Synopses & Reviews
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 education 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 to advance the cause of women’s literacy. Schooling for women—along with abolition, suffrage, and temperance—became one of the four primary arenas of nineteenth-century women’s activism. Following the Revolution, textbooks and fictions about schooling materialized that revealed ideal curricula for women covering subjects from botany and chemistry to rhetoric and composition. A few short decades later, such curricula and hopes for female civic rhetoric changed under the pressure of threatened disunion.
Using a variety of texts, including novels, textbooks, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen chart the shifting ideas about how women should learn and use writing, from the early days of the republic through the antebellum years. They also reveal how these models shaped women’s awareness of female civic rhetoric—both its possibilities and limitations.
Review
“A truly fascinating look at how educated women used the power of the pen to promote civic goals, as well as how a new female readership emerged and changed as the yet fledgling book industry, Imagining Rhetoric is a highly recommended contribution to Women’s Studies and Literary History reference collections and academic reading lists.”
—MidWest Book Review
Review
“ . . .highly recommended as a source for those studying rhetoric and composition, American history, educational theory, women’s studies, women’s history, and philosophy at the upper-division undergraduate level and above.”
—Choice
Review
“Eagerly awaited, Eldred and Mortensen's Imagining Rhetoric will excite anyone interested in early modern U.S. women's composition pedagogy and practice. From early national notions of language, fictions of schooling, textbook pedagogies, and perspectives from a black woman's teaching journal--the diverse richness of women's views on rhetoric, anguage and teaching astonishes. Significantly, the book helps uncover a tradition of female civic rhetoric that resists raced and gendered theories of domesticity. It will persuade those who still believe American women did not participate in public persuasion over the major national events of their day.”
—Catherine L. Hobbs, University of Oklahoma
Synopsis
Janet Eldred and Peter Mortensen examine the development of women’s writing in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and how women imagined using their education to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation.
About the Author
Janet Carey Eldred is associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky.
Peter Mortensen, associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is co-editor of Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy.