For Penn State Rhetoric Paper, scroll down.

JANE L. DONAWERTH

Department of English, University of Maryland at College Park

College Park, Maryland 20742 Telephone: (301) 405-3818

EMPLOYMENT: Professor of English since 1997, UMCP since 1974

Affiliate Faculty in Women's Studies since 1989

Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature, and in Theatre

Director of Freshman Writing 1984-1988

Acting Director of Comparative Literature, spring 1995

EDUCATION: 1975: Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison

(English Literature, Renaissance; History of Rhetoric minor)

1970: M.A. University of Wisconsin, Madison (English Literature)

1969: B.A. Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, Magna Cum Laude

(English Literature, French minor) Phi Beta Kappa

HONORS: 1997-98: University of Maryland Lilly Teaching Fellow

1997: Graduate English Organization Service to Students Award

1995-96 University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher

1994: Co-Director NEH Summer Institute, "Sappho and Lady Mary Wroth"

1994, 1982: UMCP Book Subsidy Awards

1993, 1998: UMCP Center for Teaching Excellence Student Choice Award 1990: Students' Award for Excellence in Teaching in Arts & Humanities

1989: Arts and Humanities Grant to Integrate Scholarship on Women

1996, 1988, 1978, 1976: UMCP General Research Board Awards

1980: NEH Fellow

1979: Fellow at the Institute for Research in Humanities,

University of Wisconsin, Madison

BOOKS:

Ed. with Mary Burke, Linda Dove, and Karen Nelson. Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor-Stuart Britain. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999.

Daughters of Frankenstein: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1996.

Ed. with Carol Kolmerten. Worlds of Difference: Utopian and Science Fiction by Women. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994.

Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

BOOKS IN PROCESS:

Edited with Adele Seeff. Attending to Early Modern Women--Crossing Boundaries. Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies of the University of Maryland Publication Series. Wilmington: Delaware University Press.

Edited and translated with Lillian Doherty. Selected Rhetorical Writings of Madeleine de Scudéry. In University of Chicago Press Series edited by Albert Rabil and Margaret King.

Editing, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology.

ESSAYS ON RHETORIC:

"Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and the Creation of a Women's Tradition of Rhetoric." Rhetoric, the Polis, and the Global Village. 1998 Proceedings Rhetoric Society of America. Ed. Jan Swearingen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 12 pp. ms.

"Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women." Rhetorica 16.2 (Spring 1998): 181-99.

"Oratory and Rhetoric." Renaissance Women Online. Brown Women Writers Project. http://www.wwp.brown.edu/rwo/home.html. 1998. 8 pp.

"Madeleine de Scudéry's Rhetoric of Conversation." Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Wertheimer. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1997. 305-19.

"Textbooks for New Audiences: Women's Revisions of Rhetoric at the Turn of the Century." Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Wertheimer. University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 335-56.

"The Politics of Rhetorical Theory by Women." In The Rhetoric of Politics and Renaissance Women. Ed. Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995, 256-72.

With Students from ENGL 607, "An Annotated Bibliography of Non-Western Rhetorical Theory before 1900." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 24.3/4 (1994): 167-180.

"Transforming the History of Rhetorical Theory." Feminist Teacher 7.1 (Fall 1992): 35-39.

"A Bibliography of Women and the History of Rhetorical Theory Before 1900." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20 (Fall 1990): 403-414.

ESSAYS ON RENAISSANCE STUDIES:

"Women's Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange." In Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture. (see above)

"Shakespeare in the Context of Renaissance Women's Culture." Special Issue on "Teaching Judith Shakespeare," ed. Elizabeth Hagemann and Sara Jayne Steen. Shakespeare Quarterly. 47.4 (Winter 1996): 476-489.

"Holofernes, the Spelling Controversy, and Renaissance Philosophy of Language." Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference 1983 (Villanova: Villanova University, 1985), pp. 79-88.

"Shakespeare and Acting Theory in the English Renaissance." In Shakespeare and the Arts. Ed. Cecile Cary and Henry Limouze (Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982): 165-78.

"Words and Things." La grande festa del linguaggio: Shakespeare e la lingua inglesee. Ed. Keir Elam. (Bologna: I1 Mulino, 1986).

"Holofernes, the Spelling Controversy, and Renaissance Philosophy of Language." Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference 1983. (Villanova: Villanova University, 1985): 79-88.

"The Language of Voice, Expression, and Gesture in Hamlet." Hamlet Studies (Summer 1981): 32-47.

ESSAYS ON SCIENCE FICTION

"Lilith Lorraine: Feminist Socialist Writer in the Pulps." Science Fiction Studies. 17.2 (July 1990): 252-258.

"Utopian Science: Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction by Women." NWSA Journal 2.4 (Autumn 1990): 535-557.

"Science Fiction." The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 780-782.

"Mothers are Animals: Women as Aliens in Science Fiction by Women." Graven Images: A Journal of Law, Culture, and the Sacred. 2 (Fall 1995): 237-47.

"Woman as Machine in Science Fiction by Women." Extrapolation. (Fall 1995): 210-21.

"Feminist Dystopias in the 1990s." Future Females, The Next Generation. Ed. Marleen Barr. (Boulder: Roman and Littlefield, 1999).

Co-editor 1990-94 with Melissa Sites and Joan Gordon of SF4, a newsletter on women and science fiction for academics.

ESSAYS ON PEDAGOGY:

"Changing Our Originary Stories: Renaissance Women on Education,

and Conversation as a Model for our Classrooms." Attending to Early Modern Women. Ed. Susan Amussen and Adele Seeff. Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming.

"Teaching Science Fiction by Women." English Journal 79.3 (March 1990): 39-46.

"Fostering Conversation: Redistributing Authority in the Discussion Classroom." Essays on Quality Learning. Ed. Steven Selden. College Park, MD: University of Maryland Center for Teaching Excellene, 1998. 11-16.

TEACHING: beginning and advanced composition; surveys on literature, poetry, the novel, drama; Shakespeare, early modern women's writings, renaissance literature, rhetoric, science fiction by women, senior seminars; graduate courses in composition pedagogy, history of rhetorical theory, science fiction and utopian literature by women, renaissance literature, renaissance women's writings.

Penn State Rhetoric Conference Paper

for summer 1999

Jane Donawerth jd32@umail.umd.edu

Department of English 301-405-3818

University of Maryland

College Park, MD 20742

Nineteenth-Century United States

Conduct Book Rhetoric by Women

In 1904, Mary August Jordan, a professor of rhetoric and eventually President of Smith College, published Correct Writing and Speaking with a national publishing company. Looking very much like a rhetoric textbook,¹ this book yet came out in a series called "The Woman's Home Library." The contents of this book seem to fall under the category of late nineteenth-century rhetorical theory--advice on composition and speech. But in the mixture of bellestristic rhetoric, contemporary scientific linguistics, and history of the language from a literary perspective, Jordan also includes passages on what we would now call "etiquette": polite conversation and letter-writing. Where do these passages come from, and what are they doing in such a book?

Mary Augusta Jordan, first-generation college student and among the first generation of women PhDs, is drawing simultaneously on two traditions, for a new generation of women who belong to both traditions. The first is the tradition we are all familiar with, academic rhetoric. Jordan is an enthusiastic and novel consumer and producer of rhetorical theory in the academic tradition. She is interested in how people effectively write and learn how to write, how they use the dictionary, how they learn and reform their language, how they speak and how they learn to speak on public, formal occasions. She is especially interested in adapting these academic materials from a mainly masculine tradition to women's use.

