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...

Reviews Christopher Reid, "Imprison'd Wranglers": The Rhetorical Culture ofthe House ofCommons, 1760-1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-958109-2 As rhetoricians expand the parameters of rhetorical histories, the inter­ actions between politicians and the people on "Main Street" or "out of doors" become as important as the words of famous orators. In Imprison'd Wranglers, Christopher Reid extends this approach to the eighteenth-century British Parliament. He argues for a "rhetorical culture" surrounding the House of Commons in an era when politicians became public figures. According to Reid, new relationships developed between Members and constituents with the expansion of print culture: "eloquence was flowing outside the House, to be captured, admired, or caricatured in print, before flowing back in the form of pamphlets and newspaper reports... which were read in the Chamber " (p. 14). By tracing this flow through multiple institutions and media, he produces a comprehensive account of change and continuity in parliamentary oratory. The title of Reid's book comes from William Cowper's The Task (1785), in which the poet, reading newspaper reports of debates, longs to "set th' im­ prison'd wranglers free." While Cowper reconstructs orators' performances, Reid examines now MPs were metaphorically "imprisoned" in the "chain of newspaper mediations that brought speech events in Westminster" to distant constituents and reassesses the rhetorical dynamics of distributing parliamentary speech in print (p. 3). By addressing "the complex reciprocity between print and oratory" in late eighteenth-century Britain, Imprison'd Wranglers complements recent work by Carolyn Eastman (A Nation ofSpeechifiers , 2009) and Sandra Gustafson (Imagining Deliberative Democracy, 2011), who explore how printed American oratory fostered new political identities in the new nation and promoted new forms of rhetorical education at the turn of the nineteenth century (Eastman, p. 10). Reid likewise studies how print reconstructions of the British Commons "brought parliamentary debate onto a broader terrain of public argument," "permanently altered the rhetorical context" of political speech, and gave the people "a stake in Parliament" (Reid, p. 11, 75). To survey the breadth of Parliament's "rhetorical culture," Reid exam­ ines newspapers, pamphlets, letters, collections like William Cobbett's ParliaRhetorica , Vol. XXXII, Issue 3, pp. 312-323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.312. Reviews 313 ntaty History ofEngland, and satirical sketches (p. 3). The architecture of the Chamber, the classical curriculum, and the working conditions of newspaper reporters also come under his purview. He draws on political historians like David Cannadine and Joanna Innes but approaches parliamentary texts and practices as a historian of rhetoric. Reid compares parliamentary speaking techniques to classical and eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and ad­ dresses the challenges of working with transcripts of oral performances. For him, reporters transcripts matter less as accurate representations of speech than as efforts to represent "the House as a place of collective rhetorical action ... in which political arguments and meanings were forged" (p. 17). These archives, including the transcripts, the Chamber, and reporting practices, re­ veal how oratory circulated beyond the Chamber and brought constituents into the political nation. Imprison'd Wranglers comprises four sections: Part 1 (Chapter 2) ap­ plies Roxanne Mountford's "geography of a communicative event" to St. Stephen's Chapel, the home of the eighteenth-century Commons (p. 25). The three chapters of Part 2 discuss how Parliament reached the public through the "fictitious tribunals of the press" (Chapter 3), reporters who copied debates from memory (Chapter 4), and visual satirists like James Gillray (Chapter 5) (p. 75). In Part 3, Reid examines how MPs modified classical rhetorical practices including declamation (Chapter 6) and the con­ cept of ethos (Chapter 7) in the face of increasing publicity. Part 4 features a broader view of parliamentary rhetorical culture with a case study of the 1773 Lord Clive debates (Chapter 8) and an exploration of MPs' persuasive uses of quotation (Chapter 9). Reid concludes with...

Abstract Milton's regicide tracts of 1649, The Tenure, Observations, and Eikonoklastes, are recombinations of two of his most familiar compositional modes of the 1640s, the oration and the animadversion, tactics derived ultimately from classical rhetorical theory and Renaissance assimilations of it. Each tract also displays a poeticized rhetoric which represents Milton's signature adaptation of the close relationship between rhetoric and poetic found in classical and Renaissance rhetorical texts. Evidence for these claims can be found in the structures, styles, and aesthetic manifestations of all three pamphlets, particularly the classical low and middle styles, the formulaic mechanism of quotation and reply, and the prose genre of the Character.

Milton’s regicide tracts of 1649, The Tenure, Observations, and Eikonoklastes, are recombinations of two of his most familiar compositional modes of the 1640s, the oration and the animadversion, tactics derived ultimately from classical rhetorical theory and Renaissance assimilations of it. Each tract also displays a poeticized rhetoric which represents Milton’s signature adaptation of the close relationship between rhetoric and poetic found in classical and Renaissance rhetorical texts. Evidence for these claims can be found in the structures, styles, and aesthetic manifestations of all three pamphlets, particularly the classical low and middle styles, the formulaic mechanism of quotation and reply, and the prose genre of the Character.