries of peace? But haven’t they also served as arresting images, which kept us attached and immobilized? Human activity didn’t stop in Crete or Çatal Hüyük. We can’t build a society free from domination by fixing our sights backward on some long-ago tribe or city. The continuing spiritual power of an image lives in the interplay between what it reminds us of—what it brings to mind—and our own continuing actions in the present. When the labrys becomes a badge for a cult of Minoan goddesses, when the wearer of the labrys has ceased to ask herself what she is doing on this earth, where her love of women is taking her, the labrys, too, becomes abstraction—lifted away from the heat and friction of human activity. The Jewish star on my neck must serve me both for reminder and as a goad to continuing and changing responsibility. (227, emphasis in original) The way labrys becomes abstraction is the way “woman” can become an abstraction. We— i.e., those who wish to write feminist histories of rhetoric—can avoid that, I believe, by moving in two directions: moving earthward in the gesture of locating oneself as a person writing in a particular context and moving outward from women’s experience to an analysis of how women are represented within a gendered system—never upward in a transcendence, attempting to supersede, for where’s the history in that? This locatedness might be called Antaean, from the Greek wrestler Antaeus whose strength came from contact with the earth. Only this coinage would recast the “he” who struggles alone into the “s/he” who thinks, talks, and acts with others. The aim of the first move is to correct the illusion of universality created by occupying the space at the center of power. Of course women have not historically occupied that space. But as academics, we are trained to masquerade as those who have, a cross-dressing more difficult 12 and complex when color, class, and sexual orientation increase the distance from the model. From my safe, now tenured position in a well-funded state university filled with well-fed, white, middle-class students, it is easy to sink back into the white privilege (McIntosh) and arrogant perception (Lugones) characteristic of many North Americans, in the academy and out, feminist or not. By naming these locations, I engage an always partial effort to discover where they blind me. They may help explain the appeal of the roots of Western civilization in classical antiquity, while reminding me to ask questions about color and class that often seem

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to interrupt a line of thinking or research. Stated simply, feminists have helped us to see how all discourses are located, but that some fail to locate themselves, assuming an omnipresence. In the writing of history, this failure of location expresses itself through the oracular voice proclaiming the (single) truth of the past. For women’s history, that voice can become the mother’s voice of truth and right. Embodying and specifying voices requires locating them in time and space. I see connections between Rich’s politics of location and two more recent feminist uses of the metaphor of space. Alcoff’s essay offers “positionality” as a way to describe a desirable relationship among contradictory theoretical foundations in contemporary feminisms. Positionality offers subjectivity through historicized experience (431). Describing the subject as a complex of concrete habits, practices, and discourses, Alcoff then names gender as a position from which to act politically. She is not essentializing women in this move and rejects a universal, ahistorical definition of gender. Gendered identities are constructed by a position in an existing cultural and social network: [A woman] herself is part of the historicized, fluid movement, and she therefore actively contributes to the context within which her position can be delineated . . . the identity of a woman is the product of her own interpretation and reconstruction of her history, as mediated through the cultural discursive context to which she has access. (434) Alcoff argues for a concept of positionality as “a place from which values are interpreted and constructed rather than as a locus of an already determined set of values” (434). Women’s lived experience becomes part (not all) of their equipment for theorizing and historicizing. Louise Wetherbee Phelps asserts this in her Preface to Composition as a Human Science when she calls theory autobiography. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers a characteristically elegant and cautiously circumscribed version of herself as critic in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Questioning the role of the Western intellectual in contemporary relations of power, she uses situations of British colonialism in India to demonstrate the problem of representation from within oppressive economies (namely, world-wide capitalism) and from dominant ideology: First, a few disclaimers: In the United States the third-worldism currently afloat in humanistic disciplines is often openly ethnic. I was born in India and received my primary, secondary, and university education there, including two years of graduate work. My Indian example could thus be seen as a nostalgic investigation of the lost roots of my own identity. Yet even as I know that one cannot freely enter the thickets of “motivations,” I would maintain that my chief project is to point out the positivitist-idealist variety of such nostalgia. I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth and education has provided me with a sense of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent

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languages that are useful tools for a bricoleur especially when armed with the Marxist skepticism of concrete experience as the final arbiter and a critique of disciplinary formations. Yet the Indian case cannot be taken as representative of all countries, nations, cultures, and the like that may be invoked as the Other of Europe as Self. (“Subaltern” 281, emphasis in original) I quote this long passage because in it Spivak locates herself so carefully without engaging a discourse of “identity” or privileging personal experience outside of discursive analysis. Spivak’s evocation of Marxism provides a transition to another form of feminism using the metaphor of place: the socialist feminist conception of standpoint. Standpoint theory finds its roots in Marx’s recognition that different practices create different ways of knowing. Georg Lukacs, in his elaboration of Marx’s theory, locates epistemological standpoints in group experience, groups being defined as economic classes within capitalism. Following this line of argument, Nancy Hartsock has identified general characteristics of the standpoint of the proletariat and then applied these to women’s labor, claiming that women have an understanding of oppression “from beneath” the dominant ideology, enabling them to see the “perverse inversions” practiced by patriarchal, capitalist institutions (Hartsock 284–85). Because of the special forms of exploitation and oppression experienced by women under capitalism today, their standpoint, Hartsock argues, “carries a historically liberatory role” (285). According to Alison Jaggar, standpoint is “a position in society from which certain features of reality come into prominence and from which others are obscured” (382). Feminist standpoint theory draws on the variety of women’s experiences and considers the “epistemological consequences” of differences (Jaggar 386); experience and difference are key terms in standpoint theory, which identifies “not simply an interested position (interpreted as bias) but interested in the sense of being engaged” (Hartsock 285). No one can “see” all perspectives, but by foregrounding specific epistemological and political claims, a standpoint can offer “engaged vision” (Hartsock 285). This spatial politics creates an ethics of experience but avoids a naive privileging of any single person’s “experience” thought to be transmitted unmediated through transparent language. Standpoint theory provides a more specific emphasis on economy and ideology than positionality, but as it has been theorized thus far, it has some drawbacks. Hartsock has been criticized for identifying reproduction as the defining feature of women’s experience and for ignoring the complex ways women are positioned in power relations other than gender. I would reject Hartsock’s view that women’s experiences can be brought together under the wing of “reproduction” but do support a more basic Marxist position that sees “conceptual frameworks as shaped and limited by their social origins” (Jaggar 369–70). On the second objection, Jane Flax has noted that standpoint theory disturbingly assumes “that women, unlike men, can be free from participating in relations of domination” such as those rooted in race and class differences (642). While I agree that Hartsock’s concept of “perversion” effects only a binary reversal of power relations, I wouldn’t go so far as Flax in rejecting totally the epistemological claims of standpoint theory. The approach seems to me to offer new possibili-

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ties for thought and action to all marginalized groups. Fredric Jameson here describes such an extension: Standpoint analysis specifically demands a differentiation between the various negative experiences of constraint, between the exploitation suffered by workers and the oppression suffered by women and continuing on through the distinct structural forms of exclusion and alienation characteristic of other kinds of group experience. (70) Though I would not argue for the necessary epistemological priority of women’s experience in particular (or that every woman, by virtue of biology, will necessarily see the world in the same way), I endorse feminist standpoint theory because it creates a “capacity for . . . seeing features and dimensions of the world and of history masked to other social actors” (Jameson 70). Feminist standpoint theory does not produce the Truth, but rather makes possible a “principled relativism,” under which epistemological claims may by “inspected (and respected) for their . . . respective ‘moments of truth’ ” (Jameson 65). When the “subject” is understood as the locus of a multiplicity of subject positions on axes of class, race, gender, and so on, then standpoint theory can be used to call into play multiple, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory epistemological perspectives. Here the connection with classical rhetoric, specifically sophistic rhetoric, suggests itself. The sophists trained their students to work with dissoi logoi, contradictory propositions available for every position; this heuristic opens up ideological tension and lays out courses of possible action. Standpoint theory cannot be a sufficient means of accounting for the calls one heeds amid the cacophony of voices in late capitalism; it doesn’t, for example, speak of the unconscious. Jaggar acknowledges that Although a standpoint makes certain features of reality visible, however, it does not necessarily reveal them clearly nor in their essential interconnections with each other . . . [T]he standpoint of women is not expressed directly in women’s naive and unreflective world view. (382, 371) Like Jaggar, I see the relevance of discourses such as psychoanalysis and sociology of science in dialogue with standpoint theory for the project of developing more complex conceptualizations of reality. Despite reservations about some forms of standpoint theory, I find that collectively these ideas of place, position, and standpoint in contemporary feminisms offer to feminist historiography a way of maintaining connection with a collective identity and purpose without falling into abstraction.

Historical Practice: From Identification to Representation The most obvious extension these processes of positioning for feminist history is that women writing history in a male-centered tradition and academy seek female sources. In locating

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themselves as female within a male tradition, they look for the same in history. But given the now-common understanding of history as constructed, the problem of representation arises. To reformulate the original dilemma, how does one acknowledge that women seek an identity in history—i.e., the same—while also arguing for history as a process of constructing the “other”? Or again, how does a located feminist historian create the “other” of history, when that “other” is a woman? The terms of “otherness” I use here come both from earlier work of my own (Introduction and chapter 3 in Rereading the Sophists) and from the work of Michel de Certeau, who defines history-writing as “intelligibility established through a relation with the other” (3). For Certeau, “the other is the phantasm of historiography, the object that it seeks, honors, and buries” (2). His fascination with identity and difference in the practice of historiography make him a compelling source for feminist ruminations, though he does not concern himself directly with gender issues. He offers a scenario for history-writing much like the positioning I’ve described above when he sees the fundamental situation of historiography expressed in the relationship of a history to its preface, in which the historian speaks of his own labor: “two uneven but symbolic halves, join[ing] to the history of the past the itinerary of a procedure” (38). Certeau frames his theoretical speculations within the notion of place as well. Finding history on the boundary that both joins and separates a society from its past, he figures the constant movement along that margin through a modernist visual metaphor: [History] takes place along these lines which trace the figure of a current time by dividing it from its other, but which the return of the past is continually modifying or blurring. As in the paintings of Miró, the artist’s line, which draws differences with contours and makes a writing possible (a discourse and a “historicization”), is crisscrossed by a movement running contrary to it. It is the vibration of limits. The relation that organizes history is a changing rapport, of which neither of its two terms can be the stable point of reference. (37–38) How provocative to apply this shifting, sliding, vibrating image of history to women! If history eludes us, fixing itself on a margin at the limits of reason or of the possible (43), this marginalized space sounds much like the space of “woman” as a figure of difference from many versions of “man” in Western history: man as rational animal, man as self–created by thought, man as polis animal or citizen, creating in negative woman as irrational, woman as uncreated, woman as outside the boundaries of the polis. If history is a construction of an “other”—i.e., the past as other—how does a woman author such a text? As a disguised man? Another “other”? Would that make her the “same”? The theory of representation Spivak lays out in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” offers not a model but guidance in this problem. The essay begins as a critique of intellectual invisibility in a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Spivak observes that these two

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European academicians recreate a Western subjectivity through their failure to locate themselves in relation to the others about whom they speak: “Maoists,” “workers,” or “the Third World” (“Subaltern” 272). She insists that theories of economy and ideology are necessary to expose the “surreptitious subject of power and desire marked by the transparency of the intellectual,” such a subject belonging to “the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor” (280). In a double move, Spivak wants to go beyond the constitution of the colonial subject (the “subaltern”) as Other to ask about the sexed subaltern: can a subject removed from dominant discourse in the West by two kinds of imperialism—national and sexual—speak? While I would not collapse the task of the (white, middle-class) North American academic seeking women’s histories of rhetoric with that of an Asian intellectual of a certain class, training, and history investigating the representation of the subaltern woman, I do hear Spivak speaking to feminist critics in the West. Her warning is, simply put, that in writing history we do not “represent” in the sense of advocating the women of the past but rather always “re-present” in the sense of imaging our own desire, while in the process recording as well as recommitting epistemic violence. To retell in every woman’s history a “herstory” of suppression and silencing might be to miss a more subtle operation of what Spivak calls a “vast two-handed engine” (“Subaltern” 281): the mechanism by which a normative narrative is constituted in the context of others. While Spivak is concerned with comprehensive and agentless theories of “power and desire” advanced by Foucault and Deleuze, the issue to which I apply her critique is the adequacy of a women’s history of rhetoric that remains within the mainstream American feminist goal of attaining equal rights as an individual—a project often characterized as finding a “voice.” Aware of what the work cannot say, the historian must keep before her the ways her own consciousness urges her to create an object which recreates her own struggle. The trouble comes in “the slippage from rendering visible the mechanism to rendering vocal the individual” (“Subaltern” 285). The whole issue of colonialism, primary to Spivak’s argument, is variable for the large area I take in under “history of rhetoric.” To my knowledge, no one is yet working on a specifically rhetorical project in non-Western, female discourse. But the issue of constructing a consciousness in the object of history is relevant, and a focus on representation opens up the problem more fully, I now believe, than a discussion of categories. Essentialism, liberalism, post-feminism: none of these terms serves to describe adequately the painfully necessary work Spivak performs on Hindu widow sacrifice, a work free from the sentimentality some find tiresome in the language of the “pragmatic radical” but washed over inevitably with the pain of association. The following passage brings together for me processes of positioning and representation in a most helpful way: In seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically “unlearns” female privilege. (295, first emphasis added)

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Spivak leads us to see how the practice of writing history is not so much about finding the voice of the past but about moving toward a finer understanding of the ways temporal discourses shape our own desires and sketch out futures both determined and open.

A Case in Point: Gendering Rhetoric in Classical Antiquity As a way of suggesting directions for historiographical practice under the auspices of location and representation, I will review some recent work in classics that clears a space for feminist inquiry in history of rhetoric. Gerda Lerner describes the condition of women in ancient cultures in terms of their exclusion from the world of the symbolic, as language was created and religious narratives were codified. Women appear most often as objects of symbolic activity (both discursive and visual) from prehistory forward. Though we might desire women with agency, sketching woman as a subject—i.e., as a producer of symbols—particularly in antiquity is, of course, much more difficult than observing her as an object. For centuries, we have very few fragments of text unmediated by male re-presentation. [. . .] As a practice through which a public space for political deliberation was defined from Homer forward, rhetoric has traditionally been defined by gender to the extent that access to and uses of that space are accorded differently to men and women. Using rhetorical tools such as topoi, forms of argument, and ethos, however, we can chart women’s discourse along a continuum from the public sphere in to realms of private, sometimes non-rational performances. If norms for public speech are in some sense defined by the gender of the Greek citizen, then a gendered analysis may reveal what is reflected, adjusted, distorted, or completely absent from that discourse. Froma Zeitlin’s analysis of Aristophanes’s Thesmophoriazousae, for example, establishes a parallel between gender and genre in the late fifth century B.C. The elaborate transvestism of actor and playwright in this comedy signal for Zeitlin a link between the feminine and mimesis. She reads in the presence of Helen in the play the ambivalence which Greek thought will manifest with increasing articulation toward the mimetic powers of the verbal and visual arts to persuade with the truths of their fictions. This ambivalence is not incongruent, at some level, with the increasing ambivalence with which the city’s male ideology view its other gender, an attitude which serves to connect the feminine still more closely with art and artifice. (206) Another kind of “feminization” is presented in Page duBois’s reading of Plato’s Socrates in the Phaedrus. Noting Socrates’ frequent use of metaphors drawn from female reproduction, duBois finds early fourth-century B.C. philosophy appropriating and neutralizing the feminine: In the Phaedrus, there is, I will argue, as there is in the Theaetetus and the Symposium, a mimesis of the female, so that in the homoerotic movement of

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the dialogue, the female is perhaps more present than she is in later texts of the tradition where the less absolute social oppression of women leaves space for philosophy to be more radically phallocentric. . . . (Sowing 171) Both critics read the literary text against the social text, assessing the figuration of the feminine in relation to the status of women in society. Zeitlin finds in Aristophanic comedy that the anxiety and frustration over the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.C. are compensated for by “a shift [in attention] away from masculine values of politics to the private sphere—to the domestic milieu at home, to the internal workings of the psyche, and to a new validation of eros, all of which the feminine as a cultural category best exemplifies” (211). These gendered readings speak suggestively to rhetorical issues, and the modes of analysis employed by Zeitlin and duBois offer rich possibilities for approaching other texts with questions relevant to rhetoric. We need to investigate Plato’s use of Aspasia to recast the ideological function of the funeral oration in Menexenus and of Diotima to give voice to Socratic eros in the multivocality of the Symposium. Studies of dramatists Aristophanes and Euripides could yield gendered analyses of the sophisticated rhetorical persuasions by women in Lysistrata and Trojan Women. While the question of whether real women ever existed to whom such performances could be attributed has dominated some discussions (Waithe), readings of these “literary” sources in terms of gender as constitutive of social relations may open a new interpretive space for rhetoric in the classical period. Another strategy would force the historian outside the boundaries of public assembly and court, toward the frenzied cries of the maenadic celebrants of Dionysus, the profanity uttered in fall fertility festival of Thesmophoria, and ritual laments for Adonis and Kore. These forms of women’s speech, performed during the religious festivals which provided the only acceptable form of public activity for women in Greek antiquity, stand as a radical alternative to the “rational” discourses of rhetoric and philosophy taking shape in the fifth century. Again, the category of gender provides a theoretical ground for analyzing the construction of difference between these modes of expression. Gendered readings would seek the interplay of these various forms of women’s speech with conventional rhetoric in ancient Greece. Beyond speech itself gender, according to Scott, constitutes women as cultural symbols and generates the normative interpretations cultures adopt for them. Conceptual languages of many types employ differentiation to establish meaning, and I would argue that a feminist history of rhetoric would take in the investigation of such languages.

Teaching Feminist History How might feminist histories and historiography affect courses in the history of rhetoric? This question struck with some urgency as I confronted my most recent graduate seminar in classical rhetoric. With only one semester of exposure to the field, would my students wish to “sacrifice” big names in the tradition in order to venture into more complex encounter with a historiography “of that which is not immediately visible” (Leydesdorff 19)? We achieved a

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resolution (a local and temporary practice) by clustering canonical and non-canonical texts around the figure of Helen in Greek antiquity. We read Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen and Socrates’ “correction” of Gorgias against duBois’s analysis of the figure of Helen in Sappho’s Fragment 16 (“Sappho and Helen”). This gendering of the two male rhetoric texts by the woman’s poem raised questions of subjectivity and agency, of causation and desire, of genealogy and ideology. While Aristotle and Plato remained in our canon, undisplaced by an alternative women’s history of classical rhetoric, we were able in some cases to apply gendered readings to the definitions and categories, inclusions and exclusions, visions and blindnesses of the central figures in the male-authored tradition. French feminists assist in the gendering of classical texts. Cixous’s rereading of Achilles and Penthesileia in The Newly Born Women (112– 122) speaks of the desire to recast Homer; Irigaray kaleidoscopically constructs a case against Plato the feminist by shaking fragments of his own texts into the figure of woman (152–59). Beyond the manipulation of reading lists, I think the concepts of positioning and representation can be brought fruitfully into the classroom. We should ask our students (as well as ourselves) to write their multiple selves—gendered, racial, classed—into history, creating narratives not in a unique voice but in polylog with past and future selves and others, singular accounts intertextualized with histories recent and distant. As we resist the curricular impetus toward coherence in favor of an eclectic and variegated historical practice, we complicate a unified narrative of the past with our own desires for the present and future.

Notes These issues were taken up in a colloquium called “Politics of Historiography” (published in Rhetoric Review 7, 1988: 5–49) and in a PRE/TEXT volume devoted to historiography (8, 1987). 2 By writing “as a woman” I mean to place myself neither from within a permanent, natural state of female sexuality nor in a post-gendered condition of gender irrelevance, but rather within a fluctuating identity always in the historical process of being shaped and reshaped. Because this essay concerns the terms under which a collectivity labeled “women” become both objects and agents of history, I will postpone any further discussion of the label, other than to cite Denise Riley’s assertion that “both a concentration and a refusal of the identity of ‘women’ are essential to feminism” (1). 3 See the Introduction and chapter 1 of my Rereading the Sophists. 4 Though my use of the word “ideology” here sounds pejorative, I understand the term to mean pervasive and inevitable systems of power and knowledge, but not a system of total subjection. I agree with Paul Smith that there is a place for agency within the workings of ideology and seek to describe an historical practice that works to reveal (always partially) the workings of ideology in the past and to act on the ideologies of the present. [. . .] 6 For complete information about these panels, see Program, 1988 CCCC Convention, St. Louis, Missouri. Language, Self and Society (61, 79, 87, 125) and Program, 1989 CCCC, Seattle, Washington. Empowering Students and Ourselves in an Interdependent World (33, 70, 101, 110). For comparison, the 1989 “Topic Index to Concurrent Sessions” (2–13) listed 25 entries under “Women and Writing,” whereas the 1988 index did not include any category containing the words “women” or “feminist.” There were no panels or papers on women in history in 1987 and one paper in 1986 (26). Prior to 1

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the excellent offerings in feminist history in the Rhetoric Society proceedings of 1989, no such titles appeared in the 1987 or 1985 collections. Based on this brief survey, it could be said that a womanoriented history of rhetoric has only begun to develop in the late 1980s. [. . .] 12 Patricia Bizzell, in her essay on Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and the status of the woman speaker, proposes that women foreground their ambivalent relationship to the position of authority created by public discourse by overtly playing the fool. [. . .]

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda. “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.” Signs 13 (1988): 405–36. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political History of the Novel. NewYork: Oxford, 1987. Bizzell, Patricia. “The Praise of Folly, the Woman Rhetor, and Postmodern Skepticism.” Forthcoming in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Draine, Betsy. “Refusing the Wisdom of Solomon: Some Recent Feminist Literary Theory.” Signs 15 (1989): 144–70. duBois, Page. “Sappho and Helen.” Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers. Albany: SUNY, 1984: 95–105. —. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Flax, Jane. “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory.” Signs 12:4 (1987): 621–43. Flynn, Elizabeth. “Composing as a Woman.” College Composition and Communication 39 (1988): 423– 435. Foley, Helene P., ed. Reflections of Women in Antiquity. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1981. Fuss, Diane. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989. Hartsock, Nancy C. M. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Discovering Reality. Eds. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka. Boston: D. Reidel, 1983. 283–310. Irigaray, Luce. “On the Index of Plato’s Works: Woman.” Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Cornell UP, 1985. Jaggar, Alison M. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983. Jameson, Fredric. “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project.” Rethinking Marxism 1 (1988): 49–72. Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

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Kelly, Joan. Women, History and Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Leydesdorff, Selma. “Politics, Identification and the Writing of Women’s History.” Trans. Lonette Wiemans. Current Issues in Women’s History: 9–20. Lugones, Maria. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege, Male Privilege.” Unpublished ms. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. —. “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style” Cultural Critique (Spring 1988): 3–22. Morgan, Susan. Sister in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. New York: Oxford, 1989. North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Perradotto, John, and J. P. Sullivan, eds. Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers. Albany: SUNY, 1984. Rackin, Phyllis. “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage.” PMLA 102 (1987): 29–41. Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. Composition as a Human Science: Contributions to the Self-Understanding of a Discipline. New York: Oxford, 1988. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979– 1985. New York: Norton and Co., 1986. Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1988. Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia, 1988. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Snyder, Jane McIntosh. The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman.” Displacement: Derrida and After. Ed. Mark Krupnick. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983: 169–95. —. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Waithe, Mary Ellen, ed. A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. I, 600 B.C.–500 A.D. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. Weedon, Chris. Poststructuralist Theory and Feminist Practice. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Zeitlin, Froma I. “Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmorphoriazousae.” In Foley, ed.

sex, lies, and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric* Cheryl Glenn A fellow rhetorician recently gave me a nineteenth-century print entitled “Alcibiades and Aspasia.” In beautiful detail, French artist J. L. Gerome (best-known for transfusing his journeys to the East with an exotic and erotic charm) presents Aspasia reclining seductively on Alcibiades, her hand cupping his breast, her head suspiciously near his stomach and widespread legs, while Alcibiades looks away from her and reaches out to grasp Socrates’ hand [see figure 1]. Thus Aspasia comes down to us as an odalisque, while Alcibiades, the object of her attention, comes to us wreathed in laurel. For the past 2500 years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement).2 Little wonder, then, that women have been closed out of the rhetorical tradition, a tradition of vocal, virile, public—and therefore privileged—men. Women’s enclosed bodies provide lacunae in the patriarchal territory of rhetorical practices and displays, a gendered landscape, with no female rhetoricians clearly in sight. But just as recent feminist scholarship has begun to recover and recuperate women’s contributions in the broad history of culture-making—in philosophy, literature, language, writing, societal structure, Christianity, history, education, reading, psychology, and gender—so too have feminist historians of rhetoric begun to re-map rhetorical history. In her “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric,” Patricia Bizzell accounts for various disruptions that could realign and regender the rhetorical terrain and anticipates the consequences of refiguring the role of women on that terrain.4 And in “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Barbara Biesecker works to “forge a new storying of our tradition that circumvents the veiled cultural supremacy operative in mainstream histories of Rhetoric” (147). Such challenges not only restore women to rhetorical history and rhetorical history to women, but the restoration itself revitalizes theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study.5 More than theory is, of course, at stake here. For in challenging *  College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 180-99. Copyright 1994 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted and used with permission. Note: This essay has been condensed. 36

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the dominant stories of the West, feminist scholars are challenging the contemporary academic and cultural scene as well.

Figure 1: J. L. Gerome, Alcibiades and Aspasia.

Aspasia of Miletus As part of the feminist challenge to the history of rhetoric, I want to reconstruct and refigure a woman whose texts, life, and manuscripts have been annexed by men: Aspasia of Miletus. In fifth-century BC, Miletus was a Far-Eastern Greek subject-ally, a cultivated city (in what is now Turkey) renowned for its literacy and philosophies of moral thought and nature. A nonAthenian, citizen-class Greek, Aspasia arrived in Athens brilliantly educated by means that have never been fully explained.7 Whether she was educated within a literate Milesian family or within a school for hetaerae (upper-class courtesans), she was exceptionally fortunate, for “there is no evidence at all that in the classical period girls attended schools, and it is entirely consistent with what we know about the seclusion of women in Athens that Athenian girls did not do so (some other cities may have been less benighted in this respect)” (Harris 96).8 Married at an early age, Athenian women neither attended schools nor participated in the polis.9 Yet the system of the polis, which implied both civic consciousness and “the extraordinary preeminence of speech over all other instruments of power” (Vernant, Origins 49), tripped the

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mechanism that powered the active diffusion and acquisition of literacy among Greek males (proper citizens). And we must assume that at least a few Athenian or Athenian-colony women of the citizen class, even those defined by good families and cultural constraints, became literate—and became conscious of civic rights and responsibilities (Cole 222–23; Harris 103, 107). Aspasia of Miletus was one of those women. As a free woman brought up in the transitional society of Asia Minor, Aspasia was freed from the rigidity of traditional marriage and from the identity that arose from that fixed role. And upon emigrating from Miletus, Aspasia emerged in Athens linked with the great statesman Pericles (fl. 442 BC), the aristocratic democrat who placed Athenian democratic power “in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people,” with everyone equal before the law (Thucydides 2.37.1). Thus this non-Athenian, or “stranger-woman,” was subject to Athenian law but did not have citizen rights. Nor was she accountable to the severe strictures of aristocratic Athenian women, whose activity, movement, education, marriage, and rights as citizens and property-holders were extremely circumscribed by male relatives. Aspasia could ignore— even rupture—the traditional enclosure of the female body. She could subvert Pericles’ advice for ideal womanhood: “Your greatest glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you” (Thucydides 5.46.2). She could—and she did. We know about Aspasia much the same way we know about Socrates: from secondary sources, for neither of their work exists in primary sources. Although the historical tradition has readily accepted secondary accounts of Socrates’ influence, teaching, and beliefs, the same cannot be said about any female counterpart, especially a woman described so briefly and in so few accounts. But the fact that Aspasia is even mentioned by her male contemporaries is remarkable, for rare is the mention of any intellectual woman. Surviving fragments and references in the work of male authors provide tantalizing indications that the intellectual efforts of Aspasia were, at least occasionally, committed to writing—and to architecture. Aspasia is memorialized in a fresco over the portal of the University of Athens, in the company of Phidias, Pericles (on whom she leans), Sophocles, Antisthenes, Anaxagoras, Alcibiades, and Socrates. When other women were systematically relegated to the domestic sphere, Aspasia seems to have been the only woman in classical Greece to have distinguished herself in the public domain. Her reputation as both a rhetorician and philosopher was memorialized by Plato (437– 328 BC), Xenophon (fl. 450 BC), Cicero (100–43 BC), Athenaeus (fl. AD 200), and Plutarch (AD 46-c.120)—as was, of course, her enduring romantic attachment to Pericles. For those authors, Aspasia clearly represented the intelligentsia of Periclean Athens. Therefore, I want to consider seriously this historical woman who merited such documentation, for the story of her intellectual contributions to rhetoric may suggest the existence of an unrecognized subculture within that community, and the artistic and literary uses of Aspasia of Miletus may configure an emblem of Woman in rhetorical history.

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The best-known source of information about Aspasia is Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (AD 100), an account written several hundred years after her existence. Nevertheless, all earlier mentions of Aspasia confirm this inquiry about the woman, what art or charming facility she had that enabled her to captivate, as she did, the greatest statesmen, and to give the philosophers occasions to speak so much about her, and that, too, not to her disparagement. That she was a Milesian by birth, the daughter of Axiochus, is a thing acknowledged. And they say it was in emulation of Thargelia, a courtesan of the old Ionian times, that she made her addresses to men of great power. Thargelia, was a great beauty, extremely charming, and at the same time sagacious; she had numerous suitors among the Greeks. . . . Aspasia, some say, was courted and caressed by Pericles upon account of her knowledge and skill in politics. Socrates himself would sometimes go to visit her, and some of his acquaintances with him; and those who frequented her company would carry their wives with them to listen to her. Her occupation was anything but creditable, her house being a home for young courtesans. . . . [I]n Plato’s Menexenus, though we do not take the introduction as quite serious, still thus much seems to be historical, that she had the repute of being resorted to by many of the Athenians for instruction in the art of speaking. Pericles’s inclination for her seems, however, to have rather proceeded from the passion of love. He had a wife that was near of kin to him, who had been married first to Hipponicus, by whom she had Callias, surnamed the Rich; and also she brought Pericles, while she lived with him, two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus. Afterwards, when they did not well agree, nor like to live together, he parted with her, with her own consent, to another man, and himself took Aspasia, and loved her with wonderful affection; every day, both as he went out and as he came in from the market-place, he saluted and kissed her. (200–01) By every historical account, Aspasia ventured out into the common land, distinguishing herself by her rhetorical accomplishments, her sexual attachment to Pericles, and her public participation in political affairs. Her alleged connection with the courtesan life is only important so far as it explains her intellectual prowess and social attainments—and the surprise of an Athenian citizenry unaccustomed to (or perhaps jealous or suspicious of) a public woman.11 As Marie Delcourt wrote in her study of Pericles: No one would have thought the less of Pericles for making love to young boys . . . but they were shocked by his treating [Aspasia] like a human being— by the fact that he lived with her instead of relegating her to the gynaikeion [women’s quarters], and included his friends’ wives when he issued invita-

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tions to dinner. It was all too amazing to be proper; and Aspasia was so brilliant she could not possibly be respectable. (77) Aspasia opened an academy for young women of good families (or a school for hetaerae according to some sources) that soon became a popular salon for the most influential men of the day: Socrates, Plato, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Phidias, and Pericles. Aspasia’s appearance was unprecedented at a time when the construction of gender ensured that women would be praised only for such attributes as their inherent modesty, for their inborn reluctance to join males (even kinsmen) for society or dining, and for their absolute incapacity to participate as educated beings within the polis; at a time when a woman’s only political contribution was serving as a nameless channel for the transmission of citizenship from her father to her son (Keuls 90); and at a time when Pericles pronounced that “the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising . . . or criticizing” (Thucydides 5.46.2).13 It is difficult to overemphasize how extraordinary the foreign-born Aspasia—a public woman, philosopher, political influence, and rhetorician—would have been in fifth-century BC Athenian society.

Fifth-Century BC Athens In the burgeoning democracy of Periclean Athens, men were consciously forming human character in accordance with the new cultural ideals of military strength and justice (diké) tempered by the traditional concepts of areté (excellence of virtue, usually associated with the well-born and wealthy citizen-class). Only aristocratic male citizens, equal in their homonoia (being of one mind), argued for civic and political areté, the essential principle of government by the elite—a democratic oligarchy. Yet the Platonic Socrates called for areté according to social role, be it male or female, free or slave (Republic 353b), and later Aristotle would write that both the rulers and the ruled, males and females alike, “must possess virtue” and that “all must partake of [moral virtues] . . . in such measure as is proper to each in relation to his own function” (Politics 1260a5; 1260a7). Thus was manifested the complex tension between the elitist areté and a more democratic homonoia. In The Origins of Greek Thought, Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us that “Greek political life aimed to become the subject of public debate, in the broad daylight of the agora, between citizens who were defined as equals and for whom the state was the common undertaking” (11). Such public oratory fed the spirit of panhellenism, a doctrine sorely needed to unify the Greek city-states, just as it satiated the male appetite for public display. Vernant describes the polis as a system implying “the extraordinary preeminence of speech over all other instruments of power, [speech becoming] the political tool par excellence, the key to authority in the state, the means of commanding and dominating others” (49). In what would be an inestimable contribution to a democratic oratory possessed by aristocratic characteristics, former logographer (speech writer) Isocrates practiced rhetoric as a literary form, one imbued with

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civic, patriotic, and moral purpose. Confident in the power of words, he practiced and taught a morally influenced and rhetorically based system of general culture that propounded individual responsibility as well as political and social action. No longer were men deferring to their sovereign or the gods, who could reinforce nomos (beliefs, customs, laws as enforced by universal opinion) with physis (nature, reality). “With this denial of the absolute status of law and moral things, the stage [was] set for a controversy between the two . . . [and for drawing] different practical conclusions from it” (Gutherie III: 60). Individuals would be responsible for their own actions and collectively responsible for the actions of the democratic state, the polis. The Athenian polis was founded upon the exclusion of women, just as, in other respects, it was founded upon the exclusion of foreigners and slaves (Vidal-Naquet 145). Although females born of Athenian-citizen parents were citizen-class and subjects within the polis, they were not actual citizens in any sense. Nor could foreign-born women or men hope for citizenship, regardless of their political influence, civic contributions, or intellectual ties with those in power. Therefore, noncitizens such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Anaxagoras, and Aspasia functioned within the polis, yet outside its restraints. If we think of gender as a cultural role, a social rank, “a social category imposed on a sexed body” (Scott 32), or as “a primary way of signifying relations of power” (Laqueur 12), then we can more easily trace Aspasia’s movement across gendered boundaries of appropriate roles for women and men in fifth-century BC Athens. She seems to have profited by her excursion into the male domain of politics and intellect, even at the expense of her respectability, reputation, and authority. Named among the rather short “list of Athenian citizen [class] women” known to us from literature (Schaps 323), the assertively intelligent Aspasia has been interpreted as self-indulgent, licentious, immoral. Historical records have successfully effaced the voice of the ideal Greek woman, rendering silent her enclosed body. And those same historical records have defaced any subversion of that ideal woman, rendering her unconfined body invalid. Thus, even though her contributions to rhetoric are firmly situated and fully realized within the rhetorical tradition, those contributions have been directed through a powerful gendered lens to both refract toward and reflect Socrates and Pericles. Ironically, then, Aspasia’s accomplishments and influence have been enumerated by men, and most often attributed to men—or installed in the apocryphal, the safest place for wise (and therefore fictitious) women. And as for Aspasia’s popular salon, it’s often accredited to Pericles instead of to his female companion.

Aspasia, Pericles, and the Funeral Oration Pericles, perhaps the most socially responsible, powerful, and influential of Athenians, was indeed surrounded with the greatest thinkers of his age—with Sophists, philosophers, architects, scientists, and rhetoricians. In his Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, Josiah Ober refers to Pericles’ intellectual circle as the “ ‘educated elite’ of late fifth-century Athens” and “a brain trust,” describes the Sophists as “experts in political manipulation who were flocking

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to Athens from other Greek poleis,” and places the “educated courtesan Aspasia . . . among Pericles’ closest associates,” calling her “the power behind the throne” (89–90). For forty years, the Athenians applauded Pericles’ eloquence, often invoking his wise and excellent companions, including rhetorician Aspasia and philosopher Anaxagoras. In the Phaedrus, the Platonic Socrates calls Pericles “the most perfect orator in existence” and attributes Pericles’ eloquence to the successful combination of his natural talents with the high-mindedness he learned from Anaxagoras, who “filled him with high thoughts and taught him the nature of mind . . . and from these speculations [Pericles] drew and applied to the art of speaking what is of use to it” (269e4 ff.). Cicero later concurred that Pericles’ teacher was indeed Anaxagoras, “a man distinguished for his knowledge of the highest sciences; and consequently Pericles was eminent in learning, wisdom and eloquence, and for forty years was supreme at Athens both in politics and at the same time in the conduct of war” (De Oratore III.xxxiv. 138–39). Yet several centuries later, Philostratus (fl. AD 250) wrote in his Epistle 73 that “Aspasia of Miletus is said to have sharpened the tongue of Pericles in imitation of Gorgias,” with “the digressions and transitions of Gorgias’ speeches [becoming] the fashion” (qtd. in Sprague 41–42). Philostratus echoes Plato, the earliest writer to mention Aspasia. In the Menexenus, the Platonic Socrates reveals Aspasia to be the author of Pericles’ Funeral Oration (Epitaphios), an assertion I explore below. Aspasia becomes implicated even more in Pericles’ education if we consider the “familiar knowledge at Athens that Aspasia had sat at the feet of Anaxagoras in natural philosophy” (Courtney 491). And several hundred years later, when Quintilian (AD 100) examined Pericles’ written works, he concluded that some other pen had composed them: “I have been unable to discover anything in the least worthy of [Pericles’] great reputation for eloquence, and am consequently the less surprised that there should be some who hold that he never committed anything to writing, and that the writings circulating under his name are the works of others” (Institutio Oratoria 3.1.12). The rhetorician most closely associated with Pericles would no doubt have served as his logographer, as logography (the written composition of speech) was commonly the province of rhetoricians. Hence, Aspasia surely must have influenced Pericles in the composition of those speeches that both established him as a persuasive speaker and informed him as the most respected citizen-orator of the age. Although Plutarch credits Aspasia with contributing greatly to intellectual life, specifically to philosophy, politics, and rhetoric, many scholars have since discredited her. In the aforementioned “Life of Pericles,” Plutarch draws on a now-incomplete work of Aeschines (450 BC) to describe Aspasia, but neither his nor Aspasia’s case has been strengthened by the fragments of Aeschines that survived. Those fragments present a controversial statement on gender equality: “the goodness of a woman is the same as that of a man,” an assertion Aeschines illustrates with the political abilities of Aspasia (qtd. in Taylor 278). Both Xenophon and Cicero (and later, medieval abbess Heloise, perhaps best-known for her attachment to Abelard), however, tap that same complete text, giving credence to the text—as well as to the existence of a historical Aspasia.

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According to several ancient authors, all of whom knitted together secondary sources to shape a reliable Socrates, Socrates deeply respected Aspasia’s thinking and admired her rhetorical prowess, disregarding, it seems, her status as a woman and a hetaera. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, for instance, Socrates explains to Critobulus the “art of catching friends” and of using an intermediary: I can quote Aspasia. . . . She once told me that good matchmakers are successful only when the good reports they carry to and fro are true; false reports she would not recommend for the victims of deceptions hate one another and the matchmaker too. I am convinced that this is sound, so I think it is not open to me to say anything in your praise that I cannot say truthfully. (II.36) In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Socrates ascribes to Aspasia the marital advice he gives to Critobulus: “There’s nothing like investigation. I will introduce Aspasia to you, and she will explain the whole matter [of good wives] to you with more knowledge than I possess” (III.15). Plutarch writes that “Socrates sometimes came to see her [Aspasia] with her disciples, and his intimate friends brought their wives to her to hear her discourse . . . as a teacher of rhetoric” (200); Athenaeus calls Aspasia “clever . . . Socrates’ teacher in rhetoric” (V.29) and goes on to account for the extent of Aspasia’s influence over Socrates: [I]n the verses which are extant under her name and which are quoted by Herodicus . . . [she says]: “Socrates, I have not failed to notice that thy heart is smitten with desire for [Alcibiades]. . . . But hearken, if thou wouldst prosper in thy suit. Disregard not my message, and it will be much better for thee. For so soon as I heard, my body was suffused with the glow of joy, and tears not unwelcome fell from my eyelids. Restrain thyself, filling thy soul with the conquering Muse; and with her aid thou shalt win him; pour her into the ears of his desire. For she is the true beginning of love in both; through her thou shalt master him, by offering to his ears gifts for the unveiling of his soul.” So, then, the noble Socrates goes a-hunting, employing the woman of Miletus as his preceptor in love, instead of being hunted himself, as Plato has said, [Socrates] being caught [as he was] in Alcibiades’ net. (V.219) Furthermore, in the Menexenus, the Platonic Socrates agrees that were the Council Chamber to elect him to make the recitation over the dead (the Epitaphios) he “should be able to make the speech . . . for she [Aspasia] who is my instructor is by no means weak in the art of rhetoric; on the contrary, she has turned out many fine orators, and amongst them one who surpassed all other Greeks, Pericles” (235–36). But it was Pericles—not Aspasia—who delivered that speech.

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The Menexenus contains Plato’s version of Socrates’ version of Aspasia’s version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, further recognition of Aspasia’s reputation as rhetorician, philosopher, and as influential colleague in the Sophistic movement, a movement devoted to the analysis and creation of rhetoric—and of truth. Moreover, the Funeral Oration itself held political, philosophical, and rhetorical significance: by its delivery alone, the Funeral Oration played out “rhetoric’s important role in shaping community” (Mackin 251). In The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, Nicole Loraux clarifies the funeral oration as an “institution—an institution of speech in which the symbolic constantly encroached upon the functional, since in each oration the codified praise of the dead spilled over into generalized praise of Athens” (2). Besides conflating praise of the Athenians with praise of Athens, this institutionalized and specialized epideictic was useful for developing “consubstantiality [homonoia]” and creating a “similar rhetorical experience” for everyone present, be they citizens, foreigners, or women related to the dead.” The shared experience of this rhetorical ritual linked everyone present even as it connected them “with other audiences in the past” (Mackin 251). As “one of the authorized mouthpieces of classical Athens,” the funeral oration translated into “Greek patriotism,” for it was “Athenian eloquence” “adapted to the needs of a given historical situation” (Loraux 5). As such, the issues of translation and adaptation easily connect the Epitaphios with Sophistic philosophy. In Rereading the Sophists, Susan Jarratt reminds us that “for the Sophists, human perception and discourse were the only measure of truths, all of which are contingent” (64); therefore, they focused on “the ability to create accounts of communal possibilities through persuasive speech” (98). And Loraux tells us that in every epitaphios, “a certain idea that the city wishes to have of itself emerges, beyond the needs of the present” (14). Thus the beliefs and practices of Sophists overlapped beautifully with one basic requirement of an epitaphios: “the personality of the orator has to yield to the impersonality of the genre . . . as an institution and as a literary form” (11). Aspasia’s Sophistic training, political capacity, and powerful influence on Pericles’ persuasive oratory easily translated into Socrates’ pronouncement to Menexenus that she composed the famous funeral oration delivered by Pericles: I was listening only yesterday to Aspasia going through a funeral speech for [the Athenians] . . . [S]he rehearsed to me the speech in the form it should take, extemporizing in part, while other parts of it she had previously prepared, . . . at the time when she was composing the funeral oration which Pericles delivered. (236b) That Aspasia may well have composed Pericles’ speech makes sense, since after all, being honored by the opportunity to deliver the Epitaphios, he would have prepared well, seeking and following the advice of his colleagues, including Aspasia, on points of style and substance. That she wrote it becomes more convincing when we consider Loraux’s assurance that “the political orator must have the ascendant over the logographer” (11) and that the Sophist would

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preserve the “essential features of the civic representations” (107). For reasons of Aspasia’s proximity to Pericles and her intellectual training, Quintilian was right, then, to doubt the originality of Pericles’ work. Before demonstrating her expertise at composing moving, patriotic epideictic oratory, Aspasia reminds Socrates of the efficacy of rhetoric. In the Menexenus, the Platonic Aspasia explains that “it is by means of speech finely spoken that deeds nobly done gain for their doers from the hearers the meed of memory and renown” (236e)—an accurate description of contingent truth. Jarratt explains the sophistic rhetorical technique and its social-constructionist underpinning with her definition of nomos as a “self-conscious arrangement of discourse to create politically and socially significant knowledge . . . thus it is always a social construct with ethical dimensions” (60). Hence, the author of the Epitaphios—whether viewed as Aspasia or Pericles—makes clear the power of oratory to influence the public’s belief that its history was other than it was. Loraux explains that “a Sophist and a rhetor [would have] used the official oration in order to write a fictitious logos; within the corpus, then, the ‘false’ follows hard upon the ‘true’ ” (9). Accordingly, the most aggressive exploits of Attic imperialism are represented as “[bringing] freedom [to] all the dwellers of this continent” (Menexenus 240e), as “fighting in defence of the liberties of the Boeotians” (242b), as “fighting for the freedom of Leontini” (243a), as “setting free . . . friends” (243c), and as “saving their walls from ruin” (244c). In offering this version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, an exaggerated encomium abounding with historical misstatements and anachronisms, Plato makes explicit his own feelings about the use of rhetoric—just as Thucydides uses his own version of the Epitaphios to make explicit his belief in the necessary subjection of individual citizenship to the polis: “A man who takes no interest in politics is a man . . . who has no business here at all” (II.40). Thinly disguised in the Menexenus is Plato’s cynicism. In his opinion, the development of oratory had negative consequences for Athens, the most glaring defect of current oratory being its indifference to truth. A rhetorician such as Aspasia was, indeed, interested more in believability than in truth, more interested in constructing than delivering truth, more interested in nomos than physis—interests leading to Thucydides’ claims that such—“prose chroniclers . . . are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public” (I.21). In the opening dialogue of the Menexenus, the Platonic Socrates disparages the orators in much the same way he does in the Symposium, saying that “in speeches long beforehand . . . they praise in such splendid fashion, that . . . they bewitch our souls. . . . [E]very time I listen fascinated [by their praise of me] I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome . . . owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker” (235b). Thus Plato recoils from the touch of rhetoric.

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Aspasia’s Influence Aspasia was an active member of the most famous intellectual circle in Athens, her influence reaching such well-known thinkers as Socrates and such exemplary orators as Pericles. Most importantly, her influence extended to Plato, coloring his concept of rhetoric as well. Like Aspasia, Plato taught that belief and truth are not necessarily the same, a sentiment he makes evident in his Gorgias when Gorgias admits that rhetoric produces “[mere] belief without knowledge” (454). Plato also agrees with Aspasia that rhetoric, which is the daughter of truthdisclosing philosophy, does not always carry on the family tradition; rhetoric can be used to obscure the truth, to control and deceive believers into belief. In the Gorgias, his Socrates says, “[R]hetoric seems not to be an artistic pursuit at all, but that of a shrewd, courageous spirit which is naturally clever at dealing with men; and I call the chief part of it flattery” (463). And in the Phaedrus, Plato writes that “in the courts, they say, nobody cares for truth about these matters [things which are just or good], but for that which is convincing; and that is probability” (272e). Like Aspasia, Plato approved of a rhetoric of persuasion; he too sees the political potential of public rhetoric. But his rhetoric is foremost a search for the truth; only truth—not fictive effect over accuracy—should constitute persuasive rhetoric. His perfect orator of the Phaedrus “must know the truth about all the particular things of which he speaks and writes . . . [and] must understand the nature of the soul” (277c), for the ideal rhetorician speaks “in a manner pleasing to the gods” (273e). What Plato could have learned, then, from Aspasia was the potentially harmful uses of rhetoric as a branch of philosophy—as well as the as-yet uncalibrated potential of rhetoric to create belief. In addition to influencing Socrates and Plato, Aspasia also influenced Xenophon and his wife, specifically in the art of inductive argument. In De Inventione, Cicero uses her lesson in induction as the centerpiece for his argumentation chapter. Like others before him, Cicero too acknowledges Aspasia’s influence on Socrates as well as the existence of the Aeschines text: [I]n a dialogue by Aeschines Socraticus[,] Socrates reveals that Aspasia reasoned thus with Xenophon’s wife and with Xenophon himself: “Please tell me, madam, if your neighbour had a better gold ornament than you have, would you prefer that one or your own?” “That one,” she replied. “Now, if she had dresses and other feminine finery more expensive than you have, would you prefer yours or hers?” “Hers, of course,” she replied. “Well, now, if she had a better husband than you have, would you prefer your husband or hers?” At this the woman blushed. But Aspasia then began to speak to Xenophon. “I wish you would tell me, Xenophon,” she said, “if your neighbour had a better horse than yours, would you prefer your horse or his?” “His,” was the answer. “And if he had a better farm than you have, which farm would you prefer to have?” “The better farm, naturally,” he said. “Now if he had a

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better wife than you have, would you prefer yours or his?” And at this Xenophon, too, himself was silent. Then Aspasia: “Since both of you have failed to tell me the only thing I wished to hear, I myself will tell you what you both are thinking. That is you, madam, wish to have the best husband, and you, Xenophon, desire above all things to have the finest wife. Therefore, unless you can contrive that there be no better man or finer woman on earth you will certainly always be in dire want of what you consider best, namely, that you be the husband of the very best of wives, and that she be wedded to the very best of men.” To this instance, because assent has been given to undisputed statements, the result is that the point which would appear doubtful if asked by itself is through analogy conceded as certain, and this is due to the method employed in putting the question. Socrates used this conversation method a good deal, because he wished to present no arguments himself, but preferred to get a result from the material which the interlocutor had given him—a result which the interlocutor was bound to approve as following necessarily from what he had already granted. (I.xxxi. 51–53) Few women participated in the intellectual life of ancient Greece. Aspasia was a striking exception. Although Aspasia was a powerful force in Periclean Athens and seems to have affected the thinking of Plato and Socrates, few Greek thinkers accepted women as mental equals. Aristotle makes no provision for the intellectual woman, except for his nod to Sappho: “Everyone honours the wise. . . . [T]he Mytilenaeans [honour] Sappho, though she was a woman” (Rhetoric 1389b.12). Otherwise, Aristotle denied any philosophical or rhetorical contributions of women. He quotes Sophocles when he writes, “ ‘Silence gives grace to woman’—though that is not the case likewise with a man” (Politics I.v.9). Reasoning from Aristotle’s basic premise, Aspasia could not have become a teacher, much less a rhetorician. By the principle of entelechy (the vital force urging one toward fulfilling one’s actual essence), she would have naturally followed her predetermined life course, her progress distinctly marked off and limited to a degree of perfection less than that for a man. The power politics of gender, the social category imposed on each sexed body, both gives rise to and then maintains the social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men. Denied the telos of perfect maleness, Athenian women were denied a passport into the male intellectual battleground of politics, philosophy, rhetoric. But Aspasia had approached the border—and trespassed into masculine territory. For the most part, Aristotle’s accounts of woman, buttressed by the defective scientific understanding of reproduction and biological processes, belie woman’s participation in the making of culture, leaving her daughters without access to any knowledge of a female tradition or intellectual underpinning. For Aristotle, men and women differed only in outward form—but the inequality is permanent. Unlike Plato, he could not see beyond the contemporary and seemingly permanent inferior status of Greek women. In the Politics, Aristotle writes “be-

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tween the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject” (I.ii.l2); in the Poetics, he pronounces goodness as possible “even in a woman . . . though [she] is perhaps an inferior . . . but it is not appropriate in a female Character to be manly, or clever” (15.1454a.20–24); and in the Rhetoric, he writes that “one quality or action is nobler than another if it is that of a naturally finer being: thus a man’s will be nobler than a woman’s” (I.9.15). And those naturally finer beings (men) were awarded a public voice, which enabled them to participate as speakers, thinkers, and writers in the polis, in the “good” of public life. A public voice was the right and privilege of those who were declared to possess reason and goodness to its fullest extent—men only. In the polis—the public sphere of action, the realm of highest justice, the world of men—women and slaves should be invisible and aphonic. “Naturally” then, women and slaves—inferior beings in every way—were condemned to silence as their appointed sphere and condition. And most women spoke no memorable alternative—that is, except for Aspasia. But even Aspasia’s voice is muted, for she speaks only through men.

Aspasia’s Challenge to the History of Rhetoric Aspasia colonized the patriarchal territory, but her colony was quickly appropriated by males. Although she herself escaped enclosure, although she publicly articulated her intelligence and her heterosexual love, she did not escape those who defined her. Her influence has been enclosed within the gendered rhetorical terrain—and neutralized. “And the trouble is,” Myra Jehlen writes, “that the map of an enclosed space describes only the territory inside the enclosure. Without knowing the surrounding geography, how are we to evaluate this woman’s estate . . .” (80). Few of us have ever heard of Aspasia of Miletus, teacher of rhetoric. But if we locate her colony within “its larger context” and “examine the borders along which [she] defined herself” (8l)—the writings of the men she influenced, Plato, Socrates, and Pericles—we can better map out how Aspasia was perceived by those men and, perhaps, how she might have perceived her estate within the surrounding geography. But even now, Aspasia’s intellectual estate seems to be “off-limits,” except in that her story serves as a morality tale for women who insist on entering the rhetorical arena: such a woman will be used, misappropriated, and eventually forgotten. Or worse, perhaps, they will be disfigured in artistic renderings such as Gerome’s, inscribed with masculine fantasy and curiosity. Gerome’s idyllic rendition of Aspasia and Alcibiades is both inaccurate and unfair: Our Mother of Rhetoric, life-long companion of Pericles and influential colleague of famous men, is the harem girl to the arrogant, dissolute, untrustworthy, love-object of Socrates, Alcibiades. Thus the example of Gerome’s print brings to the fore the whole notion of women’s place in rhetoric. Where on that landscape we call rhetorical history should we begin to look for women? How many women remain hidden in the shadows of monumental rhetoricians? How many others remain misidentified as holes and bulges on out-of-the-way territories? And how much of rhetorical history is itself, as Carole Blair describes, “rhetorical iterations, saturated

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with the impure representations, intrinsic interestedness, and general obstreperousness of any discourse” (417)? By acknowledging that rhetorical history is not neutral territory, the refiguring of Aspasia’s role in the history of rhetoric has ramifications on past study as well as implications for future study. The most powerful ramification is an awareness of women’s place on the rhetorical terrain. Until most recently, we had not even thought of looking for a woman in rhetoric. It had already been assumed, a priori, that no woman participated in the rhetorical tradition. We had been willing to believe the tautology that no women have been involved in rhetorical history because not a single rhetorical treatise by a woman appears in lists of primary works (we resolutely ignore Lucia Olbrechts-Tyteca) and because not a single woman appears in the indices of the most comprehensive histories of Western rhetoric. But upon examination, the fault line of gender reveals that women have indeed participated in and contributed to the rhetorical tradition, and that fault line reverberates down the corridors of past scholarship to the foundations of the Greek intellectual tradition. Our first obligation, then, as rhetorical scholars is to look backwards at all the unquestioned scholarship that has come before; then, we must begin to re-map our notion of rhetorical history. By simply choosing which men and women to show and how to represent them, we subtly shape the perceptions of our profession, enabling the profession to recognize and remember—or to forget—the obvious and not-so-obvious women on our intellectual landscape. But looking backwards will not be enough; we must attend to the current professional scene as well. For example, the early and influential work of Ann Berthoff, Janet Emig, Janice Lauer, and Mina Shaughnessy could easily fade out of our professional consciousness if we don’t keep these foremothers of composition studies in our professional narratives, if we don’t know or remember the scholarship on which we’re building our own work. Perhaps the most important consequence of refiguring rhetorical history, however, is the effect on our students, for we also shape the perceptions of them. By writing a more inclusive history of rhetoric, we can more easily enable and encourage both our female and male students to participate in a literature, in a history, in a profession, or in communities of discourse from which they may feel excluded or detached. Fortunately, rhetorical scholars—females and males alike—around the country are involved in various feminist historiographic projects. And their archeological findings are serving to challenge the history of rhetoric to recognize the full range of its texts, its lies, its manuscripts, its practices, and its theories. In fact, it’s the “theoretical understanding of rhetorics of the past [that] underwrites our capacity for further theorizing” (Blair 404). And Aspasia’s contribution to rhetoric is just one of many stories that disrupt, refigure, and then enrich what has long been held as patriarchal territory. Until recently, we didn’t seem to realize that the rhetorical map had flattened out the truth, leaving scarcely a ridge on the surface that could suggest all the women, and the otherwise disenfranchised, that are buried beneath the surface. The significance of Aspasia’s challenge lies in recharting the plains, valleys, and borders of

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rhetoric, and accounting for all the pockets of as-yet-unaccounted-for activity. Having passed through the familiar and patriarchal territory of exclusionary rhetoric, we are moving into a frontier—the rhetorics of the future that await our exploration, our settlements, and our mapping.

Notes [. . .] 2 Bodily definition maps out class as well as gender: “Silence, the closed mouth, is made a sign of chastity. And silence and chastity are, in turn, homologous to women’s enclosure within the house” (Stallybrass 127). [. . .] 4 A regendered history does not reproduce traditional gendered categories of the “empowered” and “other,” nor does it reduce them, but rather imagines gender as an inclusive and nonhierarchical category. In Rhetoric Retold I locate women’s contributions to and participation within the rhetorical tradition and write them into an expanded, inclusive tradition. 5 Joan Kelly tells us that women’s history has a dual goal: “to restore women to history and to restore our history to women. . . . In seeking to add women to the fund of historical knowledge, women’s history has revitalized theory, for it has shaken the conceptual foundations of historical study” (“Social Relation” 1). [. . .] 7 Most scholars (Bloedow, Flaceliere, Halperin, Just, Keuls, Licht, Ober, for instance) have labeled Aspasia a courtesan, schooled in intellectual and social arts. But both Eva Cantarella and William Courtney argue that the Athenian suspicion and misunderstanding of such a powerful, political, nonAthenian, unmarriageable woman living with their controversial leader, Pericles, led automatically to the sexualized and undeserved label of hetaera; Nicole Loraux refers to Aspasia as a foreigner and as a nonpolitician; Mary Ellen Waithe calls her “a rhetorician and a member of the Periclean Philosophic Circle” (History 75); and Susan Cole writes only of Aspasia’s intellectual influence and measure of literacy (225). 8 Cantarella clearly describes the hetaera as “more than a casual companion,” “more educated than a woman destined for marriage, and intended ‘professionally’ to accompany men where wives and concubines could not go [namely social activities and discussions]” (30). “This relationship was meant to be somehow gratifying for the man, even on the intellectual level, and was thus completely different from men’s relationships with either wives or prostitutes” (31). Robert Flaciere agrees that “in practice, if not in law, they [hetaerae] enjoyed considerable freedom” (130). He goes on to quote Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists (XIII) that the hetaerae “applied themselves to study and the knowledge of the sciences” (131). 9 H. D. F. Kitto places Athenian women in Oriental seclusion: “In this pre-eminently masculine society women moved in so restricted a sphere that we may reasonably regard them as a ‘depressed area’” (222). He accepts such restrictions as sensible. [. . .] 11 Roger Just reminds us that “Aspasia’s notoriety and the popular resentment her supposed influence aroused should . . . be remembered—a resentment transmuted into mockery by comedy” (21). In the Acharnians, Aristophanes writes that the Megarians “abducted two whores from Aspasia’s stable in Athens” (523); Plutarch writes that Cratinus, “in downright terms, calls her a harlot”: “To find him a Juno the goddess of lust/Bore that harlot past shame, /Aspasia by name” (201). Flaceliere assures us that “the Athenian comic poets never tired of repeating that Aspasia led a life of debauchery, though

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apparently she was as well behaved as she was well informed, and even a scholar” (131). And Cantarella writes, “It is not surprising that many Athenians hated Aspasia. She was not like other women; she was an intellectual” (54–55). [. . .] 13 Pierre Vidal-Naquet writes that “the sole civic function of women was to give birth to citizens. The conditions imposed upon them by Pericles’ law of 451 was to be the daughter of a citizen and a citizen’s daughter” (145). [. . .]

Works Cited Aristophanes. The Archarnians. Trans. Douglass Parker. Four Comedies. Ed. William Arrowsmith. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969. 99–112. Aristotle. Politics. Trans. H. Rackman. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1977. —. The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater. New York: Modern Library, 1984. Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Trans. Charles Burton Gulick. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140–61. Bizzell, Patricia. “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 11 (1992): 50–58. —. “The Praise of Folly, The Woman Rhetor, and Post-Modern Skepticism.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1992): 7–17. Blair, Carole. “Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Change.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 403–28. Bloedow, Edmund F. “Aspasia and the ‘Mystery’ of the Menexenus.” Wiener Studien (Zeitschrift fur Klassiche Philologie und Patristic) Neu Folge 9 (1975): 32–48. Cantarella, Eva. Pandora’s Daughters. 1981. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Cicero. De Inventione, De Optimo Genere, Oratorum, Topica. Trans. H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. 1–348. —. De Oratore. 2 vols. Trans. E. W. Sutton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. Cole, Susan Guettel. “Could Greek Women Read and Write?” Foley 219–45. Counney, William. “Sappho and Aspasia.” Fortnightly Review 97 (1912): 488–95. Delcourt, Marie. Pericles. N.p.: Gallemard, 1939. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Flaceliere, Robert. Love in Ancient Greece. 1960. Trans. James Cleugh. London: Frederick Muller, 1962. Foley, Helene P. Reflections of Women in Antiquity. New York: Gordon, 1981. Glenn, Cheryl. “Author, Audience, and Autobiography: Rhetorical Technique in The Book of Margery Kempe.” College English 53 (1992): 540–53. —. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, forthcoming. Gutherie, W. K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Harris, William V. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Jarratt, Susan C. “The First Sophists and Feminism: Discourses of the ‘Other.’ ” Hypatia 5 (1990): 27–41. —. “Performing Feminisms, Histories, Rhetorics.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1992): 1–6. —. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Jehlen, Myra. “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism.” Warhol and Herndl, 75–96. Just, Roger. Women in Athenian Law and Life. London: Routledge, 1989. Kelly, Joan. “The Social Relation of the Sexes.” Kelly 1–18. —. Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Keuls, Eva C. The Reign of the Phallus. New York: Harper, 1985. Kirk, G. S., and J. E. Raven. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962. Kitto, H. D. F. The Greeks. Middlesex: Penguin, 1951. Kneupper, Charles, ed. Rhetoric and Ideology: Compositions and Criticisms of Power. Arlington: Rhetoric Society of America, 1989. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Licht, Hans [Paul Brandt]. Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. London: Abbey Library, 1932. Loraux, Nicole. The Invention of Athens. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Lunsford, Andrea A., ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, in press. Mackin, James A., Jr. “Schismogenesis and Community: Pericles’ Funeral Oration.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 251–62. Moncrieff, C. K. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. New York: Knopf, 1942. Nye, Andrea. “A Woman’s Thought or a Man’s Discipline? The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.” Hypatia 7 (1992): 1–22. Ober, Josiah. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Plato. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Trans. H. N. Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977. 405–579. —. Gorgias. Trans. W. C. Helmbold. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952. —. Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. —. Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles. Trans. R. G. Bury. 1929. London: HeinemannLoeb, 1981. Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Trans. John Dryden. Rev. Arthur Hugh Clough. New York: Modern Library, 1932. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. H. E. Butler. 1920. 4 vols. London: Heinemann, 1969. Schaps, David M. “The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women’s Names.” Classical Quarterly 27 (1977): 323–31. Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Sprague, Rosamond Kent, ed. The Older Sophists. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1972. Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” Ferguson et al. 123–44. Taylor, A. E. Plato, the Man and his Work. 7th ed. London: Methuen, 1960. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Rex Warner. London: Penguin, 1954. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. 1974. New York: Zone, 1980. —. Myth and Thought Among the Greeks. 1965. London: Routledge, 1983. —. The Origins of Greek Thought. 1962. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

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Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. The Black Hunter. Trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Waithe, Mary Ellen, ed. A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. I. 600 BC-500 AD. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. 4 vols. Warhol, Robyn R., and Diane Price Herndl. Feminisms. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. Xenophon. Memorabilia and Oeconomicus. Trans. E. C. Marchant. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism* Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford  1 One quality or action is nobler than another if it is that of a naturally finer being: thus a man’s will be nobler than a woman’s. —Aristotle, Rhetoric I.9 The work of the mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera 82

Standing at the Border Western rhetoric began, or so one predominant disciplinary narrative tells us, as a response to disputes regarding property, regarding borders.2 As language awareness became closely linked with the expedient workings of the newly democratic Syracuse, rhetoric flourished as a practical art, a vital part of civic life in this democracy fraught with a mass of litigation on property claims. Corax and Tisias, the heroes of this narrative, crossed borders to establish boundaries, pioneers armed only with an enchiridion of successful rhetorical practices. After dedicating its early years to settling boundary disputes, rhetoric soon found itself submitting to the same kinds of boundarying. Unsettled by Plato’s sound drubbing in the Gorgias and increasingly disarmed by philosophy’s disvaluing, rhetoric has, for much of its history, been viewed as either the codification of and instruction in discursive, persuasive practices or as a sophisticated system of tropes. But even within these bounds, rhetoric contained *  Rhetorica 13.4 (Autumn1995): pp. 401-41. © 1995 The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Published by the University of California Press. Note: This essay has been condensed. 54

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and remembered its power. In his In Defence of Rhetoric, Brian Vickers joins other twentiethcentury scholars as he works to release that power and reemphasize rhetoric’s central role in public discourse. As Vickers argues, the “conception of rhetoric as public debate in a society guaranteeing free speech, a debate in which both sides of the case are heard and those qualified to vote come to a decision binding on all parties, has much more to offer us . . . than Plato’s equation of it with cosmetics, cookery, and other more disreputable arts designed, according to him, to satisfy base pleasures rather than promote knowledge.”3 Other scholars, such as Kenneth Burke, Samuel IJsseling, and Ernesto Grassi,4 have interrogated philosophy’s traditional disvaluing of rhetoric, exposing the willed misreadings that support such a view, and thus they have rehabilitated rhetoric’s epistemic status and heuristic value across the disciplines. Rhetoric may well border other studies, but it is not necessarily circumscribed by them. Thanks to both broad and deep shifts in our contemporary epistemological assumptions and practices—shifts that call into question what Jane Flax terms western culture’s “Enlightenment story”—rhetoric’s boundaries are no longer so clearly delimited or contested.5 Indeed, as John Bender and David E. Wellbery note in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, “rhetorical inquiry, as it is thought and practiced today, occurs in an interdisciplinary matrix that touches on such fields as philosophy, linguistics, communication studies, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, and political theory.”6 Each of us doubtless has his or her own response to Bender and Wellbery’s list and to the larger issue of appropriation that disciplinary border-crossing inevitably raises. As teachers of writing and scholars of rhetoric, we note, for instance, the absence from this catalogue of both classics and composition studies, two fields of disciplinary inquiry whose borders often intersect with those of rhetoric. In this essay, however, we wish to focus on another disciplinary field whose borders have upon occasion intersected with those of rhetoric, but which still remain largely at the margins of rhetorical inquiry: feminism. More specifically, we explore the intersections of rhetoric and feminism—intersections that Gloria Anzaldúa might refer to as “the Borderlands/La Frontera.”8 As a political movement—as resistance to patriarchal assumptions and practices—feminism is as old as, well, at least as old as Aphrodite. But as a self-conscious academic field of inquiry, feminism is more recent, its history having developed over the last thirty years. Although much feminist work is grounded in the humanities, considerable work in the social sciences and sciences has taken place. Like rhetoric, feminism is both multidisciplinary—situated in multiple academic disciplines—and, in many instances at least, also interdisciplinary. In spite of its multidisciplinarity and the inevitable accompanying methodological differences, the feminist project was, until the 1970s, marked by a strong degree of consensus. As Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips tell us In Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, “1970s feminism assumed that one could specify a cause of women’s oppression. Feminists differed substantially (and fiercely) as to what this cause might be . . . but did not really ques-

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tion the notion of a cause itself. Nor was there any difficulty with the idea of oppression, which seemed to have self-evident application.”11 Since that time, a number of factors have radically destabilized this consensus. AfricanAmerican and third-world/postcolonial women writers have pointed out the extent to which feminism’s claims for authority and representation rested upon racist and ethnocentric assumptions about women’s nature and oppression; they have also charged feminism with ignoring the intersections of gender with race and class. [. . .] In addition, poststructuralist and postmodern theorists have also raised questions about many of feminism’s traditional assumptions and practices. Theorists such as Carla Freccero, Amy Ling, Joan W. Scott, Elaine Showalter, and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak have characterized feminism (or certain strains of feminism) as relying upon individualist, rationalist, and universalist assumptions. From such a perspective, feminism’s traditional dream of freedom from oppression and equality for women appears complicitous with both Enlightenment and modernist narratives of individualism and progress. As a result of such contemporary debates, those writing within feminism have increasingly been drawn to the term “feminisms,” rather than “feminism,” as a marker for their projects.14 For purely stylistic reasons, we have chosen to use the singular form throughout this essay, yet we wish to acknowledge the extent to which feminism—like rhetoric, for that matter—is not only a construction but a place of contest and difference. Although both feminism and rhetoric have at times been represented as having continuous traditions and innocent encounters with others (peoples, disciplines, cultures), their situations are, of course, much more complex. In “Towards a Transactional View of Rhetorical and Feminist Theory,” Barbara A. Biesecker calls for “putting into contact the genius of Rhetoric and the (very different) genius of feminism.”15 In this essay, we attempt to respond to Biesecker’s call as we inhabit and unsettle the conventionally understood borders between rhetoric and feminism. We hope that further engagement between these two disciplinary projects will be beneficial, but we cannot anticipate, much less predict, the consequences of ongoing dialogue—though we tend to agree with Biesecker, who suggests that the contact may “both uncramp the orthodoxy of rhetorical theory and advance the theory and practice of feminism.”16 We, too, see our project as encouraging the kind of border crossings that might allow both feminists and rhetoricians to reflect upon, and possibly even to reconsider, their disciplinary projects.

Canonical Mappings Aristotle may well have been the first cartographer of western rhetoric; in the fourth century BCE, he charted the canons of invention, arrangement, and style for the edification and ease of his students. Together, his Rhetoric and Anaximenes’ Rhetorica ad Alexandrum serve as baseline maps for the author of Rhetorica ad Herennium as well as for Cicero and Quintilian, all of whom added the dimensions of memory and delivery. Throughout the ages, then this map of rhetoric has evolved. All maps are cultural artifacts that reveal value, and the value of

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the canons of invention, memory, arrangement, style, and delivery has remained uncontested—regardless of deviations in their forms and influence in varying historical eras. Whether studied separately or in truncated form, the canons today retain their “tendency toward completeness, interaction, and interdependence.”17 As a result of their long history, the traditional rhetorical canons provide familiar guides for us as we attempt to explore the borderlands of rhetoric and feminism. We have chosen to use the canons to mark the sections of our essay not only because of their enthymematic familiarity, but also in order to emphasize the mutually heuristic nature of the border crossing that we envision for rhetoric and feminism. Feminist theories and practices pose interesting questions and challenges for traditional understandings of the canons. But the canons also help illuminate how much is at stake in feminism’s scholarly and performative enterprise, providing a fertile context for exploring the radical nature and significance of contemporary feminist efforts. As Burkean terministic screens, then, the canons provide a framework that enables us to gain new perspectives on both rhetoric and feminism by inhabiting their borders. But as is the case with all terministic screens, our framework entails certain limitations. Although the linearity of print demands that we treat the canons consecutively, we wish to call attention at the outset to their tendency to overlap and interact. As Kathleen Welch writes, in this regard the canons represent “the aspects of composing which work together in a recursive, synergistic, mutually dependent relationship,”18 one we find particularly apt for the collaborative process we have enjoyed in composing this essay.

On Invention and Memory [Invention] is the most important of all the divisions, and above all is used in every kind of pleading. —Cicero, De inventione I.7.9 Now let us turn . . . to the custodian of all parts of rhetoric, memory. —Rhetorica ad Herennium I.2.3 We begin our exploration by linking invention, the heart and soul of inquiry, with memory, the very substance of knowledge. Although these canons have, of course, traditionally been treated separately, with invention often relegated to the province of philosophy, and memory often ignored or deleted without comment, there seem to us to be compelling reasons for considering them together, not the least of which is the rich overlap between inquiring (inventio) and knowing (memoria), one that demonstrates interconnections and blurrings characteristic of all canonical boundaries. Sharon Crowley tells us that

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until the modern period, memory held a central place within rhetorical theory. . . . In ancient times even people who could write easily . . . relied on their memories, not merely as storage facilities for particulars, but as structured heuristic systems. In other words, memory was not only a system of recollection . . . ; it was a means of invention.19 Even in the most traditional terms, then, the canon of invention leads the rhetor to search “in any given place [for] the available means of persuasion” and to use the topics and the pisteis to do so.20 But additionally, the rhetor must surely rely heavily, in all searches, on memoria, for where else would the ancients have stored their commonplaces, their topics? Cicero tells us that the “structure of memory, like a wax tablet, employs places [loci] and in these gathers together images.”21 Thus memory ignites the process of invention. With the dominance of print over oral culture, however, memory became misremembered, and, eventually, associated not with the full powers of invention but with mere rote memorization. Much important work of the last thirty-five years has sought to reclaim the canons of invention and memory for contemporary rhetoric. For invention, the work of James Kinneavy, Janice Lauer, Edward P. J. Corbett, Richard Young, Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Burke has been particularly significant. For memory, similar reclamation has been carried out by Mary Carruthers, Brian Stock, Fred Reynolds, Sharon Crowley, and Welch. But even this contemporary work on invention and memory, though valuable, all too often focused on method, such as new ways of recovering information, locating topics, using heuristics, and building proofs, without acknowledging the degree to which these tools are themselves always situated within larger discursive and ideological systems that tend to valorize some methods while silently rejecting others. From a postmodern perspective, invention and memory are hardly neutral methods but rather represent socially and historically constructed—and constructing—language games. Like other games, more is at stake in acts of invention and memory than might first seem apparent, for invention and memory constrain and shape both who can know and what can be known. Consider, for instance, the frequent references (including our own) to such ancient Greek city-states as Syracuse as democracies. In order to identify Syracuse as a democracy—to remember this “fact” and to select it as an example and an “available means of persuasion”— the rhetor must accept as natural and commonsensical these city-states’ exclusion of slaves and women from civic participation. Feminist efforts not only to remember these exclusions, but also to employ them in contemporary arguments about the nature and significance of western democracies, aim to expose the political and ideological assumptions that inevitably inform any act of invention or memory. Before they could engage in this act of memory, invention, and argumentation—or at least before they could claim a public space for this engagement—feminists had to recognize, remember, and challenge traditional understandings of the rhetor, for until recently, the figure of the rhetor has been assumed to be masculine, unified, stable, autonomous, and capable of

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acting rationally on the world through language. Those who did not fit this pattern—women, people of color, poorly educated workers, those judged to be overly emotional or unstable— those people stood outside of the rhetorical situation, for they were considered neither capable of nor in need of remembering and inventing arguments. From a feminist vantage point, however, it is impossible to take the subjectivity of the rhetor for granted, impossible not locate that subjectivity within the larger context of personal, social, economic, cultural, and ideological forces, impossible not to notice not only the context itself, but also who is absent from this context as well as what exclusionary forces (regarding knowledge and argument, for example) are at work there. Equally challenged by this perspective is what counts as knowledge. In this regard, feminist theory has consistently challenged any public/private distinction, arguing that knowledge based in the personal, in lived experience, be valued and accepted as important and significant. In describing her own way of speaking and writing, of inventing, hooks says she must “incorporate . . . a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me. . . . When I say then that these words emerge from suffering, I refer to that personal struggle to name the location from which I come to voice.”25 Women have also sought to include the intuitive and paralogical, the thinking of the body, as valuable sources of knowing, as sites of invention. Lorde writes, “As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves.”26 If in making these claims, contemporary feminists have implicitly sought to expand the canon of invention, they have often done so by linking it with memory, which Toni Morrison tells us is “a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was . . . The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way,” which, she insists, is the province of memoria.27 [. . .] [A]s human beings we are both limited and empowered by our individual and collective memory and invention. This recognition spurred our interest in working collaboratively on this article, for we realized that any effort to inhabit the borderlands of feminism and rhetoric could only be enriched by such dialogue. We also quickly realized the centrality of invention and memory to conceptions of subjectivity and knowledge as well as to understandings of the other canons. We wish to emphasize, then, that the following discussions of arrangement, style, and delivery both assume and depend upon a rethinking of invention and memory— one that recognizes the role that both these canons play in current efforts to reconceptualize and reenact what it means to know, speak, and write.

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On Arrangement A speech has two parts. You must state your case, and you must prove it. —Aristotle, Rhetoric III.13 Aristotle’s cryptic injunction to arrange discourse into “two parts” was elaborated into a powerful, seven-part architectonic for the creation of ideas (inventio). Indeed, Cicero’s adumbration and exploration of exordium, narratio, partitio, confirmatio, reprehensio, digressio, and conclusio established a highly flexible pattern for what Richard Enos calls “structuring compositions to the limits of the situation.”30 This structure has, in many respects, stood the test of 2500 years. Certainly it has worked well to realize the traditional ends of rhetoric: to deploy, in Aristotle’s terms, “all the available means of persuasion,”31 or in Burke’s, to use “language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.”32 In short, if speakers/writers wanted to “state a case and prove it,” they would be hard pressed to find more effective ways of disposing their cases and proof than in this logical, linear chain aimed at persuasion. Or so western writers have generally assumed. But what if what constitutes “your case” and “your proof” are not clear-cut, are instead themselves highly contested sites? And what if the traditional aim of persuasion, of winning over an audience, is also highly contested? What might such disruptions suggest for the venerable canon of arrangement? While few theorists of rhetoric or of feminism have addressed these questions directly and in quite these terms, many feminist scholars have approached them obliquely. In a widely-cited early article, for instance, Sally Miller Gearhart charges that rhetoric is based on a “conquest model” and that “any intent to persuade is an act of violence.”33 Over fifteen years later, Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin elaborated Gearhart’s claim, tracing the ways in which rhetoric’s focus on winning has led to the dominance of several master narratives—of progress and exclusion, of subjection, of conversion.34 All of these narratives, Foss and Griffin insist, invoke patterns of arrangement aimed at winning, at control. Other scholars have noted the ways in which patterns of control are inscribed in seemingly innocuous conventions related to the arrangement of discourse, such as those governing endnote/footnote and works cited lists, all of which are relegated to the margins, to the periphery or very end of discourse. The text exerts its own univocal control, taking center stage and pushing beyond its borders the voices of others. Many women writers, such as Tillie Olsen, have sought to open up this textual space, to allow for the sharing of space and authority. Perhaps no one on the contemporary scene has done so as consistently and consciously, however, as hooks. Early in her career, hooks chose to eschew the use of footnotes and to open up her text and her style to multiple voices. She has done so out of her belief that such discursive conventions are exclusionary, that they mark discourse “for highly educated, academic audiences only.” Hooks aims instead to reach out, sans footnotes, to a very broad audience, “to speak

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simply with language that is accessible to as many folks as possible”—even if such practices lead critics to label her “anti-intellectual” and “unprofessional.”36 But these narratives of control and exclusion, of subjection/winning, of conversion, no longer seem to encompass or to respond to many writers’ goals. Consider the well-known case of literary critic Jane Tompkins, invited to contribute a critical response to the work of another scholar for the journal New Literary History. In traditional rhetorical terms, Tompkins’ goal is clear: she should make her case, that the other scholar’s essay is mistaken in its view of epistemology, and she should do so (as she puts it) by “using evidence, reasons, chains of inference, citations of authority, analogies, illustrations, and so on.”37 Tompkins does not want to do so, however, or to dispose her arguments in traditional form, for such a response ignores what she calls her “other voice,” the one that is deeply in sympathy with the other scholar’s goals, the one that wants to write about her feelings that the kind of academic discourse she is expected to write is a “straitjacket” she longs to throw off, the one that wants not to fight, not to “beat the other person down,” not, in short, to win.38 In rejecting the master narrative of triumphing over an opponent, Tompkins also eschews traditional patterns of arrangement, suggesting, at least indirectly, that the aim and the means of realizing the aim are inextricably linked. Instead, Tompkins opts for an alternation, and a dissonant juxtaposition, of her “two voices,” concluding not on a note of victory or of traditional closure but of rage: “I can’t strap myself psychically into an apparatus that will produce the right gestures when I begin to move. . . . This one time I’ve taken off the straitjacket, and it feels so good.”39 Tompkins has not been alone in wishing to loosen the “straitjacket” of agonistic aims and patterns of discourse. Of the many feminists who have attempted to slip its holds (from Sappho to Mary Wollstonecraft and from Emily Dickinson to Lorde), we would like to call special attention to Margaret Fuller, the only woman admitted as an intellectual equal to the rarefied Transcendental Club of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and other highly educated and influential mid-nineteenth-century Bostonians. In a detailed reading of Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Annette Kolodny demonstrates the revolutionary nature of Fuller’s rhetorical patterning.40 In particular, Kolodny responds to Fuller’s contemporary critic Orestes Brownson, who archly assessed Fuller’s book to be “no book, but a long talk. . . . It has neither beginning, middle, nor end, and may be read backwards as well as forwards, and from the center outwards each way, without affecting the continuity of the thought or the succession of ideas. We see no reason why it should stop where it does, or why the lady might not keep on talking in the same strain till doomsday, unless prevented by want of breath.”41 Kolodny’s essay demonstrates the epistemological and ideological grounds on which this judgment of incompetence rests. Fuller, herself thoroughly versed in classical and contemporary rhetoric and having developed a rhetoric class for women derived in part from a detailed and highly insightful reading of Richard Whately,42 was perfectly capable of producing the rhetorical forms Brownson values. Rather, Kolodny shows, Fuller rejected the “authoritarianism of coercion and the manipulative strategies [of traditional forms] . . . , endeavoring instead to

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create a collaborative process of assertion and response in which multiple voices could—and did—find a place.” As Kolodny concludes, Fuller’s use of a conversational and collaborative structural pattern, rather than one based on traditional ways of disposing an argument, led to her devaluation, one that still prevents our hearing the brilliant rhetorical lessons she had to teach. If we view Fuller from the perspective gained by standing on the borderlands of rhetoric and feminism, however, we may read her refusal to order her discourse in conventional ways not as a failure at winning a traditional argument but instead as a striking success at conducting “the inclusive, collaborative, and open-ended conversations”43 she and many other women before and since have valued. Learning to look anew at discourse that does not follow conventional patterns, that does not pursue a master narrative of subjection, can yield major insights for rhetoricians and theorists of rhetoric, as Kolodny has clearly shown. In the same way, we have much to gain by reexamining the traditional rhetorical drive toward closure, with its reliance on those structures that lead readers inevitably to an ending, that follow Aristotle’s advice that discourse must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this regard, we also have much to gain by crisscrossing the borders of rhetoric and feminism, particularly in terms of long-standing feminist attempts to disrupt the linear orderliness of prose, to contain contradictions and anomalies, to resist closure. These goals have been pursued vigorously by Hélène Cixous, whose attempts at “writing the body” introduce disruptive forms that push against traditional patterns of discourse and closure.44 Drawing on Cixous’ work Lynn Worsham argues that conventional standards of unity and coherence, standards that rely on linearity and closure, rest on a logic that is thoroughly masculine—but that alternative logics, those that value indeterminacy, nonclosure, and multiplicity of meanings, are also possible.45 Julia Kristeva is another theorist who has written extensively of alternative discursive possibilities. In “Women’s Time,” for example, Kristeva invokes a discursive attitude that could allow for, indeed invite, “parallel existence[s] . . . In the same historical time or even . . . interwoven one with the other.”46 This possibility of simultaneity and multiplicity offers, Suzanne Clark suggests, a “dialogic rhetoric,”47 one based not on oppositions or conquest but on collaboration, relationality, and mutuality, one that “can interrupt the rigidities of language and open it to a subject in process, to the unsettling and nonlogical life of the body.”48 Kristeva’s project, which resists the domination of sameness and order by offering a way to transform language from within, aims to provide a pathway through the crisis of modernity and away from the “colonizing discourse of mastery.”49 Ironically—especially in light of rhetoric’s long association with democratic ideals—this discourse of mastery, so familiar to traditional rhetorical forms of arrangement and aim, is itself a great threat; in Kristeva’s view, the future of political democracies will depend on their ability to include in material and practical as well as rhetorical ways all those within their borders. As Clark points out in a studied understatement, “There are high stakes involved in finding more inclusive forms of argument.”50 [. . .]

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As we hope these examples suggest, the borderlands of feminism and rhetoric offer provocative signposts toward a reexamination of the canon of arrangement. Drawing on rhetoric’s (potential) plasticity, its attention to context, and its goal of finding discursive forms to meet the needs of particular audiences; and drawing on feminism’s insights regarding the ideological freight and exclusionary result of many influential contemporary forms—as well as on women’s long-standing attempts to create alternative discursive patternings—we may find our way toward a reimagined dispositio, one we may both theorize and enact.

On Style The right thing in speaking really is that we should be satisfied not to annoy our hearers, without trying to delight them. . . . [N]evertheless the arts of language cannot help having a small but real importance, whatever it is we have to expound to others: the way in which a thing is said does affect its intelligibility. Not, however, so much as people think. All such arts are fanciful and meant to charm the hearer. Nobody uses fine language when teaching geometry. —Aristotle, Rhetoric III.1 One has only to think of Aristotle’s comments on style in the Rhetoric to be reminded of the extent to which style functions as a site of tension and contest within rhetoric. As readers will recall, in Book III Aristotle provides copious advice about style and delivery, but he does so with some ambivalence. For bordering Aristotle’s emphasis on style—“it is not enough to know what we ought to say; we must also say it as we ought”54 —is an anxiety about the extent to which language can be used to obscure and mislead, to play upon the emotions of the audience. As Aristotle notes, the speaker “must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially” (our emphasis).55 Inscribed in Aristotle’s comments on style are a series of oppositions—between res and verba, reason and emotion, demonstration and persuasion, and fact and interpretation—that for centuries have troubled those working within the rhetorical tradition. An example from Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student provides a useful instance of one such difficulty. In this work, Corbett introduces his discussion of style by noting that “once arguments had been discovered, selected, and arranged, they had to be put into words. Words . . . serve as the medium of communication between speakers or writers and their audience.”56 Corbett’s definition of style is certainly conventional, but it nevertheless represents a potential dilemma for rhetoric. If ideas and arguments are separate from and prior to language, as Corbett’s definition seems to suggest, then they are epistemologically foundational, and rhetoric, however necessary and helpful, is open to the charge of being “ ‘mere outward show for pleasing the hearer.’ ”57 Aware of this potential difficulty, Corbett quickly modifies his opening statement,

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commenting that “one notion about style that needs to be erased at the outset is that style is simply ‘the dress of thought.’ ”58 It is, no accident, of course, that Corbett uses the derogatory—and gendered—phrase “dress of thought” to characterize undesirable views of rhetoric. As Susan Jarratt observes in Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured, “Both rhetoric and women . . . [have been] trivialized by identification with sensuality, costume, and color—all of which are supposed to be manipulated in attempts to persuade through deception.”59 The history of rhetoric as a scholarly and pedagogical discipline, as well as a performative tradition, is marked by recurring tensions and oscillations as both theorists and rhetors have negotiated the relation of rhetoric poetics, and logic—and in so doing have often challenged the centrality, and at times even the validity of attention to style. Think of Plato’s dismissal of rhetoric in the Gorgias as mere “pandering,” akin to “cookery” and “beauty-culture”60; of Ramus’ bifurcation of invention and arrangement from style and delivery; and of the Royal Society’s effort, reported by Thomas Spratt, to “reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words.”61 As feminists have noted, the “primitive purity” that the rejection of style entails has generally necessitated the exclusion of women from the rhetorical scene, for how could women, with their inferior reason and their involvement in the stylish, the embodied, and the material, hope to attain such rigorous rationality? [. . .] [A]lthough rhetoric may desire to decenter style, style—as the material embodiment of the relationships among self, text, and world—resists such displacement. For though some writers (including a number of feminists) experience style primarily as technique, many others find that style raises powerful and difficult personal, political, and ethical issues. Acutely aware of the patriarchal nature of the western phallogocentric tradition, many feminist writers feel themselves to be in a double bind. In order to claim authority and agency, to function as subjects in the discursive arena and thus further feminism’s emancipatory goals, some feminists choose (as we choose in this essay) to adhere to the stylistic conventions of traditional western discourse—conventions that sharply dichotomize the public and the private, that devalue personal experience in favor of “objective” facts, “rational” logic, and established authorities. For many, however, Lorde’s well-known dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” powerfully evokes the potential limitations of such an approach. For even when women employ the style of traditional argumentation, gender-related concerns and questions can and often do influence both the immediate and subsequent reception of their work. Consider, for instance, the case of Emma Goldman, the Russian-born American anarchist, lecturer, writer, and editor who achieved great notoriety in the United States from the 1890s to 1917. Although Goldman’s politics were radical (she was a passionate anarchist and argued [among other things] in favor of free love and birth control), her argumentative style in many ways resembled “standard American rhetoric.”65 Nevertheless, Goldman often

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scandalized contemporary popular audiences, while intellectuals and critics—both then and now—have tended to dismiss her as sentimental and romantic. Such a double bind was almost inevitable, Clark argues. As a speaker, Goldman’s ethos and style of delivery violated the expectations of mass audiences, for Goldman “broke their most sacred codes of womanly behavior. She did not smile; she did not defer” as she uttered her passionately held and expressed ideas.66 Goldman’s more intellectual listeners and readers had different reservations; they found her lacking because her “language was not like the symbolist or modernist practice, not experimental.”67 In the “twentieth century . . . struggle over how emotion is to be regulated and distributed,” modernism came down on the side of a refined aestheticism that favored irony and restraint, not passion.68 Goldman resisted these (gendered) conventions, preferring to emulate such earlier American writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson—an unacceptable practice given modernism’s critique of American romanticism. As a consequence, from a modernist perspective, Goldman occupied “the impossible position of the passionate woman.”69 Goldman did succeed in creating a space for her words and ideas in her own time; and if she stirred controversy and strong response (a response that eventually led to her deportation to Russia), she “generated not only antagonists but also adherents.”70 Goldman’s writing could not survive the critique of modernism, however, for her passion and her adherence to a oncerevered Emersonian style was an embarrassment. Consequently, “under the regime of the new criticism, Goldman’s connections to literary history became unspeakable, and forgotten.” 71 Mindful of the fate of Goldman and of the previously discussed Fuller, “the most forgotten major literary figure of her own times,”72 a number of women have attempted to forge not only alternative styles but also alternative discourses. Perhaps one of the most radical such efforts is that of Daly, whose “co-conjured” Websters’ [sic] First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language73 represents an attempt to “conceive of language itself as a fabric that was originally woven by women in conversation with one another.”74 In so doing, Daly often reclaims earlier meanings of words, giving back to the term “spinster,” for instance, its significance as “a woman whose occupation is to spin.”75 Such projects are not without their own risks, however. After reading Daly’s earlier Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism,76 Lorde wrote “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” which questioned the sources of Daly’s alternative vision for feminism, asking, among other things, why Daly’s “goddess-images [are] only white, western-european, judeo-christian.”77 Lorde’s letter is of interest not only for its suggestive treatment of arrangement noted above, and its commentary on Daly’s work, but also for its direct, dialogic, and invitational style. Rather than relying upon confrontational, agonistic strategies, Lorde employs personal disclosures, frequent addresses to readers, and questioning rather than critique or dismissal to convey her reservations about Daly’s work. Lorde concludes her letter with these words: We first met at the MLA [Modern Language Association] panel, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Shortly before that date, I

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had decided never again to speak to white women about their racism. I felt it was wasted energy, because of their destructive guilt and defensiveness, and because whatever I had to say might better be said by white women to one another, at far less emotional cost to the speaker, and probably with a better hearing. This letter attempts to break this silence. I would like not to have to destroy you in my consciousness. So as a sister Hag, I ask you to speak to my perceptions. Whether or not you do, Mary, again I thank you for what I have learned from you. This letter is in repayment.78 In this closing passage, Lorde fuses the public and the private, the personal and the political, using direct address, many first- and second-person pronouns, and personal reminiscence to demonstrate her gratitude and make connections that unsettle the traditional borders between speaker and listener. We have already discussed the work of Cixous and Kristeva, continental writers who resist traditional western stylistic conventions of unity, coherence, linearity, and closure and whose texts challenge traditional distinctions between poetry and prose. In “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire,” Jamaican Michelle Cliff similarly composes a text that offers stylistic explorations while occupying the borderlands between poetry and prose.79 Her essay moves with poetic intensity from personal reflections to snatches of texts and remembered sayings, interweaving a sustained, though hardly traditional, critique of race relations in her country and abroad. In the closing paragraph, Cliff comments upon her writing and its relationship to her experience: There is no ending to this piece of writing. There is no way to end it. As I read back over it, I see that we/they/I may become confused in the mind of the reader: but these pronouns have always co-existed in my mind. . . . I am Jamaica is who I am. No matter how far I travel—how deep the ambivalence I feel about ever returning. And Jamaica is a place in which we/they/I connect and disconnect—change place.80 Other writers, such Anzaldúa and Sandra Cisneros,81 portray the various stylistic borderings they inhabit by blending English, Spanish, and “Spanglish” throughout their fiction and essays; in so doing, they not only portray the multiple realities through which they live and write, but also provide opportunities for others to experience such multiplicities. A number of feminists in the United States have enacted yet another form of stylistic resistance to conventional expectations. These (largely academic-and tenured) writers compose what literary critic Miller terms “personal criticism,” criticism that engages, rather than distances, the writer’s experiences.82 Such criticism, Miller argues, represents an intervention

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into contemporary cultural and theoretical practices, and it does so at the level of style: “[B]y turning its authorial voice into spectacle, personal writing theorizes the stakes of its own performance. . . . Personal writing opens an inquiry on the cost of writing—critical writing or Theory—and its effects.”83 Not all feminists agree with Miller’s assessment of the value of the personal style or with Daly’s effort to create a language free of patriarchal influence. In “Surviving to Speak New Language: Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich,” Jane Hedley argues that Daly’s efforts to construct a feminist discourse are ultimately totalizing, “self-contextualizing and autotelic to a quite remarkable degree.”84 Many postmodern feminists are also suspicious of efforts to develop more personally grounded forms of criticism, believing that such efforts reinscribe the western tradition’s emphasis on individualism and authenticity, while feminists of color such as hooks and Trinh T. Minh-ha challenge the ease with which many white feminists have felt comfortable representing (or, from hooks’s and Trinh’s perspectives, ignoring or misrepresenting) the experiences of others. Even recent attempts on the part of feminists to acknowledge the extent to which feminism has ignored race and class and to affirm what Rich terms a “politics of location” often have the effect, critics such as hooks argue, of “re-centering the white authorial presence.”85 For these and other reasons, in contemporary feminism, few issues are as contentious as issues of style. While some feminists engage in agonistic arguments about the disadvantages and advantages of experimental efforts such as those of Kristeva and Cixous and of personal criticism as practiced by Tompkins and Miller, others focus their inquiry on the difficulty of writing itself. In Woman, Native, Other, for instance, Trinh calls for feminists to embrace “a practice of language which remains, through its signifying operations, a process constantly unsettling the identity of meaning and speaking/writing subject, a process never allowing I to fare without non-I.”86 In the context of such a practice, style marks the borderland where conflicting ideological, cultural, political, and other forces important to both rhetoric and feminism contend.

On Delivery [Delivery] is, essentially, a matter of the right management of the voice to express the various emotions. . . . Those who . . . bear [delivery] in mind . . . usually win prizes in the dramatic contests; and just as in drama . . . , so it is in the contests of public life, owing to the defects of our political institutions. —Aristotle, Rhetoric III.1 Aristotle’s barest outline of the canon of delivery emphasized “the three things—volume of sound, modulation of pitch, and rhythm—that a speaker bears in mind.” Fully aware of rhetoric as public display, as performance art, as the one-time demonstration before a judge

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and jury, Aristotle lamented rhetoric’s “unworthy” yet necessary concern with the delivery of “appearances.” After all, we should “fight our case with no help beyond the bare facts: nothing . . . should matter except the proof of these facts.” But “owing to the defects of our hearers” (that is, to the defects of our humanness), “we must pay attention to the subject of delivery . . . because we cannot do without it.”87 Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor as head of the Peripatetic School, later elaborated and codified this canon, dividing delivery into matters of voice and gesture—or action—and providing rules for each. His now-lost but influential On Delivery informed rhetoric throughout antiquity, as numerous texts attest. The author of Rhetorica ad Herennium details delivery’s “exceptionally great usefulness,”88 for example, and Cicero addresses delivery in De Oratore as “the dominant factor in oratory; without delivery the best speaker cannot be of any account at all, and a moderate speaker with a trained delivery can often outdo the best of them.”89 Delivery is presented in Brutus as that element of rhetoric that “penetrates the mind, shapes, moulds, turns it,”90 and in the Orator as a “sort of language of the body.”91 Quintilian notes that “the nature of the speech we have composed within our minds is not so important as the manner in which we produce it, since the emotion of each member of our audience will depend on the impression made upon his hearing.”92 And both Cicero and Quintilian took apparent pleasure in recounting Demosthenes’ memorable response when asked to list the three most important components of rhetoric: “Delivery, delivery, delivery.”93 Delivery remains vital to rhetoric, given that it is, indeed, the culmination of the composing process, the combination and culmination of all five canons. Whether written, oral, or visual/aural (electronic), each rhetorical act culminates in delivery. Just as the ancient teachers went to great lengths to teach their students rhetorical effectiveness, so, too, have all students, from antiquity to this postmodern era, hoped to inhabit rhetorical power. In writing this essay, for example, we aimed throughout at effective delivery. Just a glance at the lengthy annotated footnotes, the copious examples (our artistic and nonartistic proofs), and our use of time-honored sources indicates how thoroughly we three academic women have attempted to embody the traditional delivery medium of the professional academic essay. Our introduction with its aims of establishing good will, common ground, and good sense; our presentation of topic and explanation of methodology; the very linearity of our argument, in which we use the canons of rhetoric as organizing principles—all these strategies comprise the public performance, the appearance before and attention to a university-trained, international audience, all of whom have easy familiarity with the delivery system represented by an academic journal. But our ability to enter this arena of public academic discourse and to deliver our message is utterly dependent on one crucial item: access not only to the conventions regarding delivery but also to the system of delivery itself. Cicero conflates delivery with the “language of the body,”95 making us particularly conscious of the privilege we enjoy since, as Biesecker (among others) notes, “Rhetoric is a discipline whose distinctive characteristic is its focus on public address, a realm to which women as a class have historically been denied access.”96 Indeed, for

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most of the history of rhetoric in the western world, women generally could not have entered the public arena as we have here. Most women have been closed out of a rhetorical tradition of vocal, public, and, therefore, privileged men, silenced by force and by means of their educations. Nevertheless, women have not been excluded entirely from effective communication. Those whose work we will note here represent only a fraction of the largely as-yet unexplored number of women who have turned to alternative, often private, forms of delivery (in secondary sources, mystical visions, autobiographies, translations, letters, lists, prose-poems, teachings, humor, and recordings by educated males).97 First of all, these women had to gain access to a medium of delivery; then they most often found themselves altering that medium in whatever ways would allow them to speak (through the writings of others, for example), even if those voices reached no attentive audience for centuries. Other women reached a highly educated audience only by translating, filtering their erudition through the words of men. Still others, those who took hold of a system designed for men, shaped the traditionally masculine medium of oral delivery to their own advantage and pushed the boundaries of platform rhetoric to include a broader listening audience. Although largely ignored until very recently, the rhetorical deliveries of these women have ultimately proved as powerful and long-lasting as traditionally masculine displays. By means of secondary sources, fifth-century BCE Aspasia of Miletus, for example, provides one of the earliest examples of women’s use of alternative delivery methods: her work has been delivered to us by the way of men’s writing, for none of Aspasia’s work exists in primary sources.99 Aspasia’s reputation as both a rhetorician and philosopher, as well as the text of her various speeches, have been preserved by men. Given the cultural constraints that limited her, Aspasia used the only media of delivery available—that is, media employed by men. The most important of her compositions may well be Pericles’ Funeral Oration, a moving, patriotic epideictic that the Platonic Socrates recites from memory in the Menexenus.101 Although we have no access to her original text, the Platonic version (an exaggerated encomium abounding with historical misstatements and anachronisms) aligns well with the Platonic Aspasia’s opinions on the efficacy of rhetoric: “It is by means of speech finely spoken that deeds nobly done gain for their doers from the hearers the meed of memory and renown.”102 This version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration also aligns with Aspasia’s reputation as rhetorician, philosopher, and influential colleague in the Sophistic movement, a movement devoted to the analysis and creation of rhetoric and of truth. Aspasia’s oral text, delivered to us in the print medium of secondary sources, not only provides a compelling demonstration of rhetoric’s potential to create belief, but perhaps just as important, her dispersed but still powerful text has at last reached an appreciative audience.103 In old age, illiterate medieval mystic Margery Burnham Kempe (1373-c.1439) used the oral system of delivery to dictate the story of her life to scribes. The Book of Margery Kempe, left unidentified until five hundred years after it was written, recounts the trials and triumphs of her worldly and spiritual pilgrimages, gives voice to the silent, middle-class, uneducated

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woman, and appears to be the earliest extant autobiography in the English language.104 Despite her lack of formal literacy and training, Kempe located herself within the particular discourse of Franciscan affective piety, where she could self-consciously author and own the story of her life, create her self, record her spiritual development, and, most importantly, validate her life and her mystical visions.105 Kempe knew well the power of the written word, so she attached herself to the oral component of that written word, studying (listening to and memorizing) with a priest until she became literate—without being able to read and write (without being text-dependent). And her employment of an amanuensis enabled her to leave a written record of her oral deliveries, a written record intended, no doubt, for oral performance or delivery. Thus, her Book is Kempe’s unique inscription of rhetorical practice and delivery. It demonstrates the way in which one woman, denied ready access to the print medium, refracted her oral discourse through a scribe and sent her message down to us. Renaissance intellect Margaret More Roper (1504–44), daughter of Thomas More, delivers her rhetorical skill in her translation of Erasmus’ Devout treatise upon the Pater noster (1524). Considered derivative, defective, and muted, the feminine art of translation posed no threat to the masculine art of composition—not even when the translation itself became a major intellectual influence. Roper’s translation remains one of the earliest examples of the Englishing of Erasmian piety; in addition, it broke new ground as part of a broad campaign directed at the English-reading public in that it domesticated and disseminated Erasmus’ view of the devotional life. Translations provided Roper an outlet for her rhetorical skills and a measure of intellectual and religious influence but only because she chose decorously to conceal her voice and identity as a writer in the work of a known and accepted author, only because she delivered her thoughts through the words of men, within the constraints of womanly modesty, piety, and humility. Like Kempe, Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) remained illiterate all her life, though she drew deep from the wellsprings of oral tradition, delivering her own words through her own body. This former slave commanded large audiences whenever she spoke to the two most crucial political and social issues of her day: slavery and suffrage. At a time when the science of voice, gesture, and elocution were all the rage in rhetorical circles, at a time when (white) women’s presence at a pulpit, a podium, a platform, or the bar was often illegal (the presence of a black woman would have been unimaginable), Truth’s rhetoric of practicality shot through the fog of belletristic display. Like Kempe, she, too, appropriated the medium of oral delivery to her own end. Indeed, in contrast to most contemporary oral delivery, Truth made use of simple, straightforward language in an attempt to reach the broadest possible audience, fusing her simple style with her simple delivery. As Suzanne Pullon Fitch notes, Truth’s “use of the simple language of the uneducated, which she could weave into striking narrative and metaphors, her nearly six-foot frame that revealed the strength developed working as a farmhand and house maid, and her powerful low voice telling of her denied rights as a woman and an AfricanAmerican made her one of the most forceful instruments of reform.”106 Truth’s physical bear-

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ing, enhanced by her use of simple language and memorable stories, helped her reach her goal, that of a more inclusive audience engagement and participation. How different the “plain style” delivery of this woman was from the formal rhetorical delivery so common among nineteenth-century American public speakers, nearly all of whom were males. So memorable (and perhaps threatening) was this alternative rhetorical display— in terms of her style, her delivery, her arrangement, and her subject—that one pro-slavery newspaper wrote: “She is a crazy, ignorant, repelling negress, and her guardians would do a Christian act to restrict her entirely to private life.”107 Yet this “ignorant” woman continued in the public sphere, exhorting note-taking college students to “put their notes in their heads”108 and parlaying her illiteracy into stylized delivery: “You know, children, I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations. I can see through a millstone, though I can’t see through a spelling-book. What a narrow idea a reading qualification is for a voter! I know and do what is right better than many big men who read.”109 On these and many other occasions, Truth clearly practiced Cicero’s dictum for delivery as the “language of the body.” Still, hers was an alternative delivery, the only practice available for an illiterate, slave-class, black woman, particularly a woman who wanted to transform hostile and separatist audiences with a rhetoric of inclusion. Truth is only one in a long tradition of women who have attempted to appropriate conventional oral delivery to their own ends. If we turn to contemporary America for another example, we might well point to the former governor of Texas, Ann Willis Richards, who, like Truth, uses oral delivery—valorized speech and language—to seek out, speak, and listen to new voices. In the United States, Richards, perhaps best known for her 1988 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, participates fully in public, political, argumentative, powerful rhetoric—rhetoric in our most traditional(ly masculine) sense. But her participation is on her own terms, that of a woman, a feminist, who easily conflates the public with the private, inviting more and more people into her audience. If a commonplace in feminist theory is the link between where one stands—and delivers—in society and what one perceives, then feminist Richards self-consciously enters the political arena, perceiving with great clarity not only her own position but that of male privilege. Ever-mindful of her audience, Richards carefully avoids elitism, agonism, and paternalism, enacting, instead in her platform delivery—a fierce “maternalism” that embraces her constituents. From the platform, she reads letters from the disempowered and downtrodden. From the platform, she testifies to the benefits of inclusion, cooperation, and connection, qualities often associated with the feminine. From the platform, she reaches out to all women who worry about their families and children, to all grandmothers who want life to promise steady improvements for their generations, to all feminists who join Richards in hoping that her granddaughter Lily may never believe “that there was a time when blacks could not drink from public water fountains, when Hispanic children were punished for speaking Spanish in the public schools and women couldn’t vote.”110 She delivers all these messages with homely examples (a staple

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of platform rhetoric) and common sense (one of her favorite lines is, “Tell it so my Mama in Waco can understand it”). As she fuses her style with her delivery, she transforms her politics through her female body, and she speaks from the borderlands of women in politics—all to the advantage of her rhetorical power. In addition to providing us an example of (traditionally masculine) delivery informed by feminine/feminist ethics, Richards also exemplifies an oral delivery inscribed in and by different media. With (seemingly) full access to all systems of delivery, Richards speaks aloud from her written text to a “live” audience as well as to the audiences who hear her on the radio, watch and listen to her on television, and read excerpts from her speech in the newspaper—a merger of electronic, written, and oral media. [. . .] Just as the history of rhetoric cannot be written from rhetoric books alone, neither can the canon of delivery be theorized beyond the point of successful practice. As we hope this discussion has revealed, border-crossings between rhetoric and feminism can help us better to appreciate the power of past practices. In looking to present and future practices, we have suggested that when rhetoric and feminism come together, as in this interrogation of the canon of delivery, both are transformed. Rhetoric, a vibrant process of inquiring, organizing, and thinking, offers a theorized space to talk about delivery. And feminism offers a reason to “bridge differences (rather than to create them), to include (rather than to exclude), and to empower (rather than to seek power or weakness).”113 So when our discussion of delivery includes theories and artifacts that represent both the traditions of agonism, confidence, and competitiveness as well as more recently embodied examples of inclusion, cooperation, and identification, and when we put these influential feminine voices in dialogue with traditionally masculine deliveries, we move beyond a rhetoric of masculine privilege to a transformed rhetorical practice. Standing on the borderlands of rhetoric and feminism allows us to imagine a much wider, much more inclusive range of successful deliveries and fruitful border-crossings.

Conclusion The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us. —Aristotle, Rhetoric I.2 Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera 16

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In taking this excursus among the rhetorical canons, we have been especially conscious of our central metaphor—the borderlands (la frontera) of rhetoric and feminism. For us, this metaphor has been most powerful in its nuanced indeterminacy, its quiet reminder that borderlands shift and overlap, that they are, as Anzaldúa notes, in “a constant state of transition.”114 Indeed, as our discussion of the rhetorical canons has demonstrated, their borders also inevitably blur. At one point in working on this essay, we found ourselves disagreeing, to cite just one instance, as to whether we should discuss as style or delivery the dissonance between Goldman’s presentation of public self (her refusal to smile, to defer) and the gendered expectations of her popular lecture audiences. How can it be possible to separate style from delivery, we wondered, when both are so intimately connected with the rhetor’s subjectivity and ethos and with the specifics of the particular rhetorical situation? We thus found relevant to our experience in composing this essay Trinh’s insight that “despite our desperate, eternal attempts to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak.”115 Such leakage is, we believe, not only inevitable but helpful, for it reminds us that categories—and their boundaries and borderlands—are “sites of historicized struggles.”116 In some of these historical moments, rhetoric and feminism have had few if any intersections. As the headnote from Aristotle’s Rhetoric that begins this essay indicates, rhetoric was constituted as a patriarchal, exclusionary discipline, and it remained so for centuries. When Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine considered the nature and province of rhetoric, they did not imagine that women—or those gendered feminine by their race, class, psychology, or other characteristics—might wish or be able to employ what Aristotle terms “the available means of persuasion” to communicate their ideas. As our discussion indicates, however, those whom rhetoric has gendered as “Other” have, nevertheless, employed strategies that those working within the rhetorical tradition have recognized as “rhetoric” to form, shape, and express their ideas. In our contemporary historical moment, feminism and rhetoric stand, along with a number of other disciplines amid a rich and intricate landscape—a landscape that postmodern and poststructural critique has complicated with its skeptical probings. In such a landscape, congruences as well as dissimilarities between rhetoric and feminism appear. Both fields, for example, place high value on process, as the longevity and influence of the canons and feminism’s persistent commitment to working through to an understanding rather than to (premature) closure both demonstrate. In both fields, this focus on process signals a larger commitment to linking theory with practice, to recognizing and valuing local and applied knowledges. And both fields share a long-standing concern for public values and the public good, for creating spaces within which human subjectivities, at least potentially, can be realized, celebrated, and expanded. Both fields have also demonstrated, it goes without saying, that they are capable of both conscious and unconscious hierarchies and exclusions, that they are, as Burke so eloquently indicates, “rotten with perfection.”117 We have already discussed feminism’s belated recognition

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of the extent to which its scholarly and political project excludes women of color. As feminist theory has gained academic respectability—as scholars who viewed themselves as radical in the 1970s and 1980s have become tenured professors in the 1990s—a number of feminists, such as Kolodny, have become concerned that “Respectability Is Eroding the Revolutionary Potential of Feminist Criticism.”118 And feminists have been forced to recognize that they can be as agonistic, as competitive, as the most traditionally masculinist academic. In Gallop, Hirsch, and Miller’s “Criticizing Feminist Criticism,” for instance, Miller describes a particular vehement public attack on her work and her resulting recognition that she had “learned to fear other women in a way [she] hadn’t done until that point.”119 At the level of practice, then, feminists have become increasingly aware of the need to develop an ethics of communication. Such an ethics would also address an urgent theoretical question of concern to many contemporary feminists: how to justify and forward feminism’s scholarly and political project given postmodern and poststructural skepticism about traditional humanistic argumentation. Once aware, as Judith Butler notes, that “the subject who theorizes is constituted as a ‘theorizing subject’ by a set of exclusionary and selective procedures,”120 feminists must acknowledge the interestedness and situatedness of their own discourse. As a consequence, they must address, rather than evade, the question of rhetoric. In Thinking Fragments, for instance, Flax begins her last chapter with this statement: A fundamental and unresolved question pervading this book is how to justify—or even frame—theoretical and narrative choices (including my own) without recourse to “truth” or domination. I am convinced we can and should justify our choices to ourselves and others, but what forms these justifications can meaningfully assume is not clear to me.121 As a tradition that has for centuries concerned itself with the question of how rhetors can and should justify their choices, rhetoric has, we believe, much to offer contemporary feminist theory and practice. For as our discussion of the canons has, we hope, indicated, rhetoric offers a rich conceptual framework and terminology that could prove heuristic as feminists attempt to probe and articulate these and other concerns. As Susan Brown Carlton notes, rhetoric could enable feminists to reconstruct what many have experienced as a contentious “philosophical impasse as a map of rhetorical options available for voicing the feminist stance.”l22 Rhetoric would also benefit, we believe, if the borderlands between rhetoric and feminism were more fully explored. Mining the borders of feminism and rhetoric would seem to offer intriguing interconnections and new ratios among logos, pathos, and ethos, ones that would expand the province of rhetorical proof and hence speak to and with wider and more diverse audiences. In insisting on the value of the local, the personal, the private, the mythic, for example, Anzaldúa’s discourse embodies a set of proofs that transcends dualisms by embracing multiple understandings. The complex processes of knowing that Anzaldúa’s work enacts (and invites) resituate proofs so that, as Lata Mani observes, “The relation between experience and

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knowledge is now seen to be not one of correspondence but one fraught with history, contingency, and struggle.”123 In addition, sustaining a position on the borderlands of rhetoric and feminism holds promise of more complex and multiplicitous understandings of human communication, of how meanings arise and are inscribed. From this vantage point, the angles of the rhetorical triangle—speaker, hearer, text—become shape-shifters, three-dimensional and elastic points of contact, of location. Discussing this elasticity in another context, Michele Wallace describes the movement involved in this way of apprehending the world not as one of fixed stances (as writer or reader, for example), but as self-consciously “travelling from one position to another, thinking one’s way from one position to another” and back again.124 Perhaps most importantly, Anzaldúa’s mestiza borderland consciousness may create a space for public discourse that is inclusive, that accepts difference and Others, as Kristeva, Spivak, and hooks insist it must, without colonizing and also without shutting down exchange. Such an effort calls for considerable self-reflectiveness, a self-reflectiveness that requires rhetors to “become accountable for . . . [their] own investments in cultural metaphors and values,” as well as a willingness to experiment, to take risks.125 It also calls, as hooks wisely observes, for the continuing recognition that “it is not just important what we speak about, but how and why we speak.”126 As this essay has argued, from a perspective that borders rhetoric and feminism, attention to “what we speak about” and “how and why we speak” urges all of us not only to continued exploration and interrogation but also to a renewed responsibility for our professional and personal discursive acts.

Notes 1 [. . .] Please note that the alphabetical listing of our names represents one attempt to resist the privileging of a “first” author and indicates the degree to which the thinking about and writing of this essay have been equally shared and thoroughly collaborative throughout. 2 We are aware that many historians of rhetoric challenge the foundational stories of western rhetoric (Richard Enos, Greek Rhetoric before Aristotle [Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1993]; Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, forthcoming]; Susan Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988]; Takis Poulakos, Rethinking the History of Rhetoric [Boulder: Westview, 1993); C. Jan Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]; Victor Vitanza, Writing Histories of Rhetoric [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994]; Kathleen Welch, The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric [Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1990]; and many others). [. . .] 3 (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford, 1988), p. viii. 4 See Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950); IJsseling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict: An Historical Survey, trans. Paul Dumphy (The Hague: Martinus

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Nijhoff, 1976); and Grassi, Rhetoric and Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980). 5 In Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 30–31, Flax populates the “Enlightenment” story with “major themes and characters”: (1) a coherent, stable self (the author); (2) a distinctive and privileged mode of story-telling-philosophy (the critic and judge) and a particular notion of “truth” (the hero); (3) a distinctive political philosophy (the moral) that posits complex and necessary interconnections among reason, autonomy, and freedom; (4) a transparent medium of expression (language); (5) an optimistic and rationalist philosophy of human nature (character development); and (6) a philosophy of knowledge (an ideal form). 6 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. vii. [. . .] 8 As we crossed disciplinary borders in this essay, we appreciated the work (and implications thereof) of Gloria Anzaldúa. Her compelling Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987) brilliantly articulates the promises—and dangers—inherent in crossing borders: cultural, political, racial, ethnic, and sexual borders. Anzaldúa tells us that to survive the Borderlands, we must “live sin fronteras [without borders]” (p. 195). To be conscious of Borderlands is, according to Anzaldúa, to develop a new consciousness, a mestiza consciousness and tolerance of blurring, instability, struggle, contradictions, and ambiguity (pp. 77ff.)—the very fabric of full human consciousness itself. [. . .] 11 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 2. [. . .] 14 Warhol and Hemdl’s 1991 Feminisms argues for the regular use of the term, which acknowledges the diversity of motivation, method, and experience among feminist academics. [. . .] 15 Southern Communication Journal 57 (Winter 1992): 88. l6 Ibid. 17 Kathleen Welch, “Reconfiguring Writing and Delivery in Secondary Orality, “ in Rhetorical Memory and Delivery, ed. John Frederick Reynolds (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1993), p. 17. 18 “The Platonic Paradox: Plato’s Rhetoric in Contemporary Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” Written Communication 5 (1988): 5–6. 19 “Modern Rhetoric and Memory,” in Reynolds, Rhetorical Memory and Delivery, p. 35. 20 Aristotle, The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle (1954; rpt. New York: Modern Library, 1984), I.2. 21 Partitiones Oratoriae, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1979), p. 26. [. . .] 25 “Choosing the Margins as Space of Radical Openness,” Framework 36 (1989): 16. 26 “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), pp. 53–54. 27 “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Thought 59 (1984): 385. [. . .] 30 “Ciceronian Dispositio as an Architecture for Creativity in Composition: A Note for the Affirmative,” Rhetoric Review 4 (Sept. 1985): 108. 31 Rhetoric I.2. 32 A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 43. 33 “The Womanization of Rhetoric,” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 2 (1979): 195. [. . .] 34 “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (Mar. 1995): 2–18. [. . .]

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Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End, 1989), p. 77. “Me and My Shadow,” New Literary History 19 (Autumn 1987): 172. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 178. 40 “Margaret Fuller: Inventing a Feminist Discourse,” in Lunsford, Reclaiming Rhetorica, pp.137– 36 37

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Ibid., pp. 139–40. See Elements of Rhetoric (1828; rpt. in The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately, eds. James L. Golden and Edward P. J. Corbett [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990]). 43 “Margaret Fuller,” p. 159. 44 “ Laugh of the Medusa,” in The Signs Reader, eds. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 279–97. 45 “Writing Against Writing: The Predicament of Ecriture Féminine in Composition Studies,” in Contending With Words, eds. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb (New York: Modern Language Assoc., 1991), pp. 82–104. 46 In Warhol and Herndl Feminisms, p. 458. 47 “Julia Kristeva and the Woman as Stranger,” in Lunsford, Reclaiming Rhetorica, p. 309. 48 Ibid., p. 308. 49 Ibid., p. 314. 50 Ibid., p. 305. 54 Rhetoric III.l. 55 Ibid. 56 p. 380. 57 Aristotle, Rhetoric III.1. 58 Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, p. 381. [. . .] 59 p. 65. [. . .] 60 Trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1960), p. 44. 61 Qtd. in Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 58–59. [. . .] 65 Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 52. 66 Ibid., p. 55. 67 Ibid., p. 53. 68 Ibid., p. 31. 69 Ibid., p. 47. 70 Ibid., p. 54. 71 Ibid., p. 65. 72 Ibid., p. 45. 73 (Boston: Beacon, 1987). 74 Jane Hedley, “Surviving to Speak New Language: Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich,” Hypatia 7 (Spring 1992): 43. [. . .] 75 Websters,’ p. 167. 76 (Boston: Beacon, 1978). 41

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p. 67. Ibid., p. 71. 79 In Multi-Cultural Literacy: Opening the American Mind, eds. Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1988), pp. 63–81. 80 Ibid., p. 81. 81 See Cisneros, House on Mango Street (New York: Random House, 1994). 82 Recent examples include Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); hooks’s Talking Back; Tompkins’ “Me and My Shadow,” pp. 169–78; and Marianna Torgovnick’s edited collection Eloquent Obsessions: Writing Cultural Criticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 83 The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 24. 84 p. 47. 85 Yearning, p. 21. 86 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 76. 87 Aristotle, Rhetoric III.1. 88 Trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 3.11.19. 89 Trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3.56.213. 90 Cicero, Brutus, On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, On Duties, trans. Hubert M. Poteat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 28.142. 91 Cicero, Brutus, Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell, respectively (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 17.55. 92 Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (1920; rpt. London: Heinemann, 1969), 11.3.2. 93 Ibid., 11.3–6. [. . .] 95 Orator 17.55. 96 “Toward a Transactional View of Rhetorical and Feminist Theory: Rereading Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa,” Southern Communication Journal 57 (Winter 1992): 87. 97 Nor can we here explore the delivery of silence, a traditionally undervalued feminine mode, given the western tendency to valorize speech and language. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Listening to Silences [New York: Oxford University Press, 1944]) have recently helped us understand the expressive, positive powers of silence when it denotes alertness and sensitivity, when it signifies attentiveness or stoicism, and particularly when it seeks out and listens to new voices. Such explorations remind us of how much more we may yet learn here. [. . .] 99 Nor, of course, does any of Socrates’ work, but the historical tradition has readily accepted secondary accounts of his influence, teaching, and beliefs. The same cannot be said for any female counterpart. [. . .] 101 Plato, Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury (1929; rpt. London: Heinemann-Loeb, 1981), 240e ff. l02 Ibid., 236e. [. . .] l04 In 1934, Hope Emily Allen identified and helped Sanford Brown Meech edit the unique manuscript, long the possession of the W. Butler-Bowden estate. (Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, eds. Hope Emily Allen and Sanford Brown Meech [London: Oxford University Press, 1940].) [. . .] 77 78

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“Sojourner Truth,” in Women Speakers in the United States: 1800–1925; 1925–1993, ed. Karyln Kohrs Campbell, 2 vols. (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1993), 1:421. l07 Qtd. in ibid., 1:428. l08 Harriet Carter, “Sojourner Truth,” Chautauquan 7 (May 1887): 479. 109 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1985), 2:926. 110 Ibid., 2:649. [. . .] 113 Jamie R. Barlowe, conversation among the contributors in the “Afterword,” Lunsford, Reclaiming Rhetorica, p. 327. 114 Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 3. 115 Woman, Native, Other, p. 94. 116 Kaplan, French Lessons, p. 149. 117 Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 16. 118 The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4, 1988, p. A52. 119 See Conflicts in Feminism, p. 352. 120 “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 8. 121 p. 222. 122 “Voice and the Naming of Woman,” in Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994), p. 240. 123 “Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception,” Inscriptions 5 (1989): 4. 124 “The Politics of Location: Cinema/Theory/Literature/Ethnicity/Sexuality/Me,” Framework 36 (1989): 53. 125 Kaplan, French Lessons, p. 139. 126 Yearning, p. 151. 106

Bathsheba’s Dilemma: Defining, Discovering, and Defending Anglo-American Feminist Theories of Rhetoric(s)* Krista Ratcliffe “I have the feelings of a woman,” says Bathsheba [Everdene] in Far from the Madding Crowd, “ but I have only the language of men.” —Virginia Woolf, “Men and Women” For centuries, Bathsheba’s dilemma has troubled women differently in their daily lives, affecting their listening and speaking as well as their reading and writing.1 But this dilemma need not be read as suggesting that women and men literally speak different languages. Rather, it may be read as exposing, first, that Woman and Man occupy different relationships to language within the symbolic and, second, that each woman occupies a particular subject position within the symbolic, depending on her ever changing intersections of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, history, nationality, culture, and so on.2 Bathsheba’s dilemma is not acknowledged in traditional theories of rhetoric; instead, they perpetuate, among other things, a tradition of gender-blindness. Consider Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives. To demonstrate that the range of rhetoric includes poetics, Burke invokes Milton’s Samson who is “enraged with himself for having ‘divulged / The secret gift of God to a deceitful / Woman’ ” (3). By analyzing Samson’s rhetorical situation only in terms of Samson’s suffering and violence, Burke leaves readers wondering whether the range of rhetoric includes the unnamed but ever present Delilah. Feminist challenges to the rhetorical traditions are presently emerging to address such genderblindness with the hope of recognizing, validating, and addressing Bathsheba’s dilemma. Although feminist challenges have carved out spaces for themselves within rhetoric and composition circles, they hardly presume theoretical consensus. Indeed, they define *  Pages 1-31, as appearing in Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich by Krista Ratcliffe © 1996 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University, reproduced by permission of the publisher. 80

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Bathsheba’s dilemma differently.3 Some feminist challenges study women’s construction of knowledge claims (e.g., Mary Field Belenky, Elizabeth Flynn, Carol Gilligan, Jane Tedesco); others study women’s textual strategies (e.g., Pamela Caughie, Mary P Hiatt, bell hooks); others study how rhetorical theories position women and Woman (e.g., Linda Brodkey, Margaret Fell, Susan Jarratt, Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede); others study rhetorical theories that women themselves have constructed (e.g., Cheryl Glenn, Barbara Johnson, C. Jan Swearingen); still others study intersections of rhetorical theory and pedagogy (e.g., Florence Howe, Susan Osborn, Marjorie Curry Woods); or as Virginia Woolf claims about women and literature in A Room of One’s Own, they may study some combination thereof (3). Many feminist challenges to the rhetorical traditions draw from studies in other disciplines, interrogating their claims, methodologies, and assumptions in order to determine their implications for the history, theory, and pedagogy of rhetoric and composition studies (Horner 206). An important implication that emerges concerns methodology. Like feminist challenges to literary, historical, and philosophical traditions, feminist challenges to the rhetorical traditions may employ a variety of interwoven moves: (1) recovering, (2) rereading, (3) extrapolating, and (4) conceptualizing.5 Recovering involves the archaeological project of discovering lost or marginalized theories of rhetoric. Because Cary Nelson’s three axioms for recovering literary texts provide a means not only for expanding canons but also for critiquing the criteria by which canons are constructed, they could easily be adopted for rhetoric and composition projects: (1) retain texts that were popular or influential in particular periods, such as Ida B. Wells’ speeches, a move that will reconstruct history; (2) retain texts that people repeatedly claim are worthless—for instance, Eudora Ramsey Richardson’s text on women’s public speaking—a move that will continually force us to critique our biases; and (3) recover writers and theorists, like Margaret Fell and Audre Lorde, who have dropped out or been left out of rhetorical histories, a move that may force us off the page and into cultural gaps (Recovery 51). Once recovered, women’s rhetorical theories may be constructed into a separate rhetorical tradition or incorporated into the existing corpus of rhetorical theories. The first option assumes a gynocritical stance that emphasizes differences among women’s texts, as exemplified in Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica and Mary Ellen Waithe’s two-volume A History of Women Philosophers. The second option assumes a desegregated stance that puts women’s theories into play “equally” with men’s, as attempted in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition. Although both options serve important functions, they each pose potential pitfalls that must be guarded against: the first could allow women’s rhetorical theories to degenerate into a separate but unequal position, and the second could allow women’s rhetorical theories to become mere tokens. Moreover, because both methodologies are based on identity, both options focus on recovering specific women and their texts, a strategy that revolves around the question Who is speaking? and relegates unidentified texts into the anonymous category. Barbara Biesecker proposes an alternative means of concep-

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tualizing history, arguing that feminist histories of rhetoric should construct a new narrative. This new narrative would not frame histories around specific subjects as agents—for example, Woolf, Daly, and Rich. Instead, it would foreground the forces that make speaking possible, such as a textual analysis of discursive positions (148). To Biesecker’s claim, however, I would add the following question: What forces, including who is (not) speaking, made particular speaking subjects (im)possible? Rereading entails revising our interpretations of canonical and recovered theories of rhetoric. Rereading canonical theories may not only reaffirm their valuable contributions to rhetorical studies but also explode their patriarchal assumptions and implications for composition studies. Phyllis Lassner provides an example of this latter move in her feminist rereading of Rogerian argument. Rereading canonical theories may give voice to women’s/Woman’s silenced contributions, shedding light on their visible absences that may be perceived as flitting presences only in prefaces, footnotes, dedications, or margins. Such projects either may focus on real historical women, as in Cheryl Glenn’s study of Aspasia’s influence on Socrates’ concept of rhetoric and Drema Lipscomb’s study of Sojourner Truth’s influence on public discourse, or they may focus on the analytic category of Woman, as in Page duBois’s philosophical project and Susan Jarratt’s rhetorical one (Sophists). Rereading canonical theories may also result in the construction of feminist theories of rhetoric, as in Dale Bauer’s rereading of Bakhtin’s discourse theory (Feminist Dialogics). Furthermore, rereading women’s recovered theories and judging them by contemporary criteria might uncover important contributions to rhetorical studies, as exemplified by Bizzell and Herzberg’s inclusion of Sarah Grimke’s defense of Anglo-American women’s public speaking and by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s inclusion of Mary Church Terrell’s critique of African American women’s public speaking (Man Cannot Speak). Though not all recovered theories emerge from a feminist ideology, such theories may be reread for feminist purposes, that is, to foreground how gendered claims and strategies affect rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy. Extrapolating entails rereading non-rhetoric texts (essays, etiquette manuals, cookbooks, fiction, diaries, etc.) as theories of rhetoric. That is, theories of rhetoric may be extrapolated from women’s and/or feminists’ critiques of language as well as from the textual strategies of such critiques.7 For example, Bizzell and Herzberg encourage readers to view Christine de Pisan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies as both a rhetoric manual and an etiquette book delineating Renaissance women’s courtly gestures; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell posits a genderrelated theory of feminine style based on the ideas and textual strategies of nineteenth-century feminist orators, such as Maria W. Miller Stewart and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Man Cannot Speak); and Patricia Yaeger conceptualizes a theory of emancipatory style of women’s writing based on the ideas and textual strategies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s literature. Given that few rhetoric texts by women have been, or are likely to be, recovered and given that much of the modern and contemporary research and personal musings about women and language has occurred outside the field of rhetoric and composition,

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extrapolation may prove a rich interdisciplinary resource for rhetoric and composition scholars who are interested in constructing women’s and feminist theories of rhetoric. One point about this extrapolating move should be noted, lest an extrapolated theory be mistaken for a positivistic rendering of the nonrhetoric texts: as in ethnographic studies, the person extrapolating the theory influences the resulting theory. Conceptualizing implies writing new theories of rhetoric. The debates that rage about this process parallel debates between liberal and radical feminisms, that is, between working within institutional structures or overturning these structures. Should feminists situate their theories within rhetorical traditions, or should we question any connection with such traditions? Though these two questions appear separate, they are not. Because we are born into language, we cannot escape the dominant discourse of the symbolic. No space exists in which feminists may stand to begin totally anew, for Aristotle writes us as much as we may write (against) him. But because the dominant discourse is not static, it may be revised. Hence, two possibilities arise. The first is that new rhetorical theories and practices may emerge from the old. Roxanne Mountford, however, cautions us about relying too heavily on the old: “appropriating classical rhetorics without deeply transforming them from the point of view of the disadvantaged—those who would seek to enter some kind of public forum, some institutionalized discourse, without the benefit of the elite, white, maleness that classical rhetoric presumes its students to have—is foolhardy” (“Feminist Theory” 2). The second possibility is that the unconceptualized that-which-already-exists may be conceptualized. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell contends that such projects will radically challenge our fundamental assumptions about rhetoric (“Sound of Women’s Voices” 214); bell hooks contends that such projects will also force us to ask the questions Who is listening and What is being heard? (“Young Soldier” 14). The potential of these two possible conceptualizing moves puts liberal feminisms and radical feminisms into play. Liberal feminists must recognize that particular changes within structures can change the structures, and radical feminists must recognize that new structures emerge from existing ones, whether that emergence is violent or peaceful, fast or slow, conscious or unconscious. The implications of these conceptualizing moves are enormous. They encourage not a passive acceptance of structural oppression but rather Julia Kristeva’s “radical refusal of the subjective limitations” of the structure of dominant discourse (“Women’s Time” 20). They also reject the desire for a totalizing theory and embrace the possibilities of multiple theories that articulate multiple standpoints and practices. All four moves—recovering, rereading, extrapolating, conceptualizing, or some combination thereof—offer tremendous potential for challenging our rhetorical traditions. But if the recovery of women’s and feminist theories of rhetoric proves as difficult as Bizzell and Herzberg imply (670), then rereading, extrapolating, and conceptualizing may become crucial research functions for rhetoric and composition research about Bathsheba’s dilemma.