But she is also drawing on another tradition of non-academic rhetoric for women, I argue in this essay. For a hundred years before Jordan, women in England and the United States had been teaching women how to speak and write in conduct books for women which were used for girls' schools or for home schooling. In this essay, I consider the United States tradition of conduct book rhetoric for women.²

The history of the teaching of rhetoric in the nineteenth century and the development of theory to serve new cultural contexts has emphasized men's education and men's theory. In his ground-breaking study, Albert Kitzhaber pointed out that early nineteenth-century college rhetoric (for men) reworked and merged the belletristic rhetoric of British Hugh Blair and the psychological rhetoric of George Campbell until changes in culture made that rhetoric no longer effective. According to Kitzhaber, the experiments with combining new psychology and the science of linguistics were overwhelmed at the end of the century by the demand for correctness generated by the 1892 Harvard Report, and rhetoric became a discipline devoted to the mechanics of grammar, paragraphing, and the four forms of discourse--description, narration, exposition, and argumentation. James Berlin followed Kitzhaber, but divided nineteenth-century American writing instruction into four periods: early classical, Scottish psychological, romantic (emphasizing Emerson), and current-traditional (emphasizing correctness). Although both mention Gertrude Buck, who wrote composition textbooks, Kitzhaber and Berlin set the direction of scholarly exploration of nineteenth-century writing instruction by considering only college composition texts (almost all by men) or writings of famous men (like Emerson). Since women were not attending college yet in great numbers, how they learned to write and speak is not considered.³

Classic study by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. In the last five years, feminists have taken up the challenge of Patricia Bizzell to be "resisting" readers of the canonical texts by men of traditional rhetorical history, to "insert ... women into the traditonal history and ...[set] their work in dialogue with the canon," and "to look in places not previously studied for work by women that would not have been traditionally considered rhetoric" (51). Joy Rouse, Shirley Logan, Annette Kolodny, Carla Peterson, Hobbes, have studied women's rhetoric and the ways that women were taught writing.⁴ In her recent wide-ranging study, Anne Ruggles Gere describes the context of women's clubs and women's self-help and educational reading societies that encouraged women's literacy and writing practice as well as activism. Conduct book rhetoric grew out of and contributed to this culture of continuing education and women's clubs. But no one has treated the women who were writing rhetorical and composition theory for women--the textbooks for home schooling, if you will.

Beginning with Lydia Sigourney (who was strongly influenced by British Hannah More⁵), United States conduct books by women theorized women's cultural roles in writing and speaking and taught women conversation skills and letter-writing. Earlier conduct books by men warned women against speaking too much, being witty, and gaining too much education.⁶ These women writers of conduct books promoted women's education, and negotiated the gender constraints of speech and writing with great ingenuity, while not challenging them outright until after 1850.

In Letters to Young Ladies (1833) and Letters to My Pupils (1850), Lydia Sigourney constructs a sphere of women's rhetoric--conversation, reading aloud as parlor entertainment, and letter-writing--in the context of a republican ideal of womanhood. She represents women as industriously self-educated and as teachers.

Arguing in her introduction to Letters to Young Ladies that it is both beneficial that women be well educated in order to better nurture their children (read "sons"), and also that teaching is "natural" to women (10-12), Sigourney helps to forge a separate spheres gender theory that has far-reaching benefits as well as drawbacks for women in the nineteenth century. The drawbacks we have long understood: a separate spheres concept of gender limits women to domestic influence, unpaid work, and unequal education. The benefits include, however, the possibility of continuous self-education (common for men in nineteenth-century United States, as well), and the claim to a major role in passing on the cultural capital of knowledge and values. This last helps to explain how women are often central in nineteenth-century activist causes.

Sigourney's Letters to Young Ladies is a conduct book of essay-like reflections on the education of girls and women: what they need to know in a very particular social context of middle-class United States. Both this book and also her later Letters to My Pupils are designed to be used either in a school for girls or in home-schooling, for they set out a curriculum for girls, as well as encouraging them to continuously improve themselves. Sigourney is thus translating the "self-help" ideology of American masculine culture into feminine terms.

