Reviewed by: Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Michelle C. Smith Nancy Myers Michelle C. Smith, Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2021. 234 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8093-3835-1. In her 1863 self-researched and self-published The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work, Virginia Penny points out that "the false opinion that exists in regard to the occupations suitable for women must be changed ere women have free access to all those in which they may engage."1 Penny's research may have expanded her readers' views on women's work in the nineteenth century; however, Michelle C. Smith's Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age illustrates for the contemporary reader the "social, economic, and cultural shifts" and contexts during the antebellum period that effect gendered labor issues today (11). Comprised of five chapters, Utopian Genderscapes presents three rhetorical case studies of intentional communities: Brook Farm (1841–1847) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Harmony Society (1804–1905) settling near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1825; and the Oneida Community (1848–1881) in Oneida, New York (3). These examinations on gendered labor are framed at the beginning of the book with Smith's theoretical lens, historical [End Page 97] context, and rhetorical argument about gendered labor during the antebellum period and at the end of the text with the continuing utopian fallacy of gendered and class labor in our own time as expressed through tropes such as "tidying up," "leaning in," and "having it all" (148–153). Smith's overarching argument claims that "such rhetorics of gendered labor function to increase divides among women and preclude alliances on the basis of gender" (5). She grounds her argument through her clearly articulated and detailed theoretical approach of analyzing the intentional communities as "ecologies of gender" (6–11). This material-feminist rhetorical lens examines each community's practices in its resistance to the larger context of American industrialization and in its reflection of that industrialization as well as the societal and the cultural attitudes about gendered labor. The three case studies, as Smith explains, convey "the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that comprised women's work within each community, intervened in larger rhetorics of women's work, and initiated patterns of gendered labor that persist today" (4). In "Domestic Rhetorics," which details the distribution of labor at the transcendentalist community Brook Farm, Smith focuses on women's work to argue that while women branched out into nondomestic labor, men did not venture into traditional housework, thus reinforcing its stigma as representing menial chores. To alleviate the burden of daily living and provide time for other endeavors, the community's middle and upper-class women employed working-class women for housework further associating those tasks with class divisions. "Professional Rhetorics" demonstrates how women, labor, and prestige are not allied. In fact, as is illustrated by Gertrude Rapp in the Harmony Society, the success of one woman's entrepreneurial and rhetorical endeavors becomes a synecdoche for all women working in the silk industry. Unfortunately, many women at that time in the silk industry were laborers working for low wages and in unsafe working conditions, so they were not aligned with Rapp's privilege and whiteness. Focused on the Oneida Community, "Reproductive Rhetorics" illustrates the complex dynamic between an intentional community's mission and its practices resulting both in reinscribing societal norms tied to motherhood, childcare, and housework and in creating new hierarchies of gendered and class labor and authority. In the final chapter, Smith appropriately positions herself as researcher and scholar, as she did in the book's opening, with her clearly articulated argument and analytical method. She expands on her aims in writing history "to restore a sense of possibility" and to make that history relevant for today as a means to imagine what "might yet be otherwise" (27). She validates her aims by drawing connections between each intentional community and current social, cultural, and economic practices and attitudes about housework, professional women supporting the advancement of other women, and the continued tension...

Reviewed by: Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History by Jason Barrett-Fox Lisa Mastrangelo Jason Barrett-Fox, Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5828-6. Jason Barrett-Fox's Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History offers feminist scholars and in particular feminist historians a dense but useful theoretical method for reading and recovering feminist artifacts. In particular, Barrett-Fox is focused on media such as film and book publication. He uses his new method for reading to examine work by the film star and medium Mae West, the silent film scenarist, novella writer, and autobiographer Anita Loos, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius, the writer, editor, and co-owner of socialist publishing company Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company (source of the famous Little Blue Books series). On the surface these seem odd choices since all three have already been "recovered" and there is extensive scholarship about them. However, part of Barrett-Fox's critique of earlier recovery projects is the tendency to recover the women that we recognize most easily from our own vantage points, particularly academic women. His project therefore diverges in order to read West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius through new rhetorical lenses. [End Page 450] Barrett-Fox explicitly builds on early feminist historiography scholars such as Barbara Biesecker, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, and Carol Mattingly. Noting the strengths and weaknesses of extant models, Barrett-Fox jumps off from these previous models of feminist historiography by using a concept he calls "Medio-Materialist Historiography" or MMH. This concept provides new methods for reading texts from the past, particularly complicated ones, and requires several things from the objects in consideration. Chief among them is the original creator's use of some form of "inscriptional technology" and their "facility with a particular medium" (48). Next, "another facet of a likely candidate would be the quality with which she manipulated her chosen media and how those manipulations coincided with particular messages, critiques, or other, less overt demonstrations of (distributed) rhetorical force" (48). Importantly (and in a deviation from much current rhetorical recovery work), the material creator, in Barrett-Fox's imagining of MMH, need not be intentionally creating feminist material and may instead be responding to the private circumstances (social, historical, economic) of their own lives (31). MMH would allow for researchers to trace not just the materializations of the subject but also the distributions that result. Barrett-Fox begins with a discussion of how works may move between the ontic and the ontological in what he calls "radical inscription: materialized inscription that punctures the membrane separating the ontic from the ontological and, often, the past from the present" (4, emphasis original). With this in place, Barrett-Fox sets up the discussion of MMH and the ways in which it can be used to move beyond previous readings and even previous qualifications for whose work is recoverable. Chapter 1 of the text introduces us briefly to each of the three women under discussion (West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius) as well as some background of the ways in which these women have been remembered. Barrett-Fox also lays out some further background for the concept of MMH through the discussion of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose 1887 experimentation with telepathy pushed the threshold between existence and knowability, and Georges Méliès's concept of the "cinematic stop trick," which used distortion to create images that were not "real" (much as current cinema does with CGI). Perhaps the most important concept introduced in this first chapter is the idea of cold kairos: the idea that a text or artifact may have been dormant for many years but can now be mediated. This notion is particularly helpful for those of us who routinely encounter historical artifacts and think that they are interesting but need a larger or better framework for thinking about how and why they should be recovered. Through Chapters 2, 3, and 4 (Loos, West, and Haldeman-Julius, respectively), Barrett-Fox introduces new concepts to help bolster an MMH reading of each of his subjects. In Chapter 2, for example, Barrett-Fox introduces the idea of using MMH...