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Focusing on the extrapolating option, I offer the following critical question for this study: How may Virginia Woolf ’s, Mary Daly’s, and Adrienne Rich’s Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric be extrapolated from their feminist texts about women, language, and culture in ways that productively complicate the genderblindness of traditional rhetoric and composition history, theory, and pedagogy? As one response to this question, I examine the interrelationship between what Woolf, Daly, and Rich write and how they write; in other words, I extrapolate their feminist theories of rhetoric from their interwoven claims and textual strategies. I offer these extrapolated theories not as positivistic truths lying just under the surface of these feminists’ texts, not as the final words on feminism and rhetoric and composition studies, and certainly not as totalizing visions that speak to and for all women. Rather, I offer these extrapolated theories as my readings of three women’s texts, readings that inform my rhetoric and composition studies every time I sit down to write or walk into a classroom. I hope this study contributes to the continuing conversations about feminisms and the rhetorical traditions by inviting readers not only to question how Woman, women, and feminists have been located as a part of, and apart from, these traditions but also to explore the implications of such locations for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy. This chapter [. . . discusses] how Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric may be defined, discovered, and defended. The defining section establishes the theoretical perspective of this study and defines Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric. The discovering section rereads Roland Barthes’s essay “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Mémoire” to locate gaps in the received tradition that Woolf ’s, Daly’s, and Rich’s theories might fill or expand. Finally, the defending section argues that these three theories do indeed provide important Anglo-American feminist challenges to the rhetorical traditions.

Defining Anglo-American Feminist Theories of Rhetoric(s) My project, with its focus on Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric, offers multiple readings and, as such, demands definitions.9 My use of the term feminist refers to a materialist feminism that can be positioned, in part, in relation to the following terms: female is defined as characteristics grounded in biological sex differences, feminine as behaviors grounded in socially constructed gender differences, women as nonessentialist real-life historical subjects, Woman as an analytic category, and feminist as an ethical stance that foregrounds sexual and gender concerns as a particularly productive means of demystifying and critiquing the cultural matrix—including the complexities of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religious preference, geographical location, and so on, within which power relations function. A materialist-feminist stance cites language as an important arena of political struggle but is skeptical of isolating language and abstractions from other arenas of struggle (Newton and Rosenfelt xxi). Such a stance locates feminism as a site of inquiry from which arise possibilities for (re)visioning multiple concerns within a specific culture. Moreover, this feminist

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revisioning is not passive. It entails (re)writing the past and the present, not to ignore the roles of men but to draw attention to gendered actions, biases, and assumptions as well as the accompanying inequities of power. Since men’s roles have usually been the primary focus in history, since men themselves have usually been the primary interpreters of their roles in history, and since the construction of these “facts” occurs within discourse, an interrogation of language that exposes the constructed “nature” of ideology becomes crucial to the materialist feminist project of revision. Through this feminist revisioning, political stances are translated into action so that personal and collective change is not only imagined but effected. And this imagining and effecting are what introduce the space of rhetoric as well as the need for feminist theories of rhetoric. The materialist feminism of this study is complicated, however, by the term Anglo-American. Even though Woolf is Protestant, Daly is “Nag-Gnostic,” and Rich is Jewish, I situate these women within feminist tradition(s) that Toril Moi names Anglo-American. This classification implies a materialist feminism possessed of the ethical stance described above; it also implies a feminism admittedly situated in the white privilege of British and North American traditions. Situated in relation to African American feminist tradition(s), Caribbean American ones, Native American ones, French ones, and so on, the white privilege that is particularly located within the Anglo-American feminist tradition(s) raises certain questions, particularly questions of definition relating to the terms women and Woman. The problematics of these definitions are well articulated by bell hooks: Historically, white patriarchs rarely referred to the racial identity of white women because they believed that the subject of race was political and therefore would contaminate the sanctified domain of “white” woman’s reality. By verbally denying white women racial identity, that is by simply referring to them as women when what they meant was white women, their status was further reduced to that of a non-person. . . . White feminists did not challenge the racist-sexist tendency to use the word “woman” to refer solely to white women; they supported it. For them it served two purposes. First, it allowed them to proclaim white men world oppressors while making it appear linguistically that no alliance existed between white women and white men based on shared racial imperialism. Second, it made possible for white women to act as if alliances did exist between themselves and non-white women in our society, and by doing so they could deflect attention away from their classism and racism. (“Race and Feminism” 140) Jackie Jones Royster offers one solution to this problem: we must name everybody before we can stop naming anyone.

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Considering hooks’s critique and Royster’s solution, I name my study Anglo-American so as to respect the differences among feminists in general and to stipulate my focus on AngloAmerican feminist theories of rhetoric in particular. For as Judith Levine has claimed in “White Like Me,” Anglo-American feminists have an ethical imperative to deal with race at this particular historical moment, to move beyond discussing race mostly, or only, in terms of “the Other” (23). Such a move exposes what many people with white privilege often forget: that race is marked on Anglo-American women as well as on African American women or Native American women or Chicana women, and that particular differences exist within each of these categories.[. . .] Thus, as Toni Morrison has encouraged literary theorists to do (Playing 6), I attempt to articulate how the silences whispers, images, and arguments about race have contributed to the presence of the Anglo-American identities within Woolf ’s Daly’s, and Rich’s theories.12 [. . .] Despite our culture’s powerful socializing tendency to define feminist as man-hater, my title’s emphasis on challenges is, first of all, not a separatist move. I do not deny the effectiveness of men’s rhetorical theories, whether they be those of Aristotle, Augustine, Burke, Roland Barthes, or Henry Louis Gates. I believe, for instance, that Aristotelian rhetorical theory is so pervasive in our culture that it is inscribed on and in our bodies and that, consequently, we should understand it and use it for our own ends. Yet we must also be honest about its limitations: for example, its genderblindness. My emphasis on challenges is, second of all, not a nurturing move, which may seem strange, perhaps not supportive enough, for some feminists and nonfeminists alike. But my goal is to confront conflicts while respecting my readers and students, not to create a “safe space” in theory or in pedagogy. For even though safe spaces seemingly provide temporary harbors from a violent world, they usually exist only in the scholar/teacher’s mind. Indeed, such spaces too often deny the very real conflicts inside and outside our minds and, more importantly for our students, inside and outside our classrooms. Susan Jarratt articulates this stance particularly well: “[M]y hopes are pinned on [a theoretical conversation and] a composition course . . . in which students argue about the ethical implications of discourse on a wide range of subjects and, in doing so, come to identify their personal interests with others, understand those interests as implicated in a larger communal setting, and advance them in a public voice” (“Feminism and Composition” 121). The term rhetoric that I employ in this book problematizes Kenneth Burke’s concept, which merges “its use of identification and its nature as addressed” (Rhetoric of Motives 45). As Burke himself claims, this rhetorical function pervades all aspects of culture: “We can place in terms of rhetoric all those statements by anthropologists, ethnologists, individual and social psychologists, and the like, that bear upon the persuasive aspects of language, the function of language as addressed, as direct or roundabout appeal to real or ideal audiences, without or within” (44). This definition posits rhetoric as a conscious and unconscious socializing function of language through which specific subjects, contexts, and texts interact

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to construct meanings that influence public and private cultural spaces by moving specific subjects to personal and collective action and/or attitude (50). Such a concept of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis exposes the function of ideology in the interwoven textual, personal, and cultural and reminds us that rhetoric has a socializing, hence moralizing, function that influences all texts and all people (39; xiv-xv). Yet some gaps in Burke’s theory (as in many other theories of rhetoric) necessitate the search for feminist theories of rhetoric. First, Burke’s theory focuses on points of identification more than points of difference. Burke predicates his concept of identification upon the existence of difference and acknowledges that specific terministic screens will trigger particular worldviews; however, his desire is for rhetoric to erase such differences through consubstantiality and to thereby effect the possibility of communication. He argues that a consubstantial move is possible because different kinds of symbols, including language, promote similarities through socialization (Language as Symbolic Action 52). But much is rendered invisible when identification becomes the main rhetorical pursuit. Second, Burke’s theory perpetuates a centuries-long tradition of genderblindness. Like many other theories of rhetoric, no mention is made of the differences in men’s and women’s cultural positions; indeed, little mention is made of women except in the “Courtship” section of A Rhetoric of Motives (208). So deeply entrenched in the dominant ideology are such sex and gender biases and erasures that they appear as the natural order of things, not as subjects for investigation. Although women and feminists should not reject Burke’s theory or any other phallogocentric theories solely because of such biases or erasures, we do need to expose tacit assumptions about sex and gender and analyze their implications. To complicate these gaps in Burke’s rhetorical function, I call on the theories of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. Because Burke’s tension between identification and difference assumes binary structural boundaries that limit the potential play of language and, hence, potential meanings, I invoke Barthes’s theory of language function to complicate Burke’s theory. Barthes posits language as a sign system that presumes the potentially endless play of the signifier, that is, a signifying process in which signifiers become multiple signifieds that in turn become other signifiers. This language function as transformation becomes a game for Barthes, “the very pleasure of power,” the cultural site where various voices intersect to construct “the pensive text” (S/Z 59, 217). Despite concerns of certain feminist critics, Barthes’s play need not erase the ideological nature of language but may instead foreground it by merging questions of the personal (idiolectal forms) and the political (collective formulas) with the potential for revision (memory) (“Style and Its Image” 98–99). As such, Barthes’s doubling of multiplicity and ideology may be read as positing a language function that questions socialization as identification and celebrates socialization as perpetuation of difference. By putting the possibilities of Burke’s rhetorical function in play with Roland Barthes’s language function, I imagine a rhetorical function that offers possibilities of difference, not just identification, and that assumes multiple interpretive possibilities that, in

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turn, construct spaces for feminist revisionings. This resulting rhetorical function resembles the particle/wave theory of light in quantum physics: that is, a person’s stance, like an electron’s position, can be noted, or the continual play of the signifier, like an electron’s motion, can be noted; however, like position and motion, stance and play cannot be observed simultaneously. To confront the implications of genderblindness in this rhetorical function, I work from Kristeva’s third term of feminism, the “ insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by this history’s time” (“Women’s Time” 20). From this standpoint, many possibilities emerge. First, Kristeva’s third term enables feminists to refuse the violent metaphors of killing and scapegoating upon which Burke’s rhetorical theory is based (Rhetoric of Motives 13; Language as Symbolic Action 55). Second, it enables feminists to refuse the binary trap of being forced to identify either with Lakoff ’s color conscious women or with Cixous’s hysterical Medusa (Ryder 531)16; indeed, women can use the language of men to express the feelings of women. Third, it enables feminists to (re)theorize rhetorical theories; that is, conventional theories of rhetoric may [be] viewed not as static but as mutable, while new theories may be seen as emerging from the old and making the old unrecognizable. Such possibilities challenge the rhetorical traditions. Therefore, by complicating Burke’s rhetorical function with Barthes’s multiplicity and Kristeva’s third term of feminism, I construct a rhetorical function that intersects with my materialist feminism. From this position, I construct the following definition: Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric are those theories that employ Anglo-American materialist feminism(s) as their primary lens of inquiry to expose how language functions through subjects, contexts, and texts to construct meanings that influence public and private cultural spaces by moving specific subjects to personal and collective action and/or attitude. Given that no theory can provide a totalizing vision, Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric are admittedly limited; they foreground certain concepts and constituencies while backgrounding others. What becomes visible is how, from an Anglo-American woman’s perspective, language affects and is affected by sex and gender. But because sex and gender do not exist in a vacuum, they emerge as a productive means of demystifying and critiquing power relations within the complex cultural matrix. Thus, Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric recognize, validate, and address Bathsheba’s dilemma by contextualizing gendered discursive practices and by questioning their interwoven claims and strategies as well as their assumptions and implications. Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric assume interwoven relationships of the personal, the textual, and the cultural. Theorizing such interrelationships problematizes the poststructuralist concept of text, which is often read as enveloping everything and which is sometimes read as negating the possibility of political positioning. Andrea Nye articulates the necessity of reimagining text as follows: “structuralist and post-structuralist theories of symbolic meaning complete the philosophy of man [by positing] a textual arena where am-

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bivalent relations can be acted out, while at the same time real life continues with its murder and cruelties” (217). To address Nye’s complaint, I read the personal, the textual, and the cultural as rhetorical functions that have intersecting, though not identical, properties: the personal constructs and reflects the textual and the cultural, the textual constructs and reflects the personal and the cultural, and the cultural constructs and reflects the personal and the textual. Because all three categories are defined not as static artifacts but as rhetorical functions, specific subjects assume a limited agency, texts assume a potentiality of meanings, and cultures assume a nonstatic structuration. All are read in order to make ideology visible and to locate gaps that disempowered subjects may fill with their heteroglossic words, nonunified voices, and conflictive actions.19 Within this framework, rhetorical analyses of personal, textual, and cultural functions are imperative. For texts may emerge differently given different cultural agent(s), space(s), and moment(s). As such, texts are not fetishized but are instead rendered subject to contextualized (re)constructions of meanings at various cultural sites of production and consumption. Texts may disturb personally and culturally accepted ideas as well as effect personal and cultural transformations. At the same time, personal and cultural events may create the space for specific subjects or cultural forces to imagine, write, publish, or read such texts. These intersections of the personal, the textual, and the cultural are important, for they construct spaces wherein the dominant ideology may be continually reinforced, rejected, or reimagined; such intersections force us to recognize that when we question textuality, we also question our cultures and ourselves.

Discovering Sex and Gender Gaps in the Rhetorical Traditions Until recently, the rhetorical tradition commonly evoked such names as Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Cassiodorous, Peter Ramus, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, Richard Whately, I. A. Richards, and Kenneth Burke, all of whom have theorized and/or practiced the art of rhetoric. The construction of such a tradition, impressive as it is, has reinforced two trends: a dominance of phallogocentric theories and the marginalization of certain people. Recently, many rhetoric and composition scholars have challenged one another to interrogate the closure implied by this construction and to entertain the possibilities of multiple, diverse rhetorical traditions that not only revise the canon but also question the concept of canon and the assumptions of canon formation (e.g., Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, William Covino, Susan Jarratt, Andrea Lunsford, Jaspar Neel). In this study I respond to such challenges by focusing on feminist theories of rhetoric. To lay the groundwork for my response, in this section I identify sex and gender gaps in the received Aristotelian rhetorical tradition(s) that may serve as spaces, or starting points, for conceptualizing feminist theories of rhetoric. Although a variety of histories would seemingly serve my purpose, I will (re)read Roland Barthes’s essay “The Old Rhetoric,” compiled in 1964–65 when he became interested in the nineteenth-century “death” of the old rhetoric. Barthes’s twentieth-century reception

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of rhetorical history and theory is heavily Aristotelian, which is appropriate for my purpose here, given that Aristotle’s Rhetoric remains a dominant thread in twentieth-century “recoveries” of rhetoric. “The Old Rhetoric” not so much reconstructs a linear history as narrates moments of the old rhetoric, questioning traditional rhetorical concepts in terms of class and structuralist language assumptions. For scholars who want to complicate traditional rhetorical concepts in terms of gender, the importance of Barthes’s critique is two-fold: it not only models a critical methodology, using class as a criterion, but it also functions as a history text that may be reread for its own gender gaps. In the following paragraphs I complicate Barthes’s reading of the old rhetoric in terms of gender gaps; in particular, I examine definitions of rhetoric in terms of (1) proofs and appeals, (2) language function, (3) text and the five rhetorical canons, (4) author and audience, (5) rhetorical situation, (6) history, traditions, canons, (7) politics, and (8) pedagogy. The reason for such a rereading is simple: I want to identify the possibilities and limitations of this Aristotelian rhetorical theory for women and feminists. Like other twentiethcentury receptions, Barthes’s rendering explores the possibilities of this rhetorical theory, that is, its potential for empowering anyone in any situation to achieve any end. What is not recognized, however, is its limitations for outsiders. Women occupy different cultural spaces than men, and feminists occupy different cultural spaces than nonfeminists. Although infinite possibilities abound for particular differences within these various cultural spaces, identifying the limitations of the old rhetoric for these cultural spaces demystifies gendered power plays as well as prevalent stereotypes (e.g., that women are not as logical or as reasonable in their arguments as men). By critiquing both the possibilities and the limitations of Barthes’s reception of rhetorical history and theory for women and feminists, I simultaneously discover spaces for, and highlight the need for, feminist theories of rhetoric. To begin such a project, Barthes’s definitions of rhetoric must be examined. He claims that “the world is incredibly full of old Rhetoric” and cites rhetoric’s importance as the only theoretical structure that has foregrounded the function of language (“The Old Rhetoric” 11, 15). Though rhetoric has (re)emerged in academic circles during the last half of the twentieth century as an important site of inquiry, the term still suffers from hazy, multilayered definitions and, consequently, retains some of its power for feminism(s).21 Barthes acknowledges such a position when he defines rhetoric as a metalangauge and delineates its six different, though sometimes simultaneous, functions: (1) a technique or art, (2) a teaching, (3) a science, (4) an ethic, (5) a social practice, and (6) a ludic practice (13–14). Barthes’s multiple definitions can be read and questioned so as to invite women and feminists into the Burkean parlor. Barthes’s rhetoric as technique is defined as an “ ‘art’ in the classical sense of the word; the art of persuasion, a body of rules and recipes whose implementation makes it possible to convince the hearer of the discourse . . . , even if what he is to be convinced of is ‘false’ ” (“The Old Rhetoric” 13). For Barthes, rhetoric as techne implies a form/content split, despite

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other rhetoricians’ claims to the contrary (Corbett 381). That is, Barthes’s rhetoric as techne reveals how rhetoric as an “ideology of form” may be learned and employed by anyone in any discourse situation. While the possibilities for empowerment within such a structure are rightly emphasized, we too often forget to question the limitations of this theoretical stance. Particularly, we mystify the fact that different speakers and writers occupy different cultural positions and, hence, different positions of power. By asserting a false sense of equality (i.e., that everyone can learn and employ and be empowered by rhetorical conventions), we assume that the logic underlying this structure is a universal logic shared by all people in all cultures at all points in history, that specific agency alone can overcome structural oppressions, and that content is separated from form. Feminist theories of rhetoric should not only foreground such assumptions but also question them, problematizing rhetoric as an ideology of form in terms of Barthes’s other defining categories of rhetoric. Barthes’s rhetoric as ethic is posited as “a system of ‘rules,’ . . . at once a manual of recipes, inspired by a practical goal, and a Code, a body of ethical prescriptions whose role is to supervise (i.e., to permit and to limit) the ‘deviations’ of emotive language” (“The Old Rhetoric” 13). This ethic points to the cultural construction of rhetorical/ethical intersections, and the specific intersections constructed provide boundaries within which people assume they can function comfortably, that is, prescriptively and predictably. In this way, Barthes’s rhetoric as ethic exposes the interwoven relation of theory and praxis. Yet this ethic also functions from assumptions that limit the rhetorical potential of women and feminists, as evidenced by the following questions that may inform feminist theories of rhetoric: Who establishes this ethic? What truth conditions must be accepted for one to believe this ethic? Who benefits from the power structure of this ethic, and how? Where are the boundaries of this ethic? At what points are these boundaries visible and vulnerable? What are the implications of believing in plain and emotive languages? And how can “ ‘deviations’ of emotive language” be recovered or reread for feminist purposes? Barthes’s rhetoric as social practice is defined as “that privileged technique (since one must pay in order to acquire it) which permits the ruling class to gain ownership of speech” (“The Old Rhetoric” 13–14). This social function exposes class assumptions that control subjects’ relative access to rhetoric. It also exposes the constructed “nature” of power relations between subjects within specified cultural spaces; as such, it implies that constructed subjectivities, as opposed to essential natures, may be deconstructed. At the same time, this social function works from assumptions that limit the rhetorical potential of women and feminists, as evidenced by the following questions that should inform feminist theories of rhetoric: What happens to gender when class is the predominant cut made across the social? What happens when the matrix of the social is problematized by sex and gender as a means of interrogating class, race, sexual orientation, religious preference, geography, and so on? How does rhetoric function outside the “ruling class,” outside racial barriers, outside geo-

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graphical circles, and the like? Where do such questions overlap? And, finally, what are the assumptions and implications of believing in the “ownership of speech”? Barthes’s rhetoric as ludic practice is posed as “games, parodies, erotic or obscene allusions, classroom jokes, a whole schoolboy practice” (“The Old Rhetoric” 14). Rhetoric as ludic provides an ironically effective space for diversion and subversion. Given feminist contexts, rhetoric as ludic provides feminists entrées into dialogues about rhetoric. As with Cixous’s laughing Medusa, the play of the ludic becomes the space and the means for feminists to identify, disrupt, and reject the logic of phallogocentric discourse. These disruptions and rejections subvert the dominant ideology by creating gaps that may be filled and expanded with feminists’ voices, actions, and theories of rhetoric. What should not be forgotten is that negative material consequences for laughter exist, namely, madness and sometimes death. Yet the ludic also provides a much-needed emphasis in feminist theory, an emphasis on the pleasures that women find with(in) language. Borrowing a metaphor from Mary Oliver, Patricia Yaeger provides one such example: “the archetype of the writer as a honey-mad woman, as someone hungry for the honey of speech” (4). Barthes grounds his multileveled definitions of the old rhetoric primarily in Aristotelian theory: “[It] is above all a rhetoric of proof, of reasoning, of the approximative syllogism (enthymeme); it is a deliberately diminished logic, one adapted to the level of the ‘public,’ i.e., of common sense, of ordinary opinion. . . . [I]t would be well suited to the products of our so-called mass culture, in which an Aristotelian ‘probability’ prevails, i.e., ‘what the public believes possible.’ How many films, pulp novels, commercial articles might take as their motto the Aristotelian rule: ‘better an impossible probability than an improbable possibility’ ” (“The Old Rhetoric” 22). Like William Grimaldi’s interpretation of Aristotelian rhetoric, Barthes’s Aristotelian “rhetoric of proof ” focuses on deductive and inductive arguments with interwoven logical, emotional, and ethical appeals. As scholars too numerous to name have claimed, Aristotle’s brilliantly conceived systematic art of rhetoric has greatly influenced Western culture. Yet, to reiterate the point, Aristotle’s rhetoric also poses potential pitfalls for women and feminists and, hence, suggests many possible starting points for revisionist theories. Barthes’s Aristotelian rhetoric of proof presumes a deductive logic based on inductive precedent, namely, that which has comfortably come before. To combat this deeply ingrained impulse, feminists must frequently refute received traditions as well as recover lost ones and construct new ones, all in an attempt to construct a space from which to speak effectively. Only when such a space is constructed may they address their immediate arguments and conclusions. Based on Aristotle’s enthymeme as defined in his Rhetoric and Prior Analytics, Barthes’s rhetoric of proof also presumes the importance of a deductive logic that relies on publicly accepted (and imagined) probable premises that lead to probable conclusions.22

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Feminists frequently face particular problems with the logical appeal of Barthes’s Aristotelian enthymeme: specifically, the logic of their probable premises often does not reflect the common sense logic of the general public; therefore, the public cannot imagine or will not supply missing premises. As a result, feminists are often obliged to lay out their premises and argue their validity. This time-consuming process often delays political action. Yet even when their premises are outlined, their arguments and conclusions must still confront the judgment of mass logic. And this mass logic often denies the validity of personal experience, especially the personal experiences of women, feminists, and other outsiders, unless of course this personal experience can be validated, preferably by the testimony of two men.23 Feminists also confront particular problems with Barthes’s Aristotelian emotional appeal. That is, these appeals are largely negated by the logic of Barthes’s probable/possible distinctions. The maxim—“‘better, an impossible probability than an improbable possibility’ ”—does not provide space for many feminists’ arguments (“The Old Rhetoric” 22). Grounded in women’s private/public experiences and skeptical of major/minor distinctions, feminists’ arguments frequently emerge as emotional pleas that are too often received neither as probable impossibilities nor as improbable possibilities but as improbable impossibilities—that is, improbable within the consensus of public opinion and impossible within the logic of dominant discourse. That these improbable impossibilities (read “private emotional pleas”) might possess logics of their own is an unpopular notion that public opinion is not often willing to acknowledge, let alone explore. Jane Tompkins claims that Western epistemology allows no space for the emotional (170), but the emotional does not simply vanish. What Western epistemology does is mystify the power of the emotional by hiding it in the negative and renaming it illogical, irrational, nonsensical, untrue, invalid—all of which occupy space. As a result, emotional appeals are rendered as improbable impossibilities. Because their logic does not neatly fit the dominant logic of the masses, feminists are often labelled “mad” or “angry,” accused of giving way to emotional tirades, and dismissed as having no sense of humor. Such labels and accusations deny the validity and importance of feminists’ different emotional appeals. Barthes’s Aristotelian ethical appeal also poses problems for feminists. Aristotle restricted his concept of ethos to that sense of the speaker which emerges from the text at the site of the audience’s listening. This concept of ethos, however, has traditionally not included a space for women whose sex is visibly marked on their bodies. The sight of women or the sound of feminists behind the bar or in the pulpit has almost always evoked resistance before they could ever utter a word, or The Word. Such resistance calls not only upon public opinion but also upon the Law (of God, of the Phallus). Popularly invoked as transcendent Truth that emerges transparently through language, the Law is frequently perceived as impervious to the influences of history and culture. So women and feminists have traditionally had to argue for their right to speak or write in a public forum about private and public concerns (e.g., Margery Kempe, Laura Cereta, Margaret Fell, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Church Terrell). Although Cicero expanded Aristo-

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tle’s concept of ethos to include the reputation of the speaker (De Oratore 2.43), his theory further marginalized women and feminists who were not allowed a respectable public reputation. Clearly, if feminists’ enthymemic premises are not imagined or supplied by the public, if their logical appeals prolong political action, if their emotional appeals are hidden within the negative, and if their ethical appeals are given relatively little cultural space, then revisionist feminist theories of rhetoric need to reconceptualize these classical boundaries of proof and appeal to emancipate women from their “old” and “new” rhetorical double binds. In addition to critiquing definitions, proofs, and appeals of the old rhetoric, Barthes narrates another important rhetorical consideration, language function: [T]he art of speech is originally linked to a claim of ownership, as if language, as object of a transformation, condition of a practice, had been determined not from a subtle ideological mediation (as may have been the case in so many forms of art), but from the baldest sociality, affirmed in its fundamental brutality, that of earthly possession: we began to reflect upon language in order to defend our own. It is on the level of social conflict that was born a first theoretical sketch of feigned speech (different from fictive speech, that of the poets: poetry was then the only literature, prose not acceding to this status until later). (“The Old Rhetoric” 17) Part of the “subtle ideological mediation” that must be demystified in the above description is that “we” meant men and “our” meant men’s, while women, slaves, and children were relegated to the category of “earthly possession” for which men bargained (Aristotle, Politics 1260a.7). To redefine women’s position, feminist theories of rhetoric must critique this concept of language to determine if, and how, it can be made more inclusive. For how we assume language functions, more than anything else, determines how we read and write the cultural as well as the textual. When posited as a simple tool that communicates thought, language functions at the beck and call of unified subjects whose unlimited agency can determine when, how, and why to speak, listen, read, or write. When posited as an all-powerful structure that creates both subjects and thought, language constructs discursive positions within which specific subjects are totally determined. But when posited as a necessary component of rhetorical socialization and negotiation, language becomes a means through which specific subjects as rhetorical agents both construct and reflect their personal and collective texts and cultures. The latter position allows women and feminists the possibility of, and space for, social change. Just as importantly, it demystifies the dangers of celebrating an acultural, autonomous agency, otherwise known as the bootstrap theory, which frequently traps women and feminists into feeling inferior, inadequate, mad, or angry for not being able, singlehandedly, to overcome systemic sexism and its accompanying racism, classism, homophobia, religious prejudice, and so on. It also demystifies certain death-of-the-author

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theories that have emerged just as women, feminists, and other marginalized voices were becoming powerful in academia, theories that have sometimes been used to silence them. Barthes also narrates the concept of text. The significance of the old rhetoric for the new text of modern and contemporary rhetorical theories is elucidated in his opening paragraph: At the source or on the horizon of this seminar, as always, there was the modern text, i.e., the text which does not yet exist. One way to approach this new text is to find out from what point of departure, and in opposition to what, it seeks to come into being, and in this way to confront the new semiotics of writing with the classical practice of literary language, which for centuries was known as Rhetoric. Whence the notion of a seminar on the old Rhetoric: old does not mean that there is a new Rhetoric today; rather old Rhetoric is set in opposition to that new which may not yet have come into being: the world is incredibly full of old Rhetoric. (“The Old Rhetoric” 11) Clearly the old rhetoric cannot be ignored, for the new rhetoric must emerge from, or in opposition to, the old. Thus, feminists may construct theories of the new rhetoric by following Virginia Woolf’s injunction “to try the accepted forms, to discard the unfit, to create others which are more fitting” (“Men and Women” 195). Woolf’s third position echoes Barthes’s idea of a “text which does not yet exist,” a concept of text that provides the perfect opening for feminist theories of rhetoric. For feminists are concerned with nothing if not arguing that improbable impossibilities are indeed possible. Linking the possible to gendered textuality has implications for rethinking the canons of rhetoric, which Barthes describes as “active, transitive, programmatic, operational,” as not a structure but a “gradual structuration” (“The Old Rhetoric” 50). Although Barthes reduces the five canons to three—invention, arrangement, and style (51–52)—when dealing with written texts, feminist scholars should reclaim all five. For feminist studies of invention, arrangement, and style may help us articulate different thought processes, logics, and shaping of ideas and feelings. Studies of memory may encourage us to ask what is remembered, what is forgotten, who makes such decisions, where, and why. And studies of delivery may disclose cultural gestures that expose textual heteroglossia at all sites of production (e.g., writing, publishing, retailing, advertising, reading). Hence, all five canons are important means of tying the textual to the personal and the cultural, of uncovering the functions of sex and gender in these processes. Barthes also narrates the rhetorical concepts of author and audience by blurring their boundaries and interweaving them, thus calling into question the concepts of agency, identity, and unified self. When interrogating the concept of author, he distinguishes the auctor of the old rhetoric from our contemporary author: “As for the written text, it was not subject, as it is today, to a judgment of originality; what we call the author did not exist; around the

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ancient text, the only text used and in a sense managed, like reinvested capital, there were various functions: 1. the scriptor who purely and simply copies; 2. the compilator who adds to what he copies, but nothing that comes from himself; 3. the commentator who introduces himself into the copied text, but only to make it intelligible; 4. the auctor, finally, who presents his own ideas but always by depending on other authorities” (“The Old Rhetoric” 30). The ancient, agonistic auctor poses problems for feminists. He is assumed to be a male “athlete of speech” whose speech emerges as a competition to see who can flex the most rhetorical muscles. His speech “is the object of a certain glamour and of a regulated power,” and through this power-play merger of grammar and glamour, his aggression becomes “coded” and invisible (30). These concepts of auctor and auctor’s speech celebrate a victor/victim, winner/loser power dynamic based on violence that many feminists are unwilling to accept. Such concepts reinforce a superior/inferior ethics rather than an ethics of difference, and they denigrate personal experiences, emotions, and reasoning by their insistence on “other authorities.” Influenced by Enlightenment concepts of self that have been strengthened by Romantic notions of private visions, the contemporary author also poses problems for feminists. He is an original presence, a unified self in possession of a transcendent signified.24 This liberal humanist notion of unified self presumes an autonomous agency that uses language as transparent medium to negotiate societal structures and that succeeds or fails on the basis of individual will. When truth and talent are perceived as foundational and transcendent rather than conventional, scapegoating emerges as a popular rhetorical strategy for transferring sin, blame, and responsibility. With its focus on specific subjects, this concept of author leaves no space for theorizing institutional oppressions and thus little room for critiquing itself. That is, this closed concept of author does not provide feminists with spaces for questioning the cultural labels of women’s discourse (e.g., too personal, too emotional) and the cultural value (e.g., mundane), which emerge in commonsense logics as powerful first premises that are increasingly hard to challenge. Barthes addresses the limits of auctor/author concepts by repudiating an authorial agency in which the author’s presence functions as the sole determinate of meaning (“Death of the Author”; S/Z). Instead, he valorizes the continual play of the signifier, a stance about language that simultaneously undermines the concept of authorial presence as agency and posits a readerly agency in which the reader is invited to read and read again, with each reading rendering different possibilities, different texts, that other readers are then invited to (re) read. By blurring the categories of author and reader, Barthes argues that an act of writing is actually an act of reading the world, or as he claims, the death of the author gives rise to the birth of the reader (“Death of the Author” 55). This readerly agency retains a space in which a specific feminist may validate her own experiences by reading/writing the world, but this agency does not enable her to totally control how others receive her readings/writings.25 This stance allows feminists the possibilities of critique while acknowledging its limitations. My

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extrapolation of feminist theories of rhetoric joins this discussion. The ideas and textual strategies that inform Woolf ’s, Daly’s, and Rich’s feminist theories of rhetoric are theirs; the rhetorical values assigned to them in my extrapolation is mine; further interpretations will belong to the reader. All of these processes will, of course, be influenced by our language and our culture. Barthes’s concern with spatial and temporal influences on read­ing narrates another rhetorical concept, rhetorical situation. Barthes questions the function of space and time by addressing geographi­cal dimensions of inventive topoi: “What is a place? It is, says Aristotle, that in which a plurality of oratorical reasonings coin­cide. . . .Yet the metaphoric approach to place is more signifi­cant than its abstract definition” (“The Old Rhetoric” 64-65). Barthes complicates the function of space with the movement of time when he posits topoi as place, as a method of finding argu­ments. Although Barthes never uses the term rhetorical situation, he does refer to cultural “moments” of production and consump­tion that are continually being (re)constructed. Within this con­text, Barthes’s rhetorical situation refers to geographic spaces and moments that are both psychological and cultural. This definition opens possibilities for constructing and validating feminist revi­sionings; indeed, it offers more possibilities for feminists than does Lloyd Bitzer’s definition of rhetorical situation as the sum total of exigences, audience, and constraints. Bitzer’s positivistic render­ing mystifies the influence of time and memory, the construc­tive nature of history, and, to a degree, the multiple interpretive possibilities of a text. Demystifying these factors, Barthes’s con­cept of reading implies a rhetorical situation, or cultural moment, that is fluid and continually reconstructed. Barthes’s concept of continually reconstructed cultural mo­ments narrates a closely related rhetorical concern, the compilation of these moments into histories. For Barthes, rhetoric cannot be separated from a consideration of history and historiography: “[R]hetoric . . . call[s] into question history itself . . . ; the classification it has imposed is the only feature really shared by successive and various historical groups, as if there existed, superior to ideologies of content and to direct determinations of history, an ideology of form; as if . . . there existed for each society a taxonomic identity, a sociologic in whose name it is possible to define another history, another sociality, without destroying those recognized at other levels” (“The Old Rhetoric” 14–15). For feminists, there are both limits and possibilities for change in studying rhetorical history. Limitations emerge in conceiving rhetoric only as “an ideology of form” or static structure that has been relatively untouched by its cultural moments; such a stance may trap women into static cultural, psychological, and linguistic essentialisms. Conceiving rhetoric only as “an ideology of form” also begs a separation of intellectual bodies from stylistic dress; this separation too often implies that language functions only to communicate thought. Yet possibilities for change do exist. Studying the history of rhetoric allows feminists to question the construction and importance of language theory and language function in textual interpretive processes and in cultural power dynamics. It also enables them to question the functions of histories and historiographies, which in turn pro-

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motes the possibilities for imagining multiple histories and multiple historiographies. Such actions are imperative if feminists are to read and write their concerns of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religious preference, and so on, into history. For Barthes, rhetorical history moves in both diachronic and systematic directions (“The Old Rhetoric” 15). This doubled movement denies the closure of evolutionary historiography to which Knoblauch and Brannon consign classical rhetoric and its potential applications for contemporary composition pedagogy. This doubled movement also calls into question the concepts of tradition and canon. That is, by what criteria are existing rhetorical traditions and canons defined? Do the criteria assume gynocritcal, androcentric, or desegregated canons? Whose interests do these criteria serve? Where should feminist theories of rhetoric be located in relation to these traditions and to these canons? Should feminists establish a separate tradition or expand the canon? What truth conditions inform different traditions, different canons? And what are the limits and possibilities of feminists’ embracing the concepts of tradition and canon for their own projects of rewriting rhetorical histories? The paradox of histories that we should always keep in mind, however, is that they have meaning only in the present as they inform our conscious and unconscious thinking, acting, feeling, and being. When critiquing the knowledge constructed and dispersed within these traditions and canons, Barthes narrates another facet of the old rhetoric, its relation to politics: “It is obviously tempting to conflate this mass rhetoric with Aristotle’s politics; which was, as we know, a politics of the happy medium, favoring a balanced democracy, centered on the middle classes, and responsible for reducing antagonisms between rich and poor, majority and minority; whence a rhetoric of good sense, deliberately subordinate to the ‘psychology’ of the public” (“The Old Rhetoric” 22–23). Barthes’s temptation “to conflate this mass rhetoric with Aristotle’s politics” echoes Aristotle’s impulse to locate rhetoric between logic and ethics/politics (Rhetoric 1.4.10). Yet connecting rhetoric to Aristotle’s ethics/politics may pose problems for feminists. For example, Aristotle’s Ideal States imply a balance, a center agreed upon by most people (read “men in power” and “those men who may attain such power”). Even if such a relatively conflict-free state were possible, this definition erases the divisions between rich and poor, free and slave, men and women; as such, it privileges the first term—propertied, free, male—while presenting it as the universal subject of rhetorical theory. From a feminist perspective, this ideal state is exposed as ideal only for those with power: the truths of the margins are exposed as less important than the truths of the center, and the stress on conflict-free existence emerges not simply as a desire for harmony but as a desire for maintaining the status quo. Moreover, positing a “rhetoric of good sense” as the dominant discourse of Aristotelian Ideal States poses important questions of power (“The Old Rhetoric” 23). Who gets to define good sense? Will this good sense be constructed as a monolithic category or as a field of difference? Most importantly, why the emphasis on sense, on logic, on the head?

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A consideration of good sense located in the head points to the final concern that Barthes narrates: pedagogy. As mentioned above, a teaching is one of Barthes’s defining categories of rhetoric: “[T]he art of rhetoric, initially transmitted by personal means (a rhetor and his disciples, his clients), was soon introduced into institutions of learning; in schools, it formed the essential matter of what would today be called higher education; it was transformed into material for examination (exercises, lessons, texts)” (“The Old Rhetoric” 13). The teaching names a cultural space in which Barthes’s other defining categories can be taught and challenged, yet the institutionalization of rhetoric, particularly its relegation to fake exercises and dry handbooks, mystifies the potential of its personal, textual, and cultural powers. Thus, the teaching raises certain questions. What connections exist between institutional and noninstitutional learning, between theory and praxis? Who is allowed access to institutional learning? Where does a student or teacher stand to challenge the dominant rhetoric? And what are the relations among gendered subjects, schools, and culture? Feminists should analyze the history of rhetorical pedagogy, not just to determine how and why women have been included or excluded but also to learn how and why pedagogical power struggles have, and do, undergird the mystifications of rhetoric’s potential for changing the personal, the textual, and the cultural. Barthes concludes his essay by discussing the interwoven possibilities of rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy: “Yes, a history of Rhetoric (as research, as book, as teaching) is today necessary, broadened by a new way of thinking (linguistics, semiology, historical science, psychoanalysis, Marxism)” (“The Old Rhetoric” 92). To the parenthetical list, I would add feminisms. For an understanding of feminist theory and praxis would enable rhetoric scholars not only to locate gender gaps but also to imagine new texts of rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy that recognize, validate, and address Bathsheba’s dilemma.

Defending Anglo-American Feminist Theories of Rhetoric(s): Woolf, Daly, and Rich At the 1992 Virginia Woolf Conference, Jane Marcus claimed in her closing address, “I need to make my Virginia Woolf stand for the issues that interest me.” In many ways this claim articulates my own feelings about this project. I propose to make my Virginia Woolf, my Mary Daly, and my Adrienne Rich—or rather, the way that I read these women’s lives and texts—speak to the issue that interests me in rhetoric and composition studies. That issue is feminism, specifically the ways in which sex and gender come into play in rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy. As one attempt to articulate this play, I extrapolate Woolf’s, Daly’s, and Rich’s Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric from their writings about women, language, and culture. My extrapolations of these theories emerge from putting these three feminists’ texts into play with the sex and gender gaps discovered in the previous discussion of Barthes’s essay “The Old Rhetoric.” Such an extrapolation process assumes that these feminists’ texts are

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genuinely concerned with rhetorical concepts but that, because these feminist texts have not been constructed from the site of rhetoric and composition studies, their theories of rhetoric must be extrapolated from their nonrhetoric texts, such as their essays, diaries, letters, and poems about women, language, and culture. The limitation of such an extrapolation process is that the eight concepts in the preceding section may be read as a theoretical grid, which forces Woolf ’s, Daly’s, and Rich’s Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric to conform to previous rhetorical categories and, thus, erases any original contributions these feminists might make. But the possibility of this extrapolation process allows another interpretation: if these eight concepts are interpreted as interwoven functions that merge personal, textual, and cultural concerns, then they may be interpreted as starting points for extrapolating feminist theories of rhetoric. Obviously, these eight concepts are not the only starting points. Thus, my study invites interested scholars to expand my extrapolations and also construct other feminist theories of rhetoric. This extrapolation process has important implications. First, it challenges the received rhetorical traditions not in order to erase traditional theories nor simply to add women’s voices to them but rather to rethink our discipline; that is, this process forces us to ask what happens if we imagine rhetorical history as a map with Aristotle’s theory clearly marked and Woolf ’s, Rich’s, and Daly’s theories newly charted. Second, it asks how rhetoric and composition studies may be informed not just by the presence of Woman and women but by feminist ideology. Third, it explores how rhetoric and composition studies, specifically the question of Bathsheba’s dilemma, may be informed by literary studies, religious studies, and women’s studies. And, fourth, it also raises certain questions. Such questions will most likely emerge from the following three grounds, and although I will attempt to anticipate such queries, my responses will, I hope, evoke even more questions. The first query is often constructed as follows: would studying Woolf, Daly, and Rich in rhetoric and composition studies be appropriate, given that these feminists do not locate themselves within rhetorical traditions and given that traditional histories of rhetoric do not commonly claim the texts of these feminists? My response is simple. Both claims are true. But if someone employs these two claims to prevent interdisciplinary moves, he/she is assuming that authorial intent determines meaning and that canon formation is static. Moreover, these claims ignore Woolf ’s, Daly’s, and Rich’s concerns with rhetorical concepts. Their schooling, talents, interests, opportunities, politics, and particular historical moments have led these feminist activists to become a novelist, a philosopher (one who studies “philosophia”), and a poet, respectively. Their concerns about women, language, and writing, however, can be (re)read as Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric that challenge the genderblindness of more traditional histories, theories, and pedagogies. To emphasize how these feminists may be read as rhetorical theorists, I have included a section in each subsequent chapter that locates their feminist texts in relation to rhetorical theories, lore, and practice.

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The second query usually emerges as follows: would not focusing on French feminist theories be more appropriate, given that they are more sophisticated than Anglo-American theories? Within the logic of this question, Anglo-American feminist theories are denigrated as naive posturings of language use, autonomous wills, and identity politics; they are then compared to French feminist theories, which are hailed as sophisticated critiques of language, subjectivity, closure, writing, and so on. Ironically, this binary reinforces the structure of phallogocentric logic, with French theories occupying the dominant position and Anglo-American theories occupying the subordinate one; this binary also erases the presence of feminist theories that fit into neither category. Within this denigration logic, Anglo-American feminisms are divided into liberal and radical feminisms; in turn, radical feminisms, with which Daly’s and Rich’s texts are associated and for which Woolf ’s texts construct a space, are frequently accused of essentialism33 and separatism.34 [. . .] I revise these prevailing readings of Anglo-American feminisms; that is, I reread Woolf, Daly, and Rich to refute claims that an essential female self exists, that gender identity and sexual orientation occur only as conscious choice, and that identification among women is only achieved by a Sartrean bonding as objects (Nye 104). The third query is perhaps the most serious: would a focus on Anglo-American feminist theory preclude discussions of difference? If we assume that difference occurs only between categories of feminisms, then such a focus would preclude such discussions. But if we assume that difference occurs not only between categories but also within them, then my focus on Woolf, Daly, and Rich may be read as exposing differences within Anglo-American feminisms. [. . .] Foregrounding differences within Anglo-American feminisms is a necessary move if these theories are to be particularized and recovered from charges of naïveté. The purpose of such a move is to celebrate Anglo-American radical feminist theories as one of many kinds of feminisms. Yet the ethics of such a move entails our continually asking ourselves, and addressing, the following questions: what can be accepted in these theories, what must be discarded, and what needs to be reconstructed? It also entails asking and addressing: who is (not) speaking, who is (not) listening, and what is (not) being heard? Responses to such queries should serve as the impetus for future research. By studying Woolf ’s, Daly’s, and Rich’s Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric, I hope to invite new voices and new hearings into the history of rhetoric. For by changing contexts and lines of argument, these three Anglo-American feminists have reinforced, rejected, or reimagined traditional theories of rhetoric, whether consciously or unconsciously, to challenge the dominant ideology and push their own political goals.36 As challengers of phallogocentric culture and its dominant discourse(s), these three writers and their texts have provided a means of recognizing, validating, and addressing women’s commonsense experiences, otherwise known as Bathsheba’s dilemma. In the process, these writers and their texts have constructed feminist literacies from which to enact changes in the interwoven realms

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of the personal, the textual, and the cultural. That, I will argue, is the importance of their Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric for rhetoric and composition studies.

Notes Women’s speech has traditionally been stereotyped as “polite, emotional, enthusiastic, gossipy, talkative, uncertain, dull, and chatty” while men’s speech has been described as “capable, direct, rational, illustrating a sense of humor, unfeeling, strong (in tone and word choice), and blunt” (Kramarae 58). Scholars in communication studies (e.g., Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Theodora Martin) and sociolinguistic studies (e.g., Robin Lakoff, Cate Poynton, Julia Penelope, Dale Spender) have sought to disprove these stereotypes. [. . .] 2 My use of the term symbolic derives from Kristeva’s division of human experience into the semiotic and symbolic realms (Revolution). Her terms, in turn, echo Lacan’s division of human existence into three orders: the real (the anatomical order that cannot be known, which exists before the ego and the formation of the drives); the imaginary (the order where a child totally identifies with the world and cannot distinguish a space between self and others, particularly the Mother; Kristeva renames this order the semiotic); and the symbolic (the order of language and loss of identity in which the lack of the latter triggers continual repressions of this lack and, hence, gives rise to the unconscious and the power of the phallus). My subsequent discussions of the symbolic also assume a familiarity with other terms in French discourse theories: for example, Derrida’s logocentrism, which privileges the Logos as a metaphysical presence; Lacan’s phallocentrism, which privileges the phallus as the source/position of power; and Cixous’s combination of the two terms into phallogocentrism (Moi 105). 3 Cameron argues that debates about Bathsheba’s dilemma have actually positioned themselves into two widely defined moves: criticism and critique (Feminist Critique 2–3). The first move assumes that to change the world, we must change the world’s words: language use must be revised if women are to construct a space in which to express themselves. [. . .] Cameron’s second move, critique, assumes that to change the world and Woman’s/women’s positions within it, feminists must rethink Woman’s/ women’s relation to language and to the dominant discursive practices. Feminists must “examine the conditions upon which [Bathsheba’s dilemma] exists, calling into question the assumptions it is based on” (Feminist Critique 2). Such a philosophical critique would call into question the truth conditions of cultural assumptions about gender, class, sex roles, and so on, thus enabling feminists to describe, demystify, and revise their multiple cultural locations. [. . .] 5 [. . .] For feminist challenges to historical traditions, see Lerner; Anderson and Zinsser; and Bridenthal, Koonz, and Stuart. For feminist challenges to philosophical traditions, see Nye; and Waithe. Bizzell posits a slightly different research agenda for feminist challenges to the rhetorical traditions: (1) read traditional rhetorical theories as a resisting reader; (2) recover women who have written about rhetoric; and (3) include women who have not necessarily focused on rhetoric but whose work might reconceptualize rhetorical studies (51). [. . .] 7 To avoid repeating the awkward phrase, “women and/or feminists,” I will simply use “feminist” because it implies an ideological stance that both includes women and challenges the dominant logic and rhetoric. [. . .] 9 Although this study foregrounds feminist theories of rhetoric, other studies might just as importantly focus on women’s rhetoric(s), theories of women’s rhetoric(s), or women’s theories of rhetoric. 1

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They might examine feminine rhetoric(s), theories of feminine rhetoric(s), or feminine theories of rhetoric. They might study feminist rhetoric(s) or even theories of feminist rhetoric(s). As becomes readily apparent, a wealth of research possibilities emerges (Jarratt, “Special Issue”). [. . .] 12 When discussing cross-cultural research possibilities, questions of appropriation, colonization, and tokenism often emerge. For example, see Lee; and hooks, Talking Back. [. . .] For an excellent exploration of appropriation and race, see Anzaldúa. [. . .] 16 Lakoff stipulates certain language functions that belong to women and men and that result in “linguistic imbalances” (Language and Woman’s Place 43; qtd. in Ryder 531): women, for example, have more names for colors than men; men, on the other hand, use more expletives publicly. Cixous’s medusa recovers the monster/hysteric position for women, positing it as a position of strength. For Ryder, this binary traps women into adopting social roles that are totally determined by language (e.g., Lakoff) or having to resort to madness (e.g., Cixous). For an in-depth discussion of this binary, see Ryder 530–31. For a history of this debate, see A. O. Hill. [. . .] 19 This move presumes a definition of ideology similar to the one posited by Cixous and Clement: “For me ideology is a kind of vast membrane enveloping everything. We have to know that this skin exists even if it encloses us like a net or like closed eyelids. We have to know that, to change the world, we must constantly try to scratch and tear it. We can never rip the whole thing off, but we must never let it stick or stop being suspicious of it” (145). [. . .] 21 Natanson posits a multilayered, progressively abstract definition when he argues that rhetoric may refer to all of the following: (1) rhetorical intention in speech or writing, (2) the technique of persuasion, or methodology, (3) the general rationale of persuasion, or theory, and (4) the philosophy of rhetoric, or the critique of theory (379). Bizzell and Herzberg follow suit, situating rhetoric as “the practice of orator; the study of the strategies of effective oratory; the study of the persuasive effects of language; the study of the relation between language and knowledge; the classification and use of tropes; and, of course, the use of empty promises and half-truths as a form of propaganda” (1). 22 Aristotle’s Prior Analytics posits three types of syllogisms: scientific, dialectic, and rhetorical (the enthymeme). The first assumes true premises and conclusions; the second assumes probable premises and true conclusions; the third assumes probable premises and conclusions. His Rhetoric discusses the enthymeme and cites two types—the demonstrative enthymeme, which proves a proposition, and the refutative enthymeme, which disproves one (bk. 2, ch. 22); he also cites the four types of facts upon which an enthymeme may be based—probabilities, examples, infallible signs, fallible signs (bk. 2, ch. 25). 23 See, for example, Deuteronomy 17:6 and Numbers 30:35. Both citations refer specifically to the death penalty. But the importance of witnesses (read “men”) is stressed throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. [. . .] 24 Interrogations of presence have attempted to erase traces of authorial agency in the making of meaning and, instead, have foregrounded the functions of readers, institutional structures, and language. See Barthes, “Death of the Author”; Foucault; and Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play.” 25 Partly because of the title of his article “The Death of the Author,” Barthes is often misread as eliminating any type of agency. Because he asserts that the death of the author allows the birth of the reader, a type of readerly agency emerges. While the writer is a reader of the world, she or he cannot control the meanings in the texts that are constructed for other readers. [. . .] 33 Nye details the attack against perceived essentialism in Anglo-American radical feminisms:

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Radical feminists, having theorized a world of warring wills, cannot so easily escape their own theory. . . . . . . Early radical feminists catalogued in detail the socialization of women, but socialization did not excuse women’s capitulation. Socialization implies an intact female self which may be influenced but which can also refuse to accept the rewards of collaboration and courageously accept the pain of non-conformity. Gender identity and the choice of sexual object, however, may not be accessible to conscious change. . . . Nor is there any positive prognosis in radical feminist theory for a woman’s refusal to be a fellow traveller. . . . In each case, feminist theory and practice continues to operate within the space of Satrean metaphysics . . . [that] is inadequate to feminist practice. (102) [. . .] The perceived male/female separatism is most frequently associated with Rich’s and Daly’s texts. While their separatist moments cannot be denied, such a male-centered gaze too easily dismisses the importance of these feminist theories and erases the fact that a woman’s wanting to focus on women and fight patriarchy is not synonymous with androcide. [. . .] 36 In this sense, ideology becomes more than a set of doctrines. It becomes “the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in . . . the modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving, and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power” (T. Eagleton 14–15). This definition may be expanded for feminism by asserting that “[o]nly a concept of ideology as a contradictory construct, marked by gaps, slides, and inconsistencies, would enable feminism to explain how even the severest ideological pressures will generate their own lacunae” (Moi 26). Within this theory of ideology, the cultural and the textual are interwoven. For ideological beliefs are not only manifested in (un)stated cultural behaviors but are also “translated into literary forms and conventions that at once encode and perpetuate those values” (Bootie). [. . .] 34

Works Cited Aristotle. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. —. Prior Analytics. Trans. Robin Smith. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. —. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle. Trans. Rhys Roberts. 1954. New York: Modern Library, 1984. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Rustle of Language. 49–55. —. “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Memoire.” The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.11–94. —. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. —. “Style and Its Image.” Rustle of Language. 90–99. —. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Bauer, Dale. Feminist Dialogics. Albany: SUNY UP, 1988. Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Trouule. Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140–61. Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 1–14.

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Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford Books St. Martin’s, 1990. Brodkey, Linda. “The Discourse of Difference and Consensus.” Academic Writing as Social Practice. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. —. A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Cameron, Deborah, ed. The Feminist Critique of Language. New York: Routledge, 1990. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her. 2 vols. New York: Praeger, 1989. —. “The Sound of Women Voices.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 212–20. Caughie, Pamela. “Passing and Pedagogy.” College English 54 (1992): 775–93. Cicero. De Oratore, Books 1 and 2. Trans. E. W Sutton and H. Rackham. 1942. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1948. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1 (1976): 875–93. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clement. “A Woman Mistress.” The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. 1975. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 136–46. Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3d ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Covino, William. The Art of Wondering: A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 278–94. duBois, Page. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representation of Women. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Eagleton, Mary, ed. Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Fell, Margaret. Women’s Speaking Justified. Ed. David J. Latt. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, U of California, 1979. Flynn, Elizabeth. “Composing as a Woman.” CCC 39 (1988): 423–35. Gates, Henry Louis. “ ‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” New York Review of Books 24 Nov. 1991: 1, 26–30. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Glenn, Cheryl. “Sex, Lies, and Manuscripts: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric.” CCC 45 (1994): 180–99. Grimaldi, William. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1: A Commentary. Bronx: Fordham UP, 1980. —. Aristotle, Rhetoric 2: A Commentary. Bronx: Fordham UP, 1988. Hiatt, Mary P. “The Feminine Style.” CCC 29 (1978): 222–26. hooks, bell. “Black and Female: Reflections on Graduate School.” Talking Back 55–61. —. “Race and Feminism: The Issue of Accountability.” Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End, 1981. 119–58. —. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End, 1989. —. “ ‘When I Was a Young Soldier for the Revolution’: Coming to Voice.” Talking Back 10–18.

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Horner, Winifred, ed. The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Rev ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990. Howe, Florence. “Identity and Expression: A Writing Course for Women.” College English 32 (1971): 863–71. Jacobus, Mary, ed. Women’s Writing and Writing about Women. London: Croom Helm, 1979. Jarratt, Susan. “Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict.” Harkin and Schilb 105–23. —. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. —. ed. “Special Issue: Feminist Rereadings in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1992). Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Knoblauch, Charles, and Lil Brannon. Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1984. Kramarae, Cheris. “Proprietors of Language.” Women and Language in Literature and Society. Ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman. New York: Praeger, 1980. 58–68. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. NY: Columbia UP, 1984. —. “Women’s Time.” Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs 7 (1981): 13–35. Lakoff, Robin. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper, 1975. Lassner, Phyllis. “Feminist Responses to Rogerian Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 8 (1990): 220–31. Lee, Spike. Guest Appearance. The Tonight Show. NBC. Los Angeles. 7 Jan. 1993. Lentricchia, Frank. Criticism and Social Change. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Levine, Judith. “White Like Me: When Privilege Is Written on Your Skin.” Ms. Mar.-Apr. 1994: 22–24. Lunsford, Andrea, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica. U of Pittsburgh P, in press. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. “Rhetoric in a New Key: Women and Collaboration.” Rhetoric Review 8 (1990): 234–41. Marcus, Jane. “Pathologies: The Virginia Woolf Soap Operas.” Second Annual Virginia Woolf Conference. New Haven, CT, 14 June 1992. Martin, Theodora. The Sound of Our Own Voices: Women’s Study Clubs, 1860–1910. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. New York: Routledge, 1985. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Mountford, Roxanne. “Feminist Theory and Classical Rhetoric: Connection, Rejection or Transformation?” Conference on College Composition and Communication. San Diego, 2 Apr. 1993. Natanson, Maurice. “The Limits of Rhetoric.” Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric: Selected Readings. Ed. Richard Johannesen. New York: Harper, 1971. 371–80. Neel, Jaspar. Plato, Derrida, and Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988. Nelson, Cary. Recovery and Repression. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989. Newton, Judith, and Deborah Rosenfelt. “Introduction: Toward a Materialist-Feminist Criticism.” Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture. Ed. Newton and Rosenfelt. New York: Meuthen, 1985. xv-xxxix. Nye, Andrea. Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man. New York: Routledge, 1988. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Is There a Female Voice? Joyce Carol Oates Replies.” M. Eagleton 208.

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Osborn, Susan. “ ‘Revision/Re-Vision’: A Feminist Writing Class.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 258–72. Penelope, Julia. Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues. New York: Pergammon, 1990. Poynton, Cate. Language and Gender: Making the Difference. 1985. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Royster, Jackie Jones. “Intersecting Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Feminist Perspective.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. San Diego, 31 Mar. 1993. Ryder, Mary. “Feminism and Style: Still Looking for a Quick Fix.” Style 23 (1989): 530–44. Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Changes in American Women’s Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. 2d ed. London: Routledge, 1985. Swearingen, C. Jan. “Rereading Aspasia: Reconstructions of Gender, Public and Private.” Rhetoric Society of American Conference. Norfolk, VA, 20 May 1995. Tedesco, Jane. “Women’s Ways of Knowing/Women’s Ways of Composing.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 246–56. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 19 (1987): 169–78. Waithe, Mary Ellen, ed. A History of Women Philosophers. 2 vols. New York: Kluwer, 1989. Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Among Men—Not Boys: Histories of Rhetoric and the Exclusion of Pedagogy.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1992): 18–26. Woolf, Virginia. “Men and Women.” Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3, 192–95. —. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt, 1957. —. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being 64–137. Yaeger, Patricia. Honey Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing. NY: Columbia UP, 1988.

Part 2. Articulating and Enacting Feminist Methods and Methodologies From a gendered point of view, [a] feminist methodology of rhetorical history does not refer to an innocent research activity for research’s sake, but rather an intentionally radical effort to exert transformative power over research methods. —Hui Wu 85 As the epigraph by Hui Wu suggests, feminist researchers are a motivated group, willing to critique, revise, and transform established research methods and methodologies as needed in order to study gendered subjects, genres, and discourses. To clarify the necessity of their “radical” efforts, it’s helpful to review Victor Vitanza’s distinction between conventional and feminist approaches to rhetorical history. Conventional researchers pursue “ ‘The Rhetorical Tradition’ as if it were some monolithic, unproblematic, unified Tradition—in other words, as if it were ‘a given’ simply waiting to be uncovered” (89). Feminist researchers, on the other hand, are “less focused on the adding of facts and more focused on how interpretations of various facts get deflected across ideologies” (Vitanza 97). Richard Enos develops this point, noting that feminist historiographers routinely disrupt questionable disciplinary presumptions, such as that objectively reporting facts about the past is the goal of history writing or that singular political events and the representative lives of great European men comprise the preferred subjects of rhetorical analysis (297). In fact, major research strands in feminist rhetorics are directed toward identifying and contesting gender bias within the rhetorical tradition and revising rhetorical history from a gendered perspective, projects Cheryl Glenn figures as remapping the “male-dominated story of rhetoric” (Rhetoric Retold 5). Because feminist scholars often investigate subjects and topics off the beaten path, they sometimes find established research procedures inadequate for their particular needs and interests; when this happens, they may have developed frameworks and methods capable of doing the job. What is distinct about feminist research methods and methodologies? To explore this question, Part 2 focuses on feminist historiography, presenting key essays about the challenges and necessity of incorporating gender into rhetorical history. The six scholars in this section share important beliefs about history, for instance, that it is a construction rather than an uncontested assortment of facts that add up to Truth and that a researcher’s values, 109

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experiences, and standpoint contribute to and shape her historical narrative. Historiography is envisioned as a process of uncovering evidence and interpreting it in order to make sense of both the past and the present. Because interpretation is grounded in and influenced by the researcher’s social location, the resulting narrative is inescapably partial, interested, and contingent. Therefore, feminist historiographers (and scholars in general) frame research and writing as “self-conscious critical practice[s]” (Vitanza 97) and consistently reflect on their relationships to their subjects in hopes of bringing their inevitable stances and biases to light. This paradigm grounds all of the essays in this section. Another shared belief among feminist historiographers is that women’s rhetorical interests, experiences, and accomplishments have been systematically elided from the rhetorical tradition due, in part, to problematic research conventions, methods, and methodologies. An avenue they have taken to address this problem is to review, rework, and reinvent research processes and procedures in order to support such feminist agendas as recovery work and gender critique. The former involves “recovering historical women rhetors, recuperating contemporary and historical women’s writing and speaking not traditionally viewed as rhetoric, and analyzing recovered women’s texts” while the latter “refers to a range of critical and theoretical approaches [designed] to reconceptualiz[e] an area of study by questioning its gendered assumptions” (Ryan 24). Research methods that serve the ends of recovery and gender critique not only encourage current (and pave the way for future) scholarship in these areas but also promote the overarching ambitions of the community—making rhetorical history gender inclusive and transforming rhetorical studies. Given these goals, feminist historiography is clearly neither neutral nor uncontested. Indeed, its validity, ethics, and ethos generated energetic debate among Xin Liu Gale, Cheryl Glenn, and Susan Jarratt, who interrogated the relationships among postmodern, feminist, and rhetorical theories as well as the legitimacy of feminist assumptions about and methods of history writing (these exchanges are available in Case Study 4). These issues continue to inspire discussion about feminist methodologies, particularly its affective dimensions, political objectives, evidentiary criteria, and argumentative strategies. With this background in place, we turn to this section’s six essays, which not only employ conventional research methods but also enact alternative approaches to studying rhetorical history from a feminist perspective. In the first reading, “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” (2000), Patricia Bizzell argues that the Gale-Glenn-Jarratt debate centers on the question, Should scholars assert feminist values in conducting and reporting research? Bizzell answers affirmatively, noting that feminist methods sometimes depart significantly from conventional ones, especially regarding the function and desirability of emotion, and illustrating her points with Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream, a text that demonstrates why passion can be a vital component of feminist intellectual work.

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In “The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Feminist Historiography” (2000), Susan Romano employs a research methodology inspired, in part, by Jarratt and Glenn’s historical reconstructions of Aspasia, a resident of classical Athens of whom little reliable evidence survives. Like Aspasia, the textual remains of Catalina Hernández—a sixteenth-century religious woman recruited to a teaching mission in Mexico, who ultimately disappeared without a trace—also consist of fragments and second-hand accounts. Romano analyzes extant (and speculates about missing) letters concerning her subject and a close male companion exiled by Church fathers, adopting an inventive feminist/sophistic method of recovery reminiscent of Gorgias’s in the “Encomium on Helen.” Gorgias presents four different narratives of Helen (generated by the topoi of persuasion, force, fate, and love) in order to exonerate her from responsibility for starting the Trojan War; Romano, likewise, employs four topoi of feminist historiography—woman in love, illuminata, woman of community, analyst of rhetorical phenomena—and generates four interpretations of Hernández that examine issues of gender, power, location, and agency. One of the most interesting aspects of the piece is Romano’s decision to resist closure; she refuses to select one narrative as preferable to or truer than the others, a particularly apt choice when evidence is sparse and definitive conclusions are impossible or undesirable—a situation frequently encountered by feminist historiographers. In “The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Methodology” (1999), Vicki Tolar Collins (Burton) develops a method for tracking how a rhetor’s words and ethos evolve over time as a result of changing institutions and gender ideology. Drawing on cultural studies, the history of the book, and material feminism, she introduces the concept of rhetorical accretion in order to explain how the conversion narrative of the eighteenth-century Methodist Hester Ann Rogers was subsequently appended and amended by others, alterations that substantially revised the meaning of her message. Collins details how the Methodist church, over the course of a century of reprintings, added sermons, essays, poems, and epigraphs to The Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers and, through these textual layers or accretions, reshaped the rhetor from a spiritual devotee to a “true woman.” Collins exposes readers to a memorable method, methodology, and Methodist by tracing textual changes and their rhetorical impact on a woman and her rhetoric (546). Hui Wu’s “Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks” originally appeared in the 2002 Rhetoric Society Quarterly special issue devoted to feminist historiography. Wu offers an interpretive assessment of traditional and feminist research methodologies and validates the promise of the latter. She also encourages scholars to expand their research agendas to include both First- and Third-World women and stresses the importance of considering feminist standpoint when crossing borders to study the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on with public discourse. Wu’s observations segue readers nicely into Jessica Enoch’s “Survival Stories: Feminist Historiographic Approaches to Chicana Rhetorics of Sterilization Abuse” (2003), an essay that

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brings Chicana rhetorics more fully into discussions of women’s rhetorics and also augments feminist research methods. Enoch examines the Madrigal case, a civil lawsuit protesting ten Chicanas’ nonconsensual sterilization in the 1970s. Although they didn’t win the case, the women’s accounts of their medical experience were preserved and subsequently retold by feminist activists working for reproductive justice. In other words, the Chicanas’ stories failed to persuade in a court of law but continued to circulate and were effective in other rhetorical settings. Enoch finds established research methods of recovery, textual analysis, and historical contextualization insufficient for addressing her interest in the continuing impact of discourse, so she develops a new method—namely, asking the question, What else happened? This method attends to the ways stories are retold, repeated, and recirculated at later points in time, in different contexts, and, sometimes, with different rhetorical outcomes. Enoch’s approach, thus, captures and creates new elements for rhetorical consideration. Finally, Mary Queen’s essay, “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World” (2008), brings feminist research into dialogue with digital texts. Noting that the Internet has become “profoundly implicated in globalized capitalist practices and integral to the resistance of local, regional, and transnational social movements to those practices,” Queen examines how Afghan women’s voices and bodies were deployed rhetorically after 9/11 to support liberal democratic and military objectives. In particular, she analyzes controversial representations of oppressed Afghan women on two feminist websites—the American-run site of the Feminist Majority (FM) and the Afghan-run site of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) (472), she also develops a method for analyzing digital environments, rhetorical geneology, one that examines hypertext links between websites as a means of appraising the complex relationships among circulation, agency, and identity online. Through her study of linking practices on the FM and RAWA websites, Queen demonstrates that U.S. women have appropriated global women rhetorically and identifies the insensitivity of such use, even when directed toward such admirable goals as promoting transnational women’s equality. Together, these essays reveal how feminist scholars have made ethics, emotion, politics, and standpoint explicit elements of their work and have contributed new research methods and methodologies to the discipline. These readings also chart how the emergence of feminist rhetorics as a field of study necessitated the development of distinct research paradigms and approaches. Feminist methods and methodologies are continuing to evolve, as is apparent in Elizabeth Tasker and Frances B. Hold-Underwood’s recent survey “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric and Composition: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to the Present” and Eileen Schell and Kelly Rawson’s forthcoming edited collection, Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Feminist scholars’ commitments to nontraditional subjects and ethical methods of inquiry are likely to generate experimentation and discussion for many years to come.

Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?* Patricia Bizzell Ten years of scholarship in the history of rhetoric had to be accounted for when Bruce Herzberg and I undertook to prepare the second edition of our anthology of readings in rhetorical theory, The Rhetorical Tradition. It was first published in 1990 and the second edition is now in press. The past decade has seen a tremendous outpouring of work in the history of rhetoric, as researchers in classics, history, philosophy and speech communication have been joined in unprecedented numbers by scholars from English studies and composition. Herzberg and I have, of course, attempted to reflect this new work in the changes we have made in our anthology. But in my opinion as co-editor, the most significant change in the second edition comprises the presence of women’s rhetorics and rhetorics of color. I don’t wish to suggest that I think the new book adequately represents these strands in Western rhetoric. But I wish to argue that their increased presence is significant for two reasons. I will explore these reasons primarily in terms of women’s rhetorics here, although I believe that similar arguments could be made with respect to rhetorics of color, and as suggested below, there is considerable overlap. On the one hand, as Richard Enos contends in “Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric,” feminist research in the history of rhetoric is perhaps the best current example of what humanistic scholarship in rhetoric can accomplish. On the other hand, feminist research in the history of rhetoric presents the most trenchant challenges to traditional scholarly practices, opening up exciting new paths not only in the material scholars can study, but also, and perhaps ultimately more significantly, in the methods whereby we can study it.

I First, what has feminist research in the history of rhetoric produced? Preparing the second edition of the Rhetorical Tradition anthology puts me in a relatively good position to answer that question, because of my avowed agenda of representing women’s rhetorics in that volume *  Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 5-17. Taylor & Francis, http//www.informaworld.com, reprinted by permission of the publisher. 113

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coupled with the anthologist’s necessity of relying on already published scholarship. I felt that the state of scholarship in 1989, when the first edition of the book was sent to the printers, permitted me to include only the following: Christine de Pizan and Laura Cereta combined in a single unit, with two brief excerpts, within the Renaissance section; Margaret Fell and Sarah Grimké similarly combined, though with slightly longer excerpts, in what was then the Enlightenment section, covering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous also combined, with longer excerpts, in the twentieth-century section. This is not very many women. Furthermore, as many readers have pointed out, combining the women tends to imply a devaluation of their work, as if it were not important or substantial enough to stand on its own. And indeed, the only men presented in combination in the first edition are four nineteenth-century composition textbook authors, representing what is openly treated as a minor genre. The women are presented in combination because I felt the need to preface their work in every case with a rather lengthy headnote justifying their inclusion and providing hints for how to read these texts as rhetorical theory, since they usually do not resemble the kinds of theoretical texts written by men and familiar in the canonical tradition. The explosion of feminist scholarship in the history of rhetoric over the last ten years has enabled the table of contents of the second edition of the anthology to look very different: first, no women are presented in combination. Second, every section of the book now contains at least one woman: Aspasia in the classical section; Christine de Pizan, with more excerpts, in the medieval section (where she really seems to belong); Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Fell, and Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz in the Renaissance section; Mary Astell in the eighteenthcentury section; Maria Stewart, Sarah Grimké, Phoebe Palmer, and Frances Willard in the nineteenth-century section; and Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous, and Gloria Anzaldúa in the twentieth-century section. Adrienne Rich would have been included here as well if she had given us permission to reprint her work. From six women, we have gone up to thirteen, and moreover, what was the Enlightenment section in the first edition has been split into separate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sections in large part because my co-editor and I felt that the advent of people of color and white women on the speaker’s platform in the nineteenth century constituted a sufficiently significant change in the possibilities for rhetoric that the century—which in traditional histories is usually thought of as advancing little over the theoretical developments of the previous century—demanded its own section. Furthermore, this list is by no means exhaustive. It represents only those women on whom my co-editor and I felt sufficient research had been done to enable us to include them without tendentiousness. The importance of this research is addressed by Enos. He is concerned to mount a defense of what he calls “the humanistic study of rhetoric” (8). He wishes to argue ultimately for improved graduate training in primary research methods, to correct a situation which, he says, “encourages students to passively respond to research rather than to actively produce it” (13). Lest anyone think that this line of argument identifies Enos as some sort of conservative old fogey in rhetoric scholarship, I want to point out that his position was anticipated, to some

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extent, by a more recent in-comer to the field of historical research, Linda Ferreira-Buckley, in her essay entitled “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault,” which appeared as part of a discussion in a May 1999 College English forum, “Archivists with an Attitude.” Moreover, and most radically given the state of scholarship only ten years ago, Enos concludes his essay by holding up as models of the kind of historical research he is calling for, feminist scholars Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, Andrea Lunsford, and other contributors to Lunsford’s collection Reclaiming Rhetorica. Interestingly, Ferreira-Buckley ends up in almost the same place, featuring among her approved examples the feminist work of Elizabeth McHenry, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Susan Jarratt. I mean to imply that feminist research in the history of rhetoric has indeed had a tremendous impact, if we find it cited as exemplary in two essays with ultimately rather different argumentative agendas—Enos calling for a sort of return to traditional research while FerreiraBuckley openly advocates revisionist history while pointing out that “revisionist historians depend upon traditional archival practices” (581). If we think of the tasks of traditional research as discovering neglected authors, providing basic research on their lives and theories, and bringing out critical editions of their work, my survey of current work undertaken for the new edition of the Rhetorical Tradition anthology suggests that few, if any, other areas of research in the history of rhetoric have produced such rich results of this kind as feminist research.

II Enos, however, misses an important implication of this new work in feminist research. As the “Archivists with an Attitude” forum shows us, historical research now, though relying on some traditional methods, must also raise new methodological questions. The problems that arise when the new wine is poured into old bottles can be seen in another College English exchange, that in the January 2000 issue between Xin Liu Gale and Cheryl Glenn and Susan Jarratt. In “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus,” Gale evaluates three scholarly works on the ancient Greek rhetorician Aspasia, comparing Glenn’s and Jarratt’s accounts, the latter co-authored with Rory Ong, with Madeleine Henry’s book-length treatment. Gale favors Henry’s work because, she says, Henry gives us “meticulous treatment of historical sources,” “rather than eschewing the traditional historical method or twisting the male texts to suit her feminist needs” (379). Again and again, Gale uses the term “traditional” to characterize what she likes about Henry’s approach. From these terms of praise, we may anticipate the terms of reproach used against Glenn, Jarratt and Ong. They are continually accused of distortions and contradictions. Gale’s critique helpfully reminds us of the importance of traditional historical research methods in feminist scholarship. But Gale does not appreciate the extent to which Glenn, Jarratt and Ong employ the traditional research methods she favors. As a glance at their bibliographies will reveal, their arguments are based in detailed scholarship every bit as “meticulous” and textually oriented as that which Gale praises in Henry, although Henry has the advantage

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of being more exhaustive because she gives Aspasia book-length treatment, as opposed to the limits of an essay or book chapter. Glenn, Jarratt, and Ong have all read the classical sources and secondary scholarship carefully. Indeed, their grasp on traditional methods may be seen in their replies to Gale, in which their defense takes the fundamentally traditional tack of accusing Gale of not reading their work carefully and not quoting from it responsibly. This exchange actually testifies to the importance of the position taken by Enos and Ferreira-Buckley that I described above, namely that people who are going to do research in the history of rhetoric do need training in traditional humanistic scholarly methods, even in this postmodern day and age. At the same time, I think that none of the participants in this exchange adequately address the role of postmodern theory in feminist research methods. They do not adequately bring out just how revolutionary it has been. Gale acknowledges that all of the scholars she analyzes attest to the influence of postmodern theory on their work, but then she forgets about it in Henry’s case in order to re-cast her as a more “traditional” researcher, and she forgets about it in the cases of Glenn and Jarratt and Ong in order to damn them for trying to do something that they explicitly said they were not trying to do, namely, to set up a new master narrative— what Glenn calls in her response a “mater narrative” (388)—to establish traditional sorts of truth claims against the truth claims of traditional rhetorical histories that leave Aspasia out. Hence for Gale, there is a deep “contradiction” in the work she attacks: . . . on the one hand, we are asked to accept the post-modern belief that we are never able to obtain objective truth in history; on the other hand, we are asked to consider the reconceived story of Aspasia as a “truer” reality of women in history, a rediscovery of the obliterated “truth” independent of the existing historical discourse of men. (366) But I would argue that this is a contradiction only if there is only one kind of truth, what Gale calls here the “objective” kind, which might be taken as the object of historical research. That is not the kind of truth that the scholars she attacks are seeking. Here, for example, is how Glenn characterizes her project in her reply: Writing women (or any other traditionally disenfranchised group) into the history of rhetoric . . . interrogates the availability, practice, and preservation (or destruction) of historical evidence, [and] simultaneously exposes relations of exploitation, domination, censorship, and erasure. (389) Similarly, Jarratt makes no bones about using what she calls an “intertextual interpretive method” that allows her to “take ‘Aspasia’ both as a rhetorical construct in Plato’s text and as a real person” and to make a “speculative leap,” as she says Henry does (I believe correctly), “that [allows] scholars to imagine women in relation to the practices of rhetoric, philosophy, and literary production so long considered almost completely the domain of men” (391).

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Yet Gale does seem to be aware of this theoretical orientation in her opponents. In spite of accusing them of a contradiction involving objective truth, Gale does know that Glenn, Jarratt and Ong are not after objective truth. In the same paragraph in which she identifies the contradiction, as quoted above, she notes that Glenn is working from a “postmodern conception of truth as relative and contingent” (366), and she similarly acknowledges Jarratt’s and Ong’s research premises. I guess that what Gale would say is that the contradiction is not in her argument, but in theirs. In other words, she contends that in spite of claiming that they are not after objective truth, they argue as if they were. But it is not clear exactly what they are doing to draw this attack from Gale. Yes, they argue as if they wished to persuade readers of the merits of their positions. But it seems to me we must allow any scholar to attempt to be persuasive, without thereby accusing him or her of closet foundationalism. Indeed, Glenn, Jarratt and Ong might be expected to make more strenuous efforts to be persuasive than scholars who believe in objective truth would do, because their postmodern view of truths-pluralwith-a-small-t suggests that only through persuasion do arguments get accepted as normative. They must be persuasive because they cannot count on their audience being moved simply by clearly perceiving the Truth-unitary-with-a-capital-T in their arguments. I believe that this tangle arises from Gale’s not naming accurately what it is that bothers her in the work of Glenn, Jarratt and Ong. I am moving here into the realm of speculation, and I want to be cautious about seeming to put words in Gale’s mouth or to appropriate her arguments. But I am trying to tease out a subtle problem in feminist historiography. I suspect that what really bothers Gale is not that Glenn, Jarratt and Ong neglect traditional methods of historical research, because they in fact share these methods with Henry, whom Gale approves. I don’t think it really is that they are making unsupportable claims for new objective truths in their scholarship, because as Gale shows that she knows, they are not in fact making any objective truth claims—that is not the kind of truth they are interested in. What, then, is the problem? I believe that it has to do with the role of emotion in feminist historiography. Gale begins to get at this problem in her complaints about the ways that Glenn and Jarratt define feminist communities. As I have noted, Gale is aware that the scholars she attacks are working from what she calls a “community-relative view of truth” (370). Jarratt describes this view of truth as follows (mixing, as I have already suggested, what might be called traditional along with postmodern criteria): Does this history instruct, delight, and move the reader? Is the historical data probable? Does it fit with other accounts or provide a convincing alternative? Is it taken up by the community and used? Or is it refuted, dismissed, and forgotten? (391) But, says Gale in discussing Glenn’s work, “all women do not belong to the same community, all women are not feminists, all feminists are not women, and even all feminists do not belong

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to the same community” (371). Gale makes a similar point when discussing Jarratt’s work in her book Rereading the Sophists: If Jarratt has to attribute all the feminist characteristics to the First Sophists to include them in her feminist system, does she risk making the mistake of essentializing women? . . . [This move] may well raise questions such as how the resemblance between the Sophists and women would empower women and whether her feminist sophistic would create new exclusions, such as the exclusion of men. (377) It seems that Gale is concerned about exclusions in the communities that Glenn, Jarratt and Ong define as normative—indeed, a very legitimate concern. The problem here, though, cannot exactly be that Glenn’s, Ong’s or Jarratt’s view of feminism is not inclusive enough. In her reply, for example, Jarratt states that Gale’s “warning that my approach in this section of the book could have the effect of erasing differences among women is well taken” (392). Jarratt questions “the specter of a feminism that is One,” and she praises the multiplicity of debate in feminist work and calls it to Gale’s attention (392). This would appear to agree with Gale’s own call “to invite other perspectives to correct our own partiality” (372). But Gale, it appears, wants closure never to be achieved, persuasion never to be accomplished, because she is afraid that the influence of any community values must be oppressive. She quotes Barry Brummett’s caution in this regard, “ ‘Whose community?’ ” as if this were a question that was unanswerable (371; emphasis in original). I would argue, on the contrary, that it is answerable by a process of debate and discussion, provisionally but persuasively—though indeed, the process may require the avowal of values and may not rely on supposedly value-neutral logical demonstration. I do not believe that humanistic knowledge can ever be established above debate. That is perhaps the ultimate epistemological question on which Gale and I disagree. Therefore, I would redefine Gale’s problem with the scholars she attacks as being one that arises when persuasion does not work. Glenn, Jarratt and Ong have not drawn Gale in. I am wondering whether an important reason for her resistance is that she feels excluded not so much from their discourse or their arguments as from their emotions. Gale hears in this work expressions of feelings of solidarity that trouble her, as noted in her commentary on feminist communities above. Perhaps, she feels herself to be excluded from these feelings for reasons she does not discuss. It is notable to me that Gale is very sensitive to the emotions animating work she doesn’t like. More than once, she calls Glenn’s treatment of Aspasia “passionate” (365), a “personal ‘truth’ ” (366), too “assertive” (366 et passim). Jarratt is also too emotional, it seems, “intent on writing women into the history of rhetoric for the purpose of exposing male oppression and exclusion in order to liberate and empower women” (375). In contrast, Henry’s emotional valence as described by Gale is cool: she is “meticulous,” “painstakingly” “sifting,

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ordering, and evaluating evidence” (379), and arriving at a conclusion that “may not be as exciting as Glenn’s or Jarratt’s and Ong’s” but that “commands respect” (381). I think Jarratt is right on the money in her reply when she suggests that Gale harbors “aversions to both rhetoric and feminism” (392). But of course, Gale is under no compulsion to value either. My point would be, however, that Gale should clarify the grounds for her attack. It really isn’t that the scholars she censures have vitiated traditional research methods. They have extended them in the service of feminist values and relied in part on rhetorical ethos to promote their positions. What Gale really objects to, I suspect, are these values, and she is not moved by the ethos. Let her be clear about that. And this brings me to the methodological point that I do believe is raised by this debate, namely the function of emotions in scholarly work. We perhaps need more discussion of the part played in the setting of scholarly research agendas and the constructing of scholarly arguments by our emotions about our research topics—or subjects—and our imagined readers. Think, for example, about the unexamined role of emotion in the famous debate between Barbara Biesecker and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell over historical research that focuses on individual figures. I believe we need a more thoroughly rhetorical discussion of these complications of research. Fortunately, that discussion has already begun, and I will conclude by pointing to a few examples.

III We can now find feminist researchers in rhetoric openly discussing their feelings, both positive and negative, about their subjects of study. For example, in her essay “Women in the History of Rhetoric: The Past and the Future,” Christine Mason Sutherland has provided us with a nuanced discussion of the difficulties a twentieth-century believer in feminism and democracy encounters in studying Mary Astell, an important eighteenth-century thinker on political and religious questions and on women’s rhetoric who was opposed to democratic forms of government and to many of the liberal tenets of the contemporary women’s movement. Sutherland walks us through the ways the researcher must negotiate her feelings about a woman whom she can admire but not entirely agree with. A different example can be found in one of Vicki Tolar Collins’s first essays on women in Methodism, in which she tells how she was mysteriously drawn to the work of Hester Rogers, first acquiring her journal from Collins’s elderly relative who thought Hester might be part of the family, and then having a dream shortly after she began doctoral studies that compelled her in the middle of the night to dig the book out of boxes as yet unpacked from a move, read until dawn, and discover a research subject. Interestingly, Collins chose to omit this moving story from the longer essay on women and Methodism that she published later in Molly Meijer Wertheimer’s collection Listening to Their Voices: did she fear that, being too personal, it might taint her scholarship in traditional eyes? And one more short example: in her essay on Ida B. Wells published in Reclaiming Rhetorica, Jacqueline Jones Royster repeatedly expresses her admiration for Wells, rather than simply recounting the facts of her life and analyzing her rhetorical practices.

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Royster observes that Wells practiced the rhetorical arts “with flair and style” (169), that she worked for a world “in which we, African American included, could all flourish” (173), and, in short, that “Ida B. Wells was a wonder, personally and rhetorically” (181). I believe it is to Royster that we owe our most thorough theorizing of the role of emotions in feminist research to date. In her study of African American women’s rhetoric and social action, entitled Traces of a Stream, Royster concludes with a chapter that addresses in detail the methodological questions I have raised here. She articulates an approach that frankly begins in her identification—she takes the term from Kenneth Burke—with the subjects of her inquiries (see 252, 272). On the one hand, this is a deeply personal identification, springing from a mutual African American heritage. As Roster says, “theory begins with a story” (255), and she shares her story of community allegiances and multiple experiences with extant archives on African American women, with colleagues on the scholarly journal SAGE, and with her students at Spelman College. At the same time, Royster pointedly rejects an essentialized notion of identity. She notes: There is a constancy in the need for negotiation, beginning with the uncomfortable question of how much I actually do share identities with the women I study and how much I do not. (271) . . . identity is not natural. It is constructed. I have indeed identified multiple connections between these women and myself, despite our not being perfectly matched. (272) . . . However, as full-fledged members of humanity, this work is not by necessity ours alone. Others can also have interests and investments in it that can be envisioned from their own standpoints, from their own locations. What becomes critical to good practice, however, is that these researchers—who are indeed outsiders in the communities they study—have special obligations that begin with a need to articulate carefully what their viewpoints actually are, rather than letting the researchers’ relationships to the work go unarticulated, as is often the case with practices of disregard. (277) What becomes critical, in other words, is the acknowledgment of the multiple functions of emotions and experiences in defining one’s relationship to one’s research, a departure from traditional methods that Royster calls “practices of disregard,” which might be the practices that produce the emotional coolness I saw Gale preferring in Henry. It follows from this acknowledgment of personal connection in Royster’s theory that the scholar will care for the subjects being researched. Here is where emotional attachments come most clearly into the open. Royster notes that for students who learned about the history of African American women’s rhetoric and social action, “the most frequent types of responses . . . were affective” (266), relating not only to how they felt about the women they studied but also to how they felt about their own lives as intellectuals. Royster observes that over the years of doing archival research herself, “I was developing a habit of caring as a rhetorician”

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(258)—note how this formulation links caring with disciplinary activity—“caring as a rhetorician” (emphasis added). Particularly for African American women engaged in such research, Royster argues, what she calls an “afrafeminist” methodology should “acknowledge a role for caring, for passionate attachments” (276)—there again is that passion that Gale detected, it seems somewhat disapprovingly, in the work of Glenn, Jarratt and Ong. Lest this kind of attachment lead to what Gale regards as merely “personal truth,” however, Royster repeatedly emphasizes the necessity for feminist researchers to ground their work in the collective wisdom of their scholarly community and, importantly, in the community that they are studying. As Royster puts it: I recognize as valuable the perspectives of the scholarly fields in which I operate; simultaneously I respect the wisdom of the community with which I identify. I seek to position myself in academic writing, therefore, in a way that merges membership in two communities: the one I am studying and the ones in which I have gained specialized knowledge. (254) . . . [Afrafeminist scholars] speak and interpret with the community [of African American women], not just for the community, or about the community. (275; emphasis in original) Royster makes explicit the discursive consequences of this orientation to multiple communities. Traditional academic discourse will not serve to express her research, but rather she must devise a kind of “academic writing” that mixes the cognitive and linguistic styles of her academic and African American communities—what I have called a “hybrid” form of academic discourse. Royster describes it this way: Critical to such methodological practices, therefore, is the idea that, whatever the knowledge accrued, it would be both presented and represented with this community [that is, the community being studied], and at least its potential for participation and response, in mind. This view of subjects as both audiences and agents contrasts with a presentation and representation of knowledge in a more traditional fashion. Typically, subjects [in traditional discourse] are likely to be perceived in a more disembodied way. . . . (274) Clearly, this is an attempt to embody in discourse an answer to the question Gale rightly indicates as crucial for all postmodern historiography, namely, whose community is normative? Royster gives us more, and more specific, information on how she answers this question than any other researcher I have encountered. She does not rely on any unitary category of “women” to define her communities. Moreover, Royster is at pains to specify that even the values and perspectives of communities she holds dear cannot be allowed to hold uninterrogated sway over critical discourse. She continually stresses the need for cross-questioning among communities, not only, as noted above, between the academic community and the African

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American women’s community (two which obviously overlap, in the person, for example, of Royster herself), but also between these communities and representatives of other standpoints who may be drawn to research in this area. As Royster says: . . . the need for negotiation is, therefore, not arbitrary. It is part and parcel of the consubstantial process. The need for negotiation is yoked to the need for a well-balanced analytical view that takes into account shifting conditions, values, and circumstances between human beings. (272) Royster concludes her discussion by articulating a four-part “afrafeminist ideology” or what I would call “methodology,” that organizes these insights. It is notable that the first element Royster mentions is “careful analysis” (279 ff), by which she appears to mean the traditional “basic skills” of research for which Enos and Ferreira-Buckley call and which, I contend, Glenn, Jarratt, and Ong, as well as Henry, employ. To them, Royster adds three elements that bespeak the emotions and value commitments I have outlined in her theory above: “acknowledgment of passionate attachment” (280) to the subjects of one’s research; “attention to ethical action” (280) in one’s scholarship, which requires one to be rigorous in the traditional sense and at the same time “accountable to our various publics” (281); and “commitment to social responsibility” (281), which indicates the need not only to think about the social consequences of the knowledge we generate but also to use it ourselves for the greater common good. In conclusion, I want to stress why Royster needs the new methodology that she theorizes so thoroughly in this book. She articulates the challenges that face her at the outset: The first and most consistent challenges have come hand in hand with the very choosing of the work itself, that is, with identifying myself as a researcher who focuses on a multiply marginalized group; whose interests in this group center on topics not typically associated with the group, such as nonfiction and public discourse rather than imaginative literature and literary criticism; and who is called upon by the material conditions of the group itself to recognize the necessity of employing a broader, sometimes different range of techniques in garnering evidence and in analyzing and interpreting that evidence. (251) Later on, she explains how these challenges impacted her research methods: The project required that I learn something about history, economics, politics, and the social context of women’s lives. For the first time, I had to spend more time considering context than text. I had to take into account insights and inquiry patterns from disciplines other than those in which I was trained. I had to take into account the specific impact of race, class, gender and culture on the ability to be creative and to achieve—not in some

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generic sense, but in terms of a particular group of human beings who chose deliberately to write and to speak, often in public. (257) As Royster notes, her techniques are “quite recognizably interdisciplinary and feminist” (257); she also characterizes them as a sort of ethnographic research in which she was unable to interview her subjects, because most of them were already dead (see 282). These techniques enabled her, as she says, to explore how “knowledge, experience, and language merge” in the lives of her research subjects (259). The point I wish to emphasize is that she thus generates scholarly knowledge that clearly could be developed no other way. Have Royster, and other feminist scholars for whom she has now more completely articulated methodologies already in practice, departed radically from the rhetorical tradition? Yes, and no. No, because their work relies upon many of the traditional tools of research in the history of rhetoric. No, because the rhetors they have added to our picture of the history of Western rhetoric seem to me to be working within this tradition and enriching it, rather than constituting utterly separate or parallel rhetorical traditions. But yes, because in order to get at the activities of these new rhetors, researchers have had to adopt radically new methods as well, methods which violate some of the most cherished conventions of academic research, most particularly in bringing the person of the researcher, her body, her emotions, and dare one say, her soul, into the work. From my perspective as editor of an anthology called The Rhetorical Tradition, contemplating the major changes in scholarship over the last ten years, these new methods have made all the difference.

Works Cited Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25(1992): 140–161. Bizzell, Patricia. “Hybrid Academic Discourses: What, Why, How.” Composition Studies 27 (Fall 1999): 7–21. —. and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990 (second edition expected, 2001). Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 153–159. Collins. Vicki Tolar. “Walking in Light, Walking in Darkness: The Story of Women’s Changing Rhetorical Space in Early Methodism.” Rhetoric Review 14 (Spring 1996): 336–354. —. “Women’s Voices and Women’s Silence in the Tradition of Early Methodism.” In Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Enos, Richard. “Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29 (Fall 1999): 7–20. Ferreira-Buckley, Linda. “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault.” College English 61 (May 1999): 577– 583.

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Gale, Xin Liu. “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.” College English 62 (January 2000): 361–386. Glenn, Cheryl. “Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62 (January 2000): 387–389. Jarratt, Susan. “Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English 62 (January 2000): 390–393. —. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Lunsford, Andrea, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “To Call a Thing by Its True Name: The Rhetoric of Ida B. Wells.” In Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Andrea Lunsford, ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. —. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African-American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Women in the History of Rhetoric: The Past and the Future.” In The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe, eds. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999.

The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Feminist Historiography* Susan Romano Catalina Hernández se esfuma desde entonces: ninguna huella suya ha sido descubierta hasta el presente. Catalina Hernández then goes up in smoke: no footprint has yet been found. —Lino Gómez Canedo In her landmark 2000 essay marking the growth and influence of feminist scholarship in rhetoric history, Patricia Bizzell attributes methodological innovation to the overt and covert operations of emotion in feminist communities (“Feminist Methods”). Here and in collaboration with six authors published in the 2002 Winter issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Bizzell in effect argues for “emotion” or “emotion in community” as a potentially viable topos in feminist historiography. What we have in hand in this recent scholarship is an unusually good view of what “viability” might mean. Bizzell begins by featuring the cohesive function of emotion, billing it as the overlooked common ground in the Xin Liu Gale, Susan Jarratt, and Cheryl Glenn College English controversy; this placement goes some distance in attenuating polarization and shoring up our sensus communis. Yet ensuing discussion implies that emotion’s signature quality may just be its unpredictability—its potential to both stabilize and destabilize community. Indeed in the Preface to the Winter 2002 RSQ, Bizzell links “internal controversies” and “opposing arguments” to health and growth (7), then goes so far as to single out Christine Sutherland’s argument favoring inclusive community as potentially divisive. It would seem, then, that in its capacity to define and destabilize feminist community, emotion serves as a productive—or viable—common place. *  Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (2007): 453-80. Taylor & Francis,http//www.informaworld.com, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Note: This essay has been condensed. 125

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Indeed, in their exploration of the intersections of hermeneutics and rhetoric, Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde aptly remind us that absence of closure is the prized legacy of the classical topoi. Topics, they write, are “insights that are kept incomplete and whose very deficiency enables inquirers to deploy their understanding within a new situation” (13; emphasis in the original). Topics are those “places . . . we hold in common with others, that we dwell in and argue over, and that we use reflectively to find the issues and premises of a specific case” (12; emphasis mine). It’s not that Jost and Hyde exercise undue authority in this matter. Indeed what better example of the arts of nurturing incompletion than the Winter 2002 issue of RSQ? What interests me in the Jost and Hyde formulation, however, is the role of case specificity in feminist places dedicated to rhetorical invention. What happens, I ask in this article, when we invite women doing rhetoric in cultural ecologies far off the beaten path to inhabit our topoi? What happens when the particulars of case are assigned a large generative role? I have found the topoi of feminist historiography necessary—absolutely necessary—for my exploration of causal relationships between two letters composed and circulated by a sixteenth-century woman named Catalina Hernández and Catalina’s subsequent disappearance. Because no rich body of evidence informs my study and because no extant scholarly conversation provides impetus for advancing discussion about this incident, the topoi of feminist historiography have been home to my rhetorical invention, and the disputational topoi—those uncomfortable places absent resolution—have proved particularly useful. In this specific case, for example, methodology was inspired, not given, by what I call the “evidence” or “Aspasia” topos—the Gale-Jarratt-Glenn debate. Here the conundrums of assembling sparse evidence of women’s participation in rhetorical culture and of using this evidence effectively and ethically are usefully foregrounded; yet this place offers no clear set of instructions for how to proceed (see Wu 83–84). For starters, Catalina Hernández is no Aspasia. The distance between Catalina and mainstream sites of rhetorical performance and rhetorical education is great, yet her distance from institutional power is not. Hence one function of this topos has been to inspire calibration of the connections between mainstream rhetoric and Catalina’s particular performance and her particular education, as well as to inspire responsible uses of available evidence. My agenda is thus aligned with the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies inquiry into how best to study people doing rhetoric at the margins (Bizzell and Jarratt), and it is mindful in maintaining incompleteness.

The Chronology and the Evidence In the winter of 1530–1531, less than a decade after the Spanish invasion of Mexico, six women recruited by regent Isabel of Spain to educate and indoctrinate Mexico’s indigenous girls arrived at the Port of Veracruz and traveled overland to the urban center Tenochtitlan—now Mexico City—where they launched their teaching mission.1 Just six months later one of the six, Catalina Hernández, wrote to the colonial civic council—the Audiencia—objecting to certain controlling actions taken by the Franciscan friars. The Audiencia reported the incident

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in a letter to the Queen. Catalina’s letters were not sent along with this report because they were allegedly too “disturbed” (“Carta” 116). Instead the Audiencia members excerpted and paraphrased those portions of Catalina’s writing they considered rhetorically incompetent but nonetheless sufficiently alarming to warrant an investigation into cause. Writer and teacher Catalina Hernández then disappears from the historical record. As contemporary Franciscan scholar Lino Gómez Canedo puts it, she “goes up in smoke, and no footprint has been found” (111). Although the need to educate girls had been articulated early in the Conquest by royal decree (Muriel 29–31), it was only after the scandalous, much wept-over, 1529 abduction of two native girls that Bishop Elect Juan de Zumárraga stepped up efforts to formalize education for indigenous girls and to gain royal backing for this enterprise. The abducted girls had been taken forcibly from an informal proto-school by order of the incorrigible brother of the first President of Audiencia (that very entity that two years later would be charged with passing judgment on Catalina’s writing). Finding exigency in outrage, the Queen agreed to fund construction of a school for girls and to send over a small contingency of suitable teachers (Gómez Canedo; Muriel). The six women recruits for these teaching positions were called beatas, a slippery term not readily translated to contemporary English, meaning something like “spiritual women who belong to some form of religious community.” On shipboard, the beatas were accompanied by a Franciscan who served as confessor and chaperone and, coincidentally, by a former companion and close confidant of Ignacio de Loyola, who would soon found the Society of Jesus. This person was Calisto de Sa, and it was Calisto’s questionable relationship with the beatas that gave cause for Franciscan intervention in the beatas’ community practice.4 Catalina Hernández and Calisto evidently developed an especially close relationship, one deemed by their confessor in common as nonsexual (“Carta” 116). Even so, when they continued to see each other in the months following their arrival in Mexico, religious and civil authorities classified Calisto’s post-voyage behavior as a repetitious and inappropriate “entering into” Catalina’s appointed space (“Carta” 115). Following a series of unheeded warnings, the friars apprehended Calisto and enjoined him to go forth on an evangelizing mission of his own choosing, anywhere in the empire other than where the beatas were stationed. The news that Calisto had been exiled, presumably on her account, prompted Catalina to write to the Audiencia protesting this action. The Audiencia’s explanation to the Queen cites excerpts from Catalina’s letters and refers to what the other beatas said or did. Additional references to this teaching initiative and passing references to the incident are embedded in several letters exchanged between Queen and Audiencia or Queen and Bishop. I quote in what follows those sections from the Audiencia’s letter expressing their alarm and proposing a course of action. The Audiencia, cognate with “audience,” was the judicial body or appeals court, part of the civic arm of colonial power structure. Audiencia members were known as Oidores or “hearers.” In the first excerpt below, these “hearers” discuss and

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paraphrase Catalina’s letter. It is here too that we get the best glimpse of the beatas’ lines of reasoning, which I will extend in one of the narratives below. Note the several references to publicness. When said Catalina Hernández learned of [Calisto’s] arrest, she wrote us a letter, which, because it is long and disturbed, we do not send along to your Majesty, in which she says that we are unacquainted with justice, and that we should not be so ignorant of who the friars [really] are, nor give them the credit that we give them, and that quite naturally [the friars] say publicly that we [beatas] must do only what [the friars] wish. And that cursed be the hour that we [beatas] decided to come here if we [are] to continue down this road. [The beatas then] called us “little men” and other insults of this ilk, resolving that if that Calisto were sent away, they would not stay in this land because it was to the detriment of their honor to make it public that a man had been sent away because of his love for one of them, and that this is what was being said throughout the city. In this she has told the truth because Calisto himself publicized it. (“Carta” 116–17) In this next excerpt, the Oidores propose an explanation for Catalina’s “disturbed writing” and lay out procedures for ascertaining the validity of their hypothesis. She is likely, they posit, to be suffering from the excess of spirituality that is characteristic of Spain’s illuminati. Precisely which part of Catalina’s letter leads to this assertion goes unstated, as do the precise consequences for Catalina should the Oidores prove themselves correct. The reference to confession—the truth-production procedure of choice for the century and culture—gives way to innuendos of Inquisition by way the following terms: “probe”; “as far as possible”; “determine the course of her life,” language all the more ominous given Catalina’s subsequent disappearance. Note the repeated mention of an alliance between the civic and religious authorities: “we consulted with”; “together.” The Oidores write: Since sane and noble people find it reasonable to say that from an excess of spirituality no good comes, we consulted with the Bishop Elect and together agreed to seize Catalina Hernández, and to keep her in a very honorable house and show her the letter so that she might recognize it as hers along with the other she had written to Licenciado Salermón [one of the Oidores and signer of the letter to the Queen] . . . ; and together [we will] confess her and speak with her to probe and know the depths of her spirituality: and we have great suspicion that we’ll find some illumination in her. Our inquiry will go as far as possible to find out the truth, and in conformance with what is found out, we will determine the course of her life; and if all is clean goodness, without tinge of bad illumination, we will pardon her having written

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the letter and we will give the order about how she will be employed in the service of God and instruction of little girls, although she is very thin for this work. (“Carta” 117–18; my emphasis.)6 If the historical record neither preserves Catalina’s letters whole nor indicates precisely what happened to her physical body, it does render more than sufficient evidence for me to interrogate those contexts of production elaborated in the Audiencia letter and purporting to explain her behavior, and to develop some alternatives. My process has been to examine first the extant accounts of the incident: the sixteenth-century documents and contemporary scholarship on colonial education. I then propose two alternative contexts, one looking at Catalina’s community identity, and the other reconstructing a conversation in which the beatas theorize rhetoric from recent experience. Each of four narratives below develops an identity for Catalina: woman in love, illuminata, woman of community, analyst of rhetorical phenomena. Each narrative proposes a connection between this identity and her writing. Each is developed within the context of feminist topoi in historiography.

Narrative 1. Catalina Hernández: Woman in Love Contemporary historians of colonial education either dismiss Catalina’s rhetorical production or cast it as an impropriety with sexual overtones. For example, in their meticulous study of the foundation of the first school for indigenous girls, María Huerta Ourcel and María Sarabia Viejo do not mention Catalina at all. In Las Mujeres en la Nueva España, Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru concludes a bit reluctantly that the Catalina incident was after all just a flap over romance (77–79). In La Educatión como Conquista, José María Kobayashi refers briefly to certain “indiscrete behaviors” (203) and other problems the women had caused. Josefina Muriel, foremost authority on female education of the colonial period, takes the Oidores’ explanation to the Queen at face value, holding that “the Audiencia intervened with serenity and in the spirit of justice” (67). More surprising is Marcel Bataillon’s figuring of Catalina as a wronged woman. Although Bataillon’s massive and detailed study of Erasmus’s influence in Spain includes multiple references to women illuminati, his short piece titled the “The Ignatius-Follower and the Beata” uses Catalina as pretext to feature Calisto de Sa’s relationship with Loyola, Calisto de Sa’s travels, Calisto de Sa’s womanizing, and Calisto de Sa’s wealth accumulation (“L’Iñiguiste”). Catalina and the other beatas are of little interest in this account, despite the prominent linkages to illuminati scandals alluded to in the Audiencia letter. Coming closest to granting some agency to Catalina is contemporary Franciscan historian Lino Gómez Canedo, who assembles primary and secondary sources documenting references to Catalina without proposing a romance. Gómez Canedo notes ambiguities in the beatas’ personal and professional identities and points out that the incident colored subsequent Franciscan views of women educators. Although his comment about Catalina’s “going up in smoke” is provocative, he does not speculate on her fate.

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The Topoi The ease with which contemporary scholars figure Catalina as enamored-woman-confounding-education-initiatives makes a case for the residual power of the romance topos in mainstream historiography, a power strong enough to prevent close readings of primary evidence and its rhetorical implications. The Audiencia letter, after all, is quite clear about how Catalina has framed her concerns: . . . if . . . Calisto were sent away, [the beatas] would not stay in this land because it was to the detriment of their honor to make it public that a man had been sent away because of his love for one of them. . . . (“Carta” 117) Here Catalina is said to be interested in the power of public accusation, issuing her complaint not in terms of truth and falsehood but rather in terms of public rhetoric and loss of community ethos. Indeed the appearance, not the fact, of sexual misconduct is the very point on which all parties agree: beatas and Audiencia and Franciscans. This concern is well founded given that every mention of women’s teaching in the official documents lists good conduct and honor as professional qualifications for women’s positions in education (see Muriel). Catalina’s letter thus marks common ground, not difference, regarding the matter of romance. Yet the topos in feminist historiography corresponding to “romance” argues against easy dismissal of seduction as possible cause. What Catalina’s letter retains, even after the friar’s successful removal of Calisto from the scene of conflict, is the power to disturb. The urgency with which the Oidores move to investigate the inexplicable congruities between Catalina’s bad writing and her rhetorical authority marks their significant anxiety about a form of persuasion beyond their grasp and hence worthy of scorn and suppression: something dangerous, something practiced, something feminist scholars in rhetoric might call Peitho-esque. In the next narrative I look closely at the fear aroused by Catalina’s persuasive powers.

Narrative 2. Catalina Hernández: Illuminata Among said beatas, one from Salamanca, named Catalina Hernández, was a friend and neighbor of Francisca Hernández, who is a prisoner of the Inquisition. . . . (“Carta” 114) [A]nd [Calisto] held her in a veneration similar to that of Francisca Hernández held by those who communicate with her. . . . (“Carta” 115) [A]nd together [we will] confess her and speak with her to probe and know the depths of her spirituality: and we have great suspicion that we’ll find some illumination in her. Our inquiry will go as far as possible to find out

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the truth, and in conformance with what is found out, we will determine the course of her life; and if all is clean goodness, without tinge of bad illumination, we will pardon her having written the letter. . . . (“Carta” 117–18) [The beatas] have such attachment and devotion [to Catalina] and hold her in such high repute, like Ortiz, the friar-preacher and Francisca Hernández. . . . (“Carta” 118) The Audiencia is Catalina’s chosen audience, her addressee, that judicial body before whom she lays out a complaint about Franciscan intervention in the matter of Calisto de Sa. She thus approaches a civic body to resolve what, by choice of venue, she considers a civic matter. Yet the Audiencia turns its attention from the issue posed—whether the Franciscans acted appropriately—to the rhetoric of Catalina’s letter, a rhetoric that becomes the very object of investigation. The Audiencia seeks its cause via conjectures regarding Catalina’s past associations—neighbors in Salamanca—from whom she may have learned certain forms of persuasion. Yet guilt is not determined by association; rather association leads to a specific hypothesis regarding the relationship between Catalina’s spirituality and her bad rhetoric. Proof of this hypothesis does not fall within the realm of the civic—hence Catalina must be returned to the religious authorities authorized to investigate matters of the spirit. In charge of this proof is Bishop Elect Zumárraga, a Franciscan, who by this affiliation is the very target of Catalina’s original suit. What I want to do in this narrative is read the Audiencia letter as a believer—to follow the trajectory of its reasoning. The letter is, after all, the primary document; it’s a direct and contemporaneous response to Catalina’s letters. It’s the only direct account of Catalina’s writing, and it builds a good case for the context of production. In the excerpts cited above, the Oidores work hard on identification. Who is Catalina Hernández? She may be a friend of Francisca Hernández. How do Catalina and Francisca know each other? They are both from Salamanca. What do the two women hold in common? They have the same kind of power over others. What does this power look like? It’s a power over men, a power to command their devotion and attachment: Just as Francisca commanded the devotion of Fray Ortiz, so Catalina commanded the devotion of Calisto de Sa. What else do we know about her power over others? She has a good deal of power over her sister beatas, who, oddly enough, support her. Where would such power come from? It may come from the wrong kind of spirituality, a spirituality corresponding to illumination. Francisca is a member of the illuminati; Catalina may be too. How will we know for sure? We will use the device of confession, and the Bishop Elect will take charge of this procedure. In the political-religious context of early sixteenth-century Spain, “illumination” refers to a spiritual renaissance of broad popularity and rising intensity. It was well tolerated for a near quarter century; indeed its practitioners became so numerous that in 1525, writes Bataillon, “illuminism might be anything except a spiritual aberration or an esoteric doctrine for the

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use of a small circle of initiates” (Erasmo 185). Rather, it was a “complex and quite vigorous movement” (185) whose co-presence with the availability of humanist tracts in translation (Erasmus’s works in particular), the rise of lay reading practices and public preaching, and the popularity of small group meetings aligned it with Lutheranism in the eyes of its opposition. Despite the embrace of highly placed clergy and friars, illumination became sufficiently controversial as to raise the hackles of the Spanish Inquisition and was eventually targeted as heterodoxic or heretical. With the publication of its 1525 Edict detailing the signs and features of illumination, the Inquisition began bringing its practitioners to judgment. The Oidores’ 1531 response to Catalina’s letter is then situated within the politics of Reformation. Illuminism was available in Spain to women and others who did not have access to the kind of formal training that would customarily grant authority over religious practice. Even secular women of class who traveled in high circles numbered among the illuminati. Moreover, illumination in Spain was distinctly marked by the power of several quite famous beatas, who might be understood in contemporary terms as somewhere between cult leaders and salon keepers and whose spirituality attracted numerous followers. Through their trances and prophesies, their unaccountable theological acumen, and their alleged belief that spirituality absolved them from restrictions on sexual conduct, illuminist beatas had demonstrated the ability to attract and influence male devotees, including clergy; moreover, such clergy showed extreme and persistent devotion to these women (Bataillon Erasmo 171–72, 176–79). Although it is generally agreed that Spanish Inquisitorial interventions in illuminist practice arose from its supposed association with “Lutheranism” (an oversimplification, argues Bataillon), the rising climate of fear and growing repression of public illuminati accused of “occult Lutheranism” is inflected by questions of gender and authority. These inflections are what the Audiencia and the Franciscans bring to bear on the case of Catalina’s rhetoric. The Francisca Hernández mentioned in the Audiencia letter was a Spanish beata who in 1528 had been apprehended and placed on trial before the Inquisition for her leadership among the illuminati. Her long-time spiritual companion Fray Francisco Ortiz had been arrested for his intemperate public denunciation of Francisca’s persecution. Although the records of proceedings are lost, it appears that in the summer of 1530, after over a year’s incarceration and possible torture and during the year preceding the Catalina letters, Francisca had begun denouncing her old illuminist friends as “Lutherans.” By September 1530, writes Bataillon, her denunciations had reached “singular amplitude” (436–37).9 This was just three months before the beatas arrived in Mexico. Thus the mere mention of Francisca Hernández and her jailed defender Fray Ortiz to the Queen would certainly have bordered on alarmist rhetoric. That the Queen was highly invested in this female education mission we can assume from her attentive and detailed provision for the women’s Atlantic voyage, her recruitment of wellqualified women from a broad spectrum of religious communities, and her agreement to fund Zumárraga’s thick-walled schools. In such light, the Audiencia’s response to Catalina’s writing was political and emotional, yet, as an expression of administrative duty, logical and sensible.

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Moreover, the Inquisition’s Edict of 1525 defining the illuminist heresy was composed of fragments of overheard conversation and snippets of writing allegedly enunciated by persons deemed heretics, rather than of any coherent statement of what constituted this particular form of heresy (Bataillon 432). Knowing this, I could make the case, then, that in withholding Catalina’s letter from the Queen’s eyes (“because long and disturbed we do not send it along to Your Majesty”), the Audiencia’s actions protected this writing from a scrutiny that would have led to Catalina’s return to Spain, arrest, and torture. Moreover, if Catalina’s letter were to have contained incriminating language, its circulation might well have resulted in accusations against the friars and Oidores themselves. Arguably, then, the mention of Francisca Hernández served as code to alert the Queen of potential scandal and notify her that her loyal subjects in New Spain would be addressing the issue quietly, thus protecting both mission and persons. Such a reading accounts for the absence of a direct reply from the Queen (scholars have searched for such response and come up empty handed) and for her much delayed and vague nod of agreement with “whatever” it was that the Audiencia and Bishop had done. Yet I could as easily argue that as acting Inquisitor in the colonies, Zumárraga, who over the ensuing decade continued to argue for women’s cloistering as the solution to native education, used his authority abusively. In any case, situating Catalina’s writing within the volatile discourses on illumination points directly to issues of gender and power. Francisca, like other beatas identified as illuminati, had amply demonstrated the uses of women’s words to influence male illuminati, even clergy, and, later, to denounce them, or, even more astounding, to induce men’s own selfincriminating behavior. Associating Catalina with Francisca suggests concern not with faulty spiritual practice (a dogma issue), but with women’s powers of persuasion (a rhetoric issue). Had something approaching gender-neutral logic about spirituality been available to the Oidores, Calisto would surely have been equally suspect because of his association with Ignacio de Loyola. Loyola had been questioned by religious authorities about his alleged illuminist predilections and reading practices—Erasmus in particular (Bataillon 212–13). Twenty-first century gender logic would question a breach in logic such that a person (Calisto) whose onrecord association with someone already imbricated in the mechanisms of the Inquisition for illuminist-like behavior (Loyola) should be admonished to walk forth freely to evangelize throughout the empire, while another person (Catalina) should on scanty evidence be assigned a personal history of similar behavior justifying incarceration, interrogation, and “disappearance.” In fact, we do not know whether Catalina agreed to this version of her personal history: a spiritual orientation colored by an association with Francisca Hernández and membership in the ranks of the illuminati. No documentation answering this question has been found, and subsequent references to the incident in the literature are evasive. Couched in the safe language of school building construction, the Queen first mentions the incident a full nine months later:

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I saw what you say about what has happened there with the beatas we sent; and all of what you say and have done, regarding the house and the Indian labor . . . and the rest, it seems all right to me. . . . (qtd. in Gómez Canedo 110; my emphases) The Audiencia wrote with comparable obfuscation, passing the buck to Bishop Zumárraga. The letters crossed in the mail: About the beatas, what was mentioned before. The results of our investigation showed it to be a thing of low quality [poca calidad]. . . . And all of what is or was of this matter the Bishop will or has informed you of this, because it passed through his hands. (qtd. in Gómez Canedo 110, note 31; my emphases) The language of this exchange is markedly guarded: “what has happened there”; “all of what you say and have done”; “and the rest”; “what was mentioned before”; “a thing”; “what is or was”; “this matter”; “this”; “it.” These references collapse Catalina’s history into the two words “low quality,” yet “low quality” is a phrase with ambiguous referent: Is it Catalina’s rhetorical behavior that lacks quality? Or her sexual behavior? Or the elusive brand of spirituality she owned? Or a bungled interrogation resulting in her death and warranting coverup? Or some other unnamed transgression? The Topoi The construction of Catalina as illuminata positions her as a player within the context of a major ideological shift with broad repercussions in human history: Spain’s response to the infiltration from northern Europe of humanist and Reformation-associated practices. Were I to center, as historiographer, this particular context for Catalina’s rhetorical production, I would necessarily amplify the discussion of women and illumination in Spain, foregrounding the first public flogging of a friar and a beata together in 1529 and the first stake-burnings of illuminati in 1529 and 1530. Inflammatory illustrations of this kind would bolster the Oidores’ case, augmenting the appeal of their reasoning and augmenting the cultural capital accruing to a couple of letters written by an otherwise unknown woman. Yet there are losses entailed in advancing such a narrative. For one thing, complying with the reasoning of the Oidores places Europe at the center of rhetoric’s history, billing it as the font of rhetorical learning and performance and thereby deflecting attention not only from the Americas as rich site of rhetorical activity at this time, but also from the rhetorical act itself in the amplitude of its geographical and cultural specificity. Locating Catalina in her European context assumes no location-specific motive, no conditions of production peculiar to the resources or experiences of a particular woman in a particular moment.

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Moreover, it’s questionable whether formulating a tenuous connection between one outspoken woman and others under suspicion of Protestant leanings renders a sufficiently robust understanding of everyday women’s roles in the great shift of authority structures that characterizes the Protestant Reformation. Historian Diarmaid MacCullouch notes that small subversive acts were numerous and that even those we now recognize as having far-reaching consequences went unmarked in their day as such—for example, the subversive Zurich city council resolutions of 1524 and 1525 banning religious imagery and the observance of mass. To posit an analogy between the Zurich case and Catalina’s act is a stretch to be sure. But what I want to point out is that Catalina takes her objection about obedience within a religious authority structure to a civic body for a ruling. My larger point is that by aligning Catalina not with seductive, burning women but rather with a plethora of acts—some successful, some not—challenging the authority structures of the Church is a slight but significant shift in the way we figure the relationship of one woman’s rhetorical act to the material and intellectual forces of history. Still, the shape of this relationship I am trying to draw—between local context for rhetorical production and mainstream history—is plagued by the shortness of evidence [. . .]. Because Catalina is not “recoverable” in the sense that a body of her writings will materialize and afford her author-function status, textual traces of the historical Catalina Hernández readily lend themselves to Barbara Biesecker’s discussion of rhetorical techne, under which Catalina’s speech or writing would be classed as a “getting through” or ad hoc “making do” by a subject whose resources are necessarily located in and circumscribed by the field within which she operates, but whose enunciation, in always and already exceeding and falling short of its intending subject, harbors within it the possibility of disrupting, fragmenting, and altering the horizon of human action out of which it emerges. (168) Biesecker would perhaps not flinch, as I have, at the Oidores’ designation of Catalina’s writing as desatino—folly—because the techne Biesecker advocates is independent of ethos and intention. That is, the persuasive potential of the text, in this scheme, is disconnected from the individual and relocated within a larger collective of like, or unlike, rhetorical acts, each with varying and unpredictable degrees of effectiveness. Certainly the case of Catalina Hernández makes Biesecker’s argument attractive. Yet bringing the specificities of case to the topos (Jost and Hyde’s formulation) puts a spin on the issue: the Oidores themselves attribute agency—in fact agency is their primary concern. They identify Catalina as agent whose words are quite capable of causing great harm—to friars and to the education initiative. They explicitly connect her person [. . .] with her words, and her words with remote social effects [. . .]. Moreover, the Oidores work out the matter of agency unevenly, sometimes figuring Catalina as a “she”—sole author of her position—and some-

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times as a “they”—one member of a stubborn collective of beatas holding fast in solidarity. [. . .] What they apparently “heard” first and foremost was a woman whose rhetorical authority was likely to produce alarming social effects. Simultaneously or secondarily they may or should have “heard” community solidarity and a collective desire for the Franciscans to relinquish authority over women’s teaching communities. I pursue the role of community in yet another construction of Catalina’s identity in the narrative that follows.

