Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 by Nan Johnson
Abstract
Reviews 199 nitá della sua opera per attribuirla ad Aristotele, affidandogliela come ad un padre adottivo. Ed in realtá, come ben osserva il Velardi, la Rhetorica ad Alexandrum deve non soltanto la sua fama, ma molto probabilmente la sua stessa sopravvivenza fino ai nostri giorni, al fatto di essere stata ritenuta opera aristotélica. Il volume é corredato da una serie di indici: Indice dei luoghi citati, Indice delle cose e della parole notevoli, Indice dei nomi. Ferruccio Conti Bizzarro Universita Federico ÍI, Napoli Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 220. Nan Johnson's first book, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (1991), has been called "the most comprehensive assessment yet published of the rhetorics that shaped the teaching of English composition and pub lic speaking in the nineteenth century" (Miller 1993). It is an admirably well-researched account of how American college and university students were taught the rhetorical skills necessary for careers in the courtroom, leg islature, and religious professions, and has proved an invaluable resource for both historians and teachers of rhetoric and composition. However, in Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Johnson is silent about women's relationship to this dominant male tradition of rhetorical instruction. It is this relationship which her second book, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, takes as its focus. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 is one of three inaugural titles in a new series, Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan for Southern Illinois University Press. In part, the book is a project of historical recovery, reconstituting a separate tradition of rhetorical training for women in postbellum American society. In this respect, it fits into a body of feminist scholarship on the history of rhetoric that begins with Doris Yoakum's 1943 article "Women's Introduction to the American Platform" and includes Lillian O'Connor's Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Antebellum Reform Movement (1954), Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's two-volume Women Public Speakers in the United States: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1993, 1994), Andrea Lunsford's Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (1995), Shirley Wilson Logan's "We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women" (1999), and Jacqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000). However, while Johnson praises these texts for carrying out the vital and ongoing work of situating prominent and forgotten women speakers in rhetorical history, 200 RHETORICA she differentiates her own historiographical method from such remapping projects (7). Johnson's purpose is not to redraw the rhetorical map by restoring forgotten contributions to the rhetorical tradition, but to ask why it is that women's contribution had been—until the advent of these projects—so com pletely excluded from the twentieth-century canon (10). To answer this ques tion, Johnson examines a wide range of nonacademic rhetorical materials, including elocution manuals, conduct books, and letter writing guides, that comprised a late nineteenth-century pedagogy of "parlor rhetoric" (2). Draw ing upon terms and concepts established by feminist historians to describe the gendered ideology of nineteenth-century American culture—the "cult of domesticity," the "cult of true womanhood," "Republican motherhood"— Johnson argues that the parlor rhetoric movement, while purporting to offer rhetorical training for both sexes, prescribed separate and unequal roles for both men and women (4). Men were to exercise oratorical power in the political domain, while women were to use their rhetorical skills to exert influence in the domestic sphere. This popular pedagogy defined a very tra ditional role for women and effectively guarded "access to public rhetorical space in American life" (16). The history of the erasure of women from the rhetorical canon, Johnson suggests, began in the nineteenth century, since the parlor rhetoric movement's relegation of women to a subordinate rhetorical role legitimized their erasure from twentieth-century histories of rhetoric (10). Johnson's argument seeks to answer why it was that, in spite of their struggle for a greater public role, white middle-class women at the end of the nineteenth century were...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2003-06-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2003.0011
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