Rhetoric, History, and Women's Oratorical Education

American Women Learn to Speak

David Gold, Catherine L. Hobbs, David Gold, Catherine L. Hobbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415661058
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135104948
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth. Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate many previous claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking. Enriching our understanding of women's oratorical education and practice, this cutting-edge work makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetoric and communication.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: American Women Learn to Speak—New Forms of Inquiry into Women’s Rhetorics
• 1 “By Women, You Were Brought Forth into this World”: Cherokee Women’s Oratorical Education in the Late Eighteenth Century
• 2 “A Vapour Which Appears but for a Moment”: Oratory and Elocution for Girls during the Early American Republic
• 3 Speaking and Writing in Conversation: Constructing the Voice of Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis
• 4 Negotiating Conflicting Views of Women and Elocution: Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, Florence Hartley, and Marietta Holley
• 5 “To Supply this Deficiency”: Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations as Hybrid Rhetorical Practice
• 6 “God Sees Me”: Surveillance and Oratorical Training at Nineteenth-Century St. Mary-of-the-Woods in Indiana
• 7 The Arguments they Wore: The Role of the Neoclassical Toga in American Delsartism
• 8 Womanly Eloquence and Rhetorical Bodies: Regendering the Public Speaker through Physical Culture
• 9 Rethinking Etiquette: Emily Post’s Rhetoric of Social Self-Reliance for American Women
• 10 “Remember the World is not a Playground but a Schoolroom”: Barbara Jordan‘s Early Rhetorical Education
• 11 Learning not to Preach: Evangelical Speaker Beth Moore and the Rhetoric of Constraint
• List of Contributors
• Index