Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (review)

Students and scholars of women's rhetorical history are familiar with nineteenth-century suffragists' battle to obtain a voice in the public sphere. The rise of the middle class during the 1800s contributed to a gendered separation of spheres. Men contributed to political life through vigorous public debate, while women attended to the private domestic affairs of the home. The "proper" woman of this era rarely spoke in institutional sites of the public (for example, churches, city councils, public squares). This gendered separation produced a formidable challenge for women wishing to influence public debate on political matters such as abolition, prohibition, and woman suffrage. Although a number of scholars have examined how politically active women of this historical era acquired access to the public sphere, Caroline Levander's book Voices of the Nation offers a distinctive analytical perspective on the means by which women gained a respected and recognized voice. Teachers and scholars of women's rhetorical history will find that the book's methodological and substantive contributions to the literature make it a useful text.

Levander's methodological approach to understanding the history of women's public address differs from typical rhetorical scholarship. Rather than analyzing speech texts, she reviews a wide range of nineteenth-century reformist novels that reflect upon women's speech, including its sound, tone, and volume. She turns to these novels because they "devote much space to describing how women's voices sound and what reactions women's speech produces, especially in their male listeners" (1-2). She maintains that the authors of these novels played a central role in opening up a public space for women's influential political speech "and thus that the female voice assumed a public function, despite theories that argued women inherently lacked the capacity for public activity" (3). While some of the texts surveyed upheld conventional beliefs about women's position, such as Henry James's The Bostonians, the majority of novels examined explored the emancipatory "intervention" performed by depictions of women's voice. These transgressive novels, all authored by women, argued the need for women to gain access to the public sphere, demonstrating how the fictional heroines ultimately acquired that access.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section "illustrate[s] the strategic maneuvers by which women's speech is . . . policed into its 'natural' role of private language by its male listeners' amplification of both the vocal tone and sexual desirability of the woman speaker" (34). This section examines two novels that reflected the cultural atmosphere of the day, The Bostonians and The Lecturess. Both novels have female characters who are promising and powerful public speakers with a host of male admirers. However, the men responded only to the external features of the women's voice (that is, sound, volume, cadence), describing it in highly feminine terms (that is, soft, timid, fluid). The male audience members found a "pleasing image" in the female speakers, equating aspects of their voice with characteristics of their body (for example, "full," "round," "elegant," "pretty"). This response privileged the speech form over the speech content. Consequently, men's sexualization of the female speakers eclipsed what the women were saying. The novels end with the political careers of the heroines being cut short by male suitors who objected to their influential speaking talents. These novels illustrate how men exerted control over women by regulating their speech within marriage, shaming them into public silence.

The second section investigates novels that dramatized the consequences of the repressed female voice and included heroines that overcame the unique challenges women faced when struggling to influence public debate. Levander offers a close reading of novels that take into account connections among race, class, and gender, including Pierre,The Fatal Marriage,Awful Disclosures,The Planter's Northern Bride...