Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900 by Jane Donawerth (review)

In this broad-reaching "revisionist, feminist, critical or 'constructionist' history," Jane Donawerth offers a fascinating and nuanced survey of a female tradition of rhetorical theory arising from women's gendered experience of conversation (p. 9). The study thus engages the "rise and fall" of a body of women's theoretical texts and practical handbooks, works both based on and advancing "conversation as a model for all discourse" (p. 12). Rather than attempting an exhaustive chronological history of the subject, Donawerth provides a multiple, fragmented, and intermittent history that captures and responds to the features of the tradition itself. Like many similar areas of women's discursive performance from the early modern period forward, this history is one of difference, comprised of works written largely independent (or unaware) of writings by female precursors and emerging instead at discrete moments of counterdiscourse with the masculine traditions from which women were excluded.

Implicit, of course, in the idea that Donawerth sees as the central claim of this tradition—that all discourse should proceed from the conversational model—is a rejection and attempted correction of all discourse that does not. Donawerth's clever deployment of a constructionist method that invites one to attend to difference rather than identity permits her to marshal evidence from primary texts across three centuries of women's censures of masculine rhetorical forms and their efforts to posit alternative models that engage and revise not only women's discourses but also men's as well. This inclusive gesture in Donawerth's argument enhances the importance and power of her study, moving its impact beyond the specialized field of rhetorical history. Taking her cue from the works treated here, Donawerth puts forth a bold case for seeing women's speech and writing not as marginalized but as exemplary—and women themselves not as subordinates to masculine rule but as independent subjects with political agency in their respective periods and commonwealths.

The scope of Donawerth's study is as bold as its argument, covering the works of nearly two dozen individual writers from England and America (and one Frenchwoman), spanning three hundred years, and treating a wide variety of genres, from humanist dialogues that announce the emergence of the conversational tradition to composition textbooks that signal its decline. The first chapter finds in a collection of women's dialogic and didactic writings a shared strategy of adapting the masculine models available to them in order to reorient classical rhetoric from public oratory to private conversation. Donawerth demonstrates, however, the different ways in which these women advance this "private" conversational sphere as the foundational site of discourse in the "public" sphere. In challenging the gendered division of public and private, these writers put the essentialist view of women as natural speakers to the service of a constructivist critique of women's exclusion from public speech.

A chapter on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conduct books outlines a transatlantic theory of feminine discourse, tracing its development at the richly detailed intersection of gender and class. As the discussion moves from Hannah More's middle-class conventionality to Jennie Willing's radicalized defense of women's preaching, Donawerth demonstrates how women, despite or because of their exclusion from formal education, theorize female communication "as gendered and domestic, but wielding powerful influence" (p. 72). A study of defenses of women's preaching in a variety of genres across the period, such as theological writings, spiritual memoirs, and conversion narratives, uncovers (again, despite these women's apparent lack of awareness of previous female-authored defenses) a recognizable and consistent tradition that grounds women's rights to public speech in feminist biblical exegesis and in the acts of exemplary women in the scriptures. Donawerth deftly shows how the antifeminist discourse of traditional religious patriarchy provided the basis for a defense of women's preaching in the revisionist rhetoric of the...