Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists (review)

Lives of their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists. By Martha Watson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999; pp. vii + 149. $24.95.

Rhetorical critics, seeking to recover the voices of American women, have long recognized the need to be resourceful in that task. As many have noted, the legacy of women's public speeches is scattered in unlikely places and, when discovered, often difficult to authenticate. Thus, scholars have cast a wide net in their effort to include women's experiences in the literature.

In her 1991 edited volume, Martha Watson noted the fleeting nature of public oratory and made the case for considering the nineteenth-century woman suffrage press as a viable site for rhetorical criticism. In this latest work, Watson makes an equally compelling case for appropriating women reformers' autobiographies for the same purpose. Watson asserts that "Autobiographies argue, albeit differently from other forms of public discourse" (8). She takes the position that the reformers' written presentations of their lives serve not only to tell their stories, but also to generate support for their various causes.

In Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists, Watson employs the autobiographies of anarchist Emma Goldman, temperance advocate Frances Willard, suffrage activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anna Howard Shaw, and African American social activist and educator Mary Church Terrell as case studies for support of her thesis that such texts are rhetorical in nature.

Watson carefully makes her argument for the rhetorical nature of autobiography in the first two chapters of the text. Employing Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm, she notes how the chronological storytelling of a typical autobiography lends itself well to tests for coherence and fidelity. It also allows the reader a more thorough understanding of both the reformer and her cause. "Narratives," Watson claims, "provide the authors the opportunity to enact the tenets of their ideologies and to demonstrate in their lives the beneficient impact of their causes" (10). Another "important rhetorical resource" found in autobiographies is the author's voice, an element essential to understanding "her behaviors and decisions" (11). Historically, women reformers faced a multitude of rhetorical challenges, not the least of which was the controversial act of entering the public sphere and enacting the role of rhetor, all the while advocating unpopular causes. Thus, Watson argues, building identification with readers is essential to the persuasive success of their texts.

After a thorough discussion of the literature on the nature of autobiography, Watson turns to the texts themselves. In four subsequent chapters she critically analyzes each of the published autobiographies, offering insight and evaluation of their individual successes or failures. It is here that she convincingly demonstrates the utility of her approach. Watson provides the reader with a sense of the obstacles faced by each reformer, the critical and public reception of the autobiography when it was first published, and then a critical reading of the text itself.

The case studies begin with Emma Goldman, the only reformer judged to have "failed" in her persuasive efforts as an autobiographer, at least during her lifetime. Watson explains in the concluding section of this chapter that Goldman engages in "personal mythmaking," a necessary choice but one at odds with social notions of feminine propriety. She notes that Goldman's gender "undoubtedly . . . made her assertiveness and flamboyance doubly upsetting to many potential readers among her contemporaries" (44). Watson offers Goldman's experience as a cautionary tale for other women rhetors, stating, "To overlook or ignore these gender-based constraints runs the risk of rendering the work rhetorically ineffective, at least in the short-term effort to elicit support" (44).

As an antidote to such ineffectiveness, Watson offers the "womanly voice" of Frances Willard, president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and "protector of the home." She finds Willard to be an effective persuader whose autobiography served her image and the cause of temperance...