Reviewed by: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Sarah Walden Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 In Lives, Letters, and Qailts, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan argues for the value of “everyday rhetorics of resistance” or “the conscious, purposeful recontextualization of the seemingly ordinary means and materials available in order to mediate thought and action, and to persuade others” (3). She examines three women or groups of women who demonstrate the power of persistent, everyday acts that recontextualize the means available to them in a particular time, place, and space. Throughout the book Sohan emphasizes two key arguments. First, she argues for the importance of a translingual and transmodal framework in order to avoid oversimplifying language, to understand difference as the norm, to “recover and reclaim the ways individual composers recontextualize within and across languages, genres, modes, and media,” and to adopt “more democratic and descriptive approaches to language” (9). Sohan’s second key argument involves the need to expand what counts as rhetoric, to redefine resistance, and to reframe how scholars situate rhetors who do not necessarily fit within the typical heroic narratives. For example, when Sohan discusses the ministry of Eliza P. Gurney, she describes the legend that one of Gurney’s letters was in President Abraham Lincoln’s breast pocket the night he was assassinated. She writes, in one of the most powerful lines of the book, that this myth serves as “a reminder of how a powerful, feminist rhetorical figure can be pigeonholed and, as a result, remain hidden in plain sight, because her rhetorical practice is evaluated solely in relation to the men with whom she came in contact, rather than on its own merit” (70-71). Sohan’s commitment to feminist rhetorical scholarship is clear throughout the book as she works to articulate and examine the everyday rhetoric available to women and to argue for its value as a site of study. In chapter one, Sohan explores the letter-writing campaigns of the Townsend Movement, a populist movement that advocated pension reform for the elderly by establishing local clubs that could organize and promote the plan through letter-writing campaigns, voter-registration drives, and petitions. These clubs promoted literacy through workshopping letter-writing, which allowed members to “collaboratively imagine” their future without financial worries (41). Pearl Buckhalter, president of the Oregon [End Page 209] City, Oregon, Townsend Club No. 1, is an example of a leader who recontextualized the means available to position herself as an expert, using her own experience as her ethos, rather than simply repeating the words prescribed by Townsend headquarters (52). Sohan argues convincingly that the translingual and transmodal literacy practices of the Townsend Movement allowed individuals like Buckhalter to transform their lives through the literacy training they receive as part of their activism, even if the movement they promote ultimately fails, as the Townsend Movement did. Nevertheless, she argues, this is exactly why rhetorical scholars must fight against the impulse to examine only heroic narratives of activism and must include the everyday in their analyses. In chapter two, Sohan examines the life and work of Quaker minister and activist Eliza P. Gurney. Gurney, Sohan argues, skillfully blends the epideictic form of classical rhetoric with the “nondirective, nonconfrontational, conversational rhetorical approach” of the Quaker community (71-72). Sohan examines several key parts of her ministry: her development as a minister, her traveling ministry in Europe, and her relationship with President Lincoln. Sohan argues that Gurney harnessed silence and kairos to establish an ethos with potentially hostile audiences, at a time when ethos was assumed to be more fixed than fluid. In her discussion of Gurney’s meeting and correspondence with Lincoln, Sohan demonstrates how Gurney recontextualized the epideictic to develop a relationship with the president and to plead with him to imagine a more peaceful and just world. In this chapter, Sohan significantly builds on prior scholarship on Gurney to establish her as a skillful activist and rhetorician through a detailed exploration of Gurney’s speeches, letters, and meetings. Chapter three is perhaps...

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970 by Sara Hillin Jennifer Keohane Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 It is easy to see why Amelia Earhart has soared over the public memory of women in aviation. She was charismatic, committed to promoting women in flight, and left behind a trove of speeches, articles, and books to analyze. Yet, this valorization of Earhart’s accomplishments as the main story of women in aviation is exactly what Sara Hillin writes against in her new book. Instead, Hillin argues, there are a number of female aviators who were not [End Page 472] only taking to the skies against stacked odds, but writing and speaking about it too. Hillin’s project is primarily based in recovery. She seeks to add the words of the rhetors covered here to fill gaps in feminist rhetorical historiography (1). Earhart does not feature prominently in the analysis; although the 99s—a vocal and organized group of female aviators—are covered, and Earhart was their first president. Instead, Hillin focuses on lesser-known writers and flyers including Harriet Quimby, the first women licensed as a pilot in the United States and a transportation columnist for Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Other important aviators include Bessie Coleman and Willa Beatrice Brown, African American stunt pilots covered extensively in the Chicago Defender; Mary Alexander, a flying mother who threw birthday parties for her children in the air; and Jerrie Cobb, a pilot who passed all the tests to join the Mercury program but was never allowed to go to space. The book follows a loosely chronological structure, moving from the 1910s to the 1970s, and features eight analytical chapters, each of which focus on a different woman or group of women. While these women confronted a variety of obstacles in taking to the air, the driving similarity is their rhetorical acumen. As Hillin writes, “Rather than simply describing their experiences, they harnessed their rhetorical intuition to get others to act—to accept women as aviators, to train them as equals with men, and to influence the overall development of aviation and space exploration” (10). The narrative Hillin tells is not one of slow but steady progress throughout the twentieth century. In fact, in its infancy, flight had not yet been gendered masculine. As per Hillin’s telling, “there was something uniquely magic, even divine” in the fact that Harriet Quimby was taken so seriously as an expert on flying in her columns for Leslie’s (22). Indeed, like many of the women examined here, Quimby relied on her personal experience as an aviator to build her ethos, which Hillin defines as an embodied rhetoric in which “her physical self and its connection with the tool (airplane)” granted credibility (35). The world wars of the twentieth century also provide an important backdrop. Many women wrote against using the airplane as a tool for war, while others took advantage of the need for trained aviators to expand their place in the field (49). Other aviators had to negotiate the unique demands of race politics in addition to gender. African American flyer Bessie Coleman engaged in barnstorming tours and stunt flying, visual rhetorics that proved her skill, while white female aviators could skip these dangerous venues for flight because they had access to other forms of funding, training, and media outlets (62). Likewise, by the time Jerrie Cobb sought access to space, the Cold War competitive mentality had hardened space travel as solely a masculine achievement (137). To study the first few decades of women’s involvement in aviation is to see women doing painstaking and effective rhetorical work to grab and maintain a place in a field in which they have consistently excelled since its inception,” Hillin concludes (165). [End Page 473] Hillin has undertaken an impressive amount of archival research, and the sources she uses to recover the rhetorical actions of these female aviators are wide-ranging. She analyzes personal letters, news coverage, books, speeches, and press releases (6). The theoretical through-line for Hillin’s rhetorical analysis is Kenneth Burke’s pentad (11). This orients...

Reviewed by: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus Logan Blizzard William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 William Kirlinkus’ Nostalgic Design poses a central question: “What are you nostalgic for, why, and to which ends?” (4, 21). Nostalgia has a bad reputation in contemporary discourse, central as it has been to recent conservative movements, like the propagandistic, restorative nostalgia of “Make America Great Again.” This conflation has allowed progressives and critics to dismiss nostalgia as purely regressive and/or nationalistic, which “simply relieves critics of the responsibility of understanding an ‘illogical’ group . . . [and] blinds [them] to their own nostalgic impulses” (29). But the truth is that we are all nostalgic for something, insofar as the futures we imagine are necessarily shaped by what we value from the past. What is needed, and what Kirlinkus offers throughout the book, is a means to negotiate multiple, conflicting nostalgias, and put their affective force to constructive, democratic, and inclusive ends. By reframing nostalgia, Kirlinkus articulates nostalgic design, “a perspective and method” for engaging with competing nostalgias and incorporating these into the design of technology. The inherent rhetoricity of design—defined broadly as “the methods by which expert makers create some technology to be operated by a specific user, in a specific context, in order to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’”—has long been acknowledged by theorists like Richard Buchanan and Donald Norman, and often aligns with the future- orientation of the dominant technological paradigm (or “techno-logic”). Nostalgia, here defined as “pride and longing for lost or threatened personally or culturally experienced pasts” (6), would seem more closely aligned with another rhetorical process: memory. By recognizing that technology is far more historically-oriented than designers tend to admit (given that users tend to understand the new only through the old), nostalgic design posits nostalgia as powerful, largely-untapped resource for designers of all types, from graphic designers to medical professionals. As Kirlinkus argues, to overcome the tendency of tech design to neglect entire social groups, we must take seriously the memories, experiences, and concerns of a wide spectrum of users, and incorporate these into the very process of design. Much of the book is devoted to putting nostalgic design into practice, as a method. Kirlinkus frames the approach as a three-step process: identifying [End Page 464] exclusionary designs, mediating technological conflicts, and, ultimately, designing meaningful products (24). Perhaps due to the readily-apparent nature of exclusions in technology, the only real consideration of this first step comes in Chapter 2, which examines several cases of “critical nostos” (51), of amateurism functioning as resistance. Instead, the primary concern of Nostalgic Design is navigating the wildly divergent visions and values held by users and designers. In this way, the project runs into one of the defining questions for deliberative democracy: how to incorporate a plurality of opinions, needs, and values in a manner that is at once equitable and agonistic. The third chapter, one of the book’s strongest, engages with these concerns directly; setting four prominent theories of deliberative rhetoric—Aristotelian audience analysis, Burkean identification, Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, and Mouffe’s agonism—alongside corresponding models of deliberative design. This juxtaposition highlights the shortcomings of previous, well-meaning attempts at inclusive design, such as the patronizing efforts of “user-centered design,” or the tendency of “empathic design” to sideline designer expertise. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the final step in the process, explicating meaningful design. Returning to the pseudo-oral history method from the second chapter, Kirlinkus focuses squarely on design praxis, bringing in accounts of real designers who have developed productive relationships with user nostalgia. This approach is of particular use in Chapter 5, which poses the interactions between designers and clients as a potential conflict between the designer’s expert knowledge (techne) and the client’s experience (metis). The correlation between rhetorical communication and design professions truly shines in this discussion, as the process of adapting, adopting, or refusing feedback requires careful attention to knowledge boundaries and productive opposition—in short, the skills of the rhetorician. The project culminates with a...