What does this mean for rhetoric? The concerns of classical rhetoric find strange bedfellows in the concerns of feminine conduct. In the chapter on "Manners and Accomplishments" in Letters for Young Ladies, for example, Sigourney not only discusses etiquette, music, dancing, and the crafts of traditional feminine education, but also reading aloud. Women must have training in reading, she argues, because it provides entertainment and pleasure for those in the family she serves--and Sigourney pushes this claim fully into the realm of formal training in elocution, with the goal to be "clearly understood" (114-15). A discussion of handwriting (a traditional part of women's education by the nineteenth century) leads to a discussion of letter-writing as an art worthy of Cicero, and a claim that women have a "natural" gift of "epistolary composition" (116). The chapter on "Books" in Letters for Young Ladies includes discussion of the value of logic (154-55) and the importance of systematic training of the memory (156-60). These are considered not as valuable in themselves, or only for the character of the reader, but as part of a larger view of the rhetorical obligations on women: they need something sensible to say. Sigourney suggests grounding such study in all-women reading societies (160), where "partnership in knowledge" will lead to "great increase of intellectual wealth" (161).⁷ Here the adaptation of republican ideals to women's concerns is especially clear: knowledge is quite literally capital in this nineteenth-century American system, and women may indeed own such capital and draw interest from its circulation.

In chapters on "Conversation" in Letters to Young Ladies, and on "Fitly-Spoken Words" in Letters to My Pupils, Sigourney develops a rhetoric for the spoken discourse of domestic relations that lies outside "public" discourse, but not outside the realm of public influence. She borrows from the tradition of women's treatments of conversation the precept that women's conversation should be "agreeable" (Ladies 187). She borrows from Hannah More the conception of women's role in conversation as the good listener (Ladies 192).⁸ As in traditional conduct book literature, much of the advice on feminine conversation is couched negatively: women should not talk too much (Ladies 187); women should not talk simply to display themselves (Ladies 191); women should not interrupt others (Pupils 46); women should not flatter (Ladies 192); women should not dissect the characters of other women (Ladies 193-95, Pupils 48); women should avoid frivolous speech (Ladies 198-99). Sigourney extends these strictures, through her mainly male examples, however, to men as well as women: men, too, should not talk too much; men, too, should listen well. In sentimentalizing and moralizing the art of conversation, Sigourney also universalizes the "feminine" qualities of good conversation and opens room to further extend women's social power.

Sigourney adds to previous discussions of conversation an analysis of conversations between men and women as moral uplift, a move that suggests the benefit of sentimental culture to nineteenth-century women. "The degree of influence," she warns young women, that "you possess over young men .... is exceedingly great" (Ladies 198). What Sigourney wants women to do with this influence is improve everyone's character: steer men to "useful" rather than frivolous conversation and knowledge; encourage "habits of industry" and "just economy" (Ladies 198-99). The good conversationalist thus seems very like the good speaker of traditional rhetoric, although she is female: she possesses "disciplined intellect, to think clearly, and to clothe thought with propriety and elegance; knowledge of humna nature, to suit subject to character; true politeness, to prevent giving pain; a deep sense of morality, to preserve the dignity of speech; and a spirit of benevolence to neutralize its asperities and sanctify its powers" (Ladies 200-201). To these qualities, in the later Letters to My Pupils, Sigourney adds the republican virtues of simplicity and respect for others (32-33). Cicero and Quintilian would applaud such a speaker. Indeed, the aim of conversation for Sigourney is very close to the aim of Ciceronian rhetoric and Horatian poetry: as speakers in the Roman tradition aim at "utile et dulce," Sigourney's speakers "converse both agreeably and usefully" (Pupils 44).

That these qualities of good conversation amount to a sentimental adaptation of traditional rhetoric to new purposes in United States and feminine society, may be most clearly seen in Letters to My Pupils. In her summary of the nature of "fitly spoken words," Sigourney requires her pupils to use "words that give pleasure" (49), "words that convey instruction" (50), and "words that soothe sorrow" (52). "Sympathy" is the virtue of a good speaker that is most characteristic of the nineteenth century in Sigourney's canon of speakerly virtues (Pupils 52-53). Sigourney thus paradoxically ends her section on "fitly spoken words" with several pages on silence: silence in the presence of the sublime, silence to comfort the ill and the grief-stricken, silence in devotion (Pupils 53-55).

