This essay analyzes Alonzo Earl Foringer Foringer, Alonzo Earl. “The Greatest Mother in the World” [1917?]. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Web. [Google Scholar]’s “Greatest Mother in the World” poster, created for the American Red Cross during World War I but circulated in Britain and America during World War I and II. Although the image was highly circulated and reproduced, it has received limited scholarly attention. The analysis examines the poster and a magazine image with accompanying text from a visual rhetoric perspective. The essay argues that the poster and magazine image deploy rhetorics of motherhood and saliency to foster “flattening effects” that not only erase other maternal figures but also elevate ideologies of white supremacy.

This essay examines the multidimensional, cross-border actions and rhetorical strategies surrounding the 1931 case, Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District, the nation’s first successful class action school desegregation decision involving Mexican-origin students. A commonplace in US school desegregation history is that it started with the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. This study argues that the Alvarez v. Lemon Grove case’s success was because it was a multifaceted, multilayered effort involving multiple agents: Mexico’s State Department, the Secretary of Public Education, and the San Diego Consul, as well as lawyers and families. It considers the ways such efforts were successful in this instance in preventing segregation, yet how they were unsuccessful in disrupting other forms of racism, particularly whiteness as the standard. Ultimately, this analysis demonstrates the need for such a multidimensional analysis of similar cases in the future, a transnational archival methodology.

This essay examines the work of Genevieve Stebbins (1857-1934), an author, teacher, and proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. Specifically, I examine Stebbins’s concept of “artistic” statue posing, a practice fraught with contradictory arguments and tensions among late nineteenth-century commentators and other elocutionists who discussed appropriate forms of female embodied display. This study asserts that Stebbins drew on the rhetorical strategy of contradiction to perform an ethos of complexity and boundary innovation in advocating for female embodied rhetorical performance. Her work reveals the conflicts women have attempted to negotiate in considering rhetoric as embodied practice.

Seduction through mentoring has a long history within Western rhetoric. Plato’s Socrates, for instance, can be seen as attempting simultaneously to educate and seduce Phaedrus. In considering this topic, this essay analyzes the mid-nineteenth century correspondence of Louise Clappe and Alexander Hill Everett. Clappe was a young New England woman who later authored The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Everett was a prominent diplomat, orator, and writer. The study examines the explicit lessons conveyed, the ways the correspondence enhanced Clappe’s civic understanding as well as her social and literary skills. In addition, it explores the implicit lessons Clappe learned through navigating constraints associated with seduction, including the ability to challenge gendered expectations and the capacity to negotiate power and even benefit from it.

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This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

This essay extends efforts to complicate traditional understandings of ethos by considering it as expressed through and by means of the body. This analysis also examines ethos in relation to Vicki Tolar Burton’s concept of rhetorical accretion or the practice of overlaying new texts on the primary core text. To reveal the significance of analyzing ethos in this manner, this study explores the work of Genevieve Stebbins, a late nineteenth-century proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. The essay examines her use of textual accretion as a form of critique but also as a means of acceptance and overlay. More significantly, it reveals the ways that Stebbins’s deployment of rhetorical accretion represents a striking reversal of Burton’s concept. Instead of men overlaying a woman’s text we see the opposite practice in Stebbins’s case.

ABSTRACT Building from extant scholarship on normal schools, this essay takes up a complementary but less well-examined topic: state teachers’ institutes of the nineteenth century and the short-term practical training and professional guidance they provided teachers. Focusing on California’s state-sponsored institutes held from 1861–1863, this study examines the ways these institutes promoted the new progressive European pedagogy. More significant, extending an ecological approach to historical analysis, this essay proposes that the relationship among normal schools, teachers’ institutes, and some faculty from select eastern colleges may have been closer than has been suggested. Thus, this analysis suggests a more complex and integrated history during this period.

200 RHETORICA in un determinato ámbito della precettistica retorica, collegando le finalitá e i procedimenti espressivi che le sono propri e non altri (pp- 212—213 n. 814). Alessandro Garcea Paris Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Pall ofa Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi-xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 In her introduction, Jane Donawerth identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to address. Over the past thirty years, historians have inves­ tigated women's involvement in rhetorical theory in terms of its absence— "why there wasn't any" (p. 2). Furthermore, much of the conversation has tended to underscore rhetorical practices and not rhetorical theories. Don­ awerth asserts that scholars need to ask new questions: "How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it" (p. 2). Women theorized rhetoric based on their gendered experiences and on the genres that they were reading. Thus, women's rhetorical theory has centered on conversation—not oratory—as the basis for all discourse. In significant ways, Donawerth's book extends and complements her 2002 anthology, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, which made avail­ able to scholars, teachers, and students extensive primary texts of women's rhetorical theory. Her new book builds on this collection by including an analysis of conversation as an important tradition in women's rhetorical the­ ory. In addition, she incorporates new women, particularly those defending women's right to preach, and she provides more analysis of the historical context and its influence in shaping this aspect of women's rhetoric. To construct her argument, Donawerth examines women's rhetorical theory from a variety of sources, including humanist works defending women's education, conduct books, defenses of women's preaching, and elocution manuals. In so doing, she introduces readers to the works of various women theorists during this three-hundred-year span. However, she contends that in the 1850s, when women started writing composition and rhetoric textbooks for male as well as female students, these "theo­ ries of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy" (p. 2). To theorize rhetoric in this way, in her introduction Donawerth clarifies that she defines rhetorical theory as "writing about the nature and means of communication" (p. 7). She also situates her argument, outlines her historical method, and explains how she defines other terms relevant to her study. With its detailed framing of Donawerth's argument, the introduction should be helpful to those just beginning to navigate the field and to engage in these Reviews 201 discussion. Donawerth s book and several mentioned in her introduction are from the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, which demonstrates the significant scholarly contribution this series has made. Given the constraints of this review, I will focus on the first and fourth chapters since they feature a sampling of the diverse texts examined, and the fourth chapter aligns with some of my research interests. Chapter 1 provides a start for the book's focus by analyzing women's theorizing of conversation in humanist dialogues and defenses of women's education during the seven­ teenth century. It does so by examining the writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. During this period, humanist and classical rhetorical education were available only for men; however, there were some "exceptional women" who managed to receive such training (p. 19). With this education, these women fashioned theories of communication, and they published in humanist genres, including "dia­ logues, epistles, print orations, and encyclopedias" (p. 19). Donawerth argues that these four women theorists "radically revised classical rhetoric by cen­ tering their theories on conversation rather than public speech" (p. 39). In so doing, they challenged some of the limits conventionally associated with gendered discourse of this period. in chapter four, Donawerth contends that sentimental culture, associ­ ated with "the public display of emotion" and with women, found its perfect outlet in elocution (p. 105). The chapter investigates the ways nineteenthcenturv elocution manuals incorporated into this tradition of conversation "a theoretical consideration of women's bodies...

