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170 Conclusion �A focus on the rhetorical acts of privileged Southern white women during the American Civil War fills gaps in current rhetorical histories of the nineteenth century. While recently, studies of nineteenth-century women’s rhetorical activities have increased, Southern women, especially those who supported the Confederacy, have been largely absent from this work. A rhetorical focus also allows us to question and to complicate common assumptions that Confederate women’s wartime speech was routinely shrewish and uncontrolled and garnered little notice and that elite women’s political resistance was, if anything, an interesting curiosity. The women who inform this study, instead, suggest the often careful attention they paid to what they said and when they said it in the contested contexts of war. They suggest mindfulness of their rhetorical actions as they attempted to uphold Southern honor, even as definitions of gendered honorable conduct shifted depending on context and exigency. The diarists, along with other historical evidence, also indicate that during the Civil War, there were audiences , whether community or family members, enemy soldiers or Southern troops, who did pay heed to what these Southern women said or did not say. The diarists call attention to the role of everyday rhetorical acts during the Civil War not only for the practical purposes of navigating the challenges of the Southern home front but also for the ideological purposes of forming and cultivating Confederate identity and morale. Young Sarah Wadley prayed in 1863, “May I act as a Christian and a Southern patriot should act.”1 Some Confederate women hoped that their patriotic words and actions would buoy Southern troops and demoralize the Yankees. Others found purpose in rhetorical acts that maintained peace within war-ravaged homes, and numerous others located their primary rhetorical purpose in petitioning God’s favor for their cause. Yet, regardless of specific rhetorical purpose, diarists’ wartime recounting of their own or their fellow Southern women’s speech or communicative silence suggests that a number of privileged Southern women saw their rhetorical acts, and those of their � Conclusion � 171 fellow Confederate women, as contributing to the war effort. Through their rhetorical actions, they played an active role in the construction and support of a collective Confederate identity. During the war, and even in its aftermath as many continued to pine for the Confederacy, these diarists implied that it was not only the public speeches of politicians, military officers, and ministers that shaped the cultural landscape, cultivated nationalism, and affected the lived realities of those touched by conflict. In the South, with lines between war and home fronts blurred, the words and chosen silences of citizens had impact as well. As Confederate women diarists instructed themselves in wartime speech, they point to the rich history of rhetorical instruction and literacy practices that take place outside the classroom, what Anne Ruggles Gere has called the “extracurriculum” of composition. As diarist Susan Cornwall asserted, “A journal rightly kept would be equivalent in its effects to a regular Class meeting.” In the tradition of Cicero and Quintilian, women turned to writing and reading as tools for deliberating prudent and decorous rhetorical action during the unsettled contexts of national conflict. In such deliberations, they looked beyond the lessons of formal rhetoric, finding rhetorical role models, both positive and negative, in other women, including family members, friends, and community members, as well as in the novels and nonfiction literature that they read. In forming their rhetorical values, they considered family and community expectations and assumptions of Southern honor, often prizing prudence and rhetorical self-control, even when falling short of always enacting them in practice. With familial and community values in mind, they at times engaged in rhetorical rehearsals within their diaries, envisioning themselves interacting within contested wartime rhetorical contexts. Through such entries, Southern women’s diaries bear evidence of the importance of diarists themselves as audiences for their writing, especially during the upheaval of war. As they wrote to themselves, whether as primary or tertiary audiences for their prose, and encouraged themselves with future rhetorical performances, however local, in mind, they engaged in self-rhetorics, cultivating agency and a sense of rhetorical self. With their wartime self-instruction, these diarists urge us to heed Jessica Enoch’s recent call to expand our definitions of rhetorical education to that not necessarily rooted in traditional rhetorical pedagogies. Such an expanded definition allows for “new people, places, and practices to complicate conventional knowledge about rhetorical education.” For privileged Southern women, personal writing itself was...

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