Reviewed by: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Jennifer Keohane Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Feminist rhetoricians have pursued recovery projects for many years. Seeking to demonstrate that women had multifaceted impacts on public life, they dove deep into archives to find the forgotten fragments of their public statements. In the engaging introduction to this collection, Letizia Guglielmo labels this practice “recollecting,” which she defines both as an act of bringing to mind but also as an act of “gathering or assembling again what has been scattered” (2). Indeed, this volume serves as such recollection, bringing together fourteen eclectic essays on women’s contributions to many arenas of symbolic and collective life. As with many feminist rhetorical projects, the editors—Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey—insist that recovery of forgotten women is not the end goal of their volume. Instead (and inspired by work by Jessica Enoch and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch), they explore the rhetorical work required to remember women alongside how the memories of women come to be created, used, or erased in various situations (x). The editors segment the book into four different sections: new theoretical frameworks, erased collaborators, overlooked rhetors and texts, and disrupted memories. To the editors’ credit, the afterword recognizes that alternative organizational schemas could also have served to organize these diverse essays into a readable flow. Organization by chronology, methodology, or genre of text would facilitate additional insights into female reputation management and construction. The editors have selected the organizational scheme they use to “provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives [and] create a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues” (257–8). As a result, however, each section contains rhetors and projects that are quite different. The collection as a whole features rhetors stretching from Byzantine historian Anna Komnene to Nigerian anticolonial activist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to oral expression teacher Anna Baright Curry. [End Page 342] The collection’s greatest contribution is in recovery. Indeed, the rhetors and rhetorical practices studied here will likely be unfamiliar to most. And, for more recognizable speakers like Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day’ authors bring new insights and lenses to examine their rhetoric. Many of the authors in this “re-collection” answer Enoch’s call to examine rhetorical work broadly with great creativity and strength. That is, they interrogate questions of why some of these rhetors have been forgotten or have had their reputations tarnished throughout history. In the first section, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” the editors feature essays that “suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women” (xi). Essays by Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher, Alice Johnston Myatt, Maria Martin, and Ellen Quandahl foreground new ways of engaging the memory of women. In one particularly interesting contribution, Myatt explores the phases involved in reclaiming women’s reputations. Using Rosalind Franklin, a largely unknown scientist integral to the discovery of DNA’s structure, she shows how and why her reputation passed through erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration (41–2). Other contributions look to indigenous theory and social circulation as ways to understand the struggle and successes of women as anticolonial activists, physicians, computer programmers, and historians. The second section, “Erased Collaborators,” explores how women’s work can be expunged when women collaborate with men, who are often subsequently credited for their contributions. Essays from Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart, Henrietta Nickels Shirk, and Suzanne Bordelon provide insights into the way these collaborations often disadvantaged women. Shirk, for instance, creatively analyzes the partnership between John James Audubon and painter Maria Martin by reading both their exchanged letters and the images on which they collaborated—he painted the birds and she the backgrounds for the famous Birds of America almanac. Yet, of course, Audubon’s fame and status far outshone Martin’s own, and her artistic skills are forgotten. In the third part, the editors call our attention to “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts” and examine activity that is not included in traditional definitions of...

Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780271083506 Anna Dudney Deeb Anna Dudney Deeb Brenau University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 435–437. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.435 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anna Dudney Deeb; Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 435–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.435 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Reviews 435 Nazianzo attraverso le categorie della stilistica antica sulla falsariga della polemica tra retori asiani e retori atticisti! Questo volume, che si conclude con utili indici di nomi e luoghi notevoli, offre un'interessante sintesi suggerendo con i suoi contributi proficue linee di indirizzo e metodologie d'indagine per le future ricerche sul tardo-antico. Francesco Berardi University of Chieti Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Womens Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780271083506 The 1893 Chicago World's Fair lasted a mere five months, but the copi­ ous records of speeches and programs from the event capture the tremen­ dous social, economic, and political evolution that took place during the Gilded Age. In Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Kristy Maddux zeros in on this fascinating period during which women were "caught in a dilemma of citizenship" (vii), meaning that they were legally full citizens but were not allowed to vote. The fair marked an almost unprecedented occasion for women's public address. Close to 800 women spoke as part of the fair's congresses on issues such as education, government, and religion. Maddux argues that the participation of these women enacted diverse citizenship practices that complicate previous understandings of women's citizenship in this era. To uncover how women negotiated greater participation in public life, Maddux analyzes a large batch of texts to identify "interrelationships or overlaps and how they wor­ ked together to project ideas of women's citizenship" during the fair (46). Maddux brings together the subjects of practicing citizenship, which has been of ongoing interest to rhetorical scholars, and women's public address at the fair, which is a subject that is ripe for analysis but has yet to receive extensive consideration from rhetorical scholars. Maddux conducts a rhetorical analysis of a discursive event that has largely been the purview of English and history scholars. She also moves away from what has been a traditional focus on suffragist rhetoric and toward previously unconsidered or undervalued women's citizenship practices. She argues that scholars have previously limited their focus to women's citizenship as the fight for suffrage, which fails to account for all the other ways in which women were organiz­ ing together and defining their public roles in the late nineteenth century. To recover women's citizenship practices, Maddux considers the fair as a "multivocal projection of the circulating discourses of the Gilded Age," rather than more common readings of the fair as a representation of contem­ poraneous ideas or an illusory vision of a perfect United States (25). Maddux identifies four practices of women's citizenship that frame the remaining analysis chapters: deliberative democracy, racial uplift, organized womanhood, 436 RHETORICA and economic participation. In Chapter 2, Maddux analyzes programs and promotional documents that demonstrate how the fair's congresses "pro­ jected a vision for deliberative democracy" for women (52). The congresses served as spaces for women's self-government and for defining their civic role. Women could celebrate their identities as women but also depart from their gendered identities when they spoke about their accomplishments in civil, scientific, and educational work. Chapter 3 considers how sixteen Congress speeches characterized acts of racial uplift as practices of citizen­ ship. For these women, the goal of racial uplift was to help women of vari­ ous ethnicities, races, and classes succeed, which in turn would benefit all of humankind. African American and white women forwarded discourses based on evolutionary progress against a backdrop of racial oppression that infused the fair and projected a model of racial uplift through working together. Chapter 4 examines how women considered membership and ser­ vice in voluntary organizations as platforms for citizenship. Women partic­ ipated in civil society and shaped their futures, and the futures of their nations, through organized womanhood. Finally, Maddux focuses on women's industrial participation and financial leadership as political prac­ tice in Chapter 5. Through speeches based in liberalism and republicanism, says Maddux, "these speakers offered models of female financial leader­ ship" and portrayed this leadership as an act of citizenship (172). The con­ clusion attends to...

