Eighteenth-Century Life

Rizzo, Betty.
Male Oratory and Female Prate: "Then Hush and Be an Angel Quite"
Eighteenth-Century Life - Volume 29, Number 1, Winter 2005, pp. 23-49

Duke University Press

Betty Rizzo - Male Oratory and Female Prate: "Then Hush and Be an Angel Quite" - Eighteenth-Century Life 29:1 Eighteenth-Century Life 29.1 (2005) 23-49 Male Oratory and Female Prate: "Then Hush and Be an Angel Quite" Betty Rizzo City University of New York Content not Phoebus' envy'd heights to reach, Ye claim the dormant privilege of speech! --Morning Post (23 May 1780) Throughout the eighteenth century, while male rhetoric was almost universally, perhaps unprecedentedly, valued and studied, women's silence was almost universally commended, recommended, and virtually enforced. Who could withstand the combined authority of Aristotle and St. Paul? Enjoined silence has always been a primary tool for hegemonic reminders of inferiority. Courtiers and domestic servants, women and children, working people, and subservients of every order were directed to speak only when spoken to. Because transgressors of this rule were so disorderly, comedy made considerable use of the talkative valet or tradesman, the rebelliously vociferous son or daughter, the irrepressibly expressive wife. There had no doubt always been female resistance to a societal decree for silence, but in the eighteenth century, when men were beginning to practice vocal expression in a previously unimaginable universal manner -- women made many particular efforts to be heard, domestically, socially, and publicly, in a struggle against the male view that women's speech was insurrectional,...