Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms

by Nan Johnson

Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or “parlor” traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class woman as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space—and the debate about who should occupy that space—Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman’s proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years.

 

While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women’s words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American woman to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge the white middle class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman’s place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife.

 

Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women’s roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the “quiet woman” must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women’s space in historical discourse. 

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 18, 2002

Reviews

[Lance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson demonstrates how great women rhetors were erased from American oratory through a connection between rhetoric and the performance of gender, which was delimited by restrictive conceptions of public and private space. Women's influence was generally seen as most powerfully exerted at home and not in public spaces. Even when great women orators spoke, they had to do so from a "domesticated' lectern. I found this book absolutely essential to understanding the performance and theorizing of rhetoric in the 19th century, most of which is gendered as masculine, though perhaps not always in obvious ways. This is an important read for anyone studying rhetoric in general, but a must read for those researching the 19th century.

[BookChampions · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid (albeit at times repetitive) critique of the parlor rhetoric of the postbellum period and the turn of the 20th century that encouraged and even forced women back into the parlor/home, erased female orators from the history book and gendered available means. The primary sources are first rate--and you'll be shocked how some of these writers on etiquette were telling women how to act. Nan Johnson explores and exposes a rhetoric of silencing painted as "moral duty." Fascinating stuff.