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3. Evolution of Expression: Speech Arts and Public Speaking
- Southern Illinois University Press
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58 YZ 3 Evolution of Expression: Speech Arts and Public Speaking Historians of rhetoric have for several decades now worked to recover women’s written rhetoric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 As this work has evolved beyond what Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch have called “rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription” (31) to more robustly examining the full range of women’s rhetorical practices within their contemporary contexts in a wider range of periods, scholars have begun to take an increasing interest in women’s speaking practices, from the parlor (Donawerth; N. Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space) to the platform (Buchanan; Logan, We Are Coming; Mattingly; Mountford) to the varied types of particular institutions where women learned elocution and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life (Bordelon, “Composing”; Enoch; Kates). Such work has encouraged scholars to revisit and complicate earlier claims made about the decline of oratorical culture, the limits of gendered oratorical spaces, and the role of elocutionary training (see Gold and Hobbs). Within educational institutions, professionally on public platforms or in Chautauquas, or more privately in homes or women’s clubs, women orators have practiced speaking and leadership in ways we are just beginning to credit and understand. By examining the speaking curricula at the public women’s colleges, we hope to contribute to this emerging, multidimensional understanding of the varied ways women learned to speak in this era. As with many contemporary revisionist histories of women’s rhetorical education, comparisons and contrasts with New England’s Seven Sisters E v ol u tion o f E x p r ession 59 colleges are not a significant part of our framework here, in part because we wish to focus on the specific rhetorical context of the public women’s colleges. In general, both sets of colleges have common roots in both northern and southern female academies and seminaries that developed in postrevolutionary and antebellum America and which themselves diverged from the British male academies after which they were modeled. Mary Kelley attributes to these early women’s schools “one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the course of the nation’s history” because of the movement of women into civil society (1). These early educational institutions for girls and young women of both the “middling classes” as well as the elite (27–28) encouraged students to “envision themselves as historical actors who had claim to rights and obligations of citizenship” (17), teaching history, polite letters, and natural sciences, as well as rhetoric and speaking for evaluation purposes or student displays at commencement. The Seven Sisters colleges, which began emerging roughly two decades before the southern public women’s colleges, evolved from these early academies and seminaries while the nation was in an intensely oratorical period.2 All began with courses in oral and written rhetoric,3 and, like their men’s college counterparts, then followed the general nineteenth-century trend toward emphasizing writing over speaking over time, especially in newly forming English departments. In its late-nineteenth-century inception, English was a capacious subject that could embrace textual but also oral and aural activities involving literature, drama, philology, and also rhetoric. As Gerald Graff points out, elocution and the reading aloud of great literature was central to early literary education in the United States (43–44). But as early as the third quarter of the nineteenth century, English began to professionalize and narrow, making rhetoric into a written art and usually pushing to the margins what came to be variously called oral or spoken English, interpretive reading, or drama. Faculty who claimed central allegiance to the new field of literary studies in English joined the Modern Language Association , which formed in 1883, but in the wake of the MLA’s rejection of pedagogy as a focus early in the twentieth century, writing teachers, along with early teachers of speech, formed the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in 1911. Professionalizing public speaking teachers, feeling sidelined within the NCTE, then pulled out to form their own organization, the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, now the National Communication Association (NCA), in 1914 (Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality 32–35; Cohen 30–36; Graff 121; Miller, Evolution 134–35). This disciplinary dance meant that rhetoric, speech, drama, and their variants were taught under various institutional configurations in American colleges, sometimes as stand-alone departments, sometimes subsumed under English. [54.221.110.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20...