Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900

Preface

xi Preface This book examines rhetorical theory by women in England and the United States (and one widely translated Frenchwoman) from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. It traces the rise and fall of a tradition of women’s rhetorical theory that centers on conversation (as opposed to public speaking) as a model for all discourse. This study is a revisionist and critical, or “constructionist,” history of rhetorical theory, like James Berlin’s of the nineteenth-century United States, that asks questions and pursues lines of inquiries. This study does not attempt an exhaustive history like those by Gerald Murphy or W. S. Howell or George Kennedy: I doubt that we have yet recovered all the texts by women necessary to attempt such a history.1 However, this history is less linear even than Berlin’s history, for women often remained ignorant of women theorists before them, often reinvented a tradition of women’s rhetoric, often developed theories out of similar experiences rather than under the influence of male or female forerunners. In The Worlds Olio, Margaret Cavendish suggests that wit is like “Minerva’s loom,” for it can “spin out the fine and curious thread of fancy” (sigs. R4r and E4r ; also in Donawerth, Anthology, 54). This book spins out several threads of discourse . If women did not write rhetoric handbooks and composition textbooks, what genres were important to women theorists of rhetoric and communication? If women were denied training and practice in public speaking, how did their theories of communication reflect a different experience with speaking and writing? If men’s rhetorics reproduced a politics of privilege, how did women’s rhetorics challenge or reproduce such a politics? In this study I look at moments when women cluster around a kind of rhetorical theory—conversation, conduct book advice, defenses of women's preaching, elocution, composition. In order more precisely to place their efforts in social, rhetorical, and gendered xii Preface historical contexts, I limit myself to women’s rhetorical theory from 1600 to 1900, in England and the United States.2 While the women I treat are quite diverse , one thread runs through most of these texts: for women, because of their relative restriction to domestic roles, conversation rather than oratory becomes the model for all public discourse. Bathsua Makin, for example, in An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), her seventeenth-century discussion of women and the history of learning—including rhetoric—praises “wives of excellent parts . . . [who have been] instructed . . . in all kinds of learning , the more to fit them for . . . converse” (in Donawerth, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900 77). Under the umbrella of “converse,” Makin cites women’s published writings as well as their oratory and domestic responsibilities, thus employing conversation as a model for all discourse of the educated woman. This book is aimed at a broad audience of scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in the disciplines of rhetoric and composition, communication and speech, and women’s studies. It began as a teaching experiment . In the early 1980s, when I first designed and taught a graduate course in the history of rhetorical theory before 1900, there were no women theorists in anthologies, and there were no studies of women’s rhetorical theory before 1900, although there were a few studies of individual women’s rhetoric. In order to help students grasp the intensity of restrictions against women’s rhetorical education, I asked my students to do a research assignment—to find the first woman rhetorical theorist before 1900. I expected them not to find anyone, and I planned for the class to have a discussion about the socially imposed limitations on women’s rhetoric. But my students surprised me. If we redefine rhetoric as the art of communicating , then we can make an argument that Sappho, or Margaret Fell, or Aspasia, or Mary Astell, or Pan Chao is writing rhetorical theory. With this encouragement, I began further research and, after more than a dozen years of teaching out of xeroxed packets, published Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology. Research for that anthology did not follow the straightforward path that I had been taught in graduate school. Some women (like Arete) I had to research under a husband’s or father’s name. Other women, like Sei Shonagon , I found because I asked every humanities colleague I met if they knew of any woman in their field writing advice on communication—conversation, letter writing, composition, or public reading...