122 RHETORIC A rejected some time ago,1 goes beyond redescribing Aristotelian virtues as vices in decoupling Aristotle's twin arts of politics and ethics according to the Aristotelian distinction between making and doing. Whereas the outcome of the former is a product, that of the latter is an action. And products differ from actions in that as made things products must be judged in and of them­ selves, according to how well they work and how long they last. Actions, in contrast, can only be qualified in terms of the moral character and intentions of the agents. As a made thing or product, then, the state, which, as we have seen, must be preserved at all costs, does not derive its quality of being good or bad from the moral dispositions of its rulers. Compared rather to the doc­ tor and the painter, Machiavelli's prince practices an art rooted ultimately in techrie rather than arete understood as excellence in any moral sense. Kathy Eden Columbia University David Randall, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siecle's Conversation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, vi + 266 pp. ISBN 9781474430104 David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni­ versity Press, 2019, vii + 288 pp. ISBN 9781474448666 In The Concept of Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment, David Randall proposes that conversation as a social, cultural, and histor­ ical force has not received its due, especially in the history of rhetoric. True, books on conversation appear every so often within and outside the academy, whether historian Peter Burke's modest essay collection The Art of Conversation, literary scholar Jane Donawerth's recovery of con­ versation as a model for women's rhetorical theory in Conversational Rhet­ oric, or American essayist Stephen Miller's quasi-apocalyptic jeremiad, Conversation: A Historij of a Declining Art. But Randall's ambitions are gran­ der. Beginning with these two volumes and promising an as-vet-untitled sequel, he unfolds the concept of conversation's development from ancient Rome through the Enlightenment, as well as its struggle to displace oratory as the dominant rhetorical mode. With these ends in mind, Randall Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), 131-38, esp. 135: "Thus the difference between Machiavelli and his contemporaries cannot adequately be characterized as a difference between a moral view of politics and a view of politics as divorced from morality. The essential contrast is rather between two different moralities—two rival and incompatible accounts of what ought ultimately to be done." Reviews 123 promises two interventions common to both books: first, to reveal conver­ sation s place in rhetoric s history, and second, to realize a larger narrative reorganization along the lines of Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transfor­ mation of the Public Sphere and Theory and Practice (Concept 2-3, 8-10). Beginning with Cicero's Rome and concluding with the Republic of Letters, The Concept of Conversation challenges conversation's exclusion from the history of rhetoric by following the parallel advances of sermo (or con­ versation) and conversatio (which Randall glosses variously in both books as "behavior" and "mutual conduct") until their convergence into a wider ranging phenomenon of sociability motivated by economic self-interest (Concept 1, 5, 183; Conversational 5). After the introduction establishes the many conceptual and theoretical terms Randall juggles, chapters 1, 2, and 3 track how conversation transcended its origins as interpersonal discus­ sion. Per Chapter 1, ancient sermo was familiar, leisured conversation that sought philosophical truth conducted among the educated, male, Roman elite. It was represented in print in dialogue form and generally thought to expiate oratory's transgressions, even as its own vices—flattery, for instance—threatened its irenic aims. Chapter 2 details how Medieval Chris­ tianity universalized the concept of friendship, while the increasing public­ ness of letters pushed the ars dictaminis toward oratorical rather than conversational ends. The third chapter traces how Renaissance humanism loosened conversation's connection to Ciceronian sermo further, making conversation "the synecdoche for all conversational modes of inquiry." In this way, conversation became a metaphor that extended far beyond in-person discussion (Concept 83). These opening...

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Assistant Professor, English Director of First-Year Writing English & Foreign Languages College of Arts & Sciences Barry University 11300 NE 2nd Ave Miami Shores, FL 33161 pbanaji@barry.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 422–424. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paige V. Banaji; Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 422–424. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudéry's engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudery’s engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudery enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudery’s Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudery’s feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

Reviews Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 In the opening line of Tasteful Domesticity, Sarah Walden notes, "Taste is an elusive concept" (p. 1). It refers to both a physical sense and a theoret­ ical concept, an individual preference and a cultural standard. Taste was also central to the empiricist philosophies and belletristic rhetorics that informed nineteenth-century American rhetorical theory. Although such theoretical discussions of taste were the province of men, Walden argues that American women in the late eighteenth through early twentieth centu­ ries engaged publicly in discourses of taste in their cookbooks. Walden reveals an evolution of taste discourse through the long nine­ teenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the era with which Walden's research begins, taste discourse contributed to the proj­ ect of nation building (p. 28). Engaging in this discourse, women cookbook authors in the early republic emphasized what they represented as distinctly American virtues such as independence and frugality. Moving into the mid­ nineteenth century, discourses of taste would continue to emphasize virtue while they were further linked to Christian morality and sentimental rhetoric (p. 53). Victorian-era domestic experts emphasized and performed the role of the "true woman" in teaching and maintaining the tastes and morals of the home—and, by extension, the nation. With the rise of Progressivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prescriptions of taste would be grounded in scientific standards, and progressive-era women participating in cooking school and home economics movements sought to professionalize women's domestic work by aligning it with science. This narrative of an evolving discourse of taste, however, is not the central focus of Walden's argument. Although Tasteful Domesticity certainly offers a macrohistory of over a century of women's domestic writing, Walden's analysis reveals domestic writing as a complex and multivalent rhetorical practice that resists easy narratives. For example, readers may be surprised by Walden's inclusion of the southern antebellum cookbook The Virginia Housewife in Chapter 1: "Taste and Virtue: Domestic Citizenship and the New Republic." Unlike the other cookbook authors discussed in this chapter, Virginia Housewife author Mary Randolph refers to taste only as a sensory perception and not as a cultural standard. Walden argues that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 4, pp. 422-437. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.374.422 Reviews 423 this was common in southern antebellum cookbooks (pp. 48-49). Thus, the Virginia Housewife may seem to fit better in Chapter 3: "Taste and Region: The Constitutive Function of Southern Cookbooks," where Walden examines other antebellum southern cookbooks. However, by including Randolph's text in Chapter 1, Walden complicates her argument about early nine­ teenth-century female cookbook writers' engagement in taste discourse as a nation-building rhetorical activity. In antebellum southern cookbooks (and like the republican mother associated with northern states), the southern woman played a role in the civic progress of the region through her manage­ ment of the home (p. 49). However, in the antebellum south, management of the home also included management of slave labor. Thus, Walden concludes that Randolph's Virginia Housewife "requires one to face the difficult truth that while discourses of taste serve republican virtue, they also govern those disenfranchised by its practice" (p. 52). The inclusion of Randolph's text in Chapter 1 reveals the complicated issues of identity and power lurking within discourses of taste. Throughout her analysis, Walden examines the ways women's cookbooks contributed to ideologies of nationality, class, race, region, and gender. For example, dur­ ing the Victorian era, women's participation in taste discourse reified a gen­ der ideology that implicitly defined "true woman" as white and middle class, and these demarcations of gender, race, and class would persist throughout the nineteenth century. During the...

Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo­ lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho­ lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his­ tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub­ category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop­ erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor­ ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John­ son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso­ nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal­ yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo­ ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...

Reviews 209 Howe uses suggestive dialogue to persuade her male readers to admit her to their literary canon. Like Howe, Johnson seeks to legitimate sentimental poetry; however, Johnson does so by reading this verse through a rhetorical lens. Johnson's anal­ yses are rich and incisive. Sometimes, her larger argument gets lost in the details of her close reading. Moreover, while Johnson promises to offer readers a heuristic for reading sentimental verse, her analyses are often too local and deep to be generalizable to other texts. Regardless, Antebellum American Women s Poetry makes a valuable contribution to both rhetorical and literary scholarship, particularly feminist scholarship on nineteenth-century American women's writing. Demonstrating the importance of sentimental verse in nine­ teenth-century America, Johnson recovers a site of women's rhetorical activity that has otherwise been lost to the divide between literature and rhetoric. Paige V. Banaji Barry University Robin Reames, ed., Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. 191 pp. ISBN 9781611177688 The contributors to Logos without Rhetoric confront Edward Schiappa's so-called "nominalist" view of rhetorike techne - that it makes little sense to speak of a discipline of rhetoric before the coinage and circulation of the term rhetorike, which Schiappa famously attributes to Plato in the Gorgias. Rather than examine Schiappa's view directly, the contributors try to give substance to an "evolutionary" or "developmental" view. On this account, important ingredients of rhetoric appear in the fifth century and even before. These views do not, of course, conflict; they rather shift the question from (i) "when did the thing called rhetorike begin, and what is that thing so named?" to (ii) "what stuff if any within that thing predates its/their being called rhetorike?" The first question gets at a specific concept, its work, and its effects within Greek self-understanding, with the goal of reconstructing specific debates and conscious practices that deployed or were governed by that concept. The second question searches for any treatment of language as a "manipulation of persuasive means" (p. 8), an inquiry bound only by our own presumptions of relevance. Now, from an Aristotelian perspective, rhetorike (techne) is at once a sys­ tematic theory7 and an ongoing inquiry into the various kinds of persuasive manipulation. From that perspective, what one wants to find in an account of the origins of rhetorike is not particularly clever, routimzed, or flexible deployments of persuasive manipulation but rather evidence for the rise of a discipline, an increasingly concerted, increasingly self-conscious effort through time to understand the extent and nature of it. 210 RHETORICA Be that as it may, questions (i) and (ii) could differ markedly. The contri­ butors to Logos without Rhetoric draw the two questions together by trying to attribute a quasi- (or proto-) systematic quasi- (or proto-) consciousness to their various authors' use of persuasive manipulation, such that they could be seen not only as speaking well but also as coming to think about the task of speaking well. (The authors generally do not address the extent to which these efforts were concerted or dialectical - that is, a matter of public discus­ sion.) Success in the contributors' enterprise depends, then, on their actually identifying theoretical or disciplinary rudiments in texts. This is in principle possible since, whatever the coinage situation for the term, rhetorike must have been formed and accepted in response to some prior if rudimentary the­ oretical or disciplinary activity. As it turns out, the chapters themselves are of rather mixed success. Terry Papillon ("Unity, Dissociation, and Schismogenesis in Isocrates") contributes a short, jargon-heavy, and free-floating chapter about the rheto­ ric of divisiveness. It wavers between two theses, the rather grand and lessevidenced one that "Isocrates. . . redefined the notion of politics" (p. 17) and the rather mundane and quite plausible one that "Isocrates shows us a prac­ tical example of an early Greek rhetorical practice" (p. 18). Robert Gaines ("Theodorus Byzantius on the Parts of a Speech") argues that a pre-Platonic figure, Theodorus, distinguished oratorical speeches into twelve parts and that we see the adoption of this normative distinction in the (fragmentary) ps.-Lysianic Against Andocides for Impiety...

Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Tiffany Kinney Tiffany Kinney University of Utah, Salt Lake City Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (3): 368–370. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tiffany Kinney; Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban. Rhetorica 1 August 2017; 35 (3): 368–370. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar­ ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi­ deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour­ ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri­ umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin­ ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe­ cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...

110 RHETORICA dialect when the sophists spread their teaching in the Hellenic world. The inscriptive evidence provides a strong case for the utility of sophistic rhetoric. This innovative volume builds a case for using physical artifacts along with textual evidence to research the histories of rhetoric. Researchers look­ ing into under-represented or marginalized traditions may find this book useful for providing a method to examine the cultural context of these understudied rhetorics. Enos is arguing for an expansion of method which feminist rhetoricians are already strongly embracing. Scholars looking to expand their repertoires in academic investigation may find these new ave­ nues for research rewarding. Robert Lively, Arizona State University B. Fernandes Pereira, Retórica e Eloquéncia em Portugal na época do Renascimento, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, 2012; 988 pp. ISBN 9789722719711 For most people, the rich history of Portuguese rhetoric is terra incog­ nita. The comprehensive survey of Belmiro Pereira offers a unique occasion to explore these unknown fields and discover their many treasures. Many ISHR members will be delighted to see their names in the footnotes of this extremely well documented book. It starts with an overview of medieval rhetoric and the transmission of ancient texts during this period; there are chapters on the artes dictandi and artes praedicandi, on classical rhetoric in medieval Portuguese culture, on reading the Fathers of the Church, on the growing interest in the works of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian in the four­ teenth and fifteenth centuries. As in other parts of the book, Pereira indica­ tes where the manuscripts of these works are to be found: this precise information about the major places of learning in Portugal and Spain is very welcome. It also shows the aim of the author to present rhetoric in the wider context of education, culture and religion. This aim continues to be pursued in the second part of the book, which deals with rhetoric and the rise of humanism in Portugal. The prominence of rhetoric in Renaissance culture is considered in an international perspec­ tive, with special emphasis on developments in Spain, France and, more unexpectedly, in Germany and the Low Countries. Indeed, one of the major discoveries in this book is the importance of Northern humanism for the evolution of rhetorical education in Portugal. The author has founded his research on an extensive knowledge of the sources in the various countries under consideration. His reading of studies published in all these countries on the subject of Renaissance rhetoric is vast, up to date and accurate. A stu­ dent of German or Spanish rhetoric may learn a great deal from this book about his or her own field of interest. The presence of major works of ancient, medieval and Renaissance rhetoric in the more important Portuguese libraries is documented for two Reviews 111 periods, before and after the year 1537. The author singles out the years 1527 to 1548 for special consideration. In these two decades the King of Portugal, John the Third, sent his country's most promising students to Paris to have them acquaint themselves with the ideas and methods of Erasmian humanism. They gathered in a college run more or less perma­ nently by Portuguese scholars: Sancta Barbara, in French Sainte-Barbe. Moreover, the syllabus of the Santa Cruz monastery in Coimbra was reorga­ nised according to modern standards. Finallv, in the year 1548 the humanist Colegio das Artes is established by order of the King in the same city; and teachers educated in centres of learning in Paris and elsewhere in Europe are engaged to bring to Portugal the methods of reading and writing devel­ oped by major humanist educators. According to B. Pereira 1537 was a pivotal year: the centre of higher education was transferred from Eisbon to Coimbra and the King's brother Henry (D. Henrique) founded in Braga a new college, Saint Paul's. In this latter college, the influence of Northern humanism is conspicuous due to the presence of teachers such as N. Clenardus and J. Vasaeus. Pereira gives a great deal of attention to the career of A. Pinus (Pinheiro), educated in Paris and afterwards entrus­ ted with high offices at the Portuguese court...

200 RHETORICA in un determinato ámbito della precettistica retorica, collegando le finalitá e i procedimenti espressivi che le sono propri e non altri (pp- 212—213 n. 814). Alessandro Garcea Paris Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Pall ofa Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi-xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 In her introduction, Jane Donawerth identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to address. Over the past thirty years, historians have inves­ tigated women's involvement in rhetorical theory in terms of its absence— "why there wasn't any" (p. 2). Furthermore, much of the conversation has tended to underscore rhetorical practices and not rhetorical theories. Don­ awerth asserts that scholars need to ask new questions: "How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it" (p. 2). Women theorized rhetoric based on their gendered experiences and on the genres that they were reading. Thus, women's rhetorical theory has centered on conversation—not oratory—as the basis for all discourse. In significant ways, Donawerth's book extends and complements her 2002 anthology, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, which made avail­ able to scholars, teachers, and students extensive primary texts of women's rhetorical theory. Her new book builds on this collection by including an analysis of conversation as an important tradition in women's rhetorical the­ ory. In addition, she incorporates new women, particularly those defending women's right to preach, and she provides more analysis of the historical context and its influence in shaping this aspect of women's rhetoric. To construct her argument, Donawerth examines women's rhetorical theory from a variety of sources, including humanist works defending women's education, conduct books, defenses of women's preaching, and elocution manuals. In so doing, she introduces readers to the works of various women theorists during this three-hundred-year span. However, she contends that in the 1850s, when women started writing composition and rhetoric textbooks for male as well as female students, these "theo­ ries of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy" (p. 2). To theorize rhetoric in this way, in her introduction Donawerth clarifies that she defines rhetorical theory as "writing about the nature and means of communication" (p. 7). She also situates her argument, outlines her historical method, and explains how she defines other terms relevant to her study. With its detailed framing of Donawerth's argument, the introduction should be helpful to those just beginning to navigate the field and to engage in these Reviews 201 discussion. Donawerth s book and several mentioned in her introduction are from the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, which demonstrates the significant scholarly contribution this series has made. Given the constraints of this review, I will focus on the first and fourth chapters since they feature a sampling of the diverse texts examined, and the fourth chapter aligns with some of my research interests. Chapter 1 provides a start for the book's focus by analyzing women's theorizing of conversation in humanist dialogues and defenses of women's education during the seven­ teenth century. It does so by examining the writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. During this period, humanist and classical rhetorical education were available only for men; however, there were some "exceptional women" who managed to receive such training (p. 19). With this education, these women fashioned theories of communication, and they published in humanist genres, including "dia­ logues, epistles, print orations, and encyclopedias" (p. 19). Donawerth argues that these four women theorists "radically revised classical rhetoric by cen­ tering their theories on conversation rather than public speech" (p. 39). In so doing, they challenged some of the limits conventionally associated with gendered discourse of this period. in chapter four, Donawerth contends that sentimental culture, associ­ ated with "the public display of emotion" and with women, found its perfect outlet in elocution (p. 105). The chapter investigates the ways nineteenthcenturv elocution manuals incorporated into this tradition of conversation "a theoretical consideration of women's bodies...

Abstract Popular eighteenth-century British biographies of Cicero had a significant impact on the rhetorical identity formation of Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800). As the acknowledged founder of the “Bluestocking” salon, Elizabeth Montagu played a key role in forming the conversational and epistolary eloquence of her broad and influential network of men and women. A careful analysis of the young Elizabeth's epistolary discussion of biographies of Cicero and Atticus, especially Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero, provides insight into Montagu's mature rhetorical practice as well as neo-Ciceronian influences on men's and women's rhetorical identity formation in eighteenth-century Britain.

Book Review| August 01 2007 Book Review: Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series, by Lindal Buchanan Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series by Lindal Buchanan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. 202 pp. Rhetorica (2007) 25 (3): 332–334. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2007.25.3.332 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Book Review: Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series, by Lindal Buchanan. Rhetorica 1 August 2007; 25 (3): 332–334. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2007.25.3.332 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

332 RHETORICA Darstellung der Entwicklung des Genres Stâdtebeschreibung bzw. Stâdtelob von der Antike bis in Guicciardinis Zeit. Guicciardinis im Titel der Arbeit genanntes Werk (Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, 1567) wird nicht besprochen; wichtigstes Ergebnis für die Forschung zu dieser Schrift dürfte eine gegen Ende gemachte Feststellung des Autors sein: "No feature which one meets within Guicciardini's Descrittione seems to be without precedent." (S.355, Anm.69) Ein hilfreiches Register (S. 356-373) und ein Nachweis der Erstpublikationen der Beitrâge (S.374) beschliefien den Band. Wer ihn zur Gànze oder auch nur in Ausschnitten liest, wird dem Autor Bewunderung für die Breite seiner Interessen, seine Kenntnis der Primàr- und Sekundàrliteratur und die Detailgenauigkeit seiner Analysen nicht versagen. Dabei kônnte man sich auf Melanchthon berufen, welcher in seiner Rhetorik in einem Abschnitt über das Kommentieren sagt: "[...] qui eo est vel usu vel ingenio, ut in auctoribus videre possit, quur hoc loco, quur sic singula tractentur, ilium vehementer probandum censeo." Auch diese Passage ist Classens Analyse natürlich nicht entgangen (vgl. S.264). Johannes Gôbel Universitat Tubingen Lindal Buchanan, Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Ante­ bellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. 202 pp. With the publication of Lindal Buchanan's Regendering Delivery, South­ ern Illinois University Press's Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series has become the national leader in book-length studies of gender and rhetorical performance. While only the seventh in the series, Regendering Delivery is the fourth to deal with this subject (the others are Nan Johnson's Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, Carol Mattingly's Appropriate [ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America, and Roxanne Mountford's The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces'). Building on these works, Buchanan adds to our understanding of antebellum women's opportunities and strategies for speaking in public, par­ ticularly in three areas: elocutionary instruction for girls in public schools, public speaking occasions for young women in private colleges, and delivery styles of antebellum women activists. A central claim of Regendering Delivery is that throughout history, Amer­ ican women have had far greater access to elocutionary instruction than has been commonly thought. In Chapter 1, "Readers and Rhetors: School­ girls' Formal Elocutionary Instruction," Buchanan offers evidence that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, girls as well as boys were taught elocu­ tion as part of their reading curriculum. Eighteenth-centurv readers such as Reviews 333 Noah Webster s popular American Selection ofLessons in Rending and Speaking included elocutionary instruction (both actio and pronuntiatio) and sample debates and declamations for practice. Textbooks acknowledged schoolgirls as an audience (e.g., through instructions on conduct), making clear that reading and elocution were first thought to be gender-neutral subjects. As Buchanan s analysis shows, it was not until the nineteenth century that sep­ arate readers for girls and hoys were published, with selections from oratory omitted in some hooks for girls. Nevertheless, pronuntiatio continued to be taught, and girls participated in school-sponsored exhibitions in which they spoke before audiences, as Buchanan richly illustrates in Chapter 2. Chapter 2, "Practicing Delivery: Young Ladies on the Academic Plat­ form, ' offers a decisive response to Robert J. Connors's controversial claim that co-education was responsible for the demise of oratory in nineteenthcentury colleges and universities. Buchanan agrees with Connors that there were some changes to the curriculum in the nineteenth century, but disagrees with the reasons Connors offers. Young women spoke before public audi­ ences at school-sponsored events for fifty years prior to 1830, and throughout the nineteenth century women admitted to co-educational institutions such as Oberlin fought for the opportunity to speak in public, sometimes form­ ing their own clubs to practice in private. Weaving together a history from biographies of such famous Oberlin graduates as the Reverend Antoinette Brown, Buchanan establishes that co-education provided women hard won opportunities to develop their oratorical skills, which they later exploited in the fight for women's rights. Chapter 2 includes many interesting glimpses into the compromises forced upon college...

