Calling Alexander Graham Bell

In "Interlude II" in "Lend Me your Ear" Brenda Brueggemann places a poetic phone call to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. The poem is full of ironies. Bell isn't home, his d/Deaf wife and d/Deaf mother can't hear the phone, the d/Deaf narrator can't hear the beep, so she leaves a message when it's not recording. So the poem shifts to all the other mediums the narrator can use to get the message across: lip-reading, signing, the TTY, relay service, video, fax. All the communication technologies that would allow a d/Deaf person to communicate with Bell.

But the message can't get through. Why? Bell isn't listening, and he's not tuning into any of the other frequencies and registers that would allow a d/Deaf person to communicate. No, he's off making the argument that d/Deaf people should not marry d/Deaf people and create more d/Deaf persons. His argument would find sympathy with the woman who "calls" Brueggemann to ask her to mentor her daughter at Gallaudet into marrying a h/Hearing man.

The Medium is the message.

The narrator in the poem imagines signing a message to Bell only to have it burn his retina, turn him into a pillar of salt (the fate of Lot's wife).

Let's talk...no, let's listen, no let's look, no let's communicate on all channels, frequencies, screens, spaces.

In Interlude Three (which we didn't read for the class week, but I did anyway), Brueggemann writes about her challenges with phones at home and with her husband, noting that "[t]he phone is a sticking point, for better or worse in our marriage" (251). Brueggeman's h/Hearing husband hates using the phone, a fact that endeared him to her when she first knew him. They wrote notes and letters. But Brueggemann needs to use the phone to get things done, and she struggles to h/Hear and get things done. So its' interesting to see how she connects the Bell poem, her life with her husband, and the phone call she has with a Gallaudet student's parent who wants her to marry a h/Hearing man. There is a poetic and narrative connective thread throughout this book that creates a deep structure for analysis of the "in-betweenness" that Brueggemann experiences between d/Deaf an h/Hearing culture. The interludes are about the "Stuck between" (260). The spaces in-between.

I love that Brueggemann can do so much in this book, in part, because she is doing so much methodologically--mixing and combining qualitative research, rhetorical research, cultural analysis and critique, personal narrative, poetry. The experiences, knowledges and theories she works through require all of these methodologies. An adherence to one would mean the project would not have its multi-dimensional look and feel--a look and feel that create a prism through which we can view the many qualities of d/Deaf culture.

First Contact as a Site of Persuasion

"the oppressed of necessity know more of the oppressors’ ways than the oppressors understand the ways of those whom they oppress" (Stromberg)


Stomberg's Introduction " Rhetoric and American Indians" offers a useful overview of the major questions surrounding social histories of American Indian rhetorics.One of the first questions he addresses is to review a major question in Native Studies--"What is an Indian?" He summarizes rather quickly the major challenges in a packed paragraph that I want to break apart a bit:

Indianness is about specific markers:
---"As Louis Owens indicates, “[W]e are confronted with difficult questions of authority and ethnicity: What is an Indian? . . . Must one be raised in a traditional ‘Indian’ culture or speak a native language or be on a tribal roll?” (3)" (Stromberg). In other words, what constitutes "Indianness." Cultural knowledge, blood quantam, affiliation on tribal rolls, all of the above?

Indianness is a white invention:
--Examined from another angle, we might consider the extent to which the “Indian” is simply “a white invention and . . . a white image” having little to do with actual indigenous peoples (Berkhofer 3)" (Stromberg). In other words, indigeneous people are not bounded by the creation of Indian-ness. Remember, Columbus thought the peoples he met were Indians as in "East Indians" when he arrived on shore. "Indian" was a designation brought by Columbus, by a colonizer, not a concept that made any sense within indigeneous cultures at the time.

Indianness is a rhetorical trope:
--"All of these questions raise the larger question of the degree to which the idea of the Indian is itself a rhetorical trope designed to perform specific functions within various discourses. As Gerald Vizenor asserts, “The word Indian. . . is a colonial enactment . . . an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation” (Manifest Manners 11). In Vizenor’s argument, thereareno “real Indians,” only more simulations that “undermine the simulations of the unreal in the literature of dominance” (Manifest Manners 12). " (Stromberg). Interesting. Reminds me of Baudrillard's discussion of simulacra and simulacrum.

While the category of Indian is interrogated by Stromberg and others, so is the idea of "rhetoric." While Stromberg draws upon Kenneth Burke's rhetorical vocabulary to buttress his analysis of American Indian rhetoric, he points to problems behind Burke's rhetorical framework.

Identification:
What happens to identification, a key term from Burke? According to Stromberg: "Even as Burke defines rhetoric as a process of establishing “identification” between self and other(s), the call for unity remains troubling for many American Indians haunted by an official United States rhetoric of assimilation that proclaimed a unity just so long as it was “our” unity.'"
For many American Indian speakers and writers, establishing a measure of identification with their white audience has been a primarydemand. As Burke asserts, “You persuade aman [sic] only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifyingyour ways with his” (A Rhetoric of Motives 55).


Consubtantiality:
When one's interests are joined and being substantially one with the other...what does that mean for American Indian rhetorics? Again, Stromberg: " In other words, the transformation to consubstantiality, a shared sense of identity, was to be only one way: the white way. As a number of the essays in this collection show, the complex negotiation for many American Indian rhetoricians has been to bridge communication divisions while maintaining an insistence of difference. "

The Master's Tools:
Stromberg sees the essential challenge faced by American Indian rhetors as the challenge of " discovering and applying another’s “available means of persuasion.” (Stromberg). The challenge was to persuade the "newcomers," the colonizers. As he puts it, the five men, seven women and three children "detained" and "taken to Spain" must have exercised " elocutionary gestures" to an "obdurate" audience. The problem was that Columbus saw himself as having the right to take them with him. He saw himself as superior to the "savages." What happens in asymetrical power relations?

So the point here is that American Indian rhetorics expand what counts as rhetoric and cause us to rethink our assumptions about rhetoric.

More needs to be said here about rhetorical sovereignty and survivance as key terms in American Indian rhetorics. However,I found Stromberg's framing essay useful as it tackles two major questions that are two halves of a whole:
Who does it mean to be Indian? What are the rhetorics of Indian-ness?
What does it mean to engage American Indian rhetorics and what does it mean to draw on concepts of rhetoric from the Greco-Roman tradition and contemporary Western tradition?

"Stay Seated"" The Good Old Daze of Educational Reformers

Chapter Three of Lindal Buchanan's book and the conversation on J's blog (it's HOPPING!) sparked me to dig up the following conference paper I wrote in 2002 for CCCC about Emma Willard and Catherine Beecher. I really like the way she acknowledges the strategic rhetorical performance of Willard. When I wrote the paper below, there was little or nothing about Willard or Beecher written in our field, and then Buchanon's book came along and also Bacon's, both of which mention the public fight that Beecher had with the Grimkes. So it's great to see there are folks out here doing work on the rhetorical strategies of 19th century female rhetors engaged in educational reform--one of the great frontiers of advocacy in the 19th c. Remember--people debated how and why women should be educated. It sure was not a given.

The point that I'm always struck by is the view that these women (Willard, Beecher) were somehow conservative for making strategic rhetorical choices that drew upon the separate spheres ideology. I like that Buchanan points to the seated reading that Willard does. Reading was a familiar and more acceptable activity. J's blog really addresses that well. But I think we also need to keep in mind what Willard wanted--she wanted the state to fund women's education. This was an unprecedented and gutsy request. Women's education? Public funds for that? Asking legislators directly? How bold!

And Beecher--what a mass of contradictions. My favorite quote is the second below about how Beecher told women to stay home, but she was like a runaway coach herself. She didn't do what she advocated--she didn't marry, didn't have children, didn't stay home, didn't have a home to keep even though she wrote the bestselling housekeeping manual of the 19th c. She tirelessly advocated for women's education even though she quit teaching because it exhausted her. There's plenty to say about Beecher that I don't have time to say, so I'll leave readers with my CCCC paper, which is more concerned with how Beecher and Willard made their arguments than about their delivery, so I appreciate all Buchanan did to emphasize delivery, space, the body.


