Imagining rhetoric : composing women of the early United States / Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eldred, Janet Carey.

Contributor:

Mortensen, Peter, 1961-

Series:

Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--United States--History.

English language.

English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--Sex differences.

American prose literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American prose literature.

American prose literature--Women authors.

Women--Education--United States--History--19th century.

Women.

Women teachers--United States.

Women teachers.

Rhetoric.

Sex differences.

Women--Education.

History.

English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching.

United States.

Forten, Charlotte L. Journal.

Forten, Charlotte L.

Rhetoric--Sex differences.

Physical Description:

xi, 279 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2002]

Summary:

Imagining Rhetoric examines how women's writing developed in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and how women imagined using their educations to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation. In the late eighteenth century, proponents of female education in the United States appropriated the language of the Revolution -- civic rhetoric rich with opposing images of tyranny and liberation, lawlessness and justice -- to advance the cause of women's literacy. Reflecting the possibilities for educational opportunities in an exciting, new republic, postrevolutionary writing stressed civic argument and inspired women's education by emphasizing the sentimental and social values of literacy. As a market of female readers began to emerge, new textbooks and fictions about schooling revealed ideal curricula for women covering subjects from botany and chemistry to rhetoric and composition. Schooling for women -- along with abolition, suffrage, and temperance -- became one of the four primary arenas of early-nineteenth-century women's activism. A few short decades later, however, such curricula and hopes for female civic rhetoric changed under the pressure of threatened disunion. While postrevolutionary writing was anchored in a neoclassical tradition, antebellum writing instruction was grounded in Romantic culture. Good writing was tasteful and aesthetically pleasing; bad writing was argumentative and agonistic -- or so young women in antebellum female academies were taught.

Educator-writers of the 1840s and 1850s raised issues such as the lifelong efficacy of women's schooling in a domestic society, teaching as a profession for women, the general problems of democratic schooling, and instruction in belletristic principles of taste and style. Yet, as nineteenth-century women activists demonstrated, not every young woman took these lessons to heart. In fact, the very women who agitated for female academies drew on revolutionary writings to argue their case. Using a variety of sources, including novels, textbooks, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen examine the provenance, authority, and evolution of what they term "liberatory" civic rhetoric -- from the early days of the republic through the antebellum years -- especially as it shaped women's rhetoric and education. Imagining Rhetoric recovers what women in the early U.S. imagined instruction and practice in composition should be, and shows how this imagination shaped the possibilities and limitations of female civic rhetoric.

Contents:

1. Introduction: The Tradition of Female Civic Rhetoric 1

2. Schooling Fictions 34

3. A Commonplace Rhetoric: Judith Sargent Murray's Margaretta Narrative 66

4. Sketching Rhetorical Change: Mrs. A. J. Graves on Girlhood and Womanhood 89

5. The Commonsense Romanticism of Louisa Caroline Tuthill 113

6. Independent Studies: Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps and the Composition of Democratic Teachers 145

7. Conclusion: Rhetorical Limits in the Schooling and Teaching Journals of Charlotte Forten 189

Appendix 2 From Hannah Webster Foster's The Boarding School (1798) 220

Appendix 3 From Judith Sargent Murray's The Gleaner (1798) 223

Appendix 4 From Louisa Caroline Tuthill's The Young Lady's Home (1839) 229

Appendix 5 From Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps's Lectures to Young Ladies (1833) 232.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-273) and index.

ISBN:

0822941821

OCLC:

48837548