Narrative 3. Catalina Hernández: Woman of Community When Bishop Elect Zumárraga prompted Queen Isabel to recruit “spiritual women” to teach native girls, neither seems have given much thought to the range of practices this phrase might refer to. Indeed the Audiencia’s very question—Who is Catalina and what is her spiritual practice?—is aptly posed if all too cursorily answered. In this third narrative, one of my own making, I position Catalina’s rhetorical act not in terms of her association with the illuminati, but rather within the context of a new community’s process of formation and as a product of those ambiguities embedded in the language of women’s professional identities. The Queen’s “Provision” of March 1530 refers to four “religiosas beatas emparedadas,” telling terms that beautifully invoke the tension between women’s publicness and women’s cloistering in these times. In sixteenth-century Spain, any one of these words implied a multiplicity of practices with murky histories and tangled legal distinctions. Male and female mendicant orders had begun differentiating their practices during the thirteenth century, a phenomenon trackable in the founding documentation or “Constitutions” of each community (Foz y Foz 64). Second order female mendicants adopted rigid cloistering regulations, whereas third order women developed community practices corresponding to the new spirituality common among many populations of women. The latter kinds of community appear to have become unstable, leaning persistently toward cloistered status at the expense of the apostolic or evangelizing function that called for contact with the world outside the monastery (Foz y Foz 64).11 But not all communities adhered to this pattern. Pilar Foz y Foz argues that an ever narrowing sphere of action for women, a departure from previous freedoms, would give rise to a proliferation of less restrictive orders, which were variously referred to as beaterios, compañías (companies), sociedades (societies), congregaciones (congregations), or hermandades (sisterhoods) without clear distinction and subject to a variety of regulations and legislation (64). Terminology for the women themselves was similarly imprecise. They were called monjas (nuns), beatas (spiritual women), or emparedadas (walled-in women) indiscriminately. So Catalina’s assertion of authority over her actions would have enlarged a preexisting ambiguity embedded in the very language of professional identity and inherent in an over-generalized terminology for heterogeneous practice. These ambiguities of identity would have been exacerbated by the geographical distance from the Queen, whose discourse on native girls’ education differed qualitatively from that of New Spain authorities. The Queen was markedly attentive to the details of the women’s

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experience and to the maintenance of their social status. In her letter to Hernán Cortés, whose travel plans from Spain to Mexico coincided with those of the beatas, the Queen commends to his care these six women, calling them “women of class” and noting the importance of their being “looked after and favored” (“Provision” 309). The shipboard provisions approved by the Queen likewise point to social status: white bread, wine, raisins, peeled chestnuts and hazelnuts, olives, capers, garlic, fruit preserves, two kinds of sugar, cinnamon, cloves, saffron, pepper, ginger, mustard, anis and cumin, and, for personal care, pink medication for digestive irregularities (constipation, seasickness), skin cream, and soap. She also commissioned a servant and a cook. Moreover, the Queen marked these women as writers, ordering lap desks, lanterns to “keep the light,” three pounds of candle wax, and 100 sheets of paper. She purchased 300 primers for the native girls who would be studying Christianity under these women and learning to read and (maybe) to write (“Provision” 310–14). By way of these practical details, the Queen demonstrates no small degree of investment in this teaching mission. She attends to how the women would and should experience the voyage itself—eating, conversing, writing—and she imagines the actual teaching encounter: native girls and European teachers coming together over text. Evidence that the Queen favored a particular community affiliation is not forthcoming. In fact, the community histories of the six beatas are not traceable with any precision. What is evident is that the Queen cast her net broadly in the search of volunteers, directing inquiries to several Salamancan women’s communities and to friars of two male orders (Huerta Ourcel and Sarabia Viejo 463–64). Although early contact was made with an Augustinian friar, the recruitment coordinator and chaperone/confessor who accompanied the beatas on their journey from beginning to end was a Franciscan. So the women’s community affiliations were mixed from the get go. On the Mexican side of the Atlantic, preparation for the beatas’ arrival was framed differently, not in the language of class maintenance and literacy encounter, but in the language of physical space. Following the much lamented abduction of the two native girls, Zumárraga began making plans for a thick-walled structure and busied himself with the politics of land acquisition (Gómez Canedo 106, note 26). References to girls’ schooling drew heavily on terms of enclosure: recogimiento (a rounding up of lost women), cerca (fence), and emparedadas (walled-in women); clausura (cloistering); encerramiento (enclosure); paredes altas (high walls). Indeed instability best characterizes the state of Catalina’s community during its formative months. Again, records are contradictory and sparse. The numbers of recruits from Salamanca setting out in March of 1530 grew from four to six by May, yet four of these six resigned within two weeks of having arrived in Seville and were replaced by several women of unstated geographical origin. In May, the Queen ordered provisions for the son or daughter of one of the replacement beatas and for a servant; thus at least one beata was a mother traveling with a child. The point is that neither Queen nor Franciscan chaperone balked at the notion of a gender-mixed company or worldly histories. During June, three beatas and the servant

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abandoned the mission, and three more beatas of unstated identity joined the party. Among these—possibly—was Catalina Hernández, as her name does not appear in the first batch of Salamancan recruits. We can speculate, then, that if the six beatas who stayed the course collectively owned some community history, they held no single community experience in common. We can further speculate that it would be the common sense of education mission and the common experience of education work that would define the meaning of “community.” We might further imagine that women undertaking an uncomfortable and perilous voyage to an unknown land may have had a few ideas of their own about the kind of community they wanted to form and that these ideas would have been conjointly developed. Surely these women became well acquainted in the course of their travels. The Queen’s provision of tablecloths, a cook, a basket of china, and a plentitude of spices suggests that meals were intended for more than mere physical sustenance. Cross-gender conversation would have played a role in the shipboard experience. The Loyola-follower Calisto de Sa, an authority on innovative spiritual practice, would have interested and excited the beatas because of the parallels between his experiences and the ones they imagined for themselves. In winter 1530–1531, the beatas materialized before the Franciscan friars and civic Oidores not as the anticipated, ready-for-walls, women of good conduct, but as “ flacas”—thin women—whose ocean voyage had taken its toll. These now embodied women required medical attention and rest, as the Oidores note in their letter (“Carta” 114). Yet even as “thinness” refers to poor health, the term clusters in the Burkeian sense with terms for youth, vitality, and attractiveness. Catalina is described as “mujer flaca y de muy buen espíritu”—a thin woman of very good spirits (114)—and as “moza y flaca” (116) where the word moza has sexual connotations, implying both youth and ripeness for marriage. The beatas’ material presence would then have triggered that disconnect between an imagined contingency of obedient women teachers and the cadre of material women who had powers of speech and writing. The disconnect culminates with Catalina’s appeal for community autonomy. Arguably, she uses the friars’ dismantling of the Calisto “relationship” to mount an assault on boundaries imposed on women’s community—boundaries both physical and discursive. [. . .] The Topoi Theorizing and historicizing the stabilities and instabilities of identity, social theorist Craig Calhoun observes that the Church “has seemed through much of its history to offer—an all-encompassing scheme of identities . . . with implicit recognition by a range of authoritative others” (11). In this scheme, identities are classified as either doxic (“given” and hence normative) or orthodox, a term Calhoun defines as “authoritatively defended.” Deploying this Bourdieuian terminology, we might say that the ambiguities surrounding the beatas’ community identity led to what Calhoun aptly calls “a disputed set of shared rhetorics for both self-identification and recognition of others” (11) and that only a “limited range of common rhetorics [for organizing] struggles for identity and recognition” (12) was available. Rhetorical

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possibilities would have multiplied in tandem, with the “doxic” (the given, the normative) unavailable as a shared understanding, and with competing acts of “orthodoxy” (authoritative defenses) displayed in the beatas’ pitting of community authority against that of friars and Audiencia. The questions raised by Calhoun’s scheme are these: What rhetorics of community identity were available? How did these available rhetorics bear on Catalina’s writing and its consequences? Foz y Foz’s comparative study of women’s apostolic communities responds to these questions by positing an alternative to the Audiencia’s hypothesis regarding Catalina’s untoward sense of authority. In Spain, writes Foz y Foz, women’s non-cloistered spiritual collectives had gained stature and respect in their communities for their civic service. “In my judgment,” she writes, the most subtle distinction between the Old and New World lies in the posture of the civil authorities with respect to the benefits that monasteries, convents, beaterios, and similar groups offered society. The differentiation is less a matter of synchronization [between Old and New World practices] than it is qualitative. In Europe . . . the Modern Age brought with it a progressive sensibility for the promotion of community services of the kind that lay female institutions were involved with and which were very appreciated by the civil authorities, who favored [these institutions] and tried to protect their aspirations toward legitimacy. (70) Thus Catalina’s aborted bid for what she may have understood as a given community authority exemplifies Anthony Giddens’s observation that “what an actor knows as a competent—but historically and spatially located—member of society ‘shades off’ in contexts that stretch beyond those of his or her day-to-day activity” (qtd. in Cassell 126). Geographical distance would have distorted Catalina’s perceptions of cultural power and eroded the viability of her available rhetorics. [. . .] The larger historical significance of Catalina’s rhetorical production, then, may be that it initiates—boldly and tragically—the diminishment of women’s civic presence in the American landscape. Thus Foz y Foz’s and Giddens’s explanations are friendly to Biesecker’s theory of techne, for which a rhetorical act such as Catalina’s would be appropriately embedded within documentation of the longue durée of disputes over women’s community governance (Foz y Foz; Omaechevarría). Her act, unsurprisingly weak in and of itself, would gain historical, rhetorical presence as techne only when aligned with similar acts performed randomly over time. [. . .] Catalina’s letter opened a very provisional and short-lived deliberative space, which was handily deflated when the Audiencia called her rhetorical act aberrational. Audiencia interests were clearly better served by the invocation of a well-established, institutionally conveyed, nonrhetorical authority that submitted Catalina to a truth-gaining process and meted out a justice defined by this process. In the next narrative, I offer a reconstruction of the beatas’ reasoning

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about these matters, a reasoning that complicates the Audiencia’s assumption that all “sane and noble” people agree (“Carta” 117).

Narrative 4. Catalina Hernández: Theorist of Moral Authority, Publicness, and Justice What falls by the wayside when women’s writing is lost is good reasoning on subjects proper to rhetoric, in this case on moral authority, publicness, justice. Although Catalina’s writing is represented as riddled with desatinos (nonsense, products of derangement or lack of tact, extravagance, folly) and Catalina herself as desconcertata (disturbed, baffled, confounded, dislocated, acting recklessly), certain lines [of] reasoning can be teased from the maligned fragments of her writing. Indeed by marking what Catalina wrote and what the beatas said with extraordinary distaste, the Audiencia makes visible those fissures where beatas and patriarchy diverge in their thinking about what constitutes justice, what public is about, and what qualifies some persons to exercise authority over others. This fourth narrative (also of my own making) documents theorizing-from-experience by women doing rhetoric in local ecologies—a theorizing the Oidores have ineptly summarized and adeptly suppressed. The Beatas on Moral Authority [Catalina] says that we [Oidores] . . . should not be so ignorant of who the friars [really] are, nor give them the credit that we have been giving them . . . (“Carta” 117) [The beatas] judge the Bishop Elect and us as bad men of crude intellect because we do not reach the degrees of goodness that [Catalina] does. . . . (“Carta” 118; my emphasis) In its fragmented state, the beatas’ view of Oidor character and judgment seems harsh, arbitrary, and unduly accusational. Indeed the phrase “bad men of crude, primitive, or peasant intelligence” is neither elegant nor ego sparing. However, if we supply probable context—a dispute over community practice and authority—and if we take the beatas position [. . .] that the friars had no legal authority over this community, we can read these judgments as raising a case-pertinent distinction between the kind of authority conveyed by institutional prerogative and the kind of authority gained by good character and adequate intelligence. By way of negative example the beatas suggest that proper intellect and its exercise (ygenio) and a proper degree of goodness (bondad) are markers of a moral authority available to women (and presumably to men as well). They cite Catalina’s practice of goodness as exemplary and relevant to the case.

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The Beatas on Public [T]hat’s why [the Franciscans] went public saying that we [beatas] must do what they want, and cursed be the hour that we decided to come if we were to continue down this road. (“Carta” 117; my emphasis) [R]esolving that if that Calisto were sent away, [the beatas say] they would not stay in this land because it was to the detriment of their honor to make it public that a man had been sent away because of his love for one of them, and that this is what was being said throughout the city. In this she has told the truth because Calisto himself publicized it. (“Carta” 117; my emphases) These beata-initiated references to public, however fragmentary, illuminate not only the gender fault lines associated with public, but, more important, the beatas’ understanding of the power associated with public access and their own liabilities in this regard. In having publicized their authority over the beatas, the Franciscans will have tapped into extant beliefs about gender hierarchies, and they will have preempted the beatas’ opportunity for self imaging, for announcing in this new geography the kind of community they are. The Franciscans propose an image of (dis)obedient women in need of controlling in a general sense, while Calisto images them as vulnerable to romantic advances, if not accepting of these overtures. Calisto’s access to public is casual but significant compared to that of the beatas, who at the time of Catalina’s writing were scarcely aware of his having gone public with the story of his own exile and the reasons for it. The beatas’ words acknowledge their lack of control over public perceptions of their community and their lack of access to publicly circulating notions that impinge upon their lives. Indeed, the beatas experience public negatively, and they understand publicizing as a political act of significant power. The beatas’ few but not insignificant words render insight as to how, in this particular landscape, men and women perceive differently the function of public, how men and women attempt differently to determine how public might function, how gender affects—but does not entirely preclude—access to the resources of publicness, and how rhetorical resources are manipulated differently according to the particular way publicness functions in a given geography. The Beatas on Justice [Catalina] wrote us a letter, which because it is long and disturbed, we do not send along to Your Majesty, in which she said that we did not know what justice was and that we should not be so ignorant of who the friars [really] are nor give them the credit we give them. . . . (“Carta” 116–17; my emphasis)

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[The beatas] judge the Bishop Elect and us as bad men of crude intellect because we do not measure up to [Catalina’s] goodness. . . . (“Carta” 118; my emphasis) [And truth] being what we [Oidores] desire, they will all be treated here justly. . . . (“Carta” 118; my emphasis) Both parties raise issues of justice and judgment, working these terms differently. Catalina asserts that the Audiencia is professionally inept [. . .]. Her accusation has two parts: first, that the Oidores, who are in fact charged with “hearing” the case, are deficient in the arts of recognition and discernment (“don’t know what justice is”); second, that the witnesses are biased (the friars are not credible). The beatas thus do understand that the official function of the Audiencia is to pass judgment, and, by raising issues of witness credibility and judges’ professional and mental capacity, they focus their critique on actors within the existing system and call for space to deliberate the issue of these actors’ qualifications. The Audiencia treats the topic of justice quite differently, understanding it as a fixed process leading first to truth and then to appropriate action. Interrogation locates truth; truth leads to consequence. The outcome for a negative finding—evidence of illumination—is left unstated, and instead an additional process is provisionally delineated for the other beatas: “We will also go after them if in the inquisition for cause we find roguery, and meanwhile, we will keep them divided until reaching the truth” (“Carta” 118). Going unstated in this justicemaking process is the outcome for Catalina. The point at which Catalina, as Gómez Canedo puts it, “goes up in smoke” is left to the imagination. The Topoi By assembling extended reasoning from the cut-up pieces of Catalina’s writing and linking this reasoning to enduring topics in rhetoric studies, Narrative 4 makes that “speculative leap that allow[s] scholars to imagine women in relation to the practices of rhetoric” (Jarratt 391). More than marking the separateness of what women do and how they think, these shards of beata reasoning suggest their practical reliance on [. . .] what we would term a counter-public, one whose deliberations remain off-record, traceable only through the emotional responses they invoke from the patriarchy. Here, for example, the beatas theorize the nature and contingencies of publicness, understanding it not as a fixed space where the powerful ascend, clear throats, and speak, but first, as a set of dangerous spaces where rumor and innuendo go unanswered, and second, as a series of fluid spaces, conceived and deployed differently by parties who have clear stakes in their opening up and in their shutting down. This reasoning emerges from the standpoint of women’s experiences documented in conversations barely visible in the historical record.

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Narrative 4 thus abides, once again, in the Aspasia topos, where Cheryl Glenn points to “the silent shared conspiracy of all historians” (Partner qtd. in Glenn 388). Certainly my shared conspiracy is with the Oidores themselves, those masters of “talking about a past as though it were really ‘there’ ” (Partner qtd. in Glenn 388). Both Oidores and I employ Jarratt’s intertextual methods of historical reconstruction (391) by positioning Catalina’s writing within the discourses we “hear.” What the Oidores hear are the words of other beatas across the Atlantic denouncing men before the Inquisition; what I hear are the words of rhetoric scholars over the ages inquiring into the rhetorics of justice, publicity, and moral authority. What they hear they define as desatino (folly); what I hear I define as superbly insightful reasoning that illuminates gendered logics. Neither hearing is innocent; neither is apolitical; neither is devoid of emotion.

Coda In the end, this first go at institutionalizing European education for native girls during the early Mexican colonial period falters precisely on questions of community practice and women’s identities. Thirteen years after the first beatas arrived in Mexico, Zumárraga writes that his well-built building for housing girls and women has shut down because the native boys, even those raised by friars, refused to marry them, saying that girls trained by Castillian women were lazy and wouldn’t serve their husbands as was the native custom. So the indoctrination of girls has ceased for the most part, and all have gone home to their parents. There remain only four or five older Indian girls and one of the first women sent over by the Empress Isabel. She will return to Seville on the next sailing, never to return. And so the school building will remain empty, and I had built here the best of all buildings. (Zumárraga 177–78) Thus indoctrination of native girls by Spanish women rendered untenable and unsustainable results, yet the history of beatas and their public work in colonial Mexico did not end with Zumárraga’s failed initiative and empty building. The story continues across three centuries of colonial history where beatas take up the project of civic service. Beatas are often credited with founding grassroots spiritual communities and proto-public schools for poor women and children; they are credited with mixing adobe with their hands and with building their own structures, brick by brick. Ironically, the more successful these grass-roots institutions, the more vulnerable they became to incorporation into the rigid structures of religious authority. Many were converted from beaterio to convent school and placed under the oversight of local bishops, and founding beatas were “upgraded” to the status of cloistered nuns.

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Notes 1 Isabella of Portugal, Queen of Spain, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, and granddaughter of Isabel La Católica served as regent of Spain during the absences of her husband Carlos V between 1529–1532 and 1535–1539. [. . .] 4 The Society of Jesus was recognized by the Pope in 1540, yet not until 1572 did the Jesuit organization arrive in Mexico. Calisto knew Loyola during the early years of Loyola’s spiritual formation. [. . .] 6 All translations from Spanish to English are my own. [. . .] 9 The authoritative work on Francisca Hernández is Eduard Boehmer’s, Franczisca Hernández; see Bataillon Erasmo 435, note 6. [. . .] 11 During this period, female quarters were referred to as “monasteries” and male quarters as “convents.” [. . .]

References Bataillon, Marcel. Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la Historia Espiritual del Siglo XVI. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966. —. “L’Iñiguiste et la Beata: Premier Voyage de Calisto à México.” Revista de Historia de América. Junio 1951: 59–75. Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140–161. Bizzell, Patricia. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 5–17. —. Preface. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (Winter 2002): 7–10. Bizzell, Patricia, and Susan Jarratt. “Rhetorical Traditions, Pluralized Canons, Relevant History, and Other Disputed Terms: A Report from the History of Rhetoric Discussion Groups at the ARS Conference.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (Summer 2004): 19–25. Boehmer, Eduard. Francizca Hernandez und Frai Franzisco Ortiz. Anfänge Reformatorischer Bewegungen in Spanien under Kaiser Karl V. Leipzig: H. Hoessel, 1865. Calhoun, Craig. “Social Theory and the Politics of Identity.” Social Theory and the Politics of Identity. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1994. 9–36. “Carta de Abyencia de México a Su Magestad sobre varies asuntos de gobierno.” Colección de Documentas Inéditos Relativos al Descubrimiento, Conquista y Organización de las Antiguas Posesiones Españolas de América y Oceania. XT, T Madrid: Manuel G. Hernández, 1884. 40–138. Cassell, Philip. Ed. The Giddens Reader. London: MacMillan, 1993. Foz y Foz, Pilar. “Hipótesis de un Proceso Paralelo: La Enseñanza de Zaragoza y La Enseñanza Nueva de México.” El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, Beaterios, Recogimientos y Colegios. Ed. Manuel Ramos Medina. México: Condumex, 1995. 63–82. Gale, Xin Liu. “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.” College English 62 (January 2000): 361–386. Glenn, Cheryl. “Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62 (January 2000): 387–389.

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Gómez Canedo, Lino. La Educación de los Marginados durante la Época Colonial. México: Editorial Porrúa, 1982. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Pilar. Las Mujeres en la Nueva España: Educación y Vida Cotidiana. México: El Colegio de México, 1987. Huerta Ourcel, María Magdalena, and María Justina Sarabia Viejo. “Establecimiento y Expansión de la Orden Concepcionista en México Siglo XVI.” La Orden Concepcionista: Actas del I Congreso Internacional. Vol. 1. León, 1990: 463–474. Jarratt, Susan C. “Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English 62 (January 2000): 390–393. Jost, Walter, and Michael J. Hyde. “Introduction: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Places along the Way.” Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader. Ed. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. 1–42. Kobayashi, José María. La Educación como Conquista. México: Colegio de México, 1999. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Muriel, Josefina. La Sociedad Novohispana y sus Colegios de Niñas. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995. Omaechevarría, I. Las Clarisas a través de los Siglos. Madrid: Editorial Cisneros, 1972. “Provisión de Las Primeras Maestras Que Vinieron de España a México para la Enseñanza de las Niñas Indígenas (1530).” Gómez Canedo 307–314. Sutherland, Christine Manson. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (Winter 2002): 109–122. Wu, Hui. “Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (Winter 2002): 81–97. Zumárraga, Juan de. Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga: Primer Obispo y Arzobispo de México. Ed. Joaquín García Icazbalceta. Vol. 4. México: Editorial Porrúa, 1988.

The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Methodology* Vicki Tolar Collins (Burton) She, being dead, yet speaketh. —Title page, The Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers (1796) “What does it matter who is speaking,” someone said, “what does it matter who is speaking.” —Samuel Beckett, quoted in Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Postmodern indifference to who is speaking is a position authentically available only to those who already possess the authority to speak. When the primary modes of persuasion of a text (oral or written) are the ethos of the speaker and the moral argument of her narrative, who is speaking does indeed matter to the speaker, to the audience, to the discourse community, and to historians of rhetoric. For speakers like eighteenth-century Methodist mystic Hester Ann Rogers who exist on the margins of discourse communities, the power to address others, either in person or in writing, is not a trivial matter. And when women’s lives are formed and women’s voices are managed and silenced by the ways a production authority uses their discourse and the forms and forums in which it is published, who is speaking and who controls the materiality of the message matters very much—culturally, rhetorically, and ethically. Who is speaking and who is silenced are core feminist issues in both rhetoric and literary studies. The main tasks of feminist literary criticism have been, according to Carla Kaplan, “1) exposing the mechanisms of cultural silencing, 2) revaluing dismissed or ignored women’s writing, and 3) recovering alternative forms of women’s creative expression” (25). Patricia Bizzell has identified three projects for feminists in rhetoric: 1) resistant readings by women and men of traditional rhetoric, 2) reclaiming rhetorical works by women and valuing them along *  College English 61 (1999): 545-71. Copyright 1999 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted and used with permission. Note: This essay has been condensed. 146

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with those by men, and 3) broadening the definition of rhetoric so that it is more inclusive, especially of the work of women (51). As both Kaplan and rhetorician Christine Sutherland have suggested, there are dangers when anti-objectivists (including feminists) search texts of the past primarily for reflections of their present selves. Sutherland cautions against cultural appropriation, anachronistic readings, and privileging certain texts in ways that distort the historical text and its time. In discussing the “politics of recuperation,” Kaplan observes that feminist criticism “has often looked to women’s writing to mirror feminist criticism itself, wanting to see its own project of discovering female voices affirmed by the texts it recuperates” when, Kaplan argues, the texts selected may actually critique the feminist project (13). One way to avoid such problems in recuperating women’s texts is to approach texts rhetorically. Although a number of feminist theories of rhetorical historiography have been developed (by Bizzell, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, C. Jan Swearingen, and others), detailed methodologies are more scarce. The purpose of this essay is to present a methodology based on the concept of material rhetoric that can help scholars avoid problems of appropriation, anachronism, and decontextualization as we reclaim women’s historical texts and support the epistemological worth of women’s ordinary experience, particularly as revealed in their narratives. In order to understand and critique the function of women’s rhetoric in the cultural formation of women’s lives, feminist historians of rhetoric need to read closely not only the disembodied content of rhetoric written by and for women, but also the embodied texts, the material elements of their production and distribution, with particular attention to how publishing decisions and. practices affect ethos as it functions in women’s texts and women’s reading. In response to the need for examining women’s embodied rhetoric, this article presents a methodology, a method, and a Methodist. More specifically, the article defines material rhetoric and positions it theoretically in relation to other methodologies, including bibliographical studies, reception theory, and established feminist methodologies. After describing the research method, I illustrate feminist use of material rhetoric, drawing on my study of a rhetorical text entitled The Account of Hester Ann Rogers, the spiritual journal of an early British Methodist leader, first published in 1793 and issued in over forty editions in the nineteenth century. I call this a “rhetorical text” because its primary aims and functions within its discourse community were persuasive. The Account sought to make women readers more virtuous by persuading them to follow a certain spiritual path, the first edition focusing on constant communion with God, and later editions promoting the model of good wife, mother, and church class teacher. The case is interesting because the institutional use of The Account of Hester Ann Rogers by Methodist leaders was not the simple promotion of a woman’s narrative but an ideologically laden publishing act which shaped the ethos of the writer and her women readers. It is not within the scope of this article to review or critique the common (and generally accurate) view that in fact all texts—from novels and Supreme Court decisions to MTV videos and Budweiser commercials—are to some extent rhetorical, and that even the local McDonald’s employs its own McRhetoric. In this article I use the terms “rhetoric” and “rhetorical” in a classi-

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cal sense to refer to the art of persuasion, the act of using language effectively to bring about desired change in an audience. The key move in my discussion is to interrogate the term “desired”: Desired by whom and for whom? Once an author has composed a text, in what material ways do others layer their desires on the text? In what ways, over time, can a speaker be respoken? I use the word “speaker” for both one who persuades in oral speech and one who persuades through written texts. As Young, Becker, and Pike point out in Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, “The word rhetoric can be traced back ultimately to the simple assertion I say (eiro in Greek)” (1).

A Methodology Drawing on the work of Jerome McGann (The Textual Condition) and Michel Foucault (“The Order of Discourse”), I define material rhetoric as the theoretical investigation of discourse by examining how the rhetorical aims and functions of the initial text are changed by the processes of material production and distribution. Like Christina Haas, I borrow the Marxist notion that “the material world matters; that is, that the material-based conduct of human activities has profound implications for the development of human culture and the shape of human consciousness” (Haas 4). Material rhetoric is interested in broad implications of materiality, such as cultural formations and the shaping of gender roles. Looking at the “material-based conduct of human activities” through the lens of gender leads to what Jennifer Wicke calls “a feminism that insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements, including those of gender hierarchy, develop” (751). As feminist theologian Mary McClintock Fulkerson has argued, when women’s experience is offered as the main evidence for claims, feminism “cannot account for the systems of meaning and power that produce that experience” (vii). Scholars must “connect claims with systems of discourse and social relations that produce them” (viii). How to make that connection? It is a commonplace of cultural studies to suggest that a dialectical relationship exists between text and culture, each forming and being formed by the other. Material rhetoric complicates this dialectic by looking for rhetorical functions in relationships among authors, text(s), publishing authorities, discourse communities, and readers. A further complication is that the production authority, who controls the decision to publish or not publish a text, is also a reader who forms and is formed by the texts he or she reads and then publishes or does not publish. As a reader of multiple texts, the production authority sometimes decides to combine them—for example, to attach an introduction representing a certain ideological viewpoint, to include a dedication indicating who supported the writer, or to publish a work in a volume with other works rather than- as a solo text. This process of layering additional texts over and around the original text I call rhetorical accretion. As in the accreted growth of stones by the addition of external particles, rhetorical accretion attempts to form a whole from disjointed parts. But unlike the natural process of mineral formation, textual accretion is the result of human agency. With each accretion to a text, the speaker of the core text is respoken. Respeaking can be a way for the production authority to modify the ethos of the original speaker or call into question something in her text. As

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Foucault suggests in “The Order of Discourse,” institutions desire to control texts, provide boundaries, manage the way texts are understood by readers, and accretion is one way of controlling a text. The task of material rhetoric as a methodology is to penetrate and examine the layers of rhetorical accretion, reading each one closely not only for the nature of its own rhetoric but also for how it colors the ethos of the core text and what it, along with the modes of production and distribution, indicates about cultural formation in the larger discourse community. For the feminist critic, the focus is on discovering material practices as mechanisms for controlling women’s discourse and shaping representations of gender. The assumption that a text, rhetorical or literary, is a product that can change and be changed over time and that the changes show up in material ways connects material rhetoric with both the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss and current work in the field known as history of the book. [. . .] Like reception theory, material rhetoric, with its focus on the rhetoric of various historical traditions (for example, in this article, the tradition of early Methodism), studies how a work’s rhetorical functions and reception are shaped and controlled by institutional decisions on publication and distribution. Reception theory suggests that within a discourse tradition the aesthetic and cultural assumptions of various generations of readers affect how a work is read and used; material rhetoric applies this notion to gender, for example, by investigating how daughters’ reading of a text (even their actual receiving of a text and its inscriptions) may be shaped by mothers’ and sisters’ receiving and reading earlier versions of that text. [. . .] An interest in text as material object in social and historical context also connects material rhetoric with the area of bibliographical studies referred to as history of the book. While traditional areas of bibliographical study, for example analytical and textual criticism, have typically sought to establish the authoritative version of a limited number of (mostly maleauthored) works in English considered to be “classics,” D. F. McKenzie notes that current historians of the book study a wider variety of texts and how they were transmitted, drawing material evidence especially from records of the book trade. Though material rhetoric focuses on rhetorical texts and history of the book on more literary texts, the two share a concern for the economic and social context of books as well as an openness to texts from the margins of society. As Cathy Davidson suggests, historians of the book approach the question of how books work in society through investigating such areas as the distribution of books to subgroups, patterns of reader response to books, the rise and fall in popularity of certain titles or types of books, and changes in aesthetic criteria over time as they affect the reading and even readability of certain texts (3). While historians of the book are often interested in broad patterns of production and distribution and in the book as a category of object, material rhetoric is more likely to focus on individual texts. Among several overviews of the history of the book that I surveyed, only Davidson’s collection acknowledges gender as an area of potential interest. Yet feminist historians of rhetoric might profit from Robert Darnton’s diagram “The Communications Circuit,” which is a more politically astute construct than the communica-

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tion triangle frequently cited in rhetoric and composition studies. Darnton’s system includes not only author, text, and reader, but also publisher, printers, suppliers, shippers, booksellers, all considered in relation to intellectual influences, publicity, economic and social conjunctions, and political and legal sanctions (31). [. . .] Why is the methodology of material rhetoric, with its connections to reception theory and history of the book, useful for feminists? By examining the material rhetoric of a text in the context of its discourse community, feminists not only recover the lost voice of a woman’s text but also reveal the material “mechanisms of cultural silencing” (Kaplan’s term) or in some cases cultural muting. Feminists who approach “valuing” women’s rhetoric with some caution in order to avoid a simplistic presentation of an apparently autonomous text might find that material rhetoric enables them to gather material evidence of how the text and the writer were valued at different historical moments by both production authority and readers. Material rhetoric builds on the strong base of previous feminist work in the history of rhetoric and at the same time extends it, offering new ways to look at rhetoric’s function in cultural silencing and cultural shaping. [. . .] Material rhetoric is reconstructive not in accounting for absent texts but in reconstructing material evidence of social, institutional, and commercial structures that brought women’s rhetorical texts to print and defined the forms in which they appeared. Like ethnographic studies, material rhetoric looks at women’s rhetoric as “situated textuality” (Lynette Hunter’s term). What is new is that through close reading of texts and their transformations, material rhetoric traces the ways in which women speakers have been respoken over time through acts of publication, distribution, and reception by readers. [. . .] As a methodology, material rhetoric addresses issues of historical and rhetorical situation, of authority and ideology in publishing, and of intentionality in distribution to a certain audience, all of which expand feminist analysis of texts and textuality into the material world, addressing gender issues in terms of power, finance, and material authority. Material rhetoric offers feminists a way to examine both the rhetoric of their ideological foremothers and the rhetoric of women who are not feminist prototypes, women whose texts may even be implicated in patterns of hierarchy and domination. This should be of interest to feminists because revealing discourse practices that are supportive of hierarchy and domination has the effect of furthering liberation, not only through knowledge of systems of domination, but also by creating connections between feminists and women in other communities, even women who may distance themselves from feminism.

A Method [. . .] The first tasks of the method are descriptive. Material rhetoric starts with a published text, describing the material nature of the rhetoric, including paper, binding, and publication information; examining paratexts (Gérard Genette’s term) such as the title page, epigraph, introduction, and added texts not written by the author; even identifying other texts advertised in the book and the cost of the volume. We then work backward to identify earlier forms of

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the text—drafts or larger documents (journals, letters) from which the text was drawn—and describe their form, content, locations, and conditions of production. We ask: What or who authorized the material shift from earlier forms to published text? In what community was the writer writing? In what historical and political situation? To what audiences? For what rhetorical purpose? Returning to the published text and moving forward in time, we establish the number of editions published over a specific period of time. Did publishers change or remain constant? What other texts were published by the same publisher(s)? Useful for tracing a text’s publication history are the British Museum Catalog for texts published in Britain, the National Union Catalog for texts published in the US, and the OCLC online catalog. Examining subsequent editions after the first, we note changes and accretions to the main text, including paratexts such as title page, introduction, and so on, which might shape a reader’s view of the core text and the ethos of the speaker. We then identify the method of distribution of this text in its historical period. How much did it cost? Who could afford to purchase it? If the intended audience was, for example, young females, what would prompt parents to purchase it for their daughters or husbands for their wives? We examine the rhetoric in its communal context, scrutinizing the data for patterns of power and ideology associated with the publishing authorities as well as gender issues inscribed in each stage of textual production. Since women’s texts which reach publication (unlike those which are suppressed) have often carried an ideology the publishing authority wanted to preserve and propagate, particularly to other women, it is appropriate to ask: Whose needs were being met by the text in that society? Of what larger conversations is this text a part? We can also scrutinize various volumes of the work for traces of historical readers, for names, dates, inscriptions, marginalia, reader responses which might suggest not only the journey of the book from reader to reader but also its role in cultural formation. Finally, from our admittedly situated moment in the present, we look at all the material data and construct a story of rhetorical aims, functions, and effects as they have changed over time.

A Methodist This essay illustrates the usefulness of material rhetoric to feminist researchers by considering material and rhetorical aspects of a woman’s spiritual journal first published in 1793 under the title A Short Account of the Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers. Written by Herself. With a Brief Extract from her Diary. For the next hundred years this text, under at least twenty different titles, was the female-authored text most frequently published and distributed by the prolific presses of British and American Methodism. Because it is not possible to chronicle each stage of the material rhetoric methodology within the scope of a single article, I will focus on the aspect I have identified as rhetorical accretion, describing the origins of the text, its changes at the hands of various production authorities, and its reception by specific readers, at each stage looking particularly at the politics of ethos-revision. (Unless otherwise noted, references

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are to the 1837 Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers, here called The Account or The Account of Hester Ann Rogers.) I first encountered Hester Rogers in 1980 when Lorraine Rogers, a cousin on my mother’s side (my mother was a Rogers), gave me an 1837 edition of The Account, thinking its author might be kin to us. She wasn’t, but I became interested in who Hester Rogers might be. The first material evidence I found of Hester Rogers beyond the 1837 edition of her text was in an engraving of John Wesley’s deathbed scene which showed a room filled with people (see illustration). While Wesley’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Wesley, kneels at the foot of the bed, another woman kneels at Wesley’s side, her hands almost touching his elbow, physically closer to him than anyone else. According to the caption, this was Hester Ann Rogers. The visual rhetoric of this picture shows her as close to Wesley, intimate, her hands on his bedclothes. I wanted to know more about this woman and her text.

Figure 1: John Wesley’s Death Bed (Reproduced with permission from the Methodist collections at Drew University).

The National Union Catalog lists over forty American editions of The Account published in the nineteenth century, including several editions in German and one in Swedish. The OCLC online catalog lists over seventy versions, though not all are different editions. A cursory

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comparison with publication data of other women’s secular and spiritual texts of the period suggests that Rogers’s account enjoyed remarkably wide circulation in nineteenth-century America (see Collins, “Women’s Voices and Women’s Silence”). The indexes also indicate that versions of The Account are held by many libraries across the United States, suggesting that the text was probably sold widely. The British Museum Catalog records fewer editions extant in British libraries than in the United States; apparently the text was more widely circulated in the United States than in Britain. All editions prior to 1900 were published by presses of the Methodist Church. Who was this woman whom the Methodist establishment was promoting? Hester Rogers was a mystic. In her account she chronicles the depth of her relationship with God, including the moment in 1776 when she first experienced union with the Godhead. John Wesley considered her a successor to the French Quietist mystics (Rogers, Account 52) and regarded her as one of the few people to have experienced what he called spiritual perfection in the midst of life rather than at the moment of death (see Rack 333–42; Wesley, Plain Account of Christian Perfection). Before considering the transformations it underwent, it is important to look at the original core text of The Account and its composing. When Hester Rogers began preparing The Account for publication in the 1780s, she was drawing on a large body of her own writings, a manuscript journal of entries dating from at least 1774. Within The Account as Rogers structured it there are at least two layers, each presenting its own ethos. The core narrative is composed of selected excerpts from her daily spiritual journal, particularly passages written before her marriage when she struggled with rising and falling faith, with her controlling mother, and with her own failing health. (Her ailments were due at least in part to her ascetic practice of denying herself food; Joanna B. Gillespie suggests that she suffered from anorexia.) Interspersed among her troubles are accounts of good works like visiting the sick and the dying. But most journal entries are immediate narratives of her intimate experiences with God and Jesus. She writes of a night when she awoke at 4 A.M. to “wrestle with the Lord,” groaning for mercy and praying on her knees, when suddenly the Lord spake that promise to my heart ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. . . . Only believe.’ . . . Then did he appear to my salvation. In that moment my fetters were broken, my hands were loosed; and my soul set at liberty. The love of God was shed abroad in- my heart; and I rejoiced with joy unspeakable. (30) And later, as she struggled with her own sinfulness, she writes: I resolved . . . to use more self-denial of all kinds, and (whatever it cost me with respect to health or life) more fasting and prayer: for I hoped by these means to mortify and starve the evil tempers and propensities of my nature, til they

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should exist no more; and if my body expired in the combat, I thought I was certain of endless life. (35–36) The ethos in these passages is that of a mystic poorly suited to the ways of the family or the world. Her fasting is in the tradition of pious women in medieval times who, according to Caroline Walker Bynum, used eating and not eating as a way of controlling and renouncing self and environment. Abandoning food takes a woman away from her own physicality, toward God and into the suffering of others (Bynum 4–5). In composing The Account, Rogers embedded these excerpts from her intimate spiritual journal in a larger memoir of her early life that affirms her family’s piety, gives an account of her father’s death, and reflects her intellectual precocity. She mentions her marriage briefly (in two sentences), and her ministry in Ireland vaguely in a couple of paragraphs (never noting the fact that she is said to have converted hundreds to Methodism), and she makes passing references to her children without naming them or describing her experiences as a mother. Her relationship and correspondence with John Wesley, however, is central to the memoir section; she describes her meetings with Wesley (including “sweet hours alone” with him) and quotes his letters to her. The ethos depicted in the memoir is of a humble and godly woman who moved from well-educated daughter of an Anglican vicar to devoted and devout daughter of Methodism and intimate friend of its leader John Wesley. The breathlessness of her inner life and its journal ethos is tempered by the orderliness of her outer life and its memoir ethos.

The Material Method of Methodism Both journal ethos and memoir ethos are transformed during material production of the text through rhetorical accretion, a process which respeaks and redefines the original speaker. In the case of Hester Rogers, rhetorical accretion is a form of what might be called “talking over the woman.” [. . . I]n written texts an accretion of voices, often male, can layer over a woman’s text, revise it, correct it. Examining the material rhetoric of a historical woman’s text makes these multiple voices audible and reveals how added voices alter the ethos of the speaker and her rhetoric, inscribing the woman and her text in multilayered systems of hierarchy and control. In the case of Hester Rogers, rhetorical accretion of texts onto her core narrative changes the ethos and rhetorical function of The Account in significant ways. Hester Rogers developed and composed her mystical narrative under the spiritual, emotional, and production authority of John Wesley and in the context of a community of writers and readers which he designed and controlled. Wesley drew her to himself, identified her spiritual experience as mystical perfection, nurtured her spirituality for years, shaped her public role in the community, and cultivated her devotion to him through frequent correspondence and regular visits. After meeting Hester Roe (her name before her marriage) for the first time in 1776 and hearing her story of union with the Godhead, Wesley authorized her to “declare” what God had done for her soul (Rogers 50), by which he meant that she should testify in public about

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her experience. Her report suggests that she followed his urging. Letters she wrote to Wesley, which he subsequently published in The Arminian Magazine, indicate that although she did not preach, Hester Rogers did assume several speaking roles available to Methodist women in addition to giving testimony. One letter mentions that she repeated aloud passages from one of his sermons to a gathering and “enforced” or explained his main points by citing “a few parallel [biblical] promises” which she herself drew from Scripture (Arminian Magazine 329). Her manuscript journal also indicates that she led singing and prayed publicly as part of class and band leadership (Brown 48); she was also asked to lead prayer meetings in communities she visited in her travels (Arminian Magazine 441). Nevertheless, her primary rhetorical act, her main achievement as a “speaker” in early Methodism, was the conversion of her lengthy private journal to a concise public text, a process sanctioned and probably supervised by Wesley. The depth of John Wesley’s relationship with Hester Rogers is demonstrated by the fact that when Wesley realized his own death was near, he transferred her husband, James Rogers, to London so that she could care for her aging mentor as he lay dying (Rogers, Account 71). Wesley did not live to see The Account in print. It was first published in 1793, two years after Wesley’s death and one year before Rogers’s own death at thirty-eight from complications of childbirth. The first edition contained only her core narrative. After the first edition, the core text was never again published alone. Beginning with the second British edition in 1796, the post-Wesley Methodist publishing authority accreted other texts to the core text. The accretions include: journal passages not selected by Rogers herself for publication; carefully edited versions of Wesley’s letters to her; the sermon preached at her funeral by Thomas Coke, would-be successor to Wesley; an epideictic essay by her husband James Rogers entitled “An Appendix” to Coke’s sermon; yet other journal extracts, now presented as accretions to an accretion to an accretion—“A Supplement to the Appendix Consisting of Miscellaneous Extracts from the journals of Mrs. Hester Ann Rogers; The Dying Bed of a Saint and Sinner Contrasted”; two elegiac poems on the death of Hester Rogers written by women in her classes; a printer’s advertisement; and Hester Rogers’s epitaph. Some editions also attached her spiritual letters. The first edition was published before the death of Hester Rogers under the title A Short Account of the Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers. Written by Herself. With a Brief Extract from her Diary; the second edition (1796), published two years after her death, begins the transformation of the narrator. Two quotations appear on the title page of this second edition. The first, “Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my Soul,” indicates that Rogers is intended to be seen as a rhetor who is ready to speak publicly and whose audience is vast, that is, all who fear God. In this rhetorical call to come and hear, a woman appropriates the words of the male psalmist, daring to speak publicly of her own experience of God. The second quotation, “She, being dead, yet speaketh,” implies a kind of textual resurrection through an ability to speak from beyond the grave. But the Hester Rogers who is speaking is not exactly the same Hester Rogers who spoke in the original Account.

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The second edition changes the text through additions, deletions, and sentence-level editing. The editor adds a new first paragraph, nearly six pages of journal entries drawn from the unpublished manuscript journal, and a letter to Rogers from Wesley that does not appear in The Works of John Wesley (Works). These changes seem to have several rhetorical aims: they distance Hester Rogers from mysticism, which was controversial among Methodists at the time; they emphasize Rogers as a gendered body, a wife, and a mother; and they expunge language which would suggest intimacy between Wesley and Rogers. For example, in the Works version of Wesley’s letters to Rogers, he consistently addresses her as “My dear Hetty” and freely uses many phrases of affection. The editor of the second edition of The Account omits most references to Wesley’s personal affection and substitutes the familial “My dear sister” as the standard salutation. One eliminated passage from a letter dated Bristol, October 6, 1776 (Works version), reads, “I cannot express the satisfaction which I receive from your open and artless manner of writing; especially when you speak of the union of spirit which you feel with, My dear Hetty, Your ever affectionate, John Wesley” (13:79). By limiting passages which revealed Wesley’s deep affection for Hester Rogers, the editor protected both Wesley and Rogers from charges of improper intimacy and placed distance between them. Throughout his life Wesley was criticized for his intimate (but probably nonsexual) relationships with various young Methodist women. Henry Abelove argues that Wesley was “both seductive and monopolistic. . . . that he made his followers fall in love with him, and that he tried to prevent them from marrying” (vii), though Wesley did not hinder Hester Roe’s marriage to James Rogers. Wesley’s wife’s jealousy of his visits and correspondence with women like Hester Rogers was manifested in Mrs. Wesley’s public attacks on his reputation and his person (a visitor witnessed her physically beating Wesley) for well over twenty years until 1778, when the marriage finally ended (Rack 257–69). The production authority for the second British edition was probably sensitive to this issue, editing in a way designed to avoid resurrecting the Wesley-as-womanizer controversy.

The Preacher Speaks The most lengthy male text accreted to The Account was the sermon preached by Thomas Coke at the funeral of Hester Rogers on October 24, 1794 (published as a separate tract in 1795; first published with The Account by Methodist printer John Totten, New York, 1804). Coke begins the sermon by invoking the image of Hester Rogers’s dead body, saying, “If the remains of our departed sister, in memory of whom the present discourse is delivered, were before your eyes,” some might experience “a solemn but superstitious awe” (Coke 77). The negative connotations of “superstitious awe” imply Coke’s displeasure that the public exaggerated Hester Rogers’s spiritual gifts. Coke argues that a more appropriate response to her death would be to contemplate the biblical text Hebrews 9:27, “It is appointed unto men once to die.” He seems to be saying, “Hester Rogers is dead. She was just a human being. There is no mystery here.”

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Coke then expounds on the biblical text without further mention of Hester Rogers until the end of the sermon, or so it would appear. However, the body of the sermon, Coke’s interpretation of Hebrews 9:27, is in fact a carefully constructed argument against the possibility of a person experiencing spiritual perfection in the midst of life, as Wesley believed Rogers had done. [. . .] Whereas in her own published text Rogers barely mentions being a mother and does not give the names of all her children, Coke’s sermon includes an unpublished journal excerpt emphasizing her bodily suffering in childbirth when “the pain was so excruciating and constant . . . that I thought I must have expired! Having continued in this state about six hours, my labour came on with uncommon violence and rapidity, so that in a few minutes I was mercifully delivered of a lovely girl,” only to slip back into unconsciousness and remain near death for twelve hours. Coke also includes this tender wifely testimony: “My dear husband suffered much on my account; and I believe his tenderness greatly contributed to my recovery” (104–5). Nor, continues Coke, did Rogers complain when her husband left for a minister’s conference at Leeds soon after the difficult birth, leaving her with a newborn as well as an older child with “a malignant fever” whose “piercing cries, through agonizing pain in her head, were very pitiable.” Rogers remained the epitome of maternal strength and perseverance in spite of “fatigue, loss of rest, and painful sensations” (106), thus serving as a corrective to less patient wives of other itinerant Methodist preachers. Coke’s strangest attempt to emphasize Hester Rogers’s body was his discussion of “an obstinate windy complaint, with which she was attacked near three years before her dissolution, [which] baffled all human skill, and repelled the force of every medicine, and never left her till the day of her death” (108). It is difficult to imagine any woman who would welcome having her “windy complaint” publicized in her funeral sermon and published for posterity. How spiritually perfect can a woman’s ethos be once her audience knows she was constantly plagued with gas? Coke’s representation of Rogers is often at odds with her own writing. Rogers, who chose not to discuss her children, is praised by Coke as a model mother, particularly because she was more attentive to her husband’s children by his first wife than to her own. The Account indicates that Rogers fought constantly with her mother, who may have been an alcoholic (Rogers, 1796 edition 41–42). Yet Coke praises her unwavering filial loyalty and factually misrepresents the mother-daughter relationship. He mentions her “enjoyment of God” but sees it as important only because it improved her disposition. Women who enjoy God, Coke suggests, are easier for men to get along with. In one of the most important passages of the sermon Coke further circumscribes Hester Rogers by explicitly limiting her role as a speaker. He praises her usefulness as a public person, admiring her because “She never, indeed, assumed the authority of teaching in the church; but she visited the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and delighted to pour out her soul in prayer for them” (118). Visiting widows and orphans and praying for them is depicted as the appropriate public role for a pious Methodist woman. Although Rogers was well known as a leader of Methodist classes, Coke assured his listeners that her husband, itinerant preacher James Rog-

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ers, “would only give a few [people] to her care, desiring her to complete the class out of the world.” However, her classes would soon grow to thirty or forty, at which point James Rogers would transfer all those to another class and start her over with a few new followers. Keeping her out of the world cannot have been easy, for Coke says that in Dublin and elsewhere hundreds of people “were brought to Christ, or were awakened, by her gentle, but incessant labour of love” (118–19). Having emphasized Hester Rogers’s bodily infirmities, sexuality, and motherhood in a way that her own text never does, and having drawn boundaries around the appropriate rhetorical role for women, Coke states: Thus lived, and thus died one of the best of women. Almost everything that is good may be said of her, if she be viewed as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a friend, a private Christian, or a public person, particularly as a leader of classes and bands, in the Methodist society. (114) In thus lifting Hester Rogers to exemplar status, Coke emphasizes the traditional trajectory of her life—from daughter to wife to mother, and so on—but at the same time contains her in a way her own writings do not. In The Account she wrote publicly and expansively of her most intimate dealings with God but kept private her personal life as wife and mother, while Coke’s sermon makes public her marriage and maternal life and suppresses her mystical discourse. [. . .] By defining Rogers as the good wife, mother, and class leader, he affirmed a conservative view of women’s roles. And by praising her refusal to speak publicly (and particularly to preach), Coke weakened the position of Methodist women who preached. In the funeral sermon, Coke effectively defined and controlled Hester Rogers’s place in the community and constructed a modest female role model which suited the needs of institutional Methodism, particularly their commitment to ending preaching by women, which Wesley had protected.

The Husband Speaks Thomas Coke opened the funeral sermon for Hester Rogers by invoking the image of her corpse; her husband James Rogers, writing six months after her death, opened his epideictic essay, “An Appendix to Coke’s Sermon, Written by Her Husband,” with the image of himself, the still grieving husband who was “wounded in the tenderest nerve.” He questions his ability to express himself clearly, so deep is his grief. His essay, too, was first accreted to the core text in the 1804 New York edition. James Rogers appears to have three rhetorical purposes in his text: to enforce the idea that his wife’s spiritual experiences were both real and extraordinary, to exonerate both her and himself from public criticism, and to depict the deep intimacy of their marriage relationship. Hester Rogers’s exemplary character emerges in his description of her spiritual activities: family and private Bible study, visiting the sick, public prayer, and “teach[ing] her own sex in private” and in small classes. She never “took a text” or preached. Nor did Hester Rogers ever

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complain about her husband’s travels or interfere with his call to preach. A model minister’s spouse indeed. James Rogers develops his essay by appropriating sections from his wife’s manuscript journal which she did not choose to publish. While Coke selected passages which emphasize her commonality with other women, James Rogers chose passages which depict her uniqueness. He quotes one passage in which she describes being so overcome with the love and presence of God that she could neither speak nor stand. Walking home from meeting, she “was so overpowered by the presence of God” that she had to be supported: “I was lost in the depths of love, and admitted, as it were, into the immediate presence of my Lord’s glory!” Later, Hester Rogers believed she was in God’s presence “and was constrained to lie at his feet, in speechless adoration and humblest praise.” Her body was covered with a cold sweat, and everyone thought she was dying (125–26). On another occasion, she recalls a mystic vision: “I beheld Jesus and was, as it were, overshadowed, and weighed down by the presence and exceeding glory of the whole Deity.” For many days thereafter she could barely eat, and slept only about one hour in twenty-four. Although Hester Rogers did not include these particular instances of mystical union in The Account, they are parallel to other passages she did publish, including one in which she uses the imagery of sexual intercourse as a metaphor for her intimacy with God (Account 42–47). It is one thing to experience union with the Godhead, quite another to speak publicly of it. As early as 1776, John Wesley had urged Rogers to speak publicly of her mystical experience, and for speaking she was criticized by those who, like Coke, thought that such moments occur only at death. James Rogers justifies his wife’s earlier oral testimony about union with God by including another journal excerpt describing a 1781 meeting with the Rev. John Fletcher, whom many saw as John Wesley’s heir apparent. After dinner, evidently raising a question about divine sanction for public discourse, Hester Rogers asked Rev. Fletcher to explain a statement he had made in a letter to Miss Loxdale “That on all who are renewed in love, God bestows the gift of prophesy.” Fletcher supported his statement with scripture from the second chapter of the Acts describing Pentecost, saying “To prophesy in the sense he meant, was to magnify God . . . as they did, who on the day of Pentecost were filled with the Holy Ghost.” He himself confessed to the gathered company that he had experienced being “dead to sin” (i.e., perfected) several times, but had found various excuses not to speak of it in public. But now, because he had gained strength from Rogers’s public testimony about her “spiritual perfection,” he also was ready to publicly declare himself as “dead unto sin, and alive unto God,” and pray for union with God. A few days later Fletcher blessed Hester Rogers for her years of “still bear[ing] a noble testimony for your Lord,” despite the public criticism leveled at those who confessed moments of union with God (James Rogers 133–39). James Rogers says he includes this story because the memory of it gave his wife so much pleasure. I suggest that he included it because the encounter demonstrates that Fletcher, an eminent Methodist leader, endorsed Hester Rogers’s public testimony of experiencing spiritual

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perfection. Fletcher did so by defining prophesy as public utterance like that at Pentecost and advising even a woman that those who have experienced spiritual perfection must witness publicly. If Hester Rogers had been criticized for claiming the experience of spiritual perfection, her husband exonerates her by making public Fletcher’s blessing of her speech. The phrases by which James Rogers refers to Hester Rogers throughout the essay emphasize the marriage relationship: “my dear companion,” “best helpmate,” “one of the most valuable and faithful wives,” “best help in spiritual things,” “ever my comforter,” “The centre and constant spring of all my domestic happiness.” He writes of their shared “feeling sympathy” and “faithful love.” They experienced a “union of souls and sentiments,” and their hearts were always open to each other. He extols his wife’s even temper and cheerful disposition “in sickness and health.” If she experienced sadness or gloom, he claims that she never allowed her husband to witness it. James Rogers also praises his wife’s qualities of mind, pointing out that she was well read and could converse ably in any area of history, philosophy, or theology. He describes her as an assiduous writer of prose and poetry, public texts and private writings, but hastens to add that she never neglected her domestic duties in order to write. (Once, while he was out on a short walk, she composed a complicated poetic acrostic using their names to describe in rhymed couplets their marital union.) [. . .] Having already drawn freely from his wife’s manuscript journal (the lengthy handwritten journal from which she also drew in composing her Account), James Rogers attaches at the end “A Supplement to the Appendix consisting of Miscellaneous Extracts from the journals of Mrs. Hester Ann Rogers.” He chooses passages that show Hester Rogers as a Christlike healer, offering intercessory prayers which on several occasions resulted in miraculous healing of body and spirit. [. . .] In one journal entry dated Nov. 4, 1792, the reader sees Hester Rogers at her best as a writer as she contemplates the verse “Our life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3–4). In a sermonic composition, she emphasizes God’s power, the mystery of the physical and spiritual life, and the promise of a time of revelation when good people will be seen for what they are and their actions, words, and motives will no longer be misjudged by others. At that time the righteous and the perfected will stand with Christ in the light, no longer hid. Her inquiry follows the pattern of Wesley’s sermons, asking questions of the scripture to fully explore its meaning: How is it that we now feel, hear, smell, taste, and see? How is it that we think, judge, fear, love, desire, and enjoy? To say we are made capable of all these, is to say nothing. From what arises that capability? The soul actuates the body; but how? And who informs and actuates the soul? All is hid with Christ in God. He is the source, but we cannot search out his ways . . . What a mystery; Christ in us! (Supplement 162) Hester Rogers then predicts that those who are now persecuted will one day be publicly valorized. (It seems more than a coincidence that James Rogers published this passage at a time

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when he was himself suffering persecution within the Methodist Church.) Although Hester Rogers never preached in public, this passage shows her writing as if she imagined preaching, or at least demonstrates that she could have preached. The rhetoric of the sermon had not been lost on her: she internalized it and practiced it in her journal. It is not surprising that near the end of her life, the woman who served her community in part by reading aloud John Wesley’s sermons and then adding “parallel promises” she extracted from scripture would record her thoughts on scripture using the rhetoric of the sermon. She did not choose to include this passage from her journal in The Account, which primarily recorded her dealings with God, but James Rogers wanted this side of his wife to be public. James Rogers’s final appropriation of his wife’s writing is a short essay entitled “The Dying Bed of a Saint and Sinner Contrasted” in which she briefly contrasts her own joyous hope of death as a means of joining God with the wretched prospect of the sinner who refuses God’s call. Her main purpose in this essay is to bid farewell to her husband, children, and friends. To her children she promises God as a substitute parent. Her tender farewell to her husband echoes his belief that their “sweet union” will not be dissolved by death: “but being one in Christ, we shall be one forever” (169). To her friends, Hester Rogers says, “Weep not for me but love my God: make your peace with him, and you shall follow me to glory.” She urges them to do God’s work and remain faithful (170). She likens her ailing body to “bonds of clay which hold me from my love,” “fetters,” and “prison doors,” and she urges on the angels who will carry her to God’s “loved embrace.” Declaring that her soul is aflame with her prospects of heaven, Hester Rogers closes with the prayerful lines, “O may I ever feel the sacred flame, and through eternity proclaim the depth of Jesus’ love! Amen and Amen. Hester Ann Rogers” (172). By publishing these farewell lines, James Rogers makes public the last private thoughts and feelings of his wife. Who is his audience, and what is his purpose? Perhaps Hester Rogers’s own reticence about her marriage in her Account made him want all the more to tell his fellow Methodists this part of her story. In addition, James Rogers, who had suffered such public attack within Methodism that he approached physical and emotional collapse, may have believed that for the public to know the intimate details of his marital relationship to the esteemed Hester Rogers would be to justify himself.

Women Friends Speak It cannot be argued that only male authored texts were accreted to The Account of Hester Ann Rogers, for in 1811 New York printer Daniel Hitt published an edition of The Account to which he added two elegiac poems about Hester Rogers written by women in her classes. These poems further reinforce the ethos depicted by Coke and James Rogers: Hester Rogers as good wife, mother, and teacher of other women in private, as can be seen by looking briefly at “Thoughts on a Future State, Occasioned by the death of Mrs. Hester Ann Rogers. By a Young lady who met in her class.” In this 224-line poem in heroic couplets, the poet calls Hester Rogers “Celestia” and portrays her “experience” once she arrives in heaven. The poem begins by recalling Rogers’s

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friendship and leadership of classes, mentioning that although in friendship her “joys are mighty,” they “often fail,” implying that Rogers may have had difficulties with some female relationships. The poet says the class longed for heaven, where they could sing songs of praise as loud as they pleased, “And ecstatic joy / Burst forth in endless song without annoy” (in Rogers’s earthly classes, the enthusiastic Methodist women sang so loudly as to annoy their neighbors). The ethos depicted in this poem is not of the mystic but of the busy Methodist woman. The poem’s lofty tone and diction, the formality of the heroic couplet, the stanza structure based on Rogers’s virtues—love, knowledge, and useful occupation—support the epideictic appeal. Rogers’s ethos is expanded as earthly perfection is magnified in eternity. Her ethos also benefits from earning the praise of a young lady of obvious education and culture who not only knows the conventions of neo-classical epideictic verse (even echoing Pope’s famous line, “Alps on Alps arise”) but has the wit to sustain the poetic act for over two hundred lines.

The Printer Speaks The 1811 Baltimore edition of The Account published by John Kingston demonstrates that rhetorical accretion can come from unexpected quarters. Immediately following the title page Kingston included the following: I who had a pretty intimate knowledge of the sweet Christian deportment of Mrs. Hester Anne [sic] Rogers, (the subject of the following interesting Memoir) conceive it hardly possible, that any Wife or Mother can seriously peruse this Book without deriving from it the greatest advantage.—I well remember a Lady of the finest sense and feeling, coming into her husband’s presence one day, with eyes suffused in tears, and on his tenderly enquiring the cause of her sadness, she replied, “I have been reading the Life of Mrs. Rogers, and am quite distressed to think I am so much unlike her.” J. Kingston. Baltimore, October, 1811. Kingston’s “advertisement” functions in an interesting way rhetorically. First, Kingston claims “pretty intimate knowledge” of Hester Rogers, an intimacy he brings into question by misspelling her name. With his claim, he assumes an ethos of truth-telling which, though not expected of the printer by modern readers, would have been in keeping with the nineteenth-century linking of roles of editor, publisher, and printer. Second, Kingston explicitly identifies the audience and purpose of the text, as well as the appropriate audience response: to “any Wife or Mother” this book will bring “great advantage.” His anecdote further elevates Rogers to the status of model to be emulated and at the same time identifies tears as a woman’s appropriate response if she finds that she is not like Hester Rogers. The printer’s accretion thus not only identifies the appropriate readers of the text (wives and mothers) but also provides them with a model way of reading the text: they are to measure themselves against the high standard of “Mrs. Rogers.”

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Readers Speak Another type of accretion which plays a part in material rhetoric is the reader’s own writing or marginalia in a text. On the flyleaf of my 1837 edition of The Account of Hester Ann Rogers, written in pencil in the uneven hand of a child, is “Mary R Grace / Mary R. Jones / Sabbath School / frederica /del.” Opposite it on the inside cover are childish scribbles, including Mary attempts to practice her cursive M. Written over the scribbles, in ink in a mature hand, is “To Lib / from / Mrs. H. G. Walch / 1960.” Tucked in the pages of the book was a note to Lorraine (my Rogers relative) from Lib saying, “Am going through books again—discarding—giving away—etc—so as to make room for the inevitable more—and came across this one about a Mrs. Rogers. She seems to have been a most saintly person and it might be a relation. At any rate it is interesting, being so old, and I thought you might enjoy having it.” The note is in the same hand that wrote the “To Lib” inscription, indicating that Lib herself wanted to record this book as a gift from Mrs. Walch. Why would these inscriptions interest the historian of rhetoric, the feminist? They can, in fact, suggest ways in which the book was distributed and used by the institutional church and by individual readers. Mary’s writing of her name in two different forms indicates a claiming of the book as her own as well as a trying out of different identities. The Sabbath School reference suggests that the text might have been either studied in Sabbath School or a gift to Mary from the Sabbath School. The failure to capitalize “frederica” and the apparent use of a straight edge to align her writing may indicate that the reader was fairly young, perhaps in grammar school. The scribbling suggests that this was a book Mary carried with her, either willingly or unwillingly, and in which she felt free to pass the time, perhaps during long Methodist church services. The inscription to Lib from Mrs. Walch and the note from Lib to Lorraine suggest that this book was kept in the libraries of these women and passed from one generation to another, as it was passed to me by Lorraine. Working back to the book’s earliest owner, young Mary of “frederica, del,” it is not clear what the initial role of the church might have been in getting this text in Mary’s hands in the first place. In 1804 the General Conference of the Methodist Church in America instructed Book Steward Ezekiel Cooper to move the Book Concern from Philadelphia to New York and approved thirteen books for publication over the next four years (Pilkington 94ff.). One of the first approved texts to be published was The Life of Mrs. Hester Rogers (143). Methodist itinerant preachers supported themselves by selling books, which they ordered from the Methodist publishing house and carried in their saddlebags as they went from church to church (Trebble 516–18). Archival records from the book account ledger (Benjamin Lakin Collection, Divinity School Library, University of Chicago) indicate that in the early nineteenth century The Account of Hester Rogers was one of the best-selling books offered by the Methodist Press. The cost of one “Mrs. Rogers” was 9¢, as compared to 6¢ for John Nelson’s journal and 11/4¢ for a catechism (Sweet 700–6). Since the sales were on commission and the number of books which could be

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carried by a preacher on horseback was limited, The Account must have been in demand on the American frontier, as it was in “frederica, del.” There is interpretive significance in this passing of the book from female hand to female hand, generation to generation, for it implies a message about women’s lives that women want to preserve and share. When Lib is “discarding—giving away” her books, The Account of Hester Ann Rogers seems to be valued as a historical object rather than the story of a life (“At any rate it is interesting, being so old, and I thought you might enjoy having it”), though Lib does imply that she read the book (“she seems to have been a most saintly person”). But the real value Lib sees in giving the book to her friend Lorraine Rogers is that its author was also a Rogers. She might be kin, and thus Lorraine, herself a gentle and saintly woman, might enjoy “having” (but not reading?) the book. Lorraine gave me the book, which she may or may not have read, not to encourage in me a certain variety of womanly virtue but because I was working on the Rogers family history. She thought The Account might provide the story of one more good Rogers woman. At this point a particular volume of Hester Rogers’s Account becomes part of the rhetoric of genealogy, the process by which we construct persuasive stories about our ancestors and about ourselves. Though I could never establish that Hester Rogers was part of my own family genealogy, I have appropriated her text as part of my genealogy as a feminist and a woman in rhetoric.

The Textual/Sexual Politics of Rhetorical Accretion The story of Hester Rogers’s material text is embedded in the story of women in Methodism. By tracing the turn of each accretion, it is possible to track the-transformation of women from the early Methodist movement through the nineteenth century and even up to the present. The core journal reflects John Wesley’s concern. with the relationship of the individual woman to God. He believed that Hester Rogers had opened herself to God’s grace in an extraordinary way and. had experienced spiritual perfection, a perfection which was not completed in one moment but continued for the rest of her life, a kind of “perfecting perfection.” Wesley’s regard for Rogers reflects his belief that justification and salvation are open to all people regardless of gender, class, or race. Hester was a soul to be nurtured and encouraged and a body to be healed. To Wesley, individuals were souls before they were women or men, so when the “extraordinary call” to speak in public or experience perfection came to a woman, the authority of her call outweighed scriptural or cultural limitations on women’s roles. Thomas Coke’s desire was to strengthen the post-Wesleyan institution of Methodism and assume for himself a measure of power. To Coke, Methodists were members of an organization. Hester Rogers and other women could best benefit the organization by assuming traditional roles related to family, avoiding speech in the public arena. A woman who experienced a call to extraordinary activity could only heed that call within a tradition-bound structure of gender roles. Coke implicitly cautions women to stay in their place lest they harm the church as a whole. For James Rogers, Hester Rogers was both soul-mate and soul-maker, both wife and priest: she prayed for him, conversed with him, shared her holy dreams with him, and led him to God.

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His tender grief for his wife, his affirmation of her intelligence, talent as a writer, and spirituality, and the depth of the marriage relationship he depicts reassure women readers that in accepting the role definitions and limitations Coke has prescribed for them, they will earn not only the approval of the church but also deeply satisfying marital intimacy and praise from their spouses. The elegiac voice of the female poet reassures women that adopting Hester Rogers as a model will not deprive them of the esteem and love of other women. The printer explicitly instructs women readers to evaluate themselves with “Mrs. Rogers” as the standard. Having been fully made by God in the spirit, Hester Rogers was remade by each textual accretion until the voices of the new speakers held rhetorical power equal to her own voice. Women can be defined not only by the gaze of the other but also by the voice of the other. Through the continuing story of The Account it is evident that the nature of perfection and the responsibility for perfection have been relocated and redefined from being in relationship with God to performing in relationship to the family and community. One point that engages the sexual/textual politics of early Methodism and of rhetorical accretion is the fact that a number of people had access to Hester Rogers’s manuscript journal after her death. In his essay James Rogers mentions having his wife’s journal quartos in his possession, and he drew freely from them for his own rhetorical purposes. But the editor of the 1796 edition of The Account also drew from the manuscript journal, as did Thomas Coke. This blurring of the public and private for personal and institutional rhetorical purposes is probably a gendered act. Much as James Rogers cherished the memory of his wife, he did not honor the textual privacy she chose for herself in life. While it might be argued that John Wesley published many volumes of his own journals, his manuscript daily diary he kept in a code that others (including Mrs. Wesley) could not read. Through the rhetoric of female virtue implicit in all the accretions to The Account of Hester Ann Rogers, the ideal of female perfection came, over time, to mean not the woman who is spiritually complete, fully made by God, but the woman who perfectly meets the needs of other people, “out of the world” (Coke’s phrase) and without complaint—a visible, active, but silent saint. This view of women is congruent with what Barbara Welter has called the nineteenth-century Cult of True Womanhood, which praised women for the virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. In America, Linda Kerber argues, the mother was the guardian of both family and civic morality. This view of woman’s role was promoted by the multitude of (often maleauthored) conduct books for women published in the eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth centuries. [. . .] Thus The Account of Hester Ann Rogers, which began as a spiritual testimony to one woman’s mystical union with God, eventually performs the rhetorical function of a conduct book for young Methodist women, a guide to becoming the kind of woman approved of by the Methodist establishment. At the same time that The Account was selected for repeated publication and widespread distribution by the Methodist church, the leaders of Methodism were moving in deliberate ways to silence the women preachers whom Wesley had protected and erase them from the memories

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of the faithful. According to historian Paul Wesley Chilcote, after Wesley, Methodists with an evangelical orientation continued to support the preaching of women, particularly those women who experienced great success in revivals. Nevertheless, “those in key leadership positions advocated a more authoritarian view of the church . . . and quickly moved to restrict the function and influence of ‘unauthorized women preachers’ ” (225). The reasoning of Joseph Entwisle in an 1802 letter to a colleague summarizes the essential argument against women preaching: We have no female preachers in this part of the country. I think women might with propriety exercise their gifts in a private way, or amongst their own sex; but I never could see the propriety of their being public teachers. Under the Patriarchal dispensation, the oldest male was the priest of the family. Under the Law, all the priests were men. The seventy preachers sent out by our Lord were all men. So were the twelve Apostles. Nor do we ever read of a woman preaching, in the Acts of the Apostles. Hence I conclude, women are not designed for public teachers. (qtd. in Chilcote 232) Entwisle’s language is strikingly similar to that of Thomas Coke in the sermon preached at Hester Rogers’s funeral. Private resistance became official policy in 1803 when the preachers at the Manchester Conference passed a resolution stating that women ought not preach. But if a woman felt she had an extraordinary call to preach, “we are of the opinion she should, in general, address her own sex, and those only” (Minutes 2:188–89). To further consign the women preachers to obscurity, the Methodist production authority did not publish their journals and accounts, although as Chilcote demonstrates, a number of them had written autobiographical texts. (For the silencing of women preachers see Collins, “Walking in Light, Walking in Darkness.”) Thus the journal of the non-preaching woman not only performed the rhetorical function of shaping women’s conduct but also played an implicit role Hester Rogers never would have imagined for herself: the silencing of her sisters who preached.

“She, Being Dead, Yet Speaketh” Close reading of the material rhetoric of The Account of Hester Ann Rogers and its institutional uses demonstrates that it matters who is speaking and who decides who is speaking. Systems of discourse include forms of domination and have rhetorical functions which influence and persuade a community to adopt certain beliefs and practices. Material rhetoric expands the scope of the history of rhetoric by offering a way to reach beyond the rhetorical tradition into what Thomas Miller has called the rhetoric of traditions, a location of rhetorical activity on the margins. The tradition of early Methodism is but one material site to explore. Many others remain. This study also invites us to interrogate our own discourse practices and the ways in which we as academics are constructed by texts, nourished, and respoken by institutional practices. Not every woman’s title page proclaims, “She, being dead, yet speaketh,” but it is well to remember

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that through the materiality of epigraph and editing, omission and accretion, she who speaketh may also be respoken.

Works Cited Abelove, Henry. The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. The Arminian Magazine XIII (1790). Bizzell, Patricia. “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 11 (1992): 50–58. British Museum. Catalog of Printed Books and Supplements. London: 1960–1966+. Brown, Earl Kent. Women of Mr. Wesley’s Methodism. New York: Mellen, 1983. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. 2 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Chilcote, Paul Wesley. John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism. Metuchen, NJ: American Theological Library Association and Scarecrow P, 1991. Coke, Thomas. “A Sermon.” Hester Ann Rogers, Account (1837) 77–119. Collins, Vicki Tolar. “Walking in Light, Walking in Darkness: The Story of Women’s Changing Rhetorical Space in Early Methodism.” Rhetoric Review 14 (1996): 336–54. —. “Women’s Voices and Women’s Silence in the Tradition of Early Methodism.” Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997. 233–51. Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111 (Summer 1982): 65–83. Rpt. Davidson, Reading 27–52. Davidson, Cathy N. “Toward a History of Books: and Readers.” Davidson, Reading 1–26. —. ed. Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” Trans. Ian McLeod. Untying the Text. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge, 1981. 48–78. —. “What Is an Author?” Trans. Josué V. Harari. Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Lodge. New York: Longman, 1988. 196–210. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock. Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress P, 1994. . Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. New York. Cambridge UP, 1997. Gillespie, Joanna B. “Angel’s Food: A Case of Fasting in Eighteenth-Century England.” Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment. Ed. Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham. University Park: Penn State UP, 1992. 95–112. . Glenn, Cheryl. “Remapping Rhetorical Territory.” Rhetoric Review 13 (1995): 287–303. —. “Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 180–99. Haas, Christina. Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996.

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Hunter, Lynette. “Feminist Notes on Rhetoric.” Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. Saskatoon, Canada. July 1997. Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Kaplan, Carla. The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980. McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. McKenzie, D. F. “History of the Book.” The Book Encompassed. Ed. Peter Davison. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 290–301. Miller, Thomas P. “Teaching the Histories of Rhetoric as Social Praxis.” Rhetoric Review 12 (1993): 70–82. Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, from the First, Held in London, by the Late Rev. John Wesley, A. M. in the Year 1744. London: Printed at the Conference Office, 1812-. National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints Vol. 501. London: Mansell, 1977. OCLC. Dublin, Ohio: Online Computer Library Center, 1978–1997. Pilkington, James Penn. The Methodist Publishing House, a History. Vol. 1. Nashville: Abingdon P, 1968. Rack, Henry D. Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. Philadelphia: Trinity P International, 1989. Rogers, Hester Ann. Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers; and her Funeral Sermon, By Rev. T. Coke LL. D. to which is added Her Spiritual Letters. New York: Mason and Lane, 1837. —. Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers and her Funeral Sermon by Thomas Coke; to which is added her Spiritual Letters. Baltimore: Kingston, 1811. —. The Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers Written by Herself. To Which are Added Some Select Letters, Written to Her by the Rev. John Wesley, A. M. Which Afforded Her much Spiritual Consolation. Bristol: Edwards, 1796. —. A Short Account of the Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers. Written by Herself. With a Brief Extract from Her Diary. London: 1793. —. A Short Account of the Experience of Mrs. H. A. Rogers. Written by Herself. With a Brief Extract from Her Diary. New York: Totten, 1804. —. Manuscript journal. John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, England. Rogers, James. “Appendix to Mrs. Rogers’s Funeral Sermon Written by her Husband.” Hester Ann Rogers, Account (1837) 119–51. Sutherland, Christine. “Women and the Rhetorical Tradition.” Plenary Address. International Society for the History of Rhetoric Conference. Saskatoon, Canada. July 1997. Swearingen, C. Jan. “A Lover’s Discourse: Diotima, [Aspasia,] Logos, and Desire.” Reclaiming Rhetorica. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.25–52. Sweet, William Warren. Religion on the American . Frontier 1783–1840. Vol. 4. The Methodists. New York: Cooper Square, 1964. . Trebble, John William. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. Vol. 1. New York: Bowker, 1972.

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Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976. Wesley, John. A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. London: Epworth, 1952. —. The Works of John Wesley. Ed. Thomas Jackson. London: 1872. 3d ed. 14vols. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984. Wicke, Jennifer. “Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the Culture of Celebrity.” South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (Fall 1994): 751–78. Young, Richard E., Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970.

Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks* Hui Wu Writing women into history is not new; writing rhetorical women into history, however, is fairly new. Feminist rhetorical historiography is going through a transitional period when the issues of methodology are intertwined with ideology and politics. On the one hand, feminist historiography of rhetoric in the Euro-American tradition has made tremendous progress, as exemplified by the work of Karlyn Campbell, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, Andrea Lunsford, Krista Ratcliffe, C. Jan Swearingen, and Molly Meijer Wertheimer. More important, historiographies of the rhetoric dealing with color and class are emerging. The works of Shirley Logan and Jacqueline Jones Royster are notable examples. On the other hand, however, there are still skeptics about these methodologies. For example, in the debate publicized in the January and September 2000 issues of College English, (Gale, “Historical Studies and Postmodernism”; “Response,” Glenn; “Response,” Jarratt; “Response,” Wu), doubts about feminist methods kept resurfacing, and disputes about methodology loomed large. Feminist history writing was merely reduced to research techniques and was confusingly paralleled with postmodernism. The positive trend of feminist historiography has had little, if any, impact on women’s rhetoric in non-Euro—American traditions. Feminist ethno-rhetorical historiography, particularly that of Third World women, remains largely an uncharted territory. Take Chinese women’s history of rhetoric for example. In a situation where “most of the studies in feminist rhetoric do not talk about Chinese women, and those in Chinese rhetoric do not take up the issue of gender” (Lee 284), the historiography of Chinese women’s rhetoric is even more marginalized. Those who do feminist historiography of rhetoric and support the historical study of Chinese women’s rhetoric do not do ethnographic research themselves. Those who study Chinese women do not do rhetorical research. *  Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Spec. issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 81-97. Taylor & Francis, http//www.informaworld.com, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Note: This essay has been condensed. 170

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These controversies and problems cannot be solved unless we develop a theoretical framework that defines the nature and principles of a methodology for historical studies of rhetorical women. The following questions may help us re-articulate our understanding. For example, what is behind the skepticism toward women’s historical presence in rhetoric? If we agree that women do have a rhetorical history of their own, what materials do we document and analyze? What are the key concerns in documenting primary sources and gathering evidence? Is the historical study of rhetorical women similar to postmodernism as both supposedly deal with discourse and knowledge construction? These questions are crucial to understanding and assessing feminist rhetorical historiography and will serve as the theoretical parameters of this essay. I will, first, clarify theoretical premises of women’s history writing by defining the purpose and meanings of its methodology. [. . .] In consideration of the existing problematics, however, it is not redundant, but compelling and worthwhile, to highlight the ethical and political concerns in feminist methodology in order to assess it accurately. Second, feminist studies of rhetorical history should be distinguished from postmodernism, which has become an overwhelmingly dominant theoretical framework in rhetoric/composition. [. . .] Finally, I will draw attention to the theoretical significance of the historical research on black and Third World rhetorical women by discussing its challenges to the established criteria of selecting subjects and evaluating archival materials. This essay points out that the present difficulties in accepting discursive feminist methodologies in the study of rhetorical history are the direct results of a continued adherence to certain established interpretive frameworks dominating knowledge inquiry and construction. My discussion addresses diverse rhetorical history writing about women here in the West and there in the East—from Euro-American, to African-American, and to Third World (in my case, Chinese) women. In this, I do not assume homogeneity among women’s diverse rhetorics and histories, nor do I want to reduce the complexity of feminist methodology of historiography. The strategy allows me to address some neglect of the theoretical significance of the rhetorical history writing of women in marginalized groups, due to divisions and even conflicts of identity among scholars and their research priorities. There seems to be a hidden but ironclad contract that a scholar’s racial, sexual, or ethnic identity determines his/her research area and interest. Writing about women in China within the U.S. academy, I aim to dispel the mystery of the minority Other who is supposed to cling to marginality and the majority Other who is supposed to stick to mainstream. If I am supposed only to speak for post-Mao Chinese women whose identity and history I share, then my points and theories would be safely and naturally ignored by everybody else. If those who are said to represent mainstream EuroAmerican culture only spoke for their own people, they would be considered as observers who look at the challenges that minority poses to mainstream theories with indifference. I prefer the “reciprocity” Royster sees connecting academic and racial/ethnic/sexual communities together (254). [. . .] As feminist researchers, we [. . .] believe that gender hierarchy exists across

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cultures, no matter what forms it takes. Hence my strategy suggests that my configurations of feminist methodology of rhetorical historiography represent some common concerns of the community. Finally, this strategy strengthens the purpose of the essay—to draw scholars’ attention to alternative feminist research practices that challenge ethically and politically the dominant theoretical frameworks standing in the way of understanding and developing the historical study of rhetorical women.

Challenges to Traditional Methodology Richard Enos’s “Recovering the Lost Art of Researching in the History of Rhetoric” synthesizes well the techniques necessary for historical research, such as archive work, field work, examination of historical traces and records, translation of important primary material, and theoretical analysis of primary material (11). The techniques of tracing the details of accurate chronology, genealogy, and historical geography remain the best tools for documenting the past and probably “the best agency for change” (Ferreira-Buckley 582). The application of these techniques enables researchers, including feminists, to provide new evidence that enriches rhetorical history. However, feminist researchers have two major reasons to transform traditional assumptions of methods. First, discussions centered on techniques alone cannot bring to light the principles of feminist methodology because “preoccupation with method mystifies the most interesting aspects of feminist research process” (Harding 1). Second, the craft of “how-to” does not illustrate the ethical and political concerns that distinguish feminist methodology from that of traditional history writing. For example, why was Gale still skeptical of their research findings, even after Glenn and Jarratt and Ong had applied all the traditional techniques? Why, for centuries after the establishment of traditional methods, didn’t we find women rhetors in the canonized tradition? Why doesn’t the rhetorical canon recognize that Aspasia had the same influence on rhetorical tradition as Socrates did, even though both of them appear in Plato’s works and other independent primary sources? Why were Margaret Cavendish’s notes on persuasion and her eloquence for imaginary political and social situations excluded from the canon of rhetoric? Were these women nonexistent? If so, how about Socrates? Were their works of inferior quality? If so, what criteria do we base our judgments on? Obviously, these questions are not merely about methods. Methods, to feminist researchers, are techniques of evidence-gathering in the research process. When feminists ask questions about methods, they are talking about concrete techniques of evidence-gathering that raise ethical and political questions about methodologies. The traditional explanation of methodology is that it is a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed (Harding 3); it includes theoretical explanations of the general structure and applications of methods in a particular discipline. For historians, methodology means the theorization of the goal of research, the selection of subjects in a particular period (the research topic and focus), and the categories for evaluating historical evidence and analyzing it in relation to sociopolitical changes. From a feminist viewpoint,

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these methodological issues are not value-free. Behind them are judgment calls: is the subject worth investigating and writing about? What criteria are these categories built on? It is evident that the seemingly “neutral,” androcentric theoretical definition of methodology has erased women’s historical experiences and researchers’ standpoints in the research process (Harding 3–4). Traditional rhetorical history asks only questions about rhetoric that appear interesting to men from within the rhetorical experiences that are characteristic for men. The disinterested methodology reveals severe biases toward women’s rhetorical experiences that seem irrelevant to the “big” civic events drawing men only. Even when women made an appearance in rhetorical history, they were apparently forgotten, for instance, Aspasia and Diotima. We can put traditional methodology to the test by asking further questions with women’s experiences in mind. Given the fact that classical evidence is sporadic and fragmentary, how can traditional methodology answer the question, “If Socrates’s Diotima, as written by Plato, is ‘merely literary,’ then what of Socrates, Protagoras, or Gorgias?” (Swearingen 27). How can tradition accommodate women’s eloquence on sex roles in Margaret Cavendish’s orations that sound irrelevant to the civic affairs defined by men (225–232)? How can traditional methodology justify feminist researchers’ emotional attachment to the subjects of their research (Bizzell 15)? How can traditional methodology justify the enlightenment of the historical writing of black and Third World rhetorical women to the larger, predominant model of historical analysis? Similar questions about rhetorics must be applied to other cultures as well. For thousands of years, the Chinese essay has been male-dominated and addressed themes defined by men as honorable and lofty. But how do these essays generate gender identity for men and women? How are women writers positioned in the history of essay writing? What are driving forces behind women’s essays? Can traditional methodology provide answers? No. To explain why the answer is “no,” I turn to an examination of the purpose and ethics behind feminist methodology. From a gendered point of view, feminist methodology of rhetorical history does not refer to an innocent research activity for research’s sake, but rather an intentionally radical effort to exert transformative power over research methods (Bizzell, Harding, Scott). The purpose of feminist history writing is “to restore women to history and to restore history to women,” as Joan Kelly-Gadol articulates (15). To this end, feminist inquiry is linked avowedly to a political concern, that is, to “denounce sexism and discrimination against women, to expose the origins, foundations, and workings of patriarchy, and subsequently to formulate and implement strategies for its eventual demolition” (Thurner 122). This goal denominated clearly by the term “women’s history” throws open questions about who owns history and what counts as “real” history. Semantically, “women” as the possessive case added to “history” subverts patriarchal possession of rhetoric and history. “Women’s history” in its linguistic form opens up the possibility for women to share history with men. In its political sense, returning history to women is returning the rights of property ownership to women who traditionally had no rights to material and intellectual inheritance, thus returning their human rights to them.

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From both semantic and political viewpoints, women’s history inevitably challenges the way the content of history has been constructed, which in turn demands a renewed standpoint to scrutinize who has produced and can produce history. This concern of “subject-producer of history,” in Michel de Certeau’s term (17), further shakes the notion of objectivity on which theories of methodology of history writing are built. [. . . R]hetorical history has been written from the point of view of men and only records male theories and speeches. History has forgotten the other half of the population that has co-existed along with men but has been silenced. Put differently, women’s rhetorical history writing indicates that rhetorical history as it has been is not only incomplete but also unfair because it has left out the other half of mankind from civilization by telling a partial story. Therefore, feminist rhetorical historiography requires us to become research agents who bring transformations to dominant research practices and interpretive frameworks. It must not only emphasize women as an additional historical subject but also pose methodological challenges to predominant theoretical models.

Challenges to Postmodernism In the field of rhetoric/composition, postmodernist theories dominate critiques of rhetorical works and pedagogy. [. . . A]s an alternative interpretive framework, postmodernism offers a critical edge to diagnose problematics of universalized claims for gender, reason, science, language, progress, identity, self, and power. Some feminist historians, such as Joan Scott, endorse poststructuralism and believe that postmodernism provides tools for negotiating accepted meanings and established practices in knowledge inquiry and power structures. But the general postmodernist belief in undecidability and relativity does not do justice to nor is appropriate for feminist studies of rhetorical history. “The abandonment of notions of objectivity and reality” negates the gendered standpoint in feminist methodology that requires researchers to be responsible for historicity, committed to collective civic actions, and conscious of the transformations the research may bring to society and to academic communities. Historians, including feminist researchers, all understand the fundamental principle of history writing: the subject matter and the events of the past must be traceable as historical facts. [. . .] Like traditional historians, they recognize subjectivity in historical studies but at the same time remember that they are not allowed to rehearse the historical product as “literary texts” or “ideas.” Historians are not entitled to create history but to reconstruct it from available and affirmable sources. [. . .] However biased, prejudiced, incomplete, and inadequate that product may be, it embodies an account of events that happened quite independent of the existence of the researcher, who is not a free agent (Elton 54). In other words, historical facts are knowable only by the evidence they have left behind. Historical studies are not a question of interpreting fact, but of establishing it (Elton 57). Historians must be responsible for the stories they tell and primary sources they scrutinize and document. Their stories and documentation must contain truths, truths to be shared by the public and must be acknowledged by the public as such.

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Bizzell notices Royster’s recognition that her scholarship must be “rigorous in the traditional sense and at the same time ‘accountable to our various publics’ ” (15). For this reason, feminist history writing defines itself as adding what has been left out to present more complete and fair truths of the past than traditional historical accounts. In contrast, postmodernism emphasizes an individual’s meditations that are private and self-conscious. The postmodernist is a free agent who progresses toward the end of exploration along the path paved by his/her own rationalization. This process emphasizes the individual’s satisfaction with the exploration itself and does not require the result to be accountable to the public. Though the findings from the contemplation may be creditable, they merely point to multi-faceted realities, relative and open to further interpretations with no way of justifying. But woman and women’s history cannot be read as undecidable and relative. [. . . W]omen’s history would turn out to be an idea, or a notion, rather than a distinct past containing real stories of women. A personal case can further explain this point. I served as the Associate Chair of a department at a university in China8 but was ordered by one of my male colleagues, the Chair, to clean the office for him. When asked “why?” he simply said, “this is a woman’s job.” Marked by this kind of gender politics is my history as a woman who has the same lived experience as my subjects and is my writing of post-Mao women’s rhetorical history. How can I leave these facts and realities open to interpretation? How can I just play with the idea of “woman” or “history” without the commitment to telling true stories? My history does not allow me to read Chinese women’s history as some literary works with undecidable meanings. I must read women’s rhetorical history in and after the Maoist period (1949–1976) as facts and record it as facts, because any contingency in my methods would result in historical distortions. The researcher’s consciousness of engagement is vital in historical studies of rhetorical women. It represents a feminist standpoint, which is “not simply an interested position (interpreted as bias) but is interested in the sense of being engaged” (Hartsock 159). It is “not something anyone can have by claiming it, but an achievement through feminist struggles against male domination that women’s experience can be made to yield up a truer social reality than that available only from the perspective of the social experience of men” (Harding 185). Postmodernism, however, is a perspective based on the promise that the autonomous use of reason will make us free (Tanesini 238). Rorty hopes that “feminists will continue to consider the possibility of dropping realism and universalism, dropping the notion that the subordination of women is intrinsically abominable, dropping the claim that there is something called ‘right’ or ‘justice’ or ‘humanity’ that has always been on their side, making their claims true” (210, emphasis original). The postmodernist beliefs in a masterful, self-conscious, and universal subject and in the segregation of justification and reason from power and force, as Alessandra Tanesini generalizes, do not agree with the goal of feminist research, for empowering women means engaging oneself in competing with the dominant force. [. . .]

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Associated with postmodernist relativism and “quietism” (Tanesini 239) is the dominant Western hermeneutics that center on “the self as the ideal knower and on the individual as isolated and separate from the negative influence of others” (Ryan and Natalle 74). This selfcentered thinking has been perpetuated in Anglo-American feminist epistemology. In consequence, feminist theoretical frameworks espouse two principles: “immanent value (all humans have inherent worth) and self-determination (all humans have the autonomous capacity to direct themselves)” (Ryan and Natalle 72). These principles no doubt acknowledge gender equality and women’s human rights. However, if the purpose of feminists is achieving self and self-determination, then feminist rhetorical historiography would lose its vision of its particular functions in social justice and its goal of research that stresses social changes for the oppressed and collective efforts of women in the civic process. Thomas Miller and Melody Bowdon advocate a rhetorical stance on historical inquiry built on five methodological concerns: dialectical transaction between the rhetor and audiences, situational aspects of the transaction, rhetorical purpose, collective orientation, and productive engagement with political action (592). No matter how fundamental their message is, significant to historical inquiry is their emphasis on the historian’s rhetorical awareness of the subject’s collective civic action and transformative power in society through effective communication with target audiences. [. . .] The centrality of collectivity becomes quite a primary value in selecting subjects and materials as well as in considerations of transformative powers of feminist research. For example, Royster’s selections of her subjects are based on their strong sense of the communities they lived in and attempted to change (6). Her effort is “to document and account for what was accomplished by elite nineteenth-century women as a cadre of educated professional women, and to suggest how their activities might connect . . . to the practices of others both before and after them in the making of various traditions” (8). The rhetorical women in Campbell’s books are all women’s rights advocates or suffragists working to improve the conditions of women. Swearingen’s comparison of Diotima, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and Ruth Benedict leads to the discovery of collective consciousness as a common thread in women’s rhetoric (48). Feminists analyze their materials as rhetorical pieces: nonfiction prose/essays, speeches, or dialogues addressing ethical and sociopolitical concerns of and to the public, rather than as literary texts that are arts for art’s sake. The feminist historian is also keenly conscious of the political benefits that result from research. Glenn believes that “regendering rhetorical history is a feminist performative act [and] a commitment to the future of women” (174). In working on post-Mao Chinese women’s rhetorical history and collaboratively anthologizing their essays on gender, I am increasingly aware of the potential enlightenment Chinese rhetorical women may bring to feminist theories and women’s movements in the West. All the women writers included in the anthology experienced Maoist “women’s liberation” from 1949 to the late 1970s when gender equality was approached through mandating women to work outside home for “socialist construction” and to eliminate signs of femininity. Mao’s liberation of women, however, was not intended to sub-

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vert the traditional gender hierarchy. A woman took nontraditional tasks in the workplace, but the husband’s career and domestic needs dominated hers. The government even encouraged women to take care of all housework, so men could be entirely engaged in socialist construction. As a consequence, the traditional gender ideology prevails in both public and domestic spheres. Since the economic reform beginning in the early 1980s, women writers have worried that the traditional Chinese gender hierarchy reinforced by commercialization has brought new problems to women. Their essays function as public discourse and document post-Mao writers’ reflection upon gender politics in the wake of these sociopolitical changes. Their thoughts can serve as an orientation point from which to navigate the trajectory of China’s progress on gender equality and can shed light on some questions common to both Western and Eastern women. For instance, why are women still suffering from institutionalized sexual exploitation even after women’s equal rights have been written into law? Must gender equality be reached through androgyny? Is working outside the home the end of women’s liberation or its means? What role does the form of labor play in liberating women? If abolishing labor division is supposed to bring forth gender equality, why do Chinese women who have “been there, done that” still find themselves subordinate to the other sex? Royster expresses the feminist historiographer’s commitment to social responsibility and social action: Knowledge does indeed have the capacity to empower and disempower, to be used for good and for ill. As researchers and scholars, we are responsible for its uses and, therefore, should think consciously about the momentum we create when we produce knowledge or engage in knowledge-making processes. Our intellectual work has consequences. I believe the inevitability of these consequences should bring us pause as we think not just about what others do but about what we are obliged to do or not to do. (281) In subtle ways, postmodernism has created “epistemological troubles,” to borrow Harding’s words, for feminism and the understanding of the methodology of historical studies of rhetorical women. In light of ethics and political benefits to women (especially women of marginal status), which have accrued from producing a more accurate, less biased history, historians of rhetorical women may thank postmodernism for its alternative perspectives that enable them to question the traditional historical content. But these perspectives are not grounded on undecidability and relativity. Instead, they serve as microscopes for detecting concealed realities of women in rhetorical history. Moreover, researchers may respond to postmodernists that they cannot stay disassociated from their subjects and sociopolitical activism significant to women in the past, present as well as future. Civic activism symbolizes the rhetorical momentum that feminist historians want to establish collectively with their subjects to enlighten men and to improve material reality for women across the boundaries of culture, race, ethnicity, and gender.

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Challenges from Women of Marginal Status The recent development of feminist historiography has seen many innovative research designs in the historical work on rhetorical women in marginalized cultures. Landscaping mostly uncharted territories, these works challenge the standard notion of what merits historical documentation at a more profound level than the historical writing of rhetorical women in mainstream Euro-American cultures. Feminist theories from the Third World demonstrate that historical studies of rhetorical women should not be limited to the study of the deceased; living women should also be included as historical subjects as long as the study contributes to history building. To global feminists, this type of research engages in translations of primary texts and theoretical critiques of feminist thoughts and movements across cultures. The recognition of the importance of historicizing and preserving rhetorical women of marginal status, be it within or outside the U.S., demands us to acknowledge that this kind of research is informative, consequential, and indispensable to women’s rhetorical history construction in general and to larger interpretive frameworks. Recent history is as valuable as “old” history in terms of archival work. Since primary historical research has become disturbingly a “lost art” in rhetorical scholarship in general (R. Enos), it is imperative for historians of women’s rhetoric to take precautions against potential losses of primary sources. For example, Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline anthologizes the personal histories of Edward P.J. Corbett, Janice Lauer, Win Horner, and others about their becoming rhetoricians and compositionists (Roen et al.). Had the editors not worked out this project, where in the world could we have found out why and how Corbett transformed himself from a literary critic to a rhetorical theorist and composition teacher? We would have missed an important part of the history of our discipline. [. . .] Once lost, rhetorical treasures are almost impossible to recover. These incidents are poignant memories to people who care about the history of rhetoric and composition. The same argument applies to documenting primary sources for building rhetorical women’s history. Female scholars’ personal accounts about their growth and roles as women faculty offer a new angle to look at the history of our profession (Roen et al.). Casting a gaze from the American terrain to a global landscape, we can now access leading Brazilian feminist Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira’s thoughts since the early 1970s. Her translated book formulates the concept of the feminine as a paradigm of the twentieth century in favor of women’s search for their identity through, or as a result of, their difference. [. . .] Interestingly, and also ironically, when the subject is alive, often times she or he may not be deemed as valuable as she or he should be. Writing the history of living figures and their rhetoric is often more controversial and complicated than that of people in the past. In documenting living women’s rhetoric, one is often tempted to make judgments based on an ideology derived from dominant academic research models. This tendency is more obvious when subjects and materials come from the Third World which some Euro-American feminists naturally assume the authority to judge, or even colonize. De Oliveira’s praise of sexual differences and

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criticism of Western feminists’ emphasis on androgyny as a way to achieve equal rights could be easily criticized as essentialism, if the judgment is merely based on the standard Euro-American feminist standpoint. The translator makes great tactical efforts to explain why de Oliveira should be introduced to the Anglophone world and why her thoughts are significant and illuminative to Euro-American feminist theory construction. In the case of de Oliveira, her standpoint is actually almost identical to, though more systematic than, that of several Chinese women writers I am writing on, some of whom, however, are accused of “essentialism,” the most-ready-to-kill word in feminist research. Zhang Kangkang and Lu Xing’er, prominent writers of Chinese women’s issues, have been criticized for presenting “female stereotypes and essentialized views on gender.”9 This and other dismissals of women’s discursive viewpoints put archival work at risk. Feminists may suppress the very women and the very voices they claim to support. [. . .] In China, many women’s essays have encountered severe censorship, to the extent that no publisher dares to venture an anthology focusing on gender issues which the government may suppress. And in the U.S., there is an unwillingness to tolerate their different thoughts. This intolerance often represents structured hierarchy that is largely built on cultural bias. As Scott observes, “dominant styles and standards work to include some and exclude others . . . ‘Mastery’ and ‘excellence’ can be both explicit judgments of ability and implicit excuses for bias” (47, emphasis original). Resulting from the sense of a privileged class in the West vis-àvis the oppressed and marginalized, biased scrutiny embodies “a fundamentalist confirmation of traditional attitudes toward ‘history’ and ‘knowledge’ ” (Chow 110), ironically in the name of feminist research that is supposedly for the marginalized. Ferreira-Buckley observes, “[a]s we acknowledge the deep centrality of the lives of people of color, of women, and members of the working class, we cannot but look back with regret on historical works published in the past” (582). To recover what has been missing and to prevent what may become missing requires the recognition that historical work on rhetorical women of marginal status has broader relevance. Like the transformations mainstream feminist works have brought to traditional knowledge making, historical writing of marginalized rhetorical women, in the forms of systematic critique of the subject’s thoughts and deeds, documentation of primary sources, and translation, can provide more fresh perspectives on established definitions of who and what is worth rendering as history. Feminist works have demonstrated contributions of discursive feminist discourse from other countries (Scott et al., Mohanity et al., and Offen et al., for instance). Feminist theories from African and Latin American countries illustrate why women in the Third World persist in theorizing their histories from their own lived experiences (Arndt; de Oliveira). Their theories shed light on many unsolved dilemmas faced by Anglo-American feminists in their efforts to empower women, for example, causing them to realize that the Western feminist redefinition of gender dichotomies may not be an applicable category in the analysis of gender politics in the Third World (Bock). In the same way, black feminists’ theories and the historical writing of black rhetorical women are informative to the research on women’s rhetorics

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in other cultures. bell hooks’s historical analysis of black men’s humiliation under racial discrimination and black women’s desire to have the luxury of being “ladies” provided for by men (Ain’t I a Woman, 177–196) demonstrates some flaws in the dominant feminist conceptual framework, which tends to theorize gender politics from the departure point of upper- and middle-class white women. Royster’s and Logan’s analyses of black rhetorical women’s appeals for self-improvement to develop moral and intellectual resources for women and the community can illuminate theoretically the similar tendencies in some historical European women and post-Mao Chinese women. [. . .] The Afrafeminists’ (in their own term) revelation of the double oppressions of black women by the institution in the form of racial discrimination and by male dominance indicate that the Euro-American feminist identification of male dominance as the oppressive institution12 may reduce the complex nature of oppressions of women. Third World feminists and Afrafeminists remind researchers that historical research on rhetorical women requires substantial sensitivity to the particular sociopolitical conditions that have affected the subject’s rhetorical performance. The specific materiality and gender politics in the particular period and culture of the subject demand that the researcher revise the established categories of selecting and analyzing subjects and archival materials. The accommodation of discursive feminist approaches to history is necessary if the goal of research is to construct human history as honestly, truthfully, and completely as possible. This goal has triggered feminist rhetorical historiography and renewed the definition of its methodology. Thus, cultural, racial, ethnic, or gender identities may not separate us from our common agenda to better society and our common identity rooted in rhetoric and rhetorical history that have formed and strengthened the discipline of rhetoric/composition. What may separate us and jeopardize historical works on rhetoric is rejecting unconventional research practices due to the affiliation with predominant, mainstream theoretical frameworks and methodologies. If progressive scholars can carefully acknowledge and come to understand the purposes and meanings of feminist methodology necessitated by the complexities of women’s rhetorics and histories, then a fair and accurate assessment of historical studies of rhetorical women can be made.

Notes [. . .] 8 There were only two women out of forty-some departmental heads in that university. Both of us held the position of “Associate Chair” in our respective departments. At least at the time during my service (1987–1993), women faculty seemed to be qualified only for an “associate” or a “vice” position. 9 A reviewer of my grant proposal made this accusation. [. . .] 12 Black and post-Mao Chinese women’s histories both challenge the mainstream feminist assumption that patriarchy is the social and political institution oppressing women. To post-Mao women, patriarchy and institution, though intertwined, must be coped with separately. The institution stands largely for the Maoist sociopolitical system (1949–1976) oppressive of both genders, while patri-

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archy refers to traditional gender hierarchy since Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), which the Chinese government under and after Mao has supposedly subverted. Therefore, women’s oppressions under Mao reinforced by traditional gender ideology demand a careful delineation of analytical categories [. . .].

Works Cited Arndt, Susan. “African Gender Trouble and African Womanism: An Interview with Chikwenye Ogunyemi and Wanjira Muthoni.” Signs 25 (2000): 709–726. bell, hooks. Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End, 1981. Bizzell, Patricia. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (Fall 2000): 5–17. Bock, Gisela. “Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women’s History.” Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives. Eds. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 1–24. Campbell, Karlyn. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. Vol. 1. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989. —, ed. Man Cannot Speak for Her: Key Texts of the Early Feminists. Vol. 2. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Cavendish, Margaret. Orations of Divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers Places: Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, the Lady of Marchioness of Newcastle. London: Anno Dom, 1662. Chow, Ray. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in the Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1986. de Oliveira, Rosiska Darcy. In Praise of Difference: The Emergence of a Global Feminism. Trans. Peggy Sharpe. Rutgers University Press, 1999. Elton, G.R. The Practice of History. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967. Enos, Richard. “Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29 (Fall 1999): 7–20. Ferreira-Buckley, Linda. “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault.” College English 61 (May 1999):577– 583. Gale, Xin Liu, “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Re-reading Aspasia of Miletus.” College English 62 (January 2000): 361–386. —. “Xin Liu Gale Responds.” College English 63 (September 2000): 105–107. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. —. “Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62 (January 2000): 387–389. Harding, Sandra, ed. Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Hartsock, Nancy C. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” Feminism and Methodology. Ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

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—. “Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English 62 (January 2000): 390– 393. Kelly-Gadol, Joan. “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History.” Feminism and Methodology. Ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 15–28. Lee, Wen Shu. “In the Name of Chinese Women.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 283–302. Logan, Shirley W., ed. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. —. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Lunsford, Andrea, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Miller, Thomas, and Melody Bowdon. “A Rhetorical Stance on the Archives of Civic Action.” College English 61 (May 1999): 591–98. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Offen, Karen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall, eds. Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Ratcliffe, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. Roen, Duane, H. Stuart C. Brown, and Theresa Enos, eds. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. Rorty, Richard. “Feminism and Pragmatism.” Truth and Progress. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 202–227. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Ryan, Kathleen, and Elizabeth J. Natalle. “Fusing Horizons: Standpoint Hermeneutics and Invitational Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (Spring 2001): 69–90. Scott, Joan. “Women’s History.” New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Ed. Peter Burke. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 42–66. Scott, Joan, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates, eds. Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminists in International Politics. New York: Routledge, 1997. Swearingen, C. Jan. “A Lover’s Discourse: Diotima, Logos, and Desire.” Reclaiming Rhetorica. Ed. Andrea Lunsford. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. 25–51. Tanesini, Alessandra. An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1999. Thurner, Manuela. “Subject to Change: Theories and Paradigms of U.S. Feminist History.” Journal of Women’s History 9 (Summer 1997): 122–146. Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Wu, Hui. “A Comment on ‘Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.’ ” College English 63 (September 2000): 102–105. Zhang, Kangkang. ni dui ming yun shuo “bu” (Say “No” to Your Fate). Shanghai: Shanghai Knowledge Press, 1994.

Survival Stories: Feminist Historiographic Approaches to Chicana Rhetorics of Sterilization Abuse* Jessica Enoch On October 12, 1973, Dolores Madrigal arrived at the University of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles (USC-LA) Medical Center to give birth to her second child. She would later report that while she was in labor and under medication, staff members from the medical center coerced her into giving consent to an operation. These doctors explained that they had to perform this operation, (mis)informing her that she would die if she became pregnant too soon after the birth of her child (Madrigal 41–42). Because of the advice she received and her distressed state due to labor pains, Madrigal signed a “consent to sterilize” form written in English, even though Spanish was her primary language, and received a tubal ligation—a virtually permanent sterilization procedure in which the fallopian tubes are cut and cauterized. Madrigal maintained that when she received this operation, “No one at the Medical Center informed me that a tubal ligation operation was going to be performed on me. No one at the Medical Center informed me of what a tubal ligation operation consists nor of its permanent effects” (49). Madrigal went to court in July 1976 to sue the USC-LA Medical Center for sterilizing her without her informed consent. When she went, she was not alone. Nine other Chicanas1— Guadelupe Acosta, Estela Benavides, Consuelo Hermosillo, Georgina Hernandez, Maria Hurtado, Maria Figueroa, Rebecca Figueroa, Jovita Rivera, and Helena Orozco—also testified that in the years between 1971 and 1974 they too were sterilized at the medical center without fully agreeing to or understanding the sterilization operation they were to undergo.2 Although seven of the ten women signed “consent to sterilize” forms, all seven reported that they were coerced into signing. Many were misinformed as to the reason for or permanence of the procedure. Some signed under the duress of labor or while sedated. Others were threatened by their doctors or did not understand what they were signing because the form was written in English and Spanish was their primary language. Represented by Antonia Hernández and *  Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 5-30. Taylor & Francis, http//www.informaworld.com, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Note: This essay has been condensed. 183

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Charles Navarrete, these ten Chicanas joined together and took their class action civil rights action suit—Madrigal v. Quilligan—to the California federal court, arguing that the doctors at the USC-LA Medical Center did not obtain their informed consent for their sterilization operations and, without doing so, violated their constitutional rights to procreate. The claims made by the Chicanas in the Madrigal case stand at the center of this analysis. As the title of this essay suggests, I see their arguments as rhetorics of survival. When these women went to court and articulated their experiences in the labor and delivery room, they forcefully fought for their right to personal, familial, and cultural survival. As I examine these women’s arguments against sterilization abuse—their arguments for survival—I turn my attention to the historiographic methods through which feminist scholars might approach these women’s rhetorical endeavors. My project in this essay is to work through four different historiographic approaches to these women’s arguments as a means to understand their rhetorical significance. Three of these methods are widely recognized inside feminist rhetorical study. The fourth is my attempt to expand our methodological repertoire by considering how the term “survival” might function differently inside historiographic discussions. Here, I construct a historiographic approach that expands the range of our scholarly vision to gain a greater sense of the rhetorical effects of these women’s words. This approach, I argue, allows us to see the ways these women’s stories survived. Feminist historians have often argued it is impossible to recount women’s rhetorical significance without first calling into question traditional historiographic methods. As Cheryl Glenn notes, because rhetorical history has recorded a tradition of “vocal, virile, public— and therefore privileged—men” (1), feminist historians need to adopt research methods that enable them to “look crookedly, a bit out of focus, into the various strands of meaning in a text in such a way as to make the categories, trends, and reliable identities of history a little less inevitable, less familiar” (7). The scholars in the 2002 Rhetoric Society Quarterly special issue on feminist historiography make rhetorical history “less familiar” by recognizing feminist methods that recover women’s voices from long ignored or overlooked spaces; identify recurrences inside women’s rhetorical history; contextualize their words so as to understand both how women came to voice and how their audiences responded to that voice; analyze the ways the basic tenets of traditional rhetorical criticism often refuse the very possibility of a female (or feminized) rhetor; and, create rhetorical theories from their historical findings—theories which in turn open up more spaces for feminist recovery (see Campbell and Enos). My examination in this essay works through three of these methodological moves, reasserting their vital historiographic importance to feminist rhetorical study. I also, though, advance a different kind of historiographic approach and attempt to add a “tool” to the “historians’ trade” (Ferreira-Buckley 582). In my first two methodological moves, I follow the practice of feminist historians Shirley Wilson Logan and Jacqueline Jones Royster. Just as Logan and Royster recover the rhetorical work of African American women and then identify recurrences inside this rhetorical

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tradition, I examine the arguments made in Madrigal v. Quilligan as both an instance of and an inroad to the rich and much ignored rhetorical tradition of Chicana feminism. When I take up my third historiographic approach, I begin to learn about what happened to these women’s rhetorical endeavors. Here, I build on Richard Leo Enos’ call to contextualize a rhetorical instance in its original rhetorical situation by “determin[ing] and reconstruct[ing] its intended meaning at the time of expression [, and . . .] present[ing] it in such a manner that makes sense” (74). Situating these Chicanas’ arguments in their immediate setting enables me to examine the ways the judge presiding over the case interpreted, responded to, and, ultimately, dismissed their words. My fourth methodological move offers a historiographic practice to feminist rhetorical studies. Here, I expand notions of the rhetorical situation beyond the immediate interaction of speaker, audience, and subject to see what else happened to these Chicanas’ rhetorical endeavors. My purpose is to press the boundaries of the rhetorical situation and investigate the various ways in which these Chicanas’ words were listened to and redeployed. Through such a historiographic practice, I show not just how these women’s stories of sterilization were articulated and then dismissed but also how they survived. To achieve the purposes I’ve set forth, I analyze three major documents surrounding the Madrigal v. Quilligan case: the testimony of the Chicanas; the conclusions made by the judge, Jesse W. Curtis; and an article written by the Chicanas’ lawyer, Antonia Hernández, in a 1976 issue of the Chicano Law Review. My analysis of these documents builds on and adds to historiographic approaches to women’s rhetorics to provide a deep and descriptive explanation of how the Madrigal women challenged and changed sterilization practices thirty years ago and how their words could challenge and change approaches to and understandings of Chicana feminist rhetoric and all women’s rhetorics today. Before I examine the case itself and its implications inside studies of Chicana feminist rhetoric and feminist historiography, it is necessary first to sketch the situation surrounding informed consent and sterilization procedures in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Informed Consent In the late 1960s and early 1970s, two major groups argued for greater access to fertility control in general and sterilization procedures more particularly.7 Of course, those involved in the mainstream feminist movement saw sterilization as a permanent method of birth control and defined it as a means to sexual freedom and control of family size. As Charlotte F. Muller points out in her 1974 essay in Family Planning Perspectives, “Feminism, Society and Fertility Control,” fertility control, with sterilization as a major component, is central to women’s liberation, however defined. It establishes freedom to organize one’s life independently of biological constraints to which men are not subject, and it provides the basis for separation of psychological identity

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from the reproductive function and its relocation in a broader humanistic setting. (70) The second major group that targeted sterilization as a vital part of its program was composed of proponents for population control. Advocates for this cause, such as the president of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, Hugh Moore, connected overpopulation to war, famine, economic decline, and poor educational opportunities, and then pointed to sterilization as the primary solution to these problems. Moore’s 1968 full-page advertisement in the New York Times, which asked then President-Elect Richard Nixon to diffuse the “population bomb” through a concentrated focus on birth control, is just one example of this movement’s fervent campaign (“Dear” 5E). In 1969, Nixon spoke back to these two groups and put the presidential stamp on the issue of fertility control when he asked the country, “How can we better assist American families so that they will have no more children than they wish to have?” (qtd. in Scheyer 23–24). The medical community answered this question by loosening protocols for sterilization procedures. In 1969, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) dropped the “Rule of 120” recommendation, an age-parity formula that suggested sterilization for a woman if the number of her living children multiplied by her age equaled or exceeded 120. In 1970, ACOG further relaxed sterilization codes by no longer requiring two doctors’ signatures on the consent form or a psychiatric consultation prior to a sterilization operation. Finally, in 1971, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare began to include sterilization as a part of its health program. As the wording of the USC-LA Medical Center’s consent form illustrates, after these adjustments, the only requirement for sterilization in the early 1970s was the written consent of the patient and her spouse or relative: The undersigned patient, and spouse, or responsible relative or person, hereby consent to, authorize and request the surgeons of the Los Angeles County to perform the following operative procedure, which will or may result in sterilization, and acknowledge it has been fully explained to them. They further acknowledge their complete understanding that an operation that results in sterilization means the loss of the ability to become pregnant or to bear children. (“Consent”) Although this wording may seem clear, serious problems accompanied the new consent process. These adjusted standards might have been celebrated by population control activists and feminist groups, but the relaxed program also enabled willing members of the medical community to adopt a Malthusian ideology that targeted minority groups and the poor as primary subjects for sterilization. One such doctor was Curtis Wood, who believed that the physician’s duty was to use sterilization as a means to rid the world of “undesirable” elements. In his 1973 article “The Changing Trends in Voluntary Sterilization,” Wood argues

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for this particular medical and social role, writing, “As physicians we have obligations to our individual patients, but we also have obligations to the society of which we are a part. The welfare mess, as it has been called, cries out for solutions, one of which is fertility control” (qtd. in Hernández 23). Judging by the rise in sterilization procedures and judicial cases concerning sterilization abuse in poor and minority communities during this period, it seems many doctors took on Wood’s prescribed duties. For example, in 1970 Norma Jean Serena, a Native American woman, went to court to argue that her sterilization violated her civil rights, maintaining she was sterilized not for medical reasons, as doctors had made her believe, but because of her cultural and economic status. Serena’s case reflected a checkered history of sterilization abuse inside Native communities, with one 1979 estimate recording that in a population of 800,000 Native people, 42 percent of women of childbearing age had been sterilized (Rodriguez-Trias 158). In 1974, two African American sisters, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf, ages 14 and 12, also took their case to court, claiming they were sterilized because their mother, who could not read, thought she was agreeing to birth control for her daughters but instead signed a consent for their sterilizations. The issues raised in Relf v. Weinberģer reflected the. prevalence of corrupt sterilization practices inside African American communities across the country. As the New York Times reported in 1975, sterilizations were “so common among some groups of indigent blacks that they are referred to as Mississippi appendectomies” (qtd. in Rodriguez-Trias 150). Given these circumstances surrounding sterilization procedures in the 1970s, the Madrigal case can be seen as a representative example of chronic discriminatory medical practices targeting poor and minority women all over the country. The USC-LA Medical Center served primarily poor Chicana patients, and in the years preceding the case, the number of sterilizations performed there rose dramatically, with hysterectomies increasing by 742 percent and tubal ligations by 470 percent (Rosenfeld 1). In addition, a study of the USC-LA Medical Center, along with other hospitals in Baltimore and Boston, found that “of the 2 million people who undergo surgical sterilization each year, at least several hundred thousand are considerably less than well informed about the irreversibility, risks and alternative methods of family planning when the[y] ‘decide’ to have these operations” (9). Thus, when the women of Madrigal v. Quilligan entered the medical center to have their children, they entered into a complex debate surrounding the medical, political, and cultural role of sterilization in the U.S.

Stories of Sterilization Abuse By first recovering the stories of sterilization abuse told in Madrigal v. Quilligan, feminist historians can begin to understand how the Chicanas involved in the case invoked a rhetoric of survival that contested the discriminatory medical practices they encountered at the USCLA Medical Center. [. . .] When these women protested their sterilization abuse, however, it was not the first time Chicanas had argued for their right to survive and thrive. These

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women’s words echoed inside a Chicana feminist rhetorical tradition where concerns for and claims on the Chicana body abound. The signed consent forms of seven of the ten women in the Madrigal case suggest that these women understood the sterilization process and agreed to undergo their operations. The testimonies made by Acosta, Benavides, Hermosillo, Hernández, Hurtado, Figueroa, Figueroa, Madrigal, Rivera, and Orozco, though, tell a different story about what went on at the medical center. These women offered their sterilization experiences as alternative and persuasive evidence that discounted their signatures on the consent forms and proved the abusive treatment they received. Rivera, for instance, claimed she was lied to and verbally abused during labor: While I was in advanced labor and under anesthesia with complications in my expected childbirth and in great pain, the doctor told me that I had too many children, that I was poor, and a burden to the government and I should sign a paper not to have more children. [. . .] The doctors told me that my tubes could be untied at a later time and I could still have children. (35–36) Orozco recalled being threatened by her doctors. If she did not consent to her sterilization, they would withhold proper medical treatment: [A] doctor said that if I did not consent to the tubal ligation that the doctor repairing my hernia would use an inferior type of stitching material which would break the next time I became pregnant, but that if I consented to the tubal ligation that the stitches would hold as proper string would be used. No one ever explained what a tubal ligation operation was, I thought it was reversible. (25) Hurtado remembered a different kind of coercion experience, testifying that doctors misinformed her of the California law concerning sterilization procedures: I was told by members of the Medical Center’s Staff, through a Spanishspeaking nurse as interpreter, that the State of California did not permit a woman to undergo more than three caesarean section operations and that since this was to be my third caesarean section, the doctor would have to do something to me to prevent my having another caesarean section operation. No explanation nor description of the tubal ligation, which was later performed on me without my knowledge and free and informed consent, was given to me. (48–49) Compounding the doctors’ lies, coercive tactics, and threats of medical mistreatment was the linguistic power struggle at play at the USC-LA Medical Center. These Spanish-

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speaking women reported that they were expected to read and comprehend consent forms printed in English and that they were held responsible for understanding the doctors’ recommendations while in the final stages of labor. For example, when Benavides testified about whether or not there was anything she could do in order to understand her doctor, she said she could do nothing: the “doctor[’s] remarks were being interpreted and I was in advanced labor, in considerable pain. There was nothing I could do to understand him better” (58). By testifying to their experiences, these Chicanas asked the judge to look past what was deemed acceptable evidence (their signatures on consent forms) and acknowledge their experience as proof that they did not knowingly consent to their sterilizations. Inside discussions of feminist historiography, the significance of this recovery is clear. By identifying the Madrigal v. Quilligan case as a viable site for rhetorical excavation, we can see these Chicanas as rhetors in the most traditional sense of the word: they entered the courtroom and made their case. Their presence in this most acceptable rhetorical forum gains significance when we begin to consider the ways in which these women “negotiated the assumption of the role of the rhetor” (Campbell 51). As women who belonged to a minority group that was often discounted and discriminated against; who were poor and, for the most part, uneducated; and, who did not speak English fluently, these women faced seemingly insurmountable constraints that worked to exclude them from powerful sites of rhetorical activity like the courtroom. In spite of the asymmetrical power relations they lived with on a day-to-day basis and because of the outright abuse they received at the medical center, these women went to court and made their claims in front of yet another powerful iteration of dominant white society in the form of Judge Jesse Curtis. As rhetors, these Chicanas negotiated all of these factors to speak out against discriminatory medical practices that infringed on their constitutional rights to procreate. They told their stories of sterilization abuse to argue for their survival and to reclaim control over their bodies, their lives, and their families. The recovery of these women’s testimonies becomes even more compelling when they are seen as both an instance of Chicana feminist rhetoric and an inroad to this particular tradition’s history. The experiential claims of the women in the Madrigal case are an instance of a Chicana feminist rhetoric because they did more than articulate the wrongs done to ten individual women in a Los Angeles hospital. These Chicanas filed a class action civil rights suit, meaning that they sued the USC-LA Medical Center on behalf of themselves and other Chicanas who faced the same situation in hospitals all over the country. Their experiences, then, functioned synecdochally as these Chicanas argued that the sterilization abuse they experienced was just a small part of a much larger problem residing in the harrowing spaces where the medical and Chicana communities meet. Their goal in court was not just to rectify the wrongs done to them but also to “prevent this from ever happening again” (Hernández, telephone interview, 6 Aug. 2004). Thus, their arguments formed a collective and unified rhetoric that stood at the intersection of the particular classed, cultured, and gendered needs of the Chicana community at that moment. Their combined stories of sterilization

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abuse composed a Chicana feminist rhetoric aimed at changing prejudicial medical practices and protecting other Chicanas from a similar fate. The collective protests these women made to the wrongs done to their bodies at the USC-LA Medical Center is unfortunately not new inside Chicana feminist discourse. Their moves to articulate the violence done to them provide just a glimpse of a much ignored rhetorical history in which Chicana rhetors repeatedly articulate and protest the experiences of and the crimes against the Chicana body. For example, in This Bridge Called My Back (a title which in itself highlights the physical presence of the third-world woman’s body), Cherríe Moraga observes that many Chicanas, and other minority women, come to voice through a “theory in the flesh,” which means that “the physical realities of [their] lives—[their] skin color, the land or concrete [they] grew up on, [their] sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (“Entering” 23). Such a theory in the flesh emerges in Gloria Anzaldúa’s essay on “linguistic terrorism,” (80) which begins with a visit to the dentist who tells her “[w]e’re going to have to control your tongue” (75). [. . .] Therefore, the “politic born out of necessity” that the women in the Madrigal case voice illustrates one recurrence in a long history of Chicana feminist rhetoric that rails against the violent, life-threatening, and physical transgressions upon the Chicana body. The historiographic recovery of this case both contributes to and reveals a Chicana feminist rhetorical tradition, and, as it does, it challenges mainstream feminist histories. Recovering these Chicanas’ stories of sterilization abuse and placing their words alongside the rhetorics of Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Fuller begins to correct a historical record that, in the words of Karlyn Kohrs Campell, is “profoundly distorted, skewed toward those lucky enough to be literate, educated, and middle- and upper-class and whose works appeared in mainstream outlets with wider circulation” (46). By incorporating these testimonies of sterilization abuse into feminist rhetorical history, the historical record shifts to the claims and concerns of those who are not white, upper- or middle-class, educated or English-speaking. Although this kind of recovery work could be enough since Chicana rhetorics are far from being a regular occurrence inside rhetorical histories or present-day discussions, my next step places these women’s claims in their immediate and most visible rhetorical situation to see how their words were interpreted and deployed by Judge Curtis. By placing these articulations in context, the historiographic project expands so we not only listen to these Chicanas’ words but also examine the intricate rhetorical strategies used to discount these words.

Dismissing Stories/Dismissing Abuse When Judge Curtis came to his decision after two-and-a-half weeks of trial proceedings, he had considered a number of factors. The Chicanas’ attorneys not only brought the women and their experiences to court, but they also called to the witness stand a number of professionals to offer their expertise concerning the case. Dr. John Sloan, a renowned obstetrician and gynecologist, testified that women are not in the right state of mind to consent to or even discuss

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sterilization during labor. A handwriting expert concluded that the signatures on the Chicanas’ consent forms suggested signs of “distress and stress” (Vélez-Ibáñez, “Nonconsenting” 244). Dr. Terry Kuper, a psychiatrist, discussed the effects the sterilizations had on the Chicanas. And anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez offered the results of a 450-hour study on the cultural significance of these sterilizations inside the women’s particular Chicano/a community, ultimately arguing that the women would have needed in-depth counseling before consenting to a sterilization procedure (244). The defendants, on the other hand, spent little time on the witness stand. As Curtis recounts in his opinion statement, the doctors all testified that they had no “independent recollection of the events leading up to the operations” but that “it was their custom and practice not to suggest a sterilization procedure unless a patient asked for it or there were medical complications which would require the doctor, in the exercise of prudent medical procedures, to make such a suggestion” (8). The doctors claimed they “knew enough ‘obstetrics Spanish’ to get them by” (Vélez-Ibáñez, “Nonconsenting” 244–5) and “would not perform the operation unless they were certain in their own mind that the patient understood the nature of the operation and was requesting the procedure” (Curtis 8). After listening to both sides of the case, Curtis sided with the defense. What becomes important in terms of this feminist historiographic discussion is to investigate the rhetorical strategies Curtis used to interpret the Chicanas’ case. An examination of his concluding remarks reveals that Curtis based his decision on many of the Chicanas’ claims but redeployed them so that these arguments now served the purpose of the doctors. To make this argumentative shift, Curtis invoked a rhetoric of normalization to say that these women and their experiences fell outside what he saw as normal and acceptable and were therefore not under the purview of the doctors. Curtis begins his closing comments by summarizing and then assessing the case: The rather subtle but underlying thrust of the plaintiffs’ complaint appears to be that they were all victims of a concerted plan by hospital attendants and doctors to push them, as members of a low socio-economic group who tend toward large families, to consent to sterilization in order to accomplish some sinister, invidious, social purpose. A careful search of the records fails to produce any evidence whatever to support this contention. (2–3) His flip and dismissive remarks—“underlying thrust,” “appears,” “concerted plan,” and “some sinister, invidious purpose”—transform the Chicanas’ class action suit into a wild conspiracy theory. In the eyes of the court, these women’s testimonies of horrendous sterilization abuse become outlandish and unsubstantiated accusations with no basis in reality or truth. Curtis easily draws a line between acceptable and unacceptable evidence when he dismisses the Chicanas’ experiences as baseless and useless information outside the court’s interest. Curtis goes on to address the women’s claim that the doctors disregarded or even took advantage of the language barrier to sterilize them without their consent. He states:

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This case is essentially the result of a breakdown in communications between the patients and the doctors. All plaintiffs are Spanish speaking women whose ability to understand and speak English is limited. This fact is generally understood by the staff at the Medical Center and most members have acquired enough familiarity with the language to get by. There is also an interpreter available whose services are used when thought to be necessary. But even with these precautions misunderstandings are bound to occur. (emphasis mine, 6) Curtis here points to what the women defined as a blatant misuse of linguistic power and renames it a “misunderstanding bound to occur.” Curtis implicitly argues that if there is any fault here it lies with the women. Their inability to understand English (the normative and acceptable language in Curtis’ eyes) caused the disconnect between information given and information received. But the fact that these women were Spanish-speaking is only the start of the problem, according to Curtis. Just as he shifts the blame from English-speaking doctors to Spanishspeaking patients, Curtis makes the same kind of shift when addressing issues of culture. As noted above, anthropologist Vélez-Ibáñez testified that because of the Chicanas’ cultural background, they would have needed more and even different kinds of information about sterilization if they were to have been able to give their informed consent. Curtis takes up this point and uses it to make a distinction between what doctors do and do not need to know: [T]he cultural background of these particular women has contributed to the problem in a subtle but very significant way. [. . .] When faced with a decision of whether or not to be sterilized the decision process is a much more traumatic event with [a Chicana] than it would be with a typical patient and, consequently, she [the Chicana] would require greater explanation, more patient advice, and greater care in interpreting her consent than persons not members of such a subculture would require. [. . .] It is not surprising therefore that the staff of a busy metropolitan hospital which has neither the time nor the staff to make such esoteric studies would be unaware of these atypical cultural traits. (emphasis mine, 6–7) Here, the judge agrees to Vélez-Ibáñez’s point that the Chicanas needed greater patient advice and care. But these needs are not, Curtis contends, inside the realm of the doctors’ concern. To Curtis, these women are not the typical female patient: they speak Spanish and are part of a Chicano/a “subculture.” These women’s “atypical” language and culture are the roots of the problem, the missteps in communication, and the reasons for their sterilization. The judge’s conclusions reflect a rhetoric of normalization that resituates and rewrites the Chicanas’ sterilization experiences. As Elizabeth C. Britt describes in her essay on the

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normalization of fertility, the “norm can be thought of as an argument: an argument about what qualities or characteristics should be measured, about what units of measurements should be used, about the dividing line between the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’ ” (208). In his concluding comments, Curtis draws the dividing line between the normal and the deviant, implying that because these women are “abnormal” and “atypical”—they speak Spanish; they are Chicanas—they do not need to be accommodated. Curtis implicitly argues it is the women’s fault that they did not receive the information that he is sure was passed on to them. If, though, these Chicanas were “normal”—English-speaking and Anglo—then their doctors would have known how to communicate with them and would have done so effectively. Curtis’ conclusions here reflect the ways he used his power to interpret the Chicanas’ testimony. He renames their collective claims as conspiratorial; discounts their experience as evidence; and holds their language and culture against them as a justified and relevant reason why these Chicanas were sterilized. Instead of seeing that these women were misinformed, threatened, and discriminated against, the judge uses a rhetoric of normalization to conclude that these Chicanas and their experiences simply fell outside the range of the norm. [. . .] By contextualizing women’s rhetorics to investigate the ways powerful audiences interpret and revise them, historians intensify the critical work of feminist history. Through this practice, they not only acknowledge the fact that women spoke and identify the constraints they overcame, but they also examine the specific methods that silenced women’s voices at particular times and places. Such a historiographic practice highlights the ways feminist historiography does indeed enact a “commitment to the future of women,” as it sharpens the awareness of present-day feminists, enabling them to identify, expose, and resist the intricate and subtle rhetorical strategies used to discount women’s claims—especially marginalized women’s claims (Glenn 174). Analyzing how the Madrigal women’s voices were silenced inside the rhetorical situation of the courtroom is one way to make use of accepted feminist methods. But, as I will show in the following section, feminist historiographic practice does not have to end here. Scholars can continue their historical pursuit by asking, what else happened to women’s rhetorics? By asking this question, feminist scholars can begin to understand how women’s words were remembered and retold in different rhetorical situations and how they achieved different rhetorical effects. This particular historiographic practice grounds itself in the idea that just because a rhetoric has been silenced in one venue does not mean it is gone forever.