Separate but not Equal?: Emma Willard, Catharine Beecher, and the Rhetorical Struggle for Women’s Education, Eileen E. Schell, CCCC 2002

In the movement for the higher education of women, Emma Willard must be given first place. No other woman had made such definite experiments in education; no other woman had so daringly stepped into the limelight to wager her fight for education; nor was there anything at the time which compared in influence with her ‘Plan for Improving Female Education.” (Lutz 75).

"Catharine Beecher counseled women to effect change only by gentle influence--while, like a runaway coach, she circled the northern half of the nation, chiding her enemies and exhausting her relatives and friends.” (Boydston, Kelly, Margolis 14).

Her brother-in-law Calvin Stowe wrote to his wife Harriet Beecher Stowe that so strong and determined was Catharine Beecher that “[s]he would kill off a whole regiment like you and me in three days” (Boydston, Kelly, Margolis 14).

In this presentation, I offer a brief analysis of the public rhetorics of two nineteenth century women educational reformers who worked to persuade the American public that women deserved a good education, that the public should fund women’s educational institutions, and that schoolteaching was a profession suitable for women. The two reformers I will discuss are Emma Willard and Catharine Beecher. Emma Willard (1787-1870) was the founder of the Troy Female Seminary and the first woman to testify before a legislative body that women's education should be funded by public dollars. Catharine Beecher (1800-1878), was an educational reformer and institution-builder who initiated a campaign to educate and send "missionary" women schoolteachers to “civilize” the Western frontier. In my analysis of their rhetorical work, I will focus on how these women made strategic use of the rhetoric of “separate spheres” to validate the institutionalization of women's education and to open up teaching as a paid, respectable profession for women. This exploration is part of a book length project I am writing entitled The Rhetoric of Woman's True Profession, which explores how nineteenth century women educational reformers made strategic use of the ideology of “separate spheresto argue for women’s expanded cultural influence and for a career that gave thousands economic independence in the nineteenth century.

Although Willard and Beecher’s achievements have been widely acknowledged by historians of women’s education and teacher education and to a lesser degree by feminist literary scholars, their rhetorical and pedagogical work receive only brief mention in nineteenth century histories of women’s rhetoric and pedagogy in our field. The reasons for this seem three fold. First, these women are usually not identified as having an effect on the work of teaching composition or literacy instruction since they operated in the realm of female academies, not coeducational colleges and universities. Secondly, the analysis of their work has largely been the province by historians of education who, while they thoroughly explore their contributions, do not tend to focus on the rhetorical nature of their work. Third, the stance these two women took in relation to public persuasion and to feminism was an ambivalent and paradoxical and one that has often led to feminist scholars dismissing them as cultural conservatives because of their affirmation of women’s traditional roles. Little attention has been paid to why these educational reformers felt a separate spheres argument was a strategic rhetorical move and how it became a entry point for more radical claims about women's potential for cultural influence. In other words, the ideology of separate spheres served as a rhetorical commonplace in their work but one that both Beecher and Willard utilized in complicated and productive ways. As Anne Firor Scott has argued, Emma Willard’s rhetorical genius rested in “her ability to integrate new values with the prevailing ones” (5). On the one hand, she bought into the “idea of separate spheres and spoke highly of the patriarchal family” (5). On the other hand, she advocated women’s intellectual development and the establishment of first-rate women’s schools. Beecher’s rhetoric also affirmed patriarchal society and deployed sentimental commonplaces about women’s roles and spheres at the same time arguing forcefully for an expanded sphere of cultural influence for women. As Linda Kerber has argued in “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” the concept of separate spheres in the nineteenth century was a rhetorical construct that was utilized strategically by women reformers rather than a straightforward manifestation of “the cult of true womanhood, as some have assumed. In the remainder of my presentation, I will examine how Beecher and Willard strategically deployed the ideology of “separate spheres,” utilizing this rhetorical commonplace as an entry point for more radical claims about women's potential for cultural influence, paid work, and autonomy.

The Daughters of Democracy: Emma Willard’s Campaign
The daughter of a Revolutionary war farmer-soldier, Emma Willard (b. February 23, 1787 in Berlin, Connecticut) grew up with a strong sense of nationalism coupled with what Nina Baym has deemed a “ferocious ambition.” At the age of seventeen after receiving a piecemeal education, she began teaching at female academies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and in Vermont, all the while continuing her education through self-study. In 1809, she married Dr. John Willard, a man twenty-eight years her senior, who encouraged her intellectual interests. Living near Middlebury College, Willard often mused on the separate and unequal nature of men and women’s education: “.My neighborhood to Middlebury College made me feel bitterly the disparity in education facilities between the two sexes, and I hope that if the matter was once set before the men as legislators, they would be ready to correct the error." Shortly after their marriage, the couple fell upon hard times and wanting to “relieve” her “husband from financial difficulties,” Willard opened a boarding school. Her “further motive,” she wrote, was to keep “a better school than those about me,” and a year or two later she “formed the design of effecting an important change in education by the introduction of a grade of schools for women higher than any theretofore known.” It was thus that Willard launched a plan to create a seminary for girls in the Hudson Valley, which was to be funded by public dollars.

To draw attention to her cause, she wrote a treatise entitled "A Plan for Improving Female Education," which she sent to New York state Governor De Witt Clinton. While Clinton was charmed by Willard’s intelligence and encouraged her to open the seminary, he made no commitment to public funds. To press her case, Willard and her husband attended the legislative session of 1819 in Albany, New York. At the request of several members of the legislative body, Willard read her plan before them and also “once before a large group of people” (65). When she read her address, she “carefully remained seated to avoid any hint that she was delivering a speech” ( Campbell 11). Willard’s reading was a landmark event in women's rhetorical history since it was highly unusual for women to speak in front of mixed audiences and virtually unheard of that a woman would make arguments before legislators about funding for women’s education (65). Willard’s biographer Alma Lutz has referred to her as the “first female lobbyist” in America.

As a rhetorical document, Emma Willard’s four-part “Plan” depends upon a simple but elegant formula, one based on both “tradition and innovation” (Firor Scott 6). First, she recited the defects of the current system of women’s education and speculated on their causes. Secondly, she discussed the principles that female education should follow. Third, she set forth a plan for a “female seminary,” the name she invented to describe an institution of higher education for women. Finally, she stated the beneficial effects society would reap upon publicly supporting such an institution.. The traditional elements of the argument she underscored were that. American life and culture and its democratic system of government were dependent on an enlightened citizenry, an ideology of Republicanism so frequently utilized in rhetorical work of this time (see Murray, Rush, Rowson). Since character education was a way to create that enlightened citizenry, and since women were chiefly in charge of raising children, women deserved to be educated as they would “elevate the whole character of the community.” The argument that the preservation of the Republic depended on educated women was the decades old argument of Republican motherhood (attributable to Benjamin Rush, Judith Sargent Murray, and Susanna Rowson). By using this familiar argument, Willard appealed to her audience's sense that education would better enable women to serve in their given cultural capacity, an argument that Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has characterized as one based on an appeal to expediency, that is that women would be given rights for the good of others, not for their individual good (14-15). To this ideology of Republican motherhood, Willard offered three innovations: public funding for women’s education, the encouragement of women’s “intellectual excellence” through study of higher subjects like natural philosophy (the sciences), and professional training to help them become teachers (7), all new concepts and radical ones at that.