In The Young Lady's Friend (1836) and The Youth's Letter Writer (1840), Eliza Farrar follows in Sigourney's footsteps, offering rhetoric to women who tutor children at home or have left school for family responsibilities. Farrar is even more specific about her republican audience than is Sigourney--in The Young Lady's Friend she directly addresses "the daughters of our republic" (40). Both Sigourney and Farrar stress the moral role of women in families and society, and Farrar, like Sigourney, sentimentalizes that role, founding it on the sympathy that binds all society together (208-210, 364, for example).

In the opening to The Young Lady's Friend Farrar observes, "the influence of mothers is greater than that of fathers in forming the characters of their children" (3), and then sketches the traditional humanist, rhetorical education that lasts a lifetime--but for women, so that they can properly influence their children. The ideal woman for Farrar is the nineteenth-century version of the superwoman: she is an avid reader for moral and educational purposes (and always willing to teach others what she knows); she is a skilled manager of domestic affairs; she is a scientifically trained nurse who also dispenses pastoral care to the sick; she is a talented seamstress and needlewoman; and she is an agreeable and knowledgeable partner in conversation (especially 39-40).

Under "Evening Parties," Farrar adds to previous conduct book rhetoric a discussion of women's "self-possession" (Young Lady's Friend 363)--a telling term signaling American individualism. In Farrar's discussion, "self-possession" turns out to be a feminine equivalent of delivery. She instructs women in the courtsy of greeting, posture and graceful movement, holding still, and advises, "Your whole deportment should give the idea that your person, your voice, and your mind are entirely under your own control" (362-63). Here one sees how mainstream rhetorical advice for men becomes radical reform when applied to women: teaching graceful posture has led Farrar to advocate control over themselves to women.

Farrar devotes a whole chapter to conversation. The purposes of conversation, Farrar suggests, should be "innocent recreation" and "intellectual growth" (Young Lady's Friend 374). But more revealing is her comment that conversation "is the readiest way in which gifted minds exert their influence" (385). Like many female rhetorical theorists before her, Farrar realizes that power operates in private, domestic speech, as well as in public speaking. Like her precursors in conduct book rhetoric, she warns young women against the faults of ridicule and wit at others's expense (375-76); she also castigates the faults of exaggerated tales (377-81), irony and joking (381-83), and speaking only to display one's knowledge (421). Farrar, like Sigourney before her, raises listening to an important part of the art of conversation (384-85), but requires both partners (not just the female partner) to listen in turn (386). According to Farrar, the good conversationalist employs method, clarity, and force in speech just as the orator (386). "The art of conversation," is, however, a communal art, enabling "a company, when a good topic was once started, to keep it up, till it had elicited the powers of the best speakers, and ... [to] prevent its being cut short in the midst, by the introduction of something entirely foreign" (386). Farrar further adds a discussion of delivery in conversation, treating the signals of countenance and body that maintain connection between listener and speaker (387-88).

Near the end of The Young Lady's Friend, under the topic of "Mental Culture," Farrar gives advice on the desirability of continuing practice in writing and reading after leaving school. She recommends reading treatises on women's education, and the classics in English and other languages (422-23). That she sees such reading as an alternative to college is suggested by her recommendation that women should undertake a "course of reading" rather than reading to taste (423). Such reading will then substitute for the courses that the men of the family will take in college. Writing is central to this kind of continuing education for women in Farrar's plan: "However irksome may have been the writing of themes at school," Farrar comments, "you cannot relinquish the frequent exercise of the mind in composition, without neglecting one of the most important means of mental culture" (425). Women should note words they do not know in a notebook so that they can inquire concerning their meaning later (423-24). They should take notes on sermons, lectures, conversations, and passages from books that might serve as a topic for a practice theme. (This is the classic rhetorical exercise of the paraphrase.)

Farrar hopes that eventually not only biography and foreign travels will interest young women, but also "philosophy of language and grammar" and "rhetoric" (Young Lady's Friend 428-29). For women who want to study rhetoric, she encourages the use of Blair, Kame, Campbell--the standard nineteenth-century texts for men's college composition and rhetoric (429). Thus in her conduct book for women she is interweaving many of the same subjects and skills that are taught in the early nineteenth-century to men in college textbooks.

