Rhetoric Review Apr 2022

Radcliffe’s Strongest Woman: The Bricolaged Body in One Progressive Era Women’s College Scrapbook

Sara Cooper Murray State University

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how a progressive era Radcliffe College student (1910-1914) who earned the title “strongest woman” for her athletic feats used the unique genre affordances of the scrapbook to assert an identity that at once aligned with and contradicted dominant rhetoric about women’s bodies and education. Drawing on archived personal artifacts, the essay argues that Eleanor Stabler Brooks used this vernacular, multigenre, multivocal genre in a way that amplifies the material and the visceral through a process of bricolage, composing an embodied response to the social and institutional restrictions on her body at a time when gender values were radically destabilizing.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2022-04-03
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2022.2038509
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Topics
rhetorical criticism genre theory gender and writing editorial matter
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References (36) · 3 in this index

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