In her plan, Willard convincingly points out that male education has been regulated and funded by the state, but that women’s education has been left to “private adventurers” whose qualifications are questionable and whose schools are subject to the capriciousness of parents and pupils. The current system of “adventure schools,”, she argued was riddled with problems. Moreover, such schools were only geared to equip women for a short period of their lives, that of courtship, thus “fit[ting] them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.” In contrast to the haphazard ways in which female schooling was handled, Willard proposed a well-ordered system with four branches: moral and religious education, literary education, domestic, and ornamental. Willard assured her audience that she was not proposing a masculine education, but one that would “possess the respectability, permanency, and uniformity of operation of those appropriated to males” but that would emphasize women’s “difference of character and duties.” She also emphasized that the establishment of such female seminaries would allow for the production of a class of women who could teach in common schools and release men from that obligation. Her reasoning was that women, if “properly fitted,” could teach “children better than the other sex” (because of their patience and inventiveness with children) and at the same time do so more cheaply (12), a precursor to Beecher’s arguments.

While there were admiring supporters at the legislative session, there were also dissenting voices. A farmer commented “They’ll be educating the cows next” (Lutz 74). Other legislators voiced concern that women would be distracted by book learning from domestic duties or that serious study “would rob women of their delicacy, refinement, and charm” (74). Still others warned that women’s intellectual pursuits would “upset the established order,” damage “their health,” imperil “the race,” and potentially decrease the population (74).

Willard’s presentation of her “Plan” brought about a recommendation that the proposed academy (Waterford) be chartered and that it receive financial aid from the state's literary fund. The request for an endowment of five thousand dollars was voted down. Disappointed, Willard returned to Middlebury and published her Plan as a pamphlet at her own expense. The piece was widely read in America and in Europe, and while Willard regarded her presentation of the plan as a failure, she had garnered a number of supporters. Although she did not receive state funding for the academy she opened in Waterford, New York, she did capture the interest of others in the region. The citizens of Troy, New York asked her to move her female seminary academy from Waterford to the city of Troy , and the city’s Common Council passed a resolution to raise four thousand dollars through special taxes for the purchase of a school building. Willard’s Troy Female Seminary opened in Sept. 1821 and its curriculum offered courses in algebra and geometry, history, geography, and natural philosophy (sciences). She established an innovative curriculum, a system of peer monitors, and trained and sent out a phalanx of teachers. She set up a scholarship program for young women who wanted to become teachers but were too poor to pay for their education. She also continued to maintain a public role both as a speaker, an author of poetry, textbooks, and treatises, and an educational advocate who traveled and organized women and local people in support of schooling and teacher education. At her death and years later, she was recognized by Thomas Wentworth Higginson as the woman who “laid the foundation upon which every woman’s college may now be said to rest” (qtd in Lutz 75). For those of us working in women’s rhetorical history, Willard’s career affords us the opportunity to understand how traditional gender ideologies could be strategically deployed to create educational institutions for women and a respectable paid profession: teaching.

Gentle Persuasion: Catharine Beecher’s “Indirect” Directness
While Emma Willard, Horace Mann and others contributed significantly to the public discourses validating women's roles as teachers, Catharine Beecher became the chief popularizer of the notion that teaching was woman's true profession. Between 1829 until her death, she dispatched numerous public addresses, pamphlets, books, and traveled extensively to deliver her message that teaching was women’s holy calling sanctioned by God. Born in 1800 on Long Island, New York , Catharine Beecher successfully combined educational and domestic reform as her two lifelong projects (Boydston et al 19). While working as a teacher and educational advocate, she authored a dizzying array of treatises, essays, and books on topics as far-ranging as home economics, health education, female education, teacher education, religion, moral philosophy, and arithmetic. She also established a number of institutions including Hartford Female Seminary in 1823, the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati in 1833, and the Milwaukee Female Seminary in 1850, which eventually became Downer College and then the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where I completed my doctoral degree.

At roughly the same time that Beecher established her school in Hartford, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration were changing the face of American culture. Educational reformers Henry Barnard, Cyrus Pierce, and Horace Mann proposed a system of publicly funded common schools to act as a great equalizing factor (Sugg, 11-12). A chief problem with the common school plan, however, was that increasing numbers of men eschewed teaching in favor of pursuing work in business, law, medicine, ministry, and land speculation (Sugg, 38-39).. Aware that the number of teachers needed was expanding while the male teaching force was shrinking, educational reformers like Mann began to extol the virtues of women's suitability for teaching, knowing full well that women could be paid less than men (Sugg 30).

While we think of teaching now as a feminized profession, in the 1830s and 1840s, it was far from apparent that teaching should be a woman’s profession or that institutions for educating women for that purpose should be created. Prior to the nineteenth century, formal school instruction was seen as a temporary profession for young men on furlough from university study or local farmers or clergy who had enough formal education to qualify them to teach basic subjects. The exceptions to this were small "dame" schools taught by village women, which offered short-term instruction in reading and writing. Yet with the advent of mass schooling and the expansion of the American west, rising numbers of teachers were needed, and Beecher was more than happy to propose a system by which such teachers could be provided. In 1835, under the auspices of the American Lyceum, she delivered an address entitled "An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers." In this essay, Beecher put forward for the first time a detailed plan for creating a corps of women teachers (Sklar 113). In 1836, she launched a public speaking tour representing an agency that would bring teachers to Cincinnati for training to procure positions teaching out West. She spoke of this organization in Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Albany,NY and Philadelphia, Penn. In 1846, she attempted a second, more successful national tour and launched a full-fledged fundraising campaign.
. During her campaign of 1846, she followed a fairly standard three-pronged rhetorical strategy. First, she appealed to logic: to statistics about illiteracy and disrepair of school buildings, citing school board reports and eyewitness accounts from teachers. She painted a portrait of public schools as hellish places with "comfortless and dilapidated buildings. . . unhung doors, broken sashes, absent panes, stilted benches, yawning roofs, and muddy, moldering floors" (39). The teachers were in worse shape that the buildings. The 1844 report depicted them as cruel, harsh, intemperate and incompetent men "who lash and dogmatize in these miserable tenements of humanity" (39). Secondly, she brought out the emotional arsenal of pathetic appeals. She pointed out that in close proximity to these hellish schoolhouses were thousands of white middle class Christian women "sitting within the reach of their young voices, twining silk, working worsted, conning poetry and novels, enjoying life and its pleasures, and not lifting a hand or giving a thought to save them" (40). Beecher's solution was to bring the ill-trained and destitute children together with the idle silk-spinning young women. The result: a holy union of children and women in the larger enterprise of learning. She tapped into sentimental rhetorics about women’s natural dispensation toward mothering and exalted the loving relationship possible between a teacher and a pupil. Third, she topped it all off with a nationalistic agenda to save the American West with an army of female schoolteachers, appealing to xenophobic fears about immigrants.

Like a political candidate, she worked tirelessly to promote her cause. She sparked interest by sending circulars signed by Calvin Stowe, her brother-in-law and a clergyman, to county newspapers and small-town ministers, asking for names of women who might become missionary teachers. She also sent in advance articles to be printed in local papers (Sklar 175). After generating interest, Beecher, accompanied by Calvin Stowe or her younger brother Thomas, would dash into town to deliver a standard speech that presented her audience with her plan for missionary teachers (Sklar 170). By having a male “rhetorical proxy” deliver a speech to a mixed audience, she avoided the problem of appearing unwomanly. While Angelina Grimke faced an angry mob who burned the church to the ground after she spoke, Catherine Beecher often sat demurely on the stage, nodding and smiling as her words were delivered by a male relative. This was “indirect” influence in action.

After presenting her plan, Beecher asked groups of church women to give $100, and she established local support committees to raise funds to educate the teachers. In addition, she raised money be selling to these women copies of her Treatise on Domestic Economy or her recipe book, donating half of the proceeds to the cause(16). She also deployed letter-writing campaigns to procure the support of influential and wealthy individuals.