This Story’s Survival In 1976, Antonia Hernández took the Madrigal case out of the courtroom and drew new attention to her clients’ stories of sterilization abuse. That year she published “Chicanas and the Issue of Involuntary Sterilization: Reforms Needed to Protect Informed Consent” in the Chicano Law Review, alerting her audience that “a great injustice had been done”

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(Hernández, telephone interview, 6 Aug. 2004). The injustice she speaks of was not just the decision made against the Chicanas or the sterilizations they received. She also resituates and interprets the case to make two different appeals to her readers. First, she retells the Madrigal women’s testimony to inform her audience of the systematic sterilization abuse happening not just to Chicanas but to thousands of poor and minority women all over the country. Second, she draws on the Madrigal case as a means to distinguish the differing reproductive concerns of white, middle-class women and those of poor and minority women. In her essay, Hernández’s primary project is to use the words of the Madrigal women as a means to “emphasize the gravity of coerced sterilization” in hospitals across the U.S. (4). Although Hernández writes of the ways these sterilization practices target Chicanas and even titles a section of the essay “Special Concerns of Chicanas,” her greater purpose in retelling these Chicanas’ experiences is to build awareness and coalitions across racial lines. To achieve this purpose, Hernández first aligns the sterilization abuse voiced in the Madrigal case with that of the Relf case and presents them both as proof of the ways doctors target poor and minority women for sterilization (16–17). She strengthens this connection by linking the Madrigal case to the “unwritten policy” in certain New York City teaching hospitals in which doctors “perform elective hysterectomies on poor Black and Puerto Rican women, with only minimal medical indications, in order to train residents” (22). Hernández further highlights the ways the Madrigal women’s testimony is indicative of a pervasive problem inside poor and minority communities by citing the following statistics: “Among those women who undergo the [sterilization] surgery with less than a high school education, 14.5 percent were Caucasian but 31.6 percent were Black. Thirty-five percent of Puerto Rican women, aged 15 to 44, have been sterilized and two-thirds of these women are under the age of 30” (25). Once Hernández establishes the Madrigal case as representative of a widespread problem, she proposes a solution, and offers the following amendments to sterilization procedures: the patient must sign consent forms 30 days before the sterilization operation; “nonemergency” sterilizations must originate with a request by the patient; and verbal counseling, informed consent forms, and discussions concerning alternative forms of contraception must be in the language of the patient and written at a sixth-grade educational level of comprehension (32–34). Additionally, Hernández recommends that each potential patient must read an illustrated pamphlet and watch an audio-visual presentation—both in the language of the patient—which describe surgical sterilization and its effects (34). When Hernández offers the Madrigal women’s sterilization as emblematic of many women’s experiences inside and outside the Chicana community, she sponsors the case’s rhetorical survival. Hernández takes the Chicanas’ claims out of the courtroom and resituates their words to raise awareness about sterilization abuse. Through this process, Hernández does not let the experiences and the claims of the Chicanas disappear. Instead, she revives the case and makes it visible again by telling these women’s stories in the Chicano Law Review. Hernández, though, was not the only one who retold the Chicanas’ stories of steriliza-

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tion abuse; numbers of activists also held the case up as an instructive example of this acute medical situation. For instance, the Madrigal case was cited in Helen Rodriguez-Trias’ 1976 Reid Lecture at the Barnard College Women’s Center as yet another instance of systematic discrimination and medical oppression directed at poor and minority women. It was the subject of the 1979 Equal Opportunity Forum article “Anatomy of a Nightmare: Sterilization Abuse in America” and Claudia Dreifus’ 1975 article in the Progressive, “Sterilizing the Poor.” Through all of these retellings, the Chicanas’ stories of sterilization abuse took on new rhetorical effects. Inside the courtroom, their claims were refused, but outside the courtroom, through the retelling and re-situating of their stories, their claims became proof that sterilization abuse did occur, and their words became instructive instances of why sterilization procedures should change. By continuing to cite the claims made by the Madrigal women, these activists participated in a coalition-building process that aimed to stop sterilization abuse. Their protests joined with those of WARN: Women of All Red Nations (Barlow, “Sterilization of Native American Women”); the Ad Hoc Women’s Studies Committee (Workbook on Sterilization and Sterilization Abuse); the National Women’s Health Network (“Sterilization: Resource Guide 9”); CARASA: Committee for Abortion and Against Sterilization Abuse; and CESA: the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. These individual and collective calls built on and were driven by the Madrigal case and others like it because these cases, even if discounted in a court of law, functioned rhetorically as “lessons” to be learned and incentives to continue the fight against sterilization abuse. Eventually, these activists’ arguments were heard. [. . . A]s a result of the work of activists from various groups, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare established the following protocols for sterilization procedures: (1) Informed consent in the language spoken or read by the person. (2) Extensive counseling to include information as to alternatives. (3) A prohibition on consent at times of delivery or at any other time of stress and of overt or veiled pressures on welfare patients. (4) The right to choose a patient advocate throughout the counseling or any aspect of the process. (5) A thirty-day waiting period between consent and procedure. (6) No sterilization of people under twenty-one years of age. (Rodriguez-Trias 156–57) Thus, Hernández’s resuscitating of the Madrigal case contributed to a large-scale feminist program working to end sterilization abuse. Even though the claims of the Chicanas were dismissed by Judge Curtis, their words circulated and recirculated inside feminist, legal,

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medical, academic, and communal conversations, enabling the possibilities for coalition building and aiding in the struggle for better sterilization practices. [. . .] This historiographic tracking of the Madrigal case beyond its immediate rhetorical situation—beyond Curtis’ decision—reveals what else happened to the claims made by the Madrigal women. Hernández’s retelling makes it clear that even after a certain form of silencing, women’s voices do (sometimes) find a willing and receptive audience. [. . .] Her work calls historians to see how interpretation and redeployment can serve a vital purpose in determining the ways women’s rhetorics “stay alive” to affect community decisions, activist causes, and even policy change. As this analysis makes clear, historians should continue to resist historiographic closure at the initial or most visible rhetorical situation and continue to ask: What else happened to this rhetoric? Who else was listening? Who might have retold these stories and to what end? Even though women’s words might initially be dismissed, their words have the possibility to take on new rhetorical effects in other spaces and venues.

Survival Stories: Chicana Feminist Rhetoric and Feminist Historiography This four-step historiographic approach expands disciplinary understandings of Chicana feminist rhetoric as it also complicates and extends possibilities for feminist history and historiography. First, the recovery of the testimony made by Acosta, Benavides, Hermosillo, Hernández, Hurtado, Figueroa, Figueroa, Madrigal, Rivera, and Orozco brings into our disciplinary memory the rhetorical claims of ten Chicanas who spoke out against a powerful medical system and refused to let their injustices go unheard. The “politic born out of necessity” that these women articulate is both an example of and a recurrence inside a rich Chicana feminist rhetorical tradition—a tradition that includes but is not limited to discussions of the body. In fact, the stories of sterilization that these women tell reflect only one strand of the Chicana feminist struggle at this period. During the years these women went to court, Chicana feminists became a force well worthy of continued rhetorical study. For instance, feminist scholars could work from Vicki Ruiz’s claim that “Chicanas have a community-centered consciousness and a recognition for differences as they live amid the ‘swirls of cultural contradictions’ ” (100) by studying the insurgent feminist work of Martha Cotera and Anna Nieto-Gomez. Scholars could investigate the rhetorical strategies deployed by Sonia A. López during the Chicano Student Movement or the revolutionary contributions of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Norma Alarcón, and Enriqueta Longauex y Vásquez to collections like This Bridge Called My Back and Sisterhood Is Powerful. The feminist visions of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana and the Chicana Service Action Center would also serve as prime sites for Chicana feminist rhetorical study as these collectives focused on Chicana employment, her place inside and outside the home, and the possibilities of her leadership. Rhetorical examinations of these various manifestations of Chicana feminism would work against the ways scholars have “erased [the] specificity” of Chicana life to show how Chicanas have dealt with the competing and overlapping oppressions of race, class, gender,

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and sexuality (Saldívar-Hull 35). As Aída Hurtado makes clear, the “Chicanas’ condition [. . . is] highly influenced by their gender but not independent of other historical material conditions” (original emphasis, 131). Investigations of the rhetorical strategies needed to negotiate these historical material conditions would surely initiate a long overdue discussion of Chicana feminist rhetoric and, in so doing, influence understandings of historical and present-day feminist rhetorical practice. To make sure, though, that the recovery of these rhetorical endeavors affects the conceptual and theoretical foundations of feminist study, we need to heed Hui Wu’s advice when she writes that “[t]o recover what has been missing and to prevent what may become missing requires the recognition that historical work on rhetorical women of marginal status has broader relevance” (93). One way the Chicana feminist rhetoric studied here could shape the field in relevant ways is if we see how the Madrigal women’s articulations of sterilization abuse complicate Susan Bordo’s attempt to re-route the history of body politics. In Unbearable Weight, Bordo rightly critiques contemporary work which cites Michel Foucault as the “founding father” (17) of scholarship on the body—scholarship that implicitly claims that he invented the idea that culture has a “direct grip” on “our bodies, through the practices and bodily habits of everyday life” (16). Bordo goes on to rehistoricize the concept of body politics writing: [N]either Foucault nor any other poststructuralist thinker discovered or invented the idea, to refer again to [Don Hanlon] Johnson’s account, that the “definition and the shaping” of the body is the “focal point for struggles over the shape of power.” That was discovered by feminism, and long before it entered into its marriage with poststructuralist thought. (17) The stories of sterilization abuse articulated in the Madrigal case and the Chicana feminist rhetorical tradition that they are part of both confirm and trouble Bordo’s historical lineage. Although it is nearly impossible to pinpoint when an idea was discovered, it is important to note that mainstream second-wave feminists (whom Bordo points to as the founding mothers of body politics) were not the only ones to recognize the relationship between the body and power. Arguments over and about the Chicana body have been a prominent and pressing recurrence inside a long-standing Chicana feminist rhetorical tradition. By bringing the rhetorical claims of the Madrigal women into this discussion, historians might broaden the theoretical and rhetorical scope of body politics to see how marginalized women have also articulated the ways the personal is political. [. . .] Just as we broaden our historical understanding of body politics, we should also consistently re-consider the historiographic methods we use to record these stories. Recovering women’s voices and identifying them within a tradition enables us to see how the history and historiography of women’s rhetorics could and should change. As this study proves, though, the historiographic practice of contextualizing women’s words in their original rhetorical

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situation is also vital. [. . .] In the Madrigal case, my examination of Judge Curtis’ summation revealed the rhetoric of normalization he used to dismiss the Chicanas’ sterilization experiences. Such a finding plays an important role inside feminist historiography. It is no longer enough to know that women’s words have been stricken from the public record. We should now press further to excavate and understand the rhetorical strategies that those in power used (and use) to make this striking seem “logical,” “normal,” and “reasonable.” This methodological priority is an integral component of feminist historiography, but the historiographic pursuit does not have to end here. As my fourth methodological practice makes clear, we should pursue the possibility that women’s words might gain new and meaningful effects outside their original rhetorical situation. To understand what these effects might be, historians need first to reflect on and question “what counts” as a viable and possible rhetorical situation. Historians, then, would not limit their study to the immediate context of a rhetorical exchange but would continue their search and investigate who else was listening. By broadening the boundaries of the rhetorical situation, we might observe the ways women’s rhetorics find other audiences who not only listen to but also put their words to new uses. As my analysis of Hernández’s essay suggests, even though the Chicanas involved in the Madrigal case did not win in court, their experiences served multiple purposes outside the courtroom. Therefore, this study adds a methodological tool to the historiographic trade by calling scholars first to recover, identify recurrences in, and contextualize women’s rhetorical endeavors but then to pursue other rhetorical situations to see how women’s stories are repeated and reinterpreted to gain different rhetorical effects. The methodological practice that I offer here enables scholars to look beyond the ways the rhetorical endeavors of women were ignored or silenced in order to see how these rhetorics survived. This method should give us hope and enable us to tell survival stories.

Notes [. . .] 1 In court documents and various writings concerning Madrigal v. Quilligan, the women are defined as “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” and “Chicana.” Following the designation Antonia Hernández makes in her 1976 essay “Chicanas and the Issue of Involuntary Sterilization,” I call these women “Chicanas.” [. . .] 2 Madrigal v. Quilligan was originally filed as a class action civil rights action suit on June 19, 1975 with twelve women listed as plaintiffs in the case. In 1976, this case went to trial at the Central Federal District Court in Los Angeles. The women lost their case, but appealed it. Two years later, ten of the twelve original women (Laura Dominguez and Blanca Duran removed themselves as plaintiffs) took their case to the Ninth Circuit District Court of Appeals [. . .] where [. . .] Judge Curtis upheld the lower court’s decision and rejected the Chicanas’ claims of sterilization abuse. [. . .] 7 The Madrigal case is by no means the first instance of involuntary sterilization in the U.S. The history of eugenic and non-consenting sterilizations is unfortunately both long and complex. For further reading, see Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Cre-

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ate a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2003); Phillip R. Rielly. The Surgical Solution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1991); Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Sally Torpy, “Native American Women and Coerced Sterilization: On the Trail of Tears in the 1970s,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24.2 (2000): 1–22. [. . .]

Works Cited Ad Hoc Women’s Studies Committee Against Sterilization Abuse. Workbook on Sterilization and Sterilization Abuse. Bronxville: Sarah Lawrence Press, 1978. Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting the Flesh Back on the Object.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Watertown, MA: 1999. 182–90. “Anatomy of a Nightmare: Sterilization Abuse in America.” Equal Opportunity Forum (Aug. 1979): 6+. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. 75–86. Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Press; 1983. Barlow, Judy. “Sterilization of Native American Women.” Big Mama Rag 6.5 (1978): 5+. Benavides, Estela. Answers to Defendants Quilligan and Bosworth’s First Set of Written Interrogatives. 7 April 1976. Madrigal v. Quilligan. No. CV 75–2057. Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court. 30 June 1978. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Britt, Elizabeth. “Medical Insurance as Bio-Power: Law and the Normalization of (In)Fertility.” Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction. Eds. Mary M. Lay, Laura J. Gurak, Clare Gravon, and Cynthia Myntti. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 207–25. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Consciousness Raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice.” Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Special Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (2002): 45–64. Commonwealth ex rel. Serena v. Child Welfare Services of Armstrong County. 55 Pa. D. & C.2d 793, 1972 WL 15840 (Pa.Com.Pl.) 1972. “Consent for Sterilization Form.” County of Los Angeles. Department of Hospitals. Doc. 76C805F-209. Revised April 1970. Cotera, Martha P. The Chicano Feminist. Austin: Information Systems Development, 1977. Curtis, Jesse W. Opinion. Madrigal v. Quilligan. No. CV 75–2057. Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court. 30 June 1978. “Dear President-Elect Nixon.” New York Times Sunday (Nov. 24 1968): 5E. Dreifus, Claudia. “Sterilizing the Poor.” The Progressive (December 1975): 13–18. Enos, Richard Leo. “The Archeology of Women in Rhetoric: Rhetorical Sequencing as a Research Method for Historical Scholarship.” Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Special Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (2002): 65–79. Ferreira-Buckley, Linda. “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault.” College English 61.5 (1999): 577–83.

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Garcia, Alma. “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970–1980.” Gender and Society 3:2 (1989): 217–38. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition From Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. González, Deena J. “Lupe’s Song: On the Origins of Mexican/Woman-Hating in the United States.” Race in 21st Century America. Eds. Curtis Stokes, Theresa Meléndez, Genise Rhodes-Reed. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001. 143–58. Hurtado, Aída. “Sitios y Lenguas: Chicanas Theorize Feminisms.” Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 128–55. Hurtado, Maria. Answers to Defendants Quilligan and Bosworth’s First Set of Written Interrogatives. 7 April 1976. Madrigal v. Quilligan. No. CV 75–2057. Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court. 30 June 1978. Hernández, Antonia. “Chicanas and the Issue of Involuntary Sterilization: Reforms Needed to Protect Informed Consent.” Chicano Law Review 3.1 (1976): 3–37. —. Telephone Interview. 6 August 2004. Logan, Shirley Wilson. “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Longauex y Vásquez, Enriqueta. “The Mexican American Woman.” Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Ed. Robin Morgan. New York: Vintage, 1970. 379–84. López, Sonia A. “The Role of the Chicana within the Student Movement.” Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. New York: Routledge, 1997. 100–06. Madrigal, Dolores. Answers to Defendants Quilligan and Bosworth’s First Set of Written Interrogatives. 19 Mar. 1976. Madrigal v. Quilligan. No. CV 75–2057. Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court. 30 June 1978. Madrigal v. Quilligan. No. 75–2057. Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court. 30 June 1978. Moraga, Cherríe. “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh.” Anzaldúa and Moraga. 22–23. Muller, Charlotte F. “Feminism, Society and Fertility Control.” Family Planning Perspectives 6.2 (1974): 68–72. National Women’s Health Network. “Sterilization: Resource Guide 9.” Washington DC: National Women’s Health Network Press, 1980. Nieto-Gomez, Anna. “La Feminista.” Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. New York: Routledge, 1997. 86–91. Orozco, Helena. Answers to Defendants Quilligan and Bosworth’s First Set of Written Interrogatives. 6 April 1976. Madrigal v. Quilligan. No. CV 75–2057. Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court. 30 June 1978. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Relf v. Weinberger. 372 Federal Supplement 1196. D.D.C 1974. Rivera, Jovita. Answers to Defendants Quilligan and Bosworth’s First Set of Written Interrogatives. 19 March 1976. Madrigal v. Quilligan. No. CV 75–2057. Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court. 30 June 1978.

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Rodriguez-Trias, Helen. “Sterilization Abuse.” Biological Woman—The Convenient Myth. Ed. B. Freid et al. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Press, 1982. 145–60. Roe v. Wade. 410 U.S. 113. 1973. Rosenfeld, Bernard, Sidney Wolfe, and Robert E. McGarrah. “A Health Research Group Study on Surgical Sterilization: Present Abuses and Proposed Regulations.” Washington DC: Public Citizen, Inc., 1973. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “To Call a Thing by Its True Name: The Rhetoric of Ida B. Wells.” Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea Lunsford. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. 167–184. —. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Ruiz, Vicki. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Scheyer, Stanley C. “DHEW’s New Center: The National Commitment to Family Planning.” Family Planning Perspectives 2.1 (1970): 22–25. Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. “The Nonconsenting Sterilization of Mexican Women in Los Angeles.” Twice a Minority: Mexican American Women. Ed. Margarita B. Melville. St. Louis: C.V. Mosby, 1980. 235–48. —. “Se Me Acabó La Canción: An Ethnography of Non-Consenting Sterilizations among Mexican Women in Los Angeles” Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present. Eds. Magdelena Mora and Adelaida R. Del Castillo. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 1980. 71–91. Wu, Hui. “Historical Studies of Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks.” Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Special Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (2002): 81–97.

Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World* Mary Queen In this essay, I examine the digital circulations of representations of one Afghan women’s rights organization—the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)— to demonstrate the importance of a global and digital field for feminist rhetorical analysis. Specifically, this analysis traces how women’s self-representations are transformed through their circulation within global fields of rhetorical action in ways that often “fix” these women within neoliberal frameworks of “democracy” and “women’s rights,” thus erasing the multiple ways in which women across the globe use Internet technology to create and claim identities, agency, and political activism outside of the circulation of one-third world rhetorics of power.1 In the last decade, rhetorical scholarship on contemporary rhetorical practices has broadened its previous U.S.-centric focus. As Wendy Hesford notes in her PMLA review essay (2006) on the disciplinary, political, and cultural ideologies driving the recent “global turn” in rhetoric and composition, scholars in these fields have recently turned their attention to analyses of the rhetorical and political acts emerging from/at the intersections among local, regional, and global contexts (Schell; Chakravarty; Dingo; Gorsevski; Lu). Similarly, feminist scholars across the disciplines focus on the Internet’s impact on interactions among women and women’s rights groups (Gajjala; Hunt; Harcourt). More particularly, feminist scholars have examined the political and rhetorical strategies used by organizations such as RAWA to bring attention to Afghan women’s suffering and the ways in which neoliberal organizations deployed RAWA’s efforts in the service of other ideologies (Farrell and McDermott; Hunt; Alexander; Brodsky; Puar and Rai). Despite the important work emerging from both the global and digital turn (and in some cases, the global/digital turn) in rhetoric and composition studies, one key area has yet to be examined: the central role that the circulation of digital texts plays in the transformation and appropriation of feminist discourse. As several feminist analyses of the Feminist Majority/RAWA “battle” demonstrate, issues of representation and authority are crucial to feminist and women’s rights organizations across the globe. *  College English 70 (2008): 471-89. Copyright 2008 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted and used with permission. Note: This essay has been condensed. 202

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The focus here on the circulation of digital texts as integral to the representations of RAWA and Afghan women reveals the complexity of the intersections among global and digital production and consumption of meaning, as well as the processes through which the global circulation of digital representations becomes rhetorical and, ultimately, political actions. Feminist rhetorical studies must extend their analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations, because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority. We need to pay attention to the processes through which cyberspace circulations construct the “Other Woman” and reinforce the rationality of U.S. concepts and practices of “democracy” and “women’s rights.”2 Through neoliberal rhetorics of modernity and progress, U.S. neoliberal feminism not only distances itself—both temporally and spatially—from the Other Woman, but also reinforces a global hierarchical system in which one-third world U.S. feminists act as “saviors” of two-thirds world women imprisoned within oppressive, violent, traditional/fundamentalist patriarchal structures of underdeveloped nations.3 In doing so, we shift our own vulnerability to and culpability in the violence of U.S. patriarchal and capitalist practices onto the backs of two-thirds world women, and claim agency and self-representation for ourselves while denying this same capacity to them.

Digital Technology and Transnational Feminist Activism The complex relationship between digital technology and transnational feminist activism must become a central point of inquiry for feminist rhetoricians because Internet technology is profoundly implicated in globalized capitalist practices and integral to the resistance of local, regional, and transnational social movements to these practices. The sociotechnical production of cyberspace—the knowledge-power processes that inscribe and materialize the world in some forms rather than others (Haraway 7)—is the very embodiment of globalization and, thus, shot through with material and structural relations of force. Although advocates of Internet technology imagine an unbounded, infinite space in which to enact postmodern concepts of fragmented, multiple, liberated identities through disconnection and disembodiment, the material reality of the (re)production—both process and product—of cyberspace is neither disconnected nor disembodied. These concepts have been of central concern to feminist technology critics from a broad spectrum of theoretical and disciplinary positions because representations of the liberatory nature of cyberspace mask its kinship with militarism and patriarchal capitalism. Even more insidious and dangerous for transnational feminist movements is the way in which U.S. neoliberal feminists’ “rescue narratives” fit so neatly into U.S. neoliberal global ideologies and practices. In her analysis of the Feminist Majority’s efforts to expose the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women and to champion Afghan women’s liberation from oppressive fundamentalist practices, M. Jacqui Alexander points out that “The very category of statesponsored terror, which the Feminist Majority organization foregrounds in examining the

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operations of the Taliban, disappears in relation to the practices of the American state. One of the results of this hypervisibility and erasure is that the denunciation of the Taliban comes to inhabit a political space that simultaneously supports the act of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003” (185). Thus, rather than revealing and challenging the links among U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, and state-sponsored violence and terror, neoliberal feminist groups such as the Feminist Majority align themselves, through their rhetorics of liberation, with the interests of the state, thereby distancing themselves from the very women they claim to help. An important mode through which that alignment of interests is accomplished, I suggest, is the Internet. Internet technology is often perceived, paradoxically, as a technology that connects us to others while it simultaneously remains disconnected from material reality. Many women’s rights groups and feminists embrace Internet technology as a way to break down spatial and temporal distances and to open possibilities for global connection. When we embrace Internet technology in this way, we make the medium itself transparent, as if digital technology functioned outside the temporal and spatial contexts of geopolitical relations. As many feminist scholars have pointed out, access to the Internet is determined by a variety of factors—geopolitical, economic, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, educational, ideological—that bar most two-thirds world people from participating in the “digital revolution.” RAWA, an exception, is arguably one of the most successful women’s rights groups to capitalize on Internet capabilities to make international connections. Yet, it isn’t simply their Internet presence that enables them to cross the “digital divide.” In her analysis of RAWA’s use of the Internet, Krista Hunt argues that neoliberal feminists’ embrace of RAWA’s “cause” can be attributed not only to RAWA’s deployment of the rhetoric of democracy, freedom, and women’s rights, but, more important, to the ways in which their ideological position “confirms [Western feminists’] assumptions about the oppression that Muslim women face” (11). Through the digital circulation of RAWA’s name and website in mainstream online news and neoliberal feminist cyberspaces (including the Feminist Majority’s website), RAWA’s work on behalf of Afghan women became visible to U.S. audiences prior to 2001 and hypervisible post-9/11. This hypervisibility—created by the post-9/11 increased circulation of their website via U.S. neoliberal feminist listservs and websites (the Feminist Majority was one of the dominant digital supporters of RAWA at this time)—constructed RAWA as the leading “voice” for Afghan women. According to RAWA’s own Web statistics, “after 9/11, they received more than 2000 unique visits every day, compared to previously receiving approximately 150 per day” (Hunt 5). The continuous circulation—through various feminist and mainstream cyberfields—of RAWA’s criticisms of the Taliban’s brutal treatment of Afghan women and neoliberal feminists’ digital statements about Afghan women merged with the post-9/11 U.S. administration’s rhetoric about “liberating” Afghan women. To understand how digital circulation transforms texts and thus becomes an important site of rhetorical action, we need a conceptual apparatus that helps us visualize otherwise transparent processes.

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Digital Circulation, Rhetorical Action, and Rhetorical Genealogy The term global fields of rhetorical action refers to the cyberspaces through which an element (images, words, texts, websites, etc.) passes as it circulates. The metaphorical concept of field suggests a different relationship among rhetorical actions than do concepts such as space or network. Network is often used to describe multiple and interconnected relations among dispersed individuals and communities, as well as the literal connections among computer terminals, and is thus employed to describe how people connect in cyberspace. Space, as a concept and a material reality, gained currency in rhetoric and composition in the late 1990s, when Nedra Reynolds (1998) called on writing teachers and theorists to “attend to the negotiations of power that take place across and within a number of spaces: regional or topographical, domestic or institutional, architectural or electronic, real or imagined” (13). Although Reynolds’s idea of “imagined” spaces provides one way to conceptualize cyberspace as more fluid than that suggested by the term network, the concept of fields describes the complex rhetorical actions that emerge from encounters among multiple ideologies and practices that are historically, geopolitically, and culturally specific and that are inscribed in global relations among various communities. I am not suggesting that spatial or network metaphors are no longer useful; rather, I am proposing that the term fields provides a more accurate conceptual basis for understanding digital circulation because it helps us “visualize the effects of forces,” e.g., electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields (Schombert). In physics, fields are filled with interacting forces that, although they are imperceptible, have very real effects on objects. If we conceive of digital texts as emerging from and circulating within and across cyberfields of rhetorical action that contain innumerable ideological, cultural, geopolitical, and historical forces that interact with these texts, we can better understand how the digital circulation of RAWA’s various texts and images from their website plays a crucial role in the simultaneous construction and continuous transformation of self-representations of Afghan women within and across various cyberfields (e.g., Feminist Majority, FoxNews, ZNet). These transformations often reflect and reinforce hegemonic global relations, as demonstrated in the subsequent analysis of the circulation of RAWA’s self-representations. The nature of digital versus print texts is also crucial to understanding how digital circulation is a mode of rhetorical action. Although the assumed “stability” of print texts has been effectively critiqued and new methods have been developed for reading the material processes of textual production, digital rhetorical analysis poses a different challenge. Hypertext author and theorist Michael Joyce claims that electronic text differs fundamentally from print text because electronic text replaces itself (Of Two Minds 232). In light of their ephemerality, it seems illogical as well as ineffective to analyze electronic texts as static artifacts. Oral- and print-based rhetorical analysis stabilizes a speech/text. It attempts to identify, as Barbara Warnick points out, the “[. . .] function of a single identifiable author or speaker, a stable text, and an audience of people whose response could be tracked and described” (14). Electronic texts,

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in contrast, change not only because they are ephemeral—forming and dissolving simultaneously—but also because they are mobile: they circulate and, in the process of circulation, they encounter and are transformed by other forces (Joyce, “Replacing the Author” 283–84). Although many rhetorical scholars have turned their analytic gaze to electronic texts, most still focus primarily on the information contained within the nodes of digital texts. Nevertheless, Nicholas Burbules argues that it is the links embedded within the texts/nodes that “[. . .] create significations themselves: they are not simply the neutral medium of passing from point A to point B” (110, emphasis in original); they are, rather, the crucial rhetorical moves within electronic texts. Electronic texts change through the very linking of multiple fields. The historical, cultural, geopolitical, and ideological forces within these fields reshape the meaning of texts as they circulate. The methodological implication of this reshaping is that any rich rhetorical analysis of digital texts must account for both their ephemeral and historical nature by examining them as a series of evolving rhetorical actions emerging from and circulating through multiple temporal and spatial contexts. This accounting, in turn, calls for the creation of different conceptual and methodological frameworks that can reveal the processes of circulation through which rhetorical theory becomes rhetorical action. As exemplified through the subsequent RAWA/Feminist Majority analysis, identifying and tracing associative paths across links opens up a new area of rhetorical analysis, one that explores how meaning and knowledge are made, changed, and transformed in the movement, rather than the stasis, of texts. The methodology that I have developed for analyzing these processes of digital circulation is what I call rhetorical genealogy: a process of examining digital texts not as artifacts of rhetorical productions, but, rather, as continually evolving rhetorical actions that are materially bound, actions whose transformation can be traced through the links embedded within multiple fields of circulation. Rhetorical genealogy is rhetorical analysis that examines multiple processes of structuring representations, rather than seeks to identify the original intentions or final effects of structured (and thus already stabilized) representations. A genealogical investigation works to uncover not only the meaning of meaning, but the structuring of meaning, that is, the cultural practices and rhetorics through which particular representations and interpretations gain validity and power. Rhetorical genealogy provides the conceptual framework through which we can understand and thus (re)encounter and confront/challenge the image of the Other Woman as a mirror of our own historical and geopolitical desires and identities. Alexander and Mohanty argue that “feminist democratic practice [. . .] cannot be about self-advancement, upward mobility, or maintenance of the first-world status-quo. It has to be premised on the decolonization of the self and on notions of citizenship defined not just within the boundaries of the nation state but across national and regional borders” (xli). The fundamental promise of rhetorical genealogy as a methodology for transnational feminist activism and scholarship is that it reconceptualizes and makes visible the multiple interactions between electronic texts and the material realities from which they emerge and through which they circulate to produce

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alternative fields for encountering each other in the moment of rhetorical action. The following analysis demonstrates one method of rhetorical genealogy: tracing the transformations of representations in digital texts through their circulation and emergence in various cyberfields of rhetorical action. I begin the analysis by examining representations of RAWA in the texts/ nodes of various news reports; then I move outward to trace the transformations of these representations as they circulate through various websites and listservs.

RAWA and Internet “Liberation” Founded in 1977, RAWA is an “independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan [and] contributing to the struggle for the establishment of a government based on democratic and secular values in Afghanistan” (“About RAWA”). RAWA’s website, first published on the Web in 1997, almost immediately garnered attention from various segments of the U.S. population. In October 1997, an article entitled “Afghan Women Use Web Site to Tell of Country’s Plight” was published in Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine, a publication targeting technophiles. The article begins: “When your country has been destroyed and the media attention has been reduced to a trickle, the Internet can be a powerful tool for getting your message across” (Motavalli). Reporter John Motavalli interviews Sohaila Danish, one of the RAWA members responsible for the website. The focus of the article is on the contradictions inherent in the group’s use of “modern technology” in a geopolitical area lacking the basic necessities for daily sustenance. Exiled in Pakistan, RAWA continues to work underground in Afghanistan, while simultaneously using access to the Internet to connect to the world. Sohaila Danish describes the lack of communication resources available to Afghanistan’s people and says that RAWA’s website “inform[s] the world about what is going on in our country. This is a powerful means for communicating with the outside world and telling people what is going on inside our country,” but she adds that “unfortunately we cannot hope to use the Internet to bring any information to our own people. Can you use the Internet to communicate with the 11th century?” (Motavalli). Danish’s statements highlight two central issues with which this essay is concerned. This website doesn’t merely communicate or inform; it interacts with viewers. In other words, the textual and visual representations become rhetorical actions as they simultaneously change the views of those who read RAWA’s reports and view the brutal photos of daily life in Afghanistan. RAWA’s website has been very visible in various media forums in the United States almost since it first appeared on the Internet. The fact of its wide circulation signals something important about digital rhetorical analysis: if links, rather than texts/nodes, are the “crucial rhetorical moves” in digital texts, then when, where, and how RAWA’s website is circulated and discussed are critically important. Second, Danish’s question at the end of the quotation juxtaposes the “Internet” and “the 11th century” in ways that may reinforce ideological distance and power asymmetries between

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“Western” modernity and “Eastern” tradition (read “backwardness”). In the Euro-Western and, particularly, the U.S. cultural imagination, technological progress is associated with modernity, whereas religion and fundamentalism are associated with the “dark ages.” These asymmetries, in turn, may reinforce neoliberal beliefs that equate women’s liberation with progress and modernity and women’s oppression with stasis and tradition. Thus, RAWA’s use of Internet technology may position them as “modern” women struggling to free themselves and their Afghan sisters from the oppression of tradition and religious fundamentalism. This isn’t a criticism of RAWA’s efforts or its use of website technology; nor is it an attempt to excuse or minimize the horrors perpetrated by the Taliban and others against the Afghan people, women in particular. My point is that statements such as these can be read, by many U.S. citizens, as positive reinforcement of neoliberal ideologies that often conflate freedom and democracy with technological progress and capitalism. Additionally, these kinds of statements can be interpreted, by neoliberal feminists, as reinforcement of U.S. women’s “liberated” status and a call for us to “save” these women from their patriarchal and religious oppression. In order to interrupt or resist these possible readings or interpretations, it is crucial that the processes through which these representations are rhetorically transformed be revealed. RAWA’s efforts became visible, as I suggested earlier, primarily through the circulation of their website, which, in turn, made many U.S. citizens aware of the situation in Afghanistan for the first time. In an article in March 1999, also published in Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine, Matt Richtel writes: “For what Sohaila Danish and her compatriots have posted on the Internet, they could lose their hands” (Richtel). Richtel begins by implicitly juxtaposing modern technology, via the Internet, against the “barbarism” of tradition (as did the writer of the previously discussed article). He further emphasizes implicit connections between technological progress and freedom/liberation with his claim that “RAWA has turned the Web into a weapon for social justice” (Richtel). This connection becomes explicit when Sohaila Danish (the same RAWA member quoted in the previous article) asserts: “Our site [. . .] is like a dart in the heart of the misogynist Islamic fundamentalists. [. . .] [W]ithout the Web, it would have been most difficult for us to make ourselves seen and heard. [. . .] [I]t has had a liberating effect on us” (Richtel). It’s indicative of Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine’s audience and focus that the liberatory qualities of the Internet are emphasized. It is interesting to note, however, that these technology-oriented articles are two of the earliest published on RAWA. In the next few years, dozens of articles about RAWA appeared in a variety of U.S. newspapers and magazines. Many of these contained similar ideological slants on the relationship between technology and freedom, thus validating dominant neoliberal value systems. The following July 2000 excerpt from “Internet Gives a Voice to Afghan Women’s Cause” published in The Los Angeles Times further demonstrates the technology-freedom conflation: Based in the remote Pakistani border town of Peshawar, they took their isolation for granted until their movement—the Revolutionary Assn. of the

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Women of Afghanistan—created a Web site. Suddenly the world was knocking on their door. People from around the globe got in touch, showed up to interview them, or invited them to travel abroad to speak on the plight of Afghan women. Now in Los Angeles after an East Coast swing, they’re still marveling over the transformation. Their revolution may not be televised, but it is online. “It is because of the Internet that we are here today,” said Sajeda, who like Sehar is appearing under an assumed name to avoid arrest during trips into Afghanistan. “It was really a revolution. We had no idea the Web site would have such an impact on our work.” (O’Connor B1) After “giving voice” to the RAWA members’ view of their website, Anne-Marie O’Connor provides readers with “domestic” (U.S.) views, one from a technology oriented perspective and one from a feminist perspective: “ ‘Geographic boundaries really begin to disappear with the Internet,’ said Gregory Stock, director of programs for UCLA’s science, technology, and society program. ‘They can open a dialogue, at very low cost. It changes the game’ ” (B1). The implication, of course, is that “the game” is not only accessible to almost anyone, but also that it is played on a level field. More striking is this quote from a feminist researcher: “ ‘Having access to women’s stories immediately and not having it filtered through the news media or other organizations is really helpful as a researcher,’ said K.J. Vickery, who is writing her USC thesis on international women’s rights” (O’Connor B1). Vickery is not the only one for whom the computer screen is transparent. Most of us who use computer technology often take for granted its capabilities and its limits. It has become transparent in our lives. The reality, however, is that computer technology is filtering our information; it mediates our information to a profound degree. This mediation is most evident in the re-production by mainstream U.S. news and magazines of RAWA’s self-representations to mirror consumers’ neoliberal value systems. One article, from a major television broadcasting company’s website, clearly links technology, progress, democracy, freedom, and capitalism, but the author seems unaware of the irony in the representation. In 2002, Mehmooda Shikeba, RAWA’s communications director, was recognized as one of Wired Women’s Top 10. The brief news story on ABC.com characterizes these women as “making a difference [by creating] the technologies, the business innovations, the learning environments, the artistic and media messages, and the opportunities for public access and public service that make our technology-driven world the amazing place it has become” (Lynch). It might be difficult for many women in Afghanistan during this time to imagine the world as “an amazing place.” Who is the “our” to which Lynch refers? Who is Mehmooda Shikeba, and, as communications director, what is her direct experience with Afghan women or with daily life in Afghanistan? Where is she based? Lynch skips

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the specifics on Shikeba to focus on RAWA’s underground work in Afghanistan and in the refugee camps in Pakistan. Lynch concludes the article: And, in 1997, [RAWA] began to use the Web to share its story with a global audience. “I hope you understand the hard conditions of our struggle against brutal fundamentalists,” [Shikeba] wrote in a recent email. “I have deemed it necessary to work for the cause of Afghan women because I was witness to their unbelievable miseries.” And now, thanks to RAWA and Mehmooda Shikeba, so, too is the world. Given the wide gap in access to computer technology and the Internet, Lynch’s statement that “the world” is now witness to Afghan women’s struggles seems to conflate the one-third world with the globe. As with many of the articles published in the United States about RAWA, this news report completely ignores the fact that RAWA, whose membership is primarily composed of university-educated women, is one of only a few groups who have gained and maintained access to Internet technology. The RAWA’s ability to circulate its representation of Afghan women’s plight through cyberspace—and the one-third world’s ability to access unlimited information from across the globe—creates the “authority” to represent Afghan women’s struggles, while erasing the existence of alternative representations. Although there are a number of women’s rights activists and organizations supporting women’s rights, both within Afghanistan and in the refugee camps of Pakistan, Fariba Nawa reports that “with little coordination among the various women’s activists, the emergence of a unified, broadbased women’s movement appears unlikely. While united in their concern about the future of women’s freedoms in Afghanistan and their frustration over their exclusion from the ongoing negotiations, Afghan women’s groups are deeply divided on numerous other issues.” Given the visibility of RAWA and the invisibility of these other groups, the crucial questions become the following: How does the digital circulation of these representations change the very meaning of the representations for those of us “consuming” them? In what ways do these representations function differently as they circulate through various global fields of rhetorical action?

Cyberspace Circulation and The RAWA/Feminist Majority “Debate” The conflict between RAWA and the Feminist Majority (and the circulation of stories about this conflict) exemplifies the extent to which the circulation of representations must become an integral part of feminist rhetorical analysis. In 1996, the Feminist Majority began a campaign called “The Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan” and created a coalition of feminist groups and international rights activists that actively sought to influence U.S. policy regarding the Taliban in Afghanistan even before 9/11 (Farrell and McDermott 35). According to one reporter, the Feminist Majority’s campaign of “petitions, protests, celebrity fundraisers and political negotiations [. . .] played a significant role in the 1998 refusal by the United Nations and the United States to grant formal recognition to the Taliban”

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(Thrupkaew). Initially, the Feminist Majority worked with RAWA and other Afghan women’s groups to make Afghan women’s situation visible to U.S. citizens: they invited RAWA members to speak at its “Feminist Expo 2000” and sponsored a U.S. tour. RAWA members even appeared on Oprah. Eleanor Smeal, executive director of the Feminist Majority, Eve Ensler of Vagina Monologues fame, Mavis Leno, and other prominent U.S. feminists embraced the cause of Afghan women’s liberation from the Taliban and supported RAWA’s work, as well as that of other Afghan women’s organizations. Yet, even as RAWA gained increasing visibility and support from diverse organizations, the Feminist Majority positioned itself as the champion of the victimized women in Afghanistan. In a September 18, 2001 news report published on the FM website, Eleanor Smeal claimed: Our Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan has worked tirelessly to bring to the attention of U.S. policymakers that the Taliban must be stopped and that the war that they are waging against women and ethnic minorities in Afghanistan poses a real threat to global security and our national security. With the help of hundreds of thousands of supporters, we played a major role in preventing recognition of the Taliban by the United States and the United Nations. In the spring of 2002, Ms. Magazine (purchased in 2001 by the Feminist Majority) published a special insert—“A Coalition of Hope”—on the Feminist Majority’s work on behalf of Afghan women. Shortly afterward, a letter entitled “An Open Letter to Ms. Magazine re: Afghan Women” began circulating in cyberspace. This scathing critique of the Feminist Majority began: “The feminist majority’s self-serving appropriation of 11 pages of a magazine they now own, in order to claim a foremost role in ‘freeing’ Afghan women [. . .] confirms fears that Ms. Magazine is now the mere mouthpiece of hegemonic, US-centric, ego driven, corporate feminism” (Miller). Elizabeth Miller, the letter’s author, goes on to argue that the article failed to give any recognition to the efforts of RAWA, as well as ignored completely the atrocities committed against Afghan women by the Northern Alliance during the period of 1992–1996 (before the Taliban took control). She questions how and why the Feminist Majority failed to acknowledge these two major issues: [. . . O]ne of the most parsimonious explanations to both of these omissions is that they are connected. Throughout their involvement in Afghan issues, the Feminist Majority has made alliances with women who have ties to the Northern Alliance, ties that are an amazing compromise of value and integrity that comes at the cost of countless Afghan women’s lives. [. . .] As our own government is also filled with Northern Alliance apologists, Feminist Majority has much to gain from aligning itself with those who would sacrifice the lives of Afghan women for political expediency. Within this equation of compromise, apology, and politically expedient, hegemonic feminism,

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RAWA has no place. [. . .] So the Feminist Majority has simply written both the Northern Alliance crimes and RAWA out of its history. Miller’s letter, dated April 20, 2002, was addressed to the email address for letters to the editor at Ms. Magazine ([email protected]). It was published on RAWA’s listserv on May 2, 2002 ([email protected]), signed “Elizabeth Miller, Cincinnati, Ohio,” and included Miller’s email address. It appeared in multiple “places” in cyberspace—from feminist websites and listservs to academic listservs to conservative, anti-feminist online publications—and was mentioned in several print sources. The letter has been singled out by some as the origin of a “firestorm” of criticism aimed at the Feminist Majority for the appropriation of the Afghan women’s struggle. However, it isn’t the content of the letter that is a key point of this essay. The crucial issue about this letter and, by extension, the RAWA/Feminist Majority “debate,” is the way in which it circulated through a wide variety of online spaces and how its “appearance” in these various spaces changes its possible meanings. One of these changes is apparent through the mistaken attribution of authorship to RAWA. For example, Wendy McElroy, a prominent conservative author who positions herself as a feminist working against the “righteous radicalism” of groups such as the Feminist Majority, published a piece on Fox News’ website entitled “The Silence Surrounding RAWA,” in which she [. . .] mentions the Miller letter as “embarrassing” the Feminist Majority into silence about their relationship with RAWA. “In April, a widely circulated letter from a prominent RAWA member was posted on RAWA’s Listserv,” she writes (emphasis added). Elizabeth Miller is not a member of RAWA and makes no claims to affiliation with RAWA in her letter. Why did McElroy assume that the letter was RAWA-authored? Perhaps because the letter was posted to RAWA’s listserv, she simply assumed that it had been written by the group. [. . .] The misattribution seems odd, particularly because Elizabeth Miller’s signature, residence, and email address are clearly visible at the end of the letter, unless we consider the ways in which digital circulation masks its own complex paths through multiple cyberfields. How did an email letter to Ms. Magazine pass to RAWA’s listserv? Given that McElroy’s piece was published on a website that is widely read in the United States, we can imagine that this piece of misinformation about the author of the letter continued its circulation beyond the Fox News website. [. . .] A discussion of Miller’s letter also appeared in the April 2004 issue of the scholarly print journal Metaphilosophy. Drucilla Cornell, a well-known professor of law and women’s studies at Rutgers University, begins her analysis of the “psychical fantasy” of women as “reproducers of the nation” with a discussion of RAWA’s attack on the Feminist Majority as much more than a “political gesture.” Cornell suggests that the letter, which she attributes to RAWA, “posed a set of penetrating questions to U.S. feminists” (313). Like McElroy, Cornell seems to have assumed that, because the letter was posted on RAWA’s listserv, RAWA is the author. The author, however, is Elizabeth Miller of Cincinnati; given the Anglo name and location, as well as the feminist ideological stance of the letter, the scathing criticism seems to come from

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an “insider,” not from RAWA.10 Although this doesn’t have any serious impact on the larger argument that Cornell puts forward, it does underscore an important issue: when, how, and where did Cornell access this letter? Where, when, and how did Cornell circulate this letter (if at all)? Given their different professions and ideological perspectives, McElroy and Cornell likely occupy different “cyberfields” (e.g., personal and public email addresses, various political or academic listservs, professional affiliation websites/listservs, etc.). Therefore, Cornell and McElroy exist in different fields of rhetorical action, and the Miller letter is continuously transformed as it circulates within or across these different fields. The Miller letter is only one example of the need for feminist rhetorical scholars to reconceptualize the global circulation of digital texts. In their essay analyzing the representational politics of the RAWA/Feminist Majority debate, Amy Farrell and Patrice McDermott claim that the problems between the U.S. neoliberal feminist organization and the Afghan women’s organization demonstrate [. . . that] representations of “the authentic voices” of women in “third-world” nations often reinscribe unequal power relations among transnational feminist alliances. Yet, Farrell and McDermott also seem to mistakenly attribute a particular statement to RAWA. [. . .] It is easy to condemn the “barbaric” men of Afghanistan and pity the helpless women of Afghanistan. It is this very logic that drives the Feminist Majority’s “Gender Apartheid” campaign for Afghan women. [. . .] How “effective” would the Feminist Majority’s campaign be if they made it known that Afghan women were actively fighting back and simply needed money and moral support, not instructions? It is for this reason that the Feminist Majority is not interested in working with RAWA. Farrell and McDermott cite the source for this statement as “ ‘Saving’ Afghan Women— RAWA Documents” and provide RAWA’s Web address (www.rawa.org) and the date (May 2002) on which the statement was purportedly published. Although they do not explicitly claim the statement as RAWA’s, the context implies the authorial attribution. The statement, however, was made by Sonali Kolhatkar, a U.S. citizen, host and producer of Uprising, a Los Angeles-based radio program, and co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a Los Angeles-area-based group founded in 2000 to provide support to Afghan women. Kolhatkar’s statement, like Miller’s, appeared in various cyberspaces. Farrell and McDermott cite the “Documents” section of RAWA’s website. Although a search for the statement in this section proved fruitless, I did track it down in RAWA’s “RAWA in Media” link, which sources Kolhatkar’s statement to “ZNet free update, May 9, 2002.” A search for this statement on ZNet, a progressive online community (http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm), produced five links to an article by Kolhatkar entitled “Afghan Women: Enduring American ‘Freedom’ ” in Z Magazine’s December 2002 issue. “ ‘Saving’ Afghan Women” is only the last section of the longer article, and it is very different from the one posted on RAWA’s website. Although the

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latter article focuses on criticizing the Feminist Majority and includes the section quoted by Farrell and McDermott, the ZNet article uses less incendiary rhetoric to describe the situation in Afghanistan and the roles of the U.S. government, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance in the continued suffering of the Afghan people. There is no mention of the Feminist Majority in this ZNet article. [. . .] Although the production and consumption of two different versions of “ ‘Saving’ Afghan Women” appearing on two different websites are, in themselves, important rhetorical actions to investigate, the less visible but more crucial rhetorical action, I argue, occurs in the link rather than in the nodes/texts. The link acts as the mode of circulation by which these two already mediated texts are further transformed as they enter different rhetorical fields. Put differently, the link itself brings the texts into rhetorical proximity with the forces (ideological, geopolitical, cultural) of different cyberfields that transform the texts’ meanings. Miller’s and Kolhatkar’s accusations—that the Feminist Majority reinscribed an “imperialist feminism” stance in their appropriation of Afghan women’s oppression and in their representation of U.S. feminists and the U.S. government as “liberators” of the victimized Afghan women—may be accurate. The more critical issue, for this essay, is the particular processes of cyberspace circulation through which Miller and Kolhatkar came to “stand for” RAWA. [. . .] These three examples of misattribution demonstrate, in different ways, how digital circulation of both these texts granted status as the “voice” of RAWA to the authors. Although McElroy’s and Cornell’s purposes in quoting the Miller letter were very different, they both seemed to assume a stability and stasis to this digital text that doesn’t exist; they ignored its essential mobility and the paths it may have followed. In contrast, Farrell’s and McDermott’s misattribution can be explained by the simple assumption that what appears on RAWA’s website has been created by RAWA. Despite these minor differences, all three cases reveal an assumption—texts/nodes of digital texts are the primary sites for rhetorical action—that obscures the rhetorically transformative power of the circulation of these texts. Examining the rhetorical transformation of these digital texts through their very mobility must include careful analyses of the particular ways in which digital circulation simultaneously involves multiple processes of contextualizing and decontextualizing; in other words, the rhetorical action of delinking text from one context cannot be separated from the simultaneous rhetorical action of linking text to (an)other context. [. . .] The mobility of electronic texts and the representations embedded in them are crucial sites of rhetorical action and, thus, crucial sites for feminist rhetorical analysis.

Conclusion Given the fact that technology is at the core of the one-third world’s ability to dominate— economically, militarily, culturally—the two-thirds world, isn’t it also problematic to assume that, with access to technology, liberation from oppressive representational practices is a given? If, as Geert Lovink argues, we are living in a “technological culture” (10), what does this

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mean in terms of how we create and maintain relations with others across the globe? Some important areas of feminist rhetorical analysis are opened up when we begin to interrogate the relationship between transnational feminist activism and Internet technology: How does Internet technology not simply reflect, but also create representations that a/effect particular relations of power among feminist activists across borders? What are the digital rhetorical processes through which these representations get represented as they encounter other historical, cultural, and geopolitical forces? In what ways do digital circulations of texts detach texts from their contexts or make those contexts less important than the frameworks in which they circulate? [. . . H]ow might those representations refigure rhetorical action such that feminists across local, regional, and national borders can form tactical alliances that respond to and disrupt oppressive representations and circuits of power? [. . .] Through its alternative methodology, rhetorical genealogy gives us a way to trace the transparent processes of digital circulation and thus re-encounter how our own ideologies come to “stand(in) for” others. Rhetorical genealogy offers new ways to approach electronic texts that can bring transnational feminist democratic practice into the fields of our own scholarship and teaching practices. We need to pay attention to how we “not only engage in the production of knowledge,” as Minnie Bruce Pratt points out, “[but] also consider our relation to the ‘production of human beings’ [. . .] as teachers who mold the next generations through our classrooms, our research, and our writing” (29). We must make visible the ways in which all of our knowledge is mediated—technologically, historically, geopolitically, culturally—and how profoundly that knowledge shapes, but also can be changed, by our encounters with others, down the block and across the globe.

Notes One-third world and two-thirds world are terms that emphasize “quality of life” issues (rather than the geographic “North/South” or “Western/Non-Western” or developmental “First World/Third World”) as the key distinction between social minorities and social majorities across the globe. These terms also underscore the existence of the two-thirds world within the one-third world (and vice versa) and therefore the lines of (dis)connection between and among them. For a thorough discussion of these terms, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s essay “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles” and Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash’s Grassroots Post-modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures. 2 I employ the term “Other Woman” to highlight the hierarchical and oppositional relationship that U.S. liberal feminists often create and reinforce when the focus turns to women of/from the “Third-World.” [. . .] 3 The term “neoliberal feminism” used in this essay follows Grewal’s (2005) critique of a feminism that focuses on the rhetoric of “choice” as a major distinction between freedom and oppression, Alexander’s (2005) characterization of neoliberal feminism as one that fails to recognize the connections between discourses of democracy and capitalism’s global violences, and Mohab’s (2005) definition of neoliberal feminism as that which “reduces the growing war on women to violations of human 1

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rights and democracy, as if emancipation has already been achieved in the actually existing democracies.” [. . .] 10 There is no indication of affiliation or profession on Miller’s letter, nor have I been able to discover any information about her through Internet searches and an email to the address included in her letter. [. . .]

Works Cited “About RAWA.” Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). 25 June 2005 http:// www.rawa.org. Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke, 2005. Alexander, M. Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, 1997. Brodsky, Anne. With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. New York: Routledge, 2003. Burbules, Nicholas C. “Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Literacy.” In Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. New York: Routledge, 1998. 103–22. Chakravarty, Subhasree. “Long-Distance Nationalism: Persuasive Invocations of Militant Hinduism in North America.” Diss. Ohio State U, 2006. Cornell, Drucilla. “The New Political Infamy and the Sacrilege of Feminism.” Metaphilosophy 35 (2004): 313–29. Dingo, Rebecca. “Anxious Rhetorics: Transnational Policy-Making in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Culture.” Diss. Ohio State U, 2005. Esteva, Gustavo, and Madhu Suri Prakash. Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soul of Cultures. New York: Zed, 1998. Farrell, Amy, and Patrice McDermott. “Claiming Afghan Women: The Challenge of Human Rights Discourse for Transnational Feminism.” Hesford and Kozol 33–55. Gajjala, Radhika. “Cyberethnography: Reading South Asian Digital Diasporas.” Native on the Net: Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples in the Virtual Age. Ed. Kyra Marie Landzelius. New York: Routledge, 2006. 272–91. Gorsevski, Ellen. Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric. Albany: State U of New York P, 2004. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Harcourt, Wendy, ed. Women@Internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace. New York: Zed, 1999. Hesford, Wendy S. “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” PMLA 121 (2006): 787–801. —. “Kairos and the Geopolitical Rhetorics of Global Sex Work and Video Advocacy.” Hesford and Kozol 146–72.

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Hesford, Wendy S., and Wendy Kozol, eds. Just Advocacy?: Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005. Hunt, Krista. “Getting Connected? The Politics of Mobilizing a Transnational Feminist Response to the War on Terror.” Wagadu 2 (Summer 2005): 1–20. 31 July 2007 http://web.cortland.edu/ wagadu/Volume%202/contents2.html. Joyce, Michael. “(Re)placing the Author: ‘A Book in Ruins.’ ” The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 273–94. —. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Kolhatkar, Sonali. “Afghan Women: Enduring American ‘Freedom.’ ” Z Magazine Online. Dec. 2002, v. 15, n. 12. 31 Mar 2005 http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Dec2002/kolhatkar1202.htm. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2003. Lu, Xing. Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. Lynch, Dianne. “Wired Women’s Top 10.” ABCnews. 15 March 2002. 25 June 2005 http://www.rawa. org/abctop10.htm. McElroy, Wendy. “The Silence Surrounding RAWA.” Fox News. 20 Aug. 2002. 25 June 2005 http:// www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,60806,00.html. Miller, Elizabeth. “An Open Letter to Ms. Magazine re: Afghan Women.” Online posting. RawaSiR. 2 May 2002. 26 June 2005 http://web.falco.mi.it/indice/laboratorio900/Rawa/60C1775E­ 3B9ACA00–00100F22. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. —. “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs 28 (2003): 499–535. Mojab, Shahrzad. “Ideological Crisis in Iranian Women’s Studies: A Response to Golbarg Bashi.” Society on Podium. Iran Chamber Society. 21 Aug. 2005. 15 Sept. 2007 http://www.iranchamber.com/ podium/society/050821_ideological_crisis_iranian_women_studies.php. Motavalli, John. “Afghan Women Use Web Site to Tell of Country’s Plight.” Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine. ZdNet. 27 Oct. 1997. 25 June 2005 http://zdnet.search.com/search?q=RAWA. http://144.16.65.194/hpg/envis/doc97html/infoafgan1030.html. Nawa, Fariba. “Demanding to Be Heard: Advocates for Afghanistan’s Women Are Pushing to Ensure That Women’s Freedoms Are Protected Under a Post-Taliban Government.” Mother Jones. 14 Nov. 2001. 31 July 2007 http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/11/afghan_women.html. O’Connor, Anne-Marie. “Internet Gives a Voice to Afghan Women’s Cause, Rights: Two Activists Tell Southland Audiences of Struggles Under Their Country’s Taliban Government.” Los Angeles Times. 8 July 2000, home ed.: B1. 25 June 2005 http://www.rawa.org/latimes.htm. Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “Taking the Horizon Path—2003 NWSA Conference Plenary.” NWSA Journal 16.2 (Summer 2004): 15–33. Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit S. Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 72 (2002): 117–48. Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). 25 June 2005 http://www.rawa.org. Reynolds, Nedra. “Composition’s Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace.” CCC 50 (1998): 12–35.

Richtel, Matt. “Crying for Justice from Kabul.” Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine. Mar 1999. 25 June 2005 http://www.rawa.org/yahoo.htm. Schell, Eileen E. “Gender, Rhetorics, and Globalization: Rethinking the Spaces and Locations of Women’s Rhetorics in our Field.” Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Ed. Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006. 160–74. Schombert, James. “Field.” University of Oregon, Dept. of Physics. 5 Sept. 2004 http://zebu.uoregon. edu/~js/glossary/field.html. Smeal, Eleanor. “Special Message from the Feminist Majority on the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and Afghan Women.” The Feminist Majority Foundation. 18 Sept. 2001 25 June 2005 http://www. feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=5804. Thrupkaew, Noy. “What Do Afghan Women Want?” The American Prospect Online v.13, n.15 (Aug. 26, 2002). 25 June 2005 http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/15/thrupkaew-n.html. Warnick, Barbara. Critical Literacy in a Digital Era: Technology, Rhetoric, and the Public Interest. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002.

Part 3. Exploring Gendered Sites, Genres, and Styles of Rhetoric In the absence of any sense of “recurrences”—common practices, themes, and topoi in women’s rhetoric—students and scholars need to posit a tentative tradition if only to begin to have a fruitful and generative conversation about it. Otherwise we have no collective memory of our rhetorical past, and that absence only reproduces invisibility, silence and misrepresentation. —Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, Available Means xxviii-xix Over the past two decades, feminist researchers have uncovered evidence of women’s rhetorical activity throughout the period encompassed by the traditional rhetorical tradition, extending from Plato and Aristotle to Blair and Burke (Bizzell, “Editing” 110). Further, their studies of women’s unique rhetorical constraints and compensating strategies have revealed gendered sites, genres, and styles of discourse historically ignored in the discipline. Scholarship in feminist rhetorics has, therefore, posited the “tentative traditions” called for in the epigraph by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, rescuing women rhetors and rhetorics from “invisibility, silence and misrepresentation” and inscribing them into the discipline’s collective memory. This section provides a sampling of this work. The essays in Part 3 are organized chronologically by subject and span the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Whether making the case for private conversation as persuasive discourse or for water fountains as material claims for the temperance movement’s significance, these articles expand rhetorical realms, complicate analytical terms, and recognize gendered means of persuasion. In this section’s first essay, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women,” Jane Donawerth details how women recast conversation and letter writing—which were gendered as “feminine” and associated with domestic spaces and subjects—as rhetoric. Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, and Margaret Fell retheorized these genres to afford women means of persuading men in private and thereby influencing their actions in the public sphere. Donawerth undertakes two important projects, first, recognizing the rhetorical theorizing of Renaissance women and, second, revising traditional categories of persuasive discourse in order to acknowledge the strategies of those who are marginalized.

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Moving forward in time, no place or period has received as much attention from feminist historiographers to date as nineteenth-century America. This is likely due to the ever increasing number of women who defied restrictive gender norms in order to publicly address civic matters, ranging from abolition and woman’s rights to lynching and temperance. It’s not surprising, then, that four of the six essays in this section examine that period, a balance reflecting the abundant research on nineteenth-century women. Susan Zaeske’s “The ‘Promiscuous Audience’: Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Women’s Rights Movement” unpacks the term promiscuous and traces changes to its meaning. In the eighteenth-century, it denoted an assembly of mixed class and/or education. However, once antebellum women began to speak publicly, it acquired a double sense, indicating not only a mixed-sex audience but also a suspect woman, one who defied biblical injunctions calling for women’s public silence, one deficient in “femininity” due to participation in “masculine” spaces, one who was both seductive and irrational. These negative connotations soon discouraged women from addressing mixed-sex audiences and enabled men “to defend their traditional monopolization of the public platform and, by extension, of political power in general” (Zaeske 198). The essay details how such rhetors as Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Abby Kelley, and Lucretia Mott negotiated the rhetorical and gendered constraints encoded in the term promiscuous in order to address abolition and woman’s rights. If white female rhetors faced formidable obstacles, then the situation was even more daunting for African-American women, who contended with issues of race, class, and gender. In “Black Women on the Speaker’s Platform (1832–1899),” Shirley Wilson Logan documents the efforts of these disenfranchised speakers, many of whom “left no records, wrote no books, organized no conferences” but, nevertheless, “helped to establish a tradition of political activism among black women” (170). Logan records the accomplishments of neglected AfricanAmerican rhetors, from Maria Stewart and Frances Harper to Ida Wells and Lucy Laney, and provides an accessible introduction to the central issues they addressed—abolition, woman’s rights, lynching, and racial uplift. These committed, courageous women embodied a powerful counterargument to negative stereotypes of African Americans and thereby challenged both prejudicial attitudes and policies. In “Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America,” Nan Johnson queries the assumption that women’s discursive opportunities improved following the Civil War, countering instead that “[e]fforts to regulate women’s rhetorical behavior intensified rather than abated” in the latter half of the nineteenth century “as women pursued education, the right to vote, property rights, and mobility in public life” (223). Johnson’s analysis of popular conduct books reveals that these innocent looking self-help manuals routinely encouraged women to restrict their rhetorical efforts to the parlor and private audiences, thus promoting their public silence. The essay’s examination of gender ideology and gendered space, of trespass and backlash, illuminates the complex processes of women’s rhetorical indoctrination and regulation.

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As Johnson’s study of conduct books suggests, feminist scholars frequently move beyond conventional rhetorical texts (for instance, speeches) in order to study women’s rhetorics. Carol Mattingly’s “Woman’s Temple, Women’s Fountains: The Erasure of Public Memory” is another case in point, detailing architectural projects of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest political organization of women in the nineteenth century. Mattingly argues that its construction of water fountains and buildings across the nation not only contributed to civic improvement but also constituted a rhetorical claim for the group’s significance. She recovers the WCTU’s public works (many of them now erased from the urban landscape), decodes their rhetorical import, and, in so doing, rebuilds them in public memory. This section’s concluding essay, Bonnie Dow and Mary Boor Tonn’s “ ‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards,” examines the former Texas governor’s discourse in relation to feminine style, a rhetorical strategy first identified by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. Campbell observed that nineteenth-century women rhetors confronted a classic double bind: they were suspected of being unwomanly if they stood and spoke in “masculine” public spaces but, simultaneously, needed to display “femininity” on stage in order to gain the audience’s goodwill. To negotiate this dilemma, they developed a gendered or feminine style of discourse, characterized by the use of personal experience, example, and inductive organization as means of encouraging identification, constructing ethos, and framing female listeners as active agents. (See Campbell’s essay in Part 1 for a full explanation.) Dow and Tonn identify this style in Gov. Richards’ 1988 Democratic National Convention Keynote address and argue that she used its associated rhetorical strategies to establish new grounds for assessing government, grounds reflecting the “feminine ideals of care, nurturance, and family relationships” (289). In Dow and Tonn’s hands, the parameters of feminine style expand to include both rhetorical means and ethical values, and its use enables women not only to connect with audiences but also to articulate new philosophical and political standards. The six essays in Part 3 illustrate how a feminist lens enables scholars to identify sites, genres, and styles of discourse previously unrecognized within the realm of rhetoric. They also reveal how feminist scholars construct arguments when revising established rhetorical precepts, traditions, and histories. Finally, they exemplify how the study of gender irenovates the discipline to make it more inclusive, complex, and compelling.

Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women* Jane Donawerth In the late Renaissance in France and England, women appropriated rhetorical theory for their own use, arguing for women’s rights to education and to speech.1 In the process, they revised classical rhetorical theory to create a tradition of women’s rhetoric, modeling discourse on women’s experience in conversation rather than on men’s experience in public speaking. In this essay I shall be offering analyses of this new rhetorical theory by Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Fell, and Mary Astell.2 Because of their gender, it was argued in the Renaissance, women had no need for training in public speaking.3 Drawing on women’s material circumstances, these seventeenthcentury theorists offer, instead, defenses of women’s need for training in conversation. The rhetorical theory thus raises interesting questions. Are these female theorists contributing to the demarcation between public and private that constricts women? Are these theorists conservatives who are helping to keep women from public speech by offering them conversation as their sphere? Or are these women pragmatically moving into a position of power by adapting the space at hand? In works published between 1642 and 1684, Madeleine de Scudéry formulated a new rhetoric of conversation for the French salon, and included women as central participants. In Le Paradis des Femmes Carolyn Lougee has argued that the salon as an institution in seventeenthcentury France centered on women and promoted social mobility: the salon assimilated into the French aristocracy new nobility and some bourgeois through facilitating marriage across class lines and through defining nobility as behavior not genealogy. Published in 1642 under her brother’s name, Madeleine de Scudéry’s Les Femmes Illustres or the Heroick Harangues of Illustrious Women, addresses itself to women as an audience, and defends education, rather than beauty and marriage, as a means to social mobility for women, offering to French women a justification for their participation in rhetorical and literary culture.4 De Scudéry’s later Conversations, in*  Rhetorica 16 (1998): 181-99. © 1998 The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. Published by the University of California Press. Note: This essay has been condensed. 223

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cluding dialogues covering “Conversation,” “The Art of Speaking,” “Raillery,” “Invention,” and “The Manner of Writing Letters,” offers a rhetoric of salon conversation and model scenarios where women take intellectual control of the conversation.5 For de Scudéry, whose rhetoric is an adaptation of classical theory to the circumstances of women and the salon, “Conversation is the bond of all humane Society, the greatest pleasure of well-bred People; and the most ordinary means of introducing into the World, . . . the purest Morals, and the love of Glory and Vertue.”6 The ideal woman is one who “speaks as becomes a rational Woman to speak.” 7 Other forms of discourse follow this model of conversation: letters of gallantry, for example, are “a conversation between absent people.”8 In the preface to Les Femmes Illustres, often attributed to de Scudéry’s brother Georges even though the body of the work is acknowledged to be Madeleine’s, this rhetoric for women’s speech and writings is presented as requiring a standard different from men’s: “I have not thought that the Eloquence of a Ladie should be the same [as] a Master of Arts.”9 Arguing that “Exordes, Narrationes, Epilogues . . . and all the beautiful [rhetorical] figures” are reflections of masculine education, the de Scudérys offer, instead, “The delicacie of art . . . making believe there is none at all.”10 Playfully borrowing from the Gorgias Socrates’s disparaging comparison of rhetoric to cosmetics, the de Scudérys rehabilitate the analogy to describe a female art that changes nature but “with such a subtile negligence and agreeable cairlessness” that the audience sees only nature, not the art. In the body of Les Femmes Illustres, Madeleine de Scudéry offers the “haranges” of women speakers as models for this female speech, inventing speeches for twenty famous ancient women, including Artemisia of Halicarnassus, Marianne of Judea, Cleopatra of Egypt, Volumnia of Rome, and the black queen Sophonisba of Africa. In the final speech of Les Femmes Illustres, “Sapho to Erinna,” the older poet Sapho assumes the role of mentor to the younger poet Erinna, urging her to educate herself and to write: “They say that beauty is the portion of women; And that fine arts, good learning, and all the . . . eminent sciences, are of the domination of men, without our having power to pretend to any part of them”;11 but “our Sex is capable of every thing that it would undertake.”12 In précieuse salon circles where participants chose classical names for themselves, de Scudéry was herself called “Sapho.” In this essai à clef, she is signaling to her readers that this radical claim for women’s education and right to a voice is her own. In this speech by Sapho, de Scudéry extends the shocking comparison of female cosmetic arts to rhetoric, arguing that, instead of trusting to men’s praises, a woman may paint herself: “Perhaps you will ask of me, if it be not sufficiently glorious for a fine woman, that all the brave spirits of her time make verses in praise of her, without that she medle, to make her own Pictur her self. I say . . . if her glorie be not better established this way then the other.” Still speaking as Sapho, de Scudéry adds, “You need but speak Elegantylie, and you shall be sufficiently known.”13 Through speech and writing a woman may achieve agency, creating herself.

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In the later Conversations, de Scudéry elaborates a rhetoric for conversation, adapting from Cicero, Aristotle, Quintilian, and the sophists, and describing invention, subjects for speaking, style, wit, and the rules for performing but not dominating talk. She also explores the “private” art of letter writing.14 Classical masculine theory is centered on public debate and lecture; Quintilian, for example, claims “There would be no such thing as eloquence, if we spoke only with one person at a time.”15 At the beginning of de Scudéry’s dialogue, “Of Conversation,” Cilenia contemptuously throws out such public speech—“when Men only speak strictly according to the exigency of their Affairs,”16 —as unworthy of consideration. In aristocratic salon society fuelled by the favor of an absolute monarch, private conversation might very well garner more power than speech in public forums. Indeed, de Scudéry’s dialogue form imitates conversation, with each person agreeing on some aspect of the previous person’s speech (or apologizing for differing), with the speaker building on the ideas of the speaker before her, and with the option of more than one right answer left open. According to de Scudéry, conversation requires of its practitioners mainly the “agreeable.”17 Opting for consensus rather than debate and argument, de Scudéry further revises the tradition she inherits, adapting it to the circumstances of women’s participation and salon culture. The sophistic conception of timeliness or kairos, as adapted to conversation, thus becomes essential to de Scudéry’s theory: “there is nothing but may be said in Conversation, in case it be manag’d with Wit and judgment, and the Party considers well where [one] is, to whom [one] speaks, and who [one] is. . . . Yet the Conversation must appear so free, as to make it seem . . . all is said, that comes into the fancy.”19 Appropriate topics of conversation at times include what colors of cloth best suit one’s complexion and how well one’s children are doing, as well as gallantry and science. Although one might argue that shifting the field of rhetoric from public discourse to private conversation is giving up power for women, de Scudéry’s aim is not conservative: she appropriates rhetoric for women as a means of political power—the right to speak and, so, to influence others. Her society is one in which compliments and graciousness, as well as intelligence and patriotism, move one toward a position of power, in which Georges de Scudéry earned his political post not by military service but through his social skills at Mme. de Rambouillet’s salon.20 Madeleine de Scudéry’s rhetoric of conversation pragmatically acknowledges the importance of these “private” venues for power. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who spent most of the English Civil War with the court in exile on the continent, is the most conservative of the women who write rhetorical theory. Rather than challenging the inferior status of women, she seems to accept it, yet still manages to establish women’s need for rhetorical education. In The Worlds Olio, published during the Interregnum, Cavendish appropriates for women the encyclopedia, a form favored by second-generation male humanists a century before her. Like these humanists, Cavendish focuses her work on rhetoric: in The Worlds Olio, rhetoric is a central concept, recurring in entries such as “Of Eloquence, art and speculation,” “What discourses are enemies to Society,” and “Of speaking much or little.”21 Cavendish distributes her opinions on rhetorical theory

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throughout the encyclopedia, covering invention, levels of style, nature vs. art in eloquence, discourse as promoting society, and the dangers of words over things. Rather than challenging the distinctions between men’s rhetoric and women’s silence, she apologetically inserts women into the art of rhetoric, both by drawing analogies for speech and discourse from women’s gendered experiences, and by assuming the foundation of oratory to be private conversation not public speech. Like de Scudéry, Cavendish draws on women’s arts to form her analogical description of speech and discourse. In the introduction to The Worlds Olio, Cavendish addresses a male audience, claiming her femininity as an alternative discourse: “and though I do not write the same way you write, yet it is like Nature which works upon Eternal matter, mixing, cutting, and carving it out into several Forms and Figures.”22 This is another of Plato’s forbidden analogies to rhetoric: only false rhetoric, according to Plato, is like cookery. But here Cavendish conflates woman’s writing with Nature (a common seventeenth-century conflation), and both with cookery, a woman’s art. Through her later elevation of nature over imitation in discourse, she has accomplished a reversal of the usual denigration of women’s nature (compared to men’s reason) into a praise of women’s natural discourse (over men’s studied and imitative discourse).24 Throughout the encyclopedia, Cavendish likens discourse to women’s arts: the tongue is a midwife to a witty person’s pregnant brain; wit is spinning out the thread of fancy.25 In these ways, discourse is feminized so that it becomes appropriate for women to participate in it. Although her encyclopedia includes entries with titles like “Of Oratours,” “Of Invention,” and “Of Gentlewomen that are sent to board Schools”—all topics familiar to classical masculine rhetorical theory (except, of course, men’s schools, not women’s)—the assumption behind these classical terms is transformed from public to private speech. In fact, like de Scudéry, Cavendish discusses oratory in public forums only to disparage it: the disputations of trained logicians disrupt social harmony, and the preaching of trained ministers is tedious, self-aggrandizing, and oppressive. Instead, conversation is the center of Cavendish’s theory, as it is for the other women in this essay.26 Influenced by Bacon and other seventeenth-century empiricists, Cavendish sketches out a physiology of speech, and adopts the empiricist concepts of the mind as a tabula rasa or blank slate on which experience makes impressions, and words as marks of things rather than thoughts.27 She flavors this empiricism with a sophistic concentration on language—both speech and writing—as bond of human society.28 Rather than a public end of speech, though, Cavendish uses this social purpose as a standard by which to judge speech in private conversation: ideal discourse is “to speak rationally . . . to clear the understanding,” to err with “too much courtesy” rather than too little, to avoid dominating conversation and to know when and how much to speak according to “the manner, time and subject.”29 The ideal is thus a sophistic emphasis on communal private rather than individual public performance: “sociable discourse . . . like musick in parts.”30

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In The Worlds Olio, Cavendish answers objections to women’s speech by dividing herself into two voices: her husband, the master, who has taught her what she knows, and her self, the novice, who admires her husband and men’s learning. Social duty yet obligates even the novice to speak—“though I do not speak so well as I wish I could, yet it is civility to speak.”31 Susan Lanser and Evelyn Beck have argued that such “double-voiced discourse” is characteristic of “women who are struggling to define themselves but have not yet given up a patriarchal frame of reference.” Cavendish’s is such a “double-voiced discourse,” and she even names the voices: her husband the Duke and herself. Cavendish struggles even with women’s right to conversation because of her double voices, both condemning and justifying women’s speech. For Cavendish, echoing patriarchal restrictions, “the reason . . . women . . . talk too much, is an overweening opinion of themselves, in thinking they speak well, and striving to take off that blemish from their sex of knowing little, by speaking much.” But for Cavendish struggling to define herself, silence is not a virtue, for “it is a melancholy conversation that hath no sound, and . . . it is better to speak too much then too little, as in hospitality, . . . for civility is the life to society.”33 While Cavendish contributes to the radical instability of woman as subject that Catherine Belsey has identified as characteristic of seventeenth-century discourses,34 Cavendish also condemns silence for women as opposite to the social purpose of speech. Cavendish is not as successful in freeing herself from other biases. One strategy she uses to legitimize women’s speech is to erase gender as the primary line between those who speak and those who remain silent, and to substitute, instead, class: “vulgar discourse” is a serious fault of speech for Cavendish, at least partly because emphasizing the faults of lower-class speakers distracts from the societal injunctions against women’s speech.35 Margaret Fell was an early Quaker convert and influential “preacher,” who argued in favor of women’s preaching and prophesying. She is the only woman of this group generally accepted as a rhetorical theorist. While in prison in 1667, Fell wrote Women’s Speaking Justified,36 which appropriates the tradition of sermon rhetorics for women. In this pamphlet she claims authority by taking on the ecstatic voice of a sectarian preacher, quoting the Bible and imitating its style: “And such hath the Lord chosen, even the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty . . . I. Cor. i. And God hath put no such difference between the Male and Female as men would make.”37 Through the form of her anonymous treatise she establishes herself as speaker of an inspired text, thus invalidating the assumption that gender renders her incapable of such speech. Women who wrote in the Renaissance had to overcome the biblical authority that misogynist pamphlets invoked to silence them, especially the story of Eve’s transgression and St Paul’s command for women’s silence in church. Fell rewrites Eve’s story so that Eve is the one who begins the process of reconciliation with God—typically through her speech: “And the Woman Said, The Serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. Here the Woman spoke the truth unto the Lord” (4). Thus, argues Fell, those who speak against women speaking are siding with the

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serpent. Fell’s pamphlet also refutes the Pauline injunctions (in 1 Corinthians 14, and 1 Timothy 2) against women’s speaking in church, arguing that the apostle means not all women, but only women under the old law, who were not yet moved by their Inner Light (8–12). To make this argument, Fell develops in detail the Protestant principle of hermeneutics that holy writ be interpreted in its historical context, and according to the intent and context of the speaker (5). Fell distinguishes women who were not yet educated in the use of their Inner Light, and who should not speak, from those, trained to listen for God’s inspiration, who may preach.39 Fell also recuperates the Bible as an ally in the cause of women’s preaching, constructing a tradition of women preachers that includes Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James (7), Aquila and Priscilla (8), Hannah (13), Queen Esther (15–16), Deborah (18), and others. Fell is able to create a scriptural tradition of women preaching because of her redefinition of preaching as conversation, prophecy, and advice, rather than public lecture. In the newly constructed Quaker institution of the Meeting, preaching is reconceived as sharing rather than lecturing (and, as Gary Hamilton pointed out to me) in private rather than in public space. Fell, however, sees yet a further connection to women’s lived experience: most of her examples concern what later Protestants call “witnessing,” women talking to their friends and families about the spiritual events in their lives. My favorite from Fell’s examples is Elizabeth’s brief greeting to her pregnant cousin Mary, which Fell renames “Elizabeths Sermon concerning Christ” (14). Fell’s contribution to sermon rhetoric, then, is her redefinition of the category of preaching: using the Bible as authority for women’s preaching, she must also redefine “preaching” to include advice and comfort spoken privately. Despite Fell’s redefinition of preaching as “private” conversation, her claim for women’s preaching is not a conservative move reinforcing gendered roles, because both men and women among Quakers adopted this new form of propagating the Word. Thus, according to Fell, in the “True Church, Sons and Daughters do Prophesie, Women labour in the Gospel,” and “the true Speakers of Men and Women” “shall have the Victory . . . over the false Speaker” (17). Fell’s upper-class standing encouraged her to take her idea of conversational preaching as far as the King, to whom she frequently addressed letters and visits to request tolerant treatment of Quakers. Such a public use of this “private” form brings into question the whole notion of public and private gendered spheres. In 1694, Mary Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, arguing that women should receive a humanist education like men; she followed this with Part II in 1697, detailing a curriculum that included an art of rhetoric for women. She moves the argument against women’s education from essentialism to social construction, arguing that women are mentally inferior to men neither through God nor through nature, but only through “the mistakes of our Education” (6). As a corrective, she offers a retreat from the world that would also prepare women to serve in the world (14): a “Monastery” or a “Religious Retirement” for women (14, 30), that is really a women’s college.41 From the lower gentry, more cautious (and more Anglican) than Fell, Astell reassures her audience that she does not mean that women should preach (20). But

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she follows this denial with the biblical example of Priscilla, who “catechized” Apollos—an example also cited by Fell. Mary Astell’s conception of rhetoric as conversation grows naturally out of her idea of a women’s college as holy orders. In this place women “will quit the Chat of insignificant people” (15) for a “Holy Conversation” with God (29). Adapting the emphasis on the good life as persuasion from Augustine’s rhetorical theory,42 Astell pictures the women’s life together as “an exemplary Conversation, the continual and most powerful sermon of an holy life” (25). Such a life will prepare women for marriage, since “An ingenious Conversation will make [the husband’s] life comfortable,” and “A good and prudent Wife wou’d wonderfully work on an ill man . . . [through] those gentle persuasives . . . she wou’d use to reclaim him” (38). Still, Astell enlarges the importance of women’s province by comparing women’s traditionally private to men’s traditionally public discourses: “Catechizing,” or private religious instruction through conversation, is more useful than “Discourses of the Pulpit,” for one cannot understand sermons without first achieving “Clear Ideas” of religion (26). While women could not preach, they could catechize each other and their children and did lead evening prayers for the family servants. According to Astell, then, men’s or women’s private conversation may work better than men’s public lecturing to move a soul to God. In Part II of A Serious Proposal, Astell also remodels classical rhetoric into an art of rhetoric for women who write, building a theory of the relation between writer and reader by analogy to conversation. In Astell’s theory, the writer as “Friend” converses with the readers as “neighbours”: “They write best perhaps who do’t with the gentile and easy air of conversation.”43 Astell treats method, arrangement, imitation, style, self-criticism, ornament, and sophistry, creating an entire rhetorical curriculum for women. But her greatest contribution to theory is her treatment of audience. The development of empiricism in the eighteenth century will steer men’s rhetorical theory away from the audience as equal partner into a mechanistic conception of operating on the audience’s wills through language—a modern alienated theory. Astell, on the other hand, grants the audience respect, equality with the speaker, and freedom: “For the Design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reason; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it” (117). The purpose of the writer, imagines Astell, is “not to dictate to [the audience’s] Ignorance, but only to explain . . . what they . . . might have known before if they had consider’d it” (120). Thus the audience may be viewed as “neighbours,” and we writers “permit ’em to fancy . . . that we believe them as Wise and Good as we endeavor to make them” (121). Astell’s model of conversation encourages speakers to construct an implied audience in the image of an ideal audience, and invite our real audience to live up to it: “By this we gain their Affections which is the hardest part of our Work, excite their Industry and infuse a new Life into all Generous Tempers” (121). Since our end is “the gaining of our Neighbour” not the gaining of applause (121), we must generally use the “mode of inquiry” rather than the

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mode of lecture, so that our audience will not “imagine their Liberty’s impos’d on” (121). Here again Astell prefers private conversation over public lecture, now to liberate the audience from a dictatorship by the speaker. At bottom of Astell’s description of the audience is an Augustinian-Platonic faith in the attractiveness of truth: “Truth being always amiable, cannot fail of attracting when she’s plac’d in a Right Light.”46 It is no accident that Truth is presented here as an amiable female friend. Persuasion thus results from love. Rather than the power over the audience that rhetoric gives the speaker emphasized in renaissance and empiricist men’s rhetorics, Astell emphasizes the freedom that rhetoric provides women: “without such knowledge it is by chance that we are Good. . . . We are their Property into whose hands we fall, and are led by those who with greatest Confidence impose their Opinions on us” (127). The image of the seducer against whom women with rhetorical training may protect themselves thus answers the charge that teaching women to speak will teach them to be unchaste.47 But Astell’s rhetoric modeled on conversation is not a constraint: her aim is to free women by teaching them rhetoric, a goal of feminists for the next two centuries. These women theorists radically revised classical rhetoric by centering their theories on conversation rather than public speech. They seize on conversation as permitted to women in order to challenge the construction of categories of private and public that confine them to a certain sphere (although in the seventeenth century there is nothing like so stable a conception of women’s sphere as obtains by the nineteenth century). If the ideal woman in Renaissance culture inhabits a sphere in which she is silent (does not speak or write publicly), chaste (private), and obedient (listens to the speech of the men who own her), then each of these women uses the category of “ideal woman” to challenge the nature of restrictions on women. De Scudéry offers an ideal woman who speaks only “privately” in conversation and publishes only anonymously, but a world where conversation is the ultimate power and where everyone knows who the anonymous writer is; she calls into question the line between private and public with regard to power. Cavendish feminizes discourse so that it falls within women’s sphere (obeying her husband’s requests), and offers a set of categories in place of gendered spheres: lower class forbidden to speak vs. upper class required to speak. Rather than dividing discourse into private and public, Fell divides it into secular and religious, making it impossible to forbid the category of public to women: her instances of the private use of preaching in the Bible, and her own experience of publicly conversing with the King in order to gain the release of Quakers are instances of this refiguring of categories of discourse. Finally, Astell argues that writing, unlike public oratory, is like conversation, and so appropriate to women. The categories in which their culture divides discourse are gendered: these women use other aspects of the categories of gender or of discourse to challenge the particular limits that gendered discourse allows them by custom. In their rhetorical theories, they all contest the theories of power and its distribution that classical rhetoric has offered. Their success—de Scudéry and Astell supported themselves through writing, while Astell ran a

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school for girls—calls into question the confinement of power to the public sphere in the use of classical rhetorical theory in the seventeenth century.

Notes My essay here is a companion to one on seventeenth-century women as appropriating the Renaissance for themselves, “The Politics of Renaissance Rhetorical Theory by Women,” Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, ed. Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 256–72. [. . .] The standard histories of rhetorical theory include almost no women. [. . .] In order to include women, we must redefine rhetorical theory to cover areas other than the speech that men historically made to each other in the public business of law, government, and preaching, where women were excluded [. . .]. 2 These seventeenth-century women were not the first women rhetorical theorists: Aspasia is recorded by Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian as having taught rhetoric in fifth-century B.C. Athens; Arete, who lived about the time of Plato, and whose father and son were famous philosophers and teachers of rhetoric (both named Aristippus), probably ran her own school or salon of sophistic rhetoric; Ban Zhao (or Pan Chao) taught eloquence at the first-century Chinese court and wrote Lessons for Women, a book that includes advice on “women’s words”; Sosipatra taught sophistic rhetoric and philosophy during the fourth century A.D. near Ephesus; Christine de Pizan, who earned her living through writing in fourteenth-century France, is included as a rhetorical theorist in Bizzell and Herz[berg . . .]; in the thirteenth century, Bettisia Bezzidini was an Italian professor of rhetoric; and Beatrix Galindo, who taught Catharine of Aragon, was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Salamanca. [. . .] 3 See Joan Gibson, “Educating for Silence,” Hypatia 4 (Spring 1989): 9–27, esp. pp. 10–12, 16, and 18–20. 4 [. . .] I quote Madeleine de Scudéry’s 1650 Les Femmes Illustres in its seventeenth-century English translation, Les Femmes Illustres or the Heroick Harangues of the Illustrious Women, trans. James Innes (London, 1681). De Scudéry never published under her own name, publishing under her brother’s name while he lived, and anonymously when he died; which works she wrote, however, was an open secret. The texts I use have been attributed to Madeleine de Scudéry since the seventeenth century. 5 For all of de Scudéry’s dialogues except “The manner of writing Letters,” I quote from the seventeenth-century English translation of de Scudéry 1680 Conversations Sur Divers Sujets, Conversations Upon Several Subjects, trans. Ferrand Spence (London, 1683). I have myself translated “Conversation de la maniere d’écrire des lettres” from Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets, Dediées Au Roy (La Haye,1685). For an elaboration of my analysis of de Scudéry, see Jane Donawerth, “ ‘As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak’: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Rhetoric of Conversation,” Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, ed. Molly Wertheimer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 305–19. [. . .] 6 de Scudéry, Conversations upon Several Subjects, I: sig. Blr. 7 de Scudéry, Conversations upon Several Subjects, I: sig. F7v. 8 “Une Conversation de personnes absentes,” in de Scudéry, Conversations Nouvelles, II: Sig. B8v. 9 de Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustres, sigs. A2r-v. 1

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de Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustres, sig. A2r. de Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustres, sig. V6v. 12 de Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustres, sig. X2v. 13 de Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustres, sig. X3r. 14 de Scudéry adapts the influential Roman five divisions of oratory, probably from Cicero, to conversation (Conversations upon Several Subjects I: sig. F7v), Quintilian’s advice on diction (I: sig. F3v), Cicero’s dicta on wit (II: sigs. D5v and D9v), Cicero’s and Quintilian’s debates on imitation vs. practice and art vs. nature in the ideal speaker (I: sig. F9r, and II: sig. D9v) and Aristotle’s division of sophistries into those based on words and those based on matter (I: sig. F2). [. . .] 15 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria,I.2.31. 16 de Scudéry, Conversations upon Several Subjects, I: sig. Bl r. 17 de Scudéry, Conversations upon Several Subjects, II: sig. B10r. [. . .] 19 de Scudéry, Conversations upon Several Subjects, I: sigs. B9-B10. I have corrected the “he” of the translator’s phrasing to “one,” since de Scudéry clearly means this advice for both men and women in salon conversation. 20 Nicole Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, trans. Stuart R Aronson (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., 1978), p. 13. [. . .] 21 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Worlds Olio (London, 1655). Cavendish also discusses eloquence in Letters XXVII, XXVIII, and XXX of CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664), which has just been published in a modern edition: Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997). I quote from the seventeenth-century edition.[. . .] 22 Cavendish Worlds, fol. A2r. [. . .] 24 Cavendish, Worlds, fol. Elv. [. . .] 25 Cavendish, Worlds, fols. Dlv, and E3r; see also Clv. 26 For the references to logicians and ministers, see Cavendish, Worlds, fols. C4r, and D2r. [. . .] 27 Cavendish, Worlds, fols. Dlv, D2r-v, D4v-Elr, E4r, and D4r. 28 Cavendish, Worlds, fols. C4r, D2r, and D4r. 29 Cavendish, Worlds, fols. Dlr, and D2r. 30 Cavendish, Worlds, fols. D2v. [. . .] 31 Cavendish, Worlds, fol. E4r. [. . .] 33 Cavendish, Worlds, fols. Dlv-D2r. 34 See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985), especially Chapter 6, “Silence and Speech,” pp. 149–91. 35 Cavendish, Worlds, fols. Dlr-v. 36 All references to the pamphlet, with page numbers in the text, will be to Margaret Fell, Women’s Speaking Justified (1667, rpt, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1979). On Fell’s career as a preacher and Quaker organizer, see Isabel Ross, Margaret Fell, Mother of Quakerism (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1949). 37 Women’s Speaking, p. 3. On the ecstatic voice of Quaker women, see Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. pp. 149–50, 155, 170, 173–78, 185–86, and 207. [. . .] 39 Fell is so careful to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate speaking by women perhaps because the London Quaker meetings during 1655 to 1657 had been disrupted by Martha Sim10 11

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monds, Hannah Stranger, and other women using “Ranter” tactics in favor of James Naylor against George Fox (whom Fell supported); see Ross, pp. 101–14, and Mack, pp. 197–206. [. . .] 41 All quotations from Astell’s treatise will be to Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I and Part II, 4th ed. (1701; rpt. New York: Source Book Press, 1970). [. . .] 42 See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co.,1958), esp. Bk. IV, pp. 164–68. 43 Astell, pp. 121–24. [. . .] 46 Astell, p. 121. Again Astell is adapting Augustine, see On Christian Doctrine, p. 137: “Sometimes, when the truth is demonstrated in speaking, an action which pertains to the function of teaching, eloquence is neither brought into play nor is any attention paid to whether the matter or the discourse is pleasing, yet the matter itself is pleasing when it is revealed simply because it is true.” [. . .] Astell has faith that humans by nature are attracted to the truth. 47 [. . .] The ideal woman of the Renaissance was “chaste, silent, and obedient,” and early modern conservatives feared education for women because they assumed a connection between lack of control over a woman’s tongue and lack of control over her sexuality [. . .].

The “Promiscuous Audience” Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman’s Rights Movement* Susan Zaeske The emergence of women on the public platform is one of the major developments in the history of public address in the United States. Rhetorical scholars and historians alike have begun to identify central figures and major texts in an effort to accord women orators their rightful place in the canon. An important part of their work has been to explore the barriers that confronted women who sought to speak in public during the early nineteenth century. Of those barriers, as Karlyn Campbell has noted, none was more formidable than the charge that it was improper for women to speak from the public platform. “In nineteenth-century America,” Campbell writes, “femininity and rhetorical action were seen as mutually exclusive. No ‘true woman’ could be a public persuader.” Women who did give speeches “entered the public sphere and thereby lost their claim to purity and piety.”1 Nowhere was the contradiction between female propriety and public action more evident than in the injunction that women should not address “promiscuous audiences”—that is, audiences composed of both men and women. Although the existence of the injunction has been noted by a number of scholars, it has yet to be the subject of serious inquiry.2 Among the questions that need investigation are: What were the origins of the phrase “promiscuous audience”? What layers of meaning were associated with the phrase by the early nineteenth century? How did the phrase come to be used against women speakers in the United States? How did early women orators respond to the prohibition against addressing “promiscuous audiences”? What ramifications did their responses hold for the emergence of the woman’s rights movement and the subsequent rhetoric of its advocates? Answering such questions is crucial to understanding the rhetorical dynamics of the controversy over women entering the public sphere in antebellum America. If, as Campbell argues, the woman’s rights and suffrage movements arose to a significant degree out of the *  The Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 191-207. Taylor & Francis, http//www.informaworld. com, reprinted by permission of the publisher. 234

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struggle to speak in public, we cannot account for the emergence of either movement without close attention to the conflict between female orators and their detractors during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Nor can we fully comprehend the nature or magnitude of the barriers facing early women speakers—and how those barriers were ultimately surmounted—without close attention to the dispute over the propriety of women addressing “promiscuous audiences.” As we shall see, prior to the nineteenth century neither the word “promiscuous” nor the phrase “promiscuous audience” held strongly gendered connotations. But by the 1820s both the word and the phrase had become increasingly linked with the morality and sexuality of women. Grounded in deeply-rooted myths about the irrationality and seductive powers of the female sex, the prohibition against addressing “promiscuous audiences” reinforced early nineteenth-century conceptions of woman’s sphere and became a puissant weapon in the hands of traditionalists—secular and religious alike—who sought to keep women off the platform and out of the public arena. Although many women agreed with the prohibition and abandoned or curtailed their public reform activities as a result, others advanced a variety of arguments in defense of their right to speak before assemblies composed of both sexes. In the process, they opened the way not only for women to speak from the public platform but to enter the public sphere in other ways as well. Contrary to accepted wisdom, however, early women speakers did not ground their defenses in appeals to justice, law, equity, or constitutionalism. For too long we have glossed over the rhetorical subtleties of the early woman’s rights struggle by conflating it with the rhetoric of the organized woman’s rights and suffrage movements. As we shall see, in establishing their right to speak from the public platform during the 1830s, early feminists did not rely on appeals to natural law or to the U.S. Constitution. Although such appeals were prominent by the time of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and came to dominate the post-Civil War suffrage crusade, they were seldom employed during the battle over the propriety of women speaking from the public platform in the 1830s. Rather, in combating the charge that women should not enter the public arena by addressing “promiscuous audiences,” speakers such as Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké, Abby Kelley, and Lucretia Mott employed a rhetoric of gendered morality that emphasized the special nature of female benevolence and the social utility of exercising that benevolence through the spoken word. Although well adapted to the rhetorical exigences women faced in defending their right to speak during the 1830s, the early feminists’ emphasis on female benevolence as a justification for addressing “promiscuous audiences”—and for other forms of activity in the public sphere—had important implications that fettered the efforts of women to engage in overtly political activity during the 1840s. Let us begin by looking at the emergence of “promiscuous audience” as an ideograph used by traditionalists to keep women off the public platform.

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Emergence of the “Promiscuous Audience” Charge The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word “promiscuous” to its Latin roots of the prefix pro plus miscere, meaning “to mix.” “Promiscuous” historically denoted that which consisted “of members or elements of different kinds grouped or massed together without order.” It also referred to that which was “without discrimination or method; done or applied without respect for kind, order, number, etc.; confusedly mingled, indiscriminate.” In grammar, “promiscuous” was synonymous with “epicene,” which denoted a Latin or Greek noun having only one grammatical form to mean an individual of either sex. As a result, “promiscuous” was used occasionally to signify a person belonging to one sex but having the characteristics of the other, or of neither. Ben Jonson included in his 1637 English Grammar, “The promiscuous, or epicene, which understands both kinds,” and as late as 1878 Pasquale Villari wrote, in his Life and Times of Niccolo Machiavelli, “There were three sexes, male, female, and promiscuous.”3 When the phrase “promiscuous audience” was used during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it denoted an auditory of mixed background, wealth, and education but had nothing to do with the presence—or absence—of women auditors. In a 1692 sermon, for example, Richard Bentley described St. Paul speaking in Athens to a “promiscuous Assembly” composed of “Epicureans and Stoicks,” “Travellers and Strangers,” “Citizens and Magistrates,” “Orators and Philosophers.”4 In his Lectures on Eloquence (1768), John Witherspoon, president of Princeton College, categorized public address into three types—eloquence of the bar, of the pulpit, and of “promiscuous deliberative assemblies,” by which he meant a popular assembly made up of “common people” who lacked refinement of education and manners.5 George Campbell, the Scotsman who heavily influenced Witherspoon, also classed popular political assemblies as “promiscuous.” He said: “We may reckon a Christian congregation in a populous and flourishing city, where there is a great variety in rank and education, to be of all audiences the most promiscuous.”6 As with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, Campbell made no reference to women in his discussion of the “promiscuous audience.” By the early nineteenth century, however, the phrase “promiscuous audience” was increasingly linked with the morality and sexuality of women.7 An especially telling example can be found in an 1816 letter from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval. Jefferson wrote that fellow citizens in some sections of Virginia were claiming a right of representation for their slaves. Principle, he told Kercheval, would open the way for the correct conclusion on this matter: Were our state a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants should meet together to transact all their business, there would yet be excluded from their deliberation, 1. Infants, until arrived at years of discretion. 2. Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men. 3. Slaves, from whom the unfortunate state of things with us takes away the right of will and property. Those

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then who have no will could be permitted to exercise none in the popular assembly; and of course, could delegate none to an agent in a representative assembly.8 Jefferson’s letter reveals that although republicanism cleared some public space for women, white men had little desire to share political equality with women or slaves. Women, Jefferson argued, could not participate in public deliberations because “promiscuous mixing” would distract men from business and create “ambiguity” in decision-making. Jefferson reflected the common belief that women appealed to the passions rather than to reason and would inevitably corrupt civic virtue if they mixed “promiscuously” at public meetings.9 Indeed, Jefferson classed women with infants and slaves, thereby placing them among elements of the population who had no will and were incapable of forming opinions and of being represented in public assemblies. The implications for women speakers were clear: women had nothing to say and no right to say it. If women did speak, they would cloud the issues by inspiring immoral conduct. Although it is hard to know exactly when the phrase “promiscuous audience” came into general use in reference to women speakers, it was employed widely during the late 1820s by religious leaders who opposed the practice of women engaging in public prayer in revival meetings during the Second Great Awakening.10 The Pastoral Letter of the Ministers of the Oneida Association, issued in 1827, declared that female prayer and exhortation was permitted only in groups solely composed of women. “In promiscuous meetings,” the ministers stated, “we do not think God has made it their duty to lead, but to be in silence.” The Pastoral Letter warned that if female church members stepped outside the sphere God had assigned them, it would prove “a great calamity to the church.” To those who believed “female praying in promiscuous meetings is lawful,” the Letter replied that St. Paul had commanded otherwise.11 A similar edict was pronounced by the Pastoral Letter of the Annual Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1832. This document approved of women conversing and praying by themselves, but claimed that “to teach or exhort, or to lead in prayer, in public and promiscuous assemblies, is clearly forbidden to women in the Holy Oracles.”12 These religious commands fueled the blaze of criticism that erupted when women did pray in revival meetings. The Rev. Mr. Asahel Nettleton, writing to a fellow preacher on January 13, 1827, criticized Charles Finney’s style of revivals for stirring up problems in Troy, New York. According to Nettleton, a divinity student who espoused Finney’s “new plan” had “found fault with every thing the settled minister was doing” and was advocating “females praying in promiscuous assemblies.” This “desperate attempt to introduce the practice of females praying with males,” said Nettleton, “raised an angry dispute which lasted all summer.”13 Later that same year, the issue of women praying in “promiscuous audiences” led to a confrontation between Finney and the forces of Lyman Beecher. Meeting in New Lebanon, New York, the Beecherites presented a resolution “that in social meetings of men and women for religious worship, females are not to pray.” Although Finney and his supporters

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were able to defeat the resolution, the very next year, when Samuel Miller discussed some of the “particular disorders” plaguing the revivals, he mentioned that of “females speaking, and leading in prayer in promiscuous assemblies.”14 At the same time that religious leaders were holding forth against women praying in “promiscuous assemblies,” Frances Wright, the Scottish free-thinker, was creating a sensation by lecturing in public about politics. Contrary to what we might suppose, the injunction against addressing “promiscuous audiences” was not leveled at Wright. Although Wright was widely attacked as unfeminine and immoral for speaking from the public platform, I have not found any mention of the “promiscuous audience” in even the most vitriolic newspaper accounts of her lectures. There are two primary explanations for this. First, because Wright was one of the earliest women to speak before mixed audiences in America, it is possible that the “promiscuous audience” warning was not used widely in the secular realm until more women threatened male dominance of the rostrum. Second, Wright criticized religion, advocated whites and blacks living together, and supported “free thinking,” which was linked to free love in the public mind. Unlike religious women who supported moral reform, it was easy to attack Wright’s motives and message as immoral. The “promiscuous audience” threat was not needed to attack her ethos. Nonetheless, when other women attempted to speak in public during the 1830s, they were often castigated as “Fanny Wrightists.” This epithet, like the “promiscuous audience” charge, constituted a powerful admonition against women expanding their influence because it associated public speaking with immorality.15 Whatever the reason for the absence of the “promiscuous audience” charge during Wright’s lecture tours, the charge was at the center of the furor that erupted in 1837 when Sarah and Angelina Grimké addressed mixed assemblies on behalf of abolitionism. After being trained as abolitionist agents by Theodore Weld in November 1836, the sisters began their work in New York City by presenting parlor talks to audiences composed entirely of women. Soon men started sneaking into their discussions, but this did not create a problem until the sisters commenced their New England tour in April 1837. The tour proved to be a sensation. Not only did the Grimkés attract large and enthusiastic audiences virtually everywhere they went, but those audiences often included substantial numbers of men. By July 1837 the presence of men at the lectures had become so conspicuous that the General Association of the Massachusetts Congregational Church issued its notorious pastoral letter attacking women who deigned to speak to mixed audiences on important public issues. Writing as if women had no role in deciding whether or not to speak, the letter condemned those who countenanced women who engaged in public lecturing and chastised those who encouraged “females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in the measures of reform.” Especially deplorable to the clergy was “the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regard to things ‘which ought not to be named.’” By attempting to persuade directly, the clergy warned, woman would lose her genuine means of power—in-

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direct, delicate, charming female influence—because a “promiscuous” woman was neither moral, delicate, nor charming.16 Nor were the Grimkés the only female abolitionists to run up against the “promiscuous audience” charge. In 1843 Abby Kelley encountered it after speaking on board a ship heading to Connecticut. According to Kelley’s traveling companion, Dr. Erasmus Darwin Hudson, he and other abolitionists discussed antislavery among the passengers until several gentlemen proposed that Kelley address the company. She did so for two hours, and Hudson reported that most of the audience was pleased with her performance. However, “A few among them, a little dandy, just from a two or three months’ tour at the South, talked quite priestlike, about female modesty, and the impropriety of addressing a promiscuous audience.” As with the Grimkés, Kelley was not only criticized for speaking to a “promiscuous audience,” but her “modesty,” or sexual purity, was questioned in the same breath.17 But it was not just the clergy and other conservatives who were concerned about abolitionist women speaking to mixed audiences. Male abolitionists themselves were also alarmed. On August 12, 1837, during the crisis touched off by the Massachusetts Pastoral Letter, Angelina Grimké wrote to Theodore Weld: “No doubt thou has heard by this time all the fuss that is now making this region about our stepping so far out of the bounds of female propriety as to lecture to promiscuous assemblies.”18 Indeed, only three weeks earlier Weld had fired off a harsh letter to both the Grimkés announcing that the American AntiSlavery Society was disassociating itself from the sisters’ “public holdings-forth to promiscuous assemblies.” John Greenleaf Whittier also chastised the Grimkés, pleading that their lectures to “crowded and promiscuous assemblies” on political topics were sufficient to assert the rights of woman and that they should not press the issue of woman’s rights explicitly in their talks.19 When the Grimkés addressed a mixed audience of 1,500 people in Lowell, Massachusetts, the Emancipator acknowledged that the sisters’ oratorical efforts were effective, yet noted that “in spite of this success there are not wanting those, even among abolitionists, who doubt the propriety of their addressing promiscuous assemblies.”20 Not only did concern about addressing mixed-sex assemblies scare some abolitionists from supporting women speakers, but men were at times chastised for allowing themselves to become part of the “promiscuous audience.” “We are astonished to hear it pretended,” complained the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, “that if a woman speaks at an anti-slavery meeting, the responsibility is not her own, but it rests on every man in the assembly; a guilt from which he cannot absolve himself by protesting against it.”21 This was not an idle threat. In Seneca Falls, New York, one Jabez Matthews ended up in court after attending a lecture by Kelley. The Rev. Samuel Gridley, whose church forbade women speaking to audiences of men and women, asked Matthews at the trial: “Is the duty of females to address promiscuous assemblies on Moral & Religious subjects so clearly established in the Bible as to justify members going to hear them contrary to the established sentiment of the church to which they belong?” “I believe it is,” Mat-

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thews responded. Although church leaders dropped their charges against Matthews, they ordered an investigation of him and his wife. In September 1845 the Matthews admitted they “had done wrong” in attending the lectures and stated that “if they had understood their obligation to the church” they never would have done so.22 Although the “promiscuous audience” warning appeared frequently in descriptions of women speaking, it was noticeably absent from accounts of male speakers. Their sentiments, whether applauded or not, did not arouse the kinds of morality-laden criticisms heaped upon women who spoke to mixed groups. On June 17, 1825, for instance, Daniel Webster delivered a heralded address at the ceremony laying the cornerstone for the Bunker Hill Monument. Among the tens of thousands of people present that day was one of John Quincy’s sisters, who recorded the event in her diary. Seats for the “ladies,” she described, extended in a semicircle on each side of the stage, which was erected at the foot of the hill. Soldiers of the Revolution and the multitudes who were to come in the procession were seated directly above on the hill. “We found ourselves surrounded by an immense number of women,” she recalled, “fashionable and unfashionable, high and low, rich and poor, all animated by one interest.” The pressure of the crowd was so great that when Webster started to speak, some seats and barriers gave way, resulting in tremendous confusion. No doubt as the crowd pressed forward, men and women came into close contact in the chaotic situation. Yet even a refined woman like Quincy did not apply the word “promiscuous” to either the audience or the experience.23 Perhaps most telling, when the phrase “promiscuous audience” was used in reference to an auditory addressed by both men and women, it was applied only to the women speakers, even though the men spoke to the same audience. In May 1838 the Journal of Commerce attacked the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women held in Pennsylvania Hall. “Three women, besides Wm. Lloyd Garrison, held forth to a very promiscuous assembly of 3000 persons,” the Journal reported, though it doubted “whether such conduct is becoming the modesty which ought to belong to the female sex.” The Journal sarcastically lamented, “We have fallen upon beautiful times . . . when women, . . . with more brass than men can readily command, are seen holding forth to large promiscuous assemblies.” In commenting on Garrison’s speech, however, the Journal cast no aspersions on either his modesty or propriety, although he had addressed the same audience of men and women, whites and blacks. It was only the women speakers whose morality was questioned. Indeed, I do not know of any cases in which males were upbraided for addressing “promiscuous audiences.”24

Persuasive Force of the “Promiscuous Audience” Charge Not only was the injunction against addressing “promiscuous audiences” gender specific, but it carried great force because of the way it drew upon and reinforced deeply-rooted myths about women and their proper role in politics. As such, the term “promiscuous audience” functioned as an “ideograph.” Like a Chinese symbol, ideographs signify unique ideological

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commitments and assume that “each member of a community will see as a gestalt every complex nuance in them.” They serve as prior persuasion against defiance of social norms at the moment such defiance is contemplated.25 The “promiscuous audience” threat served to scare women from speaking before they opened their mouths. The warning emphasized, in particular, the perception that woman by nature was irrational and could persuade only through seduction. These notions were based on the coupling throughout history of women speaking with biology and sexuality. As far back as classical mythology, the legend of the Sirens, who were said to seduce men with their songs, associated women’s suasory powers with sexuality rather than with rational argument. The Christian narrative of the fall of Eve related woman’s suasory charm to her reproductive capacity. Women’s speaking was also connected with sexuality and evil during the witch trials of the 1600s when accusers claimed that the devil spoke through the witch’s vagina.26 The “promiscuous audience” threat also encapsulated a series of biblical injunctions against women speaking. In the Old Testament, for example, Proverbs 9:13–14 linked irrationality and promiscuity to women who raised their voices: “A foolish woman is clamorous; she is simple and knoweth nothing.” The New Testament admonitions of St. Paul against women speaking were especially adamant. In I Corinthians, Paul emphasized that women must obey their husbands, remain in the home, and keep silent in formal religious assemblies: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church.” In I Timothy, Paul said: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” This verse, cited frequently in the early-nineteenthcentury debates over women speaking to mixed audiences, paints woman as deceptive and proclaims her punishment to be silence. In the same way, the injunction against women addressing mixed audiences intertwined desirable womanly behavior with silence. At a time when piety was considered a preeminent feminine virtue, few women dared to risk appearing un-Christian by speaking to mixed assemblies.27 The admonition against addressing “promiscuous audiences” further silenced many women because it impugned the social identity of the antebellum reform woman. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “promiscuous audience” had been used to connote assemblies of men of mixed economic, social, and educational status. These men were thought to be less rational and susceptible to being swayed by the passions because of their lack of refinement. By contrast, audiences composed of gentlemen could be persuaded by reason. In the early republic, when democracy justified more men participating in politics, it was women who were painted as irrational, as swayed by the passions, and as the source of “promiscuous intermingling” that would disrupt decision making. Women who addressed “pro-

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miscuous audiences” were characterized as defying the Bible, relying on seduction because of their supposed irrationality, and as losing their femininity. To accuse a white middle-class woman of such transgressions during the early nineteenth century was to question her social identity, which was based on sexual purity, religious piety, and submission to her husband. “Promiscuous” was what the ideal white, middle-class woman was not. Promiscuity and lack of virtue were considered characteristics of working women, of prostitutes, and of black women regardless of class. As Lori D. Ginzberg has observed, “In the early and mid-nineteenth century, the tightly joined terms of femininity and morality supplied the language of conformity with respect to gender roles, sexual behavior, and political beliefs.” The conflation of femininity with morality and women’s belief in sexual differences accompanied by their “still stronger fear of being thought unfeminine” served the interests both of opponents of reform and members of reform movements who wanted to control women’s activism.28

Motivations Behind the “Promiscuous Audience” Charge It is not coincidental that gender-specific injunctions against women speaking to “promiscuous audiences” arose in the early nineteenth century. During the American Revolution, the rising spirit of republicanism and consequent changes in rhetorical styles encouraged farmers and mechanics, rather than aristocrats exclusively, to make their voices heard in political gatherings. Starting in the late eighteenth century, women began to add their voices to the mix. Social change of this magnitude rarely goes unchecked. “As women claimed new terrain, both literally and metaphorically,” Glenna Matthews writes, “they frequently faced what we would now call turf wars.” The prohibition against women addressing “promiscuous audiences” was one way for men to defend their traditional monopolization of the public platform and, by extension, of political power in general.29 The desire to keep women from becoming politically empowered in the public sphere explains why the prohibition against addressing “promiscuous audiences” was leveled exclusively at woman orators. Female speakers alone faced the “promiscuous audience” charge because once men became part of the auditory, female speakers were in a position to exert meaningful social and political influence. Audiences of women had no decision-making power. But when men entered the room, carrying the rights of full citizens, the audience was legitimized and empowered. When speaking to men, rather than solely to women, the female orator had the opportunity to influence directly those who held political power. Conservatives, particularly the clergy, were threatened by women gaining such power. Angelina Grimké clearly perceived the relationship between the clergy’s desire to control the actions of women and the “promiscuous audience” charge. “Why, my dear brothers,” she pleaded to male abolitionists, “can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers? They know full well that if they can persuade the people it is a shame for us to

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speak in public, . . . that even if we spoke with the tongues of men or of angels, we should have no hearers.” Grimké’s comments are an astute diagnosis of how the clergy and other critics of women speaking attempted to construct a rhetorical environment that would limit women from expanding their influence. Grimké realized that if the clergy were successful in convincing people that women speakers were shameful for addressing “promiscuous audiences,” no one would come to hear the women speak because, by implication, the audience’s behavior would be improper. The clergy’s motivation for such behavior, Grimké believed, was power. She attacked the language of the clergy and criticized their double standard: “They utterly deny our right to interfere with this [abolition] or any other moral reform except in the particular way they choose to mark out for us to walk in.”30 The desire to limit women’s attempts to expand their power explains why the audience—rather than just the female speaker—was attacked as “promiscuous.” Denigrating mixed-sex auditories addressed by women as “promiscuous audiences” not only impugned the character of the speaker, but it maligned the morality of the listeners themselves. Merely sitting in a “promiscuous audience” could be attacked as sinful. This was vital because even though individual women rhetors might be assailed on the basis of their alleged immorality or irrationality, the audience remained intact, available for other female speakers. Indicting male auditors who gathered to hear a woman speak warned men that they would suffer the consequences—as in the case of Jabez Matthews discussed earlier. Nor is it coincidental that abolitionist women often encountered the warning against speaking to “promiscuous audiences.” Abolitionism was at the radical or “ultraist” extreme of antebellum reform movements. Motivated by religious zeal, abolitionists—male and female alike—sought to dismantle the institution of slavery and to effect a moral reconstruction of society. In contrast, many other women were involved in less drastic reform efforts such as tract societies, which sought self-improvement or “perfectionism,” while still others, almost exclusively the wealthy, undertook the traditional female work of charity or “benevolence.” Such women drew little criticism for their efforts. Indeed, they were typically praised for meeting their womanly obligations by aiding the needy. As Ginzberg points out, however, the goals of ultraist women, among them abolitionists, “provided sufficient excuse for attacks by those who in other settings supported female organizing but who suddenly took a stand against women’s public activity.”31 In short, abolitionist women were attacked for addressing “promiscuous audiences” not just because they were women, but also because they were abolitionists.

Responses to the “Promiscuous Audience” Charge Whatever the motivations of the people who inveighed against women addressing “promiscuous audiences,” the injunction evoked a wide range of responses from female reformers. Some agreed with the charge, all were concerned with it, and others refuted it. Among

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the women who agreed with the idea that women should not speak to mixed audiences was Catharine Beecher, who in 1838 published her “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism” in response to Angelina Grimké’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. Although Beecher despised women addressing “promiscuous audiences,” her motives differed significantly from those of many others who sought to limit woman’s expanding power. Beecher believed that woman must use influence, but never directly exert power. Asserting power, Beecher thought, would associate woman with self interest and deprive her of the high moral ground of self-sacrifice, which was based primarily on her office as mother. Beecher abhorred slavery, but she opposed women joining abolitionism because doing so would require them to exert their power directly—as in speaking to “promiscuous audiences”—rather than employing traditional modes of female influence. Beecher’s main objection to women becoming abolitionists centered on their role in persuasion and public debate. Man, she argued, was to be active and to influence others directly, while woman was passively to hope that others would yield to her opinions out of respect. Man was to debate in “public,” while woman was to exercise her influence in the “domestic circle”—most emphatically not by addressing “promiscuous assemblies.”32 Beecher’s concern about addressing “promiscuous audiences” was shared by more than a few women. Among them was Juliana Tappan, who feared the repercussions of speaking to both sexes or of associating with organizations that condoned such behavior. Although Tappan was a fervent participant in the First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1837, she became nervous after the Massachusetts pastoral letter condemned the Grimkés. Writing to Anne Weston, Tappan revealed her anxiety and confusion over the issues raised by the pastoral letter. On the one hand, she believed “there may be occasions when it will be perfectly proper for a woman to speak before a promiscuous assembly.” On the other hand, she feared that women who spoke to mixed audiences were in danger of “losing that modesty, and instinctive delicacy of feeling” unique to their sex. Unable to resolve the conflict between these positions, Tappan expressed confidence to Weston “that the Lord will teach every serious inquirer after truth, what her duty is.” By 1840 Tappan had decided that her duty was to withdraw from the movement.”33 Even among women who remained in the movement during the 1830s there was widespread apprehension that addressing “promiscuous audiences” was, if not improper, at least unwise. When the Second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in May 1838, delegates gathered in a committee room rather than in the main room of Pennsylvania Hall, since the main room was occupied by the American Anti-Slavery Society, which, by tradition rather than rule, had few female members. The reason the groups met separately, Lucretia Mott explained, was that many female members “considered it improper for women to address promiscuous assemblies.” When Pennsylvania Hall was burned by a mob on May 17, 1838, American Anti-Slavery Society men initially believed that it was being used that night by the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. The men learned later that the

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meeting had been called by a few individual members of the women’s group because the bulk of women abolitionists “disapproved of the public address of women to promiscuous assemblies.”34 Nor should we assume that abolitionist women who eventually did take to the public platform were oblivious to the injunction against addressing “promiscuous audiences.” So powerful was the admonition that it initially deterred no less a figure than Angelina Grimké. She confided to Amos Phelps that “nothing but the repeated solicitations of our Anti Slavery brethren could have induced me to consent to speak to any but women, for tho’ my principles were all in favor of doing so, yet, as I never have done it, I felt a timidity about it.” When Grimké overcame her “timidity” and first spoke to a mixed group, she was surprised that nothing awful happened: “For the first time in my life I spoke to a promiscuous assembly . . . and found the men were no more to me than the women.”35 No matter what their personal feelings, abolition women such as Grimké who desired to speak in public had to answer the injunction against addressing “promiscuous audiences.” One way they responded was to claim that nowhere did Scripture forbid women from speaking to “promiscuous audiences.” In her 1837 reply to Beecher’s Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, for example, Angelina Grimké argued that it was moral for women to speak to mixed audiences because the Bible itself contained numerous examples of women who did so: I read in the Bible, that Miriam, and Deborah, and Huldah, were called to fill public stations in Church and State. I find Anna, the prophetess, speaking in the temple “unto all them that look for redemption in Jerusalem.” During his ministry on earth, I see women following him from town to town, in the most public manner. . . . Then, again, I see the cloven tongues of fire resting on each of the heads of the one hundred and twenty disciples, some of whom were women; yea, I hear them preaching on the day of Pentecost to the multitudes who witnessed the outpouring of the spirit on that glorious occasion. Mott, in a sermon delivered in Boston on September 23, 1841, also invoked the examples of Huldah and Deborah when justifying her right to preach before a “promiscuous” congregation.36 In her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, Sarah Grimké refuted Biblical injunctions against women speaking to “promiscuous audiences” when she replied to the Pastoral Letter by offering alternative interpretations of Bible verses. She agreed with the clergy that woman should function in her sphere, but she argued that woman’s sphere should be equal with that of man. The only reason woman was said to have a different sphere was because men had falsely translated the Bible and incorrectly interpreted the New Testament. Referring to Christ’s definition of the duties of women and men, Grimké wrote: “Men and women were CREATED EQUAL; they are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for man to do, is right for woman.” The doctrine that woman should be

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dependent on man, she held, was monstrous and anti-Christian. Putting a bushel on the light of woman, she argued, was to wage war on the minds of women and to destroy them as moral beings: “This doctrine of dependence upon man is utterly at variance with the doctrine of the Bible. . . . In that book I find nothing like the softness of woman, nor the sternness of man; both are equally commanded to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit, love, meekness, gentleness, &c.” Grimké depicted as sinners opponents who claimed to be guarding Christian ideals by keeping women from addressing mixed audiences. By prohibiting women from speaking, she held, they were using the Bible falsely. Mott also attacked false translations of the Bible, which she blamed on the “priest-craft and monopoly of the pulpit.” Opponents of women speaking to “promiscuous audiences,” she said, must prove that Biblical injunctions commanding women to be silent were binding upon the “church in all ages.” The clergy, she argued, unfairly picked scriptural commands to serve their selfish purposes. “When the apostle [Paul] recommends that widows shall not marry,” she said, “they do not agree with him, and therefore they explain it as applicable only to times of trouble and persecution.” Yet because the clergy feared sharing the pulpit with women, they treated Paul’s words against women addressing mixed audiences as timeless commands.37 Female speakers also responded to claims that they should eschew speaking to mixed audiences because women were irrational, “fallible” beings. Public sentiment was rapidly changing on this subject, Angelina Grimké said, and soon woman would be acknowledged as the equal co-worker of man in regenerating the fallen world. “Just in proportion as her moral and intellectual capacities become enlarged, she will rise higher and higher in the scale of creation. . . . Then will it be seen that nothing which concerns the well-being of mankind is either beyond her sphere, or above her comprehension.” Woman’s ascendant morality, Grimké believed, would enable her intellect. Woman orators, Grimké argued, would not degrade public deliberation. Not only were they more moral, but they could be just as rational as men—and just as capable of addressing audiences composed of men without undermining the process of public deliberation.38 When Abby Kelley was chastised about the “impropriety of addressing a promiscuous audience” aboard a ship in 1843, she turned the tables on her critics. Kelley chose not to argue that her personal behavior was chaste and pure. To do so would have validated ad personam attacks on her modesty and sexual purity. Instead, she implicitly emphasized her own morality by using her opponents’ arguments against them. Kelley’s cohort, Dr. Hudson, recalled her response to her critics: “Their ears were made to tingle, about their mock modesty, while they could unblushingly sustain the peculiar institution of the South, full of licentiousness, and wholesale adultery; where millions of women were sold in the market, and bought by vile debauchers. Yet they come to the North and talk about modesty, because woman lifts up her voice against such a hellish system!” Kelley asserted that it was slaveholders who were in fact guilty of immorality. Far from being “immodest” by addressing mixed audiences, Kelley said that she spoke in order to protect black womanhood.39

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Like Kelley’s shipboard speech, Angelina Grimké’s address to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1838 is an impressive example of employing indirect arguments to answer the “promiscuous audience” charge. While Grimké’s primary goal was to present antislavery petitions signed by 20,000 Massachusetts women and to justify woman’s right to petition, she also had to defend the propriety of speaking to a mixed audience on a political subject. She began by drawing a parallel between herself and Esther, the Queen of ancient Persia. Disassociating herself from the seductive methods used by Esther, who had “appealed to Ahasuerus through the medium of his sensual appetites,” Grimké declared: “I feel that it would be an insult to this Committee, were I to attempt to win their favor by arraying my person in gold, and silver, and costly apparel, or by inviting them to partake of the luxurious feast, or the banquet of wine. I understand the spirit of the age too well to believe that you could be moved by such sensual means.” By rejecting the persona of the seductive female speaker, Grimké made clear that she would be chaste and well-reasoned and that any man who felt aroused by her speaking must blame himself for failing to evolve from the days of the disgusting Persian king. Grimké also justified woman’s right to speak and to petition on the basis of her moral duties. “I stand before you,” she told the committee, “as a moral being, endowed with precious and inalienable rights, which are correlative with solemn duties and high responsibilities. . . . As a moral being I feel that I owe it to the suffering slave, and to the deluded master, to my country and the world” to overturn slavery.40

Conclusion Claims such as Grimké’s and Kelley’s that women who addressed “promiscuous audiences” on behalf of the slave were fulfilling their duty as moral beings were part of the rhetoric of female benevolence that found repeated expression by women reformers in the antebellum era. Based on the assumption that woman possessed more virtue than man, who was corrupted by his immersion in the public sphere, the notion of female benevolence provided a justification for women who sought to make society more moral by altruistic action. When critics claimed that speaking to mixed audiences violated female propriety, reform women responded that they were fulfilling their womanly duty by speaking in defense of the slave and other downtrodden souls.41 There was, of course, as Ginzberg has noted, a potentially radical dimension to the early reformers’ arguments justifying public action on grounds of women’s nature as moral beings. Claims that women shared a special sense of moral responsibility were potentially radical in that they nurtured a “sense of connection” among women who sought unity based on their sex despite their class and other differences. The emphasis upon women’s moral identity was also potentially radical because it redefined accepted notions of social status by privileging moral virtue, an asset associated with women, over financial wealth, which was controlled almost entirely by men. In both these ways, the use of arguments based on female

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benevolence to establish the propriety of women addressing “promiscuous audiences” contributed to a potentially comprehensive critique of male dominance.42 Although that critique was never fully developed in the 1830s, it is important to recognize that during the early struggle to speak from the public platform, pioneers of the woman’s rights movement appealed primarily to notions of a unique female morality rather than to natural rights or natural law. Indeed, as Ginzberg notes, during the 1830s and 1840s women seldom asserted their natural or constitutional right to act politically in any respect.43 Contrary to the claims of scholars such as Kraditor and Campbell, natural rights arguments did not predominate in the discourse of the earliest woman’s rights advocates.44 Although rhetorical critics and historians usually make little distinction between the discourse of early activists during the 1830s and that of the organized woman’s rights and suffrage movements of the late 1840s and beyond, it is clear that the rhetorical exigences of these decades differed and so, too, did feminist discourse. During the 1830s opponents of women activists did not deny that women had a natural or constitutional right to speak to mixed-sex audiences. Instead, opponents used the injunction against addressing “promiscuous audiences” to contend that no woman could be virtuous if she stepped outside the domestic sphere by engaging in activities such as public speaking. The challenge to women rhetors, therefore, was not to show that speaking in the public sphere was consistent with natural law or guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, but to demonstrate that it was consistent with woman’s special virtue and moral authority. As we have seen, they accomplished this by emphasizing their moral duty to speak out for those unable to speak for themselves. It was not until the late 1840s, when moral suasion and appeals to female benevolence lost their effectiveness in the face of an increased emphasis on electoral politics, that women desiring social change shifted from a language of female benevolence to a language of political rights.45 Not only did the rhetorical exigences of the 183 0 s differ from those of the 1840s, but so too did the impulses animating women to seek social change. Women such as Kelley, Mott, and the Grimkés may have employed benevolent language during the 183 0 s because they were motivated in their reform efforts above all by questions of religion and social morality. To them, the most powerful justifications for addressing mixed audiences were religious and moral rather than political. These women—many of whom were Garrisonian abolitionists—adhered to the tenets of moral suasion, no-government, and non-resistance. They decried collaborating in any way with government, which they believed was sustained by violence and immorality. To a substantial degree, it would have been philosophically inconsistent for them to have justified speaking to “promiscuous audiences” on political grounds. By the 1850s, however, moral suasion had become so ridiculed and direct political action had become so important that the daughters of antebellum female reformers were “often largely unaware that their mothers had ever doubted the efficacy of the vote or that electoral politics had not always been activists’ central concern.”46

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Although the rhetoric of early woman reformers seldom invoked the language of natural rights, it did significantly affect women’s struggle for expanded influence in society. By asserting the propriety of women addressing “promiscuous audiences”—and by continuing to address such audiences despite the objections of traditionalists—early reformers won for women the right to speak in public and established a presumption in favor of their right to engage in other forms of benevolent action in the public sphere. Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when “promiscuous audience” prohibition fell out of use, it seldom appeared in the North after the 1850 s to refer to women addressing mixed-sex assemblies. By the end of that decade, Kenneth Cmiel notes, “at least in the North and West, it was established that women could speak in public,” though critics continued to label women speakers as “mannish” for much longer.47 During the late 183 0 s and the 1840s, the rhetorical e f for t s of women such as Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, and Abby Kelley increasingly rendered the “promiscuous audience” threat an anachronism. Doing so was a crucial early step in the woman’s rights movement.

