A photo of an orange and black Monarch butterfly.The butterfly is in flight against a light blue sky and field of yellow wildflowers.The butterfly is situated toward the upper left hand corner of the image.The background of the field is out of focus, while the butterfly heads toward a foreground of yellow flowers in focus.

Preview this article: A Physiological Education: Audience Constitution and the Construction of Gender in Sex in Education, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/81/6/collegeenglish30222-1.gif

Abstract This article examines the suffrage rhetoric of nineteenth-century American physician Mary Putnam Jacobi. As a medical researcher, Putnam Jacobi believed that women’s participation in scientific research and their use of scientific arguments would improve the public’s perception of women, making woman suffrage more likely. As science grew in influence around the turn of the century, deploying its persuasive resources became an important part of both men’s and women’s social-issue rhetoric. This analysis of Putnam Jacobi’s suffrage rhetoric identifies two science-inflected arguments: first, she asserted that scientific findings had already prompted governments to be more inclusive, creating a science-driven model of social reform; second, she contended that women had met all the qualifications to vote, offering an empirical-evidence argument for suffrage.

This article examines 3 papers presented before the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine by 19th-century physician Julia W. Carpenter. The article identifies 3 strategies Carpenter used to negotiate the incompatible rhetorical expectations for women and for physicians. The published records of academy discussions provide evidence for Carpenter's colleagues' reactions to each strategy, revealing the complexity of her rhetorical situation and demonstrating the complex links among rhetorical practice, professional identity, and a communicator's social position.

In 1838, Mary Gove (Nichols) began lecturing on anatomy and physiology, a rhetorical act that was both new and risky because public discussion of the human body and disease was believed inappropriate for women. In order to protect her ethos, Gove used her ostensibly informative lectures to promote her reform agenda, by implying that her audience already shared her beliefs in women's right to physiological knowledge and their obligation to use that knowledge to reform society. Rather than relying only on the conventional advice to construct one's ethos based on the audience's existing values, Gove also crafted her audience's ethos, describing her listeners in ways that emphasized values conducive to her reform agenda. Her use of this strategy suggests that an audience's acceptance of nontraditional speakers is not simply a matter of “letting” them speak; it also means, to some degree, acknowledging the alternative values they represent.

Abstract This article examines the strategies nineteenth-century American women physicians used to maintain a respectable ethos when writing about human sexuality and reproduction. In order to make these topics appropriate for women, women physicians strove to alter the connotations surrounding sex, insisting that readers view it from a scientific, socially conscious, pure standpoint. The popularity of these texts suggests that women were active in shaping the scientific and social discourse surrounding “delicate” subjects.

In the absence of empirical data, writing center directors have relied on lore, anecdotal evidence, and advice from those who have been there before to help them imagine resolutions for immediate crises and possible long-term goals for their centers. While these sources of information have been invaluable, many directors (and the academic administrators to whom they report) have desired quantitative data about writing center operations nationwide.