While Beecher's educational vision was grandiose, and it ignored the position of women of color and working class women, she succeeded in sending 450 women teachers to the frontier, and more importantly, she succeeded in normalizing and popularizing what was once thought to be an unimaginable scheme: to make teaching into an honorable profession for women and to see the widespread establishment of normal education. Six years before her death in 1878, over one hundred Normal schools had been founded (Feldman, 1974, p. 25). In 1880, two years after her death, the percentage of women elementary and secondary teachers outnumbered men (57 percent to 42 percent). By 1918, thirty years after her death, women constituted an unprecedented eight-four percent of all teachers (Feldman, 1974, p. 25).

Conclusion:
While suffragists often supported their arguments by drawing upon natural rights philosophy--the view that women were persons, therefore entitled to the civil and political privileges of citizenship, both Willard and Beecher drew upon what Campbell has deemed arguments of expediency. "it would be beneficial, that is, desirable and prudent, to give women rights" for the greater good of society(Campbell 14). The latter argument was their best support for an extended social and economic sphere for women because it made Beecher, Willard and others who sided with her seem as if they were gaining rights for the good of others--for men and for children and the good of the nation--not for individual women (Campbell 15). Such an argument was "feminine" as opposed to feminist, and it was more acceptable to the general public because it was in keeping with the ideals of "separate spheres" popular in the nineteenth century .Willard and Beecher’s appeals to Republican motherhood, to the idea that teaching was a calling, and Expediency suggest that they subscribed to gender ideals that, while incorporating aspects of the separate spheres, broadened and transformed that concept. Historian France Cogan has argued that a gendered counterideal existed concurrent with the "Cult of True Womanhood"--the "Cult of Real Womanhood. This ideal was a median point between the cult of true womanhood and the ideals of female autonomy and natural rights promoted in nineteenth century feminism. The Real Womanhood Ideal, contends Cogan, "advocated intelligence, physical fitness and health, self-sufficiency, economic self-reliance, and careful marriage: it was in other words, a survival ethic "(4).


Works Cited

Baym, Nina. “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard’s Rhetoric of History.” American Quarterly 43.1 (March 1991): 1-23.
Beecher, Catharine. “The Evils Suffered by American Women and Children: The Causes and the Remedy.”
Boydston, Kelly, Margolis.. The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her, Volume I: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. Praeger, 1989.
Cogan, Frances. The Cult of Real Womanhood.
Feldman, S.D. Escape from the Doll’s House: Women in Graduate and Professional School Education. New York: McGraw Hill, 1974.
Kerber, Linda K. “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History.” The Journal of American History 75.1 (1988): 9-39
Lutz, Alma. Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy. Zenger, 1929.
Scott, Anne Firor. “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-1872.” History of Education Quarterly 28.1 (Spring 1979): 1-20.
Sklar, Katherine Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1973.
Willard, Emma. “An Address to the Public: Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education.” Emma Willard School Online Archives.

Hush Harbors in African American Rhetorics

"From the Harbor to Da Academic Hoood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition" by Vorris L. Nunley
in _African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives_. Ed Ronald Jackson and Elaine Richardson. SIUP, 2004.


Nunley addresses "hush harbor sites" and "hush harbor rhetoric" in this essay.

"Hush harbor sites" serve as "camouflaged locations, hidden sites, and enclosed places as emancipatory cells where they come in from the wilderness, unite their tongues, speak the unspoken, and single their own songs to their own selves in their own communities" (223). What counts as a hush harbor site, both in the historical and contemporary sense for African American peoples? Nunley provides a fairly extensive list of possible hush habors: "Woods, plantation borders, churches, burial societies, beauty shops, slave frolics, barbershops, and kitchens" (223). Nunley cites Lawrence Levine who argues in _Black Culture and Black Consciousness_ (1997) that hush harbors were places where enslaved African Americans established spaces to have unauthorized, covert meetings in "bush arbors, cane breaks, or hush harbors" (225). A hush harbor is not only a place, it is a "conceptual metaphor" for strategies of "masquerade" "hidden in plain sight"(Nunley 226 citing Levine 83). Hush harbors became places where black folks escaped the white gaze and gathered to engage with one another. Historically, hush harbors were places where African Americans gathered to plan escapes from slavery, where worship in the black church was made possible. Citing Ira Berlin, Eric Sundquist, and Robert Wright and Wilbur Hughes, Nunley notes that many black institutions have emerged from the space of the hush harbor: "Formal institutions such as the National Colored Woman's Association, the Black Panthers, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference" (227).

In addition to the term hush harbor space, Nunley introduces the idea of a hush harbor rhetoric "" a rhetorical tradition constructed through Black public spheres with a distinctive relationship to spatiality (material and discursive), audience, African American nomoi (social conventions and beliefs that constitute a world view or knowledge), and epistemology" (222). Nunley argues that scholarship in rhetoric has neglected an understanding of "spatiality," which he calls "the distinctive fourth term of the rhetorical situation" (222).

Nunley warns the reader, however, that hush harbors are not just places where Black folks congregate, but they are Black spaces because "African American nomos (social convention, worldview knowledge), rhetoric, phronesis (practice wisdom and intelligence), tropes, and commonplaces are normative in the encounters that occur in these locations" (224). Space is an important construct in Nunley's essay. It's important not only because hush harbors are spaces, but because space has been relatively neglected in rhetorical study. Nunley reviews work on architecture, postmodern geography, and rhetorical studies of space (e.g., Mountford). While Mountford addresses how spaces produce meaning, Nunley points out that she doesn't look at African American "rhetorical spaces" as "expressions of a textual and rhetorical tradition" (228). Thus, hush harbors are more than a space for gathering, they are sites of practices AND "theorizing, epistemology and history " (230). Nunley goes on to show how this is the case in African American literature and public address, namely through The "Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X's speech given in Cleveland on April 3, 1964. He offers a thoughtful analysis of how Malcolm X deployed a different ethos when addressing the black audience in Cleveland ("The Ballot or the Bullet) vs. addressing a predominantly white audience in his speech "The Black Revolution" given in Palm Gardens, N. Both speeches addressed similar themes, but the different audiences necessitated different appeals. Nunley shows how Malcolm X adapated his speech accordingly and how "The Ballot or the Bullet" given to a black audience in Cleveland is an example of hush harbor rhetoric. I like this section a great deal, but I'd like to see more analysis of how hush harbor rhetoric works in the "The Ballot or the Bullet." I get the general concept, but I'd like to see more close textual analysis of the speech itself so I can understand how Malcolm X was working within the hush harbor rhetorical space.

However, this kind of close analysis of public address is not Nunley's goal. The essay moves on to discuss the concept of black audience and black commonplaces (nomoi from Susan Jarratt). While Nunley sees hush harbor rhetoric as an important part of African American rhetorical traditions, he emphasizes that hush harbor spaces are not utopian respites free from the internecine conflicts and contradictions" (235). Harbor, perhaps, gives the concept of hush harbor the idea of a sheltered and safe space. But Nunley is not content to rest there--dwelling in the hush harbor has consequences and benefits as he shows in the "The Classroom as Contact and Combat Zone" segment of the piece where he discusses academic hush harbors. Nunley gives an example of an experience he had where he challenged two white graduate students who critiqued a multicultural textbook for being too race-based, Nunley and another student and African American faculty discussed the incident behind closed doors after the class. Yet Nunley uses this example to suggest how hush harbor rhetoric can be a transgressive pedagogical practice. He offers an example of how this can happen through the use of the "lyric shuffle" game that linguist J. Baugh discusses in his book and Beverly Silverstein's service learnign program at Crenshaw High in L.A.. Finally, Nunley ends the piece by arguing that hush harbor rhetoric provides scholars of rhetoric a useful "methodological and pedagogical possibility' (241).

As I read through, I wondered how hush harbors can parallel the space that Nan Johnson refers to as parlor rhetoric in her book on nineteenth century women rhetors? Nineteenth century white women were usually not welcome in public address, so how might parlor rhetorics parallel hush harbors, to some degree? What are the limitations as well as possibilities of comparing these two rhetorical spaces: parlor and hush harbor?

