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126 G Conclusion: Composition Textbooks by Women and the Decline of a Women’s Tradition By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a firmly established women’s tradition of rhetorical theory devised by women. It had been developed not in rhetoric textbooks but in humanist treatises and dialogues on women’s education, conduct manuals for women, defenses of women’s preaching, and elocution handbooks. Taking conversation as a model of discourse, acknowledging the gendered circumstances of communication, defending women’s right to speak publicly, and claiming an embodied rhetoric for women, this tradition helps explain women’s political success and the growth of women’s organizations in the nineteenth century, as well as the development of a diversified rhetorical tradition that spoke to different segments of the educated public. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, this women’s tradition created by women rhetorical theorists simply disappeared, as thoroughly as the first English colony in America on Roanoke Island. What happened? This chapter concludes the story of a rise and fall of a women’s tradition and answers the question of its disappearance by examining composition textbooks. The disappearance of a women’s tradition of rhetoric can be explained partly by examining composition and rhetoric textbooks by women. During the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States, women at last began to write textbooks for public schools, academies, and even colleges, and for mixed-gender audiences. Concurrently, women gradually acquired some equality with men in public forums for speaking and writing, and women’s experiences in communication become more and more similar to men’s. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many women as well as men were educated in rhetoric, and, until college, in the same schools. Women as well as men were preaching, or at least “exhorting.” Women as well as men were elocutionists. Women as well as men were speaking out on political topics. And women, even more than men, were teaching. Conclusion 127 At the end of the nineteenth century, when women begin to publish composition and rhetoric textbooks, they were writing not only for a female audience, but for both boys and girls, and women were the majority of public school teachers in America. Consequently, conversation as a model for all discourse becomes much less important to women’s conception of communication, while remaining central in the realm of pedagogy. This chapter, then, gives a brief overview of the rise of women teachers of composition and their publication of textbooks and an explanation of the reasons those books did not, in general, offer the conversational rhetoric of the women’s tradition we have seen established over the course of several centuries. The scholarship on women’s composition textbooks has concentrated on college textbooks by Gertrude Buck and Mary Augusta Jordan. In this chapter, I treat these textbooks in the context of women’s overall production of composition handbooks during the course of the century. For nineteenth-century women, the high school or academy was often their final schooling, and many academies offered both high school level and college level coursework. If we add these many textbooks, we have a much richer sense of women’s theories of communication. I have not chosen textbooks that were the most popular, but rather ones that represent the range of possibilities, for women published rhetorical grammars (Elizabeth Oram, Nelly Knox, and Lucy A. Chittenden), classical rhetorics (Harriet Keeler and Emma Davis), belles lettres handbooks (Virginia Waddy, Sara Lockwood, Elizabeth Spalding), and empiricist textbooks (Frances Lewis, Gertrude Buck).1 I researched these texts, expecting to find that women were strongly influenced by the women’s tradition of rhetoric that had preceded the rise of composition. But conversation as a conceptual model for communication is rare across all these texts, except in those that emphasize pedagogy. The exception is Mary Augusta Jordan’s college-level handbook, Correct Writing and Speaking, which I treat at length. Jordan’s handbook for women seems intended as a substitute for college and combines the latest work in philology with the women’s tradition of conversational rhetoric: it treats the history of English, advice on public speaking, but also guidance in conversation and letter writing, and throughout the book the author contests the correctness of the theory of language popular in men’s textbooks of this time period. Jordan thus also challenges the popular list of modes of discourse by her emphasis on conversation and letter writing and...

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