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Introduction
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1 X Introduction Ann George, M. Elizabeth Weiser, Janet Zepernick The 1920s and 1930s represent a tremendous breakthrough for women into American public life. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins served out the Depression as the first woman cabinet secretary. Nellie Tayloe Ross and Miriam Ferguson became state governors in 1925. Arkansas Democrat Hattie Caraway was the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate (1932), and South Dakota Republican Gladys Pyle joined her a few years later. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Wobblies’ original “Rebel Girl,” went on to help found the American Civil Liberties Union, while Mary Anderson began her quarter century as director of the Department of Labor Women’s Bureau. Meanwhile, Marjorie Merriweather Post took the Postum Cereal Company public in 1922, and Martha Matilda Harper, owner of more than five hundred hair salons, created the modern retail franchise.HattieMcDanielwonwhatwouldbetheonlyAcademyAward for an African American actress for sixty-three years, Dorothy Parker regaled New Yorker readers with her wit, and Betty Robinson became the fastest woman in the world at women track athletes’ Olympic debut in 1928. Jane Addams and Dorothy Day were household names if your household believed in peace and social justice. Dr. Florence Sabin was named the first female lifetime member of the National Academy of Sciences , and National Council of Negro Women president Mary McLeod Bethune became the first African American to head a federal agency. Ann George, M. Elizabeth Weiser, and Janet Zepernick 2 Yet that promising beginning did not yield the flood of women into public and professional life that might have been expected. Indeed, the opening of the twenty-first century, with its striking array of women’s “firsts,” presents a surreal echo of women’s activity in the 1920s–1930s and illustrates powerfully the extent to which women’s role in public life has been rendered largely invisible for the period between the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and the latter half of the century—an invisibility we aim to both examine and dislodge in this book. Wendy Sharer writes in the essay on Julia Grace Wales that opens the collection: I wish to put forward, both as a lens for studying the past and as a perspective on the present, the idea that rhetorical theories and practices articulated through alternative channels . . . deserve as much attention from scholars and teachers as the rhetorical theories and practices elaborated in more commonly studied forums such as scholarly publications and widely available textbooks. Women and Rhetoric between the Wars moves the study of gender and rhetorical practices of women entering public and professional life into the period immediately following suffrage, in a broad-based analysis that weaves together feminist cultural criticism, gender studies , historiography, and rhetorical theory. The Need for Our History Feminist scholars have repeatedly demonstrated the public activities of women at times and in places where the more superficial gaze of cultural memory tells us women’s activities were confined to home and hearth. In spite of this enormous body of richly documented evidence , the culturally shared “memory” of U.S. women’s history is that women didn’t participate in public life after suffrage or work outside the home until the 1960s advent of “women’s lib.” A closer look at the history of women’s engagement in public life, however, shows a cycle of increased participation in public life followed by increased repression of women’s voices, with the result that women in contemporary politics, corporate and union leadership, the sciences, and academia continue to face all the obstacles and hardships of the true pioneer, in spite of the many generations of women who have pioneered much of this same territory in the past. In part, as feminist historians such as Wendy Sharer and Nancy Cott note, the invisibility of women in public life in periods and activities [44.200.141.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:19 GMT) Introduction 3 outside those defined by the woman suffrage movement of the 1860s– 1910s and the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s–1970s can be understood as a consequence of the shorthand version of women’s activism that has come to dominate our thinking. According to the broad brushstrokes of this model, all the activities of women intellectuals , abolitionists, and suffragists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are grouped under the heading of “First Wave Feminism,” which culminates in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. A decades-long gap ensues, followed by “Second Wave...