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Book Reviews Review Essay Historical Narratives, Rhetorical Narratives, and Woman Suffrage Scholarship Bonnie J. Dow "The Transfiguring Sword": The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union. By Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997; pp. χ+ 201. $29.95. Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-1920. By Suzanne M. Marilley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996; pp. xi + 281. $39.95. African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920. By Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998; pp. xii + 192. $39.95 cloth; $16.95 paper. Other Powers: The Age of Suffragism, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. By Barbara Goldsmith. New York: Knopf, 1998; pp. xv + 531. $30.00. The publication of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's two-volume Man Cannot Speak for Her (MCSFH) in 1989 was a central event in the study of first wave feminist discourse.1 Although previously published essays by Campbell and others treated different actors and issues within the woman's rights movement, Campbell's book performed an indispensable function in the development of a field of study: it gave scholars a framework and a specifically rhetorical narrative to guide our understanding of the movement and its discourse. In 1990,1 began teaching a course in the rhetoric of the woman's rights movement, a course I have taught every year since then, and Campbell's two volume work always has been my primary text. Over the years, I have added and subtracted from my syllabus to expand on issues Campbell covers only briefly or to de-emphasize topics or discourse that she finds more interesting than I do. But the scaffolding remains the same; as I recently said to a group of students in Bonnie J. Dow is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 2, 1999, pp. 321-365 ISSN 1094-8392 322 Rhetoric & Public Affairs a seminar on feminist rhetoric, Campbell's account of first wave discourse is hegemonic , and understandably so. Not only does it display first-rate research and analysis , it does what good criticism should do: it makes choices, argues for them, and provides interpretation that illuminates rhetorical dynamics by interweaving them with useful contextualization. It makes sense of a long, complicated, and diverse collection of rhetors and rhetoric. Ultimately, MCSFH is a diachronic account. Although its chapters explore themes in the woman's rights movement, those themes exist within a chronology, and that chronology has a telos: to account for the development of rhetorical strategies that contributed to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. As such, MCSFH necessarily neatens the movement and distills its arguments, keeping a focus on rhetorical choices made by participants and the function of those choices in confronting the exigencies that such a movement must address in order to succeed . Indeed, as Campbell notes, "the works anthologized and analyzed are persuasive masterworks of the early movement. As such, they contributed to the development and survival of that movement, and they represent skillful human artistry in the face of nearly insuperable rhetorical obstacles."2 The influence of this approach on the treatment of feminist discourse in this field is powerful. Martha Solomon [Watson]'s edited collection of essays on the woman suffrage press, A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910, follows a similar format, in chronologizing women's newspapers throughout the nineteenth century and focusing on their contributions to the development of arguments that guided the movement to fruition.3 More recently, Cheryl JorgensenEarp 's book, "The Transfiguring Sword": The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union, although it treats British woman suffrage discourse over a short period of time, displays a similar orientation. Taking as her task the explanation of "the adoption of violent tactics as a question of rhetorical invention," JorgensenEarp argues that British women's escalation to violence in their suffrage campaign in the early twentieth century should be viewed rhetorically in two senses: in terms of its origins as a response to rhetorical exigency and as the grounds for a rhetorical campaign...

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