Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States

Abstract

Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. By Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 279. Appendices. Cloth, $34.95.)Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early Republic examines the various rhetorical and composition practices available educated women in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Co-authors Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen trace a shift from a civic (1) of the early national period (which was public, often oratory, and focused on civic duty and effecting political change during the formative years of nation building), the emergence of belletristic practices of the mid-nineteenth century (which were rooted in ideas about Romanticism and aesthetics and privileged the home as a neutral site of harmony and taste). Ultimately, Eldred and Mortensen suggest, the favoring of belletristic styles foreclosed possibilities for educated women pursue active roles in matters of civic society and politics. As a result, although women gained unprecedented access various educational institutions and played a leading role in the founding of female academies, seminaries, and normal schools in the first half of the nineteenth century, they lost opportunities utilize that education through an ungendered, unmonitored rhetorical agency associated with liberatory civic rhetoric (144). In other words, the authors argue that more access education and writing actually led less power for women, due a shift in rhetorical forms that domesticated and subdued women's voices. This is an intriguing argument and one that might be of much interest historians had the authors succeeded in making a convincing case about the scope and implications associated with the emergence of belletristic practices.To trace this shift from civic rhetoric belletrism, Imagined Rhetoric examines a variety of source materials, including textbooks, schooling fictions (viii), novels, and prescriptive literature. With the majority of their sources written and published by women, Eldred and Mortensen reveal that women were both producers and consumers of rhetorical strategies. Imagining Rhetoric begins its analysis in the early republic, when the goal of civic rhetoric was to awaken the collective conscience of a new republic (2). Chapters two and three examine various examples of rhetorical practices offered early national women. Writings about women's education were marked by competing discourses of liberation and restraint (45). This tension was reflected, in particular, in male doubt and criticism about women's intellectual capacity and ambition. Fears of over-educated women, particularly the figure of the pedant, served as warnings that women should not try compete with men professionally or politically.Although discouraged and excluded from seeking formal roles in government, writers such as Hannah Webster Foster and Judith Sargent Murray understood that neoclassical principles of rhetoric held potentially liberatory promise for women and consequently looked for alternate spaces of literary and personal expression. Foster imagined the boarding school as a space where civic rhetoric could guide the educational and literary pursuits of young women. Letter writing was another favored option, enabling women continue practices of composition and education with like-minded friends. Murray, in turn, was involved in the effort construct a nationalist standard of discourse and education, particularly through practices of composition rooted in a commonplace rhetoric (88) of accumulating, storing, and utilizing a vast collection of intellectual property. Both Murray and Foster found in liberatory civic rhetoric a means of expressing and articulating voices for women that held promise, potential, and purpose.Eldred and Mortensen argue that changes in rhetorical style and taste would alter how women's education was conceptualized and utilized respond most effectively the sweeping economic and political changes of the antebellum years. …