While Farrar briefly instructs in letter-writing in The Young Lady's Friend, under "Female Companionship" (279-83), she devotes a whole book to teaching this art, as well. In The Youth's Letter Writer; or The Epistolary Art, Farrar offers a manual of letter writing that may serve as a school text or a home-schooling guide for letter-writing. In the fashion of reformed education championed by the British Edgeworth family and others at the end of the eighteenth century, Farrar turns her textbook into a story with morals as well as instruction: a young boy, Henry, spends several months visiting his uncle's family, and so learns the value of letter-writing, since it maintains the bonds and affection between him and his family while he is away. The better letter writer he becomes, the better the bond--thus education in this volume is given a motivation very much in keeping with sentimental culture. "Young men who leave their pleasant homes" the volume tells us, "consider a letter [from a family member] one of the greatest blessings" (4). In sentimental terms, a letter is a gift to loved ones (9). This moralizing of the art of writing thus also pushes this manual over into the category of conduct literature, as well. The virtues writing letters inculcate include exactness in expression (telling the truth) (142), civility and kindness (66-67), simplicity and economy (156-58), as well as sympathy.

In The Youth's Letter Writer Henry receives lessons from his uncle on writing concisely (to get all the events on a page and not waste precious paper); punctuation and paragraphing; spelling; beginnings and endings; folding, sealing, addressing; and making pens and pensmanship. The models for letter writing recommended include Cicero, Benjamin Franklin, and the poet Cowper. Still, the bulk of instruction in this story of children learning how to write letters, is conducted through the childrens' own writing (10-11). Mr. Price, the uncle, is assisted in these lessons by his eldest daughter, Anna, and when he goes on business, she continues the lessons. Anna helps Henry with openings, finding and developing subjects, and the best way to prepare an audience for bad news. In the book's final chapter, Farrar democratizes her lessons by having Anna teach the poor boy who helps with chores on their farm how to answer a letter from his parents. At the same time that education is democratized, the class system is firmly reinforced, not only by the separation of the poor boy from other students, but also by an increased emphasis on correctness compared to earlier instruction in letter-writing (10-11).

In The Potential Woman (1881), Jennie Willing, an activist member of the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union), adapts this tradition of conduct book rhetoric for women to more radical ends--preaching and social reform. Willing's accessible, conversational style is aimed at a broader audience than many nineteenth-century conduct books, as the chapter on "Bread-Winning" implies: this audience includes not only middle class but also working women (although perhaps only those women who work before marriage).

In The Potential Woman Willing appropriates the conduct book as a genre in order to reform rather than maintain social values. As a consequence, it includes chapters on the traditional subjects of conduct books (such as home-making and nursing), but it expands some subjects, such as conversation (to teaching) and nursing (to scientific health and hygiene practices), and includes new topics (such as "bread-winning" and "economy").

In the chapter on "Talking," Willing begins with the radical proposition that men and women are equal, and that education in speech needs to be reformed to reflect women's status (11). Willing appends to this claim an analysis of the linguistic roles of men and women that result from this discrimination. "Women," she observes, "like all who have not had a fair field, have fallen into diplomacy, carrying by favor points that they are not permitted to win by direct argument" (112). With a perceptive, parodic analogy, she critiques the expected role of woman as good listener: women "say 'Yes,' and 'No,' and keep up a gentle jingle of the small bells of assent and applause, hoping to gain by pleasing what they are not allowed honorably to claim; their hearts, meanwhile, hungering for the mental food of excellent, ennobling speech" (112). This passage also calls into question the advice on conversation of the preceding fifty years of conduct book rhetoric for women. Women should not be sympathetic, agreeable, mainly good listeners, according to Willing, for it cramps their souls.

