Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
31 - Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
Summary
Location has been as important to rhetoric as discovering the available means of persuasion, to paraphrase Aristotle. Classifying orations as forensic, deliberative, and ceremonial has had as much to do with where they are uttered (courtroom, legislature, and celebratory platform or pulpit) as with their content. That these are all public locations provides the main reason why women have been excluded from such rhetorical occasions since classical times, though as litteraturazione (the application of oral rhetoric principles to written language) and rhetorical arts of conversation developed, private venues in which women could be persuasive were legitimated. The problem has always been that a woman in public seems to be a public woman, in the same sense that a lodging serving all comers is a “public” house: in other words, she seems to be a whore; or else, no woman at all.
Accusations of sexual impropriety were leveled against American women activists from early in the nineteenth century. For example, in 1837 the Congregationalist clergy of Massachusetts, provoked by the public speeches of abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, issued a Pastoral Letter against female activists, which suggests that such women take a prurient interest in the sexual exploitation of female slaves (Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition, 1046–7).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 608 - 632Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
References
and . Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.Google Scholar
. “The Other ‘F’ Word: The Feminist in the Classroom.” College English 52 (April 1990):.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. “Frances Willard, Phoebe Palmer, and the Ethos of the Methodist Woman Preacher.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006):.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and . The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd edn. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 2001.Google Scholar
. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
, ed. Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
and . Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. “Rhetoric.” In Doing What Comes Naturally. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and Other Essays. Ed. . 1838. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
. “Introduction.” In Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Ed. . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.Google Scholar
, ed. Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
and . “Introduction: Recovering Women's Voices from the Civil Rights Movement.” In Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965. Ed. and . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.Google Scholar
. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education: 1885–1937. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.Google Scholar
. Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
. “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
. “Uncovering Forgotten Habits: Anti-Catholic Rhetoric and Nineteenth-Century American Women's Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 58 (December 2006):.Google Scholar
. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
. The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
. The American Protest Essay and National Belonging. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.Google Scholar
“Queering Feminist Rhetorical Canonization.” In Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Ed. and . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.Google Scholar
. Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women's Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.Google Scholar
. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ed. Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. 2nd edn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.Google Scholar
Vote and Voice: Women's Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Maria W. Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Ed. . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
. Faces of Feminism: An Activist's Reflections on the Women's Movement. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.Google Scholar