In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 In the Palindrome of the Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of form. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols The story around the Portrait Monument—its celebration in the Rotunda and its authorization in the basement—alerted me to the existence of another movement , one of women going down at the same time as they are recognized and ostensibly included within the house. My personal experience of seeing the statue in the basement led me to think about the house I am in: it is rhetoric. Yet the Capitol remains part of the complex that offers a vision of rhetoric as a small house where people assemble and use its process for making decisions. During my first visit as well as subsequent visits to the Capitol, the awareness that women—Mott, Stanton, and Anthony—are in the basement is always immediate to me. But then someone would say, “Oh, it’s just a statue.” To this, some part of me would agree. But as I began to connect my perception of being in the basement with my imagination of seeing the Capitol as the house of rhetoric, I discovered another staircase. Besides the one in the Capitol, there is one housed in the scholarship. So, it isn’t just a statue; rather, the statue is emblematic of women as they are written down in rhetoric. I begin again on a staircase, but this time I focus on an imaginary one. To bring it into view, I give an extended example, consisting of a brief summary of the academic climb up and down of women in rhetoric during seventy years of scholarship. Let the stairs begin with the 1930s and end at the top with the 2000s. In the 1930s, the question of women in public life compelled Doris G. Yoakam to write a dissertation surveying the public-speaking activities of more than fifty women and then to argue that they had made a significant contribution to the field of speech.1 Yoakam hoped her findings would help provide future students, including “thousands of girls in universities and colleges . . . who are studying 22 / Chapter 1 speech,” with texts that more accurately reflected the past.2 Also produced during the 1930s were two major textbooks on public speaking for women.3 Both establish a need for women to study public speaking on the grounds that change and great reforms are the fruits of women speaking in the public forum.4 Similarly , Eudora Ramsay Richardson’s text justifies the teaching of public speaking to women, stating, “Women in our country stand the chance of losing all that has been gained.”5 There is reason to believe the ground “that seemed so solid” is slipping “under our feet,” Richardson said.6 She counts the number of women in state legislatures and in political organizations and finds nineteen fewer women in 1935 than in 1931. She contributes some of the decline to section 213A of the National Economy Act: “School boards and businesses, as well as governmental and state departments, were ruling out married women and giving preference to men, particularly in executive and administrative appointments.”7 After Richardson came J. V. Garland’s Public Speaking for Women, arguably one of the best collections of speeches by women in the early part of the twentieth century. When this text was published in 1938, it had the full support and backing of over two dozen women’s organizations. A majority of the speeches in Garland’s collection display women in politics, business, and education. For example , Ruth de Young, women’s editor of the Chicago Tribune, wrote a speech in which she underscores the work of “12,000,000 business and professional women” on the American landscape as well as “30,000 women in the United States with the power of the vote.”8 And there is a speech by C. Ormond Williams, honorary president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. In her radio address, Williams imagines the political power of women through their work in the service industry, especially as telephone operators, propelling women into positions of authority. Given these inroads, Richardson’s warning that the grounds of women’s inclusion were slipping under their feet seemed pessimistic at worst and exaggerated at best. In the 1940s, Jessie Haven Butler wrote a public-speaking text for women in response to the decline in the number of women studying public speaking. She emphasized the importance of...

Share