Syracuse and the "Jerry Rescue"

Jacqueline Bacon's book is a wonderful model of historical research: rich with nuance and carefully considered analysis of archival, primary, and secondary sources. While class members in 751 are blogging about the assigned chapters, I thought I would take up our recent class tour of the Abolitionist sites in Syracuse, NY. One of the connections I've been trying to draw in the class is between the social histories and historiographical texts that we are reading and the local area, which is a rich site of social history for a number of social movements and causes.

A group of 751 folks including some of our offspring (!) went downtown on Sunday to get a sense of the abolitionist picture here in 19th century Syracuse. Dennis Connor from the Onondaga Historical Association took us on a historical walk through downtown Syracuse that highlighted some of the major locations and people who were engaged in significant abolitionist activity. The day we went (Sunday) was also the day before the commemoration of the Jerry Rescue, a situation where the citizens of Syracuse rose up against federal marshals who had imprisoned William "Jerry" Henry, a local African American man who was a "runaway" slave living in Syracuse and working as a skilled woodworker. William was taken into custody by federal marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law Act, which forced all citizens to turn in runaway slaves or face a fine and imprisonment. This Act, part of the Missouri compromise, was mean to force citizens in the North to collude with the unjust slavery system of the South. While Syracuse was already a site of significant abolitionist activity, the tide was turned around the situation of William Henry. William was kept in police custody and at one point tried to escape. He ran down the street and was suppressed and struck by the marshals in public view and then dragged back to the jail. It was then hard to remain neutral about this issue. Abolition was no longer an abstract issue--one of the citizens of Syracuse was being dragged back into jail in plain view under an unjust law. A plan was fomented by Rev May and Rev. Loguen and others to break Jerry out of jail and get him to Canada. The "Jerry" rescure resulted whereby several hundred citizens gathered outside the jail, extinguished the gaslights, and broke into the jail with a battering ram and carried William out. He was hidden in various houses and dressed as a woman to conceal his identity before being taken to Kingston, Ontario by boat. The consequences for the rescuers were great in terms of facing conviction and trial. A film at the OHA illustrates the major aspects of the "Rescue."

Thus, the Fugitive Slave Law was a major incubator of activism for the citizens of Syracuse, and it stands today as an iconic moment in the history of abolition both locally and nationally. As we walked with Dennis through the city, he introduced us to several sites where speeches were made by Frederick Douglass, where runaway slaves were hidden (houses and churches), and he pointed out the sites of the court, businesses, and private residences where significant abolitionist actions were taken. What was clear is there was a rhetorical and material network in play and there were different levels of engagement depending upon the person, his/her position, and the time period--before and after the Fugitive Slave Law Act. Dennis also pointed out the ways in which African Americans were treated diffferently and often unfairly within the abolitionist movement--a point Bacon takes up as well. Those of us who attended were also struck by how much change the city has seen in terms of architectural razing and rebuilding. Many historical sites and residences are simply gone. The building where Daniel Webster gave his threatening speech about citizens obeying the Fugitive Slave Law or else (ironically) is still there--including the balcony he stood on as he delivered the speech.

If you haven't already, please go see the "Jerry" Rescue moument at Clinton Square. It faces the site of the jail where William Henry was unjustly imprisoned, and it depicts the dramatic scene of Jerry being spirited out of jail by Revs Loguen and May. Rev Loguen points north to freedom. While this was not what happened historically, it is an effective artistic rendering.

The site of the jail is a parking lot now. The folks who own it have not agreed to sell it to the OHA, which would like to create a monument there. I guess parking spaces still trump the commemoration of social justice.

I think we all found the walk very informative. There are now Freedom Trail markers around the city, and I recommend that anyone take the walk we did with Dennis. It was eye-opening and wonderfully linked to all we are discussing. It is also a reminder that the Jenna 6 should be fresh in our minds.

Chautauqua: the reasons for failure?

It's perhaps difficult for many to understand the importance of public lectures and sermons in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We tend to think of lectures as "take or leave" in our day and age--something we might go to or should go to or occasionally as something we can't miss because the person is so well-known for their PRINT persona and ideas. But imagine a public lecture as EDIFICATION AND ENTERTAINMENT, as something you would want to go to, something you would travel many miles for in an open buggy in the cold or searing heat so you could hear someone speak for two hours or sometimes more. Think of certain speakers as celebrities--well known for their platform personas, their exciting ideas, their manner of fiery speaking. As we've been reading this week, oratorical culture in the 19th c. that was being transformed in specific cultural, social, and economic ways.

Now think of Chautauqua--the lecture and circuit series founded "on the shores of New Yorks' Lake Chautauqua in 1873" (211). According to Frederick J. Antczak and Edith Siemers (referred to heretofore as A & S), authors of "The Divergence of Purpose and Practice on the Chautauqua: Keith Vawter's Self-Defense," the series in the summer "drew thousands. . . to be part of educational programs addressed particularly to teachers" (211). Rev. John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller, the founders of the series, wanted to start a series in which well-known speakers and thinkers from the east would come to speak and educate those who would soon be teaching or were teaching those in the "West"--the teachers. The program was thought of as "an early form of [an] extension program in education" (211), a precursor to the Summer Institutes for teachers that we have now.

Notables such as the philosopher William James, Thomas Edison. U.S. senators, and others would hold forth on a variety of topics of interest and public value. Religious leaders also addressed spiritual and moral issues (211). So engaged were some of the participants that they would go back to their home communities and try to establish a Chautauqua-like series, which sparked the circuit series that Vawter became involved in. The Chautauqua circuit system arose in response to that need, which I will address later in this posting.

Now why 1870? Why did that time period give rise to such a series? The explanation offered in the article is the assessment by Gould that this was a time period of social unrest and economic change, a time in which people saw "the arrogance of the railroads and the trusts, a prolonged and severe economic depression, political corruption in city, state, and federal government, a 'stolen" Presidential election (Hayes-Tilden), and a wave of bitter strikes" (Gould qtd in Antczak and Siemers 212). Sounds pretty contemporary to me! The implication was that series helped people sort through vital and pressing issues of the day such as the "eight-hour day, the conservation of natural resources, pure food and drug legislation, city planning," etc ((212). While A and S spend a few pages extolling the successes of Chautauqua, their focus is on the demise of the program. I have to admit as a reader that I didn't want to hear about the decline of the series. I wanted to hear about it in its hey-day, and I wanted to hear about its circulation and effects throughout the 19th/early 20th century communities that it touched. But this is not the story the authors wish to tell. The story to tell is about its "ultimate failure" (213) and the role of Vawter in that failure.

Ironically, Vawter was responsible for Chautauqua's success as a circuit system even as he is hailed as the reason for its failure. Vawter's idea was to create a "circuit system" where towns in proximity with each other could maximize opportunities by booking a specific speaker into a regional area. The idea was to have "centralized control on the same schedule with the same 'talent'" (214). This system was to be a way to maximize efficiency. Speakers would move from town to town on a "tight booking" system. A system of quality control was applied where speakers moving from one town to another were "advised" about how to handle themselves given their performance at the previous town. This supposedly lead to the more fiery speakers being asked to "tone it down" so as not to offend the locals. The sentiment was that local organizing committees of the Chautauqua circuit began to lean toward "pap" rather than substance and that it began to get away from the civic motives that once guided it.

While there were good things about this system--reliable booking system, guarantee of a steady circuit--there were problems. Sometimes host towns came upon financial difficulties or bad weather or local organizing boards that didn't want specific topics or speakers. Vawter worked to make local organizing committees more responsible for ensuring a good turn-out and for being liable for the monies to pay the speakers once they agreed to a booking. Chautauqua became, more and more, a business enterprise, and local organizing committees began to want to promote only "crowd-pleasers" because they wanted to be able to sell tickets and not be left with having to pay-out to make up the difference. To illustrate the difference, A & S cite an example of a 1909 bill about lecturers vs.a 1925 bill that shows how Chautauqua's public function was taken over by "entertainment" interests: Tyrolean Alpine Singers and Yodelers for instance.

