Scholarship on the rhetoric of reproduction, childbirth, and motherhood has mostly focused on a U.S. context. Drawing on oral histories that we collected from a small group of Estonian women who gave birth during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, we argue that women’s experiences of childbirth in Soviet maternity hospitals and during the postpartum period can be interpreted as micro-rhetorical interactions through which arguments about the worth or value of a particular identity are communicated implicitly and intangibly. The gendered nature of these micro-rhetorical interactions helps to explain the often observed-upon gap between the official Soviet rhetoric of gender equality and the persistently patriarchal nature of Soviet society. Ultimately, we argue that examining the rhetoric of pregnancy and childbirth in an authoritarian political context also necessitates rethinking the functions of and possibilities for rhetorical agency.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

As the mother of a fourteen-year-old girl, I am intimately familiar with the commonplace that “getting pregnant as a teenager will ruin your life.” I’ve probably said these exact words, or somethin...