In this chapter, Buchanon demonstrates how the site of education can be a useful topoi for tracing gender’s influence on delivery–the fifth rhetorical canon. In all the chapters of this text, Buchanan illustrates that delivery is grounded in social context and is, in fact, contingent on an individual or group’s social environment. In this chapter, specifically, Buchanan shows that education in the late 18th and early 19th century played a significant role in shaping women’s participation in public speaking. Buchanan begins the chapter by demystifying the notion that women lacked formal training in public speaking, which is often equated with women’s lack of participation in civic discourse. Buchanan argues that, actually schoolgirls in the late 18th and 19th centuries were educated in elocution and civic discourse through reading classes, in which they practiced oral reading and received elocution instruction from various kinds of readers. Reading aloud from readers that were directed to male, female, and mixed audiences gave schoolgirls opportunity to practice delivery by attending to their voice, gestures, and expressions. Buchanan argues that women’s education in elocution eventually increased their rhetorical performance in public settings so much, in fact, that an educational backlash occurred. This backlash “led to the truncation of the elocutionary coverage and oratorical contents of school readers likely to be consumed by a female audience, an attempt to restrict women’s eloquence to the private sphere by limiting their knowledge of the arts of oral expression” (13).
Buchanan traces literacy instruction in US Northeast schools during the colonial period and explains that not only was ones education determined by gender but also by class. While wealthy, male boys attended second tier schools where they received a classical education, boys “destined” for careers in specific trades and crafts as well as girls attended first tier schools, which focused on basic English literacy and numeracy skills (13). Gender determined what subject were taught; while wealthy boys were taught to read and write, girls were taught to read and sew(14).
In the late 18th century, elocution became part of reading instruction under the influence of the British elocutionary movement, which was sparked in response to a crisis in poor pulpit oratory that was thought to derive from poor reading instruction(15). The rationale behind this movement was that if you can read well, you can speak well, (which in contemporary US education seems to have been transformed to the notion that if you can read well, you can write well.) 18th century readers, thus, utilized elocutionary pedagogy under the belief that reading instruction, with a particular emphasis on its oral delivery, would lead to strong oratory (16).
Buchanan compares and contrasts three landmark readers published in the 18th century that prove the readers were aware of girls’ presence in the classroom and directed elocutionary instruction at them. In Webster’ reader, for instance, women’s domestic place and role in the nation was emphasized through the female characters in the selected prose. Playing off the Republican Motherhood, women’s domestic purpose was to instill civic, moral, patriotism in their children and families. In Bingham’s reader, girls were introduced to contemporary debates over women’s education and to civic rhetoric, both of which illustrated the power of public oratory even though the reader did not advocate for female students to use elocution outside the home. Moving away from the focus on patriotism, Murray’s reader focused on morality, religion, and proper conduct in its prose sections while the elocution instructional section taught elocutionary techniques and strategies that became useful in the parlor and eventually the platform. These three texts provide several insights into US schoolgirls’ rhetorical education:
1.) young female students were perceived as consumers
2.) instruction in elocution was directed specifically at girls
3.) young females were offered rationales for their education
4.) young girls were introduced to oratory and civic rhetoric
5.) therefore, girls received “real” opportunities in rhetorical education(25-26).
This opportunity, according to Buchanan did not last, however, as a trend in decreasing instruction on elocution became apparent in 19th century readers directed specifically at girls.
With the rise of industrialization, antebellum working class women began to work outside the home, which gave women exigency to defy social norms of womanhood in public, yet white women in the middle to upper classes bought into the cult of true womanhood, adopted a new feminine ideal, and constrained those opportunities. Moreso, while women were still provided with elocutionary knowledge through some readers and thus had the rhetorical and elocutionary competence to challenge gender norms in public, women’s speech stayed in private spaces in a large part because many readers encouraged women to learn elocution simply as a means for social respectability to be used in the private sphere and portrayed female characters who spoke in public in a negative light. Also, many readers directly aimed at women curtailed elocutionary instruction, especially actio. Thus, while women learned to read aloud well, they were excluded from learning how to use their bodies in oratorical performance, which in turn constrained their ability to speak persuasively in public settings.
Buchanan claims the exclusion of actio and diminishing of elocution instruction resulted from the rise of female orators in evangelical, legislative, and other public realms, which caused conservatives to deem rhetorical education for women a “contagious disease.” Although antebellum’s rhetorical performance stayed in the parlor to some extent, Buchanan ends this chapter by pointing out that many female rhetors fortunately found their way to the platform….
This chapter did some of the work I believe we all wanted Carr, Carr, and Schultz to do—namely to attend to politics of representation in 19th century readers. Although Buchanan does not really attend to issues of race and or ability in this chapter, she does illustrate how readers represented 18th and 19th century women and makes an argument as to how these representations affected women’s rhetorical education and rhetorical opportunities. (She also, of course, makes an argument about how the content or lack of content I should say affected women’s rhetorical education and opportunities to speak in public.) I am interested in the role that argument plays in this chapter as well as the rest of the book, which leads me to ask: What role does argument play in social history? What risks does Buchanan take by making explicit arguments in this social history?
Related, Buchanan begins this chapter by dispelling the myth that women lacked formal training in public speaking, which is often equated with women’s lack of participation in civic discourse. She begins most, if not all, of her other chapters in a similar fashion. I found this repeated practice effective; she is clearly attempting to revise our notions of rhetorical history by attending to the social forces and cultural networks surrounding 19th century female rhetors. By dispelling certain myths and regendering delivery in each chapter, she thus weaves together a coherent argument throughout the entire book. The back cover describes this structure and rhetorical study as a “bold” project because in a sense she challenges the histories that other scholars have produced before her. I am curious as to how this book would be reviewed by social historians. Going back to a smart question Jannell asked earlier in semester, is this text a revisionary history or a social history? Both? What is difference again???
Lastly, I really admire how Buchanan carved out a space for her scholarship and opens doors, as Zosha notes, for similar revisionary projects. Her focus on delivery makes me wonder about historical non-discursive forms of delivery employed by 19th century US women. A nice extension of this work would be to investigate how 19th century social, cultural, and political forces necessitated/engendered/constrained non-discursive delivery practices/genres by female rhetors. This research would help us better understand how gender impacted delivery and complicate the rhetorical canon which privileges discursive, public rhetorics. It would also create a new topoi or at least expand the fourth topoi of genre from which explore the nexus of gender, power, and rhetoric.
Speaking of genre, genre analysis seems as if it might be a very useful methodology for social history…..