But as A & S put it, this is not a neat and tidy narrative. Vawter was "keenly aware of the decline" and felt torn between keeping the circuit going financially and keeping its public purpose alive. Vawter's papers reveal this struggle between "profitability" and a passion for civic virtue. The story of what happened to Chautauqua's circuit series is an interesting and unresolved one. A & S go on to suggest a number of interpretations of the archival materials and published accounts of what happened to the circuit program. The questions appear to be about the nature of the circuit's demise: Did it fail due to bureaucracy and commodification of speakers that Vawter encouraged in order to keep the series going? Did it fail because the "local committees" dumbed it down to the point where it lost its edge and social value? In other words, did it fail because local organizing committees "sold" out to entertainment over public edification? Did it fail because of oratorical culture losing its sway? Did it fail because the radio came along as an instrument of public entertainment and the automobile came along to transport people to far away towns and cities for amusements of other kinds like drinking illegal whiskey? This last question is mine, of course ;-). But the point here in the article is to be careful about how we interpret Vawter's involvement in the demise and to be aware of what we take on when we try to determine what happened to the Chautauqua series.

At any rate, the answers to these questions are not entirely clear, but what the Vawter-Chautauqua test case reveals is interesting for the examination of oratorical culture. As A & S put it, the example of Vawter asks us to think more about how "rhetorical values are in fact institutionalized and to examine what happenes to them. . . when they are" (224). I think this article raises interesting questions about institutionalized rhetoric as well as social histories. How are we to intepret the failure of a rhetorical enterprise? When something dies, why does it do so? Competing values, shifting interests, someone's big gaffe? The point A & S make is that we must "complicate our stories, stories of the tensions between the roles of the individual and the stories for the tensions betwen prinicples of cultural discrimination and the interests of institutions in their own material survival" (224).

Some of the discussion here made me think of Sinclair Lewis's novel _Main Street_, which offers a send-up of small town culture and its desire for entertainment and conservative forces moreso than challenges. But Lewis also treats small towns as complex enterprises as well.

Archives as Scenes of Collective Invention

“The Archive as a Scene of Invention” Rhetoric and Public Affairs

Biesecker maintains that whatever the archive is, it is, above all, “ a settled scene of our collective invention, of our collective invention of us and it” (124). I think that this is a fascinating statement. The archive, then, is a scene of “doubled invention” rather than one of “singular discovery” (124). Biesecker notes as well the crisis in historical knowledge and questioning and movement away from master narratives (Lyotard) that has been a part of her field—communication studies—and every other major field in the humanities or social sciences where “History” has been “histories.” Even with the questioning of the master narratives that have guided history, Biesecker reminds readers that there has been a turn back to the archives as a potential unmediated passage back to the past since it contains material artifacts. She cites a series of cautionary articles that remind readers of the problems entailed in a turn back to the archives—that all archives are a mere “trace” (Derrida) of the past and that when we are dealing with archives, we are dealing with the ghostly traces of the past-not the full past. The effect, then, of the first four pages of the article is to raise a whole series of questions about the indeterminacy of using archives as a point for gathering material artifacts from which to reconstruct histories.

After raising a whole series of questions about archives, Biesecker turns to the cancellation of the “Enola Gay” exhibit proposed for the National Air and Space Museum in the nineties. The Enola Gay was the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Museum’s exhibit was to omit mention of Japanese victims of the blasts, but instead was to narrate the historic flights as those that ended the war. The exhibit was poised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the bombings. The controversy hinged over whether or not to include “bits of the archive”—photographic evidence of the effects of the blast on survivors on the ground. Another piece of the controversy rested on having only part of the B-29 present for the exhibit—“mutilated” as some veterans argued. Both sides of the controversy were debating how to include bits of the archive and what effects those “bits” would have on the viewing public. Would they view the Enola Gay differently? As an engine of death, which, of course, all bombers are. Or as an engine of freedom that ended the war and eliminated unnecessary suffering even as plenty of unnecessary suffering happened because of the bombings?

. But Biesecker’s point, though, is calling into question what both sides were questioning about the archival evidence causing viewers to question the U.S. decision to use the bomb against the Japanese. In contrast, the documentary film “Price for Peace” (aired 2002) narrated the costs of the blast told from the perspective of Japanese survivors as well as the story of the flight. The documentary was, interestingly, not objected to by veterans, was introduced by Tom Brokaw (author of The Greatest Generation). So the question was not really over the effects, but over what “bits” and what those bits would do, how they would used.

So Biesecker’s point is that we need to investigate the archive itself rather than ut the archival evidence. Her point is that the archive cannot authenticate, but it can authorize (130). So she argues we need rhetorical histories of the archive, “critical histories of the situated and strategic uses to which the archives have been put” (130).

I like this piece a lot, and I find I want to read more by Biesecker after reading it. I’d like to see Biesecker draw out further the implications of the Enola Gay controversy, but, of course, she can’t because this was a response essay in a special issue on archives for the journal.

I think it is interesting to think of writing critical rhetorical histories of archives and their situated and strategic uses. I think that is a important claim, especially in light of the ways in which specific archives have been used and reused to authorize our rhetorical and composition histories in the field—the Widener Library’s special collections at Harvard for instance. The use of that archive so frequently has guaranteed that many of the histories of the field are about east coast, elite colleges and universities and not about other places, spaces, and types of institutions—although many historians are now looking elsewhere.

I’d like to talk more about how archives are scenes of collective invention. What do we invent? For whom? And for what stakes? And what are the ways in which we create national identities and nationalisms from our archives?

Blogging from Fargo/book launch

Greetings from Fargo. I am at Bobb's Coffee house, a Taste of Seattle in Fargo, North Dakota, which is emblazoned with a Space Needle logo. As a former Seattleite, I was quite pleased to discover this Seattle-like coffee place NOTE: NOT STARBUCKS!. I was surprised, but pleased to find this place beckoning me as a drove a rental mini-van through the streets of Fargo (more on that later--they gave away all the sedans, and I'm stuck with a MINI-VAN). This coffee place does look a little like a Seattle coffee place--tin ceilings, wood floors, exposed brick. Anyway, I'm here waiting for my co-author Charlotte Hogg to fly in so we can join our other co-author Kim Donehower at the University of North Dakota. We are going to be give a lecture and sign books tomorrow. Our book _Rural Literacies_ (Southern Illinois UP) was released this summer, and this is our official book launch. I thought it was fitting that I could smell the cut wheat fields when I landed.

Anyway, I'll blog more tonight from Grand Forks, ND, and I'll write about Biesecker's article. If anyone from 751 is out there, think about this question: WHAT IS AN ARCHIVE? Biesecker offers some answers. It will be interesting to compare her answers with DeCerteau's.

More later! I'll check out everyone's blogs tonight.

History as "Cemeteries within Cities"

Some questions to consider about history and historiography as we blog and get ready for class. I'll add more to this list.

--What do we make of Marx's claim that history is the history of class struggle?
--And in what ways do you see Marx's claims anchoring the future study of social histories? In what ways are we indebted to Marx, but also, in what ways, has the crisis in historical materialism shifted the emphasis in social histories?
--How might we tie Marx into DeCerteau's point on p. 58 that "all historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production" (58).

--I was interested in DeCerteau's point about the archive and information retrieval. I think he poses some interesting points about the archive as an institutionalized informatics of retrieval (the sciences of information). After reading DeCerteau, what statements are you formulating about the archive as an entity, a technology, a place?