In her chapter on talking, then, Willing begins with the role of woman as conversationalist from the tradition of conduct book rhetoric (113), but expands that role considerably. Like Mary Astell and Hannah More before her, she argues that because they converse, women must be educated (113-114). She adds to that the insistence that they must be well educated (if only by self-help texts) in grammar, and that they must read the classics so that they have something to talk about (116). Reading for Willing also means writing: in the classical and renaissance tradition, Willing wants her pupils to write down their summaries, selected quotations, and comments in a commonplace book (116). This rhetorical program, however traditional, is immediately Christianized: "to talk well, it is necessary that the motive prompting our speech be right and pure; and we can be sure of that only as it is cleansed by the blood of Christ" (117). "To talk well" is a translation of Quintilian's rhetorical dictum that only the good speaker speaks well. But the words are translated not only from another language, but also to another forum--conversation. In addition, Willing's Christian interpretation has roots in Augustine's famous tranformation of rhetoric in De Doctrina Christiana: for Augustine, as well as for Willing, only the good Christian can be a good speaker. And finally, this program is also feminized: Willing combines these principles from the masculine tradition with the instructions from conduct book rhetoric for women not to gossip, but instead to speak so no one is caused pain (117-18).

Willing reminds us that "Christianity could not at once overturn social customs" (120), a rhetorical move that allows her to imply that the main purpose of Christianity was, in fact, to overturn and reform social customs, although not all at once. Willing is this placing herself and her women who talk in an honored tradition, and she moves on to claim further privileges. Women must not only be educated, but must also teach (121). And women who are called should also preach (118-27). The last third of her chapter, in fact, merges the defense of women's preaching into her chapter on women's conversation in a conduct book. Thus Willing seizes the conservative form of the conduct book and separates it from the separate spheres theory of women's rhetoric that had been promoted in that genre. Instead, Willing fully claims for women a private and a public voice.

In Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking (1904), almost a textbook, we can see the fruition of this rhetorical school, as women enter public forums, but through their informal training in conversation and letter-writing. Aimed at women at home (in "The Woman's Home Library" series), Jordan's book covers both the topics of masculine college composition and speech, and also the topics of conduct book rhetoric for women. "Accuracy and elegance in speaking and writing English are the hall-marks of good breeding" (3), she begins, betraying this union of masculine traditional rhetoric in the first half of the sentence, and conduct book rhetoric for women in the second. The reason for this union is that "women may be said to have come into entirely new duties and new responsibilities" in the area of "public speech" (66), according to Jordan. Jordan is quite conscious of creating a new body of knowledge for women, and she even makes fun of Farrar's earlier work, scornfully combining the titles to advise that "When all the lessons have been done ..., the scholars settle down to a type of social intercourse that has a medium vastly different from the King's English or the 'Young Lady's Epistolary Guide'" (57).

To offer women the equivalent of a college composition and speech course, Jordan covers the history of the standardization of English pronunciation, recent scientific theories of linguistic change, the purposes of literary criticism and literature as a model for one's own writing and speaking (which leads to a discussion of style), elocution, suggestions for reading in prose and poetry, an examination of the problems of "correct" spelling and handwriting, grammar, and advice on using the dictionary. She generously quotes the English canon (Chaucer, More, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Tennyson).

But Jordan also offers very specialized advice for women that recalls the conduct book tradition. She commiserates with women for their lack of formal training in public speaking (66-68), and recommends rules of thumb for diction (183-89) that lead to a critique of women who allow their children to be raised by a bored nurse (191). Her discussion of handwriting leads her to mention the art of letter-writing familiar from conduct books for women (204-6). Her suggestions for using the dictionary lead her to a section on conversation (232-37) that includes advice given by Sigourney and Farrar before her. In conversation, Farrar recommends "fair play"--no dominating the conversation, no gushing or exaggerating, no rambling, no enigmatic speech (232-35), saying what gives pleasure to hearers (236). When Farrar considers written English for women, she immediately turns to letter writing (237-41), and like Farrar she defines the letter as "a pious duty, a gift" (238). She recommends exact, clear, explicit language, treating the letter as a conversation, and making plentiful use of dictionaries and manuals of grammar while writing letters (238-41).

