Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America

Nervous, enthusiastic, and talkative women are the foam and sparkle, quiet women the wine of life. The senses ache and grow weary of the perpetual glare and brilliancy of the former, but turn with a sense of security and repose to the mild, mellow glow irradiating the sphere of the latter. We associate all ideas of rest with quiet women. They are soul-divinities reverently guarding their sacred trusts in the Court of Silence. When she speaks, her words are aptly chosen and fitly spoken. She is wise and thoughtful, but loving and meek. "Still waters run deep," but not in the world-applied sense; babbling rills do not wear their channels deep, but streams of calmest flow have hidden depths undreamed of, unsuspected.

--Anonymous, "Quiet Women" 461

In an article entitled "Quiet Women," which appeared in The Ladies' Repository in 1868, an anonymous author argues that "quiet women are the wine of life." Capturing the deep cultural longing of the postbellum period for the icon of the American woman as angel of the hearth, this portrait deifies the quiet woman and demonizes the other possibilities: the enthusiastic woman, the talkative woman, the brilliant woman, and the babbling woman. The mild and mellow queen of the "Court of Silence" is graceful, calm, and, most important of all, silent. In this characterization, an idealized woman is defined as necessarily rhetorically meek. By worshiping "the quiet woman," influential proponents of public opinion such as The Ladies' Repository reinscribed for a postbellum readership a definition of true womanhood that equated silence with feminine virtue and enthusiastic vocality with its opposite. The argument that the rhetorical conduct of the "wise and thoughtful" woman could be contrasted instructively with the trivial and ultimately inconsequential rhetorical behavior of loud and talkative women is one that was made in so many cultural conversations of the postbellum period that it achieved the power of an ideological trope. ¹

Efforts to regulate women's rhetorical behavior intensified rather than abated in the decades following the Civil War as women pursued education, the right to vote, property rights, and mobility in public life. In conduct literature, a genre that proliferated during the postbellum period, the preferred construction of the "quiet" woman was a mainstay in an ideological agenda that supported the generally held nineteenth-century view that character and the nature of one's rhetoric are mutually revealing. Like other types of self-help materials marketed in the last decades of the century, such as elocution manuals and letter-writing guides, conduct manuals included among their vast tables of contents the matters of how and where one ought to speak. In their coverage of deportment in all areas of life, conduct manuals promised the aspiring middle-class American an education in the home in the culturally valuable skills of public speaking and writing. ² The collective enterprise of the parlor rhetoric movement and conduct literature in particular was to offer happiness and success to those who would follow certain rules. Enormously popular in the postbellum period and well into the turn of the century, conduct manuals argued a conservative gender agenda that appealed to the middle-class readers of a nation who seemed eager to accept the idea that correct deportment in daily life could help to restore the social calm the postwar nation longed for. Although by the 1880s the American public had well in mind notable examples of women, such as Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had assumed powerful reformist voices in the causes of abolition, temperance, and women's rights, the rhetorical space these women occupied in shaping political and cultural life was viewed as the exception rather than the rule. ³ In spite of the high profile rhetorical careers of a handful of women, or, perhaps, because of them, postbellum America wondered uneasily just how public women's lives...