Take a look at the passage on p. 87 of DeCerteau--the "cemeteries within cities":

"it [history] functions as an inverted image: it gives way to lack and yet hides it; it creates these naratives of th epast which are the equivalent of cemeteries within cities; it exorcises and confesses a presence of death amidst the living" (87). HIstoriography produces history and tells stories (87). How does writing, how does narrative shape history? Bringing in rhetoric and logic, DeCerteau addresses how history draws on syllogism and enthymeme (for explication).

There is a "French connection" at work here in the readings--Foucault and DeCerteau. Discuss the synergies and distinctions across these texts and account for the role of the French context on both.

I'd like to address geneaology as Foucault defines it in relation to historical discourse.

More on Nietzsche later. He requires his own blog post!

Teaching Rhetorical Histories

“Rhetoric and Graduate Studies: Teaching in a Postmodern Age” Mountford and Reynolds _Rhetoric Review 15.1 (Fall 1996): 192-214.

I think Mountford and Reynolds make good points about how “rhetoric may be taught as a set of transdisciplinary theories of discourse that frame and inform the study of communicative practices as they vary and shift across multiple cultural sites” (193).

I’m particularly interested in the overview they provide of research on rhetorical education for graduate students. There is a focus on historical “sweeps” or surveys of the history of rhetoric. T.J. Miller is cited as wondering how revisionary rhetoric is accounted for in these surveys. Are these canonical surveys without revisionary content? Miller calls for scholars/teachers of the history of rhetoric to examine rhetorical history from a rhetorical perspective. I think that is very important—the rhetoricity of rhetorical history. It is clear from the overview that there are many questions to be considered about the way the history of rhetoric gets taught—“patterning rhetoric courses after traditional literature survey-courses and/or in service of composition may limit the study fo rhetoric and the potential of rhetoricality in ways that need no longer be reproduced” (200). Mountford and Reynolds present two alternative models that can be used in tandem.
1) dialogical; 2) transdisciplinary. The idea with dialogical is to pair/cluster readings across historical period to demonstrate similarities and differences—Aristotle and Burke, for instance. They argue that we need to “replace the study of history with historiography’’ a move that foregrounds theory and social practice” (201).

The transdisciplinary piece involves understanding how rhetorical study and rhetorical practice can extend and influence other arenas: law, public policy, etc. A rhetorical issue or practice can be traced across a number of domains. Mountford and Reynolds offer some really useful advice about how to create transdisciplinary clusters of pieces that illuminate new ways of studying and addressing rhetorics.

p. 209: I’d like to discuss the passage here that Mountford and Reyolds draw from Porter’s piece about creating boundaries around rhetoric and other fields. This tension is an interesting one—between making rhetoric the study of everything to rhetoric as a particular domain and discourse. What is the happy medium here? This is worth discussing, and it’s worth discussing in terms of our rhetoric curriculum of 731, 751, and 711, which are the required rhetoric track courses. One of the distinctions that I’d like to make is between the “rhetoric of,” which is rhetoric being used as a synonym for discourse or language, to rhetoric as an analytic, as a method, and a methodology. I think that the rub lies between these two uses of rhetoric.

Miller's piece is a good (earlier) companion with this one. I think both pieces constitute a hugely valuable resource. Every graduate student before going on the job market should read these pieces and plan a graduate course and an undergraduate upper-division course in the history of rhetoric that accounts for the different models presented here. Every faculty member should read these pieces before putting together a history of rhetoric survey and/or rhetorical theory course.

Social History as Imperative

Why study and write social histories of rhetoric?


I must begin at home--with my home community,which has had a hand in creating a social history.

As part of a multi-generation farm family in eastern Washington state, I grew up surrounded by the paraphernalia of former generations. My great grandfather Frank A. Schell's Model T truck sat below our family’s barn, its slatted sides long ago rotted away, its wheels sunk into the mud. Our family’s barn rose above the truck to a grand height, one of the largest barns left standing in the neighborhood, its drafty and dim exterior and multiple hay lofts called to mind its former occupants: the cows, horses, and goats of previous generations. In the late fall in the 1920s and 1930s, the barn served as an apple shed where my great grandfather, my grandfather, my grandmother, and hired men packed the fall's apple harvest into boxes before hauling them to the railroad depot to be taken to market. In the 1960s and 1970s, the barn became a storage shed for the old and the new. I wandered through it many afternoons, gazing up at the tall stack of homemade apple boxes that rose to the rafters. Stacks of old wooden ladders and new lightweight aluminum ones leaned against the hand-hewn beams. My great grandfather's tools hung on the walls of the hay loft: cross-cut blades, scythes, shingle making equipment, horseshoes, and saddles. Even the feed boxes for the animals were still intact. The barn, once a vital site of production, now housed the equipment, tools, and treasures of former generations, and my grandmother, the caretaker of the family museum, spent hours puttering in the barn’s dim interior arranging relics from the past.

Being constantly surrounded by the past made me, in some ways, obsessed with the past, with history, with the way things once were and the way things came to be. I spent hours talking to my grandmother about the past, listening to her stories, and later typing them for her as she wrote her memoirs in her late eighties (she is now 99 years old). It seemed to me that I didn’t have any choice but to be interested in social history—being part of a farm family guarantees your line in history. But there was more to it than being indebted to the past and the unbroken line of continuity that comes from tracing one’s past. It was a sense of responsibility and duty to acknowledge those how came before and those who got ignored along the way. For our farm once existed and co-existed originally with the Native people—the Wenatchis—who made their home in the Wenatchee Valley for centuries before the trappers. miners, traders, and farmer-settlers came.

My family’s farm stood at the mouth of Brender Canyon, the area the Sinpushquoisoh band of the Wenatchi Indians referred to as the Land of the Blackbirds. Every year the Sinpushquoisoh people traveled through the canyon past the eventual site of our family farm on their way to dig camas roots known as “itwah” or biscuit roots. I grew up hearing stories of how a Wenatchi woman known by her English name Molly traveled on her horse past our farm in June and July to dig her yearly supply of the camas root.. The camas roots were dug in a high mountain meadow in the Wenatchee Mountains known simply as the Camas Lands. The meadow, emblazoned with blue camas flowers, yielded a good harvest of the bulbous root.. The native people dug the roots with a paca, a digging stick made from hard wood or from an elk or deer antler, and they stowed the roots in woven bags around their waists. The high meadow also yielded the sukalusah, another type of camas root, which had white blossoms, and sukwim, or wild carrots . The itwah and sukalusah roots were versatile; the Wenatchis ate them raw or they boiled, baked, or dried them. The camas roots were also used to make a flour to bake cakes or bread. Nearby the Wenatchi also gathered “wild potato, wild onion, tiger lily, cattail, wild celery and pine nuts. Early ripening berries were gathered in June, this month being called Shyayuaenscht or “Service Berry Gathering Time.” (Scheuerman 30).
After gathering camas roots, Molly would stop at the farm on her way back, and my great grandmother Katie Belle Threeton Schell usually served her a meal. Typical of the hierarchical relations between the white settlers and the Indians, Molly ate her meal on the steps of the back porch while the Schell family ate inside.

This bit of social history is not one that most people in my home community of Cashmere, WA know or would even care to know. The Pioneer Village Museum in Cashmere, WA proudly features the history of white settlement in its replicas of log cabins, stores, a one-room schoolhouse, and other structures. The cultural property of the Native people of the region is present in the museum as well, but it is behind locked glass display cases. It is part of a private collection owned by a white resident Willis Carey who left his collection to the museum. Frequently Native people come to the museum and try to take their cultural property back—stone tools, arrowheads, and other items. This property was dug--actually robbed-- from their ancestor’s graves. The museum will not return it the families that come to claim it.

The Indian people in Cashmere are largely gone now—living on the Colville reservation to the north or scattered here and there. The US government never granted the Wenatchis the fishing reservation they were promised in the treaties they signed, and there was not a way to remain in the community without having access to the livelihood that came from unfettered access to the streams and lands that once sustained them.

