Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations (review)

When the category under analysis is women, in this case women rhetoricians, the case for essentialism must be given its due. So begins Hildy Miller and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles's Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations. Themes loop through the Miller and Bridwell-Bowles anthology, primarily centering on reclaiming the term "voice" for feminist rhetoric. Miller and Bridwell-Bowles prefer "voice" to "ethos" or "persona," calling on bell hook's notion of "coming to voice." They are well aware of the critiques that have been leveled at this tradition, but with Susan Jarratt and Nedra Reynolds ("The Splitting Image: Contemporary Feminisms and the Ethics of Ethos" James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin's Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, Dallas: SMU Press, 1994) they "reject the most radical postmodern theories that would entirely deny rhetorical agency." They claim that voice is a valid and important term. When situated in the context of lived experience, audience, authority, and persona, voice recalls agency—the roles and representations enacted by the rhetor (10).

Miller and Bridwell-Bowles's chosen genre is thus appropriate to the task of reclaiming voice in these terms. What more effective way to combat the spectre of essentialism and master narrative than to invite the voices of many? In their introduction, they speak of "variations of that shaping pivotal moment in which women 'come to voice,'" (12), claiming, in a clever and evasive fashion "if there is a women's rhetoric, it is as elusive, contradictory, and fragmentary as the footprints of Ariadne" (13). The strongest theme that emerges in the anthology, almost overwhelming the debate over voice, is the concept of rhetoric as action. Throughout the anthology, the essays reinforce the notion that there is no rhetoric without what Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie describe in their essay, "Pedagogy and Public Engagement," as the "so what" of writing, teaching, and speech. Ultimately, it is the postmodern fettering of action that Miller and Bridwell-Bowles combat as they resituate "voice," while attempting to dodge the essentialist critique.

The first section of Rhetorical Women focuses on "Representing Women Rhetors." Its function is the recovery of little-known rhetoricians like medieval writers Julian of Norwich and Angela Merici. Other better-studied writers, such as Mary Wortly Montagu and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, are given a rhetorical reading, rather than the more typical literary one. The project of recovery undertakes to "consider how women at various historical moments found ways to speak and write and make their influence felt" (17).

Each of the essays in this section is strong, but of particular interest is the one by Julia Dietrich, which takes up Julian of Norwich and Angela Merici. Dietrich outlines the development of rhetoric in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, arguing that these two women made a distinctively feminist contribution in this era. Julian of Norwich, in the late fourteenth century, used the "empirical authority of seeing" (30). Dietrich observes that "she appears to have been writing for an audience who shared her desire to see for themselves" (30). Angela Merici, her second subject, a fifteenth-century Italian, in her "warrants and reasons reveals an engaging practicality, based in her personal experience and observation" (35). In both cases, the appeal to common sense contrasts with male rhetoricians of the period whose warrants most often were based in scripture. Dietrich's analysis involves a somewhat nuanced interpretation of voice, the theme alluded to in the introduction. "The first audience is always the self" (26)—she implies that self cannot be revealed through writing because "we cannot know how much of the rhetorical work of making the radical acceptable was done to convince themselves and how much was consciously chosen for another audience" (26). The focus, then, remains on the effects of rhetoric, the rhetors' ability to negotiate the complexities of voice in order to be heard.

The second and third sections of Miller and Bridwell-Bowles's collection comprise essays on "Representing...