Notes 1 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric I (New York: Praeger, 1989) 9–10. 2 Glenna Matthews wrote in 1992 that “the word ‘promiscuous’ repeatedly shows up to characterize an audience or other assemblage composed of both men and women.” Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 100n18. Kenneth Cmiel, in 1990, defined the “promiscuous audience” as women speaking to both men and women. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990) 70. Karlyn Campbell wrote in 1989 that in the first half of the nineteenth century people were outraged when women addressed “promiscuous audiences.” Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her I, 11. Ellen Reid Gold mentioned in 1981 that the term appeared throughout the correspondence of the Grimké sisters, who were among the earliest of American woman speakers. Ellen Reid Gold, “The Grimké Sisters and the Emergence of the Woman’s Rights Movement,” The Southern Speech Communication Journal 46 (Summer 1981): 344. Other writers who mention the “promiscuous audience” include Lillian O’Connor, Pioneer Woman Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-bellum Reform Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) 69; Blanche Glassman Hersh, “‘Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?’ Abolitionist Beginnings of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979) 264; Margaret Hope Bacon, Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott (New York: Walker and Co., 1980) Ch. 8; Glenn C. Altschuler and Jan M. Saltzgaber, Revivalism, Social Conscience, and Community in the Burned-Over District: The Trial of Rhoda Bement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) 58n; Phyllis Japp, “‘Esther or Isaiah?’ The Abolitionist Feminist Rhetoric of Angelina Grimké,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71 (1985) 335. 3 J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 613–614. Ben Jonson, The English Grammar, ed. Alice Vinton Waite (New York: Sturgis and

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Walton, 1909) 81; Pasquale Villari, The Life and Times of Niccolo Machiavelli (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978) 130. 4 Dr. Richard Bentley, Matter and Motion Cannot Think: Or, A Confutation of Atheism from the Faculties of the Soul. A Sermon Preached at St. Mary-le-Bow, April 4, 1692, 3rd ed., (London: 1694) 41. 5 John Witherspoon, “Lectures on Eloquence,” in The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon, ed. Thomas Miller (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) 257–258. Witherspoon’s writings are particularly applicable to uncovering the notion of the “promiscuous audience” in America. Warren Guthrie called the 1810 edition of Lectures on Eloquence “the first complete American rhetoric,” while Miller believes Witherspoon to be possibly the most influential educational and religious leader in revolutionary America. See Guthrie, “Rhetorical Theory in Colonial America,” History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, ed. Karl R. Wallace (New York: Appleton, 1954) 48–59; Miller, Writings of Witherspoon, 1. 6 George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988) 102. Bitzer reports that Campbell’s Rhetoric was reprinted at least fortytwo times after its initial publication in 1776. All but two editions appeared in the nineteenth century, when the book was highly favored as a text for students of oratory, composition, and criticism. 7 The 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, printed in London, carried only the definition “mingled; confused.” By 1853, however, the American lexicographer Noah Webster offered as a second meaning, “not restricted to an individual; as, promiscuous love or intercourse.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers no examples before 1800 of “promiscuous” as connoting indiscriminate sexual relations, but it contains a number of such examples after that date. In 1816, for instance, Sir Walter Scott wrote in his novel Old Mortality that the Calvinists condemned “the profane custom of promiscuous dancing, that is, of men and women dancing together in the same party,” while in 1877 Herbert Spenser reported that “Promiscuity may be called indefinite polyandry, joined with polygyny.” Samuel Johnson, ed., A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1773) III, n.p.; Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (George and Charles Merriam, 1853) 876; Sir Walter Scott, Old Mortality (London: Oxford University Press, 1906) 11, 12; Herbert Spenser, Principles of Sociology (1877) 1, 672. 8 Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, September 5, 1816, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899) 46n. 9 For a more thorough discussion of this notion, see Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990) 27. 10 One distinctive public space created in the 1820s was the camp meeting. Men and women inspired by the Second Great Awakening gathered by the hundreds to hear itinerant preachers under outdoor tents set up on expansive clearings. The move from church walls to the informal setting of the camp meeting decreased a sense of hierarchical authority. Consequently, Matthews writes, “many people, women included, saw it as appropriate to engage in more spirited public behavior than under any other circumstances.” See Matthews, Rise of Public Woman 103–104. 11 Pastoral Letter of the Ministers of the Oneida Association, to the Churches Under Their Care, on the Subject of Revivals of Religion (Utica: Ariel Works, 1827). I would like to thank Jean Goodwin for leading me to this source.

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“Pastoral Letter. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States Under Their Care,” June l, 1832, in Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Wm. F. Geddies, 1832) 348. 13 Letter from Rev. Mr. A. Nettleton to Rev. Mr. Aiken, January 13, 1827, in Letters of the Rev. Dr. [Lyman] Beecher and Rev. Mr. Nettleton, on the “New Measures” in Conducting Revivals of Religion (New York: G & C Carvill, 1828) 10. 14 The resolution of the Beecher forces is quoted in Alice S. Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973) 258; Samuel Miller, Letters to Presbyterians on the Present Crisis in the Presbyterian Church in the United States (Philadelphia: Anthony Finley, 1833) 161. 15 Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books, 1967) 3–4; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard University Press, 1975) 27; Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, I, 17. 16 “Pastoral Letter: The General Association of Massachusetts to the Churches Under Their Care,” New England Spectator, July 12, 1837, in Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 211. 17 “Letter from Dr. Hudson,” National Antislavery Standard, June 8, 1843. I would like to thank Greg Lampe for leading me to this source. 18 Angelina Grimké to Theodore Weld, August 12, 1837, in Letters of Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké: 1822–1844, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965) I, 414. 19 Theodore Weld to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, July 22, 1837, in Weld/Grimké Letters I, 411– 412. John Greenleaf Whittier to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, August 4, 1837, in Weld/Grimké Letters I, 424. The growing discomfort of abolitionists with women addressing promiscuous audiences surfaced again in the correspondence of Lydia Maria Child. Writing to the editor of the Liberator in March 1840, Child decried Lewis Tappan’s opposition to women’s participation in American AntiSlavery Society meetings. Child recalled that in the autumn of 1836 Tappan had urged her to address an audience, the majority of which were men. “I told him I had never spoken in public, and should be very much embarrassed.” Nonetheless, she recounted, he persisted and even appealed to her husband to convince Child to speak. But by 1840, Tappan wanted to form a separate anti-slavery organization because he opposed women violating Pauline injunctions by participating in American Anti-Slavery Society meetings. “I am not aware that he has altered his religious opinions in the course of three years,” Child wrote. “Yet if Mr. Tappan then deemed it a sin for women to speak in promiscuous assemblies, how could he reconcile it to his conscience to urge me to do it?” Lydia Maria Child to the Liberator, March 6, 1840, in Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child, Selected Letters, 1817–1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) 128. 20 Reprinted in the Liberator, August 18, 1837. 21 Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (Boston, 1841) 16, quoted in Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969) 50. 22 Transcript of the trial of Rhoda Bement, in Altschuler and Saltzgaber, Burned Over District 166. 12

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Walker Lewis, ed., Speak for Yourself, Daniel: A Life of Webster in His Own Words (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969) 118–119. 24 Journal of Commerce reprinted in the Liberator, May 25, 1838. Abolitionist leader Theodore Weld’s letters contain many comments about public speaking, yet the phrase “promiscuous audience” does not appear before 1837, when the Grimkés began lecturing, and never in reference to male speakers. After 1837, when Weld or his correspondents described male orators addressing audiences of men and women, the descriptions contain no hint of impropriety on the part of the speaker. These conclusions are based on a reading of Barnes and Dumond, eds., Weld/Grimké Letters. In some cases “promiscuous audience” was used to refer to an auditory of mixed sex and of mixed race. When abolitionists met at Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, the Philadelphia National Gazette reported that “of the audience, about one half were females. It was promiscuously composed of white and black people.” In 1842 The New York Herald commented about an audience of abolitionists gathered in 1842 to hear male and female speakers that its “appearance was curiously variegated with here and there a white female face stuck promiscuously between two interestingly, thick, and large wooly heads.” It is significant that in both instances the impropriety of racial mixing was accompanied by mention of women being present. 25 Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980) 7, 5. 26 For a discussion of the Sirens and witches linked to women speaking, see Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 73. 27 The English Version of The Polyglott Bible, Containing The Old and New Testaments (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1847), Proverbs 9:13; 1 Corinthians 14:34–35; 1 Timothy 2:11–15. 28 Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19thCentury United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 34. 29 Matthews, Rise of Public Woman 70, 106. Cmiel (Democratic Eloquence 15) links the increased participation of women to changing rhetorical styles sanctioned by the republican impulse: “When eighteenth-century linguists located linguistic authority in the speech of gentlemen . . . it certainly wrote off the language of at least nine-tenths of the human race as ‘vulgar’ and not to be taken seriously. And no woman, even one from the elite, was allowed to be an orator.” 30 Angelina Grimké to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, August 20, 1837. Weld/ Grimké Letters I, 430. 31 Ginzberg, Benevolence 33. For a thorough discussion of the different types of female reform efforts during the nineteenth century, see Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 32 See, for example, Catharine Beecher, “Essay on Slavery and Abolition” in Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 127. For explanation of Beecher’s beliefs about woman’s proper means of persuasion, see Boydston, et al., Limits 116, 120, 4, 14, 122. 33 Julianna Tappan to Anne Weston, July 21, 1837, in Ginzberg, Benevolence 29–30. Tappan’s disagreements with the abolitionists and her abrupt withdrawal from the movement were not simply conservative reactions to women’s public activity. “Faced with pastoral charges of unfemininity,” 23

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Ginzberg says, “Tappan, like an unknown number of other women, left the antislavery movement” (Ginzberg, Benevolence 32). 34 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester, New York: 1881) I, 337; History of Pennsylvania Hall, which was Destroyed by a Mob, on the 17th of May, 1838 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838) 117. 35 Angelina Grimké to Amos Phelps, August 17, 1837, in Ceplair, Public Years 279. 36 Angelina Grimké, Reply to Beecher, in Ceplair, Public Years 189; Mott, “The Truth of God . . . The Righteousness of God,” sermon delivered at Marlboro Chapel, Boston, September 23, 1841, in Dana Greene, ed. Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons (New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1980) 27. 37 Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838) 14–21. Mott, “The Truth of God . . . The Righteousness of God,” 1841, in Greene, Lucretia Mott 27. 38 Angelina Grimké, Letters to Catherine [sic] Beecher, in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolition, addressed to A.E. Grimké, in Ceplair, Public Years 198. 39 Letter from Dr. Hudson, National Antislavery Standard, June 8, 1843. 40 Angelina Grimké, “Speech to the Legislative Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature,” February 21, 1838, recorded in the Liberator, March 2, 1838. I wish to thank Phyllis Japp for informing me that the Liberator recorded a more complete version of Grimké’s exordium than has been reprinted in various anthologies. For a closer reading of this speech, see Japp, “ ‘Esther or Isaiah?.’” 41 Ginzberg, Benevolence, chapter 1. 42 Ginzberg, Benevolence 22–24. While emphasizing the unity of “womanhood,” this approach clearly obscured real differences among women based on class and race status. 43 See Ginzberg, Benevolence, chapter 3. One exception is Angelina Grimké’s assertion of women’s political right to speak and petition for the slave. Grimké said that “American women have to do” with the subject of slavery “not only because it is moral and religious, but because it is political, inasmuch as we are citizens of this republic, and as such, our honor, happiness, and well being, are bound up in its politics, government, and laws.” Angelina Grimké, “Speech to a Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature,” reported to the Liberator by Maria Weston Chapman, March 2, 1838. At a moment when the boundaries of politics fluctuated immensely, according to Ginzberg, Grimké articulated a definition of politics that “recognized women’s participation and interest in social change but prevented their—and men’s—‘descent’ to electoral goals.” Ginzberg, Benevolence 85. 44 Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, I, 14. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) 43–74. 45 Ginzberg, Benevolence 100. For a detailed account of the changing social and intellectual climate of female activism from the late 1830s to the late 1840s that profoundly changed their discourse, see Ginzberg, Benevolence chapter 3, “Moral Suasion is Moral Balderdash.” 46 Ginzberg, Benevolence 83, 118. 47 Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence 70–71.

Black Women on the Speaker’s Platform (1832–1899)* Shirley Wilson Logan To speak of the rhetorical activities of African American women in the nineteenth century is to speak of their advocacy for change. The term rhetorical activities in this discussion includes those occasions when black women delivered persuasive public speeches. Such a discussion could develop around the oratorical careers of the most vocal and prominent women rhetors of the century, beginning in 1832 with Maria Stewart in Boston and ending at the close of the century with the speeches of Nannie Helen Burroughs or Victoria Matthews. It could also focus on varying tactics of delivery, arrangement, invention, and style, from the strongly religious and self-referencing appeals of Sojourner Truth or Stewart to the factual, disengaged approach of Ida Wells and the traditional grand style of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper or Anna Julia Haywood Cooper. Literary societies, such as the Bethel Literary and Historical Association, founded in 1881 by Washington, D.C.’s black elite, provided opportunities for black women to develop skills in oratory. But perhaps one can acquire a better sense of the extent of black women’s public involvement in nineteenth-century political life by considering their rhetorical responses to the panoply of issues challenging peoples of African descent throughout America at the time. In addition to the oppressive defining issue of slavery, these concerns included employment, civil rights, woman’s rights, emigration, and self-improvement. After the Civil War mob violence, racial uplift, and support for the southern black woman were added to the list of concerns demanding articulation. Nineteenth-century black women articulated them all. They spoke out at church conferences, political gatherings, woman’s rights conventions, and antislavery meetings. Not limiting themselves to mere participation in public forums, black women also created, organized, and publicized a large number of them. Maria Stewart, the first American-born woman to speak publicly to a mixed group of women and men, was African American. She delivered her first address in 1832, six years before Angelina Grimké’s appearance at Pennsylvania Hall, and her speeches were *  From Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women.  Ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997. 150-73. 254

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published in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, after considerable discussion, was reluctantly seated at the 1855 Colored National Convention in Philadelphia, becoming the first woman to address that body by a vote of 38 yeas and 23 nays (Minutes 1855, 10). An article in the 26 October 1855 edition of Frederick Douglass’ Paper describes that performance: “She at first had ten minutes granted her as had the other members. At their expiration, ten more were granted, and by this time came the hour of adjournment; but so interested was the House, that it granted additional time to her to finish, at the commencement of the afternoon session; and the House was crowded and breathless in its attention to her masterly exposition of our present condition, and the advantages open to colored men of enterprise” (Sterling 1984, 171). Frances Harper was employed as a lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society in 1854, becoming possibly the first black woman to earn a living as a traveling lecturer. She was certainly the most prolific. The black women’s club movement also sparked extensive issue-oriented public discussion, as any edition of the Woman’s Era demonstrates. The pages of this periodical, published by the Woman’s Era Club of Boston from 1894 to 1897, were filled with reports from the various black women’s clubs around the country relating their very public presence in current affairs. For example, the April 1895 issue carried an article by Mary Church Terrell, editor of the Washington, D.C., column, in which she condemned T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, for criticizing “the race with which he is identified for whining.” In the same issue, the column from Georgia, edited by Alice Woodby McKane, reported on the club’s interest in the emigration of two hundred blacks to Liberia. In the 1 June 1894 issue Ednah Cheney commended the Woman’s Era for its involvement in opening the medical profession to women. Later issues teemed with support for a national gathering of women, which did occur in 1895. This conference of black women held in Boston was an occasion for black women publicly to address urgent race concerns. These intersecting concerns and occasions have been classified here for discussion into the following necessarily overlapping categories: the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, lynching, and racial uplift. They represent some of the interwoven consequences of African existence in America.

Abolition of Slavery It should be clear that the abolition of slavery dominated discourse among black women during the first half of the century. Of the 750,000 blacks living in the United States at the time of the census of 1790, approximately 92 percent, or 691,000, were enslaved, and most lived in the South Atlantic states. In 1808 legislation finally made the African slave trade illegal, although it continued underground for many years. In the 1790 census Boston was the only city that listed no slaves, with approximately 27,000 free blacks living in the North and 32,000 free blacks in the South (Franklin and Moss 1988, 80–81).

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This discussion of black women’s abolitionist rhetoric centers on the public discourse of three speakers who migrated to new locales, delivering their antislavery messages to audiences in England, Canada, and across the United States. Sarah Parker Remond, a member of a prominent abolitionist family in Massachusetts, lectured in England and Scotland. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, whose father was a leader in the Underground Railroad movement in Delaware, fled with her family to Canada to avoid the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and developed into an outspoken presence in the antislavery movement there. Frances Harper, whose uncle William Watkins was active in the abolitionist movement, left Baltimore in about 1850, also in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, eventually traveling across the country with her antislavery message. Although slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, antislavery activities against its American version continued throughout the first half of the century, at which time a number of black abolitionists traveled to the British Isles to generate support for their cause. Some were freeborn blacks, like Charles Lenox Remond, and others were, like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, formerly enslaved. Sarah Remond (1815–1894) was one of eight children born to Nancy and John Remond, a native of Curaçao. Her family was part of the abolitionist society of Salem, Massachusetts. In 1856 she was appointed agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society and, as an associate of Garrison, became one of the first black women to lecture regularly before antislavery audiences. Initially a reluctant speaker, Remond toured throughout New England, New York, and Ohio between 1856 and 1858 and developed into an accomplished orator. She traveled to England in 1859 to deliver a series of lectures. From 1859 to 1861 she delivered more than forty-five lectures in eighteen cities in England, three cities in Scotland, and four cities in Ireland (Wesley 1994, 974). She was received enthusiastically wherever she spoke. In 1866 she returned to the United States and applied her oratorical skills to the task of racial uplift, in the manner of her brother Charles Remond and of Douglass. In 1867 she returned to England and subsequently settled in Florence, Italy, to practice medicine. It was said that she spoke in a “well-toned” and “pleasing style” and “demonstrated an unerring sensitivity to the political and social concerns of her listeners—particularly women reform activists” (Ripley 1985, 441). Although most male lecturers were reluctant to speak about the exploitation of enslaved black women, Sarah Parker Remond, probably the most prominent woman abolitionist to travel and speak in the British Isles, was not. In a one-and-a-quarter-hour lecture delivered to an overflowing crowd at the Music Hall in Warrington, England, on 24 January 1859, Remond relentlessly detailed the treatment of the enslaved black woman, using as a case in point the story of Kentucky slave mother Margaret Garner. Garner, who “had suffered in her own person the degradation that a woman could not mention,” escaped with her children to Cincinnati. Rather than allow her to be recaptured, Garner killed her three-year-old daughter, but she was prevented from killing her other children. Remond stated that “above all sufferers in America, American women who were slaves lived in the most pitiable condition. They could

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not protect themselves from the licentiousness which met them on every hand—they could not protect their honour from the tyrant” (Remond [1859] 1985a, 437). She also criticized the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, denying blacks the right to citizenship, and the heinous Fugitive Slave Act, which sent many blacks fleeing to northern states, Canada, and the British Isles. Remond drew support for her arguments from contemporary events. She chronicled current and widely publicized incidents with significant impact on American slavery, showing how such events—for example, the trial of Margaret Garner and the Dred Scott Decision— mirrored the sad conditions of a slave society. Stressing the hypocrisy of the Christian church, in this same speech Remond cited the shooting of a black man for insubordination by a clergyman in Louisiana and the dismissal of a minister in Philadelphia after he preached an antislavery sermon. From her English audiences she wanted public outcry. In a 14 September 1859 speech delivered at the Athenaeum in Manchester, England, she asked them to exert their influence to abolish slavery in America: “Give us the power of your public opinion, it has great weight in America. Words spoken here are read there as no words written in America are read. . . . I ask you, raise the moral public opinion until its voice reaches the American shores. Aid us thus until the shackles of the American slave melt like dew before the morning sun” (Remond [1859] 1985b, 459). Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893), the first black female newspaper editor, published the Provincial Freeman, a weekly Canadian newspaper for fugitive slaves and others who had fled to Canada in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act during the 1850s. From 1852 to 1853 she was the only black missionary in the field for the American Missionary Association (AMA), the largest abolitionist organization in America (DeBoer 1994, xi). Cary taught fugitive slaves recently arrived who, in her view, lacked motivation and self-discipline. She, along with Samuel Ward and Alexander McArthur, established the Provincial Freeman in March 1853, after the AMA informed her that it would no longer support her school. The Freeman soon became Cary’s vehicle for promoting industry among former slaves and exposing the misconduct of unscrupulous antislavery agents. In 1863 Cary returned to the United States, eventually settling in Washington, D.C., where she taught and ultimately practiced law. In her historic 1855 address to the Colored National Convention, she advocated for the emigration of blacks from America to Canada and for their total integration into Canadian society. Cary’s intense speaking style left its impression, as noted by the eyewitness quoted here: “Miss Shadd’s eyes are small and penetrating and fairly flush when she is speaking. Her ideas seem to flow so fast that she, at times, hesitates for words; yet she overcomes any apparent imperfections in her speaking by the earnestness of her manner and the quality of her thoughts. She is a superior woman; and it is useless to deny it; however much we may differ with her on the subject of emigration” (Sterling 1984, 170–71). All accounts of the works and days of the strong-willed Cary suggest that she rarely held her tongue or backed down from a position. She opposed the growing populari-

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ty of evangelical, better-life-in-the-afterworld preachers who neglected contemporary issues, with “their gross ignorance and insolent bearing, together with their sanctimonious garb,” and who hung “tenaciously to exploded customs,” giving some the impression that “money, and not the good of the people” motivated them (Cary 1986a, 32–33). One biographer describes her style as follows: “By nineteenth-century norms, Cary’s caustic, jolting language seemed ill-suited to a woman. She used phrases such as ‘gall and wormwood,’ ‘moral pest,’ ‘petty despot,’ ‘superannuated minister,’ ‘nest of unclean birds,’ ‘moral monsters,’ and ‘priest-ridden people,’ in order to keep her ideas before the public” (CallowayThomas 1994, 225). Most of Cary’s extant writings are letters and scathing editorials from the Provincial Freeman railing against intemperance, “addled brained young people,” and any number of other displeasing states of affairs. Texts of her speeches are scarce, but the following excerpt, reprinted with limited editorial intervention, comes from a sermon “apparently delivered before a Chatham [Canada West] audience on 6 April 1858” (Ripley 1986, 388) and suggests the fervor of her biblically based and feminist antislavery rhetoric: “We cannot successfully Evade duty because the Suffering fellow . . . is only a woman! She too is a neighbor. The good Samaritan of this generation must not take for their Exemplars the priest and the Levite when a fellow woman is among thieves—neither will they find excuse in the custom as barbarous and anti-Christian as any promulgated by pious Brahmin that . . . they may be only females. The spirit of true philanthropy knows no sex” (Cary 1986b, 389). As William Still’s history of the Underground Railroad documents, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) joined the abolitionist movement largely because of an incident that occurred in the slave state of Maryland, her home state. In 1853 a law was passed prohibiting free blacks from entering Maryland. When a man unintentionally violated that law, he was arrested and sent to Georgia as a slave. He escaped but was recaptured and soon died. Hearing of this sequence of events, Harper remarked, “Upon that grave I pledge myself to the Anti-Slavery cause” (Still 1872, 786). In 1854 Harper gave up teaching to become a lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. Harper delivered what was probably her first antislavery speech at a meeting in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1854; it was possibly titled “Education and Elevation of the Colored Race” (Still 1872). She continued to speak out against slavery and its con­ sequences, traveling throughout the New England area, southern Canada, and west to Michigan and Ohio. During one six-week period in 1854 she gave at least thirty-three lectures in twenty-one New England towns (Foster 1990). Because of her articulate and reserved manner, many who heard her found it difficult to believe that she was of African descent. Grace Greenwood, a journalist, labeled her “the bronze muse” and bemoaned the fact that a woman of such stature could possibly have been a slave, as if to suggest that slavery was more acceptable for some human beings than for others. For such observers she

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was considered a fascinating aberration, as this account by a Maine abolitionist suggests: “Miss W. is slightly tinged with African blood, but the color only serves to add a charm to the occasion which nothing else could give, while at the same time it disarms the fastidious of that so common prejudice which denies to white ladies the right to give public lectures” (Sterling 1984, 161). This commentary also highlights the perception that white women were different and that, while they were yet denied the right to give public lectures, black women were not always frowned upon in this role. Harper frequently focused on the economic aspects of slavery and the irony of owning “property that can walk.” In a lecture titled “Could We Trace the Record,” delivered during the 1857 meeting of the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, she argued that slavery’s financial benefits would make its abolishment more difficult: “A hundred thousand newborn babes are annually added to the victims of slavery; twenty thousand lives are annually sacrificed on the plantations of the South. Such a sight should send a thrill of horror, through the nerves of civilization and impel the heart of humanity to lofty deeds. So it might, if men had not found a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold. Instead of listening to the cry of agony, they listen to the ring of dollars and stoop down to pick up the coin” (Harper 1990a, 101). Her commitment to the abolition of slavery led her to do more than lecture. Harper was active in the Philadelphia Underground Railroad, giving time, money, and talents to its efforts. She never refused an opportunity to engage in activities designed to promote emancipation. Without exception, those who reviewed Harper’s lectures commented as much on her platform presence and her ethos as upon the content of her speeches. Such phrases as “splendid articulation,” “pure language,” “pleasant voice,” “thought flowed in eloquent and poetic expression,” “never assuming, never theatrical,” “spoke feelingly and eloquently,” and “a nature most femininely sensitive” characterize the lasting impression she left on her audiences. Even her contemporary Mary Ann Shadd Cary acknowledged Harper’s superiority as an orator. In an 1858 letter to her husband Cary wrote, “She is the greatest female speaker ever was here, so wisdom obliges me to keep out of the way as with her prepared lectures there would just be no chance of a favorable comparison” (Sterling 1984, 174). These reactions add credence to the claim that a speaker’s personality may be her most persuasive appeal. Harper’s magnetic personality should not, however, overshadow the powerful substance of her antislavery messages. One of her strongest messages, “Our Greatest Want,” appeared in an 1859 issue of the Anglo-African Magazine, addressed not to whites but to northern blacks, in response to a growing interest in material wealth: “The respect that is bought by gold is not worth much. It is no honor to shake hands politically with men who whip women and steal babies. If this government has no call for our services, no aim for your children, we have the greater need of them to build up a true manhood and womanhood for ourselves” (Harper [1859] 1990b, 103).

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Women’s Rights Prominent black women abolitionists such as Remond and Cary, as well as Maria W. Stewart and Sojourner Truth, frequently combined antislavery discussions with discussions of feminist issues, framing their antislavery arguments in feminist terms. By the same token, white free antislavery feminists, as Jean Fagan Yellin puts it, conflated the oppression of enslaved and free women by equating the literal enslavement of black women to their own figurative enslavement. Yellin goes on to point out, however, that the speeches of black women testify to no confusion between the two experiences. “Nor,” she writes, “did they confuse the free women’s struggle for self-liberation from a metaphorical slavery with their own struggle for self-liberation from slavery. For them, the discourse of antislavery feminism became not liberating but confining when it colored the self-liberated Woman and Sister white and reassigned the role of the passive victim, which the patriarchy traditionally had reserved for white women, to women who were black” (Yellin 1989, 78–79). Remond often cited the abuses of enslaved black women to bolster her abolitionist appeals. In her 1859 speech in Manchester she made a special appeal to the women of England, pointing out that “women are the worst victims of the slave power.” Cary, in addition to her abolitionist activities in Canada, addressed groups on behalf of woman’s rights, assigning the emancipation of slaves and the liberation of women equal importance. In her 1858 Chatham sermon, quoted from above, she makes appeals for “the Slave mother as well as the Slave father” and places in the same “pit” the “colored people of this country” and “the women of the land,” invoking Christ as the supreme example of one who implied “an Equal inheritance” for the sexes. When in 1869 Cary, under pressure from black women delegates, was allowed to address the National Colored Labor Union, she spoke on woman’s rights and suffrage. As a result, the union voted to include women workers in its organizations (Giddings 1984). Black women had been defending their rights well before these and other more organized events occurred. A religious abolitionist who justified social activism with biblical scriptures, Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) addressed the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston in 1832, exhorting the women to exert their influence: “O woman, woman! Your example is powerful, your influence great; it extends over your husbands and your children, and throughout the circle of your acquaintance” (Stewart [1832] 1995a, 16). In a speech at Franklin Hall she commented on the lack of employment opportunities for young black women in Boston as a consequence of “the powerful force of prejudice,” a force which prevented them from becoming more than domestic workers (Stewart [1832] 1995b, 6). Born in Connecticut, Maria Miller moved to Boston and married James W. Stewart, a ship’s outfitter, in 1826. They were members of Boston’s black middle class and friends of David Walker, the fiery, outspoken abolitionist and author of Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together With a Preamble, to The Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular And Very Expressly, To Those of the United States of America in 1829. In this pamphlet Walker

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urged the slaves to revolt, slay their masters, if necessary, and escape to freedom. Incorporating much of Walker’s style, Stewart delivered her Franklin Hall address in 1832, shortly after her husband’s death. Stewart spoke on several other occasions between 1832 and 1833, but because of strong criticism she retired from public speaking, delivering her farewell address on 21 September 1833. In her 1833 “Farewell Address” Stewart lamented the fact that she was not well received as a public speaker, declaring, “I am about to leave you, perhaps never more to return. For I find it is no use for me as an individual to try to make myself useful among my color in this city. It was contempt for my moral and religious opinions in private that drove me thus before a public. Had experience more plainly shown me that it was the nature of man to crush his fellow, I should not have thought it so hard” (Stewart [1833] 1987, 70). Marilyn Richardson points out the irony that, although Stewart’s speeches called for the liberation of all men and women, when published in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, they were “for the sake of editorial propriety” relegated to the “Ladies’ Department” (1987, 11). After leaving slavery Isabella Baumfree (1797–1883) moved to New York City, became a domestic worker, and joined a religious commune. In 1843, at that time about forty-six years old, Baumfree declared herself to be Sojourner Truth, called by God to travel and preach. In this manner she began her career as a lecturer. She told her story across Long Island and entered Connecticut and then Massachusetts, where she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. While in Massachusetts she met some of the leading abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, David Ruggles, Parker Pillsbury, and Wendell Phillips. It was during her affiliation with the association that she sharpened her speaking skills. At the Akron, Ohio, Woman’s Rights Convention in 1851, Sojourner Truth publicly validated all women when she contradicted previous speakers who had claimed women weak and helpless. Truth, after observing convention proceedings for one day, asked for permission to speak. Permission was granted even though many of the women feared that Truth’s appearance would damage their cause by association with the slavery issue. It was on this occasion that she delivered her well-known “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Interestingly, the speech, quite popular among women activists today, received little attention at the time it was delivered. No mention of it was made in the conference proceedings. In this speech she pointed to contradictions exemplified in her ability to perform physical tasks as well as any man and reminded her audience that Jesus was the product of God and a woman, without the help of a man. Several years later, at the 9 May 1867 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), Truth entered the debate over the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to grant black men but not women the right to vote. There she estimated the consequence of such a change on black women in particular: “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored woman; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women get theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad

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as it was before. . . . I want women to have their rights. In the courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. I wish woman to have her voice there among the pettifoggers. If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for me to be there” (Truth [1867] 1995, 28). A former slave, Truth, perhaps more than any of the other black women activists discussed in this chapter, embodied the arguments she made in support of women and abolition. She spoke not of weakness but of power, “the lack of power that men ascribe to womankind and the presence of her own power and the power of all women” (Yellin 1989, 80). After emancipation black women speakers concentrated on the newly freed women in the South, who needed training and protection. They addressed women’s rights conventions and church conferences, and they organized their own gatherings to defend their honor and claim their place in public life. Frances Harper continued to lecture on convergence in the plights of black and white women. In her 1866 address to the Eleventh National Woman’s Right’s Convention, “We Are All Bound up Together,” she described her shabby treatment by the state of Ohio two years earlier upon the death of her husband Fenton Harper. She acknowledged that “justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law.” Later in that same speech, however, she expressed doubt that all white women could be counted on to look out for the best interests of black women: “I do not believe that white women are dewdrops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party” (Harper [1866] 1990c, 217–18). Harper’s words here indicate black women’s awareness that although there were common interests among black and white women, there were also major differences. The black church provided a number of rhetorical opportunities for black preaching women and black women advocates of such secular causes as woman’s rights and abolitionism. As C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya point out, “many of these community service and political activities stemmed from a moral concern to uplift the race that was deeply rooted in religious motivation” (1990, 281). In fact, nearly all the women discussed in this essay were active members of black churches. It is not surprising, then, that much of the discourse on women’s rights emerged from church women such as those associated with the Black Baptist Convention. Lucy Wilmot Smith (1861–1890) spoke of black women’s needs to a largely male audience at the 1886 meeting of the American National Baptist Convention. At the time of her address she was historian of the association and, along with two other Baptist churchwomen, Mary Cook and Virginia Broughton, led the challenge against this predominantly male organization (Higginbotham 1993). Smith opened her address, “The Future Colored Girl,” by decrying the lack of adequate professional training for all women through the

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ages, and she closed by describing in particular the black woman’s condition. She cataloged employment options for black women, among them raising poultry, small fruit or flowers; bee farming; dairying; lecturing; newspaper work; photography; medicine; teaching; and practicing elocution. Her point was that black women needed to explore a range of work opportunities in order to move beyond domestic labor toward some independence: “It is one of the evils of the day that from babyhood girls are taught to look forward to the time when they will be supported by a father, a brother or somebody’s [sic] else brother. In teaching her that in whatever field of labor she enters she will abandon after a few years is teaching her to despise the true dignity of labor. The boy is taught to fill this life with as many hard strokes as possible. The girl should receive the same lesson” (Smith 1887, 74). She spoke uncompromisingly of the lack of training and employment opportunities for black women. A close friend and colleague, Mary Cook, eulogized her as follows: “She was connected with all the leading interest of her race and denomination. Her pen and voice always designated her position so clearly that no one need mistake her motive” (Higginbotham 1993, 126). Cook, in an essay prepared for an 1890 work titled The Negro Baptist Pulpit: A Collection of Sermons and Papers, encouraged the church to give women more responsibilities for “the salvation of the world” and to enlist them “to labor by the side of the men” so that “it will not be many years before a revolution will be felt all over this broad land, and the heathen will no longer walk in darkness, but will praise God, the light of their salvation” (Brawley [1890] 1971, 285). In the 1890s black women organized themselves nationally, in part as a result of the powerful rhetorical activities of Ida B. Wells. In 1895 Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a Boston woman’s activist, issued a call for a conference of black women. One concern was an open letter from John W. Jacks, president of the Missouri Press Association. The letter attacked Wells’s character and by implication the morality of all black women in an attempt to rebut Ida Wells’s accounts of southern lynching. As a result of Ruffin’s call, the First Congress of Colored Women convened on 29 July 1895 in Boston. On the program at the 1895 conference were the names of several prominent black women who spoke on issues affecting all black women. One of the most provocative addresses, “The Value of Race Literature,” was delivered by Victoria Earle Matthews (1861–1907). Matthews, born in Fort Valley, Georgia, moved to New York in 1873. She became a journalist and helped to organize the Women’s Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn. In the speech Matthews paraded before her elite audience the range of stereotypical black characters portrayed in literature by whites, and she called for those present to take the lead in creating more literature of their own. But the speech more specifically focused on women’s rights was “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” delivered in 1897 at the San Francisco meeting of the Society of Christian Endeavor. A former slave, Matthews recalled slavery’s past horrors: “As I stand here to-day clothed in the garments of Christian womanhood, the horrible days of slavery, out of which

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I came, seem as a dream that is told, some horror incredible. Indeed, could they have been, and are not?” (Matthews [1897] 1995,150). Matthews also protested the laws forbidding mixed marriages, laws which, she claimed, disgraced black women most: “As long as the affections are controlled by legislation in defiance of Christian law, making infamous the union of black and white, we shall have unions without the sanction of the law, and children without legal parentage, to the degradation of black womanhood and the disgrace of white manhood” (154). At the World’s Congress of Representative Women race activists addressed white women about black women. The congress, part of the Columbian Exposition, was held 15–22 May 1893 in Chicago. The women’s exhibit was to illuminate the accomplishments of American women, but only after much political maneuvering were a few prominent black women invited to participate. Fannie Williams, well-known in Chicago women’s circles, presented one of the major addresses, “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation.” Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944) was born to a prominent New York family and attended the Collegiate Institute of Brockport, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the School of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., where she taught for almost ten years. Williams eventually settled in Chicago and gained a solid reputation as a speaker. In her speech to the Congress Williams spoke of common womanhood shared by all those present. Given the constraints under which she spoke, Williams wisely emphasized similarities rather than differences. She argued that many black women were rapidly becoming social and intellectual equals to white women and that those who were not needed their support. Such support, she claimed, would be in the best interest of all women: “The fixed policy of persecutions and injustice against a class of women who are weak and defenseless will be necessarily hurtful to the cause of all women. Colored women are becoming more and more a part of the social forces that must help to determine the questions that so concern women generally. . . . If it be the high purpose of these deliberations to lessen the resistance to woman’s progress, you can not fail to be interested in our struggles against the many oppositions that harass us” (Williams [1893] 1995, 118). Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), present at both the National Conference of Colored Women and the Congress of Representative Women, delivered her most challenging defense of black women at the 1886 Convocation of Colored Clergy in Washington, D.C. She criticized the clergy and the Episcopalian Church for discriminating against women. Cooper taught at Wilberforce College in Xenia, Ohio, from 1884 to 1885, then returned to St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she began her education, and remained there until 1887. Cooper then moved to Washington, D.C., where she held several teaching positions. She was also in the vanguard of the black women’s club movement, helping to organize the Washington Colored Women’s League.

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In her speech “Womanhood A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race,” she rehearsed the history of women in general and the future prospects for the southern black woman in particular. Like Frances Harper twenty years earlier, Cooper employed the “same but different” argument directed to audiences throughout the century. Appealing, on the one hand, to a common womanhood, Cooper highlighted, on the other, those differences resulting from slavery and color prejudice: “With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving upon her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She must be loosed from her bands and set to work” (Cooper [1892] 1995, 63).

Lynching That the entry “antilynching movement” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1994) is essentially an article about Ida Wells indicates clearly the extent of her campaign against mob violence. Although most of the speakers discussed in this chapter spoke out against lynching, none did it more effectively and more consistently than Ida B. Wells. This discussion of antilynching discourse also centers on this forceful speaker. In manner of speaking and reputation, Wells can be compared to Cary. Both were bold, straightforward, and hard-hitting. Wells also attended the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women, but unlike her contemporaries Frances Harper and Fannie Barrier Williams, Wells had no official slot on the program of speakers. Instead, she positioned herself near the Haitian Pavilion, where Frederick Douglass was presiding, and distributed copies of an eighty-one page protest pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. The pamphlet contained pieces by Douglass; Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney who later married Wells; I. Garland Penn, a newspaperman; and Wells herself. Over ten thousand copies were circulated during the fair. But this was only one of many causes Wells espoused. Wells the social activist spoke out over a period of almost forty years, until her death in 1931, against the denial of women’s rights, against racism generally, and, of course, against the practice of lynching. Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, was the child of former slaves. Both parents died of yellow fever in 1878, leaving Wells, at sixteen the oldest, in charge of five siblings. Taking two sisters with her, she eventually moved to Memphis to teach. However, she soon discovered that she did not adapt well to the profession's constraints, and she confesses in her autobiography, “I never cared for teaching” (Wells 1970, 31). In 1889 Wells became editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Her editorials protested racial injustice in education, voting rights, and public transportation. Eager to get her newspaper into the homes of those who could not read, Wells printed several editions on easily identified pink paper. Not until 1892, after three of her friends had been lynched in Memphis and her newspaper office had been burned down by

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an angry mob, did Wells launch a verbal war against lynching that continued into the twentieth century. In response to the events in Memphis, a group of prominent black women from New York and Brooklyn organized a testimonial in her honor at Lyric Hall on 5 October 1892. On this occasion Wells delivered her first public speech, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in which she proposed corrective action against lynching: “Nothing is more definitely settled than [that] he must act for himself. I have shown how he may employ the boycott, emigration, and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery” (Wells [1892]1989, 419). Many prominent blacks, including Wells, had convinced themselves that those being lynched were indeed guilty and deserved to die. But after incidents such as the one in Memphis, they began to recognize lynching as an attempt to suppress black progress. Wells stressed this point in her first public speech. Not limiting herself to this country, she took her antilynching campaign to Europe and found favor there, in the face of disparagement by the southern press in the United States. Wells traveled to England and Scotland in April 1893 to deliver a series of antilynching lectures. She returned to England for a six-month stay in 1894, serving as paid correspondent for the Chicago Inter-Ocean. On 13 February 1893, before leaving for her first tour of England, Wells addressed the Boston Monday Lectureship. In this speech, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Wells rehearsed in detail the Memphis incident and appealed to her audience with gruesome details of a lynching in Paris, Texas, only two weeks earlier. She appealed to this predominantly white audience for public outcry, advancing her belief that their failure to act was a result of ignorance rather than apathy and drawing on their concern for America’s reputation: I am before the American people to-day . . . because of a deep-seated conviction that the country at large does not know the extent to which lynch law prevails in parts of the Republic, nor the conditions which force into exile those who speak the truth. I cannot believe that the apathy and indifference which so largely obtains regarding mob rule is other than the result of ignorance of the true situation. . . . Repeated attacks on the life, liberty and happiness of any citizen or class of citizens are attacks on distinctive American institutions; such attacks imperiling as they do the foundation of government, law and order, merit the thoughtful consideration of far-sighted Americans; not from a standpoint of sentiment, not even so much from a standpoint of justice to a weak race, as from a desire to preserve our institutions. (Wells [1893] 1995, 80)

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Racial Uplift In the midst of the struggle for freedom and equality, black women pressed their people toward self-help, self-improvement, and racial uplift. Racial uplift was emphasized from two perspectives: encouraging those who were in need to take initiative; and challenging those who had accomplished to “lift” those who had not. Although public address focused specifically on improving the working and living conditions of black women is considered above in the section called “Women's Rights,” the speeches of three activist educators who argued for general assistance to southern blacks after the Civil War are considered under the heading of “Racial Uplift.” Frances Harper made a point of addressing directly those in need of social and emotional uplift in the post-Civil War South. Edmonia G. Highgate spent her brief life teaching the newly freed in the South and lecturing for financial support in the North. Lucy Craft Laney in 1893 organized a day and boarding school in Augusta, Georgia; developed the city’s first kindergarten; and stressed in her speeches to educated blacks their crucial role in the work of racial advancement. Frances Harper, who spoke on all the issues discussed in this essay, adopted the first perspective—encouraging self-help. She availed herself of every opportunity to speak directly to the people for whom she fought, traveling throughout the Midwest before the war and in the deep South after the war. In a biographical sketch William Still writes, “For the best part of several years, since the war, she has traveled very extensively through the Southern States, going on the plantations and amongst the lowly, as well as to the cities and towns, addressing schools, Churches, meetings in Court Houses, Legislative Halls, &c., and, sometimes, under the most trying and hazardous circumstances” (1872, 767). According to one story, during an appearance in Darlington, South Carolina, instead of standing in the pulpit of the church in which she spoke, she stood near the door where those outside as well as those inside could hear her. In a 21 September 1860 letter to Jane E. Hitchcock Jones, a Quaker abolitionist from Ohio, she expresses her view that such lectures among free and formerly enslaved blacks help to lift morale and develop self-esteem: There are a number of colored settlements in the West, where a few words of advice and encouragement among our people might act as a stimulant and charm; and if they would change the public opinion of the country, they should not find it, I hope, a useless work to strive to elevate the character of the colored people, not merely by influencing the public around them but among them; for after all, this prejudice of which such complaint has been made, if I understand it aright, is simply a great protest of human minds rising up against slavery, and so hating it for themselves that they learn not only to despise it, but the people that submit to it, and those identified with them by race. (Harper 1992, 82)

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Harper must have recognized the opportunity for instruction that public speaking afforded to those who did not read and did not subscribe to newspapers. She also wrote of giving lectures privately to women at no charge. Her speeches to such audiences were usually impromptu, and generally journalists were not present; consequently, no extant texts of these spontaneous orations remain. Born to former slaves in Syracuse, New York, Edmonia Highgate (1844–1870) lived for only twenty-six years, but during those years she did all she could for racial uplift, alternately teaching the newly freed in the South and lecturing for their support in the North. At the age of twenty Highgate was sent to Norfolk, Virginia, by the American Missionary Association to teach. After three months of intense work, she had a mental breakdown and returned to Syracuse. Shortly after her return Highgate addressed the 1864 National Convention of Colored Men, held in Syracuse. Highgate and Frances Harper were the only women to address the exclusively male organization. When Frederick Douglass introduced her he said, “You have your Anna Dickinsons; and we have ours. We wish to meet you at every point” (Minutes 1969, 14). Douglass was referring here to the orator Anna Dickinson, who had achieved fame after her 1861 Philadelphia address on “The Rights and Wrongs of Women” at the age of nineteen. Although the convention minutes do not include the text of Highgate’s speech, a summary in the 26 October 1864 New Orleans Tribune demonstrates the tenor of her political activism and astuteness: “Miss Highgate said she would not be quite in her place, perhaps, if a girl as she is, she should tell the Convention what they ought to do; but she had, with others thought about what had been proposed and those thoughts she would tell them. Miss Highgate was evidently a strong Lincoln Man; so much so, that she felt that Gen. Fremont ought not to be a candidate. . . . Miss Highgate urged the Convention to press on, to not abate hope until the glorious time spoken of to-night, shall come” (Sterling 1984, 296). While back in New York, Highgate lectured to raise funds for freedmen’s relief. She returned to the South in 1865, teaching for a while in Maryland, Louisiana, and Mississippi. After four years she resumed lecturing in New York, New England, and Canada. In February 1879 she spoke at the Thirty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts AntiSlavery Society. Following a lengthy address by John M. Langston, a prominent black activist from Ohio, Highgate warned against hasty optimism. A paraphrase in the National Anti-Slavery Standard stated the following: Miss Highgate said that, after laboring five years as a teacher in the South, it was perhaps appropriate for her to give a report on the state of things there. In her opinion, even if the Fifteenth Amendment should now be ratified, it would be only a paper ratification. Even in the instruction given to the ignorant there lacks some of the main essentials of right instruction. The teachers sent out by the evangelical organizations do very little to remove caste-prejudice, the twin sister of slavery . . . President Lincoln was accustomed to take credit to himself for moving forward no

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faster than the people demanded. The Republicans in the South do no better. We need Anti-Slavery teachers there; teachers who will show that it is safe to do right. The Anti-Slavery Society must not disband, because its work in the South is not yet half done; and if not now thoroughly done, it will have to be done over again. (National Anti-Slavery Standard 1870) In a June 1870 letter to the abolitionists Gerrit and Ann Smith, Highgate mentions the advice of Theodore Tilton, famous speaker and friend, who, impressed with her speaking skills, urged her “to write a lecture to interest the general public, deliver it as other lecturers do and you will then be on your way to secure the funds necessary to aid the cause to which you are so devoted” (Sterling 1984, 301). Highgate implied in the letter that she might like to visit the Smiths to gain the privacy needed to write such a lecture. But she never did so. A month later she requested instead that the AMA send her south again to Jackson, Mississippi, for another teaching tour. She never returned to the South, however. Edmonia Highgate died in Syracuse in October 1870. As the title of Lucy Laney’s 1899 speech, “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman,” indicates, the lecture centered on racial uplift. During the post-Reconstruction period, those who had acquired education and prosperity felt a duty to educate those less fortunate. This education extended to morality and economy as well as reading and writing, for as Paula Giddings, at one point quoting Laney, writes, “Whatever their views about social sanctions, one reason for the emphasis on morality was that lack of it could be impoverishing. . . . a good part of the philosophy of racial uplift had to do with lifting the burdens of ‘ignorance and immorality’ with ‘true culture and character, linked with— cash’ ” (1984, 102). Although Laney called this challenge a “burden,” she was not resentful but despairing that the times had created this triple burden of “shame and crime and prejudice.” The “shame” Laney saw as a consequence of nonlegalized slave marriages, poor parenting skills, and ignorance of hygiene. The large numbers of young men and women incarcerated provided evidence of the “crime.” The “prejudice” came from those in power, who made it difficult to overcome the other two burdens. This speech was delivered in 1899 at the third Hampton Negro Conference on the Virginia campus of Hampton University, one of the black schools formed after the Civil War. At these annual conferences Hampton graduates and other prominent race leaders discussed strategies toward racial improvement. As was the case at many such conferences, the men and women met separately, under the unfortunate assumption that women operated in a separate sphere and had no need to address issues that were, in fact, of collective importance. Lucy Craft Laney (1854–1933) was born in Macon, Georgia, to free, literate parents. Her father, an ordained Presbyterian minister, earned enough money while enslaved to purchase freedom for himself and his wife. Laney was graduated from Atlanta University in 1873, a member of the first graduating class. After teaching for ten years, Laney established a school in Augusta, Georgia, which eventually became the Haines Normal

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and Industrial Institute. Near the end of the century Laney, one of several black women who founded their own schools, offered a curriculum in liberal arts as well as vocational training and was especially interested in the education of girls. By the time she spoke to the Hampton Negro Conference in 1899, Laney’s school was on its way to becoming an established success. In “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman” she called specifically on “the educated Negro woman” not only to teach but to speak. Laney argued that “as a public lecturer she may give advice, helpful suggestions, and important knowledge that will change a whole community and start its people on the upward way.” She cited the example of Frances Harper (as well as four other women). She closed her speech with a story about a group of male laborers who successfully lifted “a heavy piece of timber to the top of a building” only when they asked the women to help them, reinforcing her message that women as well as men were needed to ensure successful racial uplift: “Today not only the men on top call, but a needy race—the whole world, calls loudly to the cultured Negro women to come to the rescue. Do they hear? Are they coming? Will they push?” (Laney [1899] 1992, 174).

Summary The rhetorical activities of numerous other nineteenth-century black women speakers have not been mentioned here. These women spoke their minds from platform and pulpit and went to work correcting the wrongs they saw before them. They left no records, wrote no books, organized no conferences; but they helped to establish a tradition of political activism among black women. The activities of the women discussed merely illustrate the ranges of issues brought to public attention by women using oratory to effect change. The general response of white audiences to the very presence of intelligent, articulate black women was often much stronger than their response to anything the women had to say. These speakers were the embodiment of their messages—whether the message was antislavery, feminist, or an appeal for racial dignity. They authenticated their arguments; the messengers were their messages. African American women of the nineteenth century participated in history largely through their rhetorical activities. The pages of the Woman’s Era provide ample evidence of their participation in the political discourse of their time. On the front page of its 24 March 1894 inaugural edition can be found a photograph and tribute to Lucy Stone, pioneer women’s rights advocate and anti-slavery lecturer, known for her moving oratory. The Women’s Era Club members chose as their motto a phrase from her last message, “Make the world better.” (The Women’s Era, Vol. 1, No. 1, 24 March 1894, p. 1).

References Brawley, Edward M. [1890] 1971. The Negro Baptist Pulpit: A Collection of Sermons and Papers. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press.

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Calloway-Thomas, Carolyn. 1994. “Cary, Mary Ann Shadd.” In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 2, edited by Darlene Clark Hine et al., 224–26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cary, Mary Ann Shadd. 1986a. “Mary Ann Shadd Cary to Frederick Douglass, 25 January 1849.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 4: The United States 1847–1858, edited by C. Peter Ripley, 31–34. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. —. 1986b. “Sermon” [6 April 1858]. In The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 2: Canada, 1830 –1865, edited by C. Peter Ripley, 388–91. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Cooper, Anna Julia. [1892] 1995. “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race.” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by Shirley Wilson Logan, 53–74. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. DeBoer, Clara Merritt. 1994. Be Jubilant My Feet: African American Abolitionists in the American Missionary Association 1839–1861. New York: Garland. Foster, Frances Smith, ed. 1990. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist Press. Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred Moss. 1988. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York: McGraw-Hill. Giddings, Paula. 1984. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: William Morrow. Harper, Frances E. W, 1990a. “Could We Trace the Record of Every Human Heart.” In A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster, 100–102. New York: Feminist Press. —. [1859] 1990b. “Our Greatest Want.” In A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster, 1024. New York: Feminist Press. —. [1866] 1990c. “We Are All Bound up Together.” In A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster, 217–19. New York: Feminist Press. —. 1992. “Letter to Jane E. Hitchcock Jones, 21 September 1860.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 5: The United States, 1859–1865, edited by C. Peter Ripley, 81–83. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1993. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880 –1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Laney, Lucy. [1899] 1992. “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman.” In The Rhetoric of Struggle: Public Address by African American Women, edited by Robbie Walker, 167–74. New York: Garland Publishing. Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. 1990. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham: Duke University Press. Matthews, Victoria Earle. [1897] 1995. “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman.” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by Shirley Wilson Logan, 149–55. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions 1830 –1864. 1969. Ed. Howard Holman Bell. New York: Arno Press. National Anti-Slavery Standard. 1870 (5 February).

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Remond, Sarah Parker. [1859] 1985a. “Speech at the Music Hall.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 1: The British Isles 1830 –1865, edited by C. Peter Ripley, 435–44. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. —. [1859] 1985b. “Speech at the Athenauem.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 1: The British Isles, 1830 –1865, edited by C. Peter Ripley, 457–61. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Richardson, Marilyn, ed. 1987. Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ripley, C. Peter, ed. 1985. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vol. 1: The British Isles 1830 –1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. —. 1986. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vol. 2: Canada, 1830 –1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Lucy Wilmot. 1887. “The Future Colored Girl.” In Minutes and Addresses of the American National Baptist Convention, Saint Louis, Mo., 25–29 August 1886, 68–74. Jackson, Miss.: J. J. Spelman. Sterling, Dorothy, ed. 1984. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton. Stewart, Maria W. [1833] 1987. “Mrs. Stewart’s Farewell Address to her Friends in the City of Boston.” In Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, edited by Marilyn Richardson, 65–74. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. [1832] 1995a. “An Address Delivered before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston.” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by Shirley Wilson Logan, 11–16. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. [1832] 1995b. “Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall.” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by Shirley Wilson Logan, 6–10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Still, William. 1872. The Underground Rail Road. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates. Truth, Sojourner. [1867] 1995. “Speech Delivered to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association.” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by Shirley Wilson Logan, 28–29. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Wells, Ida B. 1970. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. [1892] 1989. “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” In Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vol. 2: Key Texts of the Earliest Feminists, edited by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, 385–419. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. —. [1893] 1995. “Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by Shirley Wilson Logan, 80–99. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Wesley, Dorothy Porter. 1994. “Remond, Sarah Parker.” In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 2, edited by Darlene Clark Hine et al., 972–74. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Williams, Fannie Barrier. [1893] 1995. “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation.” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by Shirley Wilson Logan, 106–19. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. The Woman’s Era (Boston, Mass.). 24 March 1894, 1 June 1894, April 1895. Yellin, Jean Fagan. 1989. Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America* Nan Johnson Nervous, enthusiastic, and talkative women are the foam and sparkle, quiet women the wine of life. The senses ache and grow weary of the perpetual glare and brilliancy of the former, but turn with a sense of security and repose to the mild, mellow glow irradiating the sphere of the latter. We associate all ideas of rest with quiet women. They are souldivinities reverently guarding their sacred trusts in the Court of Silence. When she speaks, her words are aptly chosen and fitly spoken. She is wise and thoughtful, but loving and meek. “Still waters run deep,” but not in the world-applied sense; babbling rills do not wear their channels deep, but streams of calmest flow have hidden depths undreamed of, unsuspected. —Anonymous, “Quiet Women” 461 In an article entitled “Quiet Women,” which appeared in The Ladies’ Repository in 1868, an anonymous author argues that “quiet women are the wine of life.” Capturing the deep cultural longing of the postbellum period for the icon of the American woman as angel of the hearth, this portrait deifies the quiet woman and demonizes the other possibilities: the enthusiastic woman, the talkative woman, the brilliant woman, and the babbling woman. The mild and mellow queen of the “Court of Silence” is graceful, calm, and, most important of all, silent. In this characterization, an idealized woman is defined as necessarily rhetorically meek. By worshipping “the quiet woman,” influential proponents of public opinion such as The Ladies’ Repository reinscribed for a postbellum readership a definition of true womanhood that equated silence with feminine virtue and enthusiastic vocality with its opposite. The argument that the rhetorical conduct of the “wise and thoughtful” woman could be contrasted instructively with the trivial and ultimately inconsequential rhetorical behavior of loud and talkative *  Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (2000): 221-42. Copyright © by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. Note: This essay has been condensed. 274

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women is one that was made in so many cultural conversations of the postbellum period that it achieved the power of an ideological trope. Efforts to regulate women’s rhetorical behavior intensified rather than abated in the decades following the Civil War as women pursued education, the right to vote, property rights, and mobility in public life. In conduct literature, a genre that proliferated during the postbellum period, the preferred construction of the “quiet” woman was a mainstay in an ideological agenda that supported the generally held nineteenth-century view that character and the nature of one’s rhetoric are mutually revealing. Like other types of self-help materials marketed in the last decades of the century, such as elocution manuals and letter-writing guides, conduct manuals included among their vast tables of contents the matters of how and where one ought to speak. In their coverage of deportment in all areas of life, conduct manuals promised the aspiring middle-class American an education in the home in the culturally valuable skills of public speaking and writing.2 The collective enterprise of the parlor rhetoric movement and conduct literature in particular was to offer happiness and success to those who would follow certain rules. Enormously popular in the postbellum period and well into the turn of the century, conduct manuals argued a conservative gender agenda that appealed to the middle-class readers of a nation who seemed eager to accept the idea that correct deportment in daily life could help to restore the social calm the postwar nation longed for. Although by the 1880s the American public had well in mind notable examples of women, such as Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had assumed powerful reformist voices in the causes of abolition, temperance, and women’s rights, the rhetorical space these women occupied in shaping political and cultural life was viewed as the exception rather than the rule. In spite of the high profile rhetorical careers of a handful of women, or, perhaps, because of them, postbellum America wondered uneasily just how public women’s lives were becoming and with what results. In this historical moment of uneasiness, the icon of the quiet woman, the wine of life, seemed to erase the complexity of the “Woman Question” and return the American woman to the home where she belonged. Conduct literature participated in the rhetorical repatriation of the woman back to the parlor by overtly discouraging women from having strong voices, literally and culturally, and by reminding American readers that, if happiness was to be secured, women should keep to their former place in the home and do it quietly. Postbellum readers seeking trustworthy advice to leading a happy life found inscribed in the text and illustrations of manuals promising to serve as “watchmen on the wall” the persistent message that women’s claims to rhetorics of power compromise their virtue and the moral health of the nation. By locating the negotiation of cultural power so squarely on rhetorical grounds, the genre of postbellum conduct literature provides a revealing example of the historic tendency of rhetorical pedagogy to gain its influence by reinscribing rather than rewriting normative cultural ideologies. In her analysis of how success manuals constructed the identity of the idealized American man in Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Guilded Age America (1997),

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Judy Hilkey makes a convincing case that conduct manuals published widely between 1870 and 1910 taught American men how to pursue success and reinforced the importance of the essentially masculine sphere of industrialization. Although she concentrates on how conduct for men is defined and reinforced by maxims and pictorial evidence, Hilkey also corroborates that the implications of the gendering we see in conduct manuals of this period are ideologically far-reaching: The genderized concept of success built upon, reinforced, and elaborated existing stereotypes about sex roles and gender relationships. The conceptual power of the equation of success and manhood was based on the opposition inherent in the two terms: success versus failure and manliness versus womanliness. To put it another way, the power of the linkage of success with manhood was underwritten by the power of the overt linkage of failure with womanhood. Insofar as the equation of success and manhood became normative, it became difficult to imagine a successful woman who was not “manly” or to believe that a woman could be “a success” in the world of work and politics outside the home. (9) Hilkey makes the astute point that the highly gendered focus in conduct manuals on masculinity and success as equivalent terms means that the ideological argument was being made synonymously that women could not achieve success in public life because they could not embody masculinity except in the perverse sense. Although an exploration of this consequence is not her project, Hilkey’s sensitivity to the barriers being inscribed for women in discourses that were meant to teach men how to overcome obstacles is a helpful one, for it makes quite clear that conduct literature can be read as a generic site where the overt and subtextual complexities of gender and power are being negotiated. When we read conduct manuals as an ideologically laden genre, as Hilkey suggests we do, even more layers to the gendering impact of these texts can be identified when we recognize that one of the most persistent categories that conduct manuals address is rhetorical behavior. In these discourses, American women are instructed over and over again that their only and best power lies in their “quiet” occupation of the home. Specific advice regarding how women are to speak and converse, offered under typical headings of “Marriage,” “The Wife,” and “The Mother” in conduct manuals published in the last decades of the century, reinforces the conservative postbellum desire to keep the American woman at home, a queen in her “Court of Silence.” In a representative late-nineteenth-century conduct manual, What Is Worth While (1895), Mrs. Samuel Lindsay confirms what had become a conventionalized contrast between the good, quiet woman and the untrustworthy, vocal one in her discussion of female conduct. Noting that it is potentially harmful to the development of feminine virtues such as tenderness and a loving nature for women to receive “too much” education, Mrs. Lindsay points to

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a woman asserting her rhetorical voice in public as the unfortunate consequence of a woman losing sight of her true nature: Little by little that intellectual ambition will draw us away, if we are not careful, from our true place in life, and will make cold, unloved, and unhelpful women of us, instead of the joyous, affectionate and unselfish women we might have been. If the instinct of a daughter, sister, wife, or mother dies out of a college-bred woman, even in the course of a most brilliant career otherwise, the world will forget to love her; it will scorn her, and justly. . . . [A]nd if she herself is not cheery and loving, dainty in dress, gentle in manner and beautiful in soul as every true woman ought to be, the world will feel that one thing needful is lacking,—vivid, tender womanliness, for which no knowledge of asymptotes or linguistics can ever compensate. It is better for a woman to fill a simple human part lovingly, better for her to be sympathetic in trouble and to whisper a comforting message into but one grieving ear, than that she should make a path to Egypt and lecture to thousands on ancient Thebes. (241) The intensity of Mrs. Lindsay’s suspicion of education for women is rivaled only by her condemnation of a woman lecturing to the public in a far off land, clearly a metaphor for Lindsay’s view of just how threatening the distance is between the home and the public sphere. In Lindsay’s account, the more publicly influential a woman’s rhetorical behavior becomes, the more “true womanhood” is compromised. Lindsay constructs the woman lecturer, however knowledgeable, as the worst result of a woman mismanaging her rhetorical place in the scheme of things. Lindsay’s late-nineteenth-century readers would hardly miss the “there but for the grace of God, go you” tone of this piece, a tone that indicates just how strongly nineteenth-century conduct literature advocated an ideological conflation between gender, virtue, and rhetorical behavior. The link Mrs. Lindsay makes between appropriate rhetorical behavior and feminine virtue also indicates that rhetorical performance was publicly acknowledged as a powerful variant of cultural capital in the 1890s and that the cultural debate about who was entitled to it was fraught with tension. By constructing rhetorical performance as a conduct issue and by bringing speaking under the watchful eye of advisers, conduct books participated in a widespread cultural project to police the borders between domestic and public space and to keep the average woman in her home and off the podium. The cultural debate about gender roles in late-nineteenth-century America raged with force between the covers of conduct books promising reliable guidance on topics such as where to live, how to secure an education, who to marry, where to work, how to write a letter, how to memorize, how to entertain at home, how to master the art of conversation, what to read, how to be agreeable, and how to raise children. Carrying their message of rhetorical regulation and its importance in achieving happiness, popular conduct manuals such as The Golden

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Way to the Highest Attainments: A Complete Encyclopedia of Life (Potts 1889) and Our Beacon Light, Devoted to Employment, Education, and Society (Cowen 1889) encouraged women to see themselves as powerful persuaders, but only in their own homes: It is as a mother that woman’s most signal triumphs are achieved. The home is her kingdom, the domain of her greatest and most lasting influence. Within the boundary of that kingdom there are not to dispute her sway. . . . In that holy kingdom, ruled by the wise and loving influence of the mother, those impressions are made that are to rule and govern society. The laws of the home are the miniature of those laws and influences which rule the State. There are dropped the tiny seeds, which falling upon the good soil of receptive minds in after life, “in the world’s broad field of battle” will grow into a great tree, and be known as public opinion. (341) In this passage, conduct author B. R. Cowen offers women the persuasive force of secondary influence as their only source of rhetorical power: through their influence on their children’s minds and subsequent actions, women’s ideas could influence public opinion. The effort being made here by Cowen to curtail women’s direct rhetorical power on public opinion could not be more clear. Offering women indirect rhetorical expertise and praise for using it, conduct manuals told women again and again that their voices were powerful ones only in the home. Women were urged to think of themselves as “the angel spirit of the home” and to see their role in shaping human affairs as important, but negotiated in rhetorical terms only in private. In The Imperial Highway: Essays on Business and Home Life (1888), author Jerome Paine Bates makes the case that women’s rhetorical skills in the home are crucial to the family and indispensable to the nation’s well being. Favoring the “queen and her kingdom” trope, Bates defines a woman’s rhetorical role in the home as indispensable: In a true home, woman is the God-ordained queen. Nature placed her on that throne, and she practically rules or ruins her kingdom and its subjects. Accordingly, home takes its hue and happiness principally from her. If she is in the best sense, womanly,—if she is true and tender loving and heroic, patient and self-devoted,—she consciously or unconsciously organizes and puts in operation a set of influences that do more to mold the destiny of the nation than any man, uncrowned by the power of eloquence, can possibly effect. There can be no substitute for this. There is no other possible way in which the women of the nation can organize their influence and power, that will tell so beneficially upon society and the State. Neither woman nor the nation can afford to have home demoralized, or in any way deteriorated by the loss of her presence, or the lessening of her influence there. As a nation we rise and fall as the character of our homes, presided over by woman, rises and falls. (1888, 493–94)

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Bates’s voice is but one in a large chorus of postbellum advisers making the point that the spheres of rhetorical power for men and women are separate ones. Bates’s text, The Imperial Highway was an extremely popular manual, which went through several editions and was still in print in the 1900s. The Imperial Highway can be read not only as representative in its ideological agenda, but also as widely influential (Hilkey 1997, 21). When Bates urges the American woman to see herself as a powerful orator in the home as a man might be outside the home, he draws the lines of rhetorical power sharply between the parlor and public space and constrains his wide readership to draw the conclusion that a “true” woman would never consciously seek rhetorical power outside her kingdom. Upholding with one hand the persuasive impact of the woman who knows her place and how to exert moral force within it, Bates reinscribes with the other the image of the eloquent public speaker as male by natural design. Bates’s argument and others like it played upon the public’s high regard for oratory in general by assigning to the American mother and wife as significant a rhetorical role in the home as the husband can be expected to have in the world of public affairs. Arguments like these could only have been successful within a cultural context that perceived the eloquent orator as a key player in how the political and moral fabric of the nation was created and sustained and would only be necessary during a historical period when women were putting more and more pressure on the gates barring them from the public arena. Underlining Mrs. Lindsay’s maxim that it is better for the woman to influence even the life of one child than to speak to “thousands,” Bates adds what by the 1880s is a familiar admonition, that women forfeit the great rhetorical power they possess when they leave their natural domain for public life: “[W]hen women for any reason, leave the home as their post of honor and duty, they do thereby immediately lessen the quantity and weaken the quality of their power, in exact proportion to the extent of their wanderings” (498–99). The image Bates draws of the mother and wife as “naturally” rhetorically forceful only in her proper sphere is a common one in postbellum conduct literature and reinforces a longstanding nineteenth-century assumption that women have no need for formal training in the rhetorical arts. By arguing that the domestic eloquence of women is a natural consequence of femininity, conduct authors joined the ranks of the nineteenth-century academic discipline of rhetoric, which routinely denied women training in oratory and argumentation on the grounds that women had no need for these arts in the home. What conduct authors added to the strength of this cultural bias against rhetorical education for women was the vivid depiction of just how powerful an orator the good mother and wife can be. [. . .] In The Golden Way to the Highest Attainments: A Complete Encyclopedia of Life, Potts constructs an image of the woman as a quiet variant of a culturally important rhetorician who influences public affairs indirectly but decisively if she maintains her place in the home as orator and exerts her “natural” rhetorical force as a mother and wife. This portrait amplifies the image of the quiet woman created by Lindsay, Bates, and a host of other authors who encourage women to identify with domestic rhetorics rather than with public rhetorics and to

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see their very ontological worth confirmed in a meek rhetorical disposition. It is useful to note that the ideological arguments made about gender roles in conduct manuals are often reinforced by pictorial representations of the “true” woman, representations that leave little doubt about where the ideal woman is intended to use her “voice” or about how she is to define herself. [. . .] Potts includes an illustration entitled “O Fairest of the Rural Maids,” which depicts a lovely and demure young woman enjoying the praise of an attentive young man overtly admiring her from across the garden fence (see fig. 1). Following a discussion in which Potts compares the importance of American women to notable women such as Queen Victoria and the “British Warrior Queen,” Boadicea, the incorporation of this illustration disarms the tension between Boadicea, woman of action, and Victoria, the queen who was also mother and wife, by reinstating the moderate image of the passive and lovely ideal woman holding “court” in her own backyard and, most importantly, saying absolutely nothing. Women may be valiant in the protection of their homes and they may be raised to the honored place of queen mother, but, in the end, it is the “fair maid” staying close to the homeplace who steers the best course.

Figure 1: “O Fairest of the Rural Maids.” Illustration from J. H. Potts’s The Golden Way to the Highest Attainments: A Complete Encyclopedia of Life (1989).

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Pictorial confirmations of a woman’s virtuous influence in her domestic kingdom are standard fare in conduct literature and lend visual texture to the conservative rhetorical construction of women through illustrations depicting the American woman as a quiet queen of the parlor. A particularly polemical drawing in Our Beacon Light: Devoted to Employment, Education and Society illustrates B. R. Cowen’s definition of a woman’s domestic rhetoric as the dropping of “seeds” of influence. Directly across the page from a discussion of woman’s rhetorical influence in the home in a chapter titled “Women’s Work” is a collage drawing featuring a large central circle in which a woman is sitting sewing by an open hearth. Positioned around her in smaller, orbiting circles are five other scenes depicting women at work: holding a child, gardening, instructing a young child in household chores, reading to a child, and delivering a food basket. The entire collage fills the page and is titled “Earth’s noblest thing, a woman perfected” (342; see fig. 2). Although Cowen closes the chapter “Women’s Work” with the observation that “Woman . . . finds almost every field of industry and enterprise and study open to her,” the ideological force of the entire chapter, with its textual reminder that women never exert direct force on public affairs and visual confirmation of the limits of the woman’s

Figure 2: “Earth’s noblest thing, a woman perfected.” Illustration from B.R. Cowen’s Our Beacon Light: Devoted to Employment, Education, and Society (1989).

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sphere, makes a conservative argument Cowen’s readers would have found familiar: any seeds of influence women plant had best be sown close to home. In rhetorical terms, there is very little middle ground in conduct literature between the quiet queen of the Court of Silence and the lamentable (or worse) status of the female public speaker. Seemingly, a woman could be one or the other, but never both. Even the most progressive conduct manuals, those that recognized that women had already achieved prominence at the podium, reveal the cultural anxiety that women’s public roles will compromise the American home. Nowhere in this vastly successful genre of self-help literature is the American woman encouraged without qualification to aspire to the ranks of those celebrated for their public rhetoric. Instead, any cautious celebration of women’s widening role in public life is typically accompanied by an explicit warning that the public woman should not neglect her true calling. Expressing views similar to many of his contemporaries, “the Reverend Potts” is an able spokesman of his times, for he unwittingly articulates the paradox of praise and suspicion regarding women speaking in public that is in evidence in many conduct and etiquette manuals: The time has come when women, as well as men, have a practical interest in business and professional life. They have monopolized the work of teaching, and are doing so with clerking, besides establishing various kinds of business houses, and entering the learned professions. It is pleasing to observe how well women succeed in all these new undertakings. In authorship and journalism they are showing marked adaptation, and wielding much influence, and on the platform are demonstrating their eminent capabilities. Thoughtful observers regard as conclusively settled that woman is competent to speak in public. The interest with which the masses hang upon her lips, and the persuasive power she wields, are not novel and transient impressions. Woman has a God-given mission to execute as a public speaker. In Christian America every interest of society must undergo thorough discussion, on the platform in the pulpit and through the press, and in the defense of the right, providence is summoning our mothers, wives, and daughters. (159) We can read Potts’s enthusiasm for the widening rhetorical role of women in public life as a spirited defense of an issue still contested. Potts’s argument that women’s right to speak is “God-given” and that the issue is now “settled” as to whether women should be orators tells us a great deal about how provocative the issue of women’s entrance into arenas of rhetorical power had been and continued to be. If the issue was not still a matter of intense debate in 1889 when The Golden Way to the Highest Attainments: A Complete Encyclopedia of Life was published, Potts would not have needed to make such a point of defending women’s rhetorical rights. Were Potts’s commentary to end with his sermonic pronouncement that the right of woman to speak was “God-given,” we might interpret his remarks as an indication that, at

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long last, the cultural taboo against women in public life had begun to fade in some degree. However, as he ends his celebratory exposition of women’s advances, Potts reveals a characteristic cultural ambivalence about women’s public role by offering a cautionary tale that echoes Bates’s warning that the American home is demoralized without a woman’s presence. Having praised the accomplishments of public women, Potts then defends the sanctity of the woman’s role in the home by creating a noble picture of the woman of the house for a “gentle reader” who might prefer to aspire to the hearth rather than public life: But our homes must be maintained, and some for pure love’s sake must labor there. Possibly you, gentle reader, may be of the number. If so, somebody has written for you these beautiful lines: “Sometimes I am tempted to murmur That life is flitting away, With only a round of trifles Filling each busy day; Dusting nooks and corners, Making the house look fair, And patiently taking on me The burden of woman’s care. “Comforting childish sorrows, And charming the childish heart With the simple song and story Told with a mother’s art Setting the dear home table And clearing the meal away, And going on little errands In the twilight of the day. “One day is just like another! Sewing and piecing well Little jackets and trousers So neatly that none can tell Where are the seams and joinings— Ah! the seamy side of life Is kept out of sight by magic Of many a mother and wife! “And oft when I am ready to murmur

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That life is flitting away, With the self-same round of duties Filling each busy day, It comes to my spirit sweetly, With the grace of a thought divine: ‘You are living, toiling for love’s sake, And the loving should never repine. ‘You are guiding the little footsteps In the way they ought to walk You are dropping a word for Jesus In the midst of your household talk; Living your life for love’s sake Till the homely cares grow sweet— And sacred the self-denial That is laid at the Master’s feet.’ ” (160–61) Potts’s effort to confirm the noble calling of the traditional mother and wife who in her daily, loving labor smoothes away the “seamy side of life” and guides children in the right direction, leaves his “gentle reader” with the image of the sacrificing woman who goes about her irreplaceable duties quietly and without fanfare. The appearance of this poem at the end of the chapter “Women Are Interested in Business Life” complicates Potts’s celebration of women’s entrance into public life and betrays a widely held anxiety that, while women might be speaking for just causes, their presence in public life must surely mean that home fires across the nation are going out. The tension in Potts’s rhetorical construction of the American woman as either inspiring public lecturer and professional woman or quiet, loving mother who tells stories, sings songs, and mends up the tears of the world, reinscribes the fact that for women to step outside traditional feminine space was still considered risky business. As if to put the final ideological touches on his mixed message, Potts follows the “You are guiding the little footsteps” poem with a brightly colored drawing of a courting couple (see fig. 3) and a lengthy treatment of “Home Life,” including chapters titled “Love,” “Choice of a Companion,” “The Wedding,” “The Marriage State,” “Married Life,” “Hints to Husbands,” “Hints to Wives,” “Children,” and “The Home” (165–215). Potts’s ambivalence about whether or not the American woman should aspire to public life captures the moody attitude of the nation regarding the place of women. Potts recognized, as did many late-nineteenth-century commentators, that the tide had turned in a very material way and that women’s advances had to be recognized. Even as he struggled to value women’s contribution to the public sector, Potts betrays his fear that, if women seek rhetorical power outside the home, they will lose it in the home. If women lose moral influence in the home,

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Figure 3: “The days of youth advance.” Illustration from J. H. Potts’s The Golden Way to the Highest Attainment: A Complete Encyclopedia of Life (1989).

the home will fall apart. If the American home falls apart, so does the nation. Potts was unable to imagine that a woman could minister to the home and the public affairs of the nation at the same time, and this failure of imagination reflects the limited vision of a nation that could not let go of the icon of that “quiet woman as the wine of life.” The price American women were asked to pay for this status was highly restricted rhetorical opportunity and space.

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Not all of Potts’s contemporaries were willing to view the advance of women into public rhetorical space with even mixed enthusiasm. The demonization of the “talkative” woman who has forsaken her proper place was a prevalent theme in an era during which the “Woman Question” would simply not go away. Among the more polemical conduct book manuals, essays on the moral lapses of vocal women are a prominent feature. For example, in Social Abominations, or the Follies of Modern Society Portrayed by Many Eminent Writers (1892) [. . .], essayist Rose Terry Cooke argues that the social and economic rights of women are “frequently ignored and set aside,” but she points the finger of blame for delay in awarding women equality before the law to “those freedom shriekers” who forget their position and their womanhood, who leave their families neglected and their homes forsaken to rant on platforms and usurp pulpits (444). Far worse than the image drawn by Mrs. Lindsay of the unloved lecturer who has abandoned her quiet kingdom for meaningless travel in a foreign country, Cooke’s image of “shriekers” and “ranters” is a damning one that constructs the public rhetorical performance as an act near to madness and one that compromises the efforts of sensible women to move forward. Certainly the image of the female public speaker as a “shrieker” is the antithesis of the quiet woman and makes the point again that the stronger a woman’s rhetorical voice, the more suspect she became. For the middle-class woman considering her rhetorical options, the specters of the unloved, wandering lecturer and the abominable “shrieker” who alienates everyone around her haunt the pages of Social Abominations, or the Follies of Modern Society Portrayed by Many Eminent Writers and texts like it, which are heavy with encouragements to prefer the icon of the quiet angel of the home. As if there could be any doubt about the ideal woman Cooke implicitly contrasts with “those abominable shriekers and ranters,” positioned midway through Cooke’s article is an illustration of a young, softly dressed woman in an apron holding an infant. The young mother is saying nothing, and in her voicelessness she stands as the perfect idealized foil to Cooke’s construction of those shriekers and ranters who have forsaken their silent roles as ministering angels (see fig. 4). [. . .] Guidelines for conversation in etiquette manuals addressed to women typically stress the virtues of the rhetorically “meek” woman, as Florence Hartley makes clear in her advice on conversation for “the lady in polite society" in her widely circulated treatise, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness (1882): In conversing with professional gentlemen, never question them upon matters connected with their employment. An author may communicate, voluntarily, information interesting to you, upon the subject of his works, but any questions from you would be extremely rude. [. . .] Professional or business men, when with ladies, generally wish for miscellaneous subjects of conversation, and as their visits are for recreation, they will feel excessively annoyed if obliged to “talk shop.” . . . Never, when advancing an opinion, assert positively that a thing “is so,” but give your opinion as an opinion. Say, “I think this is so,” or “these are my views.” (15–17)

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Figure 4: Woman with Child. Illustration from Rose Terry Cooke’s essay “Real Rights of Women” in Social Abominations, or the Follies of Modern Society Portrayed by Many Eminent Writers (1892), compiled by Russell. H. Conwell.

Hartley’s advice to women not to ask questions of professional men not only makes the point that women have no need to know about the details of the male-dominated professions, but also stresses a rhetorical profile of silence, meekness. Women do not ask questions, and they do not assert their opinions. [. . .] Conduct manuals generally construct a trade-off between feminine silence and feminine influence; in other words, although women are encouraged by Lindsay, Potts, Bates, Conwell, and the legion of their professional peers to be “silent” in

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public affairs, they are offered in exchange the prestige of being characterized as having limitless influence in the home. A similar bargain about rhetorical labor is struck by Hartley and other etiquette writers who stress the connection between rhetorical reserve and taste and the deep love and admiration that a woman who converses with grace, chastity, and discretion will inspire (152). In the etiquette literature, taste and culture function as ideological synonyms for virtue, and Hartley and other etiquette writers who address correct manners stress that female deportment in conversation wins the woman admiration and trust. [. . .] The equation drawn in etiquette literature between feminine virtue and rhetorical reserve becomes more obviously ideological when we compare advice on conversation addressed to women with that addressed to men. In this comparison, the contribution etiquette manuals make to the rhetorical repatriation of women to the parlor becomes even more clear. In The Mentor: A Little Book for the Guidance of Such Men and Boys as Would Appear to Advantage in the Society of Persons of the Better Sort (1884), Alfred Ayers shares with Hartley the general assumption that it is egotistical to try to claim more than one’s share of attention in a conversation and that the best conversation is one in which there is tolerance of a range of opinion. However, in giving specific advice to the aspiring gentleman, Ayers does not urge the young man to qualify his opinions, but only advises the reader to be sure before he offers his opinions that he “has attained to a position that entitles him to speak as one having authority” (134). Similarly, in Room at the Top or How to Reach Success, Happiness, Fame, and Fortune (1883), the young man is advised to assert himself, but to do it politely: “In general conversation avoid argument. If obliged to discuss a point, do so with suavity, contradicting, if necessary, with extreme courtesy” (Craig 1883, 313). In contrast to the young woman who is counseled to qualify her statements of opinions and never contradict another, the young man is counseled to speak his mind if he has “authority.” Authority is never a consideration in the discussion of women’s conduct. In her home kingdom, the quiet woman’s authority is moral, but rarely intellectual. Although etiquette literature advises young men to cultivate “conciseness and accuracy” in their conversation, it advises young women to concentrate on “grace” and “discretion.” It is with the goal of discrete femininity in mind that Hartley advises women not to engage men in “shop talk,” as this is not what men want to talk about with women. Approaching the same conversational rule from a male perspective, Ayers admonishes men not to be “rude” by discussing professional matters that will bore the “ladies.” Giving similar advice to men in Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society including Social, Commercial and Legal Forms (1892), Richard A. Wells makes it clear that a woman has the right to be annoyed if a man converses on topics with which “ladies are seldom acquainted.” The topics on which ladies are seldom “acquainted” include not only professional, “shop talk,” but also “political, scientific or commercial topics.” Instead of engaging in dialogue on these subjects with women, Wells urges men to “lead a mother to talk of her children, a young lady of her last ball” (65– 66). It is hard to miss the construction of the woman in conversation as someone who should

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not show interest in worldly subjects or as someone ill-equipped to do so. From Well’s point of view, the woman is not intellectually prepared to engage in serious dialogue; from Hartley’s point of view, she is too polite to offer an opinion on subjects outside her sphere. Either way, the performance of politeness expected of the ideal woman removes her from the kind of rhetorical exchange of serious opinion men would routinely expect from each other and thus renders her more “quiet” than ever. The gendering of conversation in etiquette literature contributed one more layer of cultural influence that predisposed American readers to conflate rhetorical behavior with the performance of gender and thus to remain vulnerable to the cultural anxiety that change in rhetorical conventions necessarily meant a change in gender relations. Postbellum conduct literature, which defines all aspects of personal, social, and professional life as etiquette or deportment issues, weighed in on a long-standing cultural struggle about gender, power, and rhetorical space. This struggle resisted smoothing out despite the polemics of the Mrs. Lindsay's, the Reverend Potts’s and the Florence Hartley’s who promised an agitated public that “just following the rules” would straighten out the confusion about who women were and where they belonged. That there remained in the late-nineteenth-century such intense cultural desire to blunt the rhetorical power of women gives us more evidence than anything could that, even as the new century was about to turn, American debates about the essential nature of women and debates about how women should speak remained mutually reinforcing discourses that could not be separated. Joan Wallach Scott has reminded us in Gender and the Politics of History (1988) that feminist history should account for those historical moments that give us insight into “the often silent and hidden operations of gender that are nonetheless present and defining forces in the organization of most societies” (27). Without doubt, the historical moment constructed by the fusion of discourses about gender and rhetorical voice in postbellum conduct literature lets us see that popular rhetorical pedagogies that “hid” themselves in the conduct and etiquette literature of the times exerted a powerful influence on late-nineteenth-century gender debates. Through various textual operations that stabilized the domestic icon of the American woman as the angel of the hearth, conduct literature of the late nineteenth century soothed the fears of a nation that had fixed upon the ideal of the American home as a precious and eternal refuge. Reigning there with wordless wisdom, the “quiet woman” reborn again and again in the pages of Our Beacon Light: Devoted to Employment, Education, and Society and The Golden Way to the Highest Attainments: A Complete Encyclopedia of Life moved silently about the house shutting the windows to controversy and to change.

Notes [. . .] 2 For details about the nature and range of nineteenth-century parlor rhetoric, see my “The Popularization of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric” and “Parlor Rhetoric and the Performance of Gender in Postbellum America” (forthcoming). [. . .]

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Works Cited Ayres, Alfred. 1884. The Mentor: A Little Book for the Guidance of Such Men and Boys as Would Appear to Advantage in the Society of Persons of the Better Sort. New York: Funk & Wagnall. Bates, Jerome Paine. 1888. The Imperial Highway, Essays on Business and Home Life with Biographies of Self-Made Men. Chicago: National Library Association. Conwell, Russell H., compiler. 1892. Social Abominations, or the Follies of Modern Society Portrayed by Many Eminent Writers. Chicago: National Book Concern. Cowen, B. R. 1889. Our Beacon Light: Devoted to Employment, Education, and Society. Columbus, OH: Patrick, Gordon. Craig, A., ed. 1883. Room at the Top or How to Reach Success, Happiness, Fame, and Fortune. Chicago: Henry A. Sumner. Hartley, Florence. 1882. The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness. Boston: Lee & Shepard. Hilkey, Judy. 1997. Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Guilded Age America. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P. Johnson, Nan. 1993. “The Popularization of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: Elocution and the Private Learner.” In Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, 139–57. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. Lindsay, Mrs. Samuel. 1897. What Is Worth While. In Three Minute Readings for College Girls, ed. Harry Davis, 239–41. New York: Hinds, Hayden & Eldredge. Potts, J. H. 1889. The Golden Way to the Highest Attainments: A Complete Encyclopedia of Life. Philadelphia, PA: P. W. Ziegler. “Quiet Women.” 1868. The Ladies’ Repository 2: 461. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia UP. Wells, Richard A. 1892. Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society including Social, Commercial and Legal Forms. Cincinnati, OH: Clark.

Woman’s Temple, Women’s Fountains: The Erasure of Public Memory* Carol Mattingly In 1996 a statue of three women who had worked for woman’s suffrage, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was moved from the first-floor crypt of the nation’s Capitol into the second-floor rotunda. Much was made of this acknowledgment of women’s work in the stately seat of power; no mention was made of a similar tribute, one floor above, that had occurred nearly one hundred years earlier. Frances Elizabeth Willard, orator and reformer who had led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for most of its nineteenth-century history, had become the first woman commemorated in the Capitol, and the only woman so honored for more than fifty years.1 By 1905, the year of the statue’s installation, the WCTU had become the largest and most influential activist movement of women in the country, extending that power into the twentieth century, taking an active and powerful role in the passage of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as hundreds of other laws affecting women and children.2 The significance of the Willard memorialization extends beyond the representation in Statuary Hall, however, as Willard’s organization made tributes to women one of their primary objectives. Despite the power and efforts of the WCTU at the turn of the twentieth century, this massive effort to recognize women and their accomplishments has been largely forgotten at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here, I will examine efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to build monuments and to establish a powerful place in public memory for women. I will use the process of “sifting” employed by Kirk Savage in his examination of Civil War monuments. Savage explored the process by which proposed monuments to African American strength and dignity after the war gradually sifted into memorials of images of white heroism and of “a black man still mired in the ethos of slavery.” For Savage, sifting accounts for why some ideas come to be viable and others failures, why some “monuments that followed . . . shut old doors and opened new ones.” 3 I will describe a similar but different process from that Savage defines: similar because, like those mentioned by Savage, WCTU women’s monuments have been gradually sifted from public collective memory; different because, unlike the pro*  American Studies 49 (2008). Note: This essay has been condensed. 291

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posed but unbuilt monuments Savage discusses, the WCTU monuments were completed and claimed public space. I will also discuss not only the difficulties a group such as the WCTU faces, even if temporarily successful, in attempting to break the traditional hold on the shaping and maintenance of public memory and public space amid the efforts of more powerful forces, especially twentieth-century militarist public discourse, but also such influences as modernist architects and changes for women that diverted attention to efforts different from those of the largely white, middle-class WCTU. Temperance became the largest political organizing force for women in the nineteenth century because of intemperance’s association with abuse of women and children. Women protested the manufacture and sale of alcohol, which they believed contributed to women’s and children’s hardships, but for many the focus expanded to include broader women’s issues, especially unequal treatment under the law. The issue became a focus for women, too, because most Americans viewed intemperance as a man’s problem. According to historian W. J. Rorabaugh, two-thirds of all distilled spirits were consumed by 50 percent of adult men—one eighth of the population.4 Because alcoholic men often became abusive and unable to provide for their families, women organized and joined the WCTU to oppose and end such abuse. Hundreds of thousands of WCTU women worked for change in a broad spectrum of areas. In addition to suffrage, they sought for women property rights in marriage, the right to custody of children in divorce, and other reforms to assist impoverished and abused women and children; further, they were instrumental in raising the age of sexual consent in nearly every state.5 Members were not content with reform alone. They sought to memorialize their leaders and their organization. To that end, they coordinated the largest capital construction campaigns by women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much as men have commemorated their power and efforts through war memorials and statuary of powerful political leaders, members of the WCTU strove to create permanent testaments to their own leaders and organization as well as to the significance of women. Their ability to do so demonstrates the power these women held at the turn of the twentieth century. The deterioration and destruction of these historic monuments attest, as well, to the diminished nature of that power and the difficulty of any group to hold and maintain public space and recognition so long held by others. Efforts of women and other marginalized groups to build monuments to recognize their achievements are important because of the significance of visual culture in American society. Collective memory is anchored not only in historical narratives but also in material structures that shape and support collective memory–creating identity for future generations, determining how we view the past and, therefore, how we see the future, and naming who is important and who is worthy of being recognized and honored.6 Multi-dimensional public monuments, in fact, form so powerful an ability to determine reality for present and future generations that struggles continuously arise over their construction and the space they occupy. Groups contest the use of space on the National Mall and, most recently, at the site where the World

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Trade Center once stood. The ability to erect such monuments speaks of power—both in the capacity to construct the monument and in the authority to control public space. The battle is intense because those who control such space influence our understandings of history. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union demonstrated such power by launching capital campaigns and constructing hundreds of buildings, monuments, and memorials throughout the country as testaments to women’s efforts. These buildings and monuments were inscribed with the name and symbols of the organization. Made of marble, bronze, granite, and stone, they were intended to create lasting legacies to the women who led and participated in this historic movement.

Fortresses of Brick, Stone, and Mortar Perhaps the WCTU’s most impressive capital project was the Woman’s Temple. In speaking of the building, leaders often used metaphors for the permanence and importance of women’s work: “Let the foundations be laid in granite, after the fashion of the evangelistic department, and let its walls go up, the departments of our work embodied in stone, moulded in brick, carved in choice woods, set in beauty everywhere in its finishing and furnishing, and it will draw the eyes of the nation as nothing planted on American soil could do.” 7 Harriet L. Dunlap, representative of the many women who believed that the Temple symbolized woman’s rightful role, attested, “I shall rejoice to see the Temple finished, and have woman take her proper place in all things in this land.”8 Completed in 1892 in downtown Chicago, the red granite and terra cotta Temple, designed by the prestigious architectural firm Burnham and Root, was thirteen stories high and cost $1.25 million to build. (See Figure 1.) The Temple was to be a woman’s building built by and for women as Frances Willard put it, representative of “a new era of woman’s work . . . both in philanthropy and the professions.”10 Matilda Carse, who led the efforts to build the Temple, called it “a place to record the deeds of great women.”11 To that end, one enormous room of marble—Willard Hall or Memorial Hall—consisted of large marble slabs engraved with the names of WCTU leaders and contributors and was often referred to as the Westminster Abbey of women by members. At the laying of the cornerstone for the building, Willard drew the comparison directly: “Here will be cherished the precious names and faces; here its brilliant banners will be hung; here its watchwords emblazoned; perchance its martyr’s [sic] names inscribed. For this majestic movement has its romance and history; its literature and art; its discoverers and soldiers; its statesmen and saints.”12 Author Harriet Hosmer expressed the hope of many women: I have long entertained the hope of seeing, before I die, a monument erected which shall record the deeds of great women wherever found, and it is high time that such a memorial should assume form. It might be, could be, and should be the finest monument our country, or any other country of our

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time, can boast, and I think would do great service to woman’s cause: a grand act, perpetuated and illustrated in such a manner that all must read, cannot but be inspiring to every woman, and would furnish the most eloquent chapter in their higher education.13 To further emphasize its tribute to women, the temple plans called for a seventy-foot gold bronze fléche, with a woman atop, but it remained uncompleted as costs increased and funding became problematic. The impressive building served as headquarters for the national WCTU and for the Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, but for various complicated reasons, the Temple fell out of the hands of the WCTU, and the building was destroyed in 1925.14

Figure 1: The Woman’s Temple.

When the building was demolished, The National Association of Building Owners and Managers deployed a research engineer, George R. Bailey, to the site even as the building was being razed and published a twenty-page booklet explaining and justifying the destruction. Many other early skyscrapers were being preserved for both historical and architectural reasons, and that the study delineating the Temple’s obsolescence took place at the point of demolition suggests that factors other than obsolescence were involved. With the decline of the WCTU and increasing disillusionment with Prohibition, the historic value of the building was less evident. In addition, the ornate design became less desirable with the new emphasis on modernist spaces. When built, the Temple had been praised lavishly by leading newspapers. A typical description is this one from the Chicago Evening Journal:

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Among all the Chicago skyscrapers that are to be thrown open to their tenants [. . .] probably the most beautiful is the Woman’s Temple. [. . .] The interior finish of the building is in some respects the finest in the city. From top to bottom the halls are covered with beautiful Florentine mosaic pavements, the wainscoting is of the finest marble, and the woodwork is elegant antique oak. There are eight high-speed passenger elevators, disposed in a concave semi-circle, in the rear of the vinculum; and the rotunda in front of them, on the ground floor within the main entrance, consisting of an imposing archway of carved granite, is a marble palace. [. . .] The effect is singular and surpassingly beautiful.15 The Chicago Inter-Ocean called it the “most beautiful of the Columbian city’s commercial palaces.”16 In another description, the Chicago Herald declared, “The building itself is a beautiful structure. It is an honor to the city and a splendid monument to the labors of noble and self-sacrificing women in a worthy cause” (Quoted in “Complete Vindication of the Temple Affairs,” The Union Signal, 6 April 1893, 9). The Chicago Woman’s Business Journal called the building “The grandest of monuments to consecrated energy and womanly aspiration” (Quoted in “Temperance Temple Items,” The Union Signal, 21 July 1892, 5), and contemporary architects Peter B. Wight and A. N. Rebori named it the “greatest of all” and “the most beautiful of the tall buildings” designed by Burnham and Root.17 The authors of the demolition study recognized that the building was “one of the finest skyscrapers in the country.”18 They further noted its having been considered among the city’s finest buildings and attested to the ingenuity of the pioneering skyscraper architects who designed the building.19 They claimed, however, that the very best features of the building led to its demise. The study suggested that the pitched roof was more expensive to repair than a “modern” flat roof, something we know today is often untrue; that although the steel frame was as sturdy as when new, and brickwork had obviously been done by the best masons, the mortar had become brittle; that while the mosaic ceramic floors were in good condition, they seemed uneven; and that dormers intended to relieve the monotony of the large roof area also formed bad leaks during storms and broke office space into irregular patterns.20 In contrast to the report’s criticism of broken office space, the women occupying the space had loved the “irregular patterns” of this floor with its interestingly shaped rooms high above the city. (See figures 2–4.) Criticism of irregular spaces contradicted earlier reports and praise for that space as well. The Chicago Evening Journal had described this same space more positively: “This floor looks as if a woman has planned it. It abounds in nooks and corners and strange shaped apartments and is a model of convenience and beauty.”21 In fact, according to the authors, the building was still serviceable, but its bulky construction diminished rentable space. The report even suggested that the excellent condition in some areas, such as the steel columns, beams, and girders, “illustrate the fallacy of any expensive treatment in connection with them, except in locations subject to dampness,”22 as those features had been perfectly

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Figure 2: Office in the Woman’s Temple.

Figure 3: Editorial Room in the Woman’s Temple.

Figure 4: Business Manager’s Room in the Woman’s Temple.

Figure 5: A WCTU Coffeehouse.

preserved and had outlived their usefulness. Charges of obsolescence were repeatedly based on the building’s failure to comply with modern standards and emphasized the elaborate ornamentation that devoured space. Its ornate construction also undermined appreciation for its historic and architectural value. The demolition took place during the rise of the modernist trend in architecture, when the ornamental was being equated with decadence, the primitive,

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and the feminine, while the sterile lines of modernism were seen as strong, clean, masculine— and valuable. Like the ornamentation and irregular spaces of the thirteenth floor, other “problems” tend to surface according to a modernist perspective. For example, “The thickness of the floors [mosaic ceramic and marble] being twenty-one inches, meant that sixty-four inches more vertical height of construction was necessary than would have been needed had the modern thirteen inch floor been in vogue,”24 and “The double grand-staircase [of marble] and the semi-circular elevator arrangement absorbed a large amount of otherwise usable area.”25 Basically, the corner of Monroe and La Salle Streets in downtown Chicago was prime real estate property, and value was now based largely on rentable space and modernist ideals. In addition, after the passage of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, the importance of the WCTU had diminished to the point that the organization had neither the will nor the power to preserve its monument. The building was sacrificed for the erection of a more modern, twenty-four story bank/office building. The WCTU was involved in numerous other capital projects nationally in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the more prominent of the national projects were a national temperance hospital and summer homes at chatauquas and at WCTU summer camps. The National Temperance Hospital, built in Chicago and renamed the Willard Hospital, used alternatives to prescribing alcohol, which was commonly prescribed for medicinal purposes in the nineteenth century. All the board of directors were women, as were most of the physicians and staff. The WCTU also built alone or joined with the Florence Crittenden Association to build homes for unwed mothers in cities across the country. Numerous summer homes allowed for comfortable quarters when women participated in chatauqua meetings or in summer schools for instruction in rhetorical, political, and parliamentary procedures provided by the WCTU, but often they were used as retreats for working girls and women. Sometimes these were national buildings, sometimes state or local. Members also sometimes opened coffee houses as alternatives to saloons. (See figure 5.) In addition, beginning in the 1880s, state and local chapters began building their own headquarters. Willard noted the “remarkable impetus” that enthusiasm for the Temple had created for the construction of such buildings: “hundreds of towns, villages, and cities are sure to have them. . . . The white-ribboners are moving out of their tents, and into their fortresses of brick, stone, and mortar.”27 Even before Willard’s pronouncement, however, many state and local unions had already begun work on their own buildings.

Temperance Fountains The most widespread capital project by WCTU women, however, involved prime public spaces. WCTU chapters erected temperance fountains in their hometowns. Some were large spraying fountains, others a series of tiered basins that allowed water to flow from one level to the next, with still others containing mechanical faucets. All provided clean drinking water; some

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housed compartments for storing ice to cool pipes conducting the water. The fountains were intended to provide pure drinking water in heavily trafficked areas of towns and cities, as men often claimed drinking liquor a necessity because of the unavailability of clean drinking water. More significant than the availability of clean water, however, may be the fountains’ public tribute to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and its members. Like the Woman’s Temple, these fountains claimed prized public space. Also like the Temple, they symbolized the power and importance of the WCTU. The fountains were always inscribed with the organization’s name. Two other features—symbols representative of the Union and drinking troughs for animals—mark most WCTU fountains. A white ribbon, the most common image of the WCTU, appears on every fountain erected by the WCTU I have found.29 The second feature of nearly every fountain illustrates the Union’s concern for animal rights. Although ostensibly dedicated to temperance, the WCTU actually comprised at least forty departments that worked for other concerns, with a national leader of each, and state, county, and local leaders of many. One active department was Vivisection, dedicated to the better treatment of animals. This concern is represented in most fountains by drinking troughs, often at a variety of levels, to provide refreshment for horses and dogs.30 Constructed amidst great pride and celebration, nearly all WCTU fountains have been destroyed or relegated to obscurity. Erected in prized spaces at the center of downtown thoroughfares, on courthouse lawns, and in busy parks, WCTU fountains showcased the name and symbols of the union. Most of the fountains were purchased from prestigious foundries at the time, J. L. Mott Iron Works and J. W. Fiske Iron Works, both of whom advertised in the Union’s newspaper, The Union Signal, in addition to distributing catalogues to local and state unions. The majority of fountains paid general tribute to the organization and acknowledged the WCTU simply with inscriptions and symbols.31 Some fountains featured symbolic women—angels, Rebecca at the well, Justice.32 These were usually tall, measuring eleven to twelve feet in height, often with mechanical faucets. One such example featuring the mythic Hebe once graced the town common in Baton Rouge, LA. Figure 6 features what remains of the large, decorative fountain. Installed in 1914, the fountain stood eleven feet tall and provided drinking water from spraying or cascading water that accumulated into a basin with chained cups hanging around it. At the time it was installed, newspapers described it as “one of the most beautiful pieces of work in any city in the south.”33 The Baton Rouge Advocate described it: The top of the fountain is the figure of a woman, dressed in the classic Grecian costume, holding in one hand a pitcher and raising aloft a bronze bowl. Through this bowl, held in her left hand, the spray will operate, throwing a shimmering veil of water vapor into the pond beneath the fountain. This pond is expected to prove one of the most attractive and satisfactory which has ever been built to hold a fountain. Its depth and diameter are sufficient to catch the strong spray and to insure strength and permanency. [. . .] One particular feature of the whole plan is that it provides for sanitary drinking

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cups around the fountain. There will be four of these placed on the concrete walls of the basin, and they will correspond with the latest sanitary regulations as to public drinking places. The flow of water through them will be continuous, providing places to quench the thirst of people enjoying Baton Rouge’s only park.34 However, despite its beauty, when plans were drawn to renovate downtown Baton Rouge, the fountain was destroyed; Hebe was placed on a block of bricks and left to vandals and the elements. The pitcher and the fingers of her right hand, as well as her left hand with the bowl through which water flowed are missing; the small bronze plaque identifying Hebe as donated by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union has disappeared. Those who notice Hebe would have no way of connecting her with the WCTU, but even if they made the connection, the importance of the figure is radically diminished.

Figure 6: Hebe atop WCTU fountain, Baton Rouge, LA. Photograph courtesy of Lisi Oliver.

Other fountains commemorated individual women, usually WCTU leaders. Most often honored was Frances E. Willard. In Chicago, Willard was honored with the original of a bronze Little Water Girl fountain, commissioned to honor Willard at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.36 The Little Water Girl fountain was later duplicated in Portland, Maine, to honor Lillian Stevens, president of the Maine WCTU who became national president at Wil-

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lard’s death (see figure 7); another copy was erected in London, in honor of Lady Henry Somerset, President of the British WCTU.37 Occasionally tributes included busts or statues of specific women, although typically only

Figure 7: A “Little Water Girl” WCTU fountain.

mythical women and queens were cast and placed in public spaces. Willard had often noted the absence of statues of women, referring to the uniqueness of the statue memorializing New Orleans’s Margaret Haughery, according to Willard the first one of a woman in the United States.38 A WCTU fountain that includes a bust of Willard still stands in Reading, Pennsylvania. (See Figure 8.) In the center of town, the monument now stands somewhat awkwardly in the middle of the concrete and brick sidewalk. A full-length statue fountain paid tribute

Figure 8: Bust of Frances Willard on a WCTU fountain in Reading, PA.

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to Laura Smith Haviland, a WCTU member in Adrian, Michigan, who had also worked to abolish slavery and founded homes for poor girls and young women.

Difficulties in Establishing Enduring Remembrance Part of the problem for WCTU memorials resulted from the Union’s success. Memorials were located in the most visible and central of public spaces. Such choices are good for establishing monuments because of their visibility and because such space speaks to power and importance; however, if tradition and sentiment for such memorials is not strong enough to protect them after the power of the originators has diminished, they are gradually sifted from the landscape, as others more powerful will lay claim to the space. The Woman’s Temple occupied prime real estate property in downtown Chicago—space valued by others, who envisioned a structure more financially profitable. Fountains too were located in central areas, but when downtowns were renovated, the fountains were often destroyed or moved to locations far from the coveted, prestigious, public high-use areas to out-of-the-way places where vandalism would take its toll. For example, a fountain in Newton, New Jersey (figure 9) originally placed at the center of Main Street, was moved when the street was widened to accommodate large trucks and greater traffic flow. The fountain, named in honor of Catherine Ryerson McMurtry, the first local president of the WCTU, was moved to a small park far from its original location. The drinking faucets no longer work, and the memorial, badly damaged, has lost the grandeur of its earlier purpose and location. The letters and symbols that acknowledged the organization and its leader are gradually being lost.

Figure 9: WCTU fountain in Newton, NJ. Left, original site on Main Street; right, relocation to a park.

Similarly, the bronze Little Water Girl fountain honoring Frances Willard, originally in front of the Woman’s Temple, was moved when the Temple was destroyed to a location near Chicago’s North Avenue on Lake Shore Drive. In 1942, the fountain was moved to Lincoln Park, but it disappeared completely in 1958. However, although theft and vandalism have played a part in the deterioration of these memorials to women, as Diane Barthel notes, “[d]estruction caused by vandals can be small stuff compared to that committed by those with economic and political clout.”42

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Rescued fountains are sometimes changed dramatically, as was the one in Sullivan IL (see figure 10). When I visited Sullivan, I spoke with Jan W. Haegen, County Planner/Coordinator, in the Moultrie County Courthouse on whose lawn the fountain sits. He told me proudly of his now deceased brother’s drive to renovate the fountain. The renovation retained the WCTU name, but the original center construction containing the Union’s symbols has been replaced with two cupids beneath an umbrella, an image unlike any the WCTU used. Similarly, when the drinking fountain in the Reading, Pennsylvania memorial failed, rather than maintaining the integrity of the monument by replacing the original piping, ugly porcelain fountains were attached to its exterior, marring its beauty as well as the ethos of the woman it celebrates and the group who built it. (See figure 11.)

Figure 10: Rescued WCTU fountain in Sullivan, IL.

Figure 11: WCTU fountain in Reading, PA.

Another feature has diminished the importance of these fountains. When the fountains are not destroyed or neglected, larger memorials, usually those honoring public leaders (typi-

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cally male) and military events, are often constructed around them, diminishing their presence. The fountain in Leominster, MA, (figure 12) for example, still stands at the city center. Although it is in need of repair, if one looks closely, its white ribbon symbols are still evident, its references to the WCTU and Willard remain readable; however, it has become insignificant as the eyes are drawn to the larger, better-kept memorials that surround it.

Figure 12: WCTU fountain in Leominster, MA.

This is not uncommon, as the fountains were originally placed in desirable, trafficked spaces. Close by the Hebe statue in Baton Rouge, large, carefully maintained war memorials dominate as well. War memorials and other monuments to once powerful political and military leaders are erected and well maintained, usually with public monies. Even though fountains were gifted to the cities or counties in which they are located, priority is given other monuments while the WCTU fountains continue to deteriorate.43 One further example associated with such fountains, even when preserved, will demonstrate the difficulty in creating lasting public memory of accomplishments outside the traditional power structure. Figure 13 depicts a Fiske fountain in Lancaster, Ohio, now restored and lighted. Lancaster historians credit A. “Andy” Bauman for the city’s beautiful fountain. Historian David Contosta names Bauman “the most outstanding” of Lancaster’s Victorian era civic-minded boosters, based on Bauman’s “crucial role” in Lancaster’s “longest-lasting Victorian improvement”—the “ornate fountain that stands in the town square more than a century after its dedication in 1890.”44 This is the story I was given when I approached David Bogear,

Figure 13: WCTU fountain in Lancaster, OH.

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superintendent of Lancaster Parks and Recreation, who generously shared the night view of Lancaster’s fountain with me; he had undoubtedly taken the information from Lancaster’s most recently written history. However, this account differs greatly from newspaper commentaries published at the time of the fountain’s placement. According to those reports, “a few ladies gathered in some social affair formed without a thought or purpose of its result, broached the subject as to what part they could contribute toward the general improvement of the place we all delight to call our home. The result of that meeting was the formation of the Ladies’ Fountain Committee, pledged to itself to purchase and present to the city, to be placed upon one of its public parks, a fountain.”45 Both local newspapers lauded the women for their “patriotism and love of our city by their presentations of this magnificent gift”46 and for their “crowning tribute—a majestic testimonial calculated to perpetuate their energy, perseverance and generosity,” providing the names of the women involved.47 According to newspaper accounts, the women did issue a thanks to Mr. A. Bauman “for his liberality and hearty co-operation with us in our efforts,” for his “advice” and recognizing “that without his aid we would not now be ready to turn over to the use of the city, the beautiful fountain which we have been enabled to secure.”48 Ironically, the accounts of the Lancaster fountain’s unveiling predict exactly what women who erected such monuments expected to happen. The Daily Eagle called the fountain “a lasting memento—and indestructible memorial to the worth, energy, and patriotism of the ladies of Lancaster,”49 and The Gazette called the fountain “a majestic testimonial calculated to perpetuate their energy, perseverance, and generosity.”50 However, a hundred years later, credit for the fountain is given to Andy Bauman with no recognition of the women who worked so hard to provide the fountain.51 What we perceive as worthy of preservation is often determined by the history of what has been preserved; similarly, accomplishments are often remembered in the form we are accustomed to expect. We might assume that the 1954 Brown decision influenced the deterioration of these public drinking fountains. However, if so, its impact seems to have been minimal. By far the majority of WCTU fountains stood outside the old South. This is not to deny the separatist impulse that followed Civil Rights advances in many areas; however, outside the South, such sentiments tended to surface in white flight from public schools and hiring practices for African Americans, rather than in separatist attitudes toward such public accommodations as rest rooms and drinking fountains. Even in the South, fear helped to maintain a continued conformity to earlier segregation patterns in many areas after 1954, and the 1960s sustained efforts at diminishing Jim Crow laws focused on schools, lunch counters, public transportation, and voting practices, rather than on drinking fountains. In addition, fountains, such as the one in Baton Rouge, had become largely ornamental rather than practical, the cups lining the base long removed.52

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The Politics of Collective Memory Monuments are powerful symbols of our history, intended to speak for their builders long after their voices are silenced, and the women who created these numerous monuments expected that their monuments would continue to speak for them. Their efforts to memorialize themselves are especially impressive when we remember how little money women controlled. The ways they raised money attests to their commitment and demonstrates their collective effort. The bulk of the money raised for the Temple, for example, came in small amounts, “The gift largely of women and little children.”53 The campaign thus demonstrates, as well, the “popular subscription” of which Savage speaks, in which “rich and poor, young and old” were expected to contribute in order to give public monuments legitimacy.54 Still, for all the legitimacy created by the WCTU, few people today know about or recognize the many monuments its members erected. As Savage notes, the appearance, if not the fact, of broad public support is generally essential for the creation of public monuments, but scholars agree on other elements necessary for maintaining collective memory, especially performative and ritualized commemoration.55 However, these features, as well, seem not to guarantee remembrance for all groups. Members of the WCTU created a successful organization partly because of their adeptness at ceremony and ritual. They transformed the look of meeting places by bringing flowers, banners, handsewn decorations, patriotic paraphernalia and other symbolic items, even rocking chairs. They organized huge processions, featuring members and children dressed symbolically in white. Later, other organizations, including suffrage groups, would emulate their ceremonial effectiveness, but at the turn of the century, few organizations so compellingly wrapped their cause in pomp and ceremony as did the WCTU.56 For example, just prior to the laying of the cornerstone for the Woman’s Temple, Carse previewed ceremonial preparations for readers of The Union Signal: Rehearsals are taking place twice a week on the three sides of the city. It is expected that two or three thousand children will take part in the chorus. A large part of the ceremony will take place in the second regiment Armory, on Michigan Avenue. It will accommodate 6,000 persons. The building will be handsomely draped and decorated with the National flag. Almost every state is sending silk banners in abundance, which will be carried by the children in their march from the Armory to the place of laying the corner-stone; those who have not a banner will carry a small flag. The children will be accompanied by marshals wearing white satin badges, headed by a band of music. They will be preceded and followed by a platoon of police. Visitors will follow in carriages. 57 To assure impressive attendance, WCTU officer Helen L. Hood arranged for railroads to “carry all persons who desire to attend the ceremony” at reduced rates. The Union Signal listed

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twenty-five railroads that had agreed to the arrangement.58 Reduced railroad rates were generally arranged for all national WCTU meetings and events. Similarly, when Frances Willard’s statue was placed in the Capital, “Anna Gordon asked that Washington school children be ‘given an opportunity to visit Statuary Hall’ to view Willard’s statue” and arranged their “march under protective escort to the Capitol Building and through Statuary Hall,” where each child placed a flower [contributed by the District of Columbia WCTU] near the Willard statue.”59 Similar pageantry accompanied installations of fountains, where bands provided music, dignitaries gave addresses, “brilliant lights” added to the significance of the occasion,60 and street parades and fireworks created “a striking resemblance to . . . a legal holiday.”61 Such ceremonial rituals were typical of major WCTU events, but such ceremonies must be sustained by later generations to preserve memorials from the sifting that takes place over time. Scholars also note the importance of emotional involvement for public memory. Emotion was key to the success of the WCTU as well. Many women, for example, became members of the WCTU when touched personally by the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. For example, Carse, who led efforts to build the Woman’s Temple, joined the WCTU after a drunken carter ran over and killed her young son, and Saleta Evans became a member of the Evansville, Indiana WCTU, donating downtown property for a WCTU building, after her sons, Paul and Robert, fatally shot one another after heavy drinking.63 Such associations were common; most were acquainted with someone who had suffered greatly from alcohol or drug abuse. Emotional stakes in the WCTU and its movement ran high. However, emotion is often valued according to context—seen as powerful and appropriate in some cases and devalued in others. In the wake of Prohibition’s failures, emotional capital surrounding the activities of the WCTU was greatly diminished. Another feature scholars attribute to creating lasting memory involves patriotism. As John Bodnar suggests, “[T]he symbolic language of patriotism is central to public memory in the United States because it has the capacity to mediate both vernacular loyalties to local and familiar places and official loyalties to national and imagined structures.”64 The WCTU made great efforts to cloak itself in patriotism. Leaders argued that harm done by alcohol diminished the productivity and health of the country. The national flag was displayed at all events, and when the national WCTU convention was held in Baltimore, leaders borrowed and displayed the historic flag from Fort McHenry. Fountains were often draped in the national flag before their formal unveiling, and children frequently carried small American flags as they marched in procession at WCTU events. However, not all patriotism is valued equally. As Bodnar has demonstrated, “In the twentieth century the administration of commemorative activity by government officials at both the state and national levels ended any doubt of which symbols and messages were to be considered dominant in public commemorative activities.”65 Bodnar cites “an aggressive patriotism”66 that has supported such commemoration, and patriotism has become inscribed largely in militaristic and nationalistic terms. Despite leaders’ and members’

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“getting it right” by attending to features most scholars recognize as successfully contributing to public memory, WCTU women and their monuments have not fared well.

Maintaining the Status Quo If, as Fentress and Wickham67 suggest, contemporary contexts help to determine which historical monuments and individuals are important, the past greatly determines present context as well. Generations who have witnessed the ceremonial pomp of tributes to presidents and military heroes already hold expectations for what deserves such commemoration. Recent funeral rituals for former President Ronald Reagan provide a case in point. The nation slowed its pace and focused on the funeral ceremonies for a full week of carefully choreographed rituals intended to be burned into the memories of those watching. The rituals were steeped in the tradition of earlier tributes to such presidents as Lincoln and Kennedy, presidents buried amidst pomp and ceremony under very emotional circumstances. For those who remembered the Kennedy assassination, or even those with passing knowledge of the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations, the ceremonies evoked feelings that helped to establish the importance of the current event. In fact, in case viewers did not make historical connections, commentators continually related the proceedings to the earlier funerals and informed viewers that many of the extensive military rituals, such as the riderless horse, can be traced to much earlier, historic times—to the Roman Empire or to Genghis Khan, for example—creating an aura of history and tradition and, therefore, of significance that helps to form the collective memory. If the most enduring public memories are those reenacted and repeated over time, 68 the repetitive and ceremonial nature of state funerals creates lasting memories that warrant further memorialization. The additional stature given such events by placement at official and sacred locations with a vast uniformed military presence and official dignitaries make it impossible for those outside the government to compete in establishing events “worthy” of such importance. Other organizations are not permitted access to such sacred sites as the capitol rotunda, nor do they control the massive funds or the military planes, persons, and arms necessary for such a display. Similar circumstances apply to national holidays that honor presidents and to military efforts. Even for observers not in agreement with the accolades so lavishly bestowed on the persons honored, the sheer press coverage and spectacle will for many assign importance to the event and, thus, to the person. Although groups will continue to erect monuments for their causes, they are likely to be slowly sifted from public view, as their efforts will have difficulty competing with traditional expectations and the force of the highly militarized and massive commemorations sponsored by the national, or even state and local governments. While I agree with Barthel that there are now efforts “designed to promote and to celebrate America’s diverse cultural and ethnic heritage,”70 it is highly unlikely that smaller groups can successfully compete with the most visible and acknowledged traditional memorialization on a significant scale. Most lasting changes in

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the memorial landscape will more likely come as diverse individuals attain the power to command those forces.

Notes Willard is probably still the most memorialized American woman. In addition to statues or busts at the national capitol, New York University’s Hall of Fame, the Asbury Park NJ Library, and the WCTU headquarters, numerous streets, buildings and halls are named for her. Many of these use only her last name, however (Willard Hall, Willard Street), and most people no longer recognize the figure behind the name. [. . .] 2 Membership numbers for the early twentieth century help to demonstrate the importance of the WCTU in attaining passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The WCTU supported suffrage for women, and the Suffrage Amendment was passed within a year of the Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment; this was not simply coincidental. Not only was the WCTU membership much larger than that of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, the largest suffrage organization, WCTU members’ less threatening demeanor and greater public acceptance also contributed to acceptance of woman’s suffrage. For further information, see Carol Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998). 1

WCTU NAWSA 1901 158,477 1900 8,981 1911 245,299 1910 19,240 1919 346,638 1914 70,240 3 4

11.

Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 209. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic, An American Tradition (New York: Oxford UP, 1979),

As late as 1905, the age of sexual consent in five states (Georgia, Mississippi, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, and Maryland) was fixed at age 10 years. In two states (Kentucky and Louisiana) the age of consent was 12 years. At least ten other states held age of consent at 14 or 15. Eighteen others placed the age at 16. (“Age of Consent,” The Union Signal, 27 April 1905, 12). Prior to WCTU efforts, age of consent in some states had been as low as seven years. 6 For the cognitive support concrete structures provide for collective memory, see Juanjo Igartua and Dario Paez in James W. Pennebaker, et al., Collective Memory of Political Events (Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997) 79–102. For other works that address the importance of the visual to collective memory, see Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone (Durham: Duke UP, 1999). 7 Mrs. S. M. I. Henry [Lady Henry Somerset], “The Temperance Temple,” The Union Signal, 7 June 1888, 4. 8 Quoted in “Temperance Temple Items,” The Union Signal, 21 August 1890, 5. Dunlap was one of the leaders of the Woman’s Crusade, the largest political protest of women in the century. Jack S. Blocker, Jr.’s “Give to the Winds Thy Fears”: The Women’s Temperance Crusade, 1873–1874 (Westport: 5

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Greenwood, 1985) is the most thorough study of the Crusade. According to Blocker, between December 1873 and November 1874, women in the movement protested the sale of alcohol by marching and by kneeling and praying inside and outside saloons. The Crusade involved an estimated 57,000 to 143,000 women across 911 U.S. cities. [. . .] 10 Frances E. Willard, “Address at Laying of Corner-Stone, Nov. 1, 1890,” The Union Signal, 8 November 1890, 2. 11 Carse, “Temple Temperance Items,” The Union Signal, 20 February 1890, 5. 12 Willard, “Address at Laying of Corner-Stone,” 2. 13 Quoted in “Temperance Temple Items,” The Union Signal, 20 February 1890, 5. 14 WCTU control of the Temple suffered from a variety of factors. The WCTU membership became divided over whether the WCTU should be involved in such a real estate venture, some concerned about the risk involved in such an expensive building and challenging Carse’s ability to lead such a project. [. . .] Willard defended Carse and the Temple project and kept membership largely in tow until her death, but at the 1898 national convention following Willard’s death, the union voted to disaffiliate with the Temple. Carse continued her efforts to save the Temple, but her own illness and general financial difficulties following the panic of 1893 with its ensuing depression led to her resignation and the Temple reverted to the mortgage holder, who finally reaped the profits from the building. For an in-depth account of the controversy surrounding the Temple and the gendered rhetoric associated with women’s venturing into the masculine financial world, see Rachel E. Bohlmann, “Our ‘House Beautiful’: The Woman’s Temple and the WCTU Effort to Establish Place and Identity in Downtown Chicago, 1887–1898,” Journal of Women’s History 11.2 (1999): 110–134. [. . .] 15 27 April 1892, 12. 16 15 May 1892, 5. 17 Qtd. in Bohlmann, note 17, 129. 18 The National Association of Building Owners and Managers, Office Building Obsolescence (Chicago: The National Association of Building Owners and Managers, 1927), 2. 19 Ibid., 3. 20 Ibid., 18. 21 Quoted in “Temperance Temple Items,” The Union Signal, 5 May 1892, 5. 22 National Association, 7. [. . .] 24 National Association, 12. 25 Ibid. [. . .] 27 Willard, “Temperance Temples,” The Union Signal, 3 May 1888, 7. [. . .] 29 The WCTU identified itself as the White Ribbon Army and referred to members as White Ribbon women. Members wore badges made of white ribbons to identify themselves as Union members, and deceased members’ graves were decorated with stone or ceramic white ribbons. The ribbon often appears across a round globe, representing the worldwide membership of the organization. 30 A fountain in Olympia, WA (Sylvester Park) honors Emma Page (1853–1910), Washington state WCTU member who spoke, wrote, and lobbied for kindness to animals and to have kindness to all living beings made a part of schools’ curricula. Another fountain at Pen Argyl, PA (Weona Park) addresses this issue. Below the symbolic white ribbon appears an image of a horse, and large troughs at horse level and at lower levels for smaller animals provided water for animals. The inscription on the fountain reads “Nature’s Own Beverage for Man and Beast.” The fountains at Lima, NY and New

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Shoreham, RI were similar, inscribed “A Fountain Made for Dogs, Horses, and Man,” the fountains had bowls attached at various levels to accommodate animals. A Strasbourg, PA fountain erected in 1900 was also inscribed for Man, Dog, and Beast. This fountain included electric globe lamps on each side, along with bowls for animals. The Strasbourg fountain was destroyed in 1922. 31 I have provided [. . .] dedication dates where available. Fountains that made a general tribute to the WCTU include one at Ocean City, NJ (1912); one at Brockton, MA (1894); the fountain at Pen Argyl, PA (1911, Weona Park); Amherst, MA (1904); Orange, MA (1904); Vineyard Haven, MA (1935, Owen Park); Hadley, MA; Uxbridge, MA; Shenandoah, IA (intersection Sheridan and Clarinda Avenues); Arcata, CA (Town Square); Fowler, CA (City Park); Madera, CA (1908, Yosemite Avenue and D Street); Ontario, CA; Red Cloud, NB; Bloomington, IN (Monroe County Courthouse); Cranbury, NJ (1907, Main Street Brainard Lake); Rehoboth Beach, DL; Hanford, CA (1905); Fortuna, CA (1905); Reedley, CA (1909, Pioneer Park); Selma, CA (1913, Lincoln Park at High and McCall); Watsonville, CA (1893, City Plaza); St. Petersburg, FL (1901, Museum of History); Trinidad, CO (1905); Lapeer, MI (1906, Old Court House); Las Vegas, NV, Lion Fountain (1896); Huntsville, AL (ca. 1900, Madison County Nature Trail); Decatur, IL (1905, originally at Central Railroad Station, now in backyard of a private residence); Dixon, IL (1912, City Hall); Edgewood, IA (Madison and Washington Streets); North Attleboro, MA; Salem, NJ (1901); Allegheny, NY (1910, Town Hall Park); Avon, NY (1904). 32 One fountain featuring Rebecca at the well stood in Lima, NY (1900) but is no longer standing; a duplicate of that fountain remains, although in very bad repair, in New Shoreham, RI (1896), and another at Block Island, RI. A winged woman (angel) [exists in] Tupelo, MS (1908); in Vernon, Texas (ca. early1900s, now at Allingham Park but originally at Wilbarger County Courthouse), the figure of the allegorical Justice. A Greek goddess stands in Riverside, CA (Mission Inn and Orange St.) and another in Anacortes, WA. Hebe tops an app. 4’6” base in Roseburg, OR (fountain base 1885, Hebe placed atop 1905, Eagles Park). 33 “Fountain Will be Presented 8:30 Tonight.” [Baton Rouge] State Advocate Times, 17 July 1914, 1. 34 “Fountain Is on Its Way to Baton Rouge.” [Baton Rouge] State Advocate Times, 19 June 1914, 1. [. . .] 36 Costing $3,000, the fountain was paid for entirely by pennies from 350,000 children in the Loyal Temperance League, the children’s affiliate of the WCTU. To assure active and broad participation by children, each child was to earn the donated pennies, and no child was permitted to give more than a dime (The Union Signal, 4 May 1893, 14). 37 The water girl measures 4’ 2” high on a base 9’ 2 1/2.” Willard described the statue as “a little girl offering a cup of cold water to the multitude, and providing also for the refreshment of the lower animals.” Willard saw the statue as especially fitting because it depicted a “child just verging upon her teens, and for this reason represents, not only one who receives, but one who gives forth of devotion, intelligent thought, and earnest action to the temperance reform in which she is already a soldier drilled and disciplined. It is this phase of the L.T. L. [Loyal Temperance Legion, one of the children’s organizations of the WCTU] work that recommends it most strongly to all” (quoted in The Union Signal 4 May 1893: 14). Other fountains in honor of Willard include one in Leominster, MA (1903); one in Richmond, VA (located in Byrd Park; this fountain also honors members of the Woman’s Crusade); Petaluma, CA (1891, Walnut Park); Lansing, MI (1902, originally Michigan and Washington Avenues, moved to Potter Park Zoo, later found thrown into river and placed in Turner Park); and

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another in Churchville, NY (Riga Library). A fountain in Griffin, GA (1916, Memorial Park) was dedicated on Willard’s birthday. Fountains dedicated to other individual women include one in honor of Emma Page in Olympia, WA (Sylvester Park); one honoring Amelia Jeanette Kilbon in Lee, MA (1899, designed by Daniel Chester French); a fountain honoring Rebecca Mitchell stands in Idaho Falls, ID; a fountain in Boise, ID (moved from the old city hall to the new one in 1988) honors Mary B. Tolles, founder of the Boise WCTU; one in Fredonia, NY dedicated to the memory of Esther McNeil, one of the original members of the Woman’s Crusade (West Barker Commons Park); in Greensboro, NC in honor of Caroline Gillespie Gorrell (1909); one honoring Anna A. Gordon, long time secretary to Frances Willard and later president of both the national and world WCTU, in Chatauqua, NY (1930, South Lake Drive); and a Newton, NJ fountain honors Catherine Ryerson McMurtry, first president of the Newton WCTU. 38 Houghery was a poor woman who, nonetheless, took in and toiled to support impoverished orphan children and contributed to orphanages. Willard’s reference to this statue shows up in many of her presidential addresses to the annual national convention. [. . .] 42 Diane Barthel, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996), 127. 43 In fact, large governmental organizations have been established to create and oversee war monuments. For example, the American Battle Monuments Commission, an agency of the Executive Branch of the federal government, creates and maintains a vast number of monuments both nationally and internationally, including the recently completed World War II monument on the National Mall. The World War II memorial cost $175 million dollars to build. 44 David R. Contosta. Lancaster, Ohio, 1800–2000: Frontier Town to Edge City (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999), 87. 45 “To View,” Lancaster Daily Eagle, 18 July 1890, 4. 46 Ibid., 40. 47 The [Lancaster] Semi-Weekly Gazette, 19 July 1890, 3. [. . .] 48 “To View,” 9. 49 Ibid., 4. 50 “An Imposing and Suitable Ceremonial,” 10 July 1890, 3. 51 I am grateful to Susan and Dennis Hall, who located this fountain, and especially to Susan Hall who retrieved the newspaper articles I cite here. 52 The classic reference work for the Jim Crow system and its evolution through court laws such as Brown and the 1960s Civil Rights movement remains C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford UP, 1955). 53 Such comments are prolific. This quotation is from Eliza J. Thomas of Evelyn, MO (“Temperance Temple Items,” The Union Signal, 5 December 1889, 4). The enormous sums of money raised for the Temple are more remarkable because individual women and unions actively raised money for so many causes related to the WCTU. In addition to annual membership dues, women participated in self-denial week, usually the week after Easter Sunday when “every white ribbon woman in Christendom is asked to deny herself something not necessary, that its cost may go to the local, state, National, or World’s W.C.T.U. treasury, as her conscience may decide” (“REMEMBER self-denial week,” The Union Signal, 7 April 1892, 1). [. . .] Many unions or union members also contributed to or endowed

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beds or furnished rooms at the National Temperance Hospital. [. . .] In addition, many local unions supported “mercy hospitals,” or hospitals for the indigent. The amount of monies raised was impressive. In 1890, the Illinois WCTU reported raising $4,000 for the Temple fund, $350 for the Temperance Hospital, and $67,000 for local work. The following charities were listed among the charities it supported within the state: The Bethesda Day Nursery and Kindergarten and Talcott Day Nursery and Kindergarten, with a combined total of 15, 929 children; the Anchorage Mission for Women, sheltering 4,000 girls; Hope Mission and Reading Room, for Scandinavians; The Bethesda Inn, serving 52,540 men with clean rooms at ten to fifteen cents per night; The Bethesda Free Medical Dispensary; the Hope Free Medical Dispensary; The Bethesda and Hope Sunday Schools; and the Central WCTU restaurant, serving over a thousand daily. Unions and union members also contributed to a variety of causes championed by both the national and the local unions, from education to vivisection (The Union Signal, 6 November 1890, 3). 54 See Savage, 6. 55 See Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989); Paul A. Shackel, Memory in Black and White (New York: Altamira P, 2003); Nico H. Frijda in James W. Pennebaker et al., Collective Memory of Political Events (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 103–127. [. . .] 56 See Janet Giele, Two Paths to Women’s Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism (NY: Twayne Publishers, 1995). 57 Carse, “Temperance Temple Items,” The Union Signal, 30 October 1890, 5. 58 The Union Signal, 16 October 1890, 5. 59 “Program,” The Union Signal, 2 February 1905, 8. 60 “Fountain Will be Presented,” [Baton Rouge] State Advocate Times, 1. 61 “An Imposing and Suitable Ceremonial.” [Lancaster, OH] Semi-Weekly Gazette, 12 July 1870, 3. [. . .] 63 Cited in Ward, 128. 64 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 14. 65 Ibid., 249. 66 Ibid. 67 James Fentress and Christopher Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge, England: Blackwell, 1992). 68 Shils. [. . .] 70 Barthel, 23.

“Feminine Style” and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards* Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn Attention to feminist rhetorical artifacts and feminist methods of analysis has burgeoned in recent years (Campbell, 1988, 1991; Carter and Spitzack, 1989; Condit, 1988; Dobris, 1989; Spitzack and Carter, 1987; Vonnegut, 1992). In traditional rhetorical analysis, such attention has focused primarily on rhetorical criticism of female rhetors in feminist movements. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s (1989) recent publication of a collection of analyses of rhetoric from the historical feminist movement is perhaps the most visible example of this trend, although it is buttressed by several individual studies in scholarly journals and edited collections (e.g., Campbell, 1987; Conrad, 1981a, 1981b; Dow, 1991; Japp, 1985; Solomon, 1991). The general purpose of these studies has been to explicate rhetorical strategies used by feminist rhetors to gain access to traditional modes of political power, primarily suffrage. Consequently, such studies have instantiated a liberal feminist orientation; that is, the goals of rhetors studied have been to gain equity for women within existing political systems, and critics have attempted to explain these goals and the rhetorical processes involved in achieving them. It can be argued that the feminist agenda in rhetorical studies itself also has been primarily liberal-feminist in orientation; a clear goal has been to revise the traditional “great speaker” paradigm to include woman rhetors (e.g., Campbell, 1991). In many cases, the rhetorical concepts, theories, and methods used to analyze feminist rhetoric produce fairly traditional “great speaker” studies, save that the speaker is female (e.g., Campbell, 1989, Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9; Dow, 1991; Japp, 1985). A noteworthy exception to this generalization is Campbell’s work on what she has termed “feminine style”(1989, p. 12; see also Campbell, 1973). Campbell’s theory of feminine style, developed through her analyses of historical and contemporary feminist rhetors and their distinctive audiences, has provided an alternative critical orientation with which to understand the source, form, and function of female communicative strategies and their effectiveness in feminist movements. While Campbell’s conclusions are a major theoretical contribution to *  The Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 286-302. Taylor & Francis, http//www.informaworld. com, reprinted by permission of the publisher. 313

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the study of public address, we believe that the potential of this contribution has thus far been limited in two ways. First, there has been little attempt to extend the concept beyond the context of feminist social reform. Second, and more important, feminine style primarily has been viewed as simply another, albeit unique and innovative, strategy that serves to empower audiences for the traditional purpose of gaining access to the existing political system. In this essay, we use the rhetoric of Texas Governor Ann Richards as a case study to extend the application and the implications of feminine style. We make two interrelated claims: 1) Richards’ rhetoric illustrates that elements of feminine style are identifiable in mainstream political discourse, and 2) in her rhetoric, feminine style functions not only as a strategy for audience empowerment but as a critique of traditional grounds for political judgment. We conclude that, in this context, the characteristics of feminine style are part of a synthesis of form and substance that works to promote an alternative political philosophy reflecting traditionally feminine values.1 While grounded in Campbell’s perspective on feminine style, our interpretation also draws upon studies of women’s talk in various contexts (Kramarae, 1981; Hall and Langellier, 1988; Maltz and Borker, 1982; Treichler and Kramarae, 1983) as well as on psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives that examine connections between women’s experiences and their modes of reasoning (Chodorow, 1978; Gilligan, 1982; Wilson Schaef, 1981). Exploration of this process furthers the feminist agenda in rhetorical criticism by expanding awareness of the philosophical, as well as tactical, implications of feminine style. Moreover, as the agenda for a critical rhetoric develops, the study of rhetorical efforts to create alternative communities and modes of reasoning enhances our understanding of potential resistance to the implicit discourses of power that shape our culture (Charland, 1991, pp. 73–74). We propose that the discursive strategies and modes of argument in Richards’ rhetoric be viewed as contributing to what feminist literary critic Rita Felski calls the “feminist counter-public sphere,” a concept adapted from Habermas’ theory of the bourgeois public sphere. Using this perspective, both the discourse itself and this analysis of it function as contributions to the continued formation of “a discursive space which defines itself in terms of a common identity” but which operates to provide potential for oppositional ideology that counters hegemonic ideas of universality (Felski, 1989, p. 166). The primary text for this analysis is Richards’ 1988 Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Because it deals with the national political climate in a presidential election year, this speech is the broadest and most comprehensive example supporting our claims. We feature another national political address, Richards’ speech to the Democratic Issues Conference in January of 1992, for similar reasons. However, to indicate consistency of style and substance, we also support our conclusions with evidence from several of Richards’ speeches as State Treasurer of Texas which preceded the 1988 Keynote and from other speeches she gave as Governor of Texas following her election in November of 1990.

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Contemporary Feminine Style Campbell traces the development and appeal of feminine style to the common experiences of women in the process of craft-learning. In this context, she argues, women developed particular capacities for concrete and contingent reasoning, for reliance on personal experience, and for participatory interaction. In a rhetorical situation, these attributes produce discourse that displays a personal tone, uses personal experience, anecdotes and examples as evidence, exhibits inductive structure, emphasizes audience participation, and encourages identification between speaker and audience (Campbell, 1989, p. 13). We maintain that these characteristics hold true in some contemporary discourse because, while the historical conditions of women have changed in many ways, their primary social roles have not. Women still learn the “crafts” of housewifery and motherhood. Few women still may make soap or weave cloth; nonetheless the traditionally female crafts of emotional support, nurturance, empathy, and concrete reasoning are still familiar requirements of the female role. Moreover, current research indicates that these specific skills, as well as the way they are learned, may continue to foster development of specific communicative strategies for women. Evidence indicates that most female children are socialized to exhibit the traditional characteristics of their perceived social roles early in life, and that possession of such skills has little to do with whether or not a woman actually becomes a wife or mother (Chodorow, 1978; Gilligan, 1982; Ruddick, 1989). As a result, women are encouraged to exhibit communicative patterns that correspond to the tasks that women are expected to perform in the private sphere, just as men’s communication reflects their primary roles in public life. While private, female communication is characterized as concrete, participatory, cooperative, and oriented toward relationship maintenance, public, male communication is characterized as abstract, hierarchical, dominating, and oriented toward problem-solving (Maltz and Borker, 1982; Treichler and Kramarae, 1983). However, public communication, primarily produced by males, has served as the model for “good” speech. Because women’s communicative patterns are associated with their roles in the private sphere of home and family, women have been perceived as ill-suited to the competitive, task-oriented, or deliberative behavior of the public sphere (Kramarae, 1981; Spitzack and Carter, 1987, pp. 407–414). Understanding this dichotomy is important for evaluating the rhetoric of female political speakers. Female politicians must operate in the ultimate public deliberative context, where feminine communicative strategies would seem least valued and adaptation to typically male communicative patterns would seem most useful. Indeed, Campbell has noted that historical feminist rhetors such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were skilled at adapting to masculine modes of communication when speaking to primarily male audiences in political or judicial contexts (1989, Chapters 6, 7). In a study of contemporary female politicians, Karlyn Campbell and E. Claire Jerry (1988) note the paradoxical demands placed on contemporary female politicians. Attempts to avoid perceptions of masculinity and to be

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rhetorically effective with public audiences have led these women to synthesize gender expectations by using socially approved rhetorical strategies commonly identified as “masculine”— formal evidence, deductive structure, and linear modes of reasoning—while simultaneously incorporating concerns and qualities typically considered “feminine,” such as family values or feminine personae. The perceived unsuitability of a feminine communicative style for traditional public discourse is supported by Campbell’s claim that this style arose as a strategic response to a nontraditional audience inexperienced in public deliberation. Campbell stresses that the similarity between characteristics of women’s private world of experience and feminine style made the latter particularly effective for powerless female audiences (1989, p. 14; see also Campbell, 1973). However, we believe that to interpret Campbell’s conclusions as restricting study of the implications of feminine style to this context is short-sighted. We contend that analysis of contemporary discourse exhibiting feminine style can elide the barriers between private and public discourse, illustrating how feminine style can function to offer alternative modes of political reasoning.

Contemporary Feminine Style in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards While State Treasurer of Texas, Ann W. Richards emerged as a national political figure with her keynote address at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in 1988. In 1990, she won a close race for Governor of Texas, and she became only the second woman to hold that position. Richards’ 1988 Keynote Address prompted recognition of her unusual qualities as a political orator. Most reviewers attributed her non-traditional style, which made use of frequent colloquialisms, personal anecdotes, sharp humor, and family values, to regional influence. Comments included descriptors such as “stemwinder,” and “Southernism” (Balzar, 1988, p. 4, 5), and references to the “tradition of Southern storytelling,” to her “laconic Texas drawl” and to Richards as “a female Texas good ol’ boy” (Applebome, 1988, p. A13). While Richards’ Texas background clearly is reflected in her rhetoric, we suggest that the most useful way to understand the appeal of her discourse is as a manifestation of contemporary feminine style. The synthesis of formal qualities of feminine style evident in Richards’ rhetoric (use of narrative, concrete examples, analogies, and anecdotes as primary evidence sources; personal tone, and encouragement of audience participation) with an alternative political philosophy reflecting feminine ideals of care, nurturance, and family relationships functions as a critique of traditional political reasoning that offers alternative grounds for political judgment. We examine three specific aspects of Richards’ rhetoric: her process of testing claims for political progress, her privileging of personal grounds for public knowledge, and her creation of a unique rhetor/audience relationship.

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Testing Claims with Experience The dominance of personal anecdotes, concrete examples, and brief narratives in Richards’ 1988 address to the Democratic National Convention is perhaps the most visible hallmark of the feminine style. Campbell notes that the use of these types of evidence can function to empower audiences because the generalizations reached from validation of personal experiences lead to the realization that “the personal is political,” a process which produces group cohesion and transforms audience members into “agents of change” (Campbell, 1973; Campbell, 1989). We argue that Richards’ reliance on such evidence functions in two additional ways: first, it creates an implicit standard for political judgment that is based on the primacy of experiential knowledge and inductive reasoning; second, it explicitly critiques the validity of claims that cannot meet this standard. Richards’ reliance on an experiential standard is evident in the DNC speech, where she is consistent in her application of the standard both to attack the opposition and to praise her own party. Richards moves into the body of her keynote address by initiating her attack on the Republican opposition; she begins the attack inductively by stating simply, “I got a letter last week from a young mother in Lorena, Texas, and I want to read a part of it to you.” The letter stresses the practical hardships that Richards will attribute to the policies of the Reagan administration: I pray my kids don’t have a growth spurt from August to December so I don’t have to buy new jeans. We buy clothes at the budget store to have them fray, stretch, and fade in the first wash. . . . We’re the people you see every day in the grocery store. We obey the laws, pay our taxes, and fly our flags on holidays. We plod along trying to make it better for ourselves and our children and our parents. . . . I believe people like us have been forgotten in America. (1988b) At the conclusion of this brief narrative Richards validates the experiential reasoning of the woman by stating, “Well, of course, you believe you’re forgotten. Because you have been” (1988b). With this first example, Richards begins a pattern that privileges concrete experience over traditional deductive reasoning and creates standards for political judgment in which claims are tested against private experience. For example, when criticizing Ronald Reagan’s handling of questions about the Iran-Contra affair, she compares his responses to those given by her children: “And when we get our questions asked, or there’s a leak, or an investigation, the only answer we get is ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I forgot.’ But you wouldn’t accept an answer like that from your children. I wouldn’t. Don’t tell me ‘you don’t know’ or ‘you forgot’ ” (1988b). Reducing a complex issue such as the Iran-Contra affair to a judgment based in parental experience promotes the validity of practical wisdom in testing claims. In this case, Richards highlights a type of wisdom that could be construed as peculiarly feminine. Sara Ruddick argues that women’s capacity and preference for concrete reasoning is tied to the contingencies

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of dealing with the growth of children (1989, p. 96–97), and Nancy Chodorow links women’s tendency for “particularistic” thinking with their primary “exercise of influence in face-to-face personal contexts” (1978, p. 180). Richards’ transfer of such reasoning to a political context brings feminine reasoning into the public sphere. While she uses practical wisdom drawn from experience to attack the opposition, Richards is consistent in that she also uses this strategy to praise the values and accomplishments of the Democratic Party. Rather than using veneration of specific party leaders or recitation of general Democratic ideals, she uses practical consequences to evaluate Democratic accomplishments: People in rural areas were told that we deserved to have electric lights, and they would harness the energy to give us electricity so that my grandmama didn’t have to carry that old coal oil lamp around. They [past Democratic leaders] told us that they were going to guarantee that when we put our money in the bank, that the money was going to be there, and it was going to be insured, and they did what they said. They did not lie to us. (1988b) Richards’ reliance on judgments based in human experience rather than abstract reasoning is also clear in her rhetoric in other contexts. In an address in Texas in 1987, Richards makes clear the importance of the daily human consequences of policy decisions: “I know what it means in human terms when the EMS [Emergency Medical Services] unit cannot get down the road for an emergency call or an elderly heart patient. Those situations . . . come back to haunt you in the wee hours of the night when you feel every ounce of the weight of your responsibility, when you reflect on the human cost of the dollars that were not available” (1987b). Richards apparently views the ability to see the human factor in a situation as part of a “feminine eye,” a perspective suggested in an anecdote she repeats in speeches as Governor: Years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt was traveling by train across the United States and she looked out the window and saw a clothes line drooping across the horizon. She made a note in her journal; two children’s play suits, a denim work shirt, a pair of faded dungarees, and a plain cotton dress. “Not much to waste here.” Others might have seen only the clothes on the line, but Eleanor saw the human beings, the family. It is time for us to open our eyes and truly see the people who live with our politics. (1992a)2 The corollary to Richards’ use of experiential wisdom as grounds for political judgment and evaluation is her critique of the validity of claims that cannot meet such a standard. In a long passage from the DNC speech, Richards explicitly contrasts a series of claims made by the Reagan administration with the reality that Americans experience: “Now they tell us that

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employment rates are great and that they’re for equal opportunity, but . . . the opportunity they’re so proud of is low-wage, dead end jobs. . . . And there is no major city in America where you cannot see homeless men sitting in a parking lot holding signs that say, ‘I will work for food’” (1988b). Using one of her trademark colloquialisms, Richards later critiques Republican defense expenditures in a similar fashion: “When our leaders say . . . we need a new weapons system, our inclination is to say, ‘Well, they must be right.’ But when we pay millions for planes that won’t fly [and] billions for tanks that won’t fire . . . that old dog won’t hunt” (1988b). In the context Richards creates, “truth” is found in consistency between what is said and what is experienced, and her rhetoric dismisses as invalid those claims that cannot meet this standard. Richards’ refusal to trust deductive claims that are divorced from concrete experience is vividly illustrated in an anecdote about federal energy policy from her 1992 Democratic Issues Conference speech to congressional leaders: “Not only did the Federal government allow the market to be flooded with a sea of cheap oil, but they sent the Navy out to escort the tankers, spending billions of dollars to bring oil out of the Middle East. The Defense Department may not like to call it a subsidy . . . but you can put lipstick on a hog and call it Monique . . . and it is still a pig” (1992a).3 As in the DNC address, the contrast between claims and experience is illustrated repeatedly in this speech, as when Richards notes that “[The people] are told their government is cutting all the fat, but riding past all the new construction of those big government buildings on the way in from the Washington airport, it sure doesn’t look that way” (1992a). Although Richards occasionally makes use of traditional lines of reasoning and impersonal forms of evidence, she promotes inductive reasoning based on experience and examples as the soundest ground for judgment. In an address to lawyers in Texas, she explicitly rejects the privileging of deductive logic in favor of experiential modes: “In thinking about what I might say to you today, I came upon something Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘The life of the law,’ observed Holmes, ‘has not been logic. It has been experience’ ” (1987c). As Campbell claims, the strategy of using concrete examples and personal experience is empowering; it encourages audiences’ reliance on their own instincts and perceptions of reality, even if these dispute dominant models. However, given this analysis, we believe that this conclusion can be extended to include the potential for feminine style to function philosophically as well as strategically, by creating alternative grounds for testing the validity of claims for public knowledge. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that Richards’ most explicit critiques of traditional political reasoning are found in the DNC address and the address to the Democratic Issues Conference: speeches to political leaders who are in the best position to implement such a philosophy. Moreover, the alternative standard evident in Richards’ rhetoric celebrates qualities regarded as traditionally feminine: the use of experience in testing generalizations, the importance of trusting personal reactions, and the applicability of wisdom from the private sphere

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of home and family to the public sphere (e.g., “But you wouldn’t accept that answer from your children”). Chodorow claims that women’s roles involve mediation “between the social and cultural categories which men have defined; they bridge the gap and make transitions . . . between nature [the private sphere] and culture [the public sphere]” (1978, p. 180). Yet because of the paradox facing female politicians and the general devaluing of women’s experiences and modes of talk, women in public life are not likely to admit reasoning from feminine experience. Richards’ defiance of this constraint, in both form and content, is explored next as we examine her explicit validation of a feminine, personal perspective on political life.

The Personal as Political Philosophy The use of a personal tone and of personal disclosure are interrelated characteristics of feminine style. The telling of personal experience presupposes a personal attitude toward the subject and a willingness for audience identification, a goal of feminine style (Campbell, 1989, pp. 13–14). However, self-disclosure for the purpose of identification is a widely used strategy, particularly by politicians (See Jamieson, 1988). Yet, Richards’ use of personal disclosure to highlight values and experiences peculiar to women’s culture makes her use of this strategy distinctive. Moreover, her celebration of women’s experiences functions to critique the exclusion of women and women’s modes of reasoning from public life and promotes grounds for political judgment that reflect traditionally feminine concerns. Most striking in this regard is Richards’ choice to begin her DNC speech with specific acknowledgement of her gender and to include a direct critique of a political system that has ignored the existence and accomplishments of women: “Twelve years ago, Barbara Jordan, another Texas woman, made the keynote address to this convention, and two women in 160 years is about par for the course. But if you give us a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels” (1988b). The indictment is less threatening couched in humor, but the humor functions to underscore the fact that women have performed on a level equal to men despite the added obstacles of sex roles (“high heels” and adapting to male leads). In a speech to the Texas “Rising Star” Awards dinner, Richards also begins by alluding humorously to the overlooked accomplishments of women, herself perhaps included: “Texas Business magazine produced a real attention-getter in December when its Texan of the Year issue displayed an empty saddle . . . and asked ‘Why is this saddle empty?’ An immodest woman might point [out] that you would have had better luck filling a side-saddle. . . . But I would never say that” (1988a). Richards’ humorous jibes both reaffirm sex roles (“high heels,” “side-saddle,” “immodest woman”) and critique them. The good humor that clearly underlies the pointed remarks introduces an element of self-deprecation, shielding Richards from the label of “angry feminist.” The personal anecdote about an eighth grade basketball game that follows her opening remarks to the DNC makes this clear: “I thought I looked real cute in my uniform, and then I heard a boy yell from the bleachers, ‘Make that basket, bird legs.’ My greatest fear is

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that same guy is somewhere out in the audience tonight and he’s going to cut me down to size” (1988b). Yet the humility implicit here is not a retreat from feminist principles, but an inductive introduction to a section celebrating the value of personal experience in political life. She continues: Where I grew up there wasn’t much tolerance for self-importance or people who put on airs. I was born during the Depression [and] . . . it was back then that I came to understand the small truths and hardships that bind neighbors together. Those were real people with real problems. And they had real dreams about getting out of the Depression. I can remember summer nights when we’d put down what we called a Baptist pallet, a quilt on the ground, and we listened to the grown-ups talk. . . . They talked about war and Washington and what this country needed—straight talk from people living their lives as best they could. And that’s what we’ll do tonight. (1988b) Richards’ self-disclosure, and the wisdom she draws from her experience, reflects a quality associated with female culture, where private experiences are shared both to enhance relationships and to create a perspective on the world (Jones, 1980, p. 195). Traditionally, women’s primary roles are their private and relational ones (wife, mother, daughter) and not their professional or public ones (Chodorow, 1978, p. 178). Consequently, the lessons learned and later transmitted through stories are grounded in personal experiences, often experiences specific to women in these relational roles (Hall and Langellier, 1988). Richards’ distinctiveness is in her extension of these qualities of private talk to the public sphere, and her promotion of the sharing and personal awareness they entail as necessary for fulfillment of human potential and political progress. An important example of her enactment of this perspective is her willingness to speak publicly about her experiences as a recovered alcoholic. Speaking to the National Conference on Women and Alcoholism, she uses her own life as an example of the possibilities of recovery: “The fact that I hold office and continue to enjoy success that amazes even my parents says something wonderful both about the treatment of chemical addiction and the changing attitudes of our society toward the disease” (1988c). Richards specifically addresses the importance of self-awareness for women with a strikingly personal passage from a speech at the commencement of an all-female school in Dallas, where she uses an extended version of the “birdlegs” anecdote that later would appear in her DNC speech: At the age of fifty-three, I have long accepted the fact that Birdlegs will always be inside with me. And the truth is, she’s good to have around. She keeps me honest. . . . But I have learned a few things Birdlegs doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that almost everyone is as insecure as she is. She doesn’t know that she’s just as smart as she will allow herself to be.

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And Birdlegs certainly doesn’t know that she is in charge of her life. She still believes in Movie Romance and Daily Miracles. Birdlegs still believes that if she uses just the right combination of mysterious potions from the make-up counter and practices sounding terribly sophisticated, she will attract the interest of a rich, Italian count with a faint aura of danger about him—and he will eventually devote himself to catering to her every whim. Ann is fairly certain that isn’t true. . . . Birdlegs even believes that there are great mysteries in life that only a select group of people understand. She thinks that if she can just work her way up high enough and far enough, she will be led into a great boardroom in the sky where the clouds will part and important men will reveal to her the secret of making big things happen. Ann knows that isn’t true. That eighth grade basketball player is still frozen in time. Ann isn’t. And neither are you. (1987a) While Richards demonstrates her susceptibility to the common fantasies of women in a humorous fashion, the narrative has a more complex function than levity. Rather, Richards’ self-disclosure and self-deprecation celebrate the strength and self-awareness gained through mature introspection. The contents of the narrative are experiences peculiar to women, which Richards comfortingly validates for this female audience. However, the moral of the tale is psychological survival, which she explicitly shares and enacts in the same address: “[T]he small voice of self-doubt will always be there in some form or another. But, over the years, you learn to talk back to it. . . . [L]et me tell you that you will survive. If nothing else, I serve as living physical proof of it” (1987a). One of Richards’ most explicit statements of the distinctiveness and value of female experience and modes of expression comes in a speech to a group of female lawyers: I hope we all accepted long ago that women and men are different. . . . The most sympathetic and sensitive of our men friends, no matter how hard he tries, cannot hear with a woman’s ear or process information through a woman’s experience. . . . The experience is different. The perspective is different. The knowing is different. We see it many ways in our society now—and I see it often in policy deliberations. . . . When I am part of a meeting . . . the nature of the discussion changes, because I am a woman. . . . When you add someone whose understanding is not intellectual, but instinctive—the whole equation changes. Their presence creates a confrontation with the obvious, a close encounter with reality. (1987c)5 In this statement, there is recognition of the concrete nature of women’s thinking (“close encounter with reality”) that creates “instinctive” (versus “intellectual”) understanding. This analysis of women’s perspective also reflects a dominant thread in Richards’ rhetoric: the value of inclusion versus separation and categorization, a theme we return to later.

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Although not as explicit, the elevation of a feminine perspective is clearly present in her DNC address as well where she develops a framework of feminine values: nurturing, care, and family relationships, as the model for measuring progress. As in her critique of reasoning described above, her promotion of these values includes a devaluation of actions that exclude them.

Female Experience and the Ethic of Care Chodorow maintains that the development of female children stresses “particularistic and affective relationships to others” tied to identification with the mother (1978, p. 176). As females mature, they attach value to connections with others in a way that male children, whose learning privileges differentiation from others in a process stressing abstract and categorical dimensions of the masculine role, do not (Chodorow, 1978, p. 176–77). The result is that women’s roles “share a concern with the crossing of boundaries” while men’s identity encourages separation from others and a reproduction of categorical definitions (Chodorow, 1978, p. 180) Ann Wilson Schaef describes “the essence of female life” for women as “relationships—not relationships that define and validate, but relationships with the self, one’s work, and the universe that nurture and grow. Not static relationships that are neatly categorized and packaged, but relationships that evolve and change, contract and expand. A process of relationships” (1981, p. 113). In the DNC speech, Richards’ critique of opposition values and her creation of an alternative paradigm for political progress reflect these distinctions. Criticizing the Republican administration for employing divisive political strategies and as divorced from ordinary concerns, she lays the groundwork for her development of an alternative framework stressing connection, empathy, and familial concerns. She uses metaphor to describe what she calls the “political theory” of “divide and conquer”: “This Republican administration treats us as if we were pieces of a puzzle that can’t fit together. They’ve tried to put us into compartments and separate us from each other. . . . We’ve been isolated. . . . And in our isolation we think government isn’t going to help us, and that we’re alone in our feelings” (1988b). As an alternative, Richards offers a vision of communal interests and connectedness produced by Democratic leaders of the past: Now, I’m going to tell you, I’m really glad that our young people missed the Depression and missed the great big war. But I do regret that they missed the leaders that I knew. Leaders who told us when things were tough and that we would have to sacrifice, and that these difficulties might last awhile. They didn’t tell us things were hard for us because we were different or isolated or special interests. They brought us together and they gave us a sense of national purpose. (1988b) Noteworthy here is Richards’ attribution of the value of connectedness, prefaced by an acknowledgement of the particular importance of this lesson for young people. Richards’ im-

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plicit use of a family metaphor here (young people would learn from the examples of their elders) runs throughout the address as she repeatedly returns to issues of care, nurturance, and the values learned from relationships. Praising leaders who “want us to be all that we can be” (1988b), she implicitly links leadership to the feminine responsibility for fostering growth and development (Ruddick, Chapter 4). This connection becomes more explicit as she immediately lauds Jesse Jackson as such a leader, who “has taught us that we are as good as our capacity for caring. Caring about the drug problem, caring about crime, caring about education and caring about each other.” The failure of Ronald Reagan to meet this standard of care is expressed through metonymy: “Now, in contrast, the greatest nation in the free world has had a leader for eight straight years that has pretended that he cannot hear our questions over the noise of the helicopter.” Richards’ critique of Republican disregard for the needs of the people extends to George Bush: “And, for eight straight years, George Bush hasn’t displayed the slightest interest in anything we care about” (1988b). Carol Gilligan notes that, as women “define themselves in a context of human relationships,” they “judge themselves in terms of their ability to care” (1982, p. 17). Richards extends the ethic of care to serve as grounds for political judgment; in essence, she takes a feminine value from the private sphere and asserts its relevance in the public world of politics. At the end of the body of the DNC speech, Richards sums up the conclusion to be drawn from her interpretation of America’s political culture when she notes “what this election is really all about. It’s about the American dream. Those who want to keep it for the few, and those of us who know it must be nurtured and passed along” (1988b) [our emphasis]. Perhaps the ultimate expression of feminine style and the philosophy that underlies it emerges in the extended narrative that serves as Richards’ conclusion to the DNC speech. Weaving together self-disclosure and concrete examples, Richards returns to the themes of the story of her childhood in Texas that began the speech, and she creates a paradigm for political progress that stresses the connections, nurturance, and family relationships that govern female life: I’m a grandmother now. And I have one nearly perfect granddaughter named Lily. And when I hold that grandbaby, I feel the continuity of life that unites us, that binds generation to generation, that ties us with each other. . . . As I look at Lily, I know that it is within our families that we learn both the need to respect individual human dignity and to work together for the common good. Within our families, within our nation, it is the same. As we sit there, I wonder if she’ll ever grasp the changes I’ve seen in my life—if she’ll ever believe that there was a time when blacks could not drink from public water fountains, when Hispanic children were punished for speaking Spanish in the public schools, and women couldn’t vote. I think of all the political fights I’ve fought and all the compromises

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I’ve had to accept as part payment. And I think of the small victories that have added up to national triumphs. . . . And I will tell Lily that those triumphs were Democratic Party triumphs. . . . And our strength lies in the women who go to work every day, who struggle to balance their families and their jobs, and who should never, ever be forgotten. I just hope that—like her grandparents and her great-grandparents before—that Lily goes on to raise her kids with the promise that echoes in homes all across America: That we can do better. (1988b) This narrative is a succinct expression of what Carol Gilligan has called women’s ideal of care: “An activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the . . . web of connection so that no one is left alone” (1982, p. 62). Richards uses the concrete concerns and values of family life and draws a connection to political responsibility. As we argue next, this emphasis on connection and relationships as the basis for political life is enacted in the relationship that Richards creates with her audience.

Nurturing and Empowerment The above analysis of Richards’ rhetoric offers several implications for the concept of the speaker/audience relationship in feminine style. As Campbell notes, identification is the goal of the personal connection forged between speaker and auditor in feminine style, and this identification serves as the basis for empowerment (1989, p. 13). We believe this conclusion can be extended to include a specific awareness of the roles that feminine style can invite speakers and audiences to play. If, as we have proposed, feminine style is grounded in the characteristics of women’s social roles, central of which is that of nurturer in their primary relationships, then the notion that feminine style presupposes a peer relationship (Campbell, 1989, p. 13) must be adjusted somewhat. It is in this context that the connection between women’s consciousness-raising groups and feminine rhetorical style (Campbell, 1989; Campbell, 1973) is made problematic. Richards’ rhetoric contains all the ingredients that indicate a participatory, peer tone using Campbell’s definition; she acknowledges the audience in her inclusive pronouns, she encourages audiences to draw their own conclusions from the examples she offers, and she self-discloses, a strategy that presupposes the trust among peers. However, these characteristics also fit nurturing relationships, which, while not explicitly hierarchical in terms of a requirement for dominance, nevertheless imply guidance rather than pure equality. We contend that the feminine style embodied in Richards’ rhetoric reflects the complicated nature of a nurturing persona, in which authority is used for the purpose of fostering the growth of the other toward the capacity for independent action. “Nurturing” is a term naturally associated with motherhood, and Ruddick identifies nurturing, and the ethic of “care” that underlies it, as central to what she calls “maternal thinking” (1989, p. 46). The charac-

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teristics of maternal thinking are closely allied with those Gilligan, Chodorow, and others delineate as central to feminine modes of reasoning, regardless of performance of motherhood. Ruddick’s description of the persona enacted through maternal thinking reflects the delicate balance of nurturing work in a mother’s life that is illustrated in Richards’ rhetoric. Richards’ attempts to facilitate the reasoning of her audience through inductive use of examples, and her encouragement of the use of personal experience in understanding self and in judging the public world are trademarks of a nurturing attitude. Ruddick writes: To be responsible for children’s moral well-being means helping them to become people who will be reliably moral when they are alone or among peers. This means turning over moral initiative to the children themselves. . . . Her children’s differences require the most challenging of a mother’s many balancing acts: alongside her own strong convictions of virtues and excellence she is to place her children’s need to ask and answer for themselves questions central to moral life. (1989, p. 108) In this context, nurturance is central to the work of empowerment. Through empathy, attentiveness, and inducements to participation, those who nurture constantly negotiate the balance between authority and independence. In Richards’ rhetoric, the wisdom she offers from her own experience, the connections she urges her audience to draw from their experiences, her insistence on an ethic of care from leaders, and her development of a family paradigm for political judgment both enact a nurturing relationship to the audience and celebrate a nurturing philosophy. Synthesis of form and substance are realized here, because a conception of what is desirable that is guided by the activity of care requires “a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract” (Gilligan, 1982, p. 19). The end result of such activity, both in traditional nurturing contexts and in Richards’ rhetoric, is empowerment, a goal Richards articulates specifically in a 1988 speech: In the sixth century before the birth of Christ, the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu noted that, “when the best leader’s work is done, the people say ‘We did it ourselves.’ ” And, today, as we fret about the absence of leaders, what we are really looking for is someone who will help us do it ourselves. (1988a) The relationship that Richards describes and enacts for her audience is key to her appeal and has potential for alleviating the increasing disaffection with traditional politics, by both politicians and voters. Such a relationship reduces distance between rhetor and audience and empowers audiences to trust their own perceptions and judgments. In an increasingly complex political climate, recognition of new and effective modes of political communication is important. While we suggest that the philosophy reflected by Richards’ rhetoric can be illuminated

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by its connections with women’s roles and experiences, its use is not necessarily restricted to women; just as women have long adapted to masculine modes of discourse, men could surely learn the usefulness of what we have called a “feminine” mode. Moreover, Richards’ success in a state as large and diverse as Texas indicates that the appeal of her style and philosophy for audiences is not limited by gender.

Conclusion We believe that this analysis illustrates the potential for an alternative perspective on feminine style, one that includes its philosophical as well as its strategic value. If feminine style is a reflection of the conditions of female existence, then perhaps feminine style reveals the potential, in the public sphere, for reproducing positive elements of those conditions. In the context of public, political discourse (rather than feminist social reform), feminine style can be interpreted as reproducing those conditions for the purpose of creating alternative grounds for political judgment. To say that the form of feminine discourse reflects a philosophical standpoint is to recognize an intimate relation between form and content, one that Leff and Sachs have labeled “iconicity,” in which the “aesthetic dimension” of a work “appears intimately connected with its political function” (1991, p. 269). Such a perspective reveals “the power of discourse to blend form and meaning into local unities that ‘textualize’ the public world and invite audiences to experience the world as the text represents it” (1991, p. 270). If the content of public, political discourse can be studied for its implicit, or explicit, philosophy, a task with long precedent, then to ask how the form of discourse contributes to that philosophy is a natural evolution. In Richards’ rhetoric three vital equations make such a process evident. First, reliance on concrete examples and anecdotes in feminine style, particularly in the process of evaluating political action, reflects a philosophy stressing the utility of practical wisdom in judging truth. The contingent reasoning on which women rely, in their social roles as wives and mothers, is privileged here. Second, Richards’ use of self-disclosure and sharing of emotion, elements of both feminine style and women’s nurturing roles, promotes a political philosophy governed by the fostering of connections and affective relationships. Finally, the combination of the above elements with Richards’ explicit avowal of a family model for political progress results in a rhetor/audience relationship based on nurturing principles. These conclusions foster realization of feminine style as a philosophy with important implications for the study of women’s rhetoric. Restricting examination of feminine style only to the context of social reform rhetoric aimed at disempowered female audiences is to limit its relevance and implicitly to reify the public/private distinction that devalues women’s communication. Campbell certainly does not endorse such separation; indeed, she explicitly notes that feminine style is not exclusive to women, as rhetors or audiences. However, only if we test the implications of feminine style beyond its original context can we realize the transformative potential of its use in a variety of situations.

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For example, a developing trend in political theory emphasizes how traditionally feminine values might be integrated into politics. In a review essay of work in this area, Jane Mansbridge notes that this project “requires seeing relations formed in the private, domestic, and particular realm as reasonable models for, or the first steps toward, some forms of public spirit” (1990, p. 133). Such a feminine political theory might include valuation of the ethic of care, of enhanced emotional capacity, and of empathy in relationships (Mansbridge, 1990, pp. 134–135). Our analysis illustrates the discursive expression and enactment of such an emerging perspective, and it carries both political and rhetorical implications. First, analysis of rhetoric such as Richards’ demonstrates the declining usefulness of distinctions between public and private modes of discourse and thought, a distinction that has devalued women’s rhetorical and political contributions. If we are to revise past definitions of universal rhetorical standards, as Charland (1991) has suggested, then this kind of analysis is an important step. We argue that the complexity of women’s social roles, and their influence on communication, may be an asset in the public sphere, rather than an obstacle. However, such an evaluation requires adjustment of conventional rhetorical, as well as political, wisdom. Ultimately our scholarship will be enriched as we come to understand the “different modes of language and thought” that can inform the lives of men and women (Gilligan, 1982, p. 174). Second, this rhetoric demonstrates that critics must revise paradigms that view female or feminist rhetorical action simply in terms of its adaptation to obstacles posed by patriarchy (usually within the context of feminist movements) and more in terms of its attempts to offer alternatives to patriarchal modes of thought and reasoning. With this focus, Felski’s concept of the feminist counter-public sphere becomes useful. Felski claims that one way to make sense of the varieties of feminist symbolic action is to view them as contributions to the feminist counter-public sphere, “a model for the analysis of the diverse forms of recent artistic or cultural activity by women in relation to the historical emergence of an influential oppositional ideology which seeks to challenge the existing reality of gender subordination” (1989, p. 164). We suggest that the existence of and analysis of rhetoric such as Richards’ can be understood as part of this phenomenon, and can contribute to the articulation of a critical rhetoric. The concept of a counter-public sphere is an adaption of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere, which he sees as a discursive arena, distinguishable from state power, that provides a realm for rational public argument to influence public opinion. The bourgeois public sphere is a historical concept originally predicated on the conditions of seventeenth and eighteenth century publics controlled by aristocratic and propertied concerns (Habermas, 1974). As growth of state economic, bureaucratic, and communicative influence has undermined the notion of an independent sphere for public discourse, and as a postmodern perspective has taken hold, Habermas’ project has been to reclaim and reconstruct what he sees as the untapped emancipatory potential of an essentially rationally grounded notion of the public sphere (Best and Kellner, 1991). However, the public sphere ideal has been attacked for its assumption of uni-

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versalism (and thus its exclusion of issues of race, gender, and class) and its related incompatibility with a postmodern perspective (Best and Kellner, 1991, pp. 241–246). According to Felski (1989, p. 166), rather than eliminating the critical potential of the public sphere ideal, the lack of a consensual basis for a universal public sphere has led some theorists to posit the development of partial or counter public spheres, of which feminism is an example. The feminist counter-public sphere does not claim universality but instead “offers a critique of cultural values from the standpoint of women as a marginalized group within society” (1989, p. 167). Clearly, given the diversity of feminist beliefs and practices, such a sphere is not univocal. Two conditions make it possible: First, its general orientation as a “critique of values” for the purpose of “revising or refuting male-defined cultural and discursive frameworks . . . through political activity and theoretical critique” (Felski, 1989, pp. 167–68). Second, and of equal importance, is its public nature, such that it is not only concerned with developing community among women but with “a dissemination of feminist ideas and values throughout society as a whole” (Felski, 1989, p. 167). Felski argues that contributions to the feminist public sphere are to be judged in terms of their political use value or “potential function as a critique of patriarchal society” (1989, p. 50), and she notes that such contributions may take a variety of forms, working either within or outside of traditional discursive or institutional forms (1989, p. 171). Such a perspective is key to understanding the importance of Richards’ rhetoric and of our claims about feminine style. To highlight only Richards’ use of feminine style, and to claim from that a political function, would be misguided. However, the synthesis of this style with the philosophical viewpoint she offers clearly has potential to function as a critique of patriarchal modes of reasoning as well as to offer an empowering alternative. Synthesis of style and substance is vital here; through feminine style, Richards enacts the type of political reasoning she proposes. Given Richards’ clear commitment to working within traditional political channels, this analysis also makes clear the value of the feminist counter-public sphere as a model for expanding the possibilities for feminist rhetorical criticism, which thus far has focused primarily on female rhetors within feminist movements. The concept of a feminist public sphere allows for a broadening of the context for feminist public action. The feminist public sphere is best understood as “coalitions of overlapping subcommunities, which share a common interest in combating gender oppression” but which differ in race, class, institutional and professional allegiances, and which “draw upon a varied range of discursive frameworks” (Felski, 1989, p. 171). Although Richards has identified herself as feminist, her primary public role is not as a feminist advocate. The important feminist implications we identify in her discourse illustrate the potential for moving beyond an agent-centered (or perhaps movement-centered) approach to feminist rhetorical criticism. Finally, we also see potential in this analysis for furthering the aims of a critical rhetoric. While a primary goal of critical rhetoric is to understand the discursive operations of power

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and domination, a complete agenda for critical rhetoric would also include investigation of positive alternatives to the discourses of power, requiring that critics “seek to name a new audience or constitute a new sensis communis” grounded in a reconstructed concept of phronesis (Charland, 1991, pp. 73–74). Such a project seeks to understand the potential for oppositional practices and to discover spaces for resistance that provide relief from a totalizing vision of domination. The definition and application of the feminist counter-public sphere that we offer here can be useful in this endeavor, for it encourages the recognition and articulation of alternative modes of symbolic and political action.

Notes We use the term “philosophy” to refer to a system of principles forming a perspective or orientation that is used for guidance in deliberating about and forming judgments toward practical affairs. A political philosophy, we contend, can be derived through study of “the conceptual structure of political discourse . . . [and] the kinds of arguments used to propose, defend, or criticize political institutions and policies” (Benn, 1967, p. 388). 2 It is important to note that this speech, given at a meeting of Democratic leaders in January of 1992, was an address about national politics delivered to a group made up largely of white males. The first use of this anecdote that we have found is in a speech given at the ceremony for the Governor’s 15th Annual Texas Volunteer Conference Awards in 1991 (1991b). 3 This anecdote was repeated in a speech to the Democratic Unity Dinner in San Francisco (1992b). 4 Another example of Richards’ use of her personal experiences with alcoholism is found in her 1991 speech to the Texas Forum on Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Texas (1991a). 5 This is an anecdote that Richards uses frequently. Two other uses we have found are in a speech to a fundraising group (1991c), and in a commencement address at Smith College (1992c). 1

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Richards, A.W. (1987c). Remarks of Texas State Treasurer Ann W. Richards at the Bexar county women’s bar brunch, October. Richards, A.W. (1988a). Remarks of Texas State Treasurer Ann W. Richards at the Texas Business “rising star” awards dinner, March 4. Richards, A.W. (1988b, July 23). Democratic National Convention Keynote Speech. Congressional Quarterly, pp. 2061–2062. Richards, A.W. (1988c). Remarks of Texas State Treasurer Ann W. Richards to the National Conference on Women and Alcoholism, Washington, D.C., September 29. Richards, A.W. (1991a). Remarks of Governor Ann W. Richards to the Forum on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, March 13. Richards, A.W. (1991b). Remarks of Governor Ann W. Richards to the Governor’s 15th Annual Texas Volunteer Conference Awards, September 17. Richards, A.W. (1991c). Remarks of Governor Ann W. Richards to the Committee of 21, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 20. Richards, A.W. (1992a). Remarks of Governor Ann W. Richards at the Democratic Issues Conference sponsored by the National Legislative Education Foundation, Piney Point, Maryland, January 30. Richards, A.W. (1992b). Remarks of Governor Ann W. Richards at the Democratic Unity Dinner, San Francisco, California, May 29. Richards, A.W. (1992c). Remarks of Governor Ann W. Richards for the Commencement Exercises of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, May 17. Ruddick, S. (1989). Maternal thinking: Toward a politics of peace. New York: Ballantine. Solomon, M. (Ed.) (1991). A voice of their own: The woman suffrage press, 1840–1910. Tuscaloosa, Al: Univ. of Alabama. Spitzack, C. and Carter, K. (1987). Women in communication studies: A typology for revision. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73, 401–423. Treichler, P. and Kramarae, C. (1983). Women’s talk in the ivory tower. Communication Quarterly, 31, 118–132. Vonnegut, K. (1992). Listening for women’s voices: Revisioning courses in American public address. Communication Education, 41, 26–39. Wilson Schaef, A. (1981, rpt. 1985). Women’s reality: An emerging system in a white male society. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Part 4. Examining Controversies: Four Case Studies We need to keep prying the inquiry open, to keep extending the conversation, casting and recasting, to find other “ways in” to a territory that is so richly endowed with a multiplicity of experiences and so deeply deserving of attention, thought, and more thought. —Jacqueline Jones Royster, “In Search of Ways In” 390 Jacqueline Jones Royster encourages scholars of women’s rhetorics to keep extending, reconsidering, and questioning their positions and perspectives in order to sustain an open and exploratory stance so central to feminism. Despite the necessity for constantly “casting and recasting,” a community truly begins to coalesce once participants identify commonalities as well as differences. As researchers have interrogated the intersections of gender, feminism, and rhetoric, their work has not only produced greater clarity, increased complexity, incremental refinement, and new lines of inquiry but also generated discussion and created controversy. All of this exploration and inquiry has shaped the field of feminist rhetorics. A newcomer begins to learn a field’s contours (and prepares to join communal conversation) by exploring its major debates. To that end, this section introduces four significant controversies in the form of case studies. Each can be envisioned as dialogue between or among scholars about particular concerns: how best to integrate women and gender into a masculinist rhetorical tradition, how gender does or does not modify foundational understandings of persuasion, how American women’s participation in higher education influenced the nature of rhetorical instruction, how to recuperate women rhetors of whom little record survives in a methodologically sound manner. We hope that presenting these issues in the form of case studies provides students and teachers with pedagogically useful means for entering the field of feminist rhetorics. At this point, we provide a brief overview of the four controversies; a fuller discussion takes place in the short introductions preceding each case. These introductions describe the rhetorical context surrounding the original debate, the key questions at stake, the stances of the participants, and the subsequent repercussions or resurfacings of the exchange. Co-editors Kate Ryan and Lindal Buchanan composed the prefaces to Case Studies 1 and 3 while Samuel Evans and Barbara Hebert, doctoral students in rhetoric at Old Dominion University, wrote the introductions to Case Studies 2 and 4 respectively. 333

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In the first case, Debating Disciplinary Directions: Recovery versus Retheorizing, Barbara Biesecker and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell consider whether feminist researchers’ efforts are best directed toward either recovering significant women rhetors and incorporating them into the canon of public speakers or retheorizing the discipline through the lenses of gender and poststructuralism. Case Study 2, Debating the Aims of Discourse: Persuasive versus Invitational Rhetoric, presents dialogue between, on the one hand, Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin and, on the other, Celeste Condit. They explore whether or not persuasion constitutes a gendered form of violence. In Case Study 3, Debating Causality: Women and the Demise of Rhetorical Education, Robert Connors and Roxanne Mountford dispute the impact that nineteenth-century women’s entry into American colleges had on the oral, competitive traditions of rhetorical instruction. The final case study, Debating Ethos: Traditional versus Feminist Research Methods, contains exchanges among Xin Liu Gale, Cheryl Glenn, and Susan Jarratt concerning scholarly credibility and ethics in rhetorical historiography. Collectively, these four controversies have contributed to the intellectual formation of feminist rhetorics, identifying issues that not only shaped the field’s past but also continue to inform its present and future directions.

Case Study 1 Debating Disciplinary Directions: Recovery versus Retheorizing In 1989, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell published Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, a two-volume work that detailed the distinctive rhetorical style and accomplishments of U.S. woman’s rights rhetors and preserved their speeches (see Part 1 for Campbell’s introduction to the project). Campbell recovered nineteenth-century women rhetors, many of whom had been long forgotten, and argued passionately for their inclusion in the predominantly male rhetorical canon, the collection of work recognized as significant within the discipline. Campbell’s goal of integrating women into the existent canon raised concerns for Barbara Biesecker, whose article “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric” (1992) comprises the first reading in this case study. Biesecker cautions that simply incorporating prominent women into the canon poses the danger of “female tokenism,” in essence, only adding a sprinkling of women to a history, tradition, and discipline founded on patriarchal assumptions and values. Campbell’s efforts to acknowledge and include extraordinary women rhetors in the canon would, therefore, represent superficial rather than substantive change, leaving the patriarchal structure that excluded women in the first place largely intact. Instead, Biesecker urges scholars to identify and interrogate gender bias within the discipline and to redefine techne (standards of rhetorical accomplishment and excellence); in this manner, feminist scholars can redress gendered precepts that have elided or marginalized women rhetors in the past. To illustrate her points, Biesecker conducts a poststructuralist critique of the discipline’s traditional privileging of individual speakers and, instead, validates the collective nature of women’s rhetoric. A means of rhetorical production frequently dictated by social location, collaboration is typically ignored in a discipline centered on the solitary (male) rhetor in the public sphere. Contextualizing discourse and questioning exclusionary assumptions and criteria in the manner modeled by Biesecker can, therefore, afford feminists routes to redefining techne and revolutionizing rhetoric.

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Campbell responded heatedly to this assessment of her work and objectives in “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either” (a play on her book’s title, Man Cannot Speak for Her). After defending her efforts to incorporate women into the rhetorical canon, she accuses Biesecker of employing post-structural theory recklessly and muting women’s voices as effectively as patriarchal bias: “Women were partially or completely silenced for centuries; then the women who dared to break these barriers were silenced in turn by rhetorical historians and critics and theorists. Now that some women have helped to make some of the voices of these once-silenced women heard again, Biesecker wishes to silence them once more” (158). Campbell argues that Beisecker’s dismissal of individual and validation of collective, anonymous discourse sustains a tradition that ignores women and their rhetorical accomplishments, a tradition that Campbell’s scholarly project contests. Biesecker and Campbell’s discussion of the relative merits and dangers of recovery work versus retheorizing rhetoric was the first significant controversy to surface within the emerging field. Initially, scholars continued to explore the implications of each option for feminist rhetorics (see Diane Helene Miller, for example), but they eventually adopted a both/and approach to the issue, recuperating forgotten women rhetors and rhetorics while simultaneously interrogating the exclusionary premises and practices responsible for their silencing. To illustrate with one of many examples in this collection, Jane Donawerth’s “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women” (in Part 3) pursues both objectives, making the case not only for rhetorical theorizing in the work of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, and Margaret Fell but also for conversation and letter writing as important persuasive genres for women. Donawerth thus incorporates previously overlooked rhetoricians into the tradition and also extends recognized sites of rhetoric to include both the public and private spheres. In the years since Biesecker and Campbell’s original exchange, it has become increasingly clear that recovering women rhetors and retheorizing rhetoric are not mutually exclusive endeavors. In fact, examining unconventional rhetors, spaces, and genres often necessitates questioning and reframing rhetorical precepts and traditions, suggesting that recovery and retheorizing may actually be complementary efforts.

Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric* Barbara Biesecker An increasing number of rhetorical critics and theorists have begun to renegotiate their relationship to the history of the discipline.1 Indeed, many of us have found it necessary to question some of our discipline’s most basic theoretical assumptions as we have understood that the rhetorical histories that emerge out of and are shaped by those assumptions have consequences both for the practices of our professional everyday lives and for the lives of our students.2 Here I think two examples will suffice. The first example is an extract taken from Gerard Hauser’s Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, a book that deserves serious attention for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is currently being used by many teachers for the express purpose of initiating undergraduate and graduate students to the discipline. The second extract is pulled from the first volume of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak for Her. I have chosen to use this source as I am persuaded that the intent of Campbell’s volumes is to supplement, if not to subvert, the received tradition that Hauser’s work represents. Selection One: The Greeks developed public deliberation, or the practice of rhetoric as the means to achieving cooperation. . . . Every citizen might raise his voice confident that his views would be weighed in the whole process of assembly deliberation. The program of public deliberation did not establish a class of leaders blessed with special authority to make decisions, nor did it single out a special group whose opinions were esteemed as inherently superior in worth . . . In the democratic assembly, many voices were heard. Each spoke as a partisan.3

*  Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140-61. Copyright © by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. 337

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Selection Two: Men have an ancient and honorable rhetorical history. Their speeches and writings, from antiquity to the present, are studied and analyzed by historians and rhetoricians. . . . Women have no parallel rhetorical history. Indeed, for much of their history women have been prohibited from speaking, a prohibition reinforced by such powerful cultural authorities as Homer, Aristotle, and Scripture. . . . As a rhetorical critic I want to restore one segment of the history of women.4 As feminists, we cannot not want to be on the side of Campbell’s revisionist history. It is a carefully documented narrative that makes all-too-visible the ideological agenda at work in Hauser’s seemingly transparent and natural history of Rhetoric. By exposing the manner in which decidedly male experiences have been made to stand in for the history of Rhetoric as such, Campbell manages to bring the discipline and our own self-understandings to crisis. Indeed, having read Campbell’s book, we cannot but be compelled to rethink our roles both in and outside the classroom, as Hauser’s implicit claim—that the glory of our origins that is also our end justifies our contemporary practices—is radically undone. Of course, Campbell is not alone in her attempt to refigure the history of the discipline. As Carole Spitzack and Kathryn Carter have recently pointed out,5 and as Karen Foss and Sonja Foss writing before them would agree,6 recent critical essays seeking to discredit the myth that “Man” is Rhetoric’s hero by writing women into its history find precedence in a relatively prodigious past. Yet even as we congratulate these critics for having taken a decisive step toward eradicating decades of cultural misrepresentation, we must also, Spitzack and Carter point out, caution against the potentially debilitating consequence of their work: female tokenism. Adrienne Rich, speaking to the students of Smith College in 1979, framed the problem of female tokenism in the following way: There’s a false power which masculine society offers to a few women who “think like men” on condition that they use it to maintain things as they are. This is the meaning of female tokenism: the power withheld from the vast majority of women is offered to few, so that it may appear that any truly qualified woman can gain access to leadership, recognition, and reward; hence that justice based on merits actually prevails. The token woman is encouraged to see herself as different from most other women, as exceptionally talented and deserving; and to separate herself from the wider female condition; and she is perceived by “ordinary” women as separate also: perhaps even as stronger than themselves.7 Like Rich, Spitzack and Carter argue that the project of situating “great women speakers” alongside their better-known male counterparts cuts two ways. On the one hand, the inclusion

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of a few great women “lends richness and balance to research practices” in the discipline; on the other hand, such projects “can easily support the presumption that the majority of women cannot rival male accomplishments.”8 That is to say, even as they recognize the importance of writing women’s contributions into the history of Rhetoric, thereby acknowledging the simple fact that women were not mere spectators of but vital participants in an oratorical tradition, Spitzack and Carter refuse to cover over what they understand to be the concomitant risk entailed in such an enterprise. While providing a heritage that potentially enables women to “seize and control their own creative resources,”9 the inclusion of particular texts spoken by women serve, albeit unwittingly, to perpetuate the damaging fiction that most women simply do not have what it takes to play the public, rhetorical game. While I agree with Spitzack and Carter that one must move with caution against female tokenism, I am also compelled to wonder at what point circumspection leads to silence, stagnation, and inactivity. Is it not the case that at a certain cultural-historical juncture one must risk the potentially dangerous side-effects of female tokenism so as to instate to their rightful place women’s rhetorical achievements? Doesn’t the mere inclusion of women’s texts in the rhetorical canon make a difference—by destabilizing the subject of rhetorical history that up to this point has been exclusively male, by challenging the suggestion that masculinity and subjectivity are co-extensive notions? Should we not take our chances given that, as Teresa de Laurentis put it, a “ ‘room of one’s own’ may not avail women’s intellection if the texts one has in it are written in the languages of male tradition”?10 To all of these questions I must respond with a “yes and no.” But I respond with a “yes and no” neither because I wish to occupy the safe middle ground of a dialectical sublation, nor because I am seeking to take refuge in a less than rigorous deconstructionist dodge. I say “yes and no” because I want to underscore yet another effect of attempts to insert “great women speakers” into the official record we call the canon, an effect that utterly escapes our detection as we weigh only the risks of female tokenism. I think it is important to notice that recent attempts to render the discipline more equitable by supplementing the canon with texts spoken by women have something like a relationship with what only a few decades ago was coined as affirmative action.11 In the socioeconomic sphere, of course, affirmative action is the institutionally sanctioned and insured measure through which a history of injustice is to be rectified. Specific structural mechanisms are set in place to provide equal opportunity to members of disadvantaged or marginal groups. Transposed to the cultural sphere and, more particularly, to the classroom, affirmative action translates into a three-pronged imperative: new knowledges must be read, taught, and learned. In quite practical terms, this means that course syllabi, comprehensives lists and curriculum requirements must all be revised. Yet when this strategy (useful as it may be in the social sphere) is made to operate in the cultural sphere, the project misfires. Why do I say that the project misfires since, as I noted earlier, thanks to pioneer feminist projects, a gender difference does seem to be challenging the identity of the field and history of Rhetoric?

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What I find objectionable in the affirmative action approach to the production and distribution of knowledges—an approach not unrelated to, but, in fact, one of the conditions of female tokenism—is its underhanded perpetuation of “cultural supremacy.” When deployed in the cultural sphere, affirmative action signifies nothing less than the power of the center to affirm certain voices and to discount others.12 Despite its ostensible purpose—to move toward multiculturalism by adding new items to an ever-expanding list of “great works”—the affirmative action agenda conserves the putative authority of the center by granting it license to continue to produce official explanations by the designation of what is and what is not worthy of inclusion. Thus, even as the list of “great works” expands over time, the criteria for determining that list need not change. Indeed, for the most part the criteria have remained firmly in place. This line of thinking compels us to raise a question that the strategy of inclusion does not: What are the criteria against which any particular rhetorical discourse is measured in order to grant or deny its place in the canon? One way into this question is to recognize that the rhetorical canon is a system of cultural representation whose present form is predicated on and celebrates the individual. It is a list of proper names signifying the exceptional accomplishments of particular individuals over time: from Gorgias, Isocrates, Cicero, and Augustine to John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King. To each of these proper names corresponds a text or set of texts, and between them is marked a certain kind of originating function that wins the individual membership in a distinguished ensemble of individuals. But what is the problem with a criterion that applies equally to all, a criterion that purportedly crosses lines of gender, race, and class and asks only that an individual, any individual, “generate rhetorical works of extraordinary power and appeal”?13 Nothing less than the fact that a system of cultural representation that coheres around the individual subject, that is both master of her- or himself and of her or his discourse, is not politically disinterested. Already entailed in the valorization of the individual is a mechanics of exclusion that fences out a vast array of collective rhetorical practices to which there belongs no proper name. The exaltation of individual rhetorical actions is secured by way of the devaluing of collective rhetorical practices which, one cannot fail to note, have been the most common form of women’s intervention in the public sphere. In short, the danger in taking an affirmative action approach to the history of Rhetoric is that while we may have managed to insert some women into the canon (and, again, this is no small thing), we will have not yet begun to challenge the underlying logic of canon formation and the uses to which it has been put that have written the rhetorical contributions of collective women into oblivion. Karlyn Campbell’s most recent, and I think landmark, attempt is not immune to such a critique. To be sure, like her predecessors, she plots her revisionist history around the model of the individual speaking subject. Effective rhetorical discourse, that is to say rhetoric worthy of inclusion in the canon, is the outcome of strategic choices made among available techniques of persuasion on the part of an autonomous individual. Indeed, in organizing her book as a series

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of cameo appearances by extraordinary women who, “on occasion, found symbolic means of responding” so as to “show that the artistry of this rhetoric generated enduring monuments to human thought and creativity,”14 Campbell’s revisionist history of Rhetoric resolidifies rather than undoes the ideology of individualism that is the condition of possibility for the emergence of the received history of Rhetoric. So far I have suggested that we must be vigilant against the desire to interpret all gestures toward inclusion as inherently revolutionary or necessarily disruptive of the status quo. More specifically, I have tried to argue that a feminist rewriting of the history of Rhetoric that founds itself on the mandate to secure a place in the canon for “great women speakers” is simply not enough. The mere accumulation of texts does not guarantee that our ways of knowing will change when the grounds for their inclusion and, likewise, our way of deciphering them, remain the same. But if a decidedly feminist revisionary history of Rhetoric hinges at least in part on our articulating an alternative to the ideology of individualism that has up until now enabled the discipline to identify “the great works,” what criterion should take its place? It is interesting that, if Karlyn Campbell’s most recent work from which I draw my representative generalization marks a certain orthodoxy and ultimately disabling cultural politics operative in the field, it is her earliest work in this area that gestures toward an alternative. In 1973, Campbell published her now famous article entitled “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron.”15 One of the most striking features of this early essay is the way in which it begins to challenge the presumed wisdom and general applicability of traditional theoretical models and customary modes of rhetorical understanding. By taking concrete instances of women’s liberation discourse (however narrowly conceived) as her point of departure, Campbell attempts to cut loose from the prevailing tendency on the part of critics to posit rhetorical categories on an a priori basis. Campbell’s boldest stroke takes the form of an explicit and seemingly uncompromising challenge to Lloyd Bitzer’s theorization of the audience. Given the history of the disenfranchisement of women, Campbell argues persuasively, “it is difficult to view them as an audience, i.e., as persons who see themselves as potential agents of change;”16 unlike other rhetorics, rhetorics directed toward the liberation of women must take as their point of departure “the radical affirmation of new identities.”17 A sensitivity to the constraints that the grafting of theoretical models onto specific discourses imposes on rhetorical analysis is what gives Campbell’s essay its critical edge. Yet it is an edge that has been blunted by the force of the tradition within which it was produced: though she identifies the limits of Bitzer’s conceptualization of audience by reopening the question of (female) identity and subjectivity, her uncritical mobilization of the concept-metaphor “consciousness raising” as the paradigmatic expression of the rhetoric of women’s liberation marks the essay’s complicity with precisely those normative theorizations that it seeks to oppose. Taken quite literally, “consciousness raising” signifies the project of bringing to the surface something that is hidden, the task of making manifest something that is concealed or covered over. Underpinned or at least burdened by the whole history of psychoanalytic theory,

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Campbell’s use of the term participates in a depth hermeneutics that posits an irreducible essence inhabiting the subject and a tropology of the psyche that writes presence as consciousness, self-presence conceived within the opposition of consciousness to unconsciousness.18 Out of this tropology comes Campbell’s notion of audience and her understanding of the overriding exigence that the rhetoric of women’s liberation must address. The discourse must, as she puts it, “violate the reality structure,” “transcend alienation to create ‘sisterhood,’ ” indeed must produce “a radical form of consubstantiality” that transcends “differences in age, education, income, etc.”19 Here “consciousness raising” marks the deliberate attempt to recover the potential originary space before the sign “woman”; in staging the specifically feminist project in recuperative terms, rhetoric is understood, once again, as a purposive act that shuttles between consummate, sovereign, though perhaps estranged, identities. Of course, Campbell is right to insist that women’s access to subjectivity is indispensable to a political program that seeks, above all else, the empowerment of women. However, following the cues of both Jacques Lacan (who has taught us to be more than a bit skeptical of “the talking cure”) and feminists working between the post-Freudian and materialist perspectives (who have warned us of the perils of sifting women’s problems through pathologizing filters20), I must admit that I find less than satisfactory the conceptualization of history and social change implied in Campbell’s reformulation of female subjectivity, a conceptualization wherein the ideology of individualism and the old patriarchal alignments are reinscribed. In Campbell’s work, the possibility for social change is thought to be more or less a function of each individual woman’s capacity to throw off the mantle of her own self-perpetuated oppression, to recognize her real self-interests (interests that are her own as a woman and, thus, are shared by all women) and to intervene on behalf of those interests. No doubt, Campbell’s promotion of a kind of self-help program plays straight into the hands of the old order that has consistently sought to deflect critical attention away from those structures of oppression larger than individual consciousness and will. In Campbell’s formulation, positivity lines up with activity, while passivity and with it femininity are identified as negative. If feminists working in the history of Rhetoric could deconstruct the all-too-easy bipolarization of the active and the passive, we would go a long way toward dismantling the ideology of individualism that monumentalizes some acts and trivializes others. Not only would we realize that any active intervention is constituted by the so-called passive but, also, that the passive is inhabited by an active potential, since it is, to borrow and turn a phrase from Kenneth Burke, the substance of the active. Thus if, as feminists, we want to produce something more than the story of a battle over the right to individualism between men and women, we might begin by taking seriously post-structuralist objections to the model of human subjectivity that has served as the cognitive starting point of our practices and our histories. Indeed, following Campbell’s initial impulse to reexamine and expand “the presumptions underlying symbolic approaches to human behavior,”21 I want to argue that the post-structuralist interrogation of the subject and its concomitant call for the radical contextualization of all rhetorical acts can

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enable us to forge a new storying of our tradition that circumvents the veiled cultural supremacy operative in mainstream histories of Rhetoric. More specifically, I want to suggest that the strategic appropriation of post-structuralism on the part of feminists sets up the conditions for a ‘new’ definition of techne that considerably alters our way of reading and writing history by displacing the active/passive opposition altogether.

A Reencounter with Post-Structuralism As R. Radhakrishnan has recently argued, what is singular about post-structuralism is its interrogation of identity.22 Unlike structuralism, Marxism, or Freudian psychoanalysis, poststructuralism attacks identity as such and not just particular and isolated forms or versions of identity. For example, in several of his works, Derrida challenges explicitly the presumed integrity of the phenomenological subject, the subject of the humanistic tradition that, as I hinted above and have argued elsewhere, underwrites most contemporary rhetorical analysis, feminist or otherwise.23 Derrida launches a deconstruction of the subject by taking seriously the possibility that the human being, like writing and speech, is constituted by différance, as “starting from/in relation to time as difference, differing and deferral.”24 By way of an elaborate argument that I will not attempt to represent here, Derrida shows us how the identity of any subject, like the value of any element in a given system, is structured by and is the effect of its place in an economy of differences. In short, against an irreducible humanist essence of subjectivity, Derrida advances a subjectivity which, structured by différance and thus always differing from itself, is forever in process, indefinite, controvertible. To claim that a movement outside the prisonhouse of the essentialist subject is necessary for writing a new history of Rhetoric is not to say that there are no subjects. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has pointed out on more than one occasion, it is possible to read in Derridean deconstruction quite another story about the subject. Put succinctly, it runs as follows: “The subject is always centered. The critic is obliged to notice persistently that this centering is an ‘effect,’ shored up within indeterminate boundaries that can only be understood as determining.”25 By this reckoning, the presence of an “I” (that is not, however, identical to an “I”’s self-presence—and this is why we must not forget the previous story) records something like the provisional stabilization of a temporality and a spacing that always and already exceeds it. Thus, subjectivity in the general sense is to be deciphered as an historical articulation, and particular real-lived identities are to be deciphered as constituted and reconstituted in and by an infinitely pluralized weave of interanimating discourses and events. I have drawn attention to Derrida’s doubled morphology of the subject because I believe it can enable us to begin to write a quite different history of Rhetoric. Were we to follow the trajectory of Derrida’s interrogation of the subject, keeping one foot firmly anchored in the former account (the subject is never coincident with or identical to itself and, thus, is open to change) and the other foot in the latter account (the subject is always centered, but that centering can only be understood as an effect of its place in a larger economy of discourses), it

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becomes possible to forge a storying that shifts the focus of historical inquiry from the question “who is speaking,” a question that confuses the subjects of history with the agents for history, to the question “what play of forces made it possible for a particular speaking subject to emerge?” Nonetheless, by claiming Derridean deconstruction for a new history of Rhetoric that begins by thinking the subject as “historical through and through,” I am not suggesting that we can find in Derrida’s work anything like a general theory of history or a coherent set of directives for writing one. In fact, if such a project is not to be given up, if we are to broach the question that Derrida enables us to ask—“what play of forces made it possible for a particular speaking subject to emerge?”—we might find it useful to slip from Derridean deconstruction to Foucaultian archaelogy. Perhaps it is worth remarking that this turn to Foucault seeks, as did the prior discussion of Derrida, to identify only a few aspects of his work that may help us to write a feminist history of Rhetoric that averts the shortcomings of the affirmative action approach. In a certain sense, the definitive characteristic of Foucault’s middle project, The Archaeology of Knowledge, is its insistence upon relating the radical reconceptualization of the subject, characteristic of post-Sartrean French thought, to forms of social organization that he calls “discursive formations.” But what are these “discursive formations”? And what is the subject’s relation to them? To be sure, Foucault mobilizes the concept-metaphor “discursive formation” in order to work against the widespread tendency amongst social theorists to presume that the socius is operated by a coherent logic that can account for all relations and practices.26 Indeed, in the chapter on discursive formations, Foucault emphasizes time and again that the socius is a discontinuous space constituted by heterogeneous fields of objects operated by a “body of anonymous historical rules,”27 a nonstatic arena woven of dispersed “I-slots.” Now it is important to note that while these “I-slots,” most often referred to as subjectpositions, are neither essential nor constant, they do, at the same time, assure a certain kind of being-in-the-world by “determining what position[s] can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be a subject” at all. Here Foucault emphasizes the discursivity of the “I” since the condition for its making sense is a function of its positioning in the “stated.” Thus for Foucault, identity is defined by way of one’s relation to or place in a network of social, political, cultural, and economic practices that are provisional (in the sense of historical and not essential), discontinuous (in the sense of nontotalizable), and normative (in the sense of rule governed and governing). Like Derrida, Foucault conceives subjectivity and identity as made available by, rather than existing outside of or prior to, language and representation. Of the subject and its relation to structure, Foucault writes: So the subject of the statement should not be regarded as identical with the author of the formulation. . . . He is not in fact the cause, origin or startingpoint of the phenomenon of the written or spoken articulation of a sentence; nor is it that meaningful intention which, silently anticipating words, orders

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them like the visible body of its intuition; it is not the constant, motionless, unchanging focus of a series of operations that are manifested, in turn, on the surface of discourse through the statements. It is a particular, vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals. . . . If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs can be called a “statement,” it is not therefore because, one day, someone happened to speak them or put them into some concrete form of writing; it is because the position of the subject can be assigned.28 If both Foucault and Derrida redefine the speaking subject as a locus of effects,29 what distinguishes Foucault’s thinking on the subject from Derrida’s is the former’s refusal to decipher subjectivity and identity as infinitely or indefinitely pluralized: “The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike. . . . In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals.”30 Where Derrida would speak of the ever-shifting limits that persistently thwart our desire to make the subject cohere in any final sense, Foucault would chart the localized rules and mechanisms of disciplinary power that insure the production and reproduction of differentially situated subjects in a nonstatic but hierarchically organized space. Indeed, Foucault himself seems interested in marking this constitutive difference between his own work and Derrida’s. At the end of the second edition of Madness and Civilization, he writes: Today Derrida is the most decisive representative of a system in its final glory; the reduction of discursive practice to textual traces; the elision of the events that are produced there in order to retain nothing but marks for a reading; the invention of voices behind texts in order not to have to analyse the modes of implication of the subject in discourse; assigning the spoken and the unspoken in the text to an originary place in order not to have to reinstate the discursive practices in the field of transformations where they are effectuated. . . . it is not at all necessary to search elsewhere, for exactly here, to be sure not in the words, but in the words as erasures, in their grill, “the meaning of being” speaks itself.31 Though Foucault himself may be written both too much and too little by Derrida,32 suffice it to say here that Foucault’s commitment to demonstrating how specific practices not only constitute distinct forms of selfhood but normalize them into being is what lends his work its distinctive ethos. Feminist and non-feminist historians alike have claimed that Foucault’s decisive contribution to our understanding of social economies and their conditions of existence and emergence is encapsulated in his theory of subject positions, a theory that resolutely challenges

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the assumption that ideology can be demystified since “individuals are not only the inert or consenting target of ideology and power but are always also the elements of their articulation.”33 But if individuals emerge always and already as particular lived-expressions of the limits and possibilities of a discursive formation, if, that is to say, subject positions are not a matter of choice but of assignation, is there then no possibility for human agency, rhetorical intervention, social change? To be sure, it is on the issue of human agency that Foucault’s work has seemed to prove less than palatable to many critics. Nancy Hartsock’s commentary may be taken as somewhat paradigmatic of a generalizable disappointment: “Foucault’s is a world in which things move, rather than people, a world in which subjects become obliterated or, rather, recreated as passive objects, a world in which passivity or refusal represent the only possible choices.”34 If, as Foucault suggests, “power is everywhere,” then it seems only reasonable to conclude that there is nowhere out of which anything like an insurrection may gain its foothold.35 Set over and against the ubiquitous and hegemonizing effects of power, the very notion of resistance seems nothing more than a fragile proposition. It would be difficult to object to this gloss on Foucault’s project; it is quite true, as Frances Bartkowski has convincingly argued, that “even though he acknowledges quite clearly that ‘you can’t have one without the other,’ Foucault never gives us as committed a look at resistance as we most certainly get at power.”36 Having said this much, however, it seems unwise to suggest, as Hartsock does, that the pressing demand for real social change obliges us to rule Foucault, indeed all post-structuralist theory, out of court or to presume, as Blair and Cooper do, that we can simply cover over the problem of human agency by refashioning Foucault into a humanist.37 To preserve one’s own emancipatory projects or salvage one’s own disciplinary identity by ignoring Foucault’s work altogether or repressing those aspects of it that make us uneasy with ourselves is myopic and politically naive. Even though Foucault does not write at great length about resistance, there is one thing he makes abundantly clear: we must hold against the temptation to construe resistance as a structure that stands over and against power, as an event subsequent to the establishment of power. Resistance is always and already a structure of possibility within power and, it should be added, power is always and already a structure of possibility within resistance. Power and resistance are two sides of the same coin and, thus, emerge in tandem. But from where? Out of what? In a phrase, Foucault responds, “of something other than itself.”38 The implicit challenge to fill out or specify the “other” that is the reserve of power and resistance has already been taken up by a handful of theorists and critics who, in contrast to Hartsock and Blair and Cooper, have attempted to articulate a theory of resistance based on Foucault’s “anti-humanism.” These critics productively regraft Foucault’s notion of subjectpositions along the lines of a conflict of interpretation schemata. Given that subjects emerge at the heterogeneous intersection of multiple and, presumably incompatible, interpretations— race, gender, and class—they cannot be made to cohere as Subjects. Hence, by reading the

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subject itself as a site of multiple and contestatory inscriptions, one can, they argue, locate a reservoir of revolutionary potential in the gaps, fissures and slippages of the nonidentical “I.”39 Though I am more than sympathetic to the claim that lived-experience is a trying, oftentimes exasperating, oftentimes failed, exercise in self-negotiation, I do not think such experience can be exploited as the basis for a theory of change. Hence, my objection to the attempt is not that such experience fails to ring true but, rather, that “the theory of pluralized ‘subject effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while . . . providing a cover for this subject of knowledge.”40 Indeed, it seems to me that such a formula can make sense only if the human being is presumed, however unwittingly, to be motivated by an a priori drive for symmetry, a presumption fearfully analogous to Freud’s pleasure principle: at the moment wherein the subject’s knowledges become out of sync, at the point upon which the wear and tear of unsynchronized knowing congeals into intolerable epistemic violence, the subject’s will-to-coherence manifests itself as a precarious sublation whose name is resistance. As Paul Smith put it in a recent book that cogently argues for this view, “the colligation of subjectpositions, far from entailing a fixed or cerned ‘subject,’ is effected precisely by the principle which stands against unification—negativity, the forgotten fourth term of Hegel’s dialectics.”41 In short, resistance is taken to be the real-lived outcome of a subject who, knowing that she does not know, is moved by an always and already unfulfilled drive to “get it together.” But must the possibilities for resistance and social change be secured by scrupulously resurrecting an ontological guarantee under the guise of an epistemological imperative? I think not. In fact, were we to allow certain aspects of Derrida’s doubled morphology of the subject to interrupt Foucault’s thinking on individuals-in-power, a more promising direction for theorizing resistance could be developed.42 That is to say, because I believe Foucault’s take on the subjectin-power is both instructive (in arguing that identity is manufactured and sustained through specifiable discursive means) and limited (in failing to adequately theorize the resources of and possibilities for social change), I want to press the issue of resistance to a further limit within the Foucaultian frame, once again using Derridean deconstruction as my lever.

Retooling Techne Earlier in the essay I argued that what lends Foucault’s work its particular ethos is his commitment to demonstrating how specific practices not only constitute distinct forms of selfhood but normalize them into being. What I should like to emphasize here is that the Foucaultian analyses of the operations of power circulate almost exclusively within, indeed are orchestrated by, a metaphorics of space. In Foucault’s work, space is everything. With the precision of the cartographer, Foucault takes his reader from the leprosariums of the High Middle Ages to the Saint-Luke Hospital founded in 1751, from the radical reorganization of the Maison de Force to Bentham’s Panopticon, from the Victorian bedroom to the analyst’s couch. With him, we trace the proliferation of disciplines and the internal necessities that open up the frontiers of knowledge and chart the progressive interiorization of madness and sexuality. Indeed, in

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Foucault’s hands, the history of the West is brilliantly divided, anatomized, and mapped as a landscape whose configuration is deciphered almost exclusively in terms of the constellation of objects: walls, irons, windows, mirrors, icons, bodies. But what would happen if the Foucaultian project was deliberately made to incorporate rather than neglect one of Derrida’s pivotal insights—namely, that the subject that is always centered is nonetheless outstripped by a temporality and a spacing that always already exceeds it? I have implied it repeatedly: were this excess that never appears as such figured into the Foucaultian calculation, it would become possible for us to recognize the formidable role structure plays in the (re)constitution of subjectivities and the capacity—albeit non-intentional in the strictest sense of the term—of those subjectivities to disrupt the structure within which and through which they are differently inscribed. Indeed, the exorbitant play of spacing is, I would argue, the “other” that is the reserve of power and resistance; spacing as such “speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space.”43 That such a notion cannot be recognized within Foucaultian archaeology should come as no surprise since it is that very thing that cannot be reduced to the form of presence. Spacing as the name of that which inaugurates the constitution of time and space, subject and object, self and other, can be related to the central problematics of this essay—power and resistance. Most important, what must be noticed is that Derrida’s particular notion of spacing as an excess that is never thoroughly absorbed by and into the present cannot be thought to be an inherent property of the subject, a pure reserve or ideologically uncontaminated pocket, which assures the subversion of power. In fact, a careful reading of Derrida’s work will show that the very possibility of resistance is to be found in the articulation of an act and not in the negativity of the actor. That is to say, Derrida’s thinking on spacing shifts the site of resistance from the subject proper to the exorbitant possibilities of the act since spacing in this special sense is precisely that which “suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of ‘desire’ or ‘will.’ ” 44 In the end, then, such a shift enables us to work within the Foucaultian framework: subjects are effects of their sociopolitical, historical, economic, and cultural contexts. It also, however, makes it possible for us to push the limits of that framework: in claiming with Foucault that individuals are manufactured and sustained through specifiable discursive means, we need not presuppose that their practices are nothing but reflections of such contexts or that their practices are thoroughly disciplined by them. But already a finer distinction needs to be made. For if what we are trying to indicate is a certain structure of reserve that breaks open a pathway within the hegemonizing effects of power by means of an act whose effluence eludes the mastery of the acting subject, then the word practice simply will not do. Indeed, at least since Aristotle, who seems to have been the first to use it as a technical term, “practice” designates a purposeful doing: “I accomplish (e.g., a journey),” “I manage (e.g., state affairs),” “I do or fare (e.g., well or ill),” and, in general, “I act, I perform some activity.”45 Still, today practice is the name for an intended doing, a deliberate—often theoretically informed—activity targeted to some end: practical criticism, prac-

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tical argument and reasoning, the practice of rhetoric. Thus what I am seeking to point to is not practice per se but, instead, a force or structure of breaching in practice that establishes a cleft or fissure out of which an unforeseen and undesigned transgression may ensue. Might we not then settle upon the word techne as the sign for an exorbitant doing that depends upon practice but which does not obey the imperatives of practice? Here I shall state my claim directly and unequivocably: by scrupulously working within and against the grain of the word’s historically constituted semantic field, techne can be used to refer to a kind of “getting through” or ad hoc “making do” by a subject whose resources are necessarily located in and circumscribed by the field within which she operates, but whose enunciation, in always and already exceeding and falling short of its intending subject, harbors within it the possibility of disrupting, fragmenting, and altering the horizon of human action out of which it emerges. Now without belaboring the obvious, it should be noted that to use techne as a word signifying a way or means by which something gets done is not new in the proper sense of the word. As I noted above, Aristotle, and even Plato before him, had said this much. What is ‘new,’ however, is the attempt to use techne differently by bracketing out the ethical/moral sedimentations that have, through the history of its uses, been attributed to the word and thereby making it possible for us to refuse to grasp the agent of history as identical with her intentions. I should perhaps emphasize that it is precisely in refusing to conflate the always already intending subject with the potentially heterogeneous and counter-hegemonic effects of action that my use of the concept-metaphor techne differs from the way in which Michel de Certeau mobilizes the word. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau makes the important distinction between techne as “tactic” and techne as “strategy.” While de Certeau distinguishes these two modalities of human action “according to whether they bet on place or on time,” both are taken to be interventions whose implications can be calculated in advance.46 Like LeviStrauss’s bricoleur, de Certeau’s practician tinkers with the rules and tools of the established order and in so doing “establishes a degree of plurality and creativity” within “the place where he has no choice but to live.”47 These deliberate modes of use or re-use are simultaneously, for de Certeau, the modes of historical change. He writes, for example, . . . even when they were subjected, indeed even when they accepted their subjection, the Indians often used the laws, practices, and representations that were imposed on them by force or by fascination to ends other than those of their conquerors; they made something else out of them; they subverted them from within—not by rejecting them or by transforming them (though that occurred as well), but by many different ways of using them in the service of rules, customs or convictions foreign to the colonization which they could not escape. They metaphorized the dominant order: they made it function in another register. They remained other within the system which they assimilated and which assimilated them externally. They diverted it without leaving it.48

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Contrary to de Certeau, then, my own use of techne seeks to mark out a structure of possibility in action that never entered the space and temporality of the intending consciousness upon which its own legibility depends. Contrary to de Certeau, I am suggesting that if we use techne as a word signifying a way, manner or means whereby something is gained, without any sense of art or cunning,49 then techne signifies a bringing-about in the doing-of on the part of an agent that does not necessarily take herself to be anything like a subject of historical or, as in the above instance, cultural change. Used in this way, techne displaces the active/passive binary that dominates even de Certeau’s thinking on power and resistance. Techne points to a heterogeneous history of practices performed in the interstices between intention and subjection, choice and necessity, activity and passivity. It is, as Derrida would put, the trace of “the not-seen that opens and limits visibility.”50

Back to History As I see it, this essay could be summarized as a call for a gender-sensitive history of Rhetoric that, in working against the ideology of individualism by displacing the active/passive opposition, radically contextualizes speech acts. And although the historiographical approach advocated here does not deny that over time distinguishable and distinguished speaking subjects emerge, it does suggest that the conditions of possibility for their emergence must be located elsewhere. Thus, for the feminist historiographer interested in rewriting the history of Rhetoric, the plurality of practices that together constitute the everyday must be conceptualized as a key site of social transformation and, hence, of rhetorical analysis. To be sure, this is no easy task. Were the critic to take up such a project, not only would she be obliged to confront the limits of her own disciplinary expertise (deciphering “great speeches” would not be enough); she would also be forced to come to the sobering realization that little assistance is to be gained from even the most benevolent enclaves of the academy. It is not only the discipline of Rhetoric that is written by the ideology of individualism, History, History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Literary Studies, Foreign Language and Literature programs, and even the more recent Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies programs share that history and, thus, its burden with us. History and Philosophy of Science may be the most telling example. While scientific practice is routinely collective, historians of those practices tend to write figural histories that celebrate, indeed monumentalize, individuals.51 More important, perhaps, the critic taking up the project of rewriting the history of Rhetoric would be required to come to terms with rather than efface the formidable differences between and amongst women and, thus, address the real fact that different women, due to their various positions in the social structure, have available to them different rhetorical possibilities and, similarly, are constrained by different rhetorical limits. Indeed, the argument I have put forward presses for a feminist intervention into the history of Rhetoric that persistently critiques its own practices of inclusion and exclusion by relativizing rather than universalizing what Aristotle identified as “the available means of persuasion.” It obliges the feminist histo-

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riographer interested in rewriting the history of Rhetoric to take on the full burden of the notion of unequal or non-synchronous development—obliges her to write the story not only of the differences between women’s and men’s subject (re)formation but, also, to write into that account the story of the differences between women as well. Put simply, not only would one have to declare “man cannot speak for her.” One would also have to admit that no individual woman or set of women, however extraordinary, can speak for all women. Does all of this mean, then, that we must abandon our canon, forfeit our masterpieces, renounce our tradition? Absolutely not. Even though the canon and the histories that have propped it up do not represent the way “things really were,” we can learn to read them differently and, thus, teach ourselves something about who we are now or, more precisely, how we have become that which we now understand ourselves to be. Likewise, must the feminist project of retrieving texts spoken and written by women be stopped dead in its tracks? Again, I think not. For what is beginning to emerge there under the guise of information retrieval is the cathected story of what it is that we wish to become. For the academic feminist, however, that story may prove to be the most difficult of all to decipher. For in that story, we must begin to read ourselves as part and parcel of the history we so desperately seek to disown.

Notes What follows is a revised and extended version of a paper I first delivered at the 1989 Speech Communication Association meeting held in San Francisco. I wish to thank the International Society for the History of Rhetoric and its then vice-president, Takis Poulakos, for having provided a forum for a discussion that signified, to borrow and turn Protagoras’s phrase just a bit, a deliberate and collective attempt to reorder our own house. I should also like to thank Michael Calvin McGee, Bruce Gronbeck, and the director and staff at University House at the University of Iowa for providing me with an occasion to rethink the notion of techne advanced here. Special thanks go to Alan Scult for having responded so carefully to my work during the summer workshop. Finally, I wish to acknowledge formally my indebtedness to and profound respect for my teacher and friend Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This essay is dedicated to her. 2 There is a steadily growing body of work dealing with the historiography of Rhetoric. Although a complete bibliography cannot be presented here, it may be useful to identify a few particularly recent and noteworthy contributions. See, for example, a special volume of Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory [8 (1987)] titled “Historiography and the Histories of Rhetorics I: Revisionary Histories.” See also a special section in the Western Journal of Speech Communication [54 (1990)] on Rhetoric and Historiography. 3 Gerard Hauser, Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 20. 4 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, Vol. I (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 1–13. 5 Carole Spitzack and Kathryn Carter, “Women in Communication Studies: A Typology for Revision,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 401–23. 1

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Karen A. Foss and Sonja K. Foss, “The Status of Research on Women and Communication,” Communication Quarterly 31 (1983): 195–204. 7 Adrienne Rich, Ms. 8 (September 1979): 43. 8 Spitzack and Carter, 405. 9 Dale Spender, “Women and Literary History,” The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 32. 10 Teresa de Laurentis, “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 1 (1989): 15. 11 For this very interesting connection, I am indebted to the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. See her “On Behalf of Cultural Studies.” Social Text (forthcoming). 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “On Behalf of Cultural Studies.” [Social Text (forthcoming).] For an earlier elaboration of this issue see: E.D. Hirsch Jr., Gayatri Spivak, Roger Shattuck, Jon Pareles and John Kaliski, “Who Needs the Great Works: A Debate on the Canon, Core Curricula, and Culture,” Harper’s (September 1989): 43–53. 13 Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 189. 14 Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 15. 15 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 74–86. 16 Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” 78. 17 Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” 82. 18 I borrow the deconstruction of the Freudian tropology of the subject from Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1978), 196–231. 19 Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” 79. What cannot go unnoticed here is that Campbell writes out the real-lived differences between women in order to establish a hegemonic feminism upon which she can then build her case. Rendering material differences as immaterial does enable her to construct what at least appears to be an elegant argument that explains a whole history of heterogeneous rhetorical practices in one fell swoop and to continue working within a traditional aesthetic axiology against which the value of particular discourses can be judged as worthy or not of canonization. This point will be taken up later in the essay. 20 Harriet Goldhor Lerner, “Problems for Profit?” The Women’s Review of Books 8 (April 1990): 16. 21 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Ontological Foundations of Rhetorical Theory.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 3 (1970): 106. 22 R. Radhakrishnan, “Feminist historiography and post-structuralist thought: Intersections and departures,” The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, ed. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989), 189–206. 23 Barbara Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110–30. 24 Cited in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982), 95. 6

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 279. 26 For a thorough and astute discussion of Foucault’s work and its relation to social theory see Mark Cousins and Athar Hussain, Michel Foucault (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984). 27 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 117. 28 Foucault, Archaeology, 95. 29 See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 142–43. 30 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 98. 31 Quoted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Introduction,” Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), lxi-lxii. 32 The point here is not to resurrect influence studies in the old way, but rather to note the uncanny play of différance within Foucault’s own work. 33 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98. 34 Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 167. 35 As A. Belden Fields has pointed out in his article titled “In Defense of Political Economy and Systemic Analysis: A Critique of Prevailing Theoretical Approaches to the New Social Movements,” even Foucault leaves us with very little to hold onto. He tells us that “power is amorphous, a machine in which everyone is caught up. And he finds that ‘against these usurpations by the disciplinary mechanisms . . . we find that there is no solid recourse available to us today.’ ” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 1988), 144–45. 36 Frances Bartkowski, “Epistemic Drift in Foucault,” Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern U P, 1988), 44. 37 Carole Blair and Martha Cooper, “The Humanist Turn in Foucault’s Rhetoric of Inquiry,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 151–71. Indeed, in counter-distinction to Blair and Cooper, I do not think it necessary to dress Foucault up in the old humanist drag in order to make him useful for Rhetoric. For if rhetorical interventions are articulations of their socio-historical contexts, it does not follow that they are nothing but reflections of such contexts. This point will be taken up more fully in the following portion of the essay. 38 Michel Foucault, “The Question of Power,” Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvere Lotinger (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 186. 39 See, for example, the essays collected in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern U P, 1988); Isaac D. Balbus, “Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse,” Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 110–27; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 40 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 1988), 271. In this 25

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essay, Spivak brings the critique of Foucault’s and Deleuze’s theories of pluralized “subject-effects” to bear upon the Western Intellectuals’ role within contemporary relations of power. 41 Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 156. Smith’s book may be summarized as a prolegomenon to theorizing resistance. In the book, he examines a multitude of contemporary perspectives (Derridean, Althusserian, Marxian, psychoanalytic, feminist, semiotic, anthropological) on the issue and identifies their latent deficiencies. It is interesting that Smith never offers a sustained analysis of Foucault’s thinking on power and resistance. It would not be far from the truth, however, to identify Foucault as the shadow figure that constitutes the margin of this text. 42 For a discussion of the productive notion of interruption as a cut of sorts that allows something to function, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Practical Politics of The Open End,” The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 110–11. 43 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 68. 44 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 8. 45 Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame and London: U of Notre Dame P: 1967), 9. 46 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1984), 39. 47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 30. 48 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 31–32. 49 Oxford English Dictionary, 1785. 50 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 163. 51 For a critique of these histories, see, for example, Sandra Harding and Jean F. O’Barr, eds., Sex and Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: U of Chicago P), 1987.

Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either* Karlyn Kohrs Campbell I am impelled to reply to Biesecker’s attacks on my publications Man Cannot Speak for Her (hereafter For Her) and “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron” (hereafter “Oxymoron”). Her essay “Coming to Terms” (Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 2 [1992]: 140– 61) focuses on these two works; another is footnoted; and the “substance” of her attack would apply to at least five other of my publications as well as it does to the two selected. Biesecker begins pleasantly enough, contrasting a paragraph from For Her with a paragraph from Gerard Hauser’s Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, and seems to find some merit in my words. I put it cautiously because immediately after citing me, she says: “As feminists, we cannot not want to be on the side of Campbell’s revisionist history” (141). Cannot not want? Not, I think, a locution ordinarily chosen to praise. Biesecker’s first attack consists of a warning against the inclusion of texts by women because of its “potentially debilitating consequence,” which is “female tokenism,” and cites this definition of it: “ ‘there’s a false power which masculine society offers to a few women who “think like men” on condition that they use it to maintain things as they are’ ” (141). She extends this attack by saying that the inclusion of particular texts by women serves, “albeit unwittingly, to perpetuate the damaging fiction that most women simply do not have what it takes to play the public, rhetorical game” (142). This attack can be viewed in three ways. First, as an attack on me, my honesty, and my scholarly independence. Men have given me power on the understanding that I will support the status quo (and them?). But the attack cannot stand in sheerly personal terms because the things I have published must be part of this agreement to support the status quo. So, second, the attack must also be directed toward my work on the earlier and contemporary women’s movements and on the rhetoric of individual women, and here the charge begins to collapse. I have written of Maria Miller Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Carrie Lane Chapman Catt, and many others. These women wanted to “maintain things as they [were]?” Further, when I began this work, their rhetoric was not *  Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 153-59. Copyright © by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. 355

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part of public address as it then existed. Hence, by definition, I cannot have supported the status quo. Finally, because she has chosen to make this attack, I shall content myself with simply listing the third way the issue can be seen—that men empower women who are willing to attack other women who attempt to change the status quo. Biesecker makes no logical case for her female tokenism charge. Indeed, if no one did any further work on women’s rhetoric, it is not clear to me that female tokenism would be the result. I have written of some thirty women and their rhetoric plus the rhetorical outgrowths of such group efforts as the Seneca Falls Convention, the National Woman’s Party, the Convention of Anti-Slavery Women, and of works adopted by conventions, e.g., Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1854 and 1860 addresses, and of groups in the contemporary feminist movement(s); others have added at least an equal number. Female tokenism? No, just a beginning. Of course, one may assume that all feminists (and she claims to be one) will refuse to add to the store of analyses of women’s rhetoric and, instead, spend their time attacking what has been done. One may assume that; I do not. But suppose, for a moment, that there is now female tokenism in our field. It was men who, over the years, excluded women from their rightful rhetorical place. Consider, then, the motive that could lead one to attack, not the men, but a woman who is trying to alter the rhetorical landscape. Biesecker continues this attack by finding that I have implied that most women do not have what it takes to play the public, rhetorical game. Guilty as charged; most women do not have the ability to excel in public discourse. Where she goes wildly astray is in tying this notion to the idea that women are not as good as men in the rhetorical arena (142). The most vicious misogynists who claimed that women were by nature incapable of rhetorical excellence never claimed that all men were capable of such excellence. Indeed, the anthologies that excluded women for so many years never pretended that all men were rhetorically gifted. Hence, to include the works of rhetorically gifted women merely gives their voices equal weight with those of men. Biesecker next shifts to the notion that including women’s rhetoric is a sort of affirmative action. (One might think that a feminist would see affirmative action positively, but no.) Including women’s rhetoric, i.e., this particular brand of affirmative action, is bad because it perpetuates “cultural supremacy” and the “putative authority of the center” (143). This cultural supremacy and central authority rest on the evil of individualism, i.e., speeches included all originated with individuals, and I have perpetuated this evil. The easiest thing to point out is that the claim is sheer nonsense. The rhetorical efforts of women were, with some exceptions, created by individual women, those of men, by individual men. But those women who spoke gave voice, usually at great personal cost, to the feelings and concerns of their silenced sisters; however, only the women’s creations were systematically kept out of our anthologies and went unexamined in our criticism. Clearly, individualism was not a

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criterion for inclusion, one had to be a male individual to be included. As an aside, consider the naive view of rhetorical invention implicit in this attack. I have written of the unfair criteria used in our field that have excluded women and minorities.1 Many speeches by white males have little rhetorical interest, but are studied for historical reasons. Women were prohibited from political office and the professions; hence, they could make fewer addresses seen as historically significant. And many women’s efforts are highly significant rhetorically, but are still disregarded. Biesecker ignores these criteria entirely. It is the demon individualism she will confront, but now she adds a new wrinkle, that individualism in rhetoric is to be damned because it prevents the inclusion of collective rhetoric, “the most common form of women’s intervention in the public sphere” (144). Biesecker does not give a single example of what she means by collective rhetoric, an omission that would be surprising in any case, and is mind-boggling in light of her claim that such rhetoric has been women’s most usual form of public discourse. Given her attack, it appears that works that emerge out of social movements, even those with multiple authorship, do not merit consideration. I devote major sections to what might be seen as collective rhetoric in For Her, one to the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions authored by a group of women, another to the Address to the Second Convention of Anti-Slavery Women, which was created by a committee and ratified by a larger group, and a third to the role of the banners of the National Woman’s Party, all of which Biesecker ignores. The analysis of more contemporary women’s efforts in “Oxymoron” focused on the discourse of individuals whose words cohered into a rhetorical movement that sought to alter the usual meanings of language (pace Foucault). And why should we conclude that social movements are not examples of what Foucault calls the “surfaces of emergence” out of which new “discursive objects” develop? Consider the role of contemporary feminism in creating such concepts as “sexism” and “sexual harassment,” or is she claiming that we reaffirm the “putative authority of the center” in studying the rhetoric of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon? And one is certainly entitled to certain suspicions. Biesecker will have nothing to do with cultural supremacy, with individual excellence, and she deplores the exclusion of collective rhetoric, whatever that is. Can this be a veiled attempt to make all expressive behavior by all women a part of rhetoric under the guise of collective rhetoric? The suspicions become a near certainty when, considerably later in the essay, she says emphatically that women have different rhetorical abilities and possibilities and that we (meaning feminists) must “take on the full burden of the notion of unequal or non-synchronous development” and declares that neither men nor an “individual woman or set of women, however extraordinary, can speak for all women” (158). (Has anyone claimed that they have or did?) Biesecker may find it simple to take on such a burden and cast off the efforts of extraordinary women. Because she does not offer criticism, she can merely utter theoretical pronouncements. Of course, such pronouncements fall into a vacuum because she admits that her

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formulations will require the wiping out of half a dozen disciplines—“History, History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Literary Studies, Foreign Languages and Literature programs, and even the more recent Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies programs” (157)— and remaking them along unspecified lines. For myself, I very much wish to be associated with the artistic rhetorical acts of extraordinary women. And until she or someone else can show the value of collecting and analyzing some other body of work, I shall continue to prefer the memorable to the mediocre. Biesecker condemns me for having used “consciousness raising” in my earlier “Oxymoron” essay, a phrase that is “underpinned or at least burdened by the whole history of psychoanalytic theory” (146). She has learned from Lacan to be skeptical of the “talking cure.” This, I’m afraid, is mere thrashing about on her part. “The talking cure” is a phrase long applied to orthodox psychoanalysis. The “talking” involved was done by a person, often a woman, in the presence of a male authority who mainly kept silent, viewed women as defective men, and occasionally pointed out contradictions in the patient’s remarks. For her to tie this sort of talking to the talking of women in groups fighting to understand themselves and their oppression, including oppression rooted in psychology, is preposterous. The origins of women’s consciousness raising go back, not to Freud, but to Marx and Mao and religious testifying through which members went from division and a sense of individual guilt and responsibility toward a recognition of their common condition and its relation to the nature of the system in which they lived. That is what “the personal is political” meant and means. Does she imagine that women in the sixties and seventies sat in groups and bemoaned the absence of penises or lamented their ability to function rationally in the manner of males? And, as an afterthought, what can she mean by collective rhetoric if she wishes to exclude the discourse of CR groups? Biesecker then turns to the concept of techne. It is no accident, I think, that individualism and techne are her targets because to have eliminated either and left the other would have been an embarrassment. She says her use of the term is new because she eliminates its ethical/moral connotations and that makes it possible to avoid identifying the agent with the agent’s intentions or motives. The scholarship here is weak. Classicists have worked and reworked this territory, and the commentaries of Gerald Else, E. M. Cope, William Grimaldi, and George Kennedy draw quite different conclusions from those she advances.2 As to her claim, I note that she does not explain how she has eliminated these qualities; she does not indicate the presence of these qualities in Plato and Aristotle; and she appears to confuse (a) the presence or absence of the ethical/moral dimensions of techne with (b) the relationship between an agent and that agent’s intentions (155). Derrida and Foucault may regard (a) and (b) as similar or identical; Plato and Aristotle certainly did not. However, one can understand Biesecker’s attempt to eliminate techne or to clothe it in meaningless jargon. Techne, as an art, means that the products of that art are there to be dealt with. The products of rhetors are oral or written texts, and she clearly wishes to have nothing to do with such products. If she is to condemn individualism, she must, of course, also abolish the

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rhetorical texts created over the centuries by individuals. She can admit whatever she means by collective rhetoric because, presumably, there are no texts, no standards of excellence, and no individuals to worry about. Finally, for those who value consistency, we witness here the striking spectacle of an individual attacking another individual in the cause of abolition of individualism in rhetoric. It seems to me relatively easy to point to self-contradictions and fallacies in Biesecker’s essay; it is more difficult to say just what she is up to. When one has excluded the things she clearly is not up to, only one thing is left. She is not adding to the store of knowledge about women’s rhetoric. She is not explaining the nature and function of whatever it is she means by collective rhetoric. She certainly is not berating the males who have excluded and continue to exclude women from anthologies and texts and courses and rhetorical consideration generally. She offers the results of no critical analysis or archival research. What she does is assert so-called theoretical views. She spends some seventeen pages, plus footnotes, urging the abandonment of individual women and the rhetoric they created. True, part of one paragraph on the eighteenth page says we can keep our (male?) masterpieces, although there are no grounds in what she has said for so doing without committing precisely the sins she has spent seventeen pages describing. The only conclusion I can draw is that Biesecker means what her essay attempts to say. She wants to do away with the individuals and the rhetorical art they created. She wants to silence them. Women were partially or completely silenced for centuries; then the women who dared to break these barriers were silenced in turn by rhetorical historians and critics and theorists. Now that some women have helped to make some of the voices of these once silenced women heard again, Biesecker wishes to silence them once more.

Notes “The Communication Classroom: A Chilly Climate for Women?” ACA Bulletin, 51 (January 1985): 68–72; “The Sound of Women’s Voices,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 212– 20; “Hearing Women’s Voices,” Communication Education 40 (January 1991): 33–48. 2 Else writes, “[W]e in the Anglo-Saxon tradition are on the whole too far gone in individualism to think of ‘poetry’ as actually made by an Art of poetry. Yet that is what Aristotle, if honestly read, requires us to do.” See Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1967), p. 4. See also E. M. Cope, An Introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric with Analysis Notes and Appendices (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1867), p. 135, n2; William M. A. Grimaldi, S. J., Aristotle Rhetoric I: A Commentary (New York: Fordham University Press, 1980), p. 5; George A. Kennedy, Aristotle On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 289. 1

Case Study 2 Debating the Aims of Discourse: Persuasive versus Invitational Rhetoric Samuel R. Evans The two readings in this case examine the traditional equation of rhetoric with persuasion and debate the degree to which persuasion is imbued with gender bias. In “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin suggest that persuasion is inherently patriarchal because it attempts to change an audience and gain authority. Although persuasion is necessary in many communicative situations, they observe that the discipline has failed to consider other instances when “changing and controlling others is not the rhetor’s goal” (5). For these alternate settings, Foss and Griffin advance invitational rhetoric, a mode of communication grounded in the feminist tenets of equality, immanent value, and selfdetermination. Changing listeners has a peripheral role in invitational rhetoric as its primary goal is to understand, appreciate, and validate the perspectives voiced by both the rhetor and audience. Two strategies are central to the full exploration of differing viewpoints—offering and yielding. Offering refers to expressing a perspective without advocating its implementation while yielding refers to according another’s perspective sufficient time to make an impact. If change occurs as a result of the process, it is not because the rhetor has persuaded her or his audience but because the free exchange of ideas has led to new understanding (Foss and Griffin 6). Foss and Griffin believe that expanding the definition of rhetoric to include both persuasive and invitational discourse gives marginalized groups, particularly women, a method for exposing systems of domination and injustice and transforming them into “a reality of equality and mutuality” (17). To help make the case for expanding rhetorical studies beyond persuasion, Foss and Griffin represent traditional rhetoric as patriarchal and invitational rhetoric as feminist. Celeste Condit’s “In Praise of Eloquent Diversity: Gender and Rhetoric as Public Persuasion” questions their conception of distinct masculine and feminine communication styles, a perspective she describes as gender dichotomy. According to Condit, an emphasis on gender difference 360

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originally led to persuasion’s association with the public sphere (which was coded as masculine) and women’s exclusion from it; consequently, scholars who use a dichotomous gender perspective perpetuate binary thinking and inadvertently encourage “a future much like the past” (94). Instead, she urges others to envision gender as contingent, fluid, and performative, positing that subjects can construct themselves as feminine, masculine, or a mix of the two regardless of their biological configuration. This gender diversity perspective seeks to erase the male/female binary and, with it, gender oppression. It also suggests that rhetors select from an assortment of stylistic features coded as masculine or feminine in order to adapt ethos and discourse to specific rhetorical occasions. In this manner, Condit disrupts Foss and Griffin’s association of persuasion with male violence and casts rhetorical choice as a “constructor of gender rather than as constructed by gender,” a stance that promises to yield new insights into the ways that “differently gendered bodies speak” (110). Since this exchange (which was followed by a 1997 response article from Foss, Griffin, and Foss), a great deal of scholarship has been dedicated to challenging and clarifying invitational rhetoric’s tenets and premises. Critiques of invitational rhetoric argue that it erroneously equates persuasion with violence (Pollock et al., 1996), that it is unsuitable for many rhetorical situations (Fulkerson 1996), and that it is persuasion in disguise (Cloud 2004). Although some scholars do not accept invitational rhetoric, others have embraced it, making it a key component of dialogic communication (Ryan and Natalle 2001), academic discourse (Belcher 2007), and ethical rhetoric (Bone, Griffin, and Scholz, 2008). Despite their obvious differences, Foss, Griffin, and Condit’s rhetorical perspectives also share some common ground, requiring not only adept and insightful rhetors who “perform” responsibly but also audiences who are willing to “listen,” no matter what rhetorical strategies are employed. As Krista Ratcliffe’s research on rhetorical listening and Judith Butler’s scholarship on gender performance suggest, context and audience matter whether rhetoric is invitational or persuasive.

Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric* Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin Acknowledgment of the patriarchal bias that undergirds most theories of rhetoric is growing steadily in the communication discipline. As feminist scholars have begun to explicate the ways in which standard theories of rhetoric embody patriarchal perspectives, they have identified communicative modes that previously have not been recognized or theorized because they are grounded in alternative values (see, for example, Edson, 1985; Elshtain, 1982; Foss & Foss, 1991; Foss, Foss, & Trapp, 1991; Foss & Griffin, 1992; Gearhart, 1979; Griffin, 1993; Kramarae, 1989; Shepherd, 1992). Attention to non-patriarchal forms of communication, feminist scholars argue, expands the scope of rhetorical theory and enhances the discipline’s ability to explain diverse communicative phenomena successfully. One manifestation of the patriarchal bias that characterizes much of rhetorical theorizing is the definition of rhetoric as persuasion. As far back as the Western discipline of rhetoric has been explored, rhetoric has been defined as the conscious intent to change others. As Shepherd (1992) notes, in humanistic, social scientific, and critical perspectives on communication, “interaction processes have typically been characterized essentially and primarily in terms of persuasion, influence, and power” (p. 204). Every communicative encounter has been viewed “as primarily an attempt at persuasion or influence, or as a struggle over power” (p. 206). As natural as an equation of rhetoric with persuasion seems for scholars of rhetoric, this conception is only one perspective on rhetoric and one, we suggest, with a patriarchal bias. Implicit in a conception of rhetoric as persuasion is the assumption that humans are on earth to alter the “environment and to influence the social affairs” of others. Rhetorical scholars “have taken as given that it is a proper and even necessary human function to attempt to change others” (Gearhart, 1979, p. 195). The desire to effect change is so pervasive that the many ways in which humans engage in activities designed for this purpose often go unnoticed: *  Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2-18. Taylor & Francis, http//www.informaworld.com, reprinted by permission of the publisher. 362

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We conquered trees and converted them into a house, taking pride in having accomplished a difficult task. We conquered rivers and streams and converted them into lakes, marvelling in ourselves at the improvement we made on nature. We tramped with our conquering spaceboots on the fine ancient dust of the Moon and we sent our well-rehearsed statements of triumph back for a waiting world to hear. (Gearhart, 1979, p. 196) Embedded in efforts to change others is a desire for control and domination, for the act of changing another establishes the power of the change agent over that other. In some instances, the power of the rhetor over another is overt, as it is, for example, in laws that exert control over women’s bodies, such as those concerned with abortion. In securing the adherence of women to these laws, lawmakers have power over women and their lives. But even in cases where the strategies used are less coercive, rhetors who convince others to adopt their viewpoints exert control over part of those others’ lives. A student who tells another student that she ought to take a particular course, for example, controls or influences the nature of another’s life, if only for a few minutes, if the other enrolls in the course or even considers enrolling in it. We suggest that a strikingly large part of many individuals’ lives is spent in such efforts to change others, even when the desired changes have absolutely no impact on the lives of the change agents. Whether a friend enrolls in a particular course, for example, often is irrelevant to a student’s own life. The reward gained from successful efforts to make others change is a “rush of power” (Gearhart, 1979, p. 201)—a feeling of self-worth that comes from controlling people and situations. The value of the self for rhetors in this rhetorical system comes from the rhetor’s ability to demonstrate superior knowledge, skills, and qualifications—in other words, authority—in order to dominate the perspectives and knowledge of those in their audiences. The value of the self derives not from a recognition of the uniqueness and inherent value of each living being but from gaining control over others. The act of changing others not only establishes the power of the rhetor over others but also devalues the lives and perspectives of those others. The belief systems and behaviors others have created for living in the world are considered by rhetors to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus in need of change. The speaker’s role very often “may be best described as paternalistic” (Scott, 1991, p. 205) in that the rhetor adopts a “ ‘let me help you, let me enlighten you, let me show you the way’ approach” (Gearhart, 1979, p. 195). Audience members are assumed to be naive and less expert than the rhetor if their views differ from the rhetor’s own. Rhetorical scholars have prided themselves on the eschewal of physical force and coercion and the use, in their place, of “language and metalanguage, with refined functions of the mind” (Gearhart, 1979, p. 195) to influence others and produce change. Although these discursive strategies allow more choice to the audience than do the supposedly more heavy-handed strategies of physical coercion, they still infringe on others’ rights to believe

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as they choose and to act in ways they believe are best for them. Even discursive strategies can constitute a kind of trespassing on the personal integrity of others when they convey the rhetor’s belief that audience members have inadequacies that in some way can be corrected if they adhere to the viewpoint of the rhetor. Such strategies disallow, in other words, the possibility that audience members are content with the belief systems they have developed, function happily with them, and do not perceive a need to change. The traditional conception of rhetoric, in summary, is characterized by efforts to change others and thus to gain control over them, self-worth derived from and measured by the power exerted over others, and a devaluation of the life worlds of others. This is a rhetoric of patriarchy, reflecting its values of change, competition, and domination. But these are not the only values on which a rhetorical system can be constructed, and we would like to propose as one alternative a feminist rhetoric. Although definitions of feminism vary, feminists generally are united by a set of basic principles. We have chosen to focus on three of these principles—equality, immanent value, and self-determination—to serve as the starting place for a new rhetoric. These principles are ones that explicitly challenge the positive value the patriarchy accords to changing and thus dominating others. Primary among the feminist principles on which our proposed rhetoric is based is a commitment to the creation of relationships of equality and to the elimination of the dominance and elitism that characterize most human relationships. As Wood (1994) aptly summarizes this principle, “I don’t accept oppression and domination as worthy human values, and I don’t believe differences must be ranked on a continuum of good and bad. I believe there are better, more humane and enriching ways to live” (p. 4). Efforts to dominate and gain power over others cannot be used to develop relationships of equality, so feminists seek to replace the “alienation, competition, and dehumanization” that characterize relationships of domination with “intimacy, mutuality, and camaraderie” (hooks, 1984, p. 34). Yet another principle that undergirds most feminisms is a recognition of the immanent value of all living beings. The essence of this principle is that every being is a unique and necessary part of the pattern of the universe and thus has value. Immanent value derives from the simple principle that “your life is worth something. . . . You need only be what you are” (Starhawk, 1987, pp. 115–116). Worth cannot be determined by positioning individuals on a hierarchy so they can be ranked and compared or by attending to emblems of external achievement, for worth cannot be “earned, acquired, or proven” (Starhawk, 1987, p. 21). Concomitant with a recognition of the immanent value of another individual is the eschewal of forms of communication that seek to change that individual’s unique perspective to that held by the rhetor. Self-determination is a third principle that typically comprises a feminist world view. Grounded in a respect for others, self-determination allows individuals to make their own

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decisions about how they wish to live their lives. Self-determination involves the recognition that audience members are the authorities on their own lives and accords respect to others’ capacity and right to constitute their worlds as they choose. As Johnson (1991) explains, this principle involves a trust that others are doing the best they can at the moment and simply need “to be unconditionally accepted as the experts on their own lives” (p. 162). When others are seen as experts who are making competent decisions about their lives, efforts by a rhetor to change those decisions are seen as a violation of their life worlds and the expertise they have developed. Our purpose in this essay is to propose a definition and explication of a rhetoric built on the principles of equality, immanent value, and self-determination rather than on the attempt to control others through persuasive strategies designed to effect change. Although we believe that persuasion is often necessary, we believe an alternative exists that may be used in instances when changing and controlling others is not the rhetor’s goal; we call this rhetoric invitational rhetoric. In what follows, we offer a description of this rhetoric, beginning with a discussion of its definition and purpose and then describing the communicative options available to rhetors who wish to use it. We conclude our essay with two examples of invitational rhetoric and a discussion of some implications of invitational rhetoric for rhetorical theory. Although invitational rhetoric is constructed largely from feminist theory, the literature in which its principles and various dimensions have been theorized most thoroughly, we are not suggesting that only feminists have dealt with and developed its various components or that only feminists adhere to the principles on which it is based. Some dimensions of this rhetoric have been explicated by traditional rhetorical theorists, and we have incorporated their ideas into our description of this rhetoric. We also do not want to suggest that the rhetoric we propose describes how all women communicate or that it is or can be used only by women. Feminism “implies an understanding of inclusion with interests beyond women” (Wood, 1993, p. 39), and its aim is not to “privilege women over men” or “to benefit solely any specific group of women” (hooks, 1984, p. 26). The rhetoric we describe is a rhetoric used at various times by some women and some men, some feminists and some non-feminists. What makes it feminist is not its use by a particular population of rhetors but rather the grounding of its assumptions in feminist principles and theories. Our goal in offering this theory is to expand the array of communicative options available to all rhetors and to provide an impetus for more focused and systematic efforts to describe and assess rhetoric in all of its manifestations.

Definition Invitational rhetoric is an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and to see it as the rhetor does. In

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presenting a particular perspective, the invitational rhetor does not judge or denigrate others’ perspectives but is open to and tries to appreciate and validate those perspectives, even if they differ dramatically from the rhetor’s own. Ideally, audience members accept the invitation offered by the rhetor by listening to and trying to understand the rhetor’s perspective and then presenting their own. When this happens, rhetor and audience alike contribute to the thinking about an issue so that everyone involved gains a greater understanding of the issue in its subtlety, richness, and complexity. Ultimately, though, the result of invitational rhetoric is not just an understanding of an issue. Because of the nonhierarchical, nonjudgmental, nonadversarial framework established for the interaction, an understanding of the participants themselves occurs, an understanding that engenders appreciation, value, and a sense of equality. The stance taken by invitational rhetors toward their audiences obviously is different from that assumed by traditional rhetors. Invitational rhetors do not believe they have the right to claim that their experiences or perspectives are superior to those of their audience members and refuse to impose their perspectives on them. Rhetors view the choices selected by audience members as right for them at that particular time, based on their own abilities to make those decisions. Absent are efforts to dominate another because the goal is the understanding and appreciation of another’s perspective rather than the denigration of it simply because it is different from the rhetor’s own. The result of the invitational rhetor’s stance toward the audience is a relationship of equality, respect, and appreciation. Invitational rhetoric is characterized, then, by the openness with which rhetors are able to approach their audiences. Burke (1969) suggests that rhetors typically adjust their conduct to the external resistance they expect in the audience or situation: “We in effect modify our own assertion in reply to its assertion” (p. 237). In invitational rhetoric, in contrast, resistance is not anticipated, and rhetors do not adapt their communication to expected resistance in the audience. Instead, they identify possible impediments to the creation of understanding and seek to minimize or neutralize them so they do not remain impediments. Change may be the result of invitational rhetoric, but change is not its purpose. When change does occur as a result of understanding, it is different from the kind of change that typifies the persuasive interactions of traditional rhetoric. In the traditional model, change is defined as a shift in the audience in the direction requested by the rhetor, who then has gained some measure of power and control over the audience. In invitational rhetoric, change occurs in the audience or rhetor or both as a result of new understanding and insights gained in the exchange of ideas. As rhetors and audience members offer their ideas on an issue, they allow diverse positions to be compared in a process of discovery and questioning that may lead to transformation for themselves and others. Participants even may choose to be transformed because they are persuaded by something someone in the interaction says, but the insight that is persuasive is offered by a rhetor not to support the superiority of a particular perspective but to contribute to the understanding by all participants of the issue and of one another.

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The internal processes by which transformation occurs also are different in invitational rhetoric. In traditional rhetoric, the change process often is accompanied by feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, pain, humiliation, guilt, embarrassment, or angry submission on the part of the audience as rhetors communicate the superiority of their positions and the deficiencies of those of the audience. In invitational rhetoric, on the other hand, rhetors recognize the valuable contributions audience members can make to the rhetors’ own thinking and understanding, and they do not engage in strategies that may damage or sever the connection between them and their audiences. This does not mean that invitational rhetoric always is free of pain. In invitational rhetoric, there may be a wrenching loose of ideas as assumptions and positions are questioned as a result of an interaction, a process that may be uncomfortable. But because rhetors affirm the beliefs of and communicate respect for others, the changes that are made are likely to be accompanied by an appreciation for new perspectives gained and gratitude for the assistance provided by others in thinking about an issue. The process of engaging in invitational rhetoric assumes two primary rhetorical forms. One is offering perspectives, a mode by which rhetors put forward for consideration their perspectives; the second is the creation of external conditions that allow others to present their perspectives in an atmosphere of respect and equality.