So social histories matter because it is a history, often, of social injustice as well as the struggle to right social wrongs. Now one might say what is rhetorical about any of this? The rhetoric is in the telling or the construction of historical accounts and their persuasive nature. It is in the way that one version of history gets told—white settlement and white pride and white racism—and in the way another version—the Native people and cultural annhilation—gets completely elided or relegated to a portion of a museum as the “past,” not the future. How did it become persuasive for one story, one history to be acknowledged as the important one? What power relations, public policies, and cultural arguments allowed that to happen? This is where the social historian of rhetoric can step in to addresss the gap between “official” histories of progress and inevitability and address the ways in which such progress was at the expense of whole classes of people and/or the environment. The example I cite is one from my own community, but there are thousands more to address. This is what makes social histories of rhetoric such a powerful area of development for the field. More later!! I have more to say about Thomas Miller and others in relation to this idea of social history.

Octalog II

I enjoy the Octalogue entries (I & II) because they are mini-manifestos!
I’ll be progressively blogging over the next few days, but I wanted to comment in particular on Octalogue II, which sets an agenda, in many ways, for a course in historical study.

From Octalogue II:

“Serving Time in the Archives” “Where were the women? The people of color” (Ferreira-Buckley 26).


Ferreira-Buckley makes an excellent point about the nature of archival work: many of us do not receive training in the ways to conduct traditional research, and such research takes a lot of time and resources (travel to archives, time to sift through archival boxes, make sense of documents, etc). There is also the problem of language—knowing Hebrew, Greek, Latin well enough to read and translate texts. Ferreira Buckley worries that our obsession with theory and with its narrative structures will make for shallow or under researched histories. I find this an honest and reflective account. She raises many strong points about the nature of archival research: its material demands, in particular. But I want some thoughts from her about what it means to try to address, overcome, and/or compensate for these factors? What are ways that graduate schools should try to address these problems? With the speed-up productivity pressure around publication, how can academic departments and promotion and tenure committees factor in the time it takes to do traditional historical research?

“Storiography and Rhetoric and Composition”
Lauer writes critically of the ways in which our histories of the field are compromised by shallow methods of study.. She is particularly critical of how graduate students consume histories of the field: portraying historical figures as heroes or villains or as examples of particular theoretical categories. She makes a good point that there is a tendency to “fix” historical figures and scholars into a particular time and place instead of acknowledging how such figures/scholars grow and change over time, develop new ideas, take new directions. She opposes the static way in which some of us tend to read in the field: fixing a particular piece in time instead of trying to read it in context. What Lauer does not address are the ways in which the field itself helps perpetuate static readings through its writing of histories where hero/villain narratives are commonplace: e.g., Fred Newton Scott (hero) and Adams Sherman Hill (villain) in Berlin and Connors. I love Robin Varnum’s history of composition at Amherst College Fencing with Words because she avoids the binaries.

More later!

Going Back to the Land as Genre

Last night, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's new book _Animal, Vegetable, Mineral_. A couple of folks said to me that they thought I'd like it because of my interest in local agriculture and sustainability. I'm up to page 70, and I am enjoying it. If you have not read it, the plot runs like this: Kingsolver moves from Arizona with her family (two daughters and husband) back to their "summer" farm in southern Appalachia. They have spent many summers there, but they are now going back to live--live off their land and feed themselves locally. The motive is living a more sustainable and connected lifestyle. Kingsolver lyrically describes the family's movement back into the local "foodshed." Her youngest daughter gives up Pop-Tarts. They all give up fresh fruit out of season. She describes the pleasures of gardening: growing asparagus and the coming promise of spring and green eatables.

Kingsolver mentions Gary Nabhan early on in the book. Gary is author of _Coming Home to Eat_, a wonderful book about Nabhan's attempts to eat locally in the Arizona desert. This is not an easy thing because it means making bread of mesquite flour and scavenging local cacti.

So Kingsolver does see herself writing in the genre of "going back to the land," the genre familiar to so many of us from reading _Walden_. As a matter of fact, she mirrors lines from Thoreau.

While there is much to like about Kingsolver's book, I can't help but feel a bit impatient with it even as I am enjoying it. These are familiar moves--write about reconnecting with your own local food shed. Michael Pollan's book _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ deals with this theme, in part, although the scope of his book is larger. This is becoming a rhetorical commonplace in the middle-class writer's life. Tell the story of reconnecting with nature and local food. Humorously describe your own struggles to move away from grocery store consumerism to local food webs. Lyrically describe the green shoots coming up in the garden. Talk about the value of the local farmer. Yadda, yadda, yadda...OK, I'm being too sarcastic.

This book will get people's attention. Barbara Kingsolver is an accomplished writer, she is well-known and much-loved. People will read her book, they will be affected, they will make changes-hopefully. Her husband Steven Hopp has included side bars in the book introducing ecological concepts and sustainable farming. She does point out how High-fructose corn syrup is leading to obesity. She points out the connection between fossil fuel use and food production (food miles--how far food travels to the table). She discusses the public policies that have made local agriculture difficult in the face of industrialized agriculture (The Farm Bill as the Farm Kill). OK, so she does a lot of teaching in this book.

There have been people preaching this message for years: small-scale farmers!!, sustainable farmers, organic farmers, community food security people, Slow Food advocates, farmers' market directors, rural folks with a lick of good sense in their heads. I guess for it to filter into middle class consciousness, it will take someone like Kingsolver or Pollan. Who wants to listen to a real farmer or rural person with a backyard garden?

Again, I'm trying to contain my critique so I can read the book and enjoy it. But I can't help but feel frustrated when I read Kingsolver. What she describes about eating seasonally was what I grew up with. We grew a big garden, canned fruit and vegetables for the winter,, ate locally as much as we could, including wild game. Eating locally, as she pointed out, the way a lot of rural people live and continue to live when they have a plot of land to scratch around in and not much money to burn. We lived this way because it was less money, we had the land, and we had the time, and we were tied ot the seasons and the soil. We lived this way, too, because my mom and Dad were depression era babies who knew that food shortages could happen. Ecology was just common sense, and food from the garden was good and fresh and cheap. Now that doesn't mean, though, that my Dad wasn't spraying pesticides on our commercial apple and pear orchards. He thoroughly bought into industrialized agriculture--after all, he had two degrees from land-grant institutions--WSU and Cornell-- where the latest technology was promoted. After all, the American consumer couldn't accept an apple with worm holes or aphid bites. So our family was contradictory; local food to eat, industrialized growing of apples and pears for export and domestic markets. Some of our apples made the journey by container ship to Japan.

What Kingsolver is trying to accomplish is not only the rendering of her experience, but a strong message about returning to the local--a message directed at those who are disconnected from the local. People will point to her book as a guide or an inspiration. I think it's an important book, but one I feel conflicted about for reasons I'm still figuring out.

Anyway, more to think about.....

Getting Back into the Swing

Well, this has been a significant blog hiatus with my last entry in mid-April. C'mon, what happened?

Well, I interviewed for the position of Chair of my Department for one. That slowed me down some, and now that I've taken on the role, I'm finding it hard to get much time for anything. A double whammy. But what really made me stop writing and posting in April were the shootings at Virginia Tech. You see, I used to work there in the English Department--the same English Department where the shooter took classes. I know people who were affected by the shootings--colleagues, former students. It was eerie to watch the broadcasts and see familiar buildings and hear familiar names. Then I went down to Virginia Tech for a Research Symposium ten days after the shootings. It was a good trip, but being there brought the devastation home. So I didn't feel much like posting for awhile.

But I'm going to try to get back into the swing of things and post more.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot is food safety and the stories coming out about China's food industry. I've posted a bit before about food safety in the U.S.--ecoli in bagged spinach, for instance. But the situation in China really takes the cake. First it is tainted pet food, then toothpaste, then a variety of foodstuffs. Don't get me wrong--we have our own struggles with food safety in the U.S. Eric Schlosser tells us in _Fast Food Nation