Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 (review)

While the controlling idea of Nan Johnson's monograph is not groundbreaking, she has written a text that contributes something useful to those interested in gender and culture in nineteenth-century America. As part of the Studies in Feminisms and Rhetorics Series, Johnson's study explores the ways in which parlor (nonacademic) traditions of "rhetoric and popular constructions of rhetorical performance" for white, middle-class women after the Civil War "promot[ed] a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity" (2). Central to this argument is the notion that the cult of true womanhood was infused much more deeply and broadly into postbellum culture than scholars have previously acknowledged. But what is most compelling about Johnson's text are the sources she carefully and thoroughly examines through a gendered rhetorical lens in order to demonstrate her argument: elocution manuals, conduct literature, letter-writing texts, biographical and autobiographical depictions of women rhetoricians, and canon-building anthologies of great orators of the nineteenth century.

Johnson's book begins with a fruitful introduction that engages important methodological questions for histories and theories of rhetorics, a discussion that moves beyond the field of rhetoric to larger conversations of feminist recoveries and analyses. Building upon Cheryl Glenn's trope of remapping the rhetorical tradition to regender it, Johnson argues that beyond seeing who is missing from the map, historiographic endeavors will benefit from examining more extensively how the cultural terrain was gendered, and thus have a richer context for the rhetorical practices of the time.

After establishing her theoretical framework, the next five chapters examine the rhetorical sites mentioned above. Focusing first on parlor rhetoric, Johnson contends that the unique postbellum space reinscribed traditional roles for women in an attempt at normalcy after the chaos of war and that sustaining conservative ideals of the American woman and the American home were at the center of this recovery. The tension described in this chapter and played out in the remainder of the book is conveyed in the parlor-rhetoric movement that encouraged rhetorical literacy to a general population but also came with an ideologically constricting view on gender roles in postbellum society. At the same time that this education was available in an increasing number of homes, women were all the more keenly denied the kind of rhetorical education laden with cultural power, that of argumentation and public speaking. Rather, the implicit and explicit rhetorical instruction of the day claimed that women "could beguile rather than argue logically" (23). Within texts such as The Handy Speaker, The Speaker's Garland and Literary Bouquet, and The American Star Speaker, separate spheres were reinforced with every idea and illustration; in her rhetorical analysis of these and other texts and illustrations, Johnson seeks to demonstrate that the apparent inclusivity of rhetorical manuals belies the deep conservatism displayed within the texts themselves. Readers will especially appreciate the analysis of visual rhetoric used to make this claim, along with the twenty-one illustrations sprinkled throughout the text.

Nineteenth-century American women are continually instructed that their power is found and should stay within the home. As conduct manuals continually reinforce, a true woman would not seek rhetorical power elsewhere, evidenced by what Johnson terms the "demonization of the talkative woman who has forsaken her proper place" (64). Similarly, her reading of handbooks and etiquette manuals for letter-writing leads her to conclude that correspondence for women was intended to address social and domestic concerns, a point sometimes literally illustrated in images of workspaces: women's desks were bare but for the inkwell and paper, while men's were cluttered with business papers.

Last, Johnson studies the way domestic cultural values are attached to prominent women rhetoricians, and issues of race emerge more fully in analyses of biographies of women orators. Most relevant for constructions of women was "whether or not [they] performed gender appropriately," where white and middle class was synonymous with appropriate (112). African American...