Throughout, Jordan emphasizes change and collaboration as the basis for written and spoken language--phrasing, for example, as part of style, she tells us, is "a medium of exchange in the world of expression," for "a good expression was too good a thing for ownership" (53). She imagines public speaking is a union of the forces of the speaker and the audience, for "The successful speaker will use his art to enable him to discern the signs of the spiritual forces coming into action in his presence," and "his aim will be to conserve them, to let as little as possible real energy go to waste" (69).

During the nineteenth century, then, women first appropriate the conduct book for women as a means of teaching each other how to speak and write, since they are excluded in most cases from colleges. Because of the separate spheres of men's and women's activities in the nineteenth century, the forms these women concentrate on at first are "feminine": reading aloud, conversation, letter-writing. But they also situate rhetoric for women in the context of nineteenth-century culture, especially in their republican, sentimental, self-help rationale for women's education in rhetoric and composition. Indeed, they use this ideology to claim a larger and larger portion of the arts of rhetoric and composition, so that by mid-century, they offer advice about continuing education in reading and composition, and by the end of the century, much of the men's rhetoric, as well. By century's end, in Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking, it is hard to tell is we are reading a textbook for a men's college class or a conduct book for women at home.

What seems most different from men's rhetoric, other than the genres treated, is the consideration of reading and writing as social activities rather than individual activities. If we compare the treatment of conversation by Sigourney or Farrar or Jordan to that by nineteenth-century Thomas De Quincey, for example, we can see that the American women emphasize the art of collaboration (listening, acknowledging the audience, selecting topics to please the audience), while the Englishman emphasizes individual performance (competitive conflict, wit, displaying one's intellect [269-79]). Women's rhetorical theory, then, is an important and neglected precursor for one strand of twentieth-century rhetoric and composition studies.

Thus, from now on when we consider the rhetoric of nineteenth-century United States, we need to consider not just academic textbooks, but also the other venues for education in nineteenth-century United States, especially conduct book rhetoric by women. We need to see, as nineteenth-century writers and speakers did, that conversation and letter-writing are rhetorical activities just as much as public speaking and essay-writing. Conduct book rhetoric by women is clearly one important step in the gradual democratization of rhetorical education that continues to today.

Notes

1. Indeed, in my earlier essay including Mary Augusta Jordan, "Textbooks for New Audiences," I treated it as a textbook, which it may have been, since Jordan taught at Smith College.

2. In nineteenth-century America, two strands of rhetorical theory addressed women: conduct books and elocution. In this paper I shall discuss one of these strands--conduct book rhetoric for women. I hope to treat elocution and parlor entertainment in later publications.

3. This trend of considering college textbooks, and so mainly men's texts has continued in admirable studies of the men's college tradition of composition by Nan Johnson, Robert Connors, John C. Brereton. Others? For example, although Brereton includes Luella Clay Carson's "Compilation of Standard Rules and Regulations Used by the English Department of the University of Oregon" (1898) in his sourcebook (one of only 5 women out of over 50 entries), he considers her list as a precursor for college handbooks, rather than realizing that women as normal and high school teachers had been compiling such lists for several decades before Carson. See, for example, Lockwood, and Keeler and Davis.

4. New work on women's rhetoric in 19th century. Lundsford, Hobbes, Wertheimer, Logan, Rouse, etc.

5. On Hannah More's influence on Lydia Sigourney, see Donawerth, "Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and the Creation of a Women's Tradition of Rhetoric."

6. Conduct books for women by men: the knight of the tower, suzanne hull, peter stalleybrass, margie ferguson, catherine belsey, who for 18th century?

7. Kolodny and other one on Margaret Fuller. See also Eliza Farrar on reading societies for girls, pp. 258-60

8. The concept of the agreeable in conversation extends back to Madeleine de Scudéry's writings on salon conversation. See Donawerth, "'As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak': Madeleine de Scudéry's Rhetoric of Conversation." Sigourney qualifies the goal of pleasure in conversation from being "agreeable" with moral purpose (191). The feminine role of listening is explored by Hannah More; see Donawerth, "Hannah More".

Works Cited

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Donawerth, Jane. "'As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak': Madeleine de Scudéry's Rhetoric of Conversation." Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Wertheimer. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 305-19.

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