While feminist scholarship in Composition and Rhetoric has tended to move in two parallel, though sometimes intersecting, directions—one with a focus on feminist rhetorical texts and practices and one with a focus on writing, pedagogy, and curricula within universities—I highlight throughout the chapters ahead how the two function reciprocally to enhance research, teaching, and writing in Composition and Rhetoric. Indeed, through these contributions, rhetorical and pedagogical, feminists in the field have rewritten the story of composition.
Works Cited
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.
Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition. Champaign, IL: NCTE, 1963. Print.
Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Print.
—. “Overwork/Underpay: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers
Since 1880.” Rhetoric Review 9.1 (1990): 108–26. Print.
Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Print.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.
Douglas, Wallace. “Rhetoric for the Meritocracy.” English in America. Ed. Richard Ohmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. 97–132. Print.
Enos, Theresa. “Gender and Publishing Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition.” Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 558–72. Print.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
Grumet, Madeleine R. Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Print.
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 14.2 (1985): 65–107. Print.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminization of Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201–29. Print.
Jarratt, Susan C. “Introduction.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA, 1998. 1–18. Print.
Knoblauch, C.H., and Lil Brannon. Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1984. Print.
Lunsford, Andrea A. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Print.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Print.
North, Stephen M. “The Death of Paradigm Hope, the End of Paradigm Guilt, and the Future of (Research in) Composition.” Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 194–207. Print.
—. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.
Schell, Eileen. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. Print.
For Further Reading
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.
Crowely, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminization of Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201–29. Print.
Miller, Susan. “The Feminization of Composition.” Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 520–33. Print.
2 The Rhetorical Tradition Through a Feminist Lens: Locating Women
Rhetoric has a complex reputation. To some, it is a venerated, classical tradition—a two-thousand-year-old centerpiece of western education, and the cornerstone of effective public discourse and persuasion. To others, the term rhetoric signifies empty political discourse, or worse, a tool of nasty, partisan politics. A quick Google news search on “rhetoric,” for instance, yields phrases like this: “GOP full of empty rhetoric”; “his campaign is full of rhetoric that doesn’t amount to much”; “US officials deploy increasingly aggressive rhetoric”; “Obama’s rhetorical onslaught”; and “politicians stepped up ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric.” This tells us that, at least within mainstream media, rhetoric denotes speech that is public and political, uttered by powerful figures, sometimes devoid of meaning, and often agonistic or argumentative. Still others approach rhetoric as vehicle for argument and agency—a way to make one’s voice heard, to sponsor change. This, in fact, is how contemporary scholars in Composition and Rhetoric tend to view rhetorical engagement. Here, rhetoric is writing and speaking that creates and communicates knowledge; rhetorical strategies (i.e., how a text is organized, what evidence is used, what kind of voice is employed) are necessarily shaped by cultural assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality. By examining what kinds of rhetorical practices are most predominant at a given time, we learn much about the values, assumptions, and social and political contexts of its users. As James Berlin notes, however, rhetoric is not a unitary field. “While one particular rhetorical theory may predominate at any historical moment, none remains dominant over time; thus, we ought not to talk about rhetoric but [. . .] of rhetorics” (3).
Indeed, women writers and feminist scholars have played an important role in revising the idea of a unitary masculine rhetoric, since, as Cheryl Glenn notes, the tradition of classical rhetoric is often problematically conceived of “great men speaking out” (52). Historically, rhetorical acts were categorized as “exclusively upper-class, male, agonistic, and public—yet seemingly universal” (2). While “universal” implies that any speaker could enter the rhetorical sphere, the definition of rhetoric as public, competitive acts of persuasion long excluded women from rhetorical participation. Women have historically been denied public speech, education, and literacy—and in fact, in some cultures, are still denied—making it difficult, and sometimes nearly impossible, to speak and to be heard.
Despite these conditions, feminist scholars have successfully demonstrated that we can hear women’s voices in the tradition(s) if we listen hard enough, or, in some cases, if we listen for different kinds of rhetoric. Thanks to the work of these scholars, an extensive revision of the rhetorical tradition is underway, as they recover women’s voices, and in so doing, alter the very definition of rhetoric.
In this chapter, I provide a sampling of the voices feminist rhetors have recovered, beginning with the texts that have now become what Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald call “the primary works” of feminist rhetoric. These voices include overlooked female figures from ancient rhetoric, like Aspasia and Diotima, and early female theologians, like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. These voices also stem from the suffragist and abolitionist movements. While we may have learned about figures like Susan B. Anthony or Sojourner Truth in our history books, feminist rhetoricians help us consider how these women were rhetoricians in their own right, borrowing and appropriating rhetorical strategies to participate in the public sphere.
As I showed in the last chapter, one of the ways Composition Studies has sought to establish itself as a discipline is by claiming its historical roots in rhetoric. The work of recovering women’s voices to the rhetorical tradition, then, has much to do with writing instruction, which is central to composition. Whether or not classical rhetoric is composition’s ancestor,