This essay reveals the importance of investigating mundane internal documents, particularly when considering muted rhetors, who may use such texts strategicallyin an attempt to subvert the status quo. It does so by examining the first and second women presidents of NCTE and their efforts to professionalize the organization andto strengthen the voice of the president.

ABSTRACT Complicating claims about the decline of oratorical culture in the nineteenth century, this article demonstrates that rhetorical training was integral to the coeducational literary societies at California State Normal School in the 1870s and 1890s and that women benefited from such education. The societies were based on assumptions of relative equality between the sexes, fostering the development of teachers who would serve as powerful public speakers and leaders within their communities. This study also challenges arguments concerning the feminization of argumentation in the nineteenth century by highlighting the centrality of debate to the societies and the ways this argument overlooks such activities.

This essay examines the rhetorical education that late-nineteenth-century women received at California State Normal School. The article complicates Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's claim that during the nineteenth century, rhetorical theory and practice shifted from an oratorical to a professional culture by considering how gender, class, and region affected this transformation. Building on the research of Beth Ann Rothermel, this analysis also reveals that although experimentation concerning women's gender roles occurred in the northeast, it was more sustained in the West. California women generally faced fewer gender constraints than did women in northeastern state normal schools and were provided with more opportunity to learn typically masculine discourse practices.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

Some scholars trace the start of writing across the curriculum to the 1970s. However, in 1929, when appointed president of the National Council of Teachers of English, Ruth Mary Weeks initiated A Correlated Curriculum (1936), a significant interdisciplinary project that specifically viewed English as the mechanism for achieving an integrated curriculum. Although her goal was not fully realized, Weeks's efforts are important in their attempts to open education to broader classes of students, to promote learning as a collaborative process, to prepare all students to meet the demands of transforming social and industrial circumstances, and, ultimately, to restructure industrial America.

This essay examines women’s commencement addresses presented from 1910 to 1915 at Vassar College. These addresses are significant because they reveal the students’ rhetorical education and the “available means” upon which these women drew in developing a public voice. By prompting reflection and the potential for change, the commencement addresses also demonstrate the civic importance of epideictic rhetoric.

Abstract This essay investigates the ways that some teachers colleges not typically considered in traditional histories of the Speech field reconfigured aspects of elocution or the performance arts through their teaching practices. Focusing on San Jose State Teachers College in the early decades of the twentieth century when Speech was emerging as a discipline, this analysis demonstrates how some speech teachers refashioned and democratized the teaching of oral reading, particularly the oral reading of poetry. In so doing, this study reveals the gendered nature of our standard histories while broadening our understanding of how teachers colleges fit into the disciplinary split between Speech and English.

In preparing Suzanne Bordelon’s article for the February issue of CCC, the editorially unthinkable happened: An earlier version of her fine article replaced the final, wellrevised version as it went to the printer. In addition to my profuse apologies to Professor Bordelon, I have decided to publish the correct version of the article, delaying until September my publication of Janet Eldred’s review essay of several books on technology. The silver lining, in this instance, is a teachable moment, a rare glimpse for readers of CCC into an accountable but ultimately human (and I hope humane) editorial process: Bordelon’s article, quite good to begin with, was judged an “accept with revisions,” and she revised the article extensively and well, passing muster with a final read by one of the first reviewers and me.

The article contends that previous scholars have misread George Pierce Baker’s efforts by focusing primarily on The Principles of Argumentation and the role of logic. Baker’s view of logic was more complex than scholars have claimed. He challenged traditional concepts of formal logic, highlighting only those aspects that would help students learn argument.

Abstract This article adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship critiquing Robert J. Connors’ assertion that the entrance of women into higher education in the nineteenth century contributed to the decline of oratory and debate. It contradicts and complicates Connors’ claim by highlighting the efforts of Mary Yost, who taught English at Vassar College during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yost promoted debate both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, and she crafted a feminist theory of argument quite distinct from the traditional type of argument that Connors argues was displaced after women entered higher education.

Spoken and Written Discourse: A Multi‐disciplinary Perspective by Khosrow Jahandarie. Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Publishing Company, 1999. 446 pp. Mattingly's “Telling Evidence”;: Re‐Seeing Nineteenth‐Century Women's Rhetorics Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader edited by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 292 + xii. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth‐Century America by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uniersity Press, 2002. 175 + xv. Seeking the Words of Women: Two Recent Anthologies Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology edited by Jane Donawerth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 337 + xlii pp. Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s) edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 521 + xxxi pp.