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

Introduction: Adding Women’s Rhetorical Theory to the Conversation

1 G Introduction: Adding Women’s Rhetorical Theory to the Conversation When Mary Astell, in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, part II, published in 1697, outlines what ladies should study under the rubric of rhetoric, she terms the audience of her would-be writers “our neighbors” and the communication these writers would convey a “conversation” (120–22). When Jennie Willing, in the 1887 edition of The Potential Woman: A Book for Young Ladies (originally published in 1881) discusses “Talking,” she emphasizes public speaking and defends women’s preaching, but she begins with conversation: “the sweet and serious words of a sister, the tender counsel of a mother, the whispered confidences of a wife” (113). In his essay on Hugh Blair’s use of Quintilian, Michael Halloran suggests that every rhetoric both “situates itself in relation to . . . the rhetorical tradition” and “transforms what tradition offers into symbolic instruments for dealing with the present” (194). Both Mary Astell and Jennie Willing, two centuries apart, are doing just that: they are theorizing rhetoric, the art of communication, for women and are transforming rhetoric by drawing on women’s gendered experience in conversation as a model for all discourse. This book examines the rise and fall of a women’s tradition of rhetoric. Between 1600 and 1900, English and American women (and one much-translated Frenchwoman) composed rhetorical theories based on conversation as a model of discourse. Madeleine de Scudéry, Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, Margaret Fell, Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, Ellen Stewart, Hallie Quinn Brown, Genevieve Stebbins, Frances Willard, Anna Morgan, Virginia Waddy, Mary Augusta Jordan , and many others theorized rhetoric—conversation, letter writing, testimony and preaching, elocution, and eventually public speaking—for women. Unlike traditional histories of rhetoric, this one does not tell a story of linear progress and achievement, of contention and influence. The Anglo-American 2 Introduction women’s tradition of rhetorical theory is a story of moments, not movements, of starts and stops and starting over, not progressive development. Women theorized not in the handbooks of traditional rhetorical education but in whatever places of publication were open to them, and their story concerns the moments when they discover the gendered nature of communication or construct a theory out of the circumstances of women’s domestic lives—especially conversation . Until the nineteenth century, then, there is little influence but many discrete moments of discovery, and women are not necessarily influenced by other women before them. This study enters an ongoing scholarly conversation. Much of the time, historians of rhetoric have defined women’s theory in the negative—why there wasn’t any. In addition, the scholarly conversation has so far emphasized women’s rhetorical practices, not their rhetorical theories. During the 1980s and 1990s, many women orators were recovered, and many studies of women’s rhetorical activities were published. Feminist scholars have fully reversed the earlier sense that rhetoric was men’s business only and at the same time have thoroughly examined the reasons that so many women were silent and so few women (relatively) attempted public persuasion. We now have a good sense of why women did not write rhetoric textbooks until very late in this period. But there are other forms of rhetoric besides public speaking, and there are places other than rhetoric textbooks where communication may be theorized. Consequently, it is time to ask new questions and change the course of the conversation. How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it? This study shows us how women availed themselves of the genres that women were reading to theorize the communication that women were achieving. Women seized the available means1 and published theories of communication in a variety of places: in humanist treatises defending women’s education, in conduct books for women, in defenses of women’s preaching, and in elocution handbooks. In these places, over the course of three centuries, they developed theories of women’s rhetoric based on conversation, not on public speaking. But when at last, in the middle of the nineteenth century, they began to write rhetoric and composition textbooks for both male and female students, these theories of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy. This study will trace this rise and fall, examining conversation as a model of discourse in women’s humanist dialogues and defenses of women’s education, the recognition of the gendered nature of communication in women’s conduct...