Offering Perspectives When rhetors do not seek to impose their positions on audience members in invitational rhetoric, the presentation and function of individual perspectives differ significantly from their nature and function in traditional rhetorics. Individual perspectives are articulated in invitational rhetoric as carefully, completely, and passionately as possible to give them full expression and to invite their careful consideration by the participants in the interaction. This articulation occurs not through persuasive argument but through offering—the giving of expression to a perspective without advocating its support or seeking its acceptance. Offering involves not probing or invading but giving, a process “of wrapping around the givee, of being available to her/him without insisting; our giving is a presence, an offering, an opening” (Gearhart, 1982, p. 198). In offering, rhetors tell what they currently know or understand; they present their vision of the world and show how it looks and works for them. As a rhetorical form, offering may appear to be similar to some traditional rhetorical strategies, such as the use of personal narrative as a form of support for a rhetor’s position. But narrative as offering functions differently from narrative as a means of support. It is presented in offering for the purpose of articulating a viewpoint but not as a means to increase the likelihood of the audience’s adherence to that viewpoint. The offering of a personal narrative is, itself, the goal; the means and the ends are the same in offering. Offering is not based on a dichotomy of cause and effect, an action done in the present to affect the future. Instead, as Johnson (1989) explains, the “ ‘means are the ends; . . . how we do something is what we get’ ” (p. 35). In this mode, then, a story is not told as a means of supporting or

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achieving some other end but as an end in itself—simply offering the perspective the story represents. A critical dimension of the offering of a perspective, in whatever form it takes, is a willingness to yield. Not unlike Buber’s (1965) notion of the “I-Thou” relationship, the basic movement of a willingness to yield is a turning toward the other. It involves meeting another’s position “in its uniqueness, letting it have its impact” (p. xiv). Tracy (1987) explains the connection between the meeting of another’s uniqueness and a willingness to yield: “To attend to the other as other, the different as different, is also to understand the different as possible” (p. 20). When they assume such a stance, rhetors communicate a willingness to call into question the beliefs they consider most inviolate and to relax their grip on those beliefs. The process is not unlike the self-risk that Natanson (1965) describes as the risking of the self’s world of feeling, attitude, and the total subtle range of its affective and conative sensibility. . . . [W]hen I truly risk myself in arguing I open myself to the viable possibility that the consequence of an argument may be to make me see something of the structure of my immediate world. (p. 15) Scott (1976) calls this self-risk “a grave risk: the risk of the self that resides in a value structure” (p. 105). Thus, the perspective presented through offering represents an initial, tentative commitment to that perspective—one subject to revision as a result of the interaction. A few specific examples of offering may clarify the nature of this rhetorical form. Although much rarer than we would like, offering sometimes occurs in academic settings when faculty members and/or students gather to discuss a topic of mutual interest. When they enter the interaction with a goal not of converting others to their positions but of sharing what they know, extending one another’s ideas, thinking critically about all the ideas offered, and coming to an understanding of the subject and of one another, they are engaged in offering. Offering also is marked by discursive forms such as “I tried this solution when that happened to me; I thought into this it worked well” or “What would happen if we introduced the idea of problem?” rather than statements with forms such as “You really ought to do ” or “Your idea is flawed because you failed to take into account .” Offering may occur not only in small-group settings but also in formal presentational contexts. A rhetor who presents her ideas at an academic colloquium, for example, engages in offering when she presents her ideas as valuable yet also as tentative. She acknowledges the fact that her work is in progress; thus, she is open to the ideas of others so she can continue to revise and improve it. She builds on and extends the work of others rather than tearing their ideas apart in an effort to establish the superiority of her own. In an offering mode, she provides explanations for the sources of her ideas rather than marshalling evidence to establish their superiority. Audience members, too, may engage in offering behavior. They do so when they ask questions and make comments designed not to show the

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stupidity or error of the perspective presented or to establish themselves as more powerful or expert than the presenter. Instead, their questions and suggestions are aimed at learning more about the presenter’s ideas, understanding them more thoroughly, nurturing them, and offering additional ways of thinking about the subject for everyone involved in the interaction. We have tried to write this essay using such features of the offering form. We present a proposal for an invitational rhetoric, for example, a word we chose deliberately to suggest that what we present here is only one of many equally legitimate perspectives possible. We suggest that invitational rhetoric is a viable form of interaction in many instances but do not assert that it is the only appropriate form of rhetoric and should be used in all situations or contexts. We acknowledge the importance and usefulness of traditional theories of rhetoric even as we propose an alternative to them, and we try to build on and extend the work of other theorists—both traditional and feminist—rather than characterizing their work as inaccurate or misguided. Although we are constrained somewhat by the format of a journal article, we see this essay as in progress and plan to continue to work on our ideas; the responses of some of our colleagues and the reviewers and editor of Communication Monographs already have helped us clarify and improve our description of this rhetoric. We have attempted, then, to model the offering of a perspective within the perimeters allowed by a framework of scholarly discourse. Offering also may be seen in the nonverbal realm; a perspective may be offered in the clothing individuals wear, the places in which and how they live, and in all of the symbolic choices rhetors make that reveal their perspectives. This kind of offering is illustrated by Purple Saturday, sponsored by the Women’s Caucus at Speech Communication Association (SCA) conventions. On Purple Saturday, the women attending the convention (and those men who wish to show their support for women) are asked to wear purple, a color of the early women’s suffrage movement, to proclaim women’s solidarity and presence in SCA. When women wear purple on Saturday at the convention, they are not trying to persuade others to become feminists, to accept feminist scholarship, or to value women. Instead, they are simply offering a perspective so that those who wish to learn more about feminist scholarship or to join in the celebration of feminism may do so. Although not designed to influence others to change in particular directions, such nonverbal offerings may have that effect; some who view the wearing of purple by others at a convention may choose, for example, to explore or engage in feminist research themselves. Another form offering may take, particularly in a hostile situation or when a dominant perspective is very different from the one held by the rhetor, is re-sourcement (Gearhart, 1982). Re-sourcement is a response made by a rhetor according to a framework, assumptions, or principles other than those suggested in the precipitating message. In using resourcement, the rhetor deliberately draws energy from a new source—a source other than the individual or system that provided the initial frame for the issue. It is a means, then, of

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communicating a perspective that is different from that of the individual who produced the message to which the rhetor is responding. Re-sourcement is not unlike Burke’s (1984) notion of perspective by incongruity, but in re-sourcement, the juxtaposition of two systems or frameworks is split between rhetor and audience, with one reflected in the original message, the other in the response. Re-sourcement involves the two processes of disengagement from the framework, system, or principles embedded in the precipitating message and the creative development of a response so that the issue is framed differently. Rorty’s (1986) description of the process of generating new vocabularies points to this two-part process: “The idea is to get a vocabulary which is (at the moment) incommensurable with the old in order to draw attention away from the issues stated in the old, and thereby help people to forget them” (p. 114). In Forget’s (1989) words, this kind of communication is “a swerve, a leap to the other side, which lets us. . . . deploy another logic or system” (p. 136). Although a refusal to engage in conflict or interaction under the terms proposed by a rhetor sometimes is seen as a negative, ineffective form of communication because it is interpreted as disconfirmation (e.g., Veenendall & Feinstein, 1990) or as a kind of manipulation associated with passive-aggressive behavior, it can be a positive response to a situation. It allows rhetors to continue to value themselves as well as the audience because it communicates that they are not willing to allow the audience to violate their integrity. Re-sourcement also opens up possibilities for future rhetorical choices, providing more options for rhetors than were previously available. As later options, rhetors who use re-sourcement may articulate their positions through more traditional forms of offering or standard forms of persuasion. An example of re-sourcement is provided by Starhawk (1987) in her description of an incident that followed the blockade of the Livermore Weapons Lab in California to protest its development of nuclear weapons. She and other women were arrested and held in a school gym, and during their confinement, a woman was chased into the gym by six guards. She dove into a cluster of women, and they held on to her as the guards pulled at her legs, trying to extract her from the group. The guards were on the verge of beating the women when one woman sat down and began to chant. As the other women followed suit, the guards’ actions changed in response: They look bewildered. Something they are unprepared for, unprepared even to name, has arisen in our moment of common action. They do not know what to do. And so, after a moment, they withdraw. . . . In that moment in the jail, the power of domination and control met something outside its comprehension, a power rooted in another source. (p. 5) The guards’ message was framed in a context of opposition, violence, hostility, and fear; the women, in contrast, chose to respond with a message framed in terms of nonviolence and connection.

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Re-sourcement in a discursive form is exemplified in a story told by Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch (1974) about a police officer who was issuing a citation for a minor traffic violation when a hostile crowd began to gather around him. By the time he had given the offender his ticket, the mood of the crowd was ugly and the sergeant was not certain he would be able to get back to the relative safety of his patrol car. It then occurred to him to announce in a loud voice: “You have just witnessed the issuance of a traffic ticket by a member of your Oakland Police Department.” And while the bystanders were busy trying to fathom the deeper meaning of this all too obvious communique, he got into his cruiser and drove off. (pp. 108–109) The initial message presented to the police officer was framed in the context of opposition and hostility; he chose, however, to respond with a message grounded in a framework of simple explanation, cooperation, and respect. Re-sourcement, as a means of offering, allowed him to diffuse the situation and to communicate his own perspective—that he was doing the job he was hired by the crowd members, as taxpayers, to do.

External Conditions Offering can occur whether or not an audience chooses to join with a rhetor in a process of discovery and understanding. But if invitational rhetoric is to result in mutual understanding of perspectives, it involves not only the offering of the rhetor’s perspective but the creation of an atmosphere in which audience members’ perspectives also can be offered. We propose that to create such an environment, an invitational rhetoric must create three external conditions in the interaction between rhetors and audience members—safety, value, and freedom. These are states or prerequisites required if the possibility of mutual understanding is to exist. The condition of safety involves the creation of a feeling of security and freedom from danger for the audience. Rhetoric contributes to a feeling of safety when it conveys to audience members that the ideas and feelings they share with the rhetor will be received with respect and care. When rhetoric establishes a safe context, the rhetor makes no attempt to hurt, degrade, or belittle audience members or their beliefs, and audience members do not fear rebuttal of or retribution for their most fundamental beliefs. Even in a volatile situation such as that described by Starhawk, when the guards were about to beat a woman seeking safe haven in a group of protesters, rhetoric that promotes a feeling of safety can be created. In this case, the women did nothing to endanger the guards or make them feel as though they would be hurt. They did not fight them physically or argue against the guards’ use of force; neither did they engage in verbal abuse or ridicule the guards’ training and beliefs about how to deal with prisoners.

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Rhetoric that contributes to a feeling of safety also provides some means for audience members to order the world so it seems coherent and makes sense to them. When audience members feel their sense of order is threatened or challenged, they are more likely to cling to familiar ways of thinking and to be less open to understanding the perspectives of others. When a safe environment is created, then, audience members trust the rhetor and feel the rhetor is working with and not against them. The condition of value is the acknowledgment that audience members have intrinsic or immanent worth. This value is what Benhabib (1992) calls “the principle of universal moral respect”—“the right of all beings capable of speech and action to be participants” in the conversation (p. 29). Barrett (1991) describes this condition as “respectfully, affirming others” while at the same time “one affirms oneself ” (p. 148). Value is created when rhetors approach audience members as “unrepeatable individuals” and eschew “distancing, depersonalizing, or paternalistic attitudes” (Walker, 1989, pp. 22, 23). As a result, audience members feel their identities are not forced upon or chosen for them by rhetors. Rhetors do not attempt to fit audience members into any particular roles but face “the ‘otherness of the other,’ one might say to face their ‘alterity,’ their irreducible distinctness and difference from the self ” (Benhabib, 1992, p. 167). Rhetors celebrate the unique and individual identities of audience members—what Benhabib (1992) describes as the actuality of my choices, namely to how I, as a finite, concrete, embodied individual, shape and fashion the circumstances of my birth and family, linguistic, cultural and gender identity into a coherent narrative that stands as my life’s story. (pp. 161–162) One way in which rhetoric may contribute to the acknowledgment and celebration of freely chosen, unique identities by audience members is through a process Gendlin (1978) calls “absolute listening” (p. 116), Morton (1985) describes as “hearing to speech” (p. 202), and Johnson (1987) terms “hearing into being” (p. 130). In such rhetoric, listeners do not interrupt, comfort, or insert anything of their own as others tell of their experiences. Such a stance contrasts with typical ways of listening, in which “we nearly always stop each other from getting very far inside. Our advice, reactions, encouragements, reassurances, and wellintentioned comments actually prevent people from feeling understood” (Gendlin, 1978, p. 116) and encourage them to direct their comments toward listeners’ positions or orientations (Johnson, 1987). While speaking to listeners who do not insert themselves into the talk, individuals come to discover their own perspectives. Morton (1985) quotes a woman’s description of her experience in the process of being heard to speech: “ ‘You didn’t smother me. You gave it [my voice] space to shape itself. You gave it time to come full circle’ ” (p. 205). Value is conveyed to audience members when rhetors not only listen carefully to the perspectives of others but try to think from those perspectives. Benhabib’s (1992) notion of the “ ‘reversibility of perspectives’ ” (p. 145) is relevant here; it is the capacity to reverse

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perspectives and to reason from the standpoint of others, “making present to oneself what the perspectives of others involved are or could be” (p. 137). When value is created in a communicative situation, audience members feel rhetors see them as significant individuals and appreciate and attend to their uniqueness. They feel rhetors care about them, understand their ideas, and allow them to contribute in significant ways to the interaction. Freedom, the power to choose or decide, is a third condition whose presence in an environment is a prerequisite for the possibility of mutual understanding. In invitational rhetoric, rhetors do not place restrictions on an interaction. Participants can bring any and all matters to the interaction for consideration; no subject matter is off limits, and all presuppositions can be challenged. The rhetor’s ideas also are not privileged over those of the audience in invitational rhetoric. All the participants in the interaction are able, in Barrett’s (1991) words, to “speak up, to speak out” (p. 148). Benhabib (1992) calls this “the principle of egalitarian reciprocity” (p. 29); within conversations, it suggests, “each has the same symmetrical rights to various speech acts, to initiate new topics, to ask for reflection about the presuppositions of the conversation, etc.” (p. 29). Freedom also is developed when a rhetor provides opportunities for others to develop and choose options from alternatives they, themselves, have created. Rather than presenting a predetermined set of options from which individuals may choose, a rhetor who wishes to facilitate freedom allows audience members to develop the options that seem appropriate to them, allowing for the richness and complexity of their unique subjective experiences. Perspectives are articulated as a means to widen options—to generate more ideas than either rhetors or audiences had initially—in contrast to traditional rhetoric, where rhetors seek to limit the options of audiences and encourage them to select the one they advocate. Freedom of choice is made available to audiences, as well, in that, in invitational rhetoric, the audience’s lack of acceptance of or adherence to the perspective articulated by the rhetor truly makes no difference to the rhetor. Some audience members will choose to try to understand the perspective of the rhetor, but others will not. Of those who do, some will choose to accept the perspective offered by the rhetor, but others will not. Either outcome— acceptance or rejection—is seen as perfectly acceptable by the invitational rhetor, who is not offended, disappointed, or angry if audience members choose not to adopt a particular perspective. Should the audience choose not to accept the vision articulated by the rhetor, the connection between the rhetor and the audience remains intact, and the audience still is valued and appreciated by the rhetor. The maintenance of the connection between rhetors and audiences is not dependent on rhetors’ approval of the choices made by audience members. Rogers’ (1962) notion of unconditional positive regard suggests the nature of the autonomy the rhetor accords the audience; the audience has the freedom to make choices without the possibility of losing the respect of the rhetor.

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Illustrations Invitational rhetoric offers an invitation to understanding—to enter another’s world to better understand an issue and the individual who holds a particular perspective on it. Ultimately, its purpose is to provide the basis for the creation and maintenance of relationships of equality. Its primary communicative options are offering perspectives and the creation of the external conditions of safety, value, and freedom that enable audience members to present their perspectives to the rhetor. In this section, we present two examples of invitational rhetoric to clarify its primary features. The first example is the acceptance speech given by Adrienne Rich when she was awarded the National Book Awards’ prize for poetry in 1974 (Rich, Lorde, & Walker, 1974/1994). When Rich accepted the award, she read a statement that she had prepared with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde—both of whom also had been nominated for the prize. In the statement, the three women announced that they were accepting the award together: “We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world” (p. 148). The statement clearly articulated the women’s own position: “We believe that we can enrich ourselves more in supporting and giving to each other than by competing against each other; and that poetry—if it is poetry—exists in a realm beyond ranking and comparison” (p. 148). They presented no arguments in favor of their belief, however, nor did they argue against the position held by representatives of the National Book Awards. Thus, they did not seek the adherence of others to their perspective but simply offered their own vision. The speech illustrates re-sourcement as a form of offering in that the women communicated their differences with the hierarchical, competitive framework established by the National Book Awards simply by not communicating within the terms of that framework: “None of us could accept this money for herself ” (p. 148). They chose to respond within a different framework—one based on support and cooperation—by accepting the prize in the name of all women: “We will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women” (p. 148). The three external conditions of safety, value, and freedom required for others to present their perspectives were created by the speech. The rhetors communicated safety when they suggested that they regarded the perspective of the judges as a legitimate one that they would treat with respect and care. “We appreciate the good faith of the judges for this award” (p. 148), they stated. They accorded value in very specific ways to many individuals, both those in their immediate audience and others:

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We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color, identification, or derived class: the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the pregnant teenager, the teacher, the grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress, the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet. (pp. 148–149) They not only recognized these diverse and unique individuals but credited them as sources for their own work, calling them “the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work” (p. 149). The brevity of the speech precluded the opportunity for the extensive development of freedom for the audience, but it is evident in that Rich, Walker, and Lorde do not specify particular options for action for women; they leave open to women whatever routes of “selfdetermination” (p. 148) they, themselves, choose. Nor do they suggest the kind of support women should give to each other or the particular contributions other women have made to them. Their ambiguity in these areas leaves open options for the audience and does not confine the terms of the interaction they initiated. Feminist and animal-rights activist Sally Miller Gearhart (1993) provides a second example of invitational rhetoric in her narration of her interaction with an anti-abortion advocate. In the interaction, Gearhart used both traditional and invitational rhetoric, so her narrative provides a useful contrast between the two and the kinds of results each tends to produce. On a trip with a friend to upstate New York, Gearhart encountered a man in the Kennedy airport “railing about all these women and abortion rights.” Because of her own pro-choice beliefs, Gearhart took him on. As a matter of fact, I took him on so loudly that we gathered a little crowd there in the Kennedy airport. I was screaming at him; I was trying to make him change. It was not successful, and it was pretty ugly, as a matter of fact. . . . They didn’t have to actually physically separate us, but it was close to that. An hour later, as she was boarding the shuttle bus to take her to Plattsburg, her destination, Gearhart encountered the man again: “There was only one seat on that bus, and guess who it was next to? . . . He looked at me and I looked at him as if to say, ‘Oh, my God, what are we going to do?’ ” Rather than continue to engage the man as she had in the airport, Gearhart decided to try something different—to engage in what we suggest was invitational rhetoric: “I decided that what I would do was to try to approach this man with something different. . . . and so I began asking him about his life and about the things that he did,” seeking to understand his perspective and the reasons it made sense to him. “In fact,” Gearhart explains, “it was even worse than I had originally thought. In fact, he was a chemist, and he had experimented on animals. He had grown up as a hunter and, of

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course, all that is absolutely counter to the things that I believe.” But rather than attempting to convince him of the error of his ways, Gearhart continued to listen to the man, and he did the same as she shared her own perspectives and experiences with him. The invitational rhetoric in which the two engaged brought Gearhart and the man together, although neither one “had changed our original position.” As the two crossed paths for the third time in the parking lot, waiting for their respective rides, they started walking toward each other. Gearhart finishes the story: I don’t know which one of us did it first, but I guess maybe I flung open my arms and he flung open his arms and we came together in this terrific hug, both of us in tears, sobbing, crying like babies. I said, “You know, I don’t know what has happened here, but my life has been totally changed after today.” And he said, “My life is totally changed, too, and I don’t know what’s happened.” We suggest that what happened was that the two individuals had offered their perspectives and listened to and acknowledged one another’s perspectives in an environment of safety, value, and freedom. Their communication thus invited understanding and brought them to a new place of awareness of and appreciation for one another. Gearhart’s (1993) summary of the experience is an excellent summary of invitational rhetoric: “It’s a way to disagree and at the same time not to hurt each other and to respect each other and to have, actually, something very close and tender.” We see the statement of Rich, Lorde, and Walker and Gearhart’s interaction as invitational, then, in that both were rooted in the principles of equality, immanent value, and respect for others and validation of their perspectives. Rich, Lorde, and Walker offered a perspective and communicated its difference with that of the judges, but they neither sought adherence for it nor denigrated the different viewpoint of the judges. Gearhart also offered a perspective very different from that of her acquaintance and listened to one very different from her own without seeking adherence or pronouncing judgment. Each rhetor created conditions of safety, value, and freedom, contributing to an environment in which audience members were able to present their different perspectives. The result was an understanding on which relationships of equality and respect could be built.

Implications for Rhetorical Theory The expansion of the notion of rhetoric to include invitational rhetoric has several implications for rhetorical theory. The introduction of invitational rhetoric into the scope of rhetorical theory challenges the presumption that has been granted to persuasion as the interactional goal in the rhetorical tradition. Identification and explication of a rhetoric not grounded in the intent to produce a desired change in others undermine the position of privilege accorded to

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efforts to influence in rhetoric. The existence of invitational rhetoric encourages the exploration of yet other rhetorics that do not involve this singular interactional goal. A second implication is that invitational rhetoric may contribute to the efforts of communication scholars who are working to develop models for cooperative, nonadversarial, and ethical communication. Such a goal, for example, is espoused by Herrick (1992), in his discussion of the link between rhetoric and ethics, when he suggests “that a virtue approach to rhetorical ethics may provide the kind of flexible, yet directive, ethic needed” to maintain the democratic nature of a pluralistic social order (p. 147). Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992) also propose such a goal in their book on argumentation; their approach is designed to create an open and free exchange and responsible participation in cooperative, dialogic communication. The framework provided by invitational rhetoric may allow such theorists to achieve their laudatory missions more easily by contributing to a reconciliation of goals and means (Makau, in press). According to Herrick’s and van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s definitions of rhetoric as a process in which rhetors seek to secure the acceptance of their perspectives by others, rhetors tend to see their audiences as opponents and sometimes may be tempted to engage in questionable ethical practices to win their “battles” with them. Rules thus are required to contain the interaction that results from the use of such strategies. Invitational rhetoric may serve as a way to allow these scholars to develop models for interaction not characterized by the opposition and competition that make the achievement of their goal difficult. The introduction of invitational rhetoric to the array of rhetorical forms available also serves a greater heuristic, inventive function than rhetoric previously has allowed. Traditional theories of rhetoric occur within preimposed or preconceived frameworks that are reflexive and reinforce the vocabularies and tenets of those frameworks. In rhetoric in which the rhetor seeks to impose change on others, an idea is adapted to the audience or is presented in ways that will be most persuasive to the audience; as a result, the idea stays lodged within the confines of the rhetorical system in which it was framed. Others may challenge the idea but only within the confines of the framework of the dispute already established. The inventive potential of rhetoric is restricted as the interaction converts the idea to the experience required by the framework. Invitational rhetoric, on the other hand, aims at converting experience “to one of the many views which are indeterminately possible” (Holmberg, 1977, p. 237). As a result, much is open in invitational rhetoric that is not in traditional rhetorics—the potential of the audience to contribute to the generation of ideas is enhanced, the means used to present ideas are not those that limit the ideas to what is most persuasive for the audience, the view of the kind of environment that can be created in the interaction is expanded, and the ideas that can be considered multiply. The privileging of invention in invitational rhetoric allows for the development of interpretations, perspectives, courses of actions, and solutions to problems different from those allowed in traditional models of rhetoric.

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Rather than the discovery of how to make a case, invitational rhetoric employs invention to discover more cases, a process Daly (1984) describes as one of creating “an atmosphere in which further creativity may flourish. . . . [w]e become breathers/creators of free space. We are windy, stirring the stagnant spaces with life” (p. 18). The inclusion of an invitational rhetoric in the array of rhetorics available suggests the need to revise and expand rhetorical constructs of various kinds to take into account the nature and function of this form. Invitational rhetoric suggests, for example, that the traditional view of the audience as an opponent ought to be questioned. It challenges the traditional conception of the notion of rhetorical strategies as means to particular ends in that in invitational rhetoric, the means constitute the ends. It suggests the need for a new schema of ethics to fit interactional goals other than inducement of others to adherence to the rhetor’s own beliefs. Finally, invitational rhetoric provides a mode of communication for women and other marginalized groups to use in their efforts to transform systems of domination and oppression. At first glance, invitational rhetoric may seem to be incapable of resisting and transforming oppressive systems such as patriarchy because the most it seems able to do is to create a space in which representatives of an oppressive system understand a different— in this case, a feminist—perspective but do not adopt it. Although invitational rhetoric is not designed to create a specific change, such as the transformation of systems of oppression into ones that value and nurture individuals, it may produce such an outcome. Invitational rhetoric may resist an oppressive system simply because it models an alternative to the system by being “itself an Other way of thinking/speaking” (Daly, 1978, p. xiii)—it presents an alternative feminist vision rooted in affirmation and respect and thus shows how an alternative looks and works. Invitational rhetoric thus may transform an oppressive system precisely because it does not engage that system on its own terms, using arguments developed from the system’s framework or orientation. Such arguments usually are co-opted by the dominant system (Ferguson, 1984) and provide the impetus “to strengthen, refine, and embellish the original edifice,” entrenching the system further (Johnson, 1989, pp. 16–17). Invitational rhetoric, in contrast, enables rhetors to disengage from the dominance and mastery so common to a system of oppression and to create a reality of equality and mutuality in its place, allowing for options and possibilities not available within the familiar, dominant framework. Our interest in inserting invitational rhetoric into the scope of rhetorical theory is not meant to suggest that it is an ideal for which rhetors should strive or that it should or can be used in all situations. Invitational rhetoric is one of many useful and legitimate rhetorics, including persuasion, in which rhetors will want to be skilled. With the identification of the rhetorical mode of invitational rhetoric, however, rhetors will be able to recognize situations in which they seek not to persuade others but simply to create an environment that facilitates understanding, accords value and respect to others’ perspectives, and contributes to the development of relationships of equality.

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Notes The authors wish to thank Bally Miller Gearhart, James F. Klumpp, Josina M. Makau, and Julia T. Wood for their contributions to the development of this essay.

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hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Boston: South End. Johnson, S. (1987). Going out of our minds: The metaphysics of liberation. Freedom, CA: Crossing. Johnson, S. (1989). Wildfire: Igniting the she/volution. Albuquerque, NM: Wildfire. Johnson, S. (1991). The ship that sailed into the living room: Sex and intimacy reconsidered. Estancia, NM: Wildfire. Kramarae, C. (1989). Feminist theories of communication. In E. Barnouw (Ed.), International encyclopedia of communications (Vol. 2, pp. 157–160). New York: Oxford University Press. Makau, J.M. (in press). [Review of Argumentation, communication and fallacies: A pragma-dialectical perspective]. Philosophy and Rhetoric. Morton, N. (1985). The journey is home. Boston: Beacon. Natanson, M. (1965). The claims of immediacy. In M. Natanson & H.W. Johnstone, Jr. (Eds.), Philosophy, rhetoric and argumentation (pp. 10–19). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Rich, A., Lorde, A., & Walker, A. (1994). A statement for voices unheard: A challenge to the National Book Awards. In S.K. Foss & K.A. Foss, Inviting transformation: Presentational speaking for a changing world (pp. 148–149). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. (Speech presented 1974) Rogers, C.R. (1962). The interpersonal relationship: The core of guidance. Harvard Educational Review, 32, 416–429. Rorty, R. (1986). Beyond realism and anti-realism. In L. Nagl & R. Heinrich (Eds.), Wo steht die Analytische Philosohie heute? (pp. 103–115). Vienna, Austria: Oldenbourg. Scott, R.L. (1976). Dialogue and rhetoric. In J. Blankenship & H. Stelzner (Eds.), Rhetoric and communication: Studies in the University of Illinois tradition (pp. 99–109). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Scott, R.L. (1991). The necessary pluralism of any future history of rhetoric. Pre/Text, 12, 195–209. Shepherd, G.J. (1992). Communication as influence: Definitional exclusion. Communication Studies, 43, 203–219. Starhawk. (1987). Truth or dare: Encounters with power, authority, and mystery. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Starhawk. (1988). Dreaming the dark: Magic, sex and politics (rev. ed.). Boston: Beacon. Tracy, D. (1987). Plurality and ambiguity: Hermeneutics, religion, hope. San Francisco: Harper and Row. van Eemeren, F.H., & Grootendorst, R. (1992). Argumentation, communication and fallacies: A pragmadialectical perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Veenendall, T.L., & Feinstein, M.C. (1990). Let’s talk about relationships. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Walker, M.U. (1989). Moral understandings: Alternative “epistemology” for a feminist ethics. Hypatia, 4, 15–28. Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J.H., & Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution. New York: W.W. Norton. Wood, J.T. (1993). Enlarging conceptual boundaries: A critique of research in interpersonal communication. In S.P. Bowen & N. Wyatt (Eds.), Transforming visions: Feminist critiques in communication studies (pp. 19–49). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Wood, J.T. (1994). Gendered lives: Communication, gender, and culture. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

In Praise of Eloquent Diversity: Gender and Rhetoric as Public Persuasion* Celeste Michelle Condit Gender dichotomy feminists have suggested that rhetoric, identified as public persuasion, is a patriarchal practice. This perspective rests on a faulty, essentialist understanding of identity and a failure to appreciate the inherently persuasive character of discourse. Gender diversity is offered as an alternative perspective that envisions gender and identity as mobile, multiple affiliations that are formed through discursive interactions. With such a vision of gender, public persuasion can be understood as a feminist art that enables collective action. The love of oratory—manifested as an appreciation for the power and eloquence of human speech—was an important ingredient in the revival of rhetorical studies [. . .] in the twentieth century. However, feminist theorists operating from a dichotomy perspective recently have portrayed this appreciation and oratory as patriarchal and have supported a move away from the study of “rhetoric,” understood as a coercive, male-oriented practice, and toward the study of “communication,” understood as a feminine activity integrally associated with everyday life and egalitarianism. Such feminist criticisms misrepresent the history of rhetoric and rest on untenable and counterproductive notions of human gender. This essay attempts to revise our understanding of gender away from the dichotomy model and toward an appreciation of diversity in order to reconstruct an understanding of the rhetorical tradition that is compatible with feminist goals while appreciative of human eloquence.

The Dichotomy Feminist’s Critique of Rhetoric Numerous feminist theorists contribute to the critique of rhetoric as a patriarchal practice. Some of these discussions stem from poststructuralist perspectives (Biesecker, 1992), others from liberal feminist positions (Campbell, 1973). The [. . .] most thorough [. . .] analyses, however, arise from a group of theorists I label “gender dichotomists” (Gearhart, 1979; Foss & Foss, 1991; Griffin, 1993; Spitzack & Carter, 1987). Dichotomy feminism portrays male and female activities and ways of being as radically separate from one another and assigns rhetoric *  Women’s Studies in Communication 20 (1997): 91-116. Note: This essay has been condensed. 381

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to the realm of the male. More specifically, these theorists argue that rhetoric is patriarchal because it is a coercive practice and because it valorizes the public sphere. As a consequence, they recommend a shift from the study of “rhetoric” as public persuasion to the study of rhetoric as “communication.” The argument that rhetoric is a coercive practice originates (in academic print at least) with Sally Gearhart (1979). Gearhart associates rhetoric with persuasion and rejects both on the grounds that “any attempt to persuade is an act of violence” (p. 195). More recent dichotomy feminists have attempted to distance themselves from Gearhart’s rather strident statement, but they likewise maintain that the patriarchal bias of rhetoric is evident in its focus on persuasion. Foss and Griffin (1995), in what is the most definitive statement by dichotomy feminists about rhetoric to date, suggest that “One manifestation of the patriarchal bias that characterizes much of rhetorical theorizing is the definition of rhetoric as persuasion” (p. 2). Spitzack and Carter (1987) come to a remarkably similar conclusion. They place women’s eloquence at the early first stage in feminist studies and discount such research approaches as merely “add women and stir” (p. 419). The claim that persuasion is violent, or at least coercive, is based on an essentialist understanding of the human person. That is, it is based on viewing human beings as having stable, autonomous identities that are violated by external requests for change. Foss and Griffin (1992) claim that persuasion constitutes “a kind of trespassing on the personal integrity of others” because “such strategies disallow . . . the possibility that audience members are content with the belief systems they have developed, function happily with them, and do not perceive a need to change” (p. 3). Foss (1996) extends this claim: Self-determination—acknowledging the right of individuals to choose for themselves—is another value violated in traditional persuasive approaches. When audience members are envisioned as authorities on their own lives, with the right to constitute their life worlds as they choose, then a rhetor’s efforts to change those decisions violate individuals’ life worlds. (pp. 55–56) This argument against persuasion presumes both that individuals are incapable of choosing among persuasive messages what they wish to believe, but also that all aspects of audience members’ beliefs are integral to their identity, and therefore ought to be treated as authentic and correct, regardless of how egregious their character. The presumption of an authentic and stable self is inherent in dichotomy feminism because such a foundation is integral to gender dimorphism. Gender dichotomists indicate that there is an essential, pre-given quality to gender and that this gender quality determines central features of one’s identity and therefore one’s interests. Foss (1989) articulates this assumption that women share a stable and identifiable set of characteristics when she refers to “male and female realms” and says that “Women’s reality is characterized by such features as a sense

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of interdependence and connection with others and with the world; . . . an egalitarian use of power; and a focus on process rather than product” (p. 2). The gender dichotomy approach thus assumes that individuals have unique, pre-given selves. To attempt to influence another’s self is thus inherently to violate that person’s core being. Such a presumption of stable essences is necessary for a rejection of rhetoric because only if interests are “authentic” (or objectively derived in some manner) rather than constructed can one advocate the elimination of conventional public rhetoric in favor of persuasion-free, influence-free discourses. If interests or identities are authentically pre-given, then rhetoric is not only unnecessary, but probably also distorting. Such a perspective is not only radically individualist, but it also blithely forgets that language is inherently and incessantly sermonic and that all realities are culturally constructed. This pair of doctrines about language has been well established by dozens of theorists operating from a range of political positions (Berger & Luckman, 1966/67; Daly, 1978; Foucault, 1970; Weaver, 1970). As I will argue below, a gender diversity perspective integrates this notion of political positions as constructed in a way that permits a re-inscription of rhetoric, including its persuasive nature. Dichotomy feminists also argue, however, that rhetoric is patriarchal because it valorizes the discourse of the public sphere. Foss and Foss (1991) highlight the fact that ordinary women have rarely had access to the public sphere, complaining that “because women’s discourse is largely in the private realm, a focus on the public generally omits consideration of such [women’s] discourse” (p. 14). While they are correct that women historically have had fewer opportunities to speak in public, having struggled with the rhetorical limitations placed on them in public speaking (Campbell, 1989), this analysis conflates past, present, and future, and mistakes a condition common to people of all genders with a condition unique to women. Foss and Foss (1991) cite “the discomfort many women feel with the traditional public speaking mode—it is not a ‘native’ form of expression for them” (p. 17). This argument ignores the fact that most men also are denied public space and feel similarly uncomfortable with public speaking (which is why public speech is taught in educational systems as a civic responsibility). It is true that women in the past have had fewer opportunities for public address and that, on average, they may have some greater degree of apprehension about speaking (or at least a willingness to admit it); but women’s opportunities for public speaking, and for learning to be comfortable in that context, are wider today than in the past. Most important for a feminist perspective, however, is what a theory constructs as possibilities for the future. By assigning public rhetoric to the “male realm,” dichotomy feminists (albeit unintentionally) encourage women not to see themselves as public speakers for the future. They thus encourage a future much like the past. This future/past is made appealing partly through a subtle conflation of the public with the bad and the private with the good. As Julia Wood pointed out to me (personal communication), however, private communications can be just as difficult, dangerous, and coercive for women as public discourses. Psychological versions of spouse abuse, parental ultimatums, play-ground

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bullying, and neighborhood status competition all exemplify private communications that are as problematic as public discourse. Thus, when the gender dichotomy perspective symbolically associates “good communication” with private communication, derived from the status of the private as a “women’s realm,” it encourages us to ignore the deeply and subtly coercive dimensions of much of that communicative form. [. . .] Some defendants of the dichotomy perspective argue that its advocates mean only to add other dimensions to rhetoric, not to efface public speaking altogether [. . .]. Foss and Griffin (1995), for example, assert [. . .] that “our interest in inserting invitational rhetoric into the scope of rhetorical theory is not meant to suggest that it is an ideal for which rhetors should strive or that it should or can be used in all situations” (p. 17); and Foss and Foss (1991) include one instance of public speaking in their book on women’s speech. However, such statements seem fundamentally incompatible with an attack on rhetoric [. . .] as historically and inherently patriarchal, violent, coercive, and ineluctably male. The claim that dichotomy feminism does not want to eliminate public persuasion also is incompatible with the continuing thrust of this work, which emphasizes private activities like sewing as the valorized methods for promoting social change—as in a recent article by Sonja Foss (1996), which states that “some feminists . . . question such [public persuasive] change efforts and have begun to propose strategies that eschew traditional persuasion” (p. 55). The efforts she explicitly lists to be eschewed include the “campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, and work to end sex discrimination in educational institutions and the workplace” (p. 55). [. . . It is] significant that Foss and Foss (1991) identify their efforts as communication studies. They say, “While some scholars make distinctions between the terms rhetoric and communication, we are using them as synonymous” (p. 23). This shift from rhetoric to communication is similarly evident in the work of Spitzack and Carter (1987). Their fourth stage of feminist study replaces first stage rhetoric (the study of public communication) with a set of practices they identify as “women as communicators,” which focuses on communication studies in the private sphere (p. 415). The effect of dichotomy feminist attacks on rhetoric is to replace rhetoric (understood as public persuasion) with communication studies focused on private, putatively non-persuasive discourses. Consequently, a different path must be constructed if feminist visions of rhetoric are to be developed that make authentic room for the appreciation of oratory and the practice of rhetoric as persuasion and public speech. Because gender dichotomy approaches assign public speech to the male realm and perceive gender identity as inviolable by persuasion, the effort to reconstitute rhetoric rather than efface it requires a different version of feminism.

Gender Diversity [. . . The task at hand is] to understand how the practice and study of rhetoric—understood as persuasive endeavors in the public sphere—can be compatible with other feminist projects [. . .]. That endeavor requires constructing a non-dichotomous understanding of gender

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and creating a distinction between eloquence and ordinary communication that is compatible with social egalitarianism. A gender diversity perspective offers a non-dichotomous understanding of gender that draws on recent theoretical explorations by what might be called “post-modern feminists.” These scholars go by a wide ranging set of names including “gender deconstructionists,” “gender trouble theorists,” and sometimes the “third wave.” While these feminists’ perspectives do differ from one another, their common agenda is to destabilize the assumption that human gender is inherently dimorphic. Theorists such as Judith Butler (1990) and Toril Moi (1985) emphasize that gender is culturally constructed, and they argue that disrupting the traditional categories of male and female is a useful way to liberate women from the strictures of oppression that have, historically, been assigned to the category “woman.” These predominantly white feminists have received some indirect support from a concurrent argument by women theorists of color such as Gloria Anzaldua (1987) and bell hooks (1989) who believe that the category “woman” is not in any way monolithic, but varies dramatically by race and class. A gender diversity perspective is based on this current vision of feminism, but it plays the tune in its own variations. Instead of merely arguing for the deconstruction of gender dimorphism, a gender diversity perspective emphasizes the active construction of multiple, transient gender categories. These categories, existing in a post-modern space, will necessarily be fragmentary and context-bound. They will reflect shifting configurations of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and personal characteristics. The goal of gender diversity approaches is to dismantle traditional gender dimorphism without leaving persons identity-less. Both of these moves are necessary for gender liberation. Women cannot be oppressed as women if they are not recognized as such within traditional/dominant sex relations. Hence, debilitating that traditional dimorphic category is an important step. Given the current agreement by traditionalists and gender dichotomists that gender is inherently dimorphic, it is necessary here to spend some space demonstrating that the suggested change is also feasible. While it is true that the human species features some biological dimorphism (some people have vaginas and some do not), the extreme cultural emphasis on that particular dimorphism is an ideological residue from eras when maintaining a level of reproduction sufficient to sustain or expand species or community survival was a struggle. The human race is no longer threatened by insufficient reproduction, and it may now be capable of assigning responsibilities for species survival more equitably between men and women, so that there is no longer a need to heighten heterosexual attraction and to dichotomize child-raising responsibilities according to gender. Moreover, for those who believe that the world is over-populated with humans relative to other species, gender dimorphism is probably a counterproductive emphasis as well. Refocusing attention away from dichotomy and toward the possible ranges of human gendering is therefore not only practicable, but perhaps also desirable for the health of the planet.

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Expanding our vision of gender possibilities might enrich human experience for us as the talking animal, capable as we are of artistic and intellectual evolution, creativity, and play. A gender diversity perspective is not only culturally desirable but also biologically and experientially viable. Some dichotomy feminists defend their perspectives by referring to presumed innate biological differences between women and men (such as the experience of menstruation or giving birth) [. . . .T]he emphasis on biological dichotomy has gained increasing currency with studies of “brain sex” and other presumed biological differences between women and men highly visible in the mass media. These studies, however, all suffer from the same failing. They treat average differences as though they represent essential differences, whereas in all cases with which I am familiar, there is actually more overlap between male and female populations than differences. In other words, for almost all females on any given measure, there are males who have the same score on the biological measure, and vice versa (see Figure 1; but for a concrete example, see Gur et. a1, 1995, Figure 3). Difference in means is created by a few outliers on either end of the distribution (a few men for whom there are no females with the same score, and vice versa), and by the relative numbers of women and men on a given score. However, when most women and men have matching scores on a given biological measure, it can hardly be said that this measure is an indication of an essential, dichotomous variation between the genders. Moreover, it suggests that those few “outliers” who are not matched by members of the other sex are the true unusual cases rather than cases that ought to be treated as ideal gender representatives.

Figure 1: Summary Model of Typical Sex Dichotomous Biological Data.

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[. . .] This same analysis can be made for other biological gender variables. Not all women menstruate, and the dichotomous gender model certainly cannot claim that women cease being women when they cease menstruating, or if they do not give birth. Interestingly, all efforts to use biological categories to dichotomize human gender ultimately break down. Even the recent resort to chromosome sexing reveals the fascinating diversity of the species, as some persons with XY chromosomes appear to be physically female, while variants from the XX or patterns, such as XXY, XYY, XXX, or XO exist, along with various mosaics of these, and various forms of hermaphroditism. All gender characteristics thus exist on a biological range of diversity rather than in simple dichotomous bins. This does not deny that the average differences in secondary sexual characteristics between “men” and “women” (however defined) lack any impact. On average, women are smaller and have less upper body strength. Most women tend to bear children, while no men yet do so. Because of these differences, it is not sufficient to efface gender identity altogether. The existence of such average differences has made it possible to generate legal and institutional structures that discriminate, on average, against persons who are gendered in specific ways, without even making any explicit mention of gender. Thus, for example, informal rules that require sixty hours of work per week for a professional career during the childbearing years discriminate against most women in a society where most women provide most of the childrearing labor. On the other side, that division of labor is reinforced by the current welfare structure, which discriminates against nurturing men who would be primary child-care givers because it allocates major categories of welfare to unemployed women with children but denies those categories to unemployed men with children. [. . . B]ecause oppression by gender group exists, and because that oppression is not a simple matter of male versus female, we need to retain the ability to identify gender in order to build what Haraway (1991) calls “affinity, not identity” (p. 155). To retain this ability without reinforcing false and rigid dualistic stereotypes of gender, we need to deemphasize the simplistic dimorphic account of gender and to replace it with a multiplicity of genderings. These genderings should not be universal, but contextually responsive, and they should not reduce persons to totalizing, stereotyped identities. The implications of this perspective for rhetoric are significant. I argue that both the history of rhetorical studies and the practices of rhetoric should be understood not as “male” but as diversely gendered.

The Gendering of Rhetoric in History The “Invitational Rhetoric” essay by Foss and Griffin (1995) condemns the entire history of the discipline of rhetoric in a single page. They summarize their depiction of rhetorical studies in this way:

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The traditional conception of rhetoric . . . is characterized by efforts to change others and thus to gain control over them, self-worth derived from and measured by the power exerted by others, and a devaluation of the life worlds of others. This is a rhetoric of patriarchy, reflecting its values of change, competition, and domination. (pp. 3–4) This reductive account does not adequately represent the diversity of rhetorical theory or of rhetorical practices. Few rhetorical theories have followed the Calliclean model described by the caricature offered by Foss and Griffin, wherein rhetoric is focused on efforts to “gain control” over others, and “self-worth” is dependent on power exerted by others. Two decade ago, for example, Douglas Ehninger (1970) advanced a conception of argument based fundamentally on one’s willingness to risk one’s self in discursive encounters with others. Similarly, Wayne Brockriede (1972) made clear distinctions among different stances in argument, based on the notion that arguers are lovers. Even avowedly instrumentalist notions of rhetoric ground this instrumentalism in the needs of community and human interaction (Hart & Burks, 1972). I would suggest that, in fact, the dominant definitional trend in recent accounts of rhetoric is profoundly interactional rather than coercive. Thomas Farrell’s (1990) definition of rhetoric is exemplary: “a collaborative manner of engaging others through discourse so that contingencies may be resolved, judgments rendered, action produced” (p. 83). It seems to me [. . .] that rhetorical studies in recent decades have been as closely aligned with what might classically have been identified as “feminine” attributes as it has been with masculine attributes. In contrast to such academic practices as economics (largely dominated by social Darwinism and laissez-faire), [. . .] psychology (focused heavily on both individualism and “healthy” gender identity), and political science (focused on “voting behavior” of rational publics), a longer, more interdisciplinary essay might argue that rhetorical studies is at least above the norm in its attention to feminine values. This tendency toward the incorporation of multiple gender values extends throughout the history of rhetorical studies. Plato himself offered a distinctively complex view of gender for his era, including the variegated placement of homoerotic relationships and women in public life. A gender diversity perspective would thus encourage us to go beyond the observation that rhetoric historically has been practiced primarily by males to explore the multiplicity and contradictions of the gendering of that practice (see, e.g., Biesecker, 1990; Dow, 1995). Such historical observations would, I believe, reveal that the gendering of rhetoric has been far more ambiguous than that captured by simple bi-valent relationships. In many historical eras, rhetoric is depicted as female. In the statuary of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Dame/Harlot Rhetoric often appeared above an arch, a busty woman bedecked in pearls (see figure 2). Moreover, the decoration of words associated with rhetoric often has been despised by manly men as effeminate, and preachers and politicians have often struggled with the sense that, compared to the military, the endeavors of their careers (nothing but words) were effete,

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and lacking in manliness. The semiotic structure of men = violence, women = persuasion was as common as the male = public, female = private split embraced by dichotomy feminists; so it might be suggested that men who practiced rhetoric were more androgynous than men who did not. Rhetoric “feminized” men in important ways. Indeed, arbiters of rhetorical taste such as Cicero went to some lengths to distinguish between inappropriate “feminine” styles and manly styles as a means of assuring men that public speaking was a manly activity after all. The gender of rhetoric has been especially problematic for men, given that an invitational, feminine style was often a highly persuasive style.

Figure 2: Dame/Harlot Rhetoric in Courtyard of St. John’s College at Oxford. Courtesy John Louis Lucaites.

This is not the place to rewrite and document the history of the gendering of rhetoric, although this clearly is needed as part of the gendered rewriting of the history of rhetoric that Susan Jarratt (1990) recommends. These examples, however, suggest that the simplistic portrayal of the history of rhetoric offered by dichotomy feminists does not provide a sufficient account of the complexities of the gendering of rhetoric [. . .]. Re-complicating the gendering of the history of rhetoric is important because it opens up more complex readings of gender in rhetorical criticism. A gender diversity perspective, for example, denies that Ann Richards, Barbara Boxer, Barbara Jordan, or even Jeanne Kirkpatrick are merely cross-dressers in a man’s world. It denies, further, that all men are inherently more comfortable speaking in public than

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women, or that all women can be sufficiently characterized as speaking in a “feminine style.” Instead of simply asserting, for example, that Ann Richards uses a “feminine style” (Dow & Tonn, 1993), we would begin to ask what kind of feminine style she uses. What alternative feminine styles does she eschew? What “masculine” components are incorporated? The portrait of human gender is much richer than it has been drawn thus far, and it would be more interesting to explore the range of human styles than simply to lump women in a single box. Jordan and Kirkpatrick are dramatically different in their styles from Richards, who is different from Boxer. Jordan and Kirkpatrick speak more deeply, with more authority, and more logical structure, in contrast to Richards’ campiness and Boxer’s solid nurturance. [. . .] A gender diversity perspective also encourages attention to male genderings of speech. Not only does it allow us to notice, as Kathleen Jamieson (1988) has, that Ronald Reagan effectively used supposedly feminine qualities of personal experience and narrative, but it also bids us to explore the different ways in which masculinity is enacted by the “Old Soldier,” Douglas MacArthur; the secular preacher, Mario Cuomo; or the would-be neutered technocrat, Michael Dukakis. It insists on comparisons among the presentations of black manhood of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. A gender diversity perspective treats rhetoric as the grounds of the construction of gender, rather than as the product of an already constructed essentialist gender. As such, it urges us to supplement studies of the ways in which women in the past had to “overcome” their gendering with studies of the ways in which women in the present/future reconstruct the range of genderings through their speaking (and thereby reconstruct rhetorical style itself). Instead of explaining continually that Ann Richards, or Geraldine Ferrarro, or Barbara Boxer had gender “against” them as speakers, we might begin to ask how these speakers, all enormously successful, constructed their genders in positive ways. To make the shift fully from the dichotomy feminist’s rejection of rhetoric to gender diversity’s revision of rhetoric, however, requires that we eliminate two basic assumptions employed by dichotomy feminists (and some other assailants of rhetoric). These anti-rhetors presume first that interests are “authentic” rather than constructed, and second that rhetoric is not an art but simply a practice equally available to anyone who can communicate.

The Need for Rhetoric: Constructing Human Goods I have already suggested the ways in which the attack on rhetoric made by dichotomy feminists rests on the assumption that each individual speaking self has a perspective that is inviolate, somehow pre-given rather than formed and reformed constantly by exposure to symbolic and nonsymbolic material realities. On this account, rhetoric is “coercive” because it seeks to change the “selves” of others. [. . .] Foss and Griffin’s (1995) theory rests on the distinction between the “intention” to persuade and resistance to such intentions in favor of “offering” one’s own perspective (p. 7). But this argument overestimates the conscious and intentional capacities of human agents, a presumption effectively deconstructed by Biesecker (1989). As one in-

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formed by Biesecker’s insights might point out, it seems quite superficial and inattentive to the character of social forces and their role in human agency to suggest that words that change me are violent and coercive if you intended to change me, but feminist if you are merely awkward and insensitive, or “offering” your views without an intention to persuade. [. . .] Finally, the dichotomy feminist account presumes that people should live their lives in a conservative fashion, closed to the suggestions and input of others. It presumes that we are isolated individuals rather than social animals who must cooperate to survive. On a planet with nearly six billion people, the need for cooperation and shared visions is overwhelming. The individualism of feminist dichotomy theorists discourages that cooperation because it favors intrinsic difference over constructed cooperation. Because rhetoric—understood as public persuasion—is a social not individual activity, and one that is not dispensable for a symbolusing species that requires shared goals and cooperation, feminists need to reconstruct rhetoric rather than replace it or efface it in favor of private communicative practices. [. . .] Rhetoric is essential to cooperation, because cooperation is not a simple pooling of pure, unshaped basic interests. It is the active creation of options and choice among options. The ability to cooperate entails the ability to share visions of the good, to meet on some plane of consubstantiality, identifying in part with others. These are, as Burke (1950, 1969), McGee (1975), LaClau and Mouffe (1985, 1987), and others have made evident, inevitably and thoroughly rhetorical actions. Thus, cooperation requires consciously constructed public discourses. The need for human cooperation makes eloquence indispensable if humans as a species are to survive and prosper as a species. Therefore, a gender diversity perspective seeks to reconfigure rhetoric rather than replace it.

The Artistry of Rhetoric: Eloquence, not Communication Even if difference feminists were to accept that rhetoric (i.e., public persuasion) is necessary, they would still likely resist the study of great women speakers in favor of the speech of “everywoman” because they are uncomfortable with the notion that some persons are more eloquent than others. Proclamations against hierarchy are almost a ritual among feminists, and this often translates into an unwillingness to categorize things as better or worse. This concern is especially pointed with regard to rhetoric because, in important ways, the ability to speak is identified with the basic character of being human, and also tied to notions of intelligence and ability that are highly valued in our culture. It is important to note, however, that feminists are much less concerned about hierarchies in the fine arts. There, feminists have reached a reasonable accommodation that values and promotes the artistic play of all human beings, while at the same time recognizing and valorizing extraordinary works of art and extraordinary artists such as Georgia O’Keefe or Toni Morrison. A similar accommodation ought to be reached in rhetorical studies. All human beings can communicate, and all human beings employ rhetoric. However, most of us lack the eloquence of an Elizabeth Cady Stanton or a Sojourner Truth. If we need cooperation on

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an issue, we would be far better off supporting such spokeswomen rather than insisting merely that “every person’s voice be heard.” This is, again, not an either/or alternative. There are places and uses for the simple multiplication of voices (e.g., in the abortion “Speak-Outs” of the 1970s and 1980s). However, eloquence and sheer volume are not simply interchangeable with one another. To understand why, consider briefly what constitutes eloquence. Eloquence is not a simple property. Its fundamental task is to take an incompletely spoken, fragmentary set of experiences and to articulate those experiences in a coherent set of relationships that nourishes a particular audience in a particular context, perhaps even moving them to new visions from old ones. To achieve this dynamic synthesis, the rhetor has only the most ephemeral resource—words. But, from these airy vibrations, the eloquent rhetor creates metaphors, stories, ironies, and enthymemes, and these, in turn, move audiences emotionally, convince them intellectually, or reassure them credibly. The process requires thoughtful choices about what experiences should be brought together, about creativity in generating these patterns of relationships, and about the beauty of the music in language. Eloquence well performed helps people understand their experiences in new ways and, because these new understandings are shared ones, it allows people to coordinate their behavior around these understandings. [. . .] This is one way of saying that all successful rhetoric is and always has been invitational. Recent audience studies indicate rather clearly that audiences have substantial power to resist messages with which they do not agree, constructing either negotiated or resistive responses to those messages (Morley, 1980; Radway, 1984). Or most commonly, as selective perception theories have long indicated, audience members may simply refuse to listen. To call rhetoric or persuasion coercive is, therefore, to pay insufficient respect to those who are the receivers of messages. It is far harder to gain, hold, and convince an audience than the magic-bullet model employed by difference feminists presupposes. We should envision audiences as leaders who call forth speakers to serve them well. Such a perspective is well illustrated by Diane Miller’s (forthcoming) explanation of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech to the New York Legislature in 1860. Miller demonstrates how Stanton’s rhetoric was merely the highly eloquent and potent neck of the hourglass through which the articulations of a mass of women (petitioners, writers, and other speakers) flowed in a critical time and place. Dichotomy feminists have been driven to a flat and false vision of persuasion for two reasons. First, they are frustrated with the tenacity of the hold of patriarchy over common sense. This is, however, to confuse structural conditions with interactional ones. The tenacity of patriarchy is attributable to structural conditions that shape the distribution of messages. In a mass-mediated society, the public’s access to appropriate speakers is a fundamental issue. Only a narrow range of speakers has access to the mass media today and

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these speakers are heavily patriarchal. [. . . This] disparity can be reduced by concentrating on structural access to the mass media. It cannot, however, be overcome by [. . . encouraging women] to renounce persuasion in favor of a valorization of private communication. A second reason for the frustration of feminists with notions of eloquence is the narrow criteria used to define eloquence. As Campbell (1990) and others note, traditional standards of eloquence in rhetorical studies favored white, male, economically privileged speakers. As Condit (1990) and Campbell (1990) have both pointed out, however, it is possible to generate different criteria for eloquence. We can construct multiple sets of fluid criteria that account for the range of experiences of differently situated persons without eliminating criteria for excellence altogether. Valorizing public eloquence does not, therefore, have to result in the perpetuation of power imbalances. We can reduce hierarchy by recognizing a broader set of ingredients for eloquence and by recognizing that different persons have different talents of which eloquence is only one. [. . .]

Implications of Gender Diversity It may seem at this point that we have strayed a substantial distance from the interests of women’s liberation. This is a somewhat unavoidable hallmark of a gender diversity approach as opposed to dichotomy feminism’s approach to women’s liberation. Dichotomy feminism’s approach foregrounds women and highlights women’s interests directly by trying to privilege women and valorize their concerns. Therefore, such theories always and obviously talk about women. In contrast, gender diversificationists take a step back to reassemble the entire structure of gender. They cannot just talk about women anymore. They have to find stances that liberate a multiplicity of genders. Re-envisioning rhetoric as a constructor of gender rather than as constructed by gender is an essential step toward such liberation. It will allow us to explore the many ways in which our differently gendered bodies speak. The feminist metaphor of “writing the body” is a highly potent one (Cixous, 1975, 1990), but it may be time to supplement a concern with the practice of writing the female body with a concern for enabling many differently gendered bodies to speak. “Speaking,” profoundly linked with rhetoric in the history of our discipline, is a metaphor that offers different resources than writing. The image of writing is of a practice that engages only the mind and the eyes. Speech engages the entire body more directly, more presently, more vividly (Conquergood, 1991). The expulsion of breath required to speak is visibly connected to the drawing of breath by the lungs. The pounding of the heart to support the passion in one’s words may be visible in a flush on the cheeks or a quaver in the voice or a swinging of the arms. Mirroring the speaker’s presence, the audience is not just a reader, but engages at least eyes and ears, and probably other senses as well, to sense, not just comprehend, the speaker (and not just the message).

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In writing, the gendering of the body can be more easily hidden. There may, of course, be subtle hints and occasional outright declarations of gender in writing, but audiences are notably capable of missing these (as is evidenced by studies demonstrating that audiences assign different credibilities to the same passage when the name of the author is rewritten from a male name to a female one). Moreover, in writing, the audience can reduce the gender of the writer more easily to its own stereotypes, perhaps to the simplistic categories of female and male. But in speaking it is harder for rhetors to hide the nuances of their gender (if that is what they seek to do), and it is harder for audiences to be reductive of gender. [. . .] The lived multiplicity of the genderings of human bodies is more “out” in the open in speech than in writing. [. . .] A gender diversity approach to rhetoric uses its attachment to the history of public address to exploit this bodily resource and to explore the range of genderings of the body as it speaks. [. . .] Because human beings are “talking animals,” this attention to gender is attention to a fundamental characteristic of human life and human speech. This project will help us to notice more closely the details of human experience and communication, but also their range. [. . .] Gender diversity also asks us to consider what genderings are absent or muted in the public sphere. This is the age of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Gay and lesbian genderings are supposed to be effaced. One need only attend a predominately gay event to recognize that there are a host of gay male speaking styles, ways that gay males would embody their rhetorical endeavors if they were allowed to let their bodies “tell.” Sometimes this style embodies a deliciously wicked humor and lively emotionality. If it is argued that such a style lacks the gravitas necessary for public rhetoric, one need only reflect on the change that would be made if we substituted Newt Gingrich’s manly style of vicious attack for the high camp of a drag queen. Perhaps the trade-off would be at least even, if not a positive improvement in the tenor of the public sphere. If gay male styles might enrich our body politic, it is harder to know about lesbian styles. While gay males have developed pronounced rhetorical spheres for displaying their bodies, this is much less true for lesbians, who live with the conflicts embedded in the historical oppressions layered on displaying one’s body as a woman. But there may too be lesbian styles of embodiment, and we should know what ways lesbian bodies speak to the polity. And are there sets of bi-sexual styles? Do bodies change their gendering? Do old women speak differently than young women? And how does all of this influence the ways in which we shape our lives together as a citizenry? The gender diversity perspective thus provides us a wider set of perspectives on what it means to be a gendered animal who speaks. It opens up a comparative approach that sees more categories than two, and that grants that those categories are fluid through time and never identically enacted on any two bodies, yet provides useful reference points for speakers and critics alike. [. . .]

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In addition to direct attention to gender, a focus on gender diversity invites other revisions in rhetorical studies as well. Feminist scholarship has introduced a variety of topics to rhetorical studies under the banner of “feminism.” Where war, civil rights, and the Presidential electoral cycle were major foci of “masculine” scholarship in our discipline for many years, feminists introduced “women’s” issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, ordination of women priests, and reproductive technologies. A gender diversity perspective encourages a new emphasis on an even broader set of issues—human health, the social construction of human reproduction, and the public construction of the role of work in life. These topics are largely ignored within a patriarchal rhetorical focus. However, they are not simply the province of women. They are crucial human issues that have perhaps fallen through the cracks as men and women respectively have sought to valorize “male” issues (sub-consciously) and “female” issues (self-consciously). Gender diversity invites a broader consideration of the range of human issues because it seeks to discover the important topics in human lives, across a variety of gender concerns. Whatever directions develop, a gender diversity project suggests the need to do more not less rhetorical analysis, especially of public artifacts. It suggests that re-envisioning rhetoric is not a matter of wiping a slate clean and replacing it with a pure and womanly practice. Human interactions are more complex than that, as is human gender. A gender diversity perspective seeks to valorize and understand the richness of rhetoric, while encouraging it to bloom in its most inclusive, community-building and life-affirming forms.

References Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands: La frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966/1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor Books. Biesecker, B. (1989). Rethinking the rhetorical situation from within the thematic of difference. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 22, 110–130. Biesecker, B. (1992). Coming to terms with recent attempts to write women into the history of rhetoric. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 25, 140–161. Biesecker, S. (1990). Feminist criticism of classical rhetorical texts: A case study of Gorgias’ Helen. In V. Vitanza & M. Ballif (Eds.), Realms of rhetoric: Phonic, graphic, electronic (pp. 67–82). Arlington, TX: Rhetoric Society of America. Brockriede, W. (1972). Arguers as lovers. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 5, 1–11. Burke, K. (1950/1969). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Campbell, K. K. (1973). The rhetoric of women’s liberation: An oxymoron. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 59, 74–86. Campbell, K. K. (1989). Man cannot speak for her: A critical study of early feminist rhetoric. New York: Praeger.

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Cixous, H. (1975/1990). The laugh of the Medusa. Reprinted in P. Bizzell & B. Herzberg (Eds.), The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present. Boston: St. Martin’s Press. Condit, C. M. (1990b). Rhetorical criticism and audiences: The extremes of McGee and Leff. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54, 330–345. Conquergood, D. (1991). Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics. Communication Monographs, 58, 179–194. Daly, M. (1978). Gyn/ecology: The metaethics of radical feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. Dow, B. J. (1995). Feminism, difference(s), and rhetorical studies. Communication Studies, 46, 106– 117. Dow, B., & Tonn, M. B. (1993). Feminine style and political judgment in the rhetoric of Ann Richards. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79, 286–303. Ehninger, D. (1970). Argument as method: Its nature, its limitations and its uses. Communication Monographs, 37, 101–110. Farrell, T. (1990). From the Parthenon to the bassinet: Along the epistemic trail. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76, 78–84. Foss, K. A. (1989). Feminist scholarship in Speech Communication: Contributions and obstacles. Women’s Studies in Communication, 12, 1–10. Foss, K. A., & Foss, S. K. (1991). Women speak: The eloquence of women’s lives. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Foss, S. K. (1996). Re-sourcement as emancipation: A case study of ritualized sewing. Women’s Studies in Communication, 19, 1–28. Foss, S. K., & Griffin, C. L. (1992). A feminist perspective on rhetorical theory: Toward a clarification of boundaries. Western Journal of Communication, 56, 330–349. Foss, S. K., & Griffin, C. L. (1995). Beyond persuasion: A proposal for an invitational rhetoric. Communication Monographs, 62, 2–18. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Gearhart, S. (1979). The womanization of rhetoric. Women’s Studies International Quarterly, 2, 195– 201. Griffin, C. (1993). Women as communicators: Mary Daly’s hagography as rhetoric. Communication Monographs, 60, 158–177. Gur, R. C., Mozley, L. H., Mozley, P D., Resnick, S. M., Karp, J. S., Alavi, A., Arnold, S. E., & Gur, R. E. (1995). Sex differences in regional cerebral glucose metabolism during a resting state. Science, 267, 528–31. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. Hart, R. P, & Burks, D. M. (1972). Rhetorical sensitivity and social interaction. Speech Monographs, 39, 75–91. hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End. Jamieson, K. (1988). Eloquence in an electronic age: The transformation of speechmaking. New York: Oxford University Press. Jarratt, S. C. (1990). Speaking to the past: Feminist historiography in rhetoric. Pre/Text, 11, 190– 209.

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LaClau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985/1987). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. McGee, M. C. (1975). In search of “the people”: A rhetorical alternative. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61, 235–49. Miller, D. H. (1996). Voice and visibility: The politics of lesbian and gay civil rights discourse (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Georgia, 1996). Dissertation Abstracts International, 54 (07A), 2740. Miller, D. H. (forthcoming, 1998). From one voice a chorus: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1860 Address to the New York State Legislature. Women’s Studies in Communication. Moi, T. (1985). Sexual/textual politics. New York: Routledge. Morley, D. (1980). The “nationwide” audience: Structure and decoding. London: British Film Institute. Radway, J. A. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy and popular literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs, 5, 631–60. Rushing, J. H. (1992). Introduction to “feminist criticism.” Southern Communication Journal, 57, 83–85. Spitzack, C., & Carter, K. (1987). Women in communication studies: A typology for revision. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73, 401–423. Weaver. R. (1970). Language is sermonic. In R. L. Johannesen, R. Strickland, & R. T. Eubanks (Eds.), Language is sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the nature of rhetoric (pp. 201–225). Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Wood, J. T. (1994). Gendered lives: Communication, gender, and culture. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Case Study 3 Debating Causality: Women and the Demise of Rhetorical Education This case examines the influence of gender on rhetorical pedagogy, theory, and education over the course of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It consists of two readings: a controversial book chapter from Robert Connors’s Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (1997) and Roxanne Mountford’s review of the book, which centers largely on the chapter in question (1999). In the first reading, “Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric,” Connors argues that rhetorical education changed profoundly between 1820 and 1910 as a result of women’s entry into the academy. At the outset of the nineteenth century, American colleges prepared men for public life through extensive and competitive training in recitation, debate, argument, and oratory; however, once women joined men in college classrooms, the struggle for verbal supremacy was no longer comfortable or desirable, a state of affairs attributable to nineteenth-century gender ideology. Women were expected to conform to what Barbara Welter terms “the cult of true womanhood” and display the “feminine” virtues of purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity (152). These qualities were fundamentally incompatible with the demands of rhetorical training and performance, which necessitated such “masculine” traits as extroversion, assertiveness, intelligence, passion, and a quest for victory. Given prevailing gender norms, women’s public speech was perceived as outright subversion. In response, coeducational colleges gradually modified their curriculums, deemphasizing agonistic (contestive or “masculine”) modes of oral display associated with “the ethos-based worlds of public affairs and government” and substituting irenic (peaceful or “feminine”) modes of reading and writing associated with silence, harmony, and solitude (Connors, Composition 44–68). According to Connors, rhetoric was pushed to the margins while composition and literature moved center stage as subjects of study. The chapter is followed by a book review that announces a challenge in its title, “Feminization of Rhetoric?” (1999). In this second reading, Mountford takes issue with Connors’s analysis on three counts. First, he oversimplifies the causes of curricular shift from an oral to writ398

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ten focus, overlooking additional factors such as the romantic movement’s glorification of the solitary writer and the influx of middle- and working-class students into American colleges. Second, he slights evidence of nineteenth-century women’s rhetorical efforts and accomplishments in genres and domains coded as masculine and of college women’s insistence on equal access to curricular and extracurricular rhetorical activities. Finally, Mountford disputes Connors’s scholarly stance and stated goal of writing an objective, data-driven narrative about the emergence of composition studies, arguing that his “story of ‘feminization’ ultimately plays upon dangerous stereotypes and is itself an interpretation of history” (n.p.). The review takes a fascinating turn at the end when Mountford switches from a professional, distanced tone to an informal, personal one. Addressing Bob (rather than Connors) directly, she questions his decision to ignore critiques of his “feminization of rhetoric” theory voiced earlier by feminist colleagues and to let their feedback fall down “the proverbial rabbit hole.” She ends the review, tongue firmly in cheek, with “Dear Bob, What were you thinking? Irenically, Roxanne” (n.p.). Although space limitations prevent inclusion of two subsequent exchanges between Connors and Mountford on the impact of gender on the college curriculum, they are well worth reviewing here and reading later. Employing wit, reason, and verbal fireworks, Connors defends his work and analysis in “Adversus Haereses: Robert J. Connors Responds to Roxanne Mountford” (1999). His retort brings to mind the thrust and parry of swordplay in its attempt to best Mountford by employing the agonistic rhetorical strategies and objectives that Connors contends have largely disappeared from university settings and exchanges. Mountford, in turn, responds with the open letter “Reply to ‘Adversus Haereses’ ” (1999) and addresses both Connors’s objections to her review and the thorny issue of why some historical interpretations are embraced by the scholarly community while others are not. She reiterates her reasons for finding Connors’s argument unconvincing, identifies the challenges of scholarly acceptance and credibility as a mutual concern, and frames their exchanges as a dialogue that is ongoing rather than closed. Mountford, in other words, adopts a feminist rhetorical stance, one that Connors, ironically, might have labeled irenic. The form, style, and substance of their extended conversation raise many provocative questions, not only concerning women’s influence on rhetorical education but also about gender and communication, agonistic and irenic discourses, and writing convincing histories of rhetoric. (These exchanges are available online in the JAC archives.) Connors’s “feminization of rhetoric” theory continues to elicit counterarguments and critiques from feminist scholars, and responses to his work have appeared recently in publications by Suzanne Bordelon, Lindal Buchanan, Sharon Crowley, Lisa Mastrangelo, and Lisa Ricker (among others). Although most refute Connors, Buchanan holds that he may, in fact, have been right but for the wrong reasons. Rather than interpreting the college curriculum’s shift from an oral to written focus as an effort to accommodate women’s presence as Connors does, she argues that it represents an effort to withhold from women knowledge of and practice in the arts of persuasion. In any case, ongoing discussions of gender’s impact on rhetorical instruction bear witness to the power and provocative nature of Connors’s original analysis.

Gender Influences: CompositionRhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric* Robert J. Connors Rhetoric in both its theories and its pedagogies changed more thoroughly during the hundred years of the nineteenth century than it had since its inception in the probate courts of ancient Syracuse in the fifth century B.C. Much of this change was due to shifting rhetorical sites. As we see in traditional rhetorical histories, the important sites of rhetorical activity move from Greece to Rome in the ancient world, and from Italy to France to England and finally to Scotland between 1400 and 1800. The central site for rhetorical activity during the nineteenth century was certainly North America, and specifically the colleges and universities of the United States. At these academic sites, the shifts in rhetorical ideas and teaching were rapid and extraordinary, and they proceeded on several levels. There was the shift from oral rhetoric to a rhetoric of writing. There was a shift from theoretical to practical rhetoric. There was a shift from argumentative rhetoric to multimodal rhetoric. The very culture of rhetoric, which had always informed Western education, turned from a public, civic orientation meant to prepare leaders of church and state toward a more privatized, interiorized, and even artistic orientation meant to aid in self-development or career preparation in bureaucratic organization. History, even the limited history of one disciplinary tradition, is so capacious, so overwhelmingly full, that it tends toward inducing a tinge of historicism in those who read it or write it, a torpid acceptance of the “givenness” of all things past: “These things, or something like them, happened, or at least people have said they did, and there’s an end on’t.” Poor medieval dentistry and the Battle of Agincourt are both “givens,” in spite of the endless dailiness of one and the uniqueness of the other, and this “givenness” can blind our eyes to the extraordinary sometimes, especially when the extraordinary was not especially remarked by people living at the time. That is, I think, what we have in nineteenth-century rhetoric: extraordinary changes that took place over just long enough a period that they were taken as normal evolution by those in*  From Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, by Robert J. Connors, © 1997. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Note: This essay has been condensed. 400

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volved. But what happened to rhetoric in American colleges between 1820 and 1900 is, in the realm of that discipline, remarkable: a 2,500-year-old intellectual tradition adopts an almost completely new base of theory, a variety of novel pedagogies, an almost completely changed audience and constituency, and a wholly new cultural status in less than eighty years. Certainly other disciplines changed, grew, were refined during the nineteenth century, but none so startlingly or so thoroughly. Surely great changes must have occurred in more than just the discipline in order to cause such a tremendous shift. Such changes did occur, and [. . .] I want to argue that composition-rhetoric [. . .] is based in very deep cultural changes in nineteenth-century America. These changes were technological, economic, and political; but in terms of change at rhetorical sites, no shift is more important than that taking place in perceptions of gender roles and possibilities. In this chapter I want to make the case that coeducation at American colleges represents one of the most highly fraught cultural shifts ever to have occurred in the United States, and that composition-rhetoric as it has come down to us today is one of the disciplinary results of that great metamorphosis in American education. Let us start with this question: Who owns rhetoric? Throughout most of Western history, the answer has been clear: rhetoric was the property of men, particularly of men of property. The continuing discipline of rhetoric was shaped by male rituals, male contests, male ideals, and masculine agendas. Women were definitively excluded from all that rhetoric implied. In the nineteenth century, however, higher education was opened—slowly, partially, grudgingly—to women, and at that same time the theretofore closed field of rhetoric began to shift and change. This shift [. . .] can also be seen as a change from an older agonistic rhetoric oriented only toward males to a more modern irenic rhetoric that can include both genders. The shift from a maledominated rhetoric of persuasion to one that can encompass other purposes powerfully shaped and changed our profession over the past 150 years. This is the story of those changes, how they have affected women, men, and the ways we think about, use, and teach discourse processes. We must start by situating the rhetorical tradition that composition-rhetoric supplemented and then gradually displaced. The old rhetoric was, of course, the 2,500-year-old discipline of persuasive public discourse. From its inception in the probate courts of early Syracuse, the techniques of rhetoric were evolved for a single purpose: to create persuasive arguments, to develop and win cases, to put forward opinions in legislative form, to stake out turf and verbally hold it against opponents in public contest. To use a term popularized by Walter Ong, rhetoric was a quintessentially agonistic discipline, concerned with contest. It was ritualized contest, yes, but contest nonetheless. Argument and debate are verbal agonistic displays, and as Ong has argued, ritual contests of all sorts have been central to Western culture for as long as we have recorded history.

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Walter Ong and the Thesis of Agonistic Education Some background here will be useful. In his book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, Ong traces the strands of agonistic ritual contest between males existing in nature and in the convoluted, codified forms of nature we call culture and civilization. Ong has made a powerful case that important elements of human behavior have been unconsciously informed by the radical insecurity and status needs of males, and that agonistic self-display has been the resulting constant tendency. For humans, bound as we are by abstract consciousness and evolving cultural constraints, the agonistic situation is far more complex than the head-butting of rams, but it exists nonetheless. In Fighting for Life, Ong shows how much of everyday life is informed by male status and display needs, by what John Updike calls “the clash of shirtfronts.” Put most simply, masculine consciousness tacitly perceives most of life from the perspective of a contest. From day to day, the agonist wins or loses in the constant struggle for power, physical comfort, ego-satisfaction, territory. Staking out “turf”—physical, intellectual, social, or emotional—and defending it against all comers seems to be connected to male consciousness in some deep way that females seldom have shared. In Fighting for Life, Ong traces a number of the forms through which this agonistic male consciousness has expressed itself, the various ritual contests each culture has evolved to allow males to “prove” superior masculinity. These contests range from overtly physical tests of bravery and ability to withstand pain (the landdiving of the Pentecost Islanders and the self-mutilating Sun Dances of the Plains Indians) to continuing ritualized physical contests (all forms of sports, from the Olympic games to fraternity beer-drinking contests) and finally to the agonistic verbal contests that have been a part of so many cultures and continue to be an important part of our own. Here, on the level of verbal display and contest, is where Ong’s argument for agonistic male consciousness begins to intersect with the history of rhetoric. Fighting for Life makes a persuasive case for the continuing existence of agonistic verbal display between males in most contemporary cultures. “Ranking someone out,” or certain kinds of pointed joking, “the dozens” in black street culture, “talking a stink” in Hawaiian culture, rap music lyrics, even many kinds of ostentatious verbal playfulness between men, all are examples of the agonism that so often informs male verbal interaction. Many of the ways men relate to other men verbally are overt or covert contests with words, and no group, not even the most liberal or liberated, is exempt. An important portion of Ong’s argument concerns the ways in which this agonistic stance has informed education, particularly collegiate education since the medieval period. Academic agonism was not just a matter of grades, which are a relatively recent phenomenon, but arises, as Ong puts it, “from a disposition to organize the subject matter itself as a field of combat, to purvey, not just to test, knowledge in a combative style” (Fighting for Life, 121). From their founding during the Medieval period forward, college and university courses were conducted as ceremonial ritual contest, in which the teacher and student— both, of course, male—were adversaries. Older students were expected to announce and

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defend theses against attacks by their professors, and from this practice we get the now vestigial practice of oral defense of PhD exams and dissertations—a last agonistic remnant of that older oral culture. And what happened to this agonistic educational culture? After over two thousand years as the central element in education, public verbal contest died out almost completely in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of the oral, argument-based, maledominated education of the pre-1870 period, education post-1870 was much more interiorized, irenic, negotiative, explanatory. The older methods of academic defense and attack died out with startling rapidity, says Ong, because of the entrance of women into higher education. Contestive, combative educational methods that had worked satisfactorily for all-male schooling now came to seem violent, vulgar, silly. A man could attack another man verbally, and was expected to do so, but to attack a woman, either physically or intellectually, was thought ignoble. As more women entered colleges, their influence—both tacit and explicit—caused the abandonment of the agonistic tradition and the evolution of less overtly contestive educational methods. Thus the educational structure we inherit, an amalgam of newer irenic values and half-understood survivals from a more agonistic time in education. This is Ong’s thesis about education in the West. Like any thesis, it has value only insofar as it explains known facts. In this chapter I wish to apply Ong’s ideas to what we know of the history of rhetoric. By doing this, we can look at many of the elements of composition-rhetoric as reflective of the great challenge women made to educational culture during the nineteenth century. We can, I hope, come to understand in a richer way the reasons rhetoric has been what it has, how it has changed, and how it is changing today.

The Agonistic Tradition in Rhetoric At the risk of seeming repetitive or hyperbolic, I need to reiterate that the discipline of rhetoric, as it had evolved from the classical period through the eighteenth century, was almost absolutely male. It categorically refused entry to women. It was thus the quintessentially agonistic discipline. Along with logic, its counterpart, it reified in technical disciplinary form the sometimes inchoate agonistic longings of masculine society. Classical rhetoric is, plain and simple, about fighting, ritual fighting with words, and this agonistic tone carried over into all rhetorical study up until the nineteenth century. Rhetoric was about contest and struggle; indeed, agonistikos as used by Aristotle in the Rhetoric means “fit for athletic contests” (1.5.14) as well as “fit for debating” (3.12.1). The Greeks seemed to prefer the analogy of rhetoric to athletics, whereas the Romans liked that of war or battle. Tacitus, in his Dialogue on Oratory, speaks of the training of the young orator by his patron, whom he was expected to follow about and support “at all his appearances as a speaker, whether in the law courts or on the platform, hearing also his word-combats [altercationes] at first hand, standing by him in his duellings, and learning, as

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it were, to fight in the fighting-line [proelio].” This training “amid the very shock of battle” was the very best possible preparation, says Tacitus (34). Cicero and Quintilian are filled with references to the “battle raging,” “Yielding ground to the enemy,” “sallying from ambush,” and so on. There are reasons for classical rhetoric in praxis being an exclusively male province. As Ong points out, successful rhetorical discourse in an oral culture was probably not physically possible except for men, whose stronger, deeper voices could be made to carry for long distances. Sheer volume had to be a consideration (141). Even more important was the ethical imperative of classical rhetoric, which demanded that the orator be seen as the social and cultural equal of the audience. Ethos was the most important of rhetorical appeals and in a warrior culture, one in which “manly” was the term of greatest approbation and “womanish” the worst insult, ethical appeal from a female speaker was unimaginable. Women before 1800 were socially inferior beings in nearly all public spheres, and thus they could not deploy ethos or be effective rhetors. As Aristotle put it in his Rhetoric, “Virtues and actions are nobler when they proceed from those who are naturally worthier, for instance, from a man rather than from a woman” (1.9.22–23). Because of the connection of oral display with combat and contest, because of women’s exclusion from both genuine combat and oral contest, and because of the tight connection of rhetoric with the ethos-based worlds of public affairs and government, the full separation of male and female discourse worlds was strongly enforced up through the eighteenth century. In spite of the best efforts of contemporary scholars, the search for a women’s tradition in the discipline that called itself rhetoric has been a failure. Impelled by the desire to recover suppressed figures, feminist cultural and literary criticism has brought many heretofore littleknown female intellectuals and heroines to our attention. In her dissertation, Muted Voices, Cheryl Glenn has traced the few thin stories that have come down to us of women in rhetoric, but her investigation shows how successful were the bars that men placed in women’s way to rhetoric. Other good examples of this recovery of women’s voices are Karlyn Campbell’s Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925, which describes early American women orators, and the recent volume Recovering Rhetorica, edited by Andrea Lunsford, which makes a case for rhetorician status for earlier women. The attempt to find foremothers in rhetoric, however, has succeeded exactly to the extent that it has been willing to leave the confines of the history of the discipline that called itself rhetoric.4 When a prohibition is intense enough, those proscribed can be so deeply buried that no trace of them is left, and so it has been with women in rhetoric. From 500 B.C. through 1840, women were definitively excluded from all that rhetoric implied in its disciplinary form. Rhetoric was the most purely male intellectual discipline that has existed in Western culture. Women were not merely discouraged from learning it, but were actively and persistently denied access to it, and thus the discipline coalesced around male behavior patterns. When we look closely at the actual theories described by premodern rhetorical works, the elements of verbal contest stand out very clearly. The classical oration itself

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evolved as a formalized version of the agonistic psyche: the speaker first introduces himself, seeking to portray his honesty, goodwill, and subscription to the values of the audience. He states his case in a careful and detailed way, attempting to show he is fair-minded, intelligent, not hasty. He proves the case with a variety of arguments, and it is here that the full range of display techniques can come out: indignation, analogies, tropes and schemes meant to dazzle and entertain, pathetic appeal issuing from histrionic talent. The agonist then enters into open contest with the opponent, refuting his adversary’s case and seeking to make his foe look ineffectual. Finally, the orator concludes, restating his own position and bowing out with another effort to establish identification with his hearers. The entire effort of this ritualized contest was to deploy any and all words, topics, tropes, and devices to assure that the champion looked more clever, honest, manly, and believable than his opponent. [. . .] We can, if we choose, trace many other elements in traditional rhetorical praxis to agonistic roots in contest and self-display. Indeed, from the beginning the very discipline itself was accused by Plato of aiming at pleasure and advantage rather than at any vision of the good. Rhetoric may have had its inception in the necessity of defending oneself, but as soon as it was rationalized into technical form it became a powerful psychological tool and a disciplinary refuge for men—the Boys’ Clubhouse where no girls were allowed and where men could thus work out their contests in private. In its emphasis on a masculine ethos, in its reliance on abstract typologies that had to be learned by heart, in the love of showing off and self-display that it formalized in the lists of tropes and figures, in all of its implicit ritual and gamesmanship, classical rhetoric was a male pastime. And a great deal of the rhetoric that descended from it remained the purview of men, and only men. The exclusion of women from rhetoric continued long after rhetoric ceased to play any important role in the actual affairs of government. With the Roman Empire and the military and civil autocracies that followed it, rhetoric devolved into the hands of a relatively few stylistic specialists. Imperial Rome and the barbarous courts that supplanted it did not need any public rhetoric other than that of supplication, homily, and entertainment. This sort of skewed epideictic discourse was forced to discount equality and ethical appeal, and the agonistic impulse was thus diverted into the empty displays of the Second Sophistic. After Rome, rhetorical practice of all important sorts moved from the Forum into the Church. There, too, women were completely excluded. While responsibility for all of Christianity’s misogyny cannot perhaps be placed on Paul of Tarsus, it was certainly he who was most responsible for attitudes toward women’s place in the public ecclesiastical sphere. Women were to be allowed no part in public discourse within the realm of the Pauline church. The rationale for this exclusion from church matters lay in two related claims about women’s nature: first, that women were sacred and private and should not lower themselves to public haranguing, and second, that women were sinful, irrational, and incapable of effective public speech. Paul, in I Timothy and I Corinthians, put the Christian position very clearly:

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Let a woman learn in quietness with all subjection. But I permit not a woman to teach nor to have dominion over a man, but to be in quietness. For Adam was first formed, then Eve; and Adam was not beguiled, but the woman being beguiled hath fallen into transgression. (I Timothy 2, 12–14) The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. . . . Let your women keep silent in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. (I Corinthians 14, 34–35) The church, of course, was increasingly where all meaningful speaking was done, and this Pauline stricture, straight out of Judaic misogyny, was taken as a commandment by all later Christian thinkers. The conception of woman as the fountainhead of human sinfulness, as the type of Eve, led to an ever more insistent demand by the church that her role be passive, circumscribed, and private, lest she corrupt men more. Thus for over 1,700 years, women were denied access to the most central forum for European speech: the church. Through the medieval period, the influence of the church kept women almost absolutely privatized, barred from rhetorical training or public speaking to any mixed audiences. It is during this time that the bifurcation of the discourse skills into exteriorized and interiorized becomes noticeable for the first time as a reflection of gender stereotyping. To put the case simply, public speech became the absolute male prerogative; and reading and writing—those private, quiet, non-self-displaying activities—were allowed to be provinces in which women might share. This division into public and private spheres had roots in Pauline stricture, but it took the system-building Middle Ages to absolutize and structure what had been free-floating prejudices into an entire code of interdiction. Although some male writers of the medieval period inveighed against women being allowed even the vernacular knowledge of reading and writing, most could support no direct stricture against women’s reading and writing. Such activities could, after all, be carried on quietly, in the private sphere of home, husband, children within which women were increasingly bound. Unlike public speaking, writing tended to be perceived as being as much women’s province as men’s. The early split between written discourse, which could be allowed to women, and oral discourse, which was hoarded by men as their private preserve, is seen in the different attitudes taken by rhetoricians teaching the two great medieval rhetorical arts, one written and one oral. As scholarship has demonstrated, the two great medieval rhetorical developments were ars dictaminis and ars praedicandi, the art of letter-writing and the art of preaching, and in the development of these two rhetorical strands, we see mirrored the separation of gender rhetorics. Put simply, the rhetoric of letter-writing always included women, and the art of preaching never did. The tradition of letter-writing—small-scale, personalized, supportive, private—had from the advent of alphabetical literacy always been open to women who were educated in reading

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and writing. Not many letters written by women during the classical period have been saved, but although it is clear that only a minority of women were ever taught literacy skills, those who were literate were more likely to engage [. . .] in letter-writing than in any other kind of composition. Letter-writing was, after all, essentially interiorized and personal in scope, often used in support of private and familial communication. If women were to communicate in writing, this quiet and nonpublic sphere would be their most likely forum. The tradition of letter-writing, of course, long preceded its being subsumed under the heading of a technae. It was not until the twelfth century that an ars dictaminis was born as part of rhetoric, and with it was born the concept of writing as an end of rhetoric, not merely a midpoint in a series of preparatory stages. We must not ignore the immense importance of this shift in communicative patterns (Campbell, “Ars Dictaminis,” 14). Before ars dictaminis, the composition and writing of an oration were assumed by rhetorical pedagogy, but the written composition was merely a script that would be learned by heart for oral delivery. With the rise of dictamen, the letter-writing specialists or dictatores established for their art a new genre within rhetoric: the letter, which was written to be read silently. It was the first purely interiorized rhetorical transaction to evolve its own pedagogy; and we cannot emphasize this too strongly because ars dictaminis from its inception not only allowed women as participants in its art, it assumed and encouraged them. [. . .] Meanwhile, the other element of the New Rhetoric was ars praedicandi, the art of preaching. Although there had been some connection between rhetoric and preaching since Augustine, there was never a specific rhetorical branch devoted to preaching and the preacher until the middle part of the thirteenth century. Around 1230, a new type of sermon began to appear, marked by a complex and rigid process of division and amplification on the theme of a quote from Scripture. These “University Sermons,” as they became known, soon were very popular, and a number of Arts of Preaching began to appear, primarily in Paris and in Oxford, where the movement was strongest. Instruction was necessary if a speaker was to master the new form, because it was difficult, based partially on Ciceronian division of the parts of an oration. As James J. Murphy argues, the new sermon form and the pedagogy that grew up around it constitutes “a truly medieval contribution to the history of rhetorical forms” (Murphy, Three Arts, xviii). Unfortunately, the new form of preaching was just as absolutely closed to women as the older forms had been. In contrast to the craft of letter writing, preaching (exterior, oral, argumentative, power-oriented, public) was always the private purview of males. The University Sermon, much more than the older discursive sermons of such earlier homiletic stars as Chrysostom, demanded complex preparation and training. It was highly formalized and was much more an agonistic performance than were the older and more natural sermonic styles. Those who gathered to listen to the new sermons often judged them on performance criteria, and reputations were won and lost on judgments of who could play this new “game” better. The result of the change was to reintroduce an element of ritual and agonism into the homiletic tradition, and thus we cannot be

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surprised to find that women were even more tightly excluded from ars praedicandi than they had been from the older forms of preaching. By the time of the development of ars praedicandi, the situation was as it had been during Paul’s era. There was no possibility of a woman priest or of any woman speaking on religious topics to mixed audiences. Robert of Basevorn, whose Forma Praedicandi was one of the most complete of the preaching rhetorics, proposed that three things were necessary for a preacher. The first was purity of life, not being in a state of sin. The second was competent knowledge of the truths of the Faith. The third was the authority of the church. In all three of these areas, women were either questionable or completely forbidden. They were seen as responsible for sin; they were seldom allowed the background or education to study the deeper mysteries of the Faith; and they had no churchly authority to preach. “Wherefore,” says Basevorn, “we learn: No lay person or religious, unless permitted by the Bishop or the Pope, and no woman, no matter how learned or saintly, ought to preach” (Forma Praedicandi, 124). Canon law still ruled absolutely. Women found preaching closed to them as a public or vocational sphere. By the later medieval period, then, the great division had been accomplished. The rhetoric of writing had been invented and developed, and it was marked by its openness to women. The rhetoric of oral discourse had been reshaped and turned to new ends, but it remained what it had always been—formal, traditional, unyielding, and absolutely masculine. Not for another five centuries would the rhetoric of writing come to its final fruition as a feminized rhetoric of composition, but the seeds had been planted. Henceforward women were allowed their share in literacy instruction, so long as they did not approach too closely the agonistic, self-advertising rhetoric of orality. The gate had been opened. In the centuries following, women would take advantage of the increasing educational opportunities opened to them by demanding an ever larger share of discourse. The progress would be slow, but processes had been set in motion that would finally mean strong challenges to the old masculine rhetorical tradition. During the Renaissance, when education for women first came to be a real issue, we might expect a new attitude toward women’s abilities to conduct public affairs, but even such liberal scholars as Leonardo Bruni and Juan Vives worked to close down the possibilities that women might be taught rhetoric, even as those possibilities seemed to be opening up. And through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although colleges developed and became more specialized, women continued to be excluded from the capstone discipline of traditional education. Feminist scholarship has shown clearly how many intellectual disciplines women had to fight their ways into during the last two millennia of Western culture, but no discipline was as closed to them as rhetorical study. Women were not encouraged to learn to read or write through most of Western history, but those skills—even the “higher” skills of Latin and Greek—were grudgingly allowed them if their social or economic status was high enough. But the discipline of rhetoric was forbidden to women. Like battle skills, rhetorical skills were assumed by men to be both beyond women’s capabilities and beneath their natures.

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I cannot stress too strongly how successful this exclusion of women from rhetoric was or how deeply it affected the discipline. Feminist scholarship in rhetorical history has scoured all the records we have; there are, of course, many women who used rhetoric, who were known as admirable stylists or influential figures. But we have found not a single woman prior to 1800 who defined herself, or was primarily defined by those around her, as a rhetorician. This central discipline, one of the three legs of the trivium of Western knowledge, was denied women completely. But then, in the nineteenth century, women demanded—and received—access to higher education in America, and rhetoric changed forever in the face of their determination to have access to it.

Women, Public Speaking, and Coeducation To understand this shift, we must look again at oral rhetoric as it related to women before the changes that coeducation brought. Both Puritans and more traditional Anglicans refused to allow women to speak to mixed assemblies in church or meetinghouse. The first genuine challenge to the Pauline stricture against women speaking in the churches and in public in general came during the English Reformation. Such enthusiastic sects as the Ranters, Anabaptists, Independents, and Fifth Monarchists all produced women who claimed the ancient and biblically sanctioned right to “prophesy in the church” (Nuttall, 87–89). It was with Quakerism, however, that a widely popular and evangelical Christian sect first began to programmatically claim the right of women to preach regularly. Quakerism could make the claim for women preachers at least in part because it refused to accept the “Romish” idea of specially educated and ordained ministers. All Quaker preachers were lay preachers, and thus the licensure that kept women from conventional pulpits never existed for Quakers. From the beginning of Quakerism in the 1640s, Friends were to speak as the spirit moved them. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote several tracts defending the right of women to prophesy and to speak in churches: The Woman’s Learning in Silence in 1656 and Concerning Sons and Daughters, and Prophetesses Speaking and Prophesying in 1661. In both of these tracts Fox took on the Pauline injunctions directly, explaining them away as being either misread or mere products of their special times and places. In 1666, Margaret Fell (who would later marry Fox) wrote the first book in which a woman truly challenged the old Pauline dispensation, Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed of By the Scriptures. In this work, which was patterned after Fox’s earlier pleas for women’s rights to hold religious meetings, Fell made a dense argument from many scriptural texts, the gist of which was that the Christian church had from the beginning misinterpreted Paul’s words in Corinthians. Fell makes the claim that the blinded men of traditional Christian dispensation “pervert the Apostles words, and corrupt his intent in speaking of them, and by these scriptures, endeavour to stop the Message and Word of the Lord God in Women, by contemning and despising of them.” Such opposition to women taking a full place in the faith is little less than demonic, says Fell:

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All this opposing and gainsaying of Womens Speaking, hath risen out of the bottomless Pit, and spirit of Darkness that hath spoken for these many hundred years together in this night of Apostacy, since the revelations have ceased and been hid, and so that spirit hath limited and bound up all within its bond and compass, and so would suffer none to speak, but such as that spirit of Darkness approved of, Man or Woman. (10) This was the first, and one of the most uncompromising, of the claims that would be made with increasing frequency throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for women’s rights to speak in public. The Quaker claim that women might preach was not widely accepted, however, and the history of Quaker martyrology is filled with the names of women who suffered for their claim to preach. Between 1650 and 1689, when the Toleration Act was passed, it is estimated that over 15,000 English Quakers were imprisoned and punished, of whom at least 450 died or were executed. Many of these victims were women, because women were among the most active evangelists for Quakerism. Indeed, they often seemed to go out of their ways to confront unbelievers in the strife-torn sectarian world of the English seventeenth century. In 1653, for example, two Quaker women—Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Williams—traveled to Cambridge to confront what they considered the overly intellectual and hierarchical theological students there. When taunted by the agonistic young scholars, the women insulted the college as a “nest of unclean birds” and “a synagogue of Satan.” At that point, the mayor was summoned and sentenced the women preachers to be whipped “till the blood ran down their bodies.” The ferocity with which this sentence was ordered and carried out struck neutral onlookers: “The executioner commanded them to put off their clothes, which they refused. Then he stript them naked to the wayste, put their arms into the whipping-post, and executed the mayor’s warrant far more cruelly than is usually done to the worst of malefactors, so that their flesh was miserably cut and torn.9 In the American colonies the persecution of Quaker women preachers was even more extreme. Between 1655 and 1700, a number of English Quaker women traveled to the American colonies to preach and found meetings. Of the eighty-seven Quaker preachers who traveled to America during this time, twenty-nine (around one-third of the total) were women (Bacon, Mothers of Feminism, 29). In most colonies these preachers were initially allowed to go about their work, but in the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts Bay, Quaker women were cruelly restrained from the beginning. The Puritan ministers, relying on fundamentalist readings of Corinthians 14, completely rejected any attempt on the part of women to prophesy or preach. In 1638 the ministers had excommunicated and banished Anne Hutchinson for daring to prophesy, and when Quaker women preachers began to appear in the 1650s, Massachusetts Bay was ready to discourage them. Women’s preaching was equated with open admission of witchcraft, and when the first Quaker women landed, they were arrested, strip-searched and examined for “devil’s marks,” imprisoned for five weeks,

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and then put back on the ship that had brought them. Mary Dyer, a former follower of Anne Hutchinson who had converted to Quakerism in 1652, returned to Boston in 1657 to preach. After several trials, banishment, and imprisonment, Dyer refused to cease preaching in Boston, and she was hanged on Boston Common in 1660. The following year, two Quaker women preachers were taken two days’ journey into the wilderness and abandoned to die. In 1662, one of these same women, Elizabeth Hooten, was sentenced to be tied to the cart’s tail, stripped to the waist, and publicly whipped through Cambridge, Roxbury, Dedham, Salisbury, and Dover. The records are filled with cruel persecutions of women who demanded the right to preach and prophesy in early New England. Despite this persecution, Quaker women continued to claim the right to preach. What is interesting to us in this study is not so much the willingness of these brave and remarkable women to put their lives on the line in order to witness their faith, but the extreme reactions they met with in men. An explicit basis for the Puritan polity was the idea of a male head of the household, whose power derived directly from divine male right and headship, and the Quaker doctrine of equality of the sexes called this idea strongly into question. Male dominance of the public forums was not merely a Puritan idea, however. It was widespread in the colonies, as is shown by how quickly the New England rejection of Quakerism was adopted by most other colonies. By the 1660s, every colony except Rhode Island had passed anti-Quaker laws. No other Protestant sect met with anything like the widespread fear and persecution that greeted Quakerism and its revolutionary claims to gender equality. The suppression of Quakerism finally led William Penn to found the “Holy Experiment” in religious freedom, Pennsylvania, in 1681. The freethinking allowed in that state would lead, during the succeeding 150 years, to vast changes in the American political and cultural structures. Even after the decline of theocracy in the colonies, the idea remained powerful that rhetoric was a man’s province. Public speaking in town meetings and civic forums was for men, not for women, and most women could not imagine their world being any different. The American Revolution initially changed these attitudes very little, despite Abigail Adams’s remonstrance to her husband John to “Remember the ladies.” In America, coeducation after grammar school did not become widespread until more than three decades after the Revolution. What was becoming available toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, was higher education for women in ladies’ academies. The first and most important, the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia, was established in 1787 on the basis of Benjamin Franklin’s “Idea of the English School” of 1751. Franklin, whose ideas had previously been the basis for the all-male Academy of Philadelphia, had proposed that the purpose of education was finally to serve the public good, and thus boys should be taught grammar, spelling, reading, rhetoric and oratory, history, sciences, and composition. This charge, not really original when applied to young men, was definitely so when it was taken up by the Young Ladies Academy. The founders actually did teach their charges the same areas and skills taught to young men. During the first few years of the school,

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the young women were taught only reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and geography, but by 1790, they were also being taught—and for the first time in America, so far as I can determine—rhetoric and composition. We must note, however, that oratorical training for the young women at the YLAP was extremely circumscribed. With the exception of the valedictorian and salutatorian of every class, who gave public addresses at the commencement, the oratory learned by the students was never actually meant to be used. As Ann Gordon says, “The most striking and pathetic feature of their commencement addresses is the absence of a future” (“Young Ladies Academy,” 82). Molly Wallace’s valedictory oration of 1792 addresses this problem directly: But yet it may be asked, what has a female character to do with declamation? That she should harangue at the head of an Army, in the Senate, or before a popular Assembly, is not pretended, neither is it requested that she ought to be an adept in the stormy and contentious eloquence of the bar, or in the abstract and subtle reasoning of the Senate—we look not for a female Pitt, Cicero, or Demosthenes. (Rise and Progress, 74) And Priscilla Mason, Salutatorian of 1793, threw down a gauntlet that must have shocked her hearers: Our right to instruct and persuade cannot be disputed, if it shall appear, that we possess the talents of an orator and have opportunities for the exercise of those talents. . . . But supposing now that we possessed all the talents of an orator, in the highest perfection; where shall we find a theatre for the display of them? The Church, the Bar, and the Senate are shut against us. Who shut them? Man, despotic man, first made us incapable of the duty, and then forbid us the exercise. (Rise and Progress, 93–94) Mason went on to ask that women be allowed full participation in civic affairs—a demand that must have been seen as nearly insane, given the temper of the times. As Hannah More put it in 1799, echoing the received wisdom, “a lady studies, not that she may qualify to become an orator or a pleader; not that she may learn to debate, but to act” (Woody, History of Women’s Education, 32). In the early nineteenth century we hear the same refrain: the proper province of women was the home, not the public assembly. Frances Wright, the first woman to dare speak to mixed lecture audiences in America (in 1828), was called “a crazed atheistical woman” by newspapers, and an article in the New York Evening Post questioned whether she should be allowed to speak even in a hall she had rented: Suppose the singular spectacle of a female, publicly and ostentatiously proclaiming doctrines of an atheistical fanaticism, and even the most abandoned lewdness, should draw a crowd from prurient curiosity, and a riot

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should ensue, which should end in the demolition of the interior of the building, or even in the burning it down—on whom would the loss fall? (Perkins and Wolfson, Frances Wright, 232) Wright did indeed often face violent demonstrations when she lectured. The abolition movement brought forward several notable female speakers, of whom the most notorious was Angelina Grimke. In 1837 the Congregational ministers of Massachusetts responded with a harsh pastoral letter to Angelina Grimke’s daring to speak to public mixed audiences. The letter condemned “the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers or teachers” (Hosford, Father Shipherd’s Magna Carta, 82). Grimke was harshly criticized for her speaking and was ostracized by her family. Women were not allowed to speak in courtrooms or to be advocates. The U.S. Supreme Court, denying Myra Bradwell the right to be an attorney even as late as 1873, opined that “the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. . . . The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator” (Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873, 16; Lawrence, 130). Through much of the nineteenth century, most men simply refused to imagine women in any public character. But as these examples suggest, a reaction against this circumscription of their roles was growing among American women, and a change was coming in women’s relations to public life and to rhetoric, one central element of which was coeducation. To understand the range and nature of the change wrought by coeducation in both colleges and American culture, we must first understand that until the nineteenth century women did not go to school with men. There were no colleges for women; education of young women was only for the wealthier classes, and was carried on, if at all, in the parents’ home (which was, of course, a young woman’s only proper sphere), primarily by private tutors, instructors, and masters. The strict classical curriculum that was long taken for granted in all-male colleges was for most of history completely unavailable to women, who were even shut out of reading about educational questions and issues because they were seldom taught Latin, the language in which most learned discourse was conducted. Both on the Continent and in the British Isles, women were educationally disenfranchised, and colonial America, where for many years the majority of people of both genders were only minimally educated, merely followed suit in its attitudes. Even after the American Revolution, with the establishment of common grammar schools, higher education for women over twelve was rare. A few “female seminaries” grew up in the late eighteenth century, but except for the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, they taught mainly ornamental and domestic skills—sewing, penmanship, music. As American culture matured, however, and the essentially agrarian nature of the society began to give way to manufacturing, a newer urban bourgeois class grew up, and the status of women in America changed. As

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Ann Douglas has argued in The Feminization of American Culture, during the nineteenth century women in America shifted from producers to consumers, from the center of a householdbased general-production economy to the main demand element in a consumption economy based on specialization, industrialization, and non-agrarian extra-household workplaces for men (48–68). Women in the American Northeast after 1800 were becoming more a leisured class, and in the egalitarian world of Jacksonian democracy, it was inevitable that institutions would spring up to serve and educate this new class. The first female academy offering rigorous classical courses was established by Emma Willard at Troy, New York, in 1821. The Hartford Female Seminary was established by Catherine Beecher in 1828, one in South Hadley, Mass. (later called Mount Holyoke) in 1836. Women were demanding their right to an education, and over the next fifty years, the first all-women’s colleges were established: Georgia Female College in 1836, Elmira Female College in the mid-1850s, Vassar College in 1860, Smith and Wellesley in 1875, Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke in 1888 (Rudolph, American College and University, 314–19). Separate education for women—including the entire classical course—was a reality by a decade after the Civil War. More central to changes in rhetoric than the general movement for women’s colleges, however, is the reorganization wrought on previously all-male colleges by the admission of women: coeducation. The movement toward allowing men and women to go to college together began around the same time as the first all-women’s colleges were established. The first college to allow women to take courses with men was Oberlin in 1837, but coeducation was a movement slow to be accepted; many educators feared that coeducation would produce “unmanly” men and “unwomanly” women, and fewer than six colleges became coeducational before the Civil War. Those that did admit women were the focus of an often rancorous debate. With the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act in 1862, however, each state was empowered to found an Agricultural and Mechanical College. These schools, especially in the booming Midwest and West, were to become the major state universities. Unshackled by the all-male traditions of many private Eastern schools, these western universities were nearly all coed from the beginning. By 1872 there were ninety-seven coed schools (sixtyseven of which, mostly larger schools, were in the West). By 1880, 30 percent of all American colleges admitted women, and this figure had risen to 71 percent by the turn of the century (Rudolph, 322). The demographic changes brought about at American colleges by coeducation were not to be denied. As early as 1869, women made up almost 15 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients at American colleges, the majority of which were still all-male at that time. By 1889 they were more than 17 percent of bachelor’s degrees; by 1900 more than 19 percent; and by 1920, 34 percent of bachelor’s degrees were awarded to women (National Center for Education Statistics, Digest, 245). Meanwhile, female teachers as well as students were proliferating in colleges. Before 1840, of course, there were no female college teachers

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in the United States, but once given the opportunity, women took naturally to academic life. Between 1870 and 1890, women went from 12 to 19 percent of college faculty (Digest, 175). From no women in colleges in 1830 to three-quarters of all American colleges admitting women by 1900 was a change in educational culture that was unprecedented in modern history. We see, within seventy years, an absolute revision of the all-male enclaves that colleges had been for over a millennium. There were, of course, schools that remained all-male—some even to the present day—but the college experience was ineluctably changed by the gradual influx of young women. This is not the place to detail the horrified objections, the often frantic attempts to safeguard the portals, the manifold arguments advanced against coeducation (see Woody). Women were on the move and would not be denied. And where women and men went to college together, the atmosphere and curricula changed as a result, the atmosphere and tone of life with startling rapidity, and the curriculum more slowly but just as certainly.

The Effect of Coeducation on Rhetoric Nowhere were these changes in culture and curriculum more sharply outlined than in the field of rhetoric. Rhetoric entered the nineteenth century as a central argumentative discipline, primarily oral and with a civic nexus. Rhetoric exited the nineteenth century as composition, a multimodal discipline, primarily written and with a personal, privatized nexus. [. . . W]e can note four major changes in rhetorical education: (1) the gradual change of student-teacher relationships in rhetoric/composition courses from challenging and adversarial to developmental and personalized; (2) the shift from oral rhetoric to writing as the central classroom focus; (3) the shift from argument as primary genre to a multimodal approach that privileged exposition; and (4) the decline of abstract subjects for writing and the rise of more personal assignments. Taken together, these shifts resulted in a new kind of rhetoric, one that could comfortably include women as well as men. Let’s look at them one by one. First of all—and perhaps most important—the decline of all-male agonistic rhetoric and the rise of a more irenic rhetoric of composition has resulted in a very different climate in the writing classroom. Traditional rhetorical training was harsh, competitive, filled with public testing, and often brutal and humiliating. But the entry of women into colleges changed the most basic rhetorical rules of engagement, and from cold, distanced, demanding lecturerecitation teaching and agonistic competition, rhetoric after 1900 became at its most typical a personalized editorial relationship, critical but not usually antagonistic. At its most progressive, it became a partnership between teacher and student. The very experience of student and teacher coming together to study discourse had after 1900 an ethos radically different from that of a hundred years before. It is difficult for us today to understand viscerally what all-male agonistic education really was like before 1860, because our own experiences are so different. (We might try imagining a campus atmosphere entirely controlled by the ethos surrounding fraternity life.) In such an

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all-male atmosphere, whether the methods were practical or theoretical, rhetorical instruction meant contest. The theoretical instruction was intensely agonistic, using lecture and recitation methods that asked students to take detailed notes of the master’s theoretical lecture one day and spit back his own words to him the next in a detailed catechetical recitation.11 It was typical for a teacher to lecture for forty-five minutes and then take the last quarter-hour to examine students through recitation. Anyone could be chosen to recite, and woe betide the unprepared reciter, who would be subject to the severest humiliation and scorn from the master at any hint of error in reciting. Those who have looked at college archives have often been surprised by the immensely detailed notebooks kept of professors’ lectures by students. (Very often these notebooks have even been copied over in a fair hand so as to give the student a book of his own.) In part, at least, students kept such detailed notes because only by having the professor’s very words to hand could they be sure of being defended against the opprobrium accompanying a failure to learn by heart the required material. In the practical instruction, the methods used were debates and “fortnightly rhetoricals” (carefully staged persuasive orations), all of which were opportunities for personal display of talent, for contest, for the thrill of victory and the humiliation of defeat. Such practices were usually attended by all the members of the class, and the professor would make his comments and observations—often very stinging ones—in front of the assembled audience. Each rhetorical exercise could produce new heroes and new goats or victims. Students were often made extremely apprehensive and fearful by the constant need for rhetorical display. Middleton Barrow wrote home to his father from the University of Georgia in 1856 that “some of the boys have to take Brandy (or at least they do take it) to pluck up courage to mount the Rostrum” in order to deliver their prepared speeches (quoted in Dyer, University of Georgia, 66). College life was, then, a kind of intellectual boot camp, a battleground of constant testing. “Habitual duel for those in the ranks provided the indispensable sense of security for the men in command,” as Lawrence Veysey puts it in The Emergence of the American University (299). This constant testing was what the school and college curricula consisted of. All in all, this was a rigorous and demanding curriculum, one requiring that good students be perpetually ready to pick up a challenge, answer a point, refute a position, come up with a turn of phrase, and in general protect their vitals from one another and from the master. It is in this kind of agonistic school situation that the long-standing hostility between college faculties and college students grew up. The dislike that students often felt for faculty members is not hard to understand in the light of the power of the old-time faculty and the ways they could use it. Before the growth of an administrative bureaucracy in the nineteenth century, all conditions of colleges were set by faculty vote. Today’s toothless tiger, the faculty senate, was then a real power on campus, and all disciplinary actions were submitted to it. As Burton Bledstein puts it in The Culture of Professionalism,

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“the tutor played the role of a judge rather than a teacher, and his relationship to the students was normally imperious and unfriendly. The feelings of antagonism were mutual” (229). And this antagonism usually played itself out verbally, and thus rhetorically, in the continuing ritualized test, attack and defense, of the agonistic oral educational tradition. This system often led to lasting distrust and bad feeling between students and teachers. There was no camaraderie and little personal interaction. As W. L. Phelps testified, the classroom atmosphere was often poisoned by this constant testing: “In the classroom, [the faculty’s] manners had an icy formality; humour was usually absent, except for occasional irony at the expense of a dull student” (quoted in Veysey, 295). Although students often hated this contestive milieu, faculty members felt that such testing was their only certain method of inculcating knowledge. As Lawrence Veysey puts it, the undergraduates could not be distracted by any voluntary means from their primary loyalty to college life as distinct from university education. Only one tactic remained at the disposal of their superiors: the compulsory examination, given at rapid intervals. The continuity of the frequent classroom test in the American system of higher education, from the days of the small colleges down into the period of the new university, revealed a similar continuity of student alienation from the system of which he was supposedly the most essential part. (298) Up until the mid-nineteenth century, most final exams were oral and public. Anyone might press the candidate with questions: “College graduates in the audience, like the masters of arts in the medieval universities, were privileged to inject questions of their own or to criticize the answers of the candidates” (Schmidt, Liberal Arts College, 100). Today, such public testing is minimized, and we tend to see professors who engage deeply in it as pathologues; for us, the “defense” of the PhD dissertation or master’s thesis is a curious relic, an atrophied survival of a harder time no one remembers. Few doctoral candidates really have to stand and fight for their theses against determined professorial foes, and it is hard for us to imagine what a student-teacher relationship of continuing hostility might mean. The closest phenomena we have today to the older forms of education are probably military boot camps and certain sports and fraternity rituals, but even these are pale survivals of the conduct of most education in the past. Education in all-male institutions was set up as a struggle for dominance; one had to wrest authority from the teacher by proving one could “master” the subject—and the proof was by ordeal. There was no sense in which student and teacher were assumed to be friends. That is a modern concept. For students of most colleges before 1850, the faculty had one clear definition. It was the enemy. It may seem a strong statement, this bald claim that students and teachers were enemies.12 But anyone who has looked into college histories can clearly see the dark side of student-faculty relations.

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Among other things, such a relationship meant that the fixed lines of ritual agonism sometimes slipped, and the contest became physical rather than merely verbal. Between 1800 and 1875 there were violent rebellions of students against faculty at Princeton, Miami, Amherst, Brown, University of South Carolina, University of North Carolina, Williams, Georgetown, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Lafayette, Bowdoin, City College of New York, Dickinson, and DePauw. Princeton alone saw six violent riots against the faculty between 1800 and 1830. The president and a professor at Georgia were stoned by students. The president of Oakland College in Mississippi was stabbed to death (Rudolph, 97–98). At Virginia, professors were publicly whipped by mobs and one was shot to death (Dabney, Mr. Jefferson’s University, 9). At Yale, one tutor was fatally wounded and another maimed by students. Stonings of faculty houses and other minor acts of violence were too common to catalogue. One paradigmatic episode occurred in 1855 at Davidson College, where the students rioted because their mathematics problems were too difficult. They barricaded themselves inside a dormitory and threw rocks at the faculty members who came to investigate. “One of the latter,” reports George P. Schmidt, “a West Pointer, drew a sword, and, following his lead, the professors advanced on the dormitory, battered down the door with an ax, and suppressed the rebellion” (82–83). It is not surprising, in such an atmosphere of persistent anxiety, insecurity, hostility, and contest, that rhetoric and debate would be important subjects. Prior to 1875, almost all students studied rhetoric and many joined the extracurricular literary and debating societies that were ornaments of almost every college. These societies, as Thomas Dyer puts it, “in many ways dominated student life and quickly became the backbone of the extracurriculum and an extremely important adjunct to the curriculum itself” (59). Society members engaged in a familiar variety of ritualistic activities, but they also assisted each other in studies by critiquing one another’s work. The most important aspect of such critiques was rhetorical, and the debates organized and judged each week by the societies were their central purposes. The centrality of rhetoric to the literary societies is shown by a speech given by a student named Scott to the Demosthenian Society (note that name) at the University of Georgia in 1809. Students, Scott said, should “attend not only to . . . collegiate pursuits but apply a few hours in the course of each week to improvement in the sublime art of Oratory,” because there was “no situation in which the powers of eloquence will not be useful” (cited in Merton Coulter, College Life in the Old South, 103). Such courses and clubs did prepare students for professional life at the bar or in the pulpit, of course, but they were also popular for the same reason that martial arts schools and street gangs proliferate in tough neighborhoods: If you are open to attack, self-defense is important. Being able to handle oneself verbally was a prime requisite of success in all-male colleges. Life there was in many senses a contest (if not a battle) before 1875, and rhetoric was the primary weapon. This, then, was college and university culture, from medieval times through and past the Civil War. It was man against man in a constant series of ritual tests of worthiness—in the classroom, on the platform, in the debate hall, in the dormitory. In Latin or in English, the agonism was always present. It existed in the argumentative rhetorical theory stretching from Cicero to

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Whately, in the forms of thesis and defense, lecture and recitation, in the purring slash of the professor’s oral rebuke, in the barking give and take of the debate club’s hall, in the silky logical entrapment of the perspiring bachelor’s candidate, and in the roaring denunciation of backsliding that issued from the pulpit. College was a man’s world, and it was a world red in tooth and claw. In a space of less than forty years, however, all this agonistic rhetorical culture was swept away, and rhetoric itself was changed forever. The primary effect of coeducation was the quick decline of public contest as a staple of college life. As Ong argues, the agonistic impulse is purely a male-against-male phenomenon. Males perceive it as noble to struggle ritually—either physically or verbally—with other males. Even to be bested in such contests preserves honor, if one has obeyed the rules of the contest. The winner and the loser have established a hierarchy they agree on and can shake hands. But to struggle in ritual contest with a woman? It was unthinkable. There was no precedent for it, and no psychological rationale. Fighting with a woman, to the agonistically charged male, is ignoble on the face of it. To be victorious in such a contest would confer only slightly less shame and loss of face than to be defeated. Real men do not fight women. And thus, when women entered the educational equation in colleges, the whole edifice built on ritual contest between teacher and student, and between student and student, came crashing down. We see evidence of this great change everywhere in reports of college experiences between 1860 and 1900. Living arrangements changed, but of more interest to us are the differences in academic life. The tone of classroom interchange underwent a rapid shift in coed colleges. From having been arenas of contest, the lecture halls and recitation rooms became forums of irenic discussion. The atmosphere changed from one of boredom punctuated by anxiety and hostility to one much more decorous. It is during this period that the lecture/recitation methods of earlier days began to die out and be supplanted by discussion-type classes, laboratory methods, and seminar-type classes—all of which, it will be noted, minimize the agonism inherent in the constant testing of recitation methods (Veysey, 153). Professors did not wish to humiliate women by forcing them to match wits or prove publicly their knowledge; male students did not want to look churlish or stupid in front of “the girls.” Andrew Dickson White in his Autobiography noted that life at the University of Michigan, his alma mater, had changed since coeducation: Formerly a professor’s lecture- or recitation-room had been decidedly a roughish place. The men had often been slouchy and unkempt. Now all was quiet and orderly, the dress of the students much neater. . . . Perhaps the most convincing piece of testimony came from an old janitor. As I met him I said: “Well, J—, do the students still make life a burden to you?” “Oh, no,” he answered; “that is all gone by. They can’t rush each other up and down the staircases or have boxingmatches in the lobbies any longer, for the girls are there.” (400)

The tone of public college life both in and outside classrooms changed completely.

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[. . .] If classrooms and lecture-halls were more orderly, other elements of college life changed radically as well. The change can most clearly be seen in specialization of function by gender. The decline of public agonistic contest as a way of college life led to a resulting canalization of that agonistic impulse into a variety of more private arenas. Male contest cannot be done away with, and after coeducation it continued as an underground phenomenon. We can note after 1870, for instance, the decline of general interest in college debate; at school after school one sees the gradual breakdown of the older literary and debating societies. At least part of the reason for this decline was the public nature of the debate clubs. Women could not easily be kept out of them, and to debate with women was unnatural, demoralizing, demeaning to the men whose private enclaves the club halls had been. Stripped of much of their psychological rationale, literary and debating clubs languished and were abandoned; their houses and halls—some of them quite elaborate—were usually bought by the institution or by fraternities. As college culture changed, pedagogy had to change as well. Early teachers at coeducational schools quickly learned that some women would balk at certain of the traditional male-oriented teaching methods. Twenty-three Oberlin women in Asa Mahan’s rhetoric class, for instance, refused to read their compositions aloud to mixed classes in 1839, and Mahan was forced to seek less public methods of criticism (Ginzberg, “Joint Education of the Sexes,” 73–74). Some colleges, like Wisconsin, allowed women (though not men) to choose whether they would recite publicly in mixed groups (Woody, 242). Chary of challenging women in classrooms in the same way they did men, professors looked for alternative teaching styles, and in rhetoric these styles generally came to focus on literary analysis and on intensive but privatized writing practice. Instead of recitations from lectures, students would analyze materials from textbooks or would—in literature-oriented classes—discuss readings from the anthologies of short selections that proliferated after 1875. It is not accidental that the Oberlin “Ladies’ Course” was renamed the “Literary Course” in 1875. Most important, discussion in classes became elective rather than compulsory, and professors’ judgments on student work shifted from oral—in class or conference—to written. It is only after 1870 that we begin to hear bitter complaints about paper-grading overwork from teachers of rhetoric, and in part this was probably due to the rise of at-home paper grading as a large part of the rhetoric teacher’s task. But the privatization of criticism was a necessary part of the influence coeducation had on all college subjects; indeed, many coeducational colleges did not give public grades to women at all until after 1900 (Solomon, “The Oberlin Model,” 86). Thus the entire public contestive edge of criticism was blunted by distance and undermined by teachers’ unwillingness to publicly evaluate the work of women or to press women with questions in any “ungentlemanly” way. [. . .] The second change we should note is related, and it affected discourse study specifically: the shift from an oral rhetoric to written composition. That such a change occurred

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was widely noticed and is almost unnecessary to argue. Curricular studies such as Lawrence Veysey’s Emergence of the American University and general college histories such as Frederick Rudolph’s The American College and University discuss the gradual change from a classical to an elective curriculum between 1800 and 1900, and the specific changes in rhetorical instruction that were subsets of that change have been briefly discussed by Albert Kitzhaber (Rhetoric in American Colleges, 31–47). In short, oral rhetoric gradually became marginalized as “elocution” during the nineteenth century, whereas written composition became ever more central. [. . .] A number of reasons have been advanced for this change: public common schools, the rise of an indigenous literary culture, easier and cheaper writing materials, the influence of romantic individualism, the rise of preprofessional training in colleges. Gender issues have thus far been little explored, but they were, I believe, critical to the shift. The history of the collegiate shift from oral to written discourse is such a close decade-by-decade mirror of women’s movement into the public sphere of college courses that a claim of no connection now seems difficult to credit. I will not claim that women’s entry to college caused the downfall of oral rhetoric or the valorization of written composition, but we need to explore the connections between coeducation and the rise of composition pedagogy. What are these connections? To understand them, we must return to the duality of public and private spheres. The general attitude toward women as the nineteenth century opened was, as we have seen, one that saw her as essentially privatized. The home and family were women’s responsibility, while the public, civic world was men’s sphere. Women were presumed not to want to go there. As Sarah Josepha Hale, herself an early feminist thinker and magazine editor, put it in 1831, “It is only in emergencies, in cases where duty demands the sacrifice of female sensitiveness, that a lady of sense and delicacy will come before the public, in a manner to make herself conspicuous. There is little danger that such an one will be arrogant in her pretensions” (“Anne Boleyn,” 3–4). As women’s colleges became more common and coeducation began to appear, teachers of rhetoric, concerned with both protecting and developing their discipline, found themselves in an unenviable position. [. . .] The early women’s seminaries did teach rhetoric to their charges, but it was a curiously old-fashioned analytical rhetoric, not the praxis-based active rhetoric available to men. Catherine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary taught rhetoric in the 1830s using Pestalozzian methods that did not include actual public speaking: “In rhetoric and logic, the classes are required to analyze the ideas, arguments, and arrangement of certain pieces pointed out by the teacher. They are also required to compose examples of the various figures of rhetoric, and of the various modes of argument, syllogisms, etc., pointed out in logic” (Woody, 433). This sort of analytical rhetoric—ars stripped of praxis—was a way of avoiding what male college administrators feared: the bringing together of women and the agonistic arena of debate. Though women’s academies and colleges were founded in increasing numbers through the 1820s and 1830s, the public arts of oratory and debate were forbidden at many women’s col-

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leges. The prospectus of Vassar in 1865 announced that methods of education would be womanly and that “no encouragement would be given to oratory and debate.” Debating societies, so popular at men’s colleges, were pronounced “utterly incongruous and out of taste” for women (Hosford, 83). Argument and debate could not be major parts of a women’s course, and oral thrust and parry was out of the question. Rhetorical analysis could take up part of the course, but not all of it. A new sort of rhetorical instruction was needed, one that minimized the agonistic tendency inherent in oral rhetoric. Women’s colleges and the coeducational schools turned increasingly to a form of discourse that no one found threatening from women: written composition. Composition had been a subject in both grammar schools and academies since the early part of the century, but around 1820 we begin to see it given strong impetus in colleges as well. Composition was an important element of Blairian belletristic instruction, and at the same time rhetoric needed purging of its public and oratorical elements in order for it to become a safe subject for both men and women. That is what happened between 1840 and 1890, as rhetoric became composition and rhetorical practice became composition-rhetoric. I do not want to suggest that composition displaced rhetoric only because women threatened male dominance within traditional oral rhetorical training. There were other important reasons for the rise of written discourse education: the influence of Blair and Kames, the needs of an increasingly far-flung industrial society for cross-continental communication, the rise of an indigenous literary-intellectual culture centered in the Northeast, the egalitarian system of common schooling that guaranteed an increasing percentage of the population basic literary skills and the incentive to refine them. The culture needed and came ever more to respect writing. These reasons for the growth of written rhetoric, real though they are, do not, however, explain the sharp decline of oral rhetoric and of education in oratory, debate, and argument. Why did oral rhetoric—central to education since ancient Athens, the heart of the trivium, one of the first chairs at any university—decline so ruinously to triviality in forty years? That falloff can at least in part be explained by the draining away of public agonism in colleges and the consequent collapse of the educational tradition that had grown up to support it. Written composition, private, multimodal, interiorizing, could be the province of both men and women; public oral oratory, since it could no longer be the province of men only, ceased to satisfy male psychological needs and was allowed to fall into desuetude—into elocutionary technae and dramatic readings. Some reasons for the replacement of rhetoric by composition are illustrated by the experience of the women at Oberlin College, which was, in 1837, the first American college to permit coeducation. In the early years, the women of Oberlin, though trained using Whately’s argument-based Elements of Rhetoric, were given only written composition to do and denied oratorical training. As Frances Hosford says in her history of coeducation at Oberlin, “The women

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of our earlier decades found every approach to public speaking closed to them, because nobody supposed that any woman in her senses would try to become either a minister or a lawyer. . . . Accordingly, the undergraduate men were trained in debate and oratory, the undergraduate women in essay writing” (71–72). We see this stricture against women being taught debate repeatedly during this era at Oberlin. Even in the sorts of exercises students did the gender exclusions were practiced; the men’s Oberlin College course included rhetoric lectures and “Compositions, Declamations, and Extemporaneous Discussions, weekly, and public original Declamations, monthly, throughout the course” (Jex-Blake, American Schools and Colleges, 52) while the Young Ladies’ Department offered “Exercises in Reading and Composition, weekly throughout the course” (59). After being refused permission to join the men’s debating society, the women of Oberlin formed a Ladies’ Literary Society and read essays and poems to each other at meetings. They were, however, forbidden to conduct debates, either in class or at meetings, and so in the 1840s Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown formed a clandestine women’s debating society. This society met first in the woods, then in the parlor of a local woman’s house, and it was forced to post sentinels whenever it met. “We shall leave this college with the reputation of a thorough collegiate course,” Stone said at the first meeting, “yet not one of us has received any rhetorical or elocutionary training. Not one of us could state a question or argue it in a successful debate. For this reason I have proposed the formation of this association” (Hosford, 94–95). Between 1840 and 1870, women were breaking down many of the barriers that had kept them from participating in public oral discourse. The abolition, suffrage, and temperance movements created by the first wave of American feminism gave many talented women access to civic forums and speaking opportunities. By the end of the 1860s, women speaking in public for important causes might have been criticized, but they were, in much of the larger world, no longer scandalous. But at colleges, those traditional training grounds for male achievement, the admission of women to the field of rhetoric during this same period was not any sort of fait accompli, as college men fought several sorts of holding action to keep oral rhetorical training out of the hands of women. The gradual admission of women to the mysteries of rhetoric could not, however, be long gainsaid. College women were too insistent, and reasons for denying them were too weak. Women, it was clear, would have to be given access to rhetoric or they would take it—and where women took rhetoric courses, composition was immediately given a larger place in them. We see these crumbling barriers clearly reflected in the changing patterns of commencement ceremonies at Oberlin. Though graduates by the nineteenth century were not expected to defend theses orally as they had been during earlier college history, commencement at many small colleges was traditionally marked by a public speech from each graduating bachelor. At Oberlin, each graduate was expected to give a short, carefully prepared oration at commencement, speaking from memory. In 1841, when the first women graduated, the col-

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lege faced the question of what to do with them. Clearly they must get some recognition, yet they could not be allowed to speak or sit on the stage. The solution, as reported by the college: To avoid the impropriety of having the young ladies read from a platform arranged for the speaking of young men, and filled with trustees and professors and distinguished gentleman visitors, the essays of the lady college graduates were read by the professor of rhetoric, the young women coming upon the platform with their class at the close to receive their diplomas. (Hosford, 67–68) The private, interior, “feminine” world of essay writing is here clearly juxtaposed with the world of oral display allowed the men. The women agitated against this stricture, so demeaning to them as scholars, but it was not until 1859 that they were allowed to read their own essays upon the stage at commencement. This reading of essays by the women continued for a decade; the graduating men continued to declaim their memorized orations, while the women were expected to read their essays in a monotone, hands at sides, eyes on text. Then came Harriet Keeler of the class of 1870, a known suffragette and radical. She did not plead for the right to join the men in oratory at commencement, to the relief of her professors. As Hosford tells it, She did not raise any issue before the crucial moment—and then she stormed and took the last line of defense. Demurely she tripped upon the stage, holding the conventional pages like the other sweet girl graduates. Demurely she read the first sentence, eyes modestly fixed upon her manuscript—and then the paper was discarded, the brave eyes swept the rows of startled faces, and the sweet girl graduate addressed the audience! (102) The docents of Oberlin held out for four more years, then in 1874 gave in and allowed full female participation in graduation oratory. The days of such oratory were numbered, though, and by 1885 the custom was done away with completely except for the valedictory address. [. . .] As women stormed and won the gates of rhetoric, rhetoric could only mutate. Oral public discourse was no longer a purely male enclave, and its secret agonistic agenda attenuating, it began to slowly wither. Meanwhile, each year more textbooks appeared that had writing, not speaking, as their primary agenda, and eventually as their only agenda. Between 1800 and 1850, we can see the increasingly theoretical nature of rhetorical texts, and from this theoretical base “practical” or written rhetoric increasingly became differentiated from elocutionary training, which was overtly oral in nature. By 1850, rhetoric had bifurcated into two lines: one was elocution, which declined, and one was composition, which prospered and strengthened. [. . .] As Albert Kitzhaber has shown, after around 1850, most rhetoric texts concentrated on composition, with oratory mentioned, if at all, only as one of the various types of composition (Rhetoric in American Colleges, 138). By 1885, even the term “rhetoric” had begun to give way to

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“composition” at most schools, and after 1895 we seldom see it in textbook titles. The Harvard Reports and the uproar over “illiteracy” sealed the fate of the older oral rhetoric, already on the downslope. Composition—a multimodal, private, nonthreatening discourse that could be the province of both men and women—ruled the day. The multimodality of composition-rhetoric is one of its central defining elements, and coeducation may be implicated here as well. In addition to the change from oral to written discourse, the nineteenth century saw a startling decline in the importance of argument and a corresponding rise in interest in other sorts of expression. Argumentative discourse had been the central canon of rhetoric since the era of Corax and Gorgias, and Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric is as a search for “the available means of persuasion” (The Rhetoric, 7). Though classical rhetoric did not completely foreclose non-argumentative ends, in traditional rhetoric the narrative or description or definition was always assumed to exist for the purpose of serving the master-end of argument. This priority of argument in rhetorical theory and practice was completely assumed for more than two millennia. But then, with startling rapidity, argumentative rhetoric was supplemented and then supplanted by a rhetoric admitting a variety of discourse ends. [. . .] As writing displaced oral rhetoric, the older insistence on a single argumentative purpose did not serve, and in 1866 the desire for a multimodal rhetorical system was met by Alexander Bain, whose English Composition and Rhetoric proposed the multimodal system that has remained to this day, the “forms” or “modes” of discourse: narration, description, exposition, and argument. Bain’s modes by no means constituted the only multimodal system (between 1850 and 1880 more than a dozen modal systems were advanced), but his was the most popular. It advanced unstoppably into almost absolute acceptance. Within three decades argument had been displaced from its historic centrality; from being the heart of rhetoric, argument became merely one sort of it. After 1885, rhetoric would be taught solely as argument only in oral-discourse classes in speech departments. In English, the four modes—and especially explanatory discourse in all of its “expository methods” permutations—would gradually come to be the prime organizing schema of composition courses. The primacy of argument was gone forever from rhetoric. Like the reasons for the displacement of oral rhetoric by writing, the reasons for the demotion of argument are not singular. Rhetorics that took nonargumentative forms as important had been around for decades, and their acceptance and growth after 1800 merely confirm the validity of nonargumentative aims and their growing importance to a pragmatic and education-minded culture. Even so, acceptance of the Bainian modes—of modal rhetoric in general—is so startling and sudden in the years after 1870 that it gives us pause. For any type of discourse to maintain absolute primacy for so long and then be swept away so quickly needs looking at in more depth. At least one important reason for the decline of unimodal rhetoric, I believe, was the decline of public agonism in colleges and the resultant lack of interest in agonism’s central genre, argument.

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This decline worked itself out quite pragmatically. As women entered colleges, the older rhetoric courses organized around argument and public contest made men (and some women) uncomfortable. Agonistic behavior—sharp debating techniques, cutting criticism, sarcastic dismissal—directed against women during these early Victorian times was disquieting to many. Argument-based courses caused acute discomfort as college men were asked by professors to perform the ungentlemanly, unthinkable act of verbally attacking young women. It was the equivalent of asking male college freshmen today to box or wrestle with young women in gym class. It could not easily be done. Argumentative battle that had been honorable, satisfying, and psychologically meaningful in all-male courses was now, to many men, dishonorable. Argument could, of course, be put into written forms and thus privatized, and Whately’s Elements was instrumental in making this step possible. But argument as classroom praxis was over. The overt agonism of rhetorical argument was meaningless or degrading in a coeducational setting, particularly to young men, but also to some women. Though President Mahan of Oberlin, whose rhetoric course used Whately’s Elements, sincerely believed in coeducation, he found that many women in his class would not face the men in argumentative contest, even when he encouraged them (Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 133). The only solution was to demote argument and allow for other aims within rhetoric. Between 1860 and 1885, we see this done, as multimodal rhetoric comes to dominate Postwar composition-rhetoric. [. . .] Related to the decline of argument was the slightly later change in the sorts of assignments that teachers of composition-rhetoric gave students to speak and write on. [. . . B]etween 1820 and 1900 the sorts of knowledge that a student in a rhetoric class was expected to command changed radically, in ways that reflect declining agonism. Students in the older oral rhetoric classes were given abstract, impersonal subjects on which to write and orate. Before 1860, such subjects as “The Baneful Effects of Indulgence” and “The Happiness of Innocence” were the usual ones assigned—subjects that assumed considerable previous cultural knowledge and that had tacit but clear bases in argument. After 1860, however, such abstract topics were increasingly supplanted by subjects based in personal observation—“A Pleasant Evening,” or “Of What Use Are Flowers?” These descriptive essays were finally joined in the late 1880s and 1890s by assignments more concrete and overtly personal in nature—“When My Ship Comes In,” “An Incident from School Life,” or “How I Caught the Woodchuck.” The rhetorical tasks assigned students during the nineteenth century are indeed one long retreat from abstraction and from subjects based outside of immediate cultural and personal experience. In part, as we shall see, the rise of personal subjects is explicable as just another evidence of romanticism as it came to dominate the psychic climate of the century. Personal writing reflects the literary writing and personally based essays that became popular during the first third of the nineteenth century—the work of Lamb, Hazlitt, Carlyle. It is also explicable as a natural result of the change from oral to written discourse education. It is

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only natural that, as oral discourse (which is public by nature) gave way to writing, the subjects of rhetoric would become smaller scale, more private, more personal. But we can, I think, see this change too as evidence of the decline of agonistic discourse that resulted from women’s entrance into the colleges. Personal writing, for whatever reason, was not a part of rhetoric for 2,400 years, and its admission to rhetoric corresponds exactly to the admission of women to rhetoric courses. Why might this be? Abstract subjects of the older sort were, I would argue, inherently related to agonistic contest. A large part of dealing with nonpersonal subjects involves the obvious deployment of hard-won extrapersonal knowledge; even if the discourse aim is purportedly explanatory, the most effective rhetor is the one who seems to know the most about the world. That is one important method of establishing ethos, the reputation for good character, knowledge, and perspicacity that was central to any effective appeal. Indeed, this question of ethos and how much a speaker had to know (or seem to know) was a central issue for both Cicero and Quintilian. They were aware that careful use of abstract knowledge—from maxims to precedents to witness to myth—was the very cornerstone of ethos, which was the heart of rhetoric. The point I want to make here is that public display of extrapersonal knowledge is agonistic, as every serious player of Trivial Pursuit knows well. Even if such fact-based discourse is not explicitly argumentative, it has as a part of its agenda the serious display of self. Dazzling listeners with wit, or command of facts, words, or impressive analysis has been a traditional part of ritual male attitudes toward other males. All of the contemporary male verbal agonistic rituals—fliting, “doing the dozens,” trading sports statistics, rapping—are displays of skill with facts and knowledge, not merely displays of argument. Although they may sometimes seem personal, these rituals actually put fictive personae in play in fictive contests. What is at stake here is the ability to manipulate the stuff of language and of the world. Personal interests and personal confession have to do with these contests only tangentially. Everyone, after all, has personal experience to draw on, and that equality is not the most natural ground from which hierarchies can be easily demonstrated. Thus, for men, display of extrapersonal information has always been part of the contests of selfhood, and traditional college expectations and assignments allowed for—even demanded—those display behaviors. From the progymnasmata to the tripos exams at Cambridge, men have educated other men by demanding public evidence of extrapersonal knowledge. In rhetoric, personal observation writing assignments grew out of teachers’ frustrations with the paucity of traditional abstract knowledge noted in college students after 1870, as an ever larger percentage of Americans attempted college. In place of the truly abysmal writing that increasingly resulted from assignments like “Filial Affection,” teachers came to ask for and accept writing based on personal observation. But personal narrations and personal feeling assignments were something new in rhetoric, and such a concession cannot be completely explained without looking at the rise of coeducation. There were elements of confession, of intimate personalism,

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and of anti-agonistic admission of weakness in the new topics that could not have existed prior to women’s entrance into higher education. “The Loneliness of Freshmen,” a suggested topic of 1912 would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier; even admitting such a feeling as loneliness would have been hooted at as unmanly in the all-male college of 1850. I am not here making any sort of sweeping claim such as “personal writing is a women’s genre,” but it is true that personal writing has traditionally been associated with women more than with men. Mary Field Belenky et al., Carol Gilligan, and many other feminist critics and scholars have remarked on the commitment to personal feelings and individual emotional reality found in women’s writing, and that case hardly needs to be made. Less investigated is the degree to which males are uncomfortable with personal effusion, but evidence does exist in the journal analyses of Cinthia Gannett, who found a clear dichotomy between the full, rich, personal lives recorded in the women’s journals in her freshman class and the narrow, uncomfortable, agonistic mentality found in most male journals (Gannett, Gender and the Journal, 152–66). Men are less comfortable talking and writing about their feelings unless those feelings are critical or negative. They are, Gannett found, very willing to write narratives, usually adventure narratives in which they as authors have a lead role. Women are comfortable both with narratives and with self-expressive, more exploratory writing. The multimodal assignments that grew up after 1880 asking for narrative, descriptive, or personal writing allowed both men and women in colleges to write essays that made them comfortable. Thus to a large extent, contemporary personal-experience writing assignments are the result of the decline of agonism and the public display of abstract knowledge that is part of its rituals. Coeducation was only one influence among many on the changing of rhetorical assignments between 1870 and 1900, but we should be aware of these interrelations. [. . .] [T]he retreat from agonistic rhetoric that began with coeducation over a century ago seems to have reached its latest stages. The teaching of composition has been in the hands of women for a long time, but in the last three decades it has been evolving into a truly feminized discipline—probably the most feminized discipline outside of women’s studies. The actual teaching of writing has long been done by an instructor corps that has had a majority or sizable minority of women, and the direction of that teaching on both secondary and college levels is also coming increasingly into the hands of women. The writing project movement, closely tied to the writing process philosophy of teaching, is overwhelmingly composed of women, as project administrators testify, and the writing projects are increasingly influential each year. Women are also making their voices heard where they had not before: in the scholarship that constructs the field. Up until the 1970s the majority of composition theorists were male, but since then a clear preponderance of the most interesting young voices in the field have been women’s. No one looking at PhDs in composition since 1980 can doubt that the future of the field—already highly feminized—will be increasingly in the hands of women. The growth of the feminist strand in composition scholarship over the last decade will also ensure that com-

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position studies will be, unlike composition teaching through most of this century, feminist as well as feminized. The irenic rhetoric whose construction I have been sketching will never be a completed project. Agonism is not gone from the teaching of writing, and in a pedagogically pluralistic world, it can never—and should never—be gone. Argument, debate, teacher criticism, hierarchies, and personal contest of all subtle sorts will remain with us. But they are not at the heart of our discipline any more, because we have ceased excluding the other half that each man and woman possesses—the nurturing, supportive, interiorized, personal elements in human character that were so long ignored or sneered at while rhetoric was only male ritual. Our task remains ahead of us: to develop rhetorical pedagogies that give students access to both sides of themselves, that do not shortchange either the outer world of demand, action, struggle, and change or the inner world of feeling, introspection, and the myriad meanings of the self.

Notes [. . .] 4 The historical place of women in rhetoric is indeed so slight that some feminist scholars are now calling for a complete revaluation of what may be called “rhetorical history.” Scholars such as Susan Jarratt wish to open up rhetorical history to include female writers, philosophers, abbesses, mystics, and other historical figures who used rhetoric. This Burkean expansion of the meaning of the term “rhetoric” is certainly necessary if feminist historians are to have any women rhetoricians at all to work with in the period before 1800. I am concerned in this chapter, however, with the discipline that called itself rhetoric and the persons who, considering themselves part of it, gave themselves the name of rhetoricians. This historical discipline allowed no women into it, and no women before the seventeenth century are known to have called themselves by that name. Contemporary ideological requirements should not force us into chronocentric distortion of the ways people in the past viewed themselves. [. . .] 9 For the numbers cited in this paragraph, see Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America, 17. For the story of Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Williams, see Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, 85. [. . .] 11 Before 1830 or so, recitation from textbooks was also widely used in colleges, though it lost popularity as an “elementary” method after 1825, when Harvard declared against it. Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Harvard class of 1841 declared that in his time, however, students still lived “from book to mouth” (quoted in Dorothy Anderson, “Edward T. Channing’s Teaching of Rhetoric,” 72). 12 I do not, of course, want to claim that all teachers were hated, or that all students disliked teachers. There were always, as there are today, extraordinary teachers who were beloved and remembered fondly by their students. Indeed, the nostalgic reminiscences such teachers often provoked from their students years later have grown into a sizable subgenre of literature—a subgenre, I would claim, that has perhaps blinded us to the majority of teacher-student relations that were not eulogized by loving disciples. These beloved teachers were the exceptions, not the rules. A few teachers were loved, most were tolerated, and a sizable minority were genuinely feared and hated. [. . .]

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Work Cited Anderson, Dorothy I. “Edward T. Channing’s Teaching of Rhetoric.” Speech Monographs 16 (August 1949): 69–82. Aristotle. The Rhetoric of Aristotle. Translated by L. Cooper. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1932. Bacon, Margaret Hope. Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America. San Francisco: Harper, 1986. Bain, Alexander. English Composition and Rhetoric: A Manual. New York: D. Appleton, 1866. Basevorn, Robert of. Forma Praedicandi. Trans. Leopold Krul. In Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, 109–215. Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Besse, Joseph. A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers. London: Luke Hinde, 1753. Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1976. Campbell, A. Y. “Ars Dictaminis: Order, Beauty, and Our Daily Bread.” Bulletin de L’Association Canadienne des Humanites 22 (1971): 13–21. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925. Westport: Greenwood, 1993. Coulter, E. Merton. College Life in the Old South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Dyer, Thomas G. The University of Georgia: A Bicentennial History, 1785–1985. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Fell, Margaret. Womens Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed of By the Scriptures (1667). Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library Publication no. 194, 1979. Gannett, Cinthia. Gender and the Journal. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Ginzberg, Lori D. “ ‘The Joint Education of the Sexes’: Oberlin’s Original Vision.” In Lasser, Educating Men and Women Together, 67–80. Glenn, Cheryl. Muted Voices from Antiquity through the Renaissance: Locating Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1989. Gordon, Ann D. “The Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia.” In Women of America: A History, ed. Carol Ruth Birkin and Mary Beth Norton, 68–91. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Hale, Sarah Josepha. “Anne Boleyn.” Ladies Magazine 4 (1831): 3–4. Hosford, Frances Juliette. Father Shipherd’s Magna Charta: A Century of Coeducation at Oberlin College. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1937. Jex-Blake, Sophia. A Visit to Some American Schools and Colleges. London: Macmillan, 1867. Kitzhaber, Albert. Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850–1900. Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1990. Lasser, Carol, ed. Educating Men and Women Together: Coeducation in a Changing World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Murphy, James J., ed. Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics, 1988. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, 1988.

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National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics, 1994. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1994. Nuttall, Geoffrey. The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946. Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Perkins, A. J. G., and Theresa Wolfson. Frances Wright: Free Enquirer. New York: Harper and Bros., 1939. The Rise and Progress of the Young-Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Stewart and Cochrane, 1794. Rudolph, Frederick. The American College and University: A History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Schmidt, George P. The Liberal Arts College. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957. Solomon, Barbara Miller. “The Oberlin Model and Its Impact on Other Colleges.” In Lasser ed., 81–90. Tacitus. Dialogue on Oratory. Trans. Sir William Peterson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Veysey, Lawrence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Whately, Richard. Elements of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. (Original work published 1878.) White, Andrew Dickson. Autobiography. New York: Century, 1905. Woody, Thomas. A History of Women’s Education in the United States. New York: Science Press, 1929.

Feminization of Rhetoric?* Roxanne Mountford Review Essay [. . .] of Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, Robert J. Connors (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. 374 pages). Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy retells the story of the birth of composition instruction in American colleges and universities in the nineteenth century, exploring nuances that scholars and teachers of composition will find invaluable. Robert J. Connors’ thesis is that the “current-traditional paradigm”—a label that he himself has used to describe this period—is misleading. He substitutes the label “composition-rhetoric” to describe the turn in the late nineteenth-century in American colleges and universities from the study of oral persuasion to a pedagogy of written communication. While Connors acknowledges that the excesses associated with the current-traditional paradigm exist—including an almost pathological obsession with mechanics, spelling, and punctuation—he complicates our understanding of this period by uncovering the economic and material conditions in which composition teachers worked. For instance, he suggests that an obsession with grammar and mechanics arose in response to the “crushing” workloads of faculty and instructors, who were obliged to respond to hundreds of themes every week. Marking grammar and punctuation became the fast way to respond to student papers. Offering students feedback on the communicative effectiveness of their writing is not a new practice in the history of composition, Connors discovers, but it has been a rare practice wherever 4/4 loads of first-year composition are the norm. One of the great contributions of this book is an exploration of the trends in composition textbooks, which, Connors shows, have both responded to and resisted the best thinking of their day. He follows the development of handbooks and rhetorics, using these books to explore how grammar and style have been taught throughout the last 100 years, and how multimodal approaches to composing (the so-called “modes” of discourse) became so ubiquitous. Connors explores why grammar instruction has been strangely immune to linguistic theory, and he charts the development of the handbook market. Those who love primary historical *  JAC Online. 19 (1999). 28 Jan. 2009. 432

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data (I confess I am one) will be interested to learn the name of the Harcourt Brace Handbook of the early twentieth century (Wooley) and the volume-by-volume developments of the longlived Writing with a Purpose. One comes away from reading Connors with a feeling that the century has far more texture and familiarity than we have come to imagine, and that the economics of textbook production, market forces, and labor are far more important to our field’s history than we care to admit. In this way, Composition-Rhetoric joins three recent books that have contributed greatly to our understanding of the historical and cultural context(s) in which composition instruction has evolved: Thomas P. Miller’s The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, Sharon Crowley’s Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, and Eileen Schell’s Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Unfortunately, the empirical drive that leads Connors to uncover forgotten textbooks and complicate our received history seems to fail him when he explores the role gender may have played in the founding of composition studies (Chapter One: “Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric”). In this essay, I will focus my comments on this chapter, and invite readers to consult Sharon Crowley’s insightful review of the entire book in Rhetoric Review. Connors’ basic argument goes like this: when women were finally admitted into public and private colleges and universities in the nineteenth century, the faculty (all male) were embarrassed by the prospect of male students’ debating with women in rhetoric classes, where public oratory was still at the center of the curriculum. The reason for this uneasiness, Connors argues, is that rhetoric was essentially an “agonistic” art and “as it had evolved from the classical period through the eighteenth century, was almost absolutely male.” In place of rhetorical instruction, which was “oral, argument-based, [and] male-dominated,” faculty began to teach a more privatized “interiorized, irenic, negotiative, explanatory” art of composition. Connors writes, “I will not claim that women’s entry to college caused the downfall of oral rhetoric or the valorization of written composition”—but he goes on to do so. In the historical incidents he offers to support his case, oral instruction in rhetoric is ended soon after women are admitted. For instance, there is the case of Oberlin College, which offered separate and unequal curricula for women and men throughout much of the nineteenth century. Commencement exercises normally involved graduates’ giving short speeches; a rhetoric teacher read the themes of women graduates so that they would not be seen onstage. Connors writes, “The private, interior, ‘feminine’ world of essay writing is here clearly juxtaposed with the world of oral display allowed the men.” In 1859 women were allowed to read their themes onstage, but were “expected to read their essays in a monotone, hands at sides, eyes on text.” By 1874, men and women were allowed to make direct appeals to the audience, but by 1885 the graduates were no longer required to give a speech. Connors sums up this situation as follows: “As women stormed and won the gates of rhetoric, rhetoric could only mutate.” So it became “composition-rhetoric”—a feminized version of rhetoric.

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Connors’ argument turns on the assumption that rhetoric (“civic oratory”) is a man’s art, and composition is a woman’s art. He sets up the dichotomy early in the chapter by looking at the cases of two medieval rhetorical arts: ars dictaminis (the art of letter writing) and ars praedicandi (the art of preaching). While letters by women can be found in collections of model letters throughout the history of this rhetorical art, Connors argues, women are absolutely excluded from the art of preaching. Connors is aware that some sects allowed women to preach, and offers the Quakers as an example. But he points to the violent reactions of Puritan men to Quaker women who dared to preach as evidence that the art of preaching was a carefully guarded male right. Whither the claims for the complexity of history upon which the rest of Connors’ book depends, and which is its strength? For surely this not a simple matter. Did rhetoric really mutate because of women, or was there already a shift in the works toward the study and practice of writing? (In fact, Connors shows that writing and oratory were already separate subjects in many colleges early in the nineteenth century.) Did rhetorical instruction really turn to the more private and individualized practice of essay writing because women came along, or was an epistemological change already afoot? (In fact, Connors admits that “the rise of personal subjects [in essay writing] is explicable as just another evidence of romanticism.”) But furthermore, if rhetoric (qua oratory) were really so agonistic and alienating to women, then why on earth were so many nineteenth-century women in America willing to stand up and speak, preach, and debate each other and men? Why did so many men listen to these women? A quick walk through the speeches collected in the second volume of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak for Her or Shirley Logan’s With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women illustrates that rhetoric certainly did not “mutate” in the hands of abolitionists and suffragists. On the contrary, in many cases, these speeches illustrate great rhetorical skill of a traditional kind. But furthermore, even in more presumably masculine preserves, women orators made great inroads in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Let’s begin with preaching. It is certainly true that the art of preaching is a rhetorical art that has not developed for women; women are almost completely ignored by preaching manuals. But we cannot assume that women have been absent from the scene. In fact, the presence of a formal prohibition is often a sign that transgressions have occurred. Connors quotes Robert of Basevorn’s prohibition: “No lay person or religious, unless permitted by the Bishop or the Pope, and no woman, no matter how learned or saintly, ought to preach” (emphasis added). Why this qualification, if learned and saintly women preachers had not already appeared? In fact they had (see Glenn). This decade’s scholarship on women preachers in British, American and Canadian history has brought to light staggering facts about the numbers of women who preached—successfully—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her recent book (based on her Yale dissertation) Catherine Brekus documents over 100 women preachers who preached the Gospel in the United States between 1740 and 1845. There was very little evidence that their speech

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was any less agonistic then men’s; for instance, Mary Dyer, one of the Quakers who was taken before a Puritan court in 1660, said (not very irenically), “God will not be mocked. . . . The Lord will overthrow both your law and you, by his righteous Judgments and Plagues poured justly upon you” (Brekus 30). Methodist women preached to great crowds in England throughout the eighteenth century, often to the entire population of a rural county. The scene in George Eliot’s Adam Bede in which Methodist evangelist Dinah Morris preaches on a rural town green is based on similar historical events. African American women preachers such as evangelist Jarena Lee and Rev. Mrs. J. H. Vigal of Buffalo, New York (AME) were successful preachers and leaders in their communities; women of many denominations who could not be accepted as preachers in their home communities became missionaries and preached around the world. Of the American women preachers she studied in the early nineteenth century, Brekus writes, “It is difficult to judge how many people genuinely respected female preachers, but their popularity seems to have been based on more than the novelty of seeing women in the pulpit” (228). Why should we assume, then, that institutional prohibitions are of relevance to those beyond the professional classes? In fact, the discourses and prohibitions of institutions—which are under criticism in Eliot’s Adam Bede—are often resisted by significant pockets of society. For instance, Michel Foucault shows that the nineteenth century rage for disclosure of private sexual transgressions first affected the upper classes, who could afford physicians, but not the lower classes, who could not. And indeed, despite prohibitions thousands of women and men were converted to Methodism by the rhetorical skill of women in the eighteenth century—but mostly in rural counties of England. What was different about the men who listened to women preach in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and America? Why did they not throw tomatoes? Why did they quietly join congregations led by women by the end of the nineteenth century? If Connors’ story is true, how is this possible? In fact, the only thing we can say with certainty about gender issues and rhetoric is that major institutions (mainstream churches and universities included) have often been slower than the culture surrounding them to admit the equal competence of women orators. It is certainly true that the discipline of rhetoric officially ignored women’s contributions and perspectives to the various rhetorical arts, but that does not mean that their contributions as rhetors were unacknowledged in their time. As Paul Wesley Chilcote has shown, when the Methodist Church became a mainstream institution near the beginning of the nineteenth century, church historians worked hard to cover up the contributions of women preachers to the establishment of the denomination. Connors acknowledges individual cases of successful women rhetors, but he draws a line between isolated practices and the rhetorical tradition as a whole. Connors’ chapter on the feminization of rhetoric has much in common with Ann Douglas’ 1977 book, The Feminization of American Culture. As Douglas tells the story, American culture in the nineteenth century began with a robust and intellectual bang, and ended with

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a sentimental whimper. The women writers who entered public debate in the mid-nineteenth century through what Connors calls the “irenic” and newly privatized polis were challenged by a liberal clergy who felt increasingly in competition for the hearts of their congregations; both groups were led ever downward on a spiral toward banality. The competition between writers like Fanny Fern and liberal clergymen like Henry Ward Beecher, Douglas says, degraded the rigor of public life permanently. Written with the smooth surfaces of a traditional history, The Feminization of American Culture suggests that the entrance of women into public life through writing was, finally, damaging to American culture. When Douglas’ book was first published, feminist historians were busy recuperating suffragists of the nineteenth century and were dismissive of organized religion (but particularly of Christianity). Therefore, Douglas’ ideas were not immediately challenged. But by 1998, when the most recent addition of Feminization was published, Douglas herself was apologetic, writing in the preface that she had ignored the fact that her real “love-interest”—the stern Calvinism of theologians like Lyman Beecher of the early nineteenth century—was far from innocent in American history (xi). The Cult of True Womanhood and the imperialism of Anglo-American culture are logical extensions of Calvinist theology. However, despite this recognition, Douglas mounts a defense of her book from historiographers. She writes, Though I welcome critical scrutiny of master narratives, I cannot endorse the current disavowal of them. If the “big picture” is now hotly contested by more rival ethnic and gender groups and complicated by more diverse intellectual strategies than most Euro-American scholars like myself could have anticipated even a few decades ago, that only makes attempting an overview more imperative. (xiv) She goes on to compare the “identity politics” of current feminists with the politics of Victorian women of the nineteenth century, who accepted the essentialist doctrines of their day. However, it is Douglas who, while attempting to give “the big picture,” has forgotten whose “big picture” she offers. And it is the story of those whom she does not discuss in her book—for starters, the many women and men (particularly African American) who made an altogether different and unsentimental call to the nation for reform and experienced an altogether different sense of public—that makes her book problematic. Connors announces at the beginning of Composition-Rhetoric that his will not be a book of historiography, but rather “a work of scholarship,” by which he means historical research supported by empirical evidence. He writes, This book seems, then, to be a narrative based on found and on sought archival materials, ordered chronologically on the basis of discrete themes, and interrogated—where they are interrogated—from a limited set of consistent questions based in personal observations of things as they are in the present.

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I want mostly to tell a story, to identify and pin down as much basic textual evidence as possible, so that further discussion from a theoretical base can then proceed from shareable data. (22) But, like Douglas, he fails to see that his story of “feminization” ultimately plays upon dangerous stereotypes and is itself an interpretation of history. I am sympathetic to Connors’ wish to immerse himself in data and let that data lead him. However, one cannot draw the line so cleanly between scholarship and theory, as Connors seems to have done. True empiricism, Deleuze has written, is not so different from theory. He writes, “an empiricist” is “a pluralist” who follows the “logic of multiplicities” (Dialogues vii-viii). The researcher analyses “the states of things, in such a way that non-preexistent concepts can be extracted from them.” But, the “[s]tates of things are neither unities nor totalities, but multiplicities” (vii). The job of an empiricist is to search for and validate anomalies, to rejoice in the havoc that anomalies play in the creation of grand narratives. Anomalies in Connors’ grand narrative of rhetoric’s feminization are both in his own chapter (e.g., the role of romanticism in the rise of composition instruction) and in the literatures on women’s contributions to rhetoric. Therefore, Connors’ claim that he has not written a work of critical historiography but has instead written a work of scholarship does a disservice both to the historiographers whom he dismisses and to the empiricists whom he embraces. And while I will not go so far as to claim that the work of historiographers and the work of archivists are one and the same, I will say that both are guided by theory and both are ethically bound to seek and expose multiplicities. The irony here is that Connors works to find anomalies and to deconstruct grand narratives in other places in this book. Why he holds onto a theory of feminization that holds so little scholarly water is a mystery. Sharon Crowley writes (and I concur) that Connors’ argument “can be taken to imply . . . that modern composition-rhetoric, with its lowly status in the university and its unfair employment practices, is nonetheless better suited to women than is the study of rhetoric” (342). One might go on to ask, “In what way has composition-rhetoric really become irenic/feminized?” Agonistic trends in oratory live on in academic writing and in academic life. For example, Olivia Frey and Jane Tompkins have argued that there is nothing more agonistic than a book review (hmmmm). And Gesa Kirsch and Theresa Enos have shown that many academic women do not feel particularly empowered in their writing and work, even within our field. But Bob is probably used to receiving this feedback, especially from feminists. After presenting his theory of feminization in one section of “Teaching and Learning As a Man,” Connors received excellent feedback in the Comment/Response sections of two issues of College English from several scholars (McGann; Kirsh; Breidenbach; Fleckenstein). I know this feedback has occurred in person at conferences as well, because I have been present for at least one such conversation. So I am wondering, frankly, why Bob hasn’t heeded all this generous feedback, why he has let it disappear down the proverbial rabbit hole. Dear Bob, What were you thinking? Irenically, Roxanne.

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Works Cited Breidenbach, Cathleen. Comment on “Teaching and Learning As a Man.” College English 59 (1997): 470–72. Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her. Vol. 2. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Chilcote, Paul Wesley. John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1991. Connors, Robert J. “Teaching and Learning As a Man.” College English 58 (1996): 964–74. Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. —. Rev. of Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, by Robert J. Connors. Rhetoric Review 16 (1998): 340–43. Deleuze, Gilles. Preface to the English Language Edition. Dialogues. By Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. 1977. New York: Noonday P, 1998. Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. Comment on “Teaching and Learning As a Man.” College English 59 (1997): 472–74. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. I. New York: Vintage, 1978. Frey, Olivia. “Beyond Literary Darwinism: Women’s Voices and Critical Discourse.” College English 52 (1990): 507–26. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. Kirsch, Gesa. Comment on “Teaching and Learning As a Man.” College English 58 (1996): 964–68. —. Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. Logan, Shirley. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. McGann, Patrick. Comment on “Teaching and Learning As a Man.” College English 58 (1996): 964– 66. Miller, Thomas P. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Schell, Eileen E. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 1997. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. New York: Blackwell, 1989. 121–39.

Case Study 4 Debating Ethos: Traditional versus Feminist Research Methods Barbara Hebert The question of how to recover women’s rhetorical efforts and legacies responsibly, especially when little trace remains of them, has been a subject of intense discussion. This case study examines a scholarly exchange about the feminist historiographic methodologies used to recover and re-vision Aspasia of Miletus, a classical woman rhetor whose contributions are audible only through the voices of male writers. Traditional methodologies in history place an emphasis on objectivity via first-hand accounts, historical documents, extant texts, and uncontested evidence. Traditional, in this case, is patriarchal; if traditional methodologies (re)create traditional history, they are inadequate for recovering or refiguring women in the rhetorical tradition. Feminist historiographic methodologies—such as those used by Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, and Rory Ong to examine Aspasia—(re)write women into history by explicitly using standpoints that may alter, meld, extend, and subvert tradition. A guiding assumption of feminist historiography is that there is no one historical truth; history is relative to context and temporality. Hence, imaginative methodologies are called for in order to recover absent women rhetors and bring to light issues conventional frameworks often ignore. Because feminist methodologies may operate differently than traditional (read “accepted”) ones, questions arise concerning the validity, credibility, and reliability of feminist historiography, questions at the core of this controversy. This case study begins with Xin Liu Gale’s “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus,” a critique of Glenn’s as well as Jarratt and Ong’s studies of Aspasia (see part 1 for Glenn’s essay). For Gale, postmodern historiography is problematic because it elicits questions about “truth and method, the role of interpretation, the definition of history and historiography, and the influences of postmodern theory on historical research” (361). However, due to the difficulties posed by their unconventional subjects, feminist historiographers may sometimes depart from “traditional methods of doing and writing history” (Gale 439

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362). For instance, in the case of Aspasia, no written texts by her exist; few, if any, historical documents offer evidence of her existence; surviving texts are reconstructions of Aspasia and her rhetoric by men; and, finally, these sources are drawn from various times and locations and, therefore, cannot be treated as equally reliable (362). Gale acknowledges that feminist historiographers require alternative ways of writing history but cautions that abandoning established methodologies ultimately lessens the credibility and validity of their work. According to Gale, Glenn renders Aspasia’s life “in an assertive and unproblematized manner” because she does not resolve the “series of dissonances in theory and practice” arising from her feminist methodology (366). For slightly different reasons, she also questions Jarratt and Ong’s approach, which she argues relies too heavily on “interpretation and speculation” colored by a feminist lens. Especially troubling for Gale is Jarratt’s theory of sophistic historiography/feminist sophistic because it privileges narrative over “objective” history and interprets the past in light of “contemporary feminist concerns” (375). Ultimately, she encourages Glenn, Jarratt, and Ong to employ “more productive, more coherent, and more convincing” methodologies (362). The final two pieces in this case study are Glenn’s and Jarratt’s responses to Gale. They (re)emphasize that a significant and necessary challenge of feminist historiography is to “disrupt” traditional accounts that ignore or subsume women and their contributions. Glenn finds Gale’s binary framing of “truth” and “fiction” (or pitting of “traditional objective historiography” against “subjective feminist fictionalization”) reductive (387). For her, all history is a retelling, so traditional and feminist renderings of the past are equally partial or situated. Glenn reiterates that her purpose in recovering female rhetors is to afford a different view of rhetorical studies, one that “address[es] silences,” “challenges absences,” and “interrogates” not only traditional history but traditional methodologies as well. Jarratt, on the other hand, concedes that Gale’s inquiry into “truth, evidence, and method” is “necessary and important” (390) but asserts that productive debate about such matters cannot occur if scholars read each other’s work erroneously. Jarratt disputes Gale’s representation of her scholarship, observing, for example, that both she and Ong employ traditional methods of historical contextualization. After questioning the depth and scope of Gale’s knowledge, Jarratt identifies “aversions to both rhetoric and feminism” (392) as the real impetus for the criticism. Initially, the core of this debate appears to concern feminist versus traditional research methods. However, Gale, Glenn, and Jarratt’s exchange also examines the value of “lived experiences,” scholarly credibility and ethics, and the role and validity of feminist scholarship; all of these issues, in fact, are picked up, argued, and extended in subsequent publications. Gale’s response to Glenn and Jarratt (2000) develops her analysis of academic ethos and reaffirms her concerns regarding feminist historiography. Meanwhile, Patricia Bizzell (2000) and Hui Wu (2000, 2002) both identify the root of Gale’s critique as a profound misunderstanding of feminist research methods (essays by Bizzell and Wu are available in part 2). The 2002 special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly further explores and extends the discussion, focusing on the

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role of emotion in feminist scholarship, practices of recovering women rhetors, and alternative approaches to historical rhetoric. Furthermore, the conversation continues. Recent work by Elizabeth Tasker and Frances B. Holt-Underwood offers an overview of scholarship on feminist research methods and methodologies while Eileen Schell and Kelly Rawson’s forthcoming edited collection, Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, more fully inquires into research in feminist rhetorics. Clearly, the essays in this case study have generated (and continue to generate) scholarly discussion of feminist historiographers’ distinct “ways of knowing.”

Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus* Xin Liu Gale In recent years, feminists in composition and rhetoric have attempted to change the maledominated history of rhetoric by recovering marginal voices or texts of women in history and by restoring women’s places in the rhetorical tradition. Responding to those who view the feminist project with suspicion, C. Jan Swearingen explains that “there are traditions there that should be reclaimed as a part of women’s history” and that “you have to have something to problematize, and if you have no history at all, no knowledge at all of those people, then you’re talking about a nonexistent problematic” (“Octalog” 22). While I have no quibble with the feminist endeavor as a whole and support heartily Swearingen’s position on the issue, I believe that feminists’ reconstruction of alternative rhetorical histories has brought to the fore important and interesting questions concerning truth and method, the role of interpretation, the definition of history and historiography, and the influences of postmodern theory on historical research. It is these questions that I will explore in this article. To avoid mere abstract theoretical and methodological argument, I will read three historical studies of Aspasia of Miletus to substantiate my discussion. I am fully aware that, though they were all done by feminist historians, the three histories or historiographies differ substantially in scope, purpose, and theoretical orientations. Since my purpose here is not to judge which study is better or whose scope is more comprehensive but to call attention to the difficulties of doing history, especially the kind of history that feminists are trying to do, I do not believe that these differences present major obstacles in my study. Further, in my attempt to evaluate the diverse means these feminist historians adopt in dealing with the various difficulties—theoretical, methodological, historical, perceptual, rhetorical, and political—in feminist historical reconstruction, I wish to help develop a sensitivity to the complexities of writing alternative histories in the institutional context and, meanwhile, provoke and challenge feminists to search for more productive, more coherent, and more convincing ways of reconstructing women’s rhetorical histories in the male-dominant academy. *  College English 62 (2000): 361-86. Copyright 2000 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted and used with permission. Note: This essay has been condensed. 442

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I chose Aspasia for several reasons. First, Aspasia is an interesting historical figure. Traditionally known as a high-class courtesan who attached herself to men of power in the fifth century BCE, Aspasia is portrayed in the histories reconstructed by feminists as one of the silenced voices and buried glories of antiquity. Rejecting the traditional representation of Aspasia as a porne and procuress, feminist historians in composition and rhetoric, including mainly Susan C. Jarratt, Rory Ong, and Cheryl Glenn, have written a new kind of history that recasts Aspasia as “the first female orator in the Western tradition” (Jarratt and Ong 22) and “an active member of the most famous intellectual circle in Athens,” whose influence reached not only Socrates and Pericles but also extended to Plato (Glenn, “Sex, Lies” 191; Rhetoric Retold 43). Second, perhaps no other woman in Western history presents a greater challenge than Aspasia for historians. The challenge comes not only from the traditional male chauvinistic assumptions about women but also from the traditional methods of doing and writing history. First of all, the absence of any written texts by Aspasia herself and the scarcity of historical documents that bear direct evidence of her existence or intellectual life make historical reconstruction a nearly impossible task. The extant literature consists of much conjecture and little good evidence for the period during which Aspasia lived. Moreover, the historical texts that are available (most of them are fragments) were most often written by men who “perceived, identified, evaluated, and described their female and male subjects very differently” (Henry 5). Usually, male historians either did not mention women’s intellectual contributions at all or mentioned them only indirectly. And historical accounts written in different historical periods often differ greatly in their perception of the same historical figure and can hardly be treated as “the same” evidence (5). Thus, how to evaluate and interpret these male texts across time and space become important issues in feminists’ historical research. Above all, working within the confines of the disciplines of rhetoric, classicism, and history—which are still the domains of men and strongholds of Enlightenment rationality, truth, and objectivity—feminist historians are faced with decisions about subjects of inquiry, theory, methodology, and rhetorical strategies in their rebuke of the traditional practices of these disciplines. If they want their new history to have any effect at all on their audience in these disciplines, they have to find new ways to relate to the established theory and practice of these disciplines and to their audience as they try to valorize women’s ways of thinking, talking, writing, and researching. It is a paradox that feminist historians have to find a way around: they have to challenge the traditional masculine assumptions about women and women’s ways of thinking and writing and at the same time seek their colleagues’ acceptance of the legitimacy and credibility of their research and scholarship. In short, overcoming these obstacles demands of the feminist historian both commitment and ingenuity. It is a tremendous challenge to write Aspasia (and other historical women) into the canonical rhetorical tradition. Last, and most important, in the process of unwriting that which renders Aspasia’s existence unworthy of any serious scholarly notice and rewriting that which bars her from the rank of significant rhetoricians and philosophers, feminist historians have to address a series of questions concerning truth and evidence, interpretation and representation, and other theoretical and meth-

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odological issues in their historical studies of the Miletian/Athenian woman. In doing so, feminist historians make these questions subjects of inquiry in their own right. In fact, my interest in questions of truth and method was rekindled by my reading of the new histories of Aspasia. Glenn’s study of Aspasia—which turns to historiography, feminism, gender theory, and postmodernism for theoretical validation—invites inquiry into the tension between the traditional historical method and the postmodern, feminist historiographical approach to history. Inevitably, issues of truth and evidence in the writing of history become the difficulties Glenn has to cope with. Jarratt and Ong’s study of Aspasia, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for exploring the role of interpretation in historical research. Since the study exemplifies Jarratt’s theory of sophistic historiography and feminist sophistic—a feminist theory that challenges the traditional male perception of history and the traditional historical method—an analysis of the possible gains and losses of Jarratt’s theory in view of the Aspasia story may contribute to a better understanding of the differences between history and historiography. Lastly, Madeleine Henry’s book-length research on Aspasia’s biographical tradition employs a synthetic historical method that combines the traditional philological method, a feminist perspective, and the postmodern wisdom of the “situatedness” of the text and the researcher. In doing so, Henry’s study suggests possibilities of revising, rather than abandoning altogether, the traditional historical research method and the traditional notions of truth and evidence. By (re)reading the three stories of Aspasia, mainly their underlying assumptions and proclaimed theories and methodologies, I hope that this study will contribute to the much needed debate over truth and method in our field and to the feminist endeavor to change the male-dominant history of rhetoric by reconstructing alternative rhetorical histories of women.

I. Aspasia as “Our Mother of Rhetoric”: Questions of Truth and Evidence in Historical Studies Cheryl Glenn’s study of Aspasia has appeared in “Sex, Lies, Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric” (1994), “Rereading Aspasia: The Palimpsest of Her Thoughts” (1995), and Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (1997). With very little variation, all three accounts represent Aspasia as a great intellectual whose contributions to the rhetorical tradition have been erased from history by men, and much effort is made to establish Aspasia as rhetorician, philosopher, and the first and only public woman with political influence in fifth-century BCE Athenian society. In all three accounts, the story of Aspasia follows similar lines: owing to her romantic relationship with Pericles and her status as a foreign-born woman who was not restrained by Athenian laws, Aspasia was able to move across “the gendered boundaries of appropriate roles for women and men in fifth-century BC Athens” (“Sex, Lies” 186). Her knowledge and skill in politics earned her not only love and respect from Pericles but admiration and recognition from Socrates, Plato, and many other lesser rhetoricians. Through her teachings, speeches, and her role as Pericles’s logographer, and through her academy for young women of good families and her popular salon for the most influential men of the

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day—Socrates, Plato, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Phidias, and Pericles—Aspasia became a “powerful voice in Periclean Athens and seems to have affected the thinking of Plato and Socrates” (192). As the “ideal Greek woman” (186), Aspasia “colonized the patriarchal territory” (193). However, “her colony was quickly appropriated by males”: “Her influence has been enclosed within the gendered rhetorical terrain—and neutralized,” and “few of us have ever heard of Aspasia of Miletus, teacher of rhetoric” (193–94). One may well read this story as a feminist fiction of an ancient woman’s life, a modern woman’s imagination of the possibilities and accomplishments of her ancient counterpart, a newly created space for women’s voices to be heard, or a purposeful distortion of history to challenge the male story of historical women. Read this way, the story of Aspasia becomes what Richard Rorty calls “Geistesgeschichte” in philosophy, the major goal of which is to “reconstruct people who were ‘significant’ in the development of something—if not philosophy, then perhaps ‘European thought’ or ‘the modern’ ” (“Historiography” 259). Rather than attempting to address questions such as whether Aspasia was “really” a major philosopher or rhetorician in her time, a Geistesgeschichte in rhetoric would reconstruct imaginatively an Athenian woman’s thinking and teaching in the absence of any primary texts written by her. Read as a feminist tale of a talented woman whose intellectual and political accomplishments were erased from the male history, Glenn’s Aspasia story is exhilarating and inspiring, for, after all, according to Rorty, one of the best things about contemporary feminism and about feminist writing is its abandonment of notions of objectivity and reality (“Feminism and Pragmatism” 210). Rorty says, Much feminist writing can be read as saying: We are not appealing from phallist appearance to nonphallist reality. We are not saying that the voice in which women will some day speak will be better at representing reality than present-day masculist discourse. We are not attempting the impossible task of developing a nonhegemonic discourse, one in which truth is no longer connected with power. We are not trying to do away with social constructs in order to find something that is not a social construct. We are just trying to help women out of the traps men have constructed for them, help them get the power they do not presently have, and help them create a moral identity as women. (210) What Rorty is saying here is that feminists should not attempt to prove themselves better than men at presenting reality or truth and that feminist writing should focus on representing women’s perspective rather than trying to develop a nonhegemonic discourse. For Rorty feminism, as well as Christianity and the Enlightenment, is not a “case of cognitive clarity overcoming cognitive distortion. Each is, instead, an example of evolutionary struggle—struggle guided by no immanent teleology” (206), and “there is no larger entity which stands behind that cluster [of genes or memes] and makes its claim true (or make some contradictory claim true)” (“Feminism and Pragmatism” 207).

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Glenn’s Aspasia story can be considered Rortyan in that she does not treat historical truth or reality about Aspasia in the traditional sense. She announces unequivocally that her method is postmodern and historiographical, which emphasizes “angle” and imagination and which allows the feminist historian “to resist received notions of both history and of writing history” and to piece together fragments to “connect the real and the discourse” when proofs are unavailable (Rhetoric Retold 6). Glenn’s angle is facilitated by gender theory, which “has served as an exceptionally useful analytical category for rereading rhetoric history to include Aspasia of Miletus” (“Rereading” 36). As Glenn explains, [U]ntil I began to view Aspasia’s intellectual and social context through the lens of gender studies, she appeared in my view as a hetaera (upper-class courtesan), who successfully and perhaps wisely exploited her sexual access to Pericles to gain access to his intellectual and political circle. But by contextualizing Aspasia within the gender limits and expectations of her time, I can now explain her political and intellectual influence—and her rhetorical accomplishments—in terms other than erotic. (36) Combining the gender “angle” with feminist strategies of resistant reading and reconstruction, Glenn advances a new definition of historiography: “Historiography, reading it crookedly and telling it slant, could help me shape—re-member—a female rhetorical presence” (Rhetoric Retold 8). All three versions of Glenn’s Aspasia story are passionate and effective, and they have no doubt helped create a place for Aspasia in composition and rhetoric and contributed to the feminist historical reconstruction project in our field. At the same time, Glenn’s historiography raises important questions about truth, evidence, method, political agenda, and community interest. First, Glenn does not limit her historiography to just “explain” Aspasia’s “political and intellectual influence.” She aims at establishing a series of historical truths about Aspasia’s accomplishments and, by moving the focus away from the Athenian woman’s identity, Glenn attempts to establish what Aspasia “really” was in history as opposed to her (unfair) portrayal by men. But this concern with historical reality brings Glenn’s historiography closer to traditional historical studies than to the kind of history writing that Rorty describes. She is compelled to cite historical and contemporary sources to “prove” that her configurations of Aspasia’s life is a better history, and thus the door is opened to the legitimate, albeit traditional, question whether the evidence used is valid, reliable, and adequate enough to support the truth-claims she makes. In the context of Glenn’s postmodern historiographical methods, feminist goals, and gender angle, the question about historical truth and historical evidence is particularly complex: Should we eschew the traditional concern about validity, reliability, and adequateness of historical sources when we purposefully turn away from the traditional way of doing history? Does the postmodern view of history and of doing history necessarily entail an abandonment of the traditional concern for truth and evidence? Would the feminist goals and the gender lens be enough in themselves to justify any “crooked” reading and “slanted” writing? Or should there still be some kind of

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consensus about the definitions of “crookedness” and “slantedness” and their acceptance as new ways of measuring the persuasiveness of the new kind of rhetorical history? I argue that, while Glenn’s allegiance to postmodernist and feminist theories and methodologies is articulately announced, her Aspasia stories nonetheless reveal a deep contradiction in thinking: on the one hand, we are asked to accept the postmodern belief that we are never able to obtain objective truth in history; on the other hand, we are asked to consider the reconceived story of Aspasia as a “truer” reality of women in history, a rediscovery of the obliterated “truth” independent of the existing historical discourse of men. This contradiction is demonstrated in a series of dissonances in theory and practice in the study of Aspasia. For example, in theory, the postmodern conception of truth as relative and contingent is endorsed; in practice, the time and context in which historical sources were created and interpreted are ignored, and the researcher’s personal “truth” of Aspasia is rendered as timeless and universal. In theory, the postmodern doctrine that history and writing are both suspect is embraced; in practice, Aspasia’s life is rendered in an assertive and unproblematized manner that does not directly acknowledge the intrinsic arbitrariness of the discourse—with its established categories and entrenched masculine values—nor the subjective nature of the researcher’s own personal experiences, emotions, and interests. In theory, the importance of imagination and discourse in constructing a women’s rhetorical tradition in fifth-century BCE Athens is stressed; in practice, the binary power relations between men and women are only reversed, with Aspasia being presented as an “ideal” woman “who colonized the patriarchal territory” (“Sex, Lies” 193). Aspasia’s contributions to the rhetorical tradition are asserted but not substantiated or imagined. If Aspasia’s conversations with Pericles or Socrates or Plato over rhetoric or philosophy were substantially imagined, like Socrates’ conversations in Plato’s Phaedrus or Gorgias, the Aspasia stories would greatly help us gain insight into the inner life of Aspasia as a rhetorician and philosopher, a recounting that would tremendously enrich the content of feminist rhetoric. But we do not as yet have such a recounting. Reading the use of evidence in Glenn’s version of Aspasia’s story from a postmodern vantage point, one could argue that it ignores the contingency of the historical sources on their purpose, context, cultural and social milieu, and their relationships to other historical documents or artifacts. The evidence is used in a decontextualized manner, a seeming use of ahistorical methods in doing history. For example, at one place, to establish Aspasia’s status as a public figure and political influence, the claim is made that Aspasia opened in Athens “an academy for young women of good families” (“Sex, Lies” 184). While such a possibility might well exist, the claim conflicts with Plutarch’s authoritative description of Aspasia’s enterprise as “a home for young courtesans” and Hans Licht’s more direct name for it, “a regular brothel” (183).3 In cases of competing claims like these, we might expect the historian either to provide new historical sources that would show Plutarch and Licht were wrong about the nature of Aspasia’s school, or to provide new insight into the political reasons behind Plutarch’s and Licht’s negative representations of Aspasia’s educational endeavor, or to make clear that different interpretations

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could be derived from the same texts. In Glenn’s formulation of historical truth, the competing historical truth-claims are not addressed, with the effect of lessening the persuasive power of the historical vision. Too often texts are read without considerations of their historical, cultural, and rhetorical contexts. For example, in a passage stating that Pericles’ power as a great statesman and orator came from Aspasia, Josiah Ober is cited as an authority who placed the “educated courtesan Aspasia . . . among Pericles’ closest associates” and who called her “the power behind the throne.” Philostratus is cited for writing in his Epistle 73 that “Aspasia of Miletus is said to have sharpened the tongue of Pericles in imitation of Gorgias.” And Plato is cited, whose Socrates in the Menexenus revealed Aspasia to be the author of Pericles’ Funeral Oration (Epitaphios) (Glenn, “Rereading Aspasia” 37–38). Because these people lived hundreds of years apart from each other, and since each was writing in a specific historical period for a specific audience with specific rhetorical purposes, it is necessary for the historian to render careful differentiation and interpretation of these sources in their respective historical contexts. When these people are quoted briefly in an ahistorical fashion in the same paragraph to support the truth that Aspasia indeed influenced Pericles and the Athenian polis through the speeches she wrote for him, questions ensue as to whether Ober really had the authority on Aspasia’s intellectual life and her power over Pericles, or whether Philostratus, a third-century sophist derivative of the classical period, might have simply tried to please her majesty with hearsay on Aspasia’s influence on Pericles in his seventy-third letter to Julia Domna, the learned Roman empress (Henry 77). As for Plato, since he composed Menexenus in 385 BCE to satirize the Periclean “Golden Age” with all of its patriotic commonplaces and distortions and falsifications of history (Grant 209), his report through Socrates’ mouth that Aspasia wrote the Funeral Oration for Pericles perhaps should be read with a consideration appropriate to the genre rather than be treated as historical fact (a point I will discuss further in later sections). Moreover, those who have read Donald Kagan’s study of Pericles’ life and learned about his philosophical training and political convictions would likely demand more than three brief quotes to convince them that Aspasia wrote Pericles’ speeches and influenced his political policies. The point I am trying to make is this: Had the story of Aspasia been written as feminist fiction, we would not have to take the truth-claims in the story seriously. But if the truthclaims are presented as historically true, we inevitably require that these truths be supported with adequate and validated historical evidence, even when we are postmodernists. [. . .] Observing the reluctance in our field to debate research methods, Reed Way Dasenbrock criticizes the current practice that “the theory itself defines what is to count as evidence for it” (548). He believes it is postmodern theory that makes it impossible for us to evaluate methods. For if Enlightenment rationality, scientific objectivity, and universal truth do not exist anymore, we are left with little to discuss about what counts as truth across communities. We either belong to a certain community and accept the truth the community as a whole accepts and thus feel no urge to question or examine the method with which the truth is obtained,

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or, if we question a certain truth and criticize a certain method, we risk being ignored because we do not belong to the community or being accused of sabotaging the community’s normal way of thinking and doing things. As a result, Dasenbrock laments, questions about truth and method either become irrelevant or lead to counterproductive exchanges among people who belong to different communities or theory camps.6 Dasenbrock’s sensitivity to the harmful consequences of the claims of community-relative truths is admirable, but by assigning blame to postmodern theories advanced by Kuhn and Foucault he seems to overlook the intricacies of interpreting theory and the complex relationship between theory, method, and practice. I do not think that Kuhn’s skepticism of objectivity should be read as his saying that there are no valid goals to achieve. Rather, Kuhn’s notion of “scientific community” calls attention to the difficulty of obtaining objectivity in writing history of science. [. . .] The scientific community, in Kuhn’s view, is the complicated social nexus of relationships and social context in which scientific inquiries are pursued, scientific theories are tested, scientific methods are invented and experimented with, truths are discovered, revolutions occur, and paradigms change, all through interactions among various subcommunities and subgroups whose members are differentiated by subjects of inquiry, membership in different professional societies, and journals read. Kuhn’s scientific community is nothing like what some will call a “partisan” group, for not only are all the subcommunities in the global scientific community interrelated to one another, but “usually individual scientists, particularly the ablest, will belong to several such groups either simultaneously or in succession” (178). In Kuhn’s scientific community, scientific revolutions occur not through “partisan fabrications” (Consigny 255) but through “competition between segments of the scientific community,” which is the “only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another” (Kuhn 8). In short, Kuhn’s community is where competing theories and paradigms drive scientific inquiry. It thrives on dissent and disagreement. If we are postmodern in the Kuhnian sense, we would then agree with Dasenbrock that it is highly necessary to carry on a conversation about truth, evidence, and method when we advance truths, even if we admit that the truths we advance are contingent and relative to our perspectives. If we are Kuhnian, we would also believe that communication about differences and disagreement among different communities are not only possible but absolutely desirable and indispensable to our scholarship. Some may turn to Foucault in Glenn’s defense and point out that Foucault advances a community-relative view of truth in his genealogy. [. . .] Foucault’s truth is the sum total of all the complexities of relationships that discourses embody and formulate. By writing a discursive history of sexuality and of the prison, Foucault sends the powerful message that truth is created linguistically and is contingent and situated because no truth can come into existence without having gone through all these complex relationships that are constitutive of as well as constituted by discourses. To say that truths are simply community-constructed beliefs is evidently a grave misunderstanding of the postmodern notion of truth conceived by Foucault.

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On the other hand, the assumption that because the story of Aspasia benefits women it is necessarily good is actually a rhetorical strategy that should be viewed with skepticism. In the first place, all women do not belong to the same community, all women are not feminists, all feminists are not women, and even all feminists do not belong to the same community. Further, the establishment of the truth, even if it were possible, that Aspasia “colonized men’s territory,” would not help end the male oppression of all women and serve the interests of all feminists. If we entertain a Kuhnian sense of community, we will then see that the project of Aspasia involves at least six disciplinary communities: philosophy, gender studies, feminism, rhetoric and composition, classical studies, and history. We will then recognize that appealing to women’s interests alone is not enough to validate one’s research method and findings. If the study of Aspasia crosses the borders of all the six subcommunities, then all these communities will decide to accept or reject the “truth” of Aspasia according to their respective criteria. To ignore or dismiss these disciplines and their research methods, therefore, would reduce the impact of feminist historical reconstruction projects on the way scholarship is produced in these disciplines. If we truly embrace the Foucauldian notion of truth, we would resist rather than allow partisan or community interests to dictate our research method and research outcome. While serving the common good of our communities is one of the important goals of our scholarship, its downside is that too often and too easily the claim of serving community interests becomes the sole justification of the “truth” and a means of control, a dangerous tendency that Foucault tries to resist with his genealogy. Barry Brummett pleads that we recognize the rhetorical nature of community interests. His insight is useful. “Community interests” sounds like a fine thing. But the question, “Whose community?” could legitimately have been raised in Plato’s time as well as today. Community means hegemony, the dominance of established power interests. . . . To pretend there is a community interest to be served is actually to hide the interests of empowered groups behind the facade of “the community.” Those privileged interests are presented as community interests. The “citizens” of Athens in Plato’s time, even if they served “community interests,” were in fact only about 15 percent of the population. Their community interests were highly partisan. . . . In the unmelted pot of fragmented and diverse American culture, using rhetoric in the service of “community interests” lends itself more to using rhetoric in the service of entrenched powers and principalities. (23; final emphasis added) Does our frank admission of our deliberate “partiality” in our scholarly work make the danger of possible hegemony of community disappear? My answer would be “no,” unless such an admission is meant to invite other perspectives to correct our own partiality. If our admission of our partiality serves only to privilege the truths we represent, then such an admission would do just what feminist historians accuse the male historians of doing—claiming the high moral

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ground of knowing the historical truth and excluding the competing truths. If we read Glenn’s announcement of “reading it crookedly and telling it slant” as a challenge to the self-righteous canonical history written by male historians, we would then accept the need to discuss and debate the limitations of her theories, methods, and practice. In this way, Glenn’s Aspasia story provides us with a place to start debating issues related to truth, evidence, method, theory, and political agenda in historical studies in the postmodern academy.

II. Aspasia as “Rational Reconstruction”: Questions of Interpretation and Speculation in Historical Studies Rather than try to prove that Aspasia is the founding mother of rhetoric, Jarratt and Ong’s “Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology” focuses on Aspasia as a “site” for interpretive work to explore the “intersection of discourses on gender and colonialism, production and reproduction, rhetoric and philosophy” (10). They acknowledge at the very beginning the complexities of the task of writing a history of Aspasia, the problems of “finding and authenticating sources” as well as dealing with “layers of representation, with their inevitable colorations of ‘envy and ill will,’ ‘favor and flattery’ ” (9). Therefore, they say, their reconstruction of Aspasia will “no more accurately recapture the ‘real’ woman than do the figure in the fresco or the character in Plutarch’s and Plato’s texts, but rather will reflect back to us a set of contemporary concerns” (10). In other words, if Glenn’s work can be called (loosely) Geistesgeschichte—picking up great dead philosophers or rhetoricians to form an alternative canon—Jarratt and Ong’s can be described as “rational reconstruction”—putting current questions into the dead philosophers’ (or rhetoricians’) mouths. In their study of Aspasia, Jarratt and Ong try to answer three questions: Did Aspasia exist? Can she be known? and Is that knowledge communicable? They swiftly skim through the first two questions with affirmative answers and focus on the third, making claims along the way that Aspasia “taught the art of rhetoric to many, including Socrates, and may have invented the so-called Socratic method” (13). Jarratt and Ong, however, do not try to present Aspasia as the only great rhetorician in the Western rhetorical tradition, as Glenn seems so inclined. As they claim Aspasia’s invention of the Socratic method, they point out at the same time that Protagoras is also believed to have created a method of questioning taken up by Socrates. By putting dissenting sources side by side, Jarratt and Ong make it clear that disagreement exists over who might have created the “Socratic method” (15). By leaving room for “multiple” historical truths rather than one single feminist truth, Jarratt and Ong show respect for the research done by their colleagues in classical studies even when they are challenging the history created by their male counterparts. On the other hand, Jarratt and Ong’s study depends so heavily on interpretation and speculation, with a preoccupation for their feminist goals, that it accentuates the question of the roles that interpretation and speculation play in writing history. For example, Plato’s Menexenus is used not only as “evidence for Aspasia’s method of teaching” and as a text for “locating Aspasia

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within the realm of sophistic rhetoric,” but also as the principal source for an understanding of issues of “gender and colonialism, production and reproduction, rhetoric and philosophy” in fifth-century BCE Athens (15, 16). Considering that the Menexenus was written in 385 BCE, long after Aspasia’s own time, and that the dialogue between Socrates and Aspasia is fictitious (Grant 209), hinging the study of Aspasia on this one text causes problems. At one point, Jarratt and Ong assert that “ ‘Aspasia’ represents for Plato a collection of ideas including not only the fifth-century democracy and rhetoric in general but a sophistic rhetoric practiced almost exclusively by non-Athenians,” a representation of a “cluster” of ideas that “Plato spent much intellectual energy opposing” (17–18). This reading of the “Aspasia” created by Plato suggests that Aspasia is a rhetorical construct without any real historical validity. Recognizing the satirical nature of the Menexenus, Jarratt and Ong interpret Aspasia—a foreigner/woman/sophist—as Plato’s rhetorical ploy to ridicule those naive enough to listen to the words of an outsider. Plato’s rendition of Aspasia reveals “Plato’s disdain for the foreigner/woman/sophist who would presume to have knowledge about the virtues of Atheno-androcentric citizenship” (20). At other points, however, Jarratt and Ong use the same Menexenus as a historical document to support the argument that Aspasia is “a key member of the sophistic movement” (15). When the text is put to this use, Jarratt and Ong have to make an interpretation that contradicts their other reading: that Plato’s Aspasia actually was respected by Socrates, who not only admits that Aspasia was “indeed his teacher” but also reports that “he heard her only the previous day composing a funeral oration” (15). The question raised by the contradictory interpretations of the same text is whether a satirical text with fictitious scenes can also be treated as historical evidence. If we accept that Plato’s Aspasia is an ideological construct and a butt of ridicule, we will be unable to accept the same Aspasia as a real historical woman whose intellectual accomplishments are recorded by Plato in the Menexenus.[. . .] It seems safe to say that Jarratt and Ong’s study reflects much of Jarratt’s theory of sophistic historiography/feminist sophistic. Thus perhaps a more fruitful approach to understanding and critiquing their methodology is to examine the theory. At the core of Jarratt’s sophistic historiography and feminist sophistic is the premise of the parallel exclusion of the “other”—the First Sophists and women, together with their rhetorical practices—from the canonical history of rhetoric. Rejecting the traditional historical method with its insistence on uncontested evidence in history, its belief in progressive historical continuity, and its privilege of logos in the Aristotelian/Platonic tradition, Jarratt advocates writing history as narratives that will “set aside the ‘history of rhetoric’ in favor of ‘rhetorical histories’ ”—provisional, culturally relevant “fictions of factual presentation” (“Toward” 168). Her sophistic historiography abandons logos in the Aristotelian/Platonic tradition in favor of two prelogical language techne, antithesis and parataxis. And it embraces literary, fictional, and mythic elements in its historical narratives that are excluded from the traditional history of rhetoric (179). Evidently, treating the historiography of Aspasia as mainly an interpreting activity is a practice congruent with Jarratt’s theory.

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In many ways, Jarratt’s sophistic historiography suggests the influence of Michel Foucault’s genealogy, which aims to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality,” which “seeks out discontinuities where others found continuous development, which avoids the search for depth,” and which “seeks the surfaces of events, small details, minor shifts, and subtle contours” (Foucault, “Nietzsche” 139). Like Foucault’s genealogy that “shuns the profundity of the great thinkers our tradition has produced and revered” and that considers Plato its “archenemy” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 106), Jarratt’s historical method veers away from the Platonic Truth in favor of truths (and histories) that are constructed rhetorically, with the help of sophistic techne and feminist strategies of reading and writing. However, in many other—and major—ways, Jarratt’s feminist sophistic/sophistic historiography differs from Foucault’s genealogy. Foucault’s subjects are abstract. He studies the history of thought, the formation of discourses, disciplines, and institutions over a period of several hundred years, not great men or women or great historical events that are usually subjects of traditional history. Jarratt’s subjects are more practical, as she studies the rhetorical aspects of classical texts by sophists and women rhetoricians, with a focus on contemporary feminist concerns. Foucault’s genealogical study of sexuality is not intended to expose the deceptive manipulation in order to enable circumvention or defeat of that manipulation. It does not intend to discover truth but to show how power relations operate in the deployment of sexuality and penalty. And Foucault does not believe in absolute liberation, for there is no discourse-independent truth, the discernment of which can free us from power (Prado 104). Jarratt, in contrast, is intent on writing women into the history of rhetoric for the purpose of exposing male oppression and exclusion in order to liberate and empower women. [. . .] [T]he sophistic historiography/feminist sophistic doggedly pursues one of the postmodern themes—the exclusion of the “other”—through rhetoric. In answering the question, “Can Aspasia be known?” Jarratt and Ong suggest that Aspasia can be known only if we locate her in the sophistic rhetorical tradition. Drawing the parallel exclusion of the first sophists and women from the history of rhetoric and the Western rhetorical tradition, Jarratt believes, will provide feminists with a theoretical and historical perspective from which the Aristotelian/Platonic/ Male rhetorical tradition will be examined and critiqued. Undoubtedly, Jarratt has broadened our understanding of Aspasia by creating a historical rhetorical context in which the Athenian woman’s exclusion as well as contributions can be better appreciated. She has also made us see how very often the oppression and exclusion of women (and arguably the First Sophists) in real life situations can be reflected and reinforced in and through rhetoric. Nonetheless, drawing a parallel between the First Sophists and women also entails some problems. If Jarratt has to attribute all the feminist characteristics to the First Sophists to include them in her feminist system, does she risk making the mistake of essentializing women? Jarratt sees the Sophists as representing the inferior set of qualities in the binaries: opinion versus the Truth, the materiality of the body (associated with cooking and cosmetics) versus the Soul, practical knowledge versus science, the temporal versus the eternal, the inferior-

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ity of writing (explicitly as an artificial aid to memory) versus speech (as the vehicle of intuited knowledge). She then equates these qualities attributed to the first sophists with the feminine traits: irrationality (or nonrationality), magical or hypnotic power, subjectivity, and emotional sensitivity (Rereading 65). Even in rhetorical style the First Sophists are described as favoring the syntactic structures that are thought to be nonmale: antithesis—the Sophists’ antithetical pairing that “awakens in the listener an awareness of the multiplicity of possible truths” (“Toward” 175); and parataxis—the loose association of clauses without hierarchical connectives or embedding (176–77). Like women, the Sophists favor nomos, the “real conditions (nomoi) under which texts are produced in specific times and places,” rather than logos, a “permanent” and “natural” structure of law, rationality, or language (Rereading 74). This parallel may well raise questions such as how the resemblance between the Sophists and women would empower women and whether her feminist sophistic would create new exclusions, such as the exclusion of man. Victor Vitanza warns that a “third space” is absent in Jarratt’s feminist sophistic/sophistic historiography, and I believe that his warning is well placed. For unless we allow a “third space” where Woman may become Man and Man Woman in a rhetorical sense, we would not be able to get out of the conundrum that Jarratt’s theory creates when doing historical research. We would have difficulty answering the following questions: Should a feminist historian consider acceptable only women’s texts that reflect only the feminine traits, female syntactic structures, and other characteristics attributed to women by men? Should a feminist rhetorical history include women rhetoricians who wrote in the mainstream rhetorical tradition and whose works reflect the male rhetorical traits and dominant ideology? Should feminists rely on men’s representations of women in the historical texts when reconstructing feminist historiographies? Or should the male texts always be feminized first and then read as feminist texts? Although one short historical study can hardly justify a comprehensive criticism of Jarratt’s theory, the historiography of Aspasia by Jarratt and Ong nonetheless provides a provocative site to investigate and debate the role of interpretation and speculation in historical research. Jarratt and Ong’s study also challenges the historians in composition and rhetoric to study and debate the role of genre in historical study. Should Thucydides’ history and Plato’s irony be treated as the same kind of evidence? Could rhetorical texts be interpreted as history and used as historical evidence? Could a feminist reading of male texts embrace the competing interpretations? Should speculation be different and differentiated from fabrication and imagination in feminist historical studies? Jarratt and Ong’s historiography of Aspasia forces us to confront these issues in reconstructing a new kind of rhetorical history.

III. Aspasia’s Biographical Tradition and the Promise of Feminist Historical Reconstructions Is it at all possible to recover great historical women whose achievements have been erased from the traditional history by men? My discussion of the previous two historiographies of

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Aspasia may have given the impression that the difficulties in reconstructing a feminist history are insurmountable. However, that is not the case. For if we change the question from “Who are those women whose voices were silenced by men in history?” to “Is it at all possible to find out how all those historical women got lost in history?” perhaps we have a better chance of discovering some traditions that may be claimed as part of women’s history. Madeleine Henry has given a brilliant answer to the latter question with her study of Aspasia’s biographical tradition and suggested a promising direction in feminist historical research. Henry’s study of the evolution of Aspasia’s bios from the fifth century BCE to the twentieth century not only presents an impressive array of important documents and texts on the ancient Athenian woman and thus creates an invaluable source for future historical study, but it also offers rich theoretical and methodological implications for future feminist historical reconstruction projects. In many ways, Henry’s project resembles Glenn’s and Jarratt and Ong’s Aspasia historiographies: her goal is political. By writing Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition, Henry strives to change the biographical tradition that deems worthy only “an account of the life of a man from birth to death” by writing an account of a woman from birth to death (4). Her perspective is feminist. She traces the various postclassical renditions of Aspasia’s life and identities to reveal how the sexualization of her intellect has influenced (negatively) current constructions of gender roles and the ways in which women do or do not participate in intellectual discourse in the West (6). According to Henry, Heloise (ca. 1100–1164) is the “first woman known to have considered Aspasia an authority and example for the way she wanted to live her life” (83). Heloise is thought to have used Cicero’s account of Aeschines’ Aspasia to refuse to “convert” to the nunlike status of Christ’s bride, apart from her attempt to use Aspasia to convince her lover that their relationship was good (85). Henry concurs with Peggy Kamuf that Heloise’s identification with Aspasia indicates the early “feminist consciousness” (85). Henry’s central concern is the Foucauldian question: How was Aspasia “put into discourse” of men over the past 2,500 years? In this sense, she is postmodern and antifoundational, like Glenn and Jarratt. Henry’s method, however, differs considerably from Glenn’s and Jarratt and Ong’s. Rather than eschewing the traditional historical method or twisting the male texts to suit her feminist needs, Henry takes an approach that combines feminist scholarship and postmodern concerns with traditional philological methods and has written a social history of an ancient woman who has fascinated literary artists, historians, philosophers, pornographers, women, and men alike for centuries. Her method, I argue, speaks persuasively to how a radical vision does not necessarily entail antitraditional methods. On the contrary, when it comes to questions of historical evidence and its interpretations, traditional philological methods can be put to good use for our progressive political goals, as Henry’s study demonstrates.13 I believe that Henry’s meticulous treatment of historical sources is the main reason for the success of her Aspasia study. To write Aspasia into the male biographical tradition in the absence of primary texts and direct records of Aspasia’s life, Henry has confronted, rather than evaded,

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the formidable task of collecting, sifting, ordering, and evaluating evidence of a bewildering quantity, quality, kind, and date (not to mention datability) from Antiquity to modern times (2). She painstakingly shows how, over centuries, various discourse traditions have constructed and construed the fifth-century woman and her identities: her bios consists of records of men’s [ridicule], historians’ abuses, the Athenian woman’s sexual conquests and intellectual power, and posterity’s romantic fantasies and mythical curiosity. Henry’s historical method is traditional in the sense that she unfolds the evolution of Aspasia’s bios by historical period: the earliest descriptions in Attic comedy in the fifth century BCE, the Socratic dialogues in the fourth century, the distilled information in Plutarch’s history at the end of Greco-Roman antiquity; and the modern creations and imaginations of Aspasia—all these sources are presented and interpreted with admirable credibility and clarity, with candid admissions of aporia and of the historian’s own perplexity whenever some undecipherable or undatable or undeterminable material is encountered. But Henry’s traditional method is foregrounded in the antifoundational assumption that Aspasia the Athenian woman was first and foremost a construct of discourse. Thus, instead of trying to establish Aspasia’s “real” identity with truth-claims, Henry first identifies the characteristics of Aspasia’s biographical tradition in its first centuries and then traces their influences on posterity. Henry admits that the attempt to search for historical documents, archives, and artifacts yields little about Aspasia’s life before she came to Athens. The only known contemporary evidence of Aspasia’s life—the fragments from Attic comedy in the fifth century—represents her as a porne and a procuress (28). The philosophical discourse of the Socratica by Plato, Antisthenes, Aeschines of Sphettos, and Xenophon in the fourth century changes the representation of Attic comedy and represents Aspasia as an “erotically alluring and intellectually formidable woman among men” (28). The descriptions of Aspasia in Plutarch’s (ca. 50–120 CE) social history, Life of Pericles, despite Plutarch’s doubts of the many sources he mentions, makes Aspasia “the archetype of the sexually alluring and politically influential courtesan” (74). The discourse on prostitutes in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods persistently groups Aspasia with a man, be it Pericles or Socrates, or both. And art historians have continued to situate Aspasia with men as well (81). By identifying the different Aspasias constructed by different discourses in early times, Henry sets the stage for exploring how the literary treatment of historical prostitutes, scholarship on comedy, comedy itself, and historical anecdote become locales within which Aspasia’s biographical tradition develops in the postclassical period (58). By tracing the evolution of the competing discourse traditions’ rendering of Aspasia, Henry sends an unequivocal message: that the “truth” about Aspasia is discourse-relative, perspective-dependent, and historically contingent, depending on whose story we take up as true. This message, needless to say, is antifoundational in its rejection of the one single truth about the fifth-century BCE woman. Henry’s claims are based on her examination of the histories, fictions, art pieces, and scholarly works in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. She tries to con-

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vince us (and succeeds) that nearly all the later works are amplifications and exaggerations of the characteristics identified in Aspasia’s bios in the first centuries, especially in Plutarch and Plato, and that each individual in each epoch adds to Aspasia the aspirations and ideal of his or her generation and age. In the end of her search, Henry says, “It is hopeless to write Aspasia back into the history of philosophy in its traditional masculine sense, for Aspasia categorically cannot have been a philosopher. Female, feminine, Ionian, sometimes orientalized, her main achievement will merely be to have freely chosen her own sexual partners, as Becq de Fouquières observed over a century ago” (130). Henry’s conclusion may not be as exciting as Glenn’s or Jarratt and Ong’s. However, her conclusion commands respect, and so does her warning: It is easy, but not enough, to say that like so many gifted women, Aspasia and her achievements were overshadowed, appropriated, and misunderstood by the men she knew and by masculinist developments of her bios. It is a longer task, but still not satisfying, to say that the West has needed, wanted, and created varying Aspasias since 440 B.C. When we need Aspasia to be a chaste muse and teacher, she is there; when we need a grand horizontal, she is there; when we need a protofeminist, she is there also. (127–28) With a conclusion and a warning that may disappoint some who are passionate about restoring Aspasia to the rhetorical canon, what does Henry’s Aspasia study have to offer? I believe that it promises a new way of looking at feminist historical reconstructions. What we can do, Henry says, is to see Aspasia and her bios as in some way contributing to our understanding of the position of women as sexual and intellectual beings in antiquity: “Because her intellect, political acumen, and sexuality were inextricably connected from almost the very start, and have continued to define her, it is the task of all successive contributors to her bios to integrate their understanding of her intellect and sexuality” (128). Such integration will inevitably bring forth questions of theory and method, questions that Henry has brilliantly addressed in her practice through her study of Aspasia’s bios. First and foremost, Henry teaches us that if the Truth about the historical Aspasia is unattainable, at least with an effective method we could find out how the multiple truths about Aspasia have been constructed in various discourses in history. Like Glenn and Jarratt and Ong, Henry’s project is feminist; so is her perspective and often her interpretive strategies. What makes Henry’s method more productive and her findings more credible is her sensitivity to the “situatedness” of the historical sources and of herself as a feminist researcher and scholar. By creatively coping with the situatedness, she establishes a biographical tradition of a woman in a male-dominated discipline. [. . .] Although Henry does not espouse postmodernist theory in her study, her study of Aspasia nevertheless helps us understand the skepticism that is very postmodern, or a kind of honesty that Richard Rorty endorses: “Honesty here consists in keeping in mind the possibility that our self-justifying conversation is with creatures of our own fantasy rather than with historical

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personages, even ideally reeducated historical personages” (“Historiography” 270). For Henry the question whether Aspasia was “really” a towering intellectual and philosopher is not as important as the question whether there is a tradition, a discursive history, that belongs to women that can be claimed and studied. With Aspasia’s biographical tradition, Henry persuades us that much can be done in feminist historical reconstruction and that much more can be done by feminist historians and rhetoricians.

IV. One More Word on the Need for a Debate over Historical Methods In Foucault, Marxism, & History, Mark Poster observes that Foucault’s new kind of history appeared in a historical context in which “the discipline of history has been revolutionized by new methodologies and new objects of study which fall under the rubric of ‘social history’ ” (70). He says, Topics like population, the city, the family, women, classes, sports and psychobiography have risen to prominence over more traditional historical subjects. Methodologies have been imported from every social science: econometrics from economics, family reconstitution from demography, “thick interpretation” from anthropology, voting analysis from political science, questionnaire analysis and class analysis from sociology, psychoanalysis from psychology. Once a field in the humanities relying on narrative writing, history has become a potpourri of social science methods. (70) Writing a new kind of history in this context, according to Poster, Foucault “unmasks the epistemological innocence of the historian” and “raises the discomforting question: What does the historian do to the past when he or she traces its continuity and assigns it its causes?” (75). It is the historian’s power to interpret history and assign the causes to history that makes Foucault wary of the traditional histories. For Foucault, “history is a form of knowledge and a form of power at the same time; put differently, it is a means of controlling and domesticating the past in the form of knowing it” (75). Because of the historian’s power, Foucault warns that the practice of the discourse of the past places the historian in a privileged position: as the one who knows the past, the historian has power. The historian becomes an intellectual who presides over the past, nurtures it, develops it, and controls it. Since, under the thesis of continuity, the historian is able to collect within himself or herself the experience of the past, he or she has an ideological interest in maintaining its importance, reasserting the inevitability with which the past leads to the present, while at the same time denying that there is a certain power at stake. (Poster 75) In other words, Foucault’s new kind of history is both resistance and critique of this continuous history, which represents a Hegelian totalization of the past and the present (76).

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My critical review of the three historical studies of Aspasia seeks to remind us that the questions about which Foucault was concerned nearly twenty years ago still concern us today. How can we write radical alternative histories of rhetoric without compromising our credibility as historians and scholars? How can we do primary scholarship without having to submit slavishly to the authority of the traditional male perspective and method? How can we foreground our research in postmodern and antifoundational theory without resorting solely to rhetorical ploy? How can we enhance the social and political good without risking creating new hierarchies, inequalities, and exclusions? Since the significance of the Aspasia stories goes far beyond historical research, I believe that all of us who are genuinely concerned with the social and political impact of scholarship and teaching in our field and in society should be willing to give up the safety and privilege secured by our claims to truth or by our authority as historians/academicians and participate in the “give and take of methodological and theoretical debate” that Dasenbrock deems lacking in our field (560). We should welcome members from other communities to debate our theories and methods and question our findings and conclusions, for only through continuous and constructive conversation will we be able to resist not only the totalizing power of the traditional male history but our tendency to privilege and perpetuate our own history and discourse. And we would keep in mind that histories and historiographies of Aspasia do not belong solely to those who wrote them or to the community of feminists in composition and rhetoric. Once published, they belong to all of the communities of scholars and teachers, and they gain meaning and life only through being read, be the readings controversial, critical, or appreciative.

Notes [. . .] 3 Donald Kagan’s historical study of Pericles’ life records that Plutarch’s ridicule of Aspasia might well have been motivated by the Athenians’ general prejudice against Aspasia because of Pericles’ affection for her and because of the scandal spread by Pericles’ political enemies. Aspasia was charged with impiety and with procuring free women for Pericles’ enjoyment. She was acquitted after Pericles successfully defended her in court (186). [. . .] 6 For example, Pamela L. Caughie argues that a debate over politics and ethics (in feminist and postmodern terms) should always take precedence over a methodological debate, implicitly assuming that only the political is ethical. Similarly, by labeling Edward Schiappa a foundationalist and himself an antifoundationalist, Scott Consigny implies the intrinsic superiority of the latter and also turns the debate over methodological issues in classicist studies into partisan quibbles. Some even call academic debates “catfights” and thus undercut the importance of exchanging different views and perspectives in discussions about theory and method. What we constantly need to remind ourselves is that postmodernism, antifoundationalism, and feminism, like any other master narrative, can be used to silence and exclude dissenting voices and shut down productive scholarly conversations among researchers and teachers. [. . .] 13 While some may argue that Glenn and Jarratt and Ong are writing in the field of composition and rhetoric, not in the discipline of classics, I believe that, as feminist historical reconstruction

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projects on women in Antiquity, their studies should be informed by the feminist methodological principles in classical studies. The most important of these feminists’ “new methodological principles” widely accepted in the 1970s include (1) “Women should not be treated ‘as an undifferentiated mass’; groups of women (not Woman) must be studied in the specific context of socioeconomic class, culture, and time period”; and (2) “Sources must also be differentiated and interpreted with due respect for their individual codes, conventions, and biases” (McManus 18). Other principles include employing “multiple viewpoints,” embodying “a feminist perspective,” encompassing “considerable diversity” and “respectful dialogue and debate,” and requiring “an interest in theory, in conjecture, in ‘the discernment of patterns, inter-relationships, and chains of causality’ rather than the mere accumulation of ‘facts’ ” (18–19). I see no reason why historians in composition and rhetoric should not critically implement these principles in their historical research. [. . .]

Works Cited Brummett, Barry. “Scandalous Rhetorics.” Public Relations Inquiry as Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. William N. Elwood. Westport: Praeger. 13–24. Caughie, Pamela L., and Reed Way Dasenbrock. “An Exchange on ‘Truth and Methods.’ ” College English 58 (1996): 541–54. Consigny, Scott. “Edward Schiappa’s Reading of the Sophists.” Rhetoric Review 14 (1996): 263–79. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Truth and Methods.” College English 57 (1995): 546–61. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. New York: Harvester, 1982. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. 1978. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. —.“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. and Trans. Donald F Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Glenn, Cheryl. “Rereading Aspasia: The Palimpsest of Her Thoughts.” Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literacy. Ed. John Frederick Reynolds. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1995. 35–44. —. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. —.“Sex, Lies, Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 180–99. Gorgias. “Encomium of Helen.” The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1990. 40–42. Grant, Michael. The Classical Greeks. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Henry, Madeleine M. Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. —.“Toward a Sophistic Historiography.” Pre/Text 8 (1987): 9–28. Rhetoric. Ed. William A. Covino and David A. Jolliffe. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 167–83.

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Jarratt, Susan C., and Rory Ong. “Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology.” Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Kagan, Donald. Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy. New York: Free Press, 1991. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. U of Chicago P, 1970. McManus, Barbara F. Classics and Feminism: Gendering the Classics. New York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1997. “Octalog: The Politics of Historiography.” Rhetoric Review 7 (1988): 5–49. Poster, Mark. Foucault, Marxism, & History. Cambridge: Polity, 1984. Prado, C. G. Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy. Boulder: Westview, 1995. Rorty, Richard. “Feminism and Pragmatism.” Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge UP, 1998. 202–27. —.“The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres.” Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge UP, 1998. 247–73. Swearingen, C. Jan. Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Vitanza, Victor J. “A Feminist Sophistic?” Journal of Advanced Composition 15 (1995): 321–49.

Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography* Cheryl Glenn College English has invited me to comment on Xin Liu Gale’s review of my feminist historiographic study of Aspasia of Miletus. Gale reiterates her 1997 “Intersections of Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference” polemic by reaffirming a set of unquestioned privileges referred to, with numbing regularity, as “tradition” and “truth.” Thus her approach takes the reactionary criticism du jour that associates much postmodern thought with the end of truth and the decline of standards and reduces it into a simple binary: on the one hand, there is traditional objective historiography, and, on the other, subjective feminist fictionalization. What is missing is the recognition that postmodern historiography does not attempt to do away with the notion of truth; instead, it attempts to think of truth outside the confines of a mythical objectivity, or, at the very least, to decouple the link between “objectivity” and “truth.” Ignoring historiography’s imbrication with truth, power, and ethics results in a reading of Susan Jarratt, Rory Ong, and me (and. presumably many others) only as adversaries, enemies of tradition, obstructionists of the Truth. In spite of these difficulties, the discussion offers several instructive points: (1) a focus on Aspasia, a figure who deserves more scholarly attention; (2) a thorough mining of the historical, literary, social, and political research in my own discursive footnotes; (3) a comparison of the purposefully different methodologies among various academic fields (i.e., rhetoric, composition, and classics); and, most of all, (4) a rearticulation of the tension between history and history writing, between notions of truth and method that I rehearsed throughout Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. I am limiting my comments to that fourth point so that I can revisit the fruitful and necessary tension between history and history writing, a tension that scholars have been grappling with for decades as they read, reread, write, and rewrite histories of various discourses and practices. Those of us who write histories of rhetoric, especially those of us who write women into those histories, do so in response to intellectual and ethical questions (of evidence, power, and *  College English 62 (2000): 387-89. Copyright 2000 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted and used with permission. 462

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politics) at the same time that we resist received notions of both history and writing history. Speaking only for myself, my goal has not been to supplant the master narrative of rhetorical history with a “mater” narrative, though such a move has long been considered the paradox of some feminist scholarship. Rather, my goal has been to investigate a number of deeply contextualized narratives in an attempt to bring a fuller, richer, different picture into focus. But regardless of my goal, process, or product, I, like every other historiographer, face the task of connecting the “real” with discourse on “the real.” As Michel de Certeau tells us, at the point where this link cannot be imagined, historiography must nevertheless work as if the real and discourse were actually being joined (xxvii). Every history writer faces this missing link. Thus, the text of history writing initiates a play between the object under study and the discourse performing the analysis. And even the most conscientious, “traditional” (however that word resonates), and conservative history writer plays this game. Collapsing any binary of history and fiction, Hayden White explains the historical as narrative, as representation, and as interpretation (51). Nancy E. Partner describes history as “the definitive human audacity imposed on formless time and meaningless event with the human meaning-maker: language.” She calls history writing “the silent shared conspiracy of all historians (who otherwise agree on nothing these days),” who “talk about the past as though it were really ‘there’ ” (97). Consequently, all historical accounts, even the most seemingly objective historical records, are stories. And even these stories are selected and arranged according to the selector’s frame of reference, an idea I’m not sure I fully appreciated until I read this rendering of my own logic, method, and representation. Why, then, should we continue to write histories (of rhetoric, or of anything else) when both writing and history are suspect? when the past was not really “there”? when we agree that there was a past but not what the past really was? Well, historiographic practices are so firmly situated in the postmodern critique of rhetoric that many of us already take for granted that histories do (or should do) something, that they fulfill our needs at a particular time and place, and that they never and have never reflected a neutral reality. In choosing what to show, how to represent it, and whom to spotlight, all these maps subtly shape our perceptions of a rhetoric englobed. That is not to say, however, that all stories are created equal, that all histories should or could be equal. Historiography’s central question is not “true” or “false.” Instead, historiography asks us to consider questions of knowledge (in what context is it produced and normalized? whom does it benefit?), ethics (to what/whom are these practices accountable? what/whom do they privilege?), and power (what practices might produce historical remembrances? what are the effects of such representation?). At the nexus of these questions reside issues of historical evidence: What counts? What is available? Who provided and preserved it—and why? How and to what end has it been used? and by whom? Thus history is not frozen, not merely the past. It provides an approachable, disruptable ground for engaging and transforming traditional memory or practice in the interest of both the present and the future.

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Writing women (or any other traditionally disenfranchised group) into the history of rhetoric, then, can be an ethically and intellectually responsible gesture that disrupts those frozen memories in order to address silences, challenge absences, and assert women’s contributions to public life. Such a gesture, particularly one that interrogates the availability, practice, and preservation (or destruction) of historical evidence, simultaneously exposes relations of exploitation, domination, censorship, and erasure. This ethical practice not only accepts the “possible insufficiency” of one’s understanding of history and implies an “openness and reflexivity in one’s encounters,” but it may also initiate a “restructuring of one’s understanding of the interrelation among the past, present and future; establishing possibilities for the alteration of one’s priorities, evaluations, and actions” (Simon 177). Learning to write new histories, histories worthy of the remarkable revival of rhetorical consciousness, means embracing new opportunities for interrogating, testing, and unfolding the rhetorical scholarship that has come before so that we might advance our re/thinking, re/assessing, and re/writing of rhetorical histories and futures, theories and practices. Whether they result in advances or setbacks, these risks invigorate our field, signify our progress, and illuminate possibilities. But they will not always be understood, let alone welcome.

Works Cited Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. 1975. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. Partner, Nancy E. “Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History” Speculum 61 (1986): 90–117. Simon, Roger I. “Pedagogy and the Call to Witness in Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion.” Education/ Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 19.2–3 (1997): 169–92. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again* Susan C. Jarratt 1 Xin Liu Gale acknowledges in her essay that there might be a problem with received histories: a possibility that women have been written out of traditions. But she is more interested here in the question of historical method: What will be the criteria for judging or verifying postmodern histories in the absence of foundational theories of knowledge? Gale is worried that feminist historians in rhetoric have set aside traditional methods in favor of distorted histories that are constructed only to advance feminist goals. Reflection on these methodological questions is necessary and important. I agree with Gale’s conclusions, based on Kuhn, that we need to carry on conversations about truth, evidence, and method, and that disagreement among different communities is not only possible but indispensable. But discussion and even meaningful disagreement are hard to achieve when discussants use dramatically different reading practices. I sometimes found Gale’s representations of my texts unrecognizable because of her practices of quoting out of context and omitting qualifiers like “perhaps,” twisting a speculation into a factual claim. Gale is led to these distortions by her desire to make our essay be about exaggerated claims for Aspasia’s accomplishments. But, as Gale acknowledges at the beginning of her discussion, our goal was to examine “Aspasia” as a site of discourse. Throughout her critique she omits any reference to our extensive and careful historical contextualizing of Plato’s use of “Aspasia” to craft a commentary on recent Athenian history. In fact, we are performing a methodology similar to the type Gale admires in Madeleine Henry’s fine book. On pages 16 and 17, for example, we discuss the differences between the funeral orations (epitaphioi) attributed to Pericles in Thucydides’ history and to Aspasia in Plato’s dialogue. The dates of Pericles’ military success in the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE), Thucydides’ writing in exile after Athens’s defeat (c. 405 BCE), and Plato’s disillusionment with Athenian politics up to the time of the King’s Peace in 386 BCE are all factored into our analysis. It seems, then, that we were not unaware of the passage of time between Aspasia’s era (mid-fifth century) and Plato’s, as Gale suggests (65), but were at *  College English 62 (2000): 390-93. Copyright 2000 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted and used with permission. 465

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pains to show what difference that passage of time made for interpreting Plato’s construction of Aspasia in the dialogue. The fact that Rory and I, like Henry, choose an intertextual interpretive method does not, for me, disqualify or diminish the force of Cheryl Glenn’s approach: a strong argument for the factual existence and intellectual importance of Aspasia. Gale finds a problem in feminist historians making both factual claims and interpretive assumptions. She informs me and Rory that we cannot take “Aspasia” both as a rhetorical construct in Plato’s text and as a real person (21). Why not? Gale, using Rorty’s categories of historical and rational reconstruction, finds a contradiction between the speculative leaps required to initiate feminist history—to imagine the world differently from the way it has been handed down to us—and the factual claims needed to make those claims persuasive. But Rorty himself is critical of overdoing the opposition between the two, leading to the mistaken impression that “one can do historical reconstruction first and leave rational reconstruction for later. The two genres can never be that independent. . . .” Rorty continues, “These two topics should be seen as moments in a continuing movement around the hermeneutic circle, a circle one has to have gone round a good many times before one can begin to do either sort of reconstruction” (53n1). In fact, whatever Henry’s method, her very choice of a subject presupposes the speculative leap that allowed scholars to imagine women in relation to the practices of rhetoric, philosophy, and literary production so long considered almost completely the domain of men. How, then, do we evaluate postmodern/feminist histories? This question was productively addressed in the “Octalog” Gale cites, a conversation among historians of rhetoric on just these issues. The answer offered there and in a host of other historiographical materials generated over the past two decades suggests that new histories will be evaluated by rhetorical criteria: Does this history instruct, delight, and move the reader? Is the historical data probable? Does it fit with other accounts or provide a convincing alternative? Is it taken up by the community and used? Or is it refuted, dismissed, and forgotten? But Gale seems in general averse to rhetoric. She warns that a postmodern/feminist historian might be in danger of “resorting solely to rhetorical ploy” (37), assures us that Gorgias “couldn’t care less” about the various interpretations of his “Encomium of Helen” because he was only a “mere rhetor” (68), and uses Derrida to warn against “rhetoricism” (68; 76n10). Likewise, Gale has concerns about feminism, setting a “gender studies” approach to history in opposition to disciplinary ones. Like rhetoric, feminism can taint the validity of a historical study; it also threatens new hierarchies and exclusions. Gale’s aversions to both rhetoric and feminism bring to mind Rereading the Sophists, another of my writings Gale takes issue with. Here again Gale’s reading practice makes a serious intellectual encounter difficult. Perhaps I didn’t make the point clearly enough in the first few paragraphs of the chapter on the first sophists and feminism (62–79) that this is not a speculation on the first sophists and women, in the past or present, but rather an observation about parallel conceptual constructs: “a process of intel-

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lectual marginalization through which the sophists take on a striking similarity to a discursive construct of woman” (64). That that process has implications for real women is also part of the analysis. Gale’s language through this section (68–9) ignores the sex (woman)/gender (the feminine) distinction basic to feminist argument (even when that distinction is contested, as in Butler), making for some confusion in her critique. But her warning that my approach in this section of the book could have the effect of erasing differences among women is well taken, an observation made earlier by Lynn Worsham in her excellent review of Rereading the Sophists. In fact, it was talking over the helpful feminist insights in that review (among many other things) that led Lynn and me to work together to create Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words, a collection of essays incorporating a wealth of different perspectives among feminists. The specter of a feminism that is One, denying difference, should not be dismissed without examination but should be tested in the abundant feminist work in rhetoric and composition— work undertaken by scholars from many different locations. The issue of differences among women was also a concern in the discussions that led to the Aspasia essay, a collaboration that came about when Rory Ong (then a graduate student at Miami) and I realized that his interest in colonial ideologies and my research in feminist history coalesced in productive ways at the site of Aspasia. Our critical reading of power relations in the period sought to extend beyond the categorization male/female into other ideological classifications, including the foreigner/alien and citizen/noncitizen. Within our essay we were at pains to place the material about Aspasia, an elite Ionian woman, in relation to information about women of various classes, including slaves (see 13–14 and 22n5). Our concern was to try to work against constructing a history of Great Women in rhetoric that would reproduce the structure of traditional masculinist history in all but the gender of its figures. In her review of Reclaiming Rhetorica, Jacqueline Rhodes offers a similar caution, along with praise for the notable achievements and careful historical scholarship in this very first collection of essays on women in the history of rhetoric. Rhodes’s review stands as another example of the fruitful dialogue underway in the world of feminist historians of rhetoric. I’m puzzled, then, about Gale’s closing remarks, an admonition to engage in debate. It seems to me that work in history of rhetoric from many perspectives has been exemplary in that regard (see, for example, Vitanza’s collection of essays drawn from an 1989 conference inviting debate about historiographical differences). I would invite Professor Gale to read more widely in feminist work in rhetoric and composition, helping us discover whether indeed feminists are constructing some kind of monolithic and exclusionary field, and to continue to participate in exchanges and dialogue such as this one.

Notes 1 This response was written in consultation with Rory J. Ong, Associate Professor of English and Comparative American Cultures at Washington State University, where he writes and teaches about race and ethnicity theories, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and discourse theory.

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Works Cited Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Jarratt, Susan C., and Lynn Worsham, eds. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. New York: MLA, 1998. Rhodes, Jacqueline. “Rediscoveries, Returns, and Reclamations: The Feminist Project of Reclaiming Rhetorica.” Rev. of Reclaiming Rhetorica. Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Composition Forum 7 (1996): 58–64. Rorty, Richard. “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres.” Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984: 49–75. Vitanza, Victor J., ed. Writing Histories of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. Worsham, Lynn. Rev. of Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured, by Susan C. Jarratt. Composition Studies 20 (1992): 89–92.

Selected Bibliography Anthologies, Edited Collections, and Special Journal Issues Bizzell, Patricia, ed. Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Spec. issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (Winter 2002). Campbell, JoAnn, ed. Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, ed. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. Vol. 2. New York: Greenwood, 1989. —. Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925: A Biocritical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. —. Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1925–1993: A Biocritical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Chávez, Karma R. and Cindy L. Griffin, eds. Power Feminism: Exploring Agency, Oppression and Victimage. Spec. issue of Women’s Studies in Communication 32.1 (Spring 2009). Donawerth, Jane, ed. Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Foss, Karen, and Sonja Foss, eds. Women Speak: The Eloquence of Women’s Lives. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991. Foss, Karen A., Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L Griffin. Feminist Rhetorical Theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999. Foss, Sonja, Cindy Griffin, and Karen Foss, eds. Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006. Hesford, Wendy S., and Eileen E. Schell, eds. Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics. Spec. issue of College English 70.5 (2008). Hobbs, Catherine, ed. Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995. Jarratt, Susan, ed. Feminist Rereadings in the History of Rhetoric. Spec. issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1 (1992). 469

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Logan, Shirley Wilson, ed. With Pen and Voice: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth Century African-American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. Lunsford, Andrea, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Mattingly, Carol, ed. Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Miller, Hildy, and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, eds. Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2005. Palczewski, Catherine Helen, ed. Argumentation and Feminisms. Spec. issue of Argumentation and Advocacy. 32.4 (1996). Phelps, Louise Wetherbee, and Janet Emig, eds. Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Portnoy, Alisse Theodore, ed. Defining, Using, and Challenging the Rhetorical Tradition. Spec. issue in Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003). Ritchie, Joy, and Kate Ronald, eds. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2001. Ronald, Kate, and Joy Ritchie, eds. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. New York: Boynton/ Cook, 2006. Royster, Jacqueline J., ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Schell, Eileen, and Kelly Rawson, eds. Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, forthcoming. Sutherland, Christine Mason, and Rebecca Sutcliffe, eds. The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Calgary, Alberta: U of Calgary P, 1999. Wertheimer, Molly, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997.

Monographs Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bacon, Jacqueline. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Ballif, Michelle. Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Bordelon, Suzanne. A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2007. Brody, Miriam. Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. Vol. 1. New York: Greenwood, 1989.

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Eldred, Janet Carey, and Peter Mortensen. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2002. Enoch, Jessica. Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. —. Unspoken: The Rhetoric of Silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Hollis, Karyn. Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Jarratt, Susan. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Johnson, Nan. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Logan, Shirley Wilson. “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. Mattingly, Carol. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. —. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998. Mountford, Roxanne. The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. Ratcliffe, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000. Sharer, Wendy. Voice and Vote: Women’s Organizations and Public Literacy, 1915–1930. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.

Works Cited Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140–61. Bizzell, Patricia. “Editing the Rhetorical Tradition.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36 (2003): 109–118. —. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 5–17. Bordelon, Suzanne. A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2007. Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 153–9. —. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. 2 Vol. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Cloud, Dana. ‘‘Not Invited: Struggle and Social Change.’’ Paper presented at the National Communication Association Convention, November 2004. Collins (Burton), Vicki Tolar. “The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Methodology.” College English 61 (1999): 545–71. Condit, Celeste. “In Praise of Eloquent Diversity: Gender and Rhetoric as Public Persuasion.” Women’s Studies in Communication 20 (1997): 91–116. Connors, Robert “Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric.” CompositionRhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. 23–68. —. “Adversus Haereses: Robert J. Connors Responds to Roxanne Mountford.” JAC Online. 19 (1999). 28 Jan. 2009. Donawerth, Jane. “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women.” Rhetorica 16. 2 (1998): 181–199. —. “Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and the Creation of a Women’s Tradition of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric, the Polis, and the Global Village. Ed. C. Jan Swearingen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. 155–61. Donawerth, Jane, ed. Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Dow, Bonnie J., and M. B. Tonn. “ ‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 286–302.

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Ede, Lisa S., and Andrea A. Lunsford. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Ede, Lisa, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford. “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism.” Rhetorica 13 (1995): 401–41. Emerling Bone, Jennifer, Cindy L. Griffin, and T. M. Linda Scholz. “Beyond Traditional Conceptualizations of Rhetoric: Invitational Rhetoric and a Move Toward Civility.” Western Journal of Communication 72 (2008): 434–62. Enoch, Jessica. “Survival Stories: Feminist Historiographic Approaches to Chicana Rhetorics of Sterilization Abuse.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 5–30. Enos, Richard Leo. “Women in the Rhetorical Tradition: The Untold History.” Review. College Composition and Communication 51 (1999): 296–303. Foss, Sonja K. “Response” to ‘Intercollegiate Debate as Invitational Rhetoric: An Offering.’ ” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate 21 (2000): 95–97. Foss, Sonja K., and Cindy L. Griffin. “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric.” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2–18. Foss, Sonja, Cindy Griffin, and Karen Foss. Feminist Rhetorical Theories. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006. —. “Transforming Rhetoric Through Feminist Reconstruction: A Response to the Gender Diversity Perspective.” Women’s Studies in Communication 20 (1997): 117–36. Foss, Sonja, Cindy Griffin, and Karen Foss, eds. Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006. French, Marilyn. From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World. Vol. 1: Origins. New York: The Feminist Press, 2008. Fulkerson, Richard. ‘‘Transcending Our Conception of Argument in Light of Feminist Critiques.’’ Argumentation and Advocacy 32 (1996): 199–218. Gale, Xin Liu. “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.” College English 62 (2000): 361–86. —. “Xin Liu Gale Responds.” College English 63 (2000): 105–7. Glenn, Cheryl. “Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62 (2000): 387–89. —. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. —. “sex, lies, and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 180–99. Gorgias. “Encomium of Helen.” The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: St. Martin’s, 2000. 40–42. Griffin, Cindy L. Invitation to Public Speaking. 3rd ed. Florence, KY: Wadsworth, 2008. Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. London: MacMillan, 1969. Jarratt, Susan. “Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English 62 (2000): 390– 93. —. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. —. “Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric.” Pre-Text 11(1990): 189–209.

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Jarratt, Susan, and Lynn Worsham, eds. Feminism and Composition: In Other Words. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1998. Johnson, Nan. “Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (2000): 221–42. Kirsch, Gesa, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau, eds. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Logan, Shirley Wilson. “Black Women on the Speaker’s Platform (1832–1899).” Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997. 150–73. —. “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. Logan, Shirley Wilson, ed. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century AfricanAmerican Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. Mailloux, Steven. “Practices, Theories, and Traditions: Further Thoughts on the Disciplinary Identities of English and Communication Studies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33.1 (Winter 2003): 129– 38. Mattingly, Carol. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. —. “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 99–108. —. “Woman’s Temple, Women’s Fountains: The Erasure of Public Memory.” American Studies 49 (2008). —. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998. Mattingly, Carol, ed. Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Mountford, Roxanne. “Feminization of Rhetoric?” JAC Online. 19 (1999). 28 Jan. 2009 —. “Reply to ‘Adversus Haereses’: Robert J. Connors Responds to Roxanne Mountford.’ ” JAC Online. 19 (1999). 28 Jan. 2009 O’Connor, Lillian. Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement. New York: Columbia UP, 1954. Phelps, Louise Wetherbee, and Janet Emig, eds. Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Pollock, Mark A., Lee Artz, Lawrence R. Frey, W. Barnett Pearce, and Bren A. O. Murphy. ‘‘Navigating Between Scylla and Charybdis: Continuing the Dialogue on Communication and Social Justice.’’ Communication Studies 47 (1996): 142–51. Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” College English 70 (2008): 471– 89.

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Ratcliffe, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Ritchie, Joy, and Kate Ronald. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2001. Rogers, Hester Ann. Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers. New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831. Romano, Susan. “The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Femininst Historiography.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (2007): 453–80. Ronald, Kate, and Joy Ritchie. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. New York: Boynton/ Cook, 2006. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003): 148–67. —. “In Search of Ways In.” Feminist Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Eds. Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. —. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000. Ryan, Kathleen. “Recasting Recovery and Gender Critique as Inventive Arts: Constructing Edited Collections in Feminist Rhetorical Studies.” Rhetoric Review 25 (2006): 22–40. Ryan, Kathleen, and Elizabeth J. Natalle. “Fusing Horizons: Standpoint Hermeneutics and Invitational Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 69–90. Schell, Eileen and Kelly Rawson, eds. Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, forthcoming. Swearingen, C. Jan. “A Lover’s Discourse: Diotima, Logos, and Desire.” Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. 25–52. Tasker, Elizabeth, and Frances Holt-Underwood. “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric and Composition: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to the Present.” Rhetoric Review 27 (2008): 54–71. Vitanza, Victor J. “ ‘Notes’ Towards Historiographies of Rhetorics; or Rhetorics of the Histories of Rhetorics: Traditional, Revisionary, and Sub/Versive.” Pre/Text 8.1–2 (1987): 63–125.  Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74. Wu, Hui. “A Comment on ‘Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.’ ” College English 63 (2000): 102–5. —. “Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002). 81–97. Yoakum, Doris. “Women’s Introduction to the American Platform.” A History and Criticism of American Public Address. Vol. 1. Ed. William Brigance. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943. 153–92. Zaeske, Susan. “The ‘Promiscuous Audience’ Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Women’s Rights Movement.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 191–207. —. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, & Women’s Political Identity. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003.

Index abolitionist, 9, 13–14, 238–239, 242–245, 247–248, 251–252, 254–261, 267, 269–270, 331, 434 Afrafeminist, 121 African American women rhetors, 180, 184, 220, 254 agency, xiv, 21, 31, 33, 64, 89, 91, 94–96, 103, 111–112, 129, 135, 148, 172, 202–203, 224, 311, 346, 391 agonistic rhetoric, 419 Anglo-American feminist rhetorics, 5, 80, 84, 86, 88, 99, 100–101 antebellum America, 234 antilynching, 265–266 Anzaldùa, Gloria, xiv Aristotle, xvi, 7, 17, 18, 33, 40, 47, 51, 54, 56, 60, 62–63, 67–68, 72, 73, 75–78, 83, 86, 89, 90, 92–94, 97, 98, 100, 103–105, 219, 225, 232, 338, 348–350, 354, 358–359, 403–404, 425, 430, 452–453 arrangement (canon of), xv, xix, 4, 45, 56, 5965, 71, 95, 229, 254, 297, 306, 421 Aspasia of Miletus, 4, 32, 36–51, 69, 82, 105, 107, 111, 114–115, 116, 118, 124, 126, 143–144, 167–168, 172, 173, 181–182, 231, 439–440, 442–448, 450–457, 459–462, 465–467 audience, 8, 12, 14, 15, 44, 60, 63, 65, 68–69, 70–74, 86, 90, 93, 95, 97, 117, 121, 127, 131, 146, 148, 150–151, 155, 157, 161–162, 176, 184–185, 193, 196, 198, 204–205, 208, 210, 217, 221, 223–224, 226, 228–230, 256–9, 261–263, 265–266, 268, 270, 313–317, 319–322, 325–327, 330, 341–342, 360–361, 363–367, 370–379, 382, 392–394, 396–397,

401, 404–405, 416–417, 424, 433, 443, 448; “promiscuous” or mixed audience 13, 220, 234–252, 406, 408, 412–413 authority, 13–16, 34, 40–41, 56, 60–61, 64, 126, 129–130, 132–133, 135–136, 138–141, 143, 146, 148, 150–151, 154–157, 164, 166, 179, 202, 210, 227–228, 241, 248, 250, 252, 288, 293, 325–326, 337, 340, 356–358, 360, 363, 380, 390, 408, 417, 438, 448, 455, 459 Barthes, Roland, 84, 86–100, 103–104 Bathsheba’s dilemma, 5, 80–81, 83, 88, 99–100, 102 Biesecker, Barbara, 36, 51, 56, 68, 81, 105, 119, 123, 135, 139, 144, 334–337, 352, 355–359, 381, 388, 390, 395 Bizzell, Patricia, xvi, 34, 36, 51, 81–83, 89, 102–103, 105, 110, 113, 123, 125–126, 144, 146- 147, 167, 173, 175, 181, 219, 231, 396, 440, 460 border-crossing, xiv, 55, 72 Borderlands, 57, 59, 62–63, 66, 72–75 Burke, Kenneth, xvi, 55, 58, 60, 73, 75, 80, 86–89, 105, 120, 182, 219, 342, 366, 370, 379, 391, 395 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, xvi, 3, 7, 12, 18, 77, 79, 82–83, 102, 105, 119, 123, 147, 167, 170, 176, 181, 184, 189, 199, 221, 234, 248–249, 251, 253, 272, 313–317, 319–320, 325, 327, 330–331, 334, 335–338, 340–342, 351–352, 355, 381, 383, 393, 395, 404, 407, 430, 434, 438 Chicana feminist rhetorics, 111–112, 184–185, 187–200 477

478

Cicero, xvi, 38, 42, 46, 51, 56–58, 60, 68, 71, 73, 76, 78, 89, 93, 105, 225, 231–232, 340, 389, 404, 407, 412, 418, 427, 455 Cocks, Joan, 19–20 conduct manuals, 82, 275–282, 286–289 consciousness-raising, 15, 325 Corbett, Edward P. J., 58, 63–64, 77, 91, 105, 178 critical rhetoric, 314, 328–331 cult of true womanhood, xvi, 10, 12–14, 16–17, 111, 165, 234, 274, 277, 289, 398, 436 Daly, Mary, 5, 65, 67, 77, 80, 82, 84–86, 97, 99, 100–101, 104, 182, 378–379, 383, 396, 471, 476 de Certeau, Michel, 19, 20–21, 29, 34, 174, 181, 349–350, 354, 463–464 deconstruction, 24, 91, 339, 343–344, 347, 352, 379, 385 delivery (canon of), xviii, 4, 44, 56–57, 59, 63–65, 67–73, 76, 78, 95, 184, 195, 254, 407 Derrida, Jacques, 35, 75, 102–103, 105–106, 343–345, 347–348, 350, 352, 354, 358, 379, 466 dichotomy feminism, 360, 381, 382, 383, 384, 393 education, x, xviii, 7, 15–16, 36, 38, 42, 69, 162, 157, 220, 223–224, 228, 233, 236, 250, 275, 276–277, 312, 324, 342, 400, 408, 414; higher education 14, 26, 264, 294, 333, 401– 403, 409, 411, 413, 430; race and education, 127, 129–130, 132–136, 138,143, 194, 258, 263, 265, 269, 267; rhetorical education, xv, xix, 78, 126, 225, 230, 334, 398–399, 406, 415, 417, 419–422, 425–429, 451; eloquence, 42, 44–45, 172–173, 224–226, 231–233, 236, 249, 250, 252–253, 278–279, 331, 379, 381–382, 385, 391–393, 396, 412, 418 emotion, 63, 65, 67–68, 96, 110, 112, 117–120, 122–123, 125, 143, 306, 327, 441, 447 empowerment, 15, 91, 167, 314, 325, 326, 342 essentialism, 23, 24, 26, 30, 103, 118, 179, 228, 352, 453

Index

ethic of care, 324, 326, 328 ethos, 31, 65, 73, 74, 92, 93, 94, 110–111, 119, 130, 135, 146–149, 151, 153–154, 157, 161–162, 221, 238, 259, 291, 302, 334, 345, 347, 361, 398, 404, 405, 415, 427, 439, 440 experience, x, 3–4, 8, 14–15, 22, 24–28, 44, 59, 64, 66–67, 73–74, 76, 93, 96, 101–102, 110, 112, 120, 123, 129, 137–138, 140–142, 147–148, 153–156, 158–161, 164, 168, 173, 175, 179, 184, 188–194, 198, 209, 221, 223, 226, 228, 230, 240, 260, 261, 271, 314–322, 326–327, 330, 333, 338, 347, 366, 372–373, 376–377, 386, 390, 392–394, 415, 419, 422, 426–428, 440, 447, 458 feminine style, 4, 14, 17, 82, 105, 221, 313–317, 319–320, 324–325, 327, 329, 389–390, 396 feminist historiography, xiv, xix, 3–4, 20–21, 24–25, 28, 32, 36, 49, 82, 109–115, 117, 125–126, 130, 147, 149, 150, 170, 171, 174, 176–178, 180, 184–185, 189, 191, 193, 198, 220, 344, 350, 439, 440, 467 feminist research, x, xvi, xix, 24, 109, 111–113, 115–116, 119–121, 151, 171–176, 179, 209, 219, 334, 369, 440, 457 feminist research methodologies, xvi, xviii, 111 feminist research methods, xv, xvi, xviii, 3–4, 58, 109–110, 112–117, 119, 120, 122–123, 143, 170, 172–173, 175, 184, 187, 193, 197, 205, 247, 313, 439,- 441, 443, 446–448, 450–451, 455, 459, 465 feminist standpoint theory, 3–4, 27–28, 88, 110–112, 120, 122, 142, 174–175, 179, 266, 327, 329, 373, 439, feminist theory, 21, 23, 59, 71, 74, 92, 99, 101, 104, 179, 365, 444 Foucault, Michel, 22, 29, 30, 103, 115, 123, 146–149, 167, 181, 197, 199, 344–348, 353–354, 357–358, 383, 396, 435, 438, 449–450, 453, 458–461 Gearhart, Sally Miller, 60, 362–363, 367, 369, 375–376, 379, 381–382, 396 gender critique, 110, 476

Index

gender diversity perspective, 361, 381, 383, 385–386, 388–391, 39–395 gendered analysis, 21–22, 24, 31 gendered readings, 21, 32–33 Glenn, Cheryl, xiii-xiv, xvii, 4–5, 75, 81, 82, 105, 109–111, 115–119, 121–122, 124–126, 143–144, 147, 167, 170, 172, 176, 181, 184, 193, 200, 334, 404, 430, 434, 438–440, 443–449, 451, 455, 457, 459–460, 464, 466 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 220, 254–256, 258–259, 262, 265, 267–268, 270–271 history of rhetoric, xvii, xix, 3–4, 7, 12, 20–23, 30–32, 34, 36–38, 48–49, 64, 69, 72, 75, 82, 84, 90, 97–101, 104–106, 109–110, 113–116, 118, 123, 150, 166, 170–178, 180, 184, 190, 338–344, 350- 351, 381, 387–389, 402–403, 407, 409, 429, 442, 444, 447, 452–454, 463–464, 467 ideal woman, 36, 38, 41, 224, 230, 233, 280, 286, 289, 447 identification, 15, 24, 64, 72, 86, 87, 101, 120, 131, 138, 180, 221, 315, 320, 323, 325, 375–376, 378, 405, 455 identity, 24, 26–29, 33, 38, 67, 70, 81, 85, 95, 97, 101–102, 104, 112, 120, 129, 136, 138– 139, 171, 173–174, 178, 180, 185, 241–242, 247, 275, 292, 314, 323, 331, 339, 341, 343, 344–347, 372, 381–382, 384–385, 387–388, 436, 445–446, 456 invention (canon of), 4, 8, 12, 44, 46, 51–52, 56–60, 64, 95, 126, 224–226, 254, 345, 357, 377- 378, 451 invitational rhetoric, 76, 182, 334, 360–361, 365–367, 369, 371, 373–378, 384, 387, 396, 474, 476 irenic rhetoric, 398–401, 403, 415, 419, 429, 433, 435–437 Jagger, Alison, 23 Jarratt, Susan, xvii, 4–5, 34, 44–45, 52, 64, 75, 81–82, 86, 89, 103, 106, 110–111, 115–119, 121- 122, 124–126, 142–145, 147, 168, 170,

479

172, 181, 334, 389, 396, 429, 439, 440, 443–444, 451- 455, 457, 459–462, 465, 468 justice, xviii, 16, 40, 48, 112, 128–129, 139, 140–143, 174–176, 193, 196, 207–208, 218, 235, 262, 264–266, 272, 298, 310, 338–339, 360 kairos, 216, 225 Kempe, Margery, 51, 69–70, 78, 93 Kristeva, Julia, 62, 66–67, 75, 77, 83, 87–88, 102, 106, 114 letter writing, 219, 225, 275, 336, 406–407, 434 logos, xix, 45, 74, 102, 168, 182, 452, 454 Lorde, Audre, 59, 61, 64–66, 81, 374–376, 380 map metaphor, xiii-xiv, 4, 24, 36, 49, 50, 56, 100, 109, 167, 348, 463 masculinity, xvi, 5, 13–14, 21–24, 32, 47–48, 50, 58, 62, 69–72, 74, 220–221, 224–226, 276, 297, 309, 315–316, 323, 327, 333, 338–339, 355, 360–361, 388, 390, 395, 398–399, 401–403, 405, 408, 434, 443, 447, 457, 467 material rhetoric, 147–151, 154, 163, 166 materialist-feminism, 84–85, 88, 106, 169, 342 maternal, 15, 16, 71,157–158, 315, 325–326, 332 memory (canon of), 4, 49, 56–59, 76, 95, 167, 196, 219, 221, 291–292, 303, 305–308, 312, 454, 460, 463 methodology, xv-xvi, xviii, xix, 5, 55, 68, 81, 90, 103, 109–112, 115, 119–123, 125–126, 145, 147, 149–151, 170–174, 176–177, 180–182, 184–185, 198, 201, 206–207, 215, 333, 439–444, 447, 452, 455, 458–460, 462, 465 offering, 360, 367–371, 374, 390–391 pedagogy, x, xvi, xviii, 24, 38, 78, 81–82, 84, 86, 90, 98–99, 105, 107, 111, 126–127, 130, 136–137, 157, 168, 174, 194, 215, 217–218,

480

230, 233, 258, 263–265, 267–269, 275, 282, 398, 400, 406–407, 415, 420–421, 428– 430, 432, 438, 445, 451, 459, 464 Pericles, 4, 38–46, 48, 50–52, 69, 443–448, 456, 459, 461, 465 Plato, xvi, xix, 31–34, 38–40, 42–48, 52, 54, 64, 75–76, 78, 106, 116, 172–173, 219, 226, 231, 349, 358, 388, 405, 443–444, 447– 448, 450–454, 456–457, 459, 461, 465 polis, 29, 37, 40–41, 45, 48, 436, 448 politics of location, 24, 26, 35, 67, 79 positionality, 26–27 postbellum period, 274–276, 279, 289 postmodern theory, 3–4, 34–35, 56, 58, 67–68, 73–74, 76, 79, 110, 115–117, 121, 124, 144, 146, 170–171, 174–177, 181–182, 203, 328–330, 353, 379, 439, 442, 444, 446–449, 451, 453, 455, 457, 459, 462–463, 465, 466 poststructuralist theory, 23–24, 35, 56, 73–74, 88, 174, 197, 334–336, 342–343, 346, 352, 381 preaching, xvi, 13, 131, 132, 155–159, 161, 163–167, 226–232, 237, 245, 250, 257–258, 261–262, 388, 390, 406–411, 434–435, 438 private sphere, 10, 38, 177, 248 public memorials, 219, 221, 291–292, 297–307, 310–311 public memory, 221, 291, 303, 305–308, 311–312 recovery, xv-xvi, xix-xx, 3–5, 36, 58, 81–83, 91–92, 101–102, 110–112, 123, 135, 146–147, 150, 157, 178, 179, 181, 184, 187, 189–190, 196–198, 221, 228, 321, 334–336, 342, 404, 436, 439- 442, 454 regender, xiii, xviii, 4–5, 36, 50–51, 75, 176, 181, 200 religion, 150, 208, 229, 238, 248, 250–251, 380, 435, 436; beatas, 127–134, 136–143 Methodist, 111, 146–147, 151, 153, 155, 156–159, 161–166, 168 Renaissance, 35, 51, 70, 75, 82, 114, 181, 200, 219, 223, 227, 230–231, 233, 336, 388, 408,

Index

430, 438, 444, 460, 462, 464 representation, xv, 4, 24, 26, 29–31, 33–34, 45, 49, 56, 105, 112, 121, 149, 157, 202–203, 205–210, 213–215, 217, 219, 236, 280, 291, 340, 344, 349, 440, 443, 447, 451–452, 454, 456, 463, 465 re-sourcement, 369–371, 374, 379, 396 Reynolds, Nedra, xiv, xx, 205, 217, 460 rhetoric of conversation, 223, 225, 231, 289 rhetorical accretion, 111, 148–149, 151, 154–155, 162–165, 167 rhetorical analysis, 8, 87, 89, 109, 202, 205– 207, 210, 214–215, 313, 328, 341, 343, 350, 395, 422 rhetorical canons, xiii, xviii-xix, 4, 56–60, 63, 67–68, 72–74, 90, 95, 98, 234 rhetorical criticism, 7–8, 184, 248, 313–314, 329, 337–389, 396, 460 rhetorical education, xv, xix, 126, 225, 279, 333–334, 398–399, 415–416, 421–422, 433–434 rhetorical geneology, 112 rhetorical situation, xv, 15, 17, 59, 73, 80, 90, 97, 104, 150, 185, 190, 193, 196, 198, 315, 352, 361, 395 rhetorical theory, 4, 56, 58, 81, 86, 88, 90, 98, 113–114, 206, 223, 225–226, 229, 231, 250, 331, 336–337, 351–352, 355, 362, 365, 376, 378–379, 384, 388, 396, 418, 425 Rhetorical Tradition, The, 81, 105, 113, 123, 460 rhetorics of survival, 184, 194 Rich, Adrienne, 5, 24, 25, 35, 67, 77, 80, 82, 84–86, 97, 99–101, 104, 114, 182, 338, 352, 374–375, 380, 397 Richards, Ann, 71–72, 221, 314, 316–332, 389–390, 396 Ronald, Kate, xi, 4, 218–219 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, xiv, xviii, 85, 86, 107, 110, 115, 119–124, 170–171, 175–177, 180, 182, 184, 201, 333 Scott, Joan, 21–23, 32, 35, 41, 52, 56, 173–174, 179, 182, 289–290, 363

Index

second wave feminism, 24, 197 Seneca Falls convention, 9, 235, 239, 356 Sojourner Truth, 28, 70–71, 79, 82, 93, 144, 254, 260–262, 272, 275, 355, 391, 453 sophistic historiography, 440, 444, 452–454, 460 sophists, 20, 28–29, 33–34, 41, 44–45, 52, 64, 69, 75, 82, 106, 118, 124, 168, 181, 225, 231, 448, 452–454, 460, 466–468 spirituality, 12–13, 25, 69–70, 111, 127–128, 130, 131–139, 143–144, 147, 151, 153–160, 164–165, 168, 228, 379 Spivak, Gayatri, 4, 23, 26–27, 29–31, 35, 56, 75, 343, 351–354 style (canon of), xvi, xviii, 4, 15, 44, 56–57, 59, 60, 63–64, 67, 70–73, 95, 219, 225–227, 229, 242, 252, 254, 256, 257–258, 261, 314, 316, 325, 329, 335, 390, 399, 402, 432, 454 subjectivity, xiii, 26, 28, 30–31, 33, 48, 59, 62, 64, 67, 73–74, 80, 82, 84, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98–99, 101, 109, 174–176, 227, 339–348, 350–352, 354, 361, 368, 454

481

suffrage movement, xviii, 7–11, 13, 17–18, 70, 79, 234–235, 248, 253, 260, 291–292, 305, 308, 312, 313, 331–332, 369, 423 techne, 90–91, 135, 139, 335, 343, 349–351, 358, 452–453 temperance movement, xvi, 10, 17–18, 219– 221, 258, 275, 291–295, 297–306, 308–312, 423 Third World rhetorical women, 26, 30, 56, 111, 170–171, 173, 178–180, 182, 190, 202–203, 210, 213–215 topoi, 31, 97, 111, 126, 129, 219 Wells, Ida B., 81, 119–120, 124, 201, 220, 254, 256, 263, 265–266, 272 women of color, 74 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 80-, 81, 82, 84-, 85, 86, 95, 97, 99–101, 106–107, 114, 176, 182

About the Editors Lindal Buchanan is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University. Kathleen J. Ryan is Associate Professor of English and the Director of Composition at the University of Montana. Both have substantial experience and expertise in the area of feminist rhetorics. Together, they have given more than thirty presentations on the topic at regional, national, and international conferences. Buchanan has published award-winning articles on feminist rhetorics as well Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Ryan is also an accomplished scholar, having published multiple articles on feminism, writing, and rhetoric, including one on edited collections in feminist rhetorical studies (Rhetoric Review, 2006) and one on teaching women’s rhetoric (“Course Design: Women, Writing, and Rhetoric,” Composition Studies, 2006). In addition to their research, the editors bring valuable classroom perspectives to this project, having designed and taught undergraduate, graduate, and independent study courses on women rhetors and feminist rhetorical scholarship.

483

Rhetoric and Composition

In Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics, Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan “have presented the field of feminist rhetorics . . . with an important and timely collection of primary scholarly work, the first collection of late twentieth and twenty-first century published scholarship in this field that they claim is here to stay. Feminist rhetorics, they assert, is ‘no longer a promising possibility or a nascent area of study but has, in fact, arrived.’ I agree with them, and I applaud their bold yet careful stance in framing this ‘walk through’ feminist rhetorics.” — Kate Ronald, “Foreword” Contributors include Barbara Biesecker, Patricia Bizzell, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Vicki Tolar Collins (Burton), Celeste. M. Condit, Robert Connors, Jane Donawerth, Bonnie J. Dow, ​Lisa Ede, Jessica Enoch, Sonja K. Foss, Xin Liu Gale, Cheryl Glenn, Cindy. L. Griffin, Susan Jarratt, Nan Johnson, Shirley Wilson Logan, Andrea Lunsford, Carol Mattingly, Roxanne Mountford, Mary Queen, Krista Ratcliffe, Susan Romano, Mary B. Tonn, Hui Wu, and Susan Zaeske. Lindal Buchanan is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University. Kathleen J. Ryan is Associate Professor of English and the Director of Composition at the University of Montana.

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Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies gathers significant, oft-cited scholarship about feminism and rhetoric into one convenient volume. Essays examine the formation of the vibrant and growing field of feminist rhetoric; feminist historiographic research methods and methodologies; and women’s distinct sites, genres, and styles of rhetoric. The book’s most innovative and pedagogically useful feature is its presentation of controversies in the form of case studies, each consisting of exchanges between or among scholars about significant questions. These debates have shaped the field’s past and continue to influence its present and future directions. The collection provides both students and teachers with an accessible introduction to and comprehensive overview of the intersections of feminisms and rhetorics.

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