Reviews 403 faith not only to sustain the congregation but also to encourage it to confront social injustice and work for racial uplift. Collectively, these women's spatial and rhetorical strategies point to an alternative method for crafting effective ethos and promoting Christian community. The epilogue addresses whether or not the "populist" preaching prac­ tices employed by O'Connor, Hill, and Moore are "feminine" ones. While acknowledging that a number of male church leaders (including Henry Ward Beecher, post-Vatican II priests, and African American preachers) have used similar methods, Mountford argues that women's abandonment of the pul­ pit, disclosure of the personal, and efforts to level hierarchy represent a significant "ritual transgression of sacred space" and tradition (156). In other words, women preachers choose alternative discursive methods and de­ livery styles in order to create ethos in a place and position traditionally antithetical to them. The Gendered Pulpit represents an important step toward understanding how gender affects discourse and rhetorical performance. Mountford con­ cludes by inviting other feminist rhetoricians into the new theoretical home afforded by a refigured fifth canon of delivery, and she encourages them to build upon her foundation and undertake further studies of women min­ isters in sacred spaces. Mountford's fine work makes a convincing case for the fifth canon as a promising site for investigating gender and rhetoric and, ultimately, for making the entire discipline inclusive and comprehensive. Lindal Buchanan Kettering University Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer, eds., Rhetor­ ical Education in America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 245 pp. This volume reconsiders contemporary rhetorical education from the perspective of the history of rhetoric. The editors provide a helpful intro­ duction (Glenn) and afterword (Lyday and Sharer). Many of the essays were plenary presentations at a Penn State Rhetoric Conference organized by the editors. The volume's most successful essays link a study of how rhetoric was historically taught with how it might be taught today. In "Lest We Go the Way of the Classics: Toward a Rhetorical Future for English Departments," Thomas P. Miller reviews the history of composition teaching as a history of crises of literacy, and suggests that we now need a curriculum that will move us from the traditional interpretive stance of the critical observer to the rhetorical stance of the practical agent involved in negotiation. Shirley Wilson Logan, in "'To Get an Education and Teach My People': Rhetoric for Social Change," examines the self-help schooling of nineteenth-century African 404 RHETORICA Americans for clues to help today's disenfranchised communities. Logan calls for "consilience," that is, a linking of knowledge across disciplines, and a rhetorical education that concentrates as much on critiquing and evalu­ ating contemporary discourses as on producing writing. With meticulous scholarship, in "Parlor Rhetoric and the Performance of Gender in Postbellum America," Nan Johnson reveals the conservative réinscription of gender roles in the potentially liberating growth of manuals for parlor rhetoric after the Civil War. Gregory Clark reminds us of the range of American rhetorics in his examination of the national park as a public experience establishing a shared sense of national collectivity, a training ground for citizens who need to respond to public conflict with transcendence. Essays by William Denman and by Sherry Booth and Susan Frisbie are not as strong. Denman argues that rhetoric lost its civic purpose during the nineteenth-century expansion that attempted to keep out the vulgar and the foreign by policing the borders of oral and written communication, but he ignores the growth in specialized textbooks and conduct-book rhetoric that offered rhetorical education to working class and female students. Booth and Frisbie argue that metaphor should be central to rhetorical education and analyze their qualified success in teaching metaphor to their students, but they mistakenly suggest that Aristotle did not find metaphor important to rhetoric and their claim that Renaissance rhetoric emphasized style not content has been significantly revised in recent scholarship. Other essays offer perceptive variations on the collection's theme of the history of rhetoric as a guide to future teaching. Susan Kates links James Raines's revision of the history of English to include respect for Appalachian English...

Abstract The Lady's Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women's rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women's and men's rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook's uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women's informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”

312 RHETORICA for Hume than for his moderate opponents. In his response, consistent with Common Sense philosophy, Campbell argues that the contest is not between two types of experience because our belief in testimony is prior to experience: we naturally accept witnesses' accounts in the absence of evidence that they are deceived or deceiving. As a philosophical point, Campbell's argument deserves the respect it has received. The problem is that Campbell does not consistently advance this view. As Suderman points out, Campbell dismissed Roman Catholic accounts of contemporary miracles—a blatant example, but hardly the only one, of Campbell's sacrificing philosophical consistency to defend his religious positions. I would argue for something closer to the reverse of Suderman's thesis. Campbell was an accomplished scholar, but he took as his mission defending and spreading the Word. As a thinker, he is most interesting when he feels most free of his mission. This explains why his relatively secular Philosophy of Rhetoric—a coherent synthesis of classical rhetoric with eighteenth-century empiricism—is his best and most important work, the one on which is reputation quite properly rests. My dissent does not, however, lessen my respect and gratitude for Sud­ erman's book. Suderman's exhaustive archival research and his intelligent reading of Campbell's works make Orthodoxy and Enlightenment a must read for scholars interested in Campbell. Arthur E. Walzer University ofMinnesota Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Com­ posing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. xi + 279 pages. Imagining Rhetoric is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Amer­ ican rhetorics. Truly a first, this book provides the only full-length study of early American women's rhetorical education and composition practices. In attempting to "glimpse how composition came to be situated in the lives of the women in the new nation," Eldred and Mortensen achieve two im­ portant tasks: they draw upon a wide range of sources, some rhetorical and pedagogical, others fictional and personal; and they resist a seamless or heroic interpretation of women's use of neoclassical civic rhetoric, al­ lowing instead for the discontinuities and disappointments that accompany liberatory struggles and revisionist historiography. This study focuses on six women, some well known, others more ob­ scure, but all grappled to make liberatory civic rhetoric their own: Han­ nah Webster Foster, Judith Sargent Murray, Mrs. A. J. Graves, Louisa Car­ oline Tuthill, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Charlotte Forten. Eldred and Mortensen recover an array of these women's "schooling fictions" from the Reviews 313 1790s to the 1860s, including female textbooks, anthologies, theoretical texts, practical writing guides, and syllabi, as well as novels, novellas, diaries, political essays, and reflective narratives. The authors demonstrate that ex­ panding the scope of sources of women's rhetoric is crucial to revising history, and in this particular case they effectively challenge the standard thesis of neoclassical rhetoric's decline. Just as "schooling fictions" imagine the roles of writing in women's post-Revolutionarv lives, Imagining Rhetoric compels readers to contemplate the possibilities of historiography. The introduction outlines the primary argument that liberatory strains of neoclassical civic rhetoric were "indispensable" to these women's visions of female education. The first chapter also raises the book's central question: were these women's uses of this rhetoric liberatory? The following chapters do not answer this question directly but illustrate the complexity of the issue and maintain a productive tension between possible responses. Chapter two discusses how female textbooks and didactic novels, both appearing after the Revolution, conceive of women's education quite differently. Whereas Donald Fraser's schoolbook, The Mental Flower-Garden, dresses up a restric­ tive and superficial education for women in liberatory garb, Foster's The Boarding School imagines an ideal education that teaches women to use liber­ atory rhetoric themselves to shape the new nation. Yet for Murray, the subject of the next chapter, a vision like Foster's is complicated by fears of sophistry, nonstandard English, and poor teachers. To temper the seductive aspects of misguided liberatory rhetoric, Murray develops a classically oriented "com­ monplace rhetoric," a system of instruction based on literary borrowings, which Eldred and Mortensen...

