Abstract

Recently, rhetoricians have engaged themselves in the project of revising histories of nineteenth-century American so as to account for the practices of women. We wish to enlarge the scope of this project to include the late eighteenth century. Yet, to discover women's place in (or outside of) the rhetorical tradition in late eighteenth-century America, we cannot turn to familiar sources: for example, the college curricula that schooled early political and religious leaders. From this particular schooling, women were excluded. Nor can we study those textbooks that promoted reading and writing as commercial skills. Women were, for the most part, scarce in this realm as well.' Rather, for women there developed a kind of rhetoric of use apart from other instrumental and secular literacies that were, in the late eighteenth century, practicable mainly by men.2