Reviews 111 Shirley Wilson Logan, "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp. Shirley Wilson Logan introduces "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by stating, "This book examines the public persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women intellectuals" (p. xi). She continues in the Preface to talk more specifically about the nature of the historical era of the analysis, constraints on the availability of texts, the nature of both public discourse and persuasive discourse, and the rhetorical theories and strategies that shape her analysis. Near the end of the Preface she says, "My hope is that these discussions might also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigences" (p. xvi). By this process, Logan makes the reader immediately aware of the extent to which the participation of African American women in public discourse during the nineteenth century signals complexity, rather than simplicity, and a need for contemporary researchers to account for patterns in rhetorical practices at the same time that we resist reducing those patterns to simplistic and monolithic notions of a "Black women's rhetoric". First of all, in focusing attention on specific rhetors, Logan re­ inscribes the historical record with the names of women who actively charted new pathways for rhetorical engagement during an era of remarkable social, political, and economic change. She brings texture to what we have come to know about the rhetorical performances of Maria Miller Stewart, Frances Watkins Harper, Ida Wells Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Shadd Cary, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others who in recent years have been brought to the attention particularly of teachers and scholars in women's studies, ethnic studies, and literary studies. To this list, however, she adds the names of women whose accomplishments are much less familiar: Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, Alice Woodby McKane, Lucy 112 RHETORICA Wilmot Smith, Mary Cook, Edmonia Highgate, Georgia Swift King and others. She reminds us that to date we have only scratched the surface of the history of African American women's intellectual work as she places the subjects of her study more visibly onto the rhetorical landscape. Using five themes that are symbolized by quotations from the texts of die rhetors, Logan explains in systematic ways how the rhetorical actions of this group were shaped and performed amid various systems and forces of the social environment. She raises for critical viewing points of inquiry that help us to envision these women both individually and collectively, interrogating, for example: the importance of allusions to an African past in the gamering of rhetorical power; their commitment to forging alliances across various communities of interest; the directing of their energies toward critical issues within the African American community; the use of specific strategies in the art of persuasion; their creation of their own arenas for rhetorical engagement; and the ways and means of rhetorical action in the particular arena of the Black Clubwomen's Movement, that is, their shaping of the discourse of racial uplift. Logan suggests that individually these women illustrate a breadth of rhetorical responses to a continuity of exigencies and that collectively they were quite astute at finding ways to invoke lively connections between themselves and their audiences; to invent themselves anew within their performative arenas; and to respond provocatively to the exigencies of multiply constrained rhetorical situations. The effect of Logan's approach is to underscore a critical point that she makes in her statement of purpose, that is, her assertion that these women are intellectuals. In attending to individual practices, common exigencies, and thematic points of inquiry, Logan makes visible that the case to be made ultimately with this analysis is not simply that African American women engaged persuasively in rhetorical practices in public arenas during this era, but that their doing so demonstrates the liveliness of their intellectual engagement and their ethical commitments. Logan's choice in making this case is to lead us analytically through a textual display, making conditions...

Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult book to write. Feminist rhetorical scholars have already identified at least three limits such revisions must observe: any feminist account of the history of rhetoric cannot stand alone, but must be continuous somehow with mainstream rhetorical histories; simply inserting "exceptional women" into an otherwise unrevised traditional account is insufficient; and only by exposing the cultural oppressions that silenced women can we hope to break their hold. Glenn succeeds brilliantly in balancing these demands as she makes the best connections she can among new kinds of (feminist) interdisciplinary research, while observing a time limit necessary for publication. Her accomplishment is significant, even though there are probably readers who will want to set the record straight about this historical person or that fact, or to join the pieces of the story more amply. Nonetheless, the space her work creates teems with opportunities for research and for insights about possible rhetorical selves for us all. MOLLY MEIJER WERTHEIMER Pennsylvania State University Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 408 pp. Studies of women's contributions and challenges to the rhetorical tradition are still sparse but, thankfully, growing. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities ofHistorical Women constitutes a welcome addition to this blossoming field. Edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Listening to Their Voices comprises an RHETORICA 92 impressive array of eighteen articles on women's rhetorical activities in contexts ranging from Ancient Egypt to twentiethcentury Europe and America. Authored by American scholars (with the exception of one Canadian), these articles greatly increase the available research on women in the history of rhetoric. The range of historical periods and cultural contexts that the articles address underscores the neglected richness and diversity of women's contributions to rhetoric, as well as the extent of all that remains to be recovered and reinterpreted. Notably, the collection stretches the realm of rhetorical activity beyond its traditional focus on public, argumentative speech or writing to include, in particular, the non-traditional genres of private letter­ writing and conversation. The inclusionary diversity of Listening to Their Voices reveals, as Wertheimer notes in her introduction, a feminist appreciation of difference and multiplicity (p. 4). At the same time, this collection is well-unified. Its unity stems, most fundamentally, from the authors' joint assumption that the study of women's rhetorical activities is worthwhile and important to the history of rhetoric. As well, the articles demonstrate a consistently fine historical contextualization of the women rhetors and rhetoricians they discuss, uniformly avoiding the imposition of contemporary social categories on these women of the past, highlighting instead the cultural and political realities which motivated and shaped their rhetorical activities. In some cases, these activities are presented as those of an "exceptional" woman who was "able to be heard in the male public sphere" (p. ix). More intriguingly, in my view, several of the studies foreground the practices of communities of women as well as rhetorical activities addressed to contexts beyond the "male public sphere". The volume is divided thematically into four main sections, an organization that allows us to perceive non-chronological links between the articles' differing historical points of focus. I will review each section in turn, commenting only—in the interests of brevity, not of ranking—on several but not all of the articles. The first section, entitled "Making Delicate Images", includes three articles that highlight the difficulties of recovering the rhetorical roles and contributions of women within a patriarchal tradition. Cheryl Glenn, for example, relocates Aspasia "on the rhetorical Reviews 93 map" by sifting through and reading against the "powerful gendered lens" of references to her in male-authored texts (p. 24...

Research Article| August 01 1991 Man Cannot Speak for Her Man Cannot Speak for Her, by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. New York: Praeger, 1989. Vol. 1: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, pp. viii + 212. Vol. 2: Key Texts of the Early Feminists, pp. xxviii + 559. Christine Oravec Christine Oravec Communication Department, The University of Utah, Humanities Center, 201 Carlson Hall, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1991) 9 (3): 275–278. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.275 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christine Oravec; Man Cannot Speak for Her. Rhetorica 1 August 1991; 9 (3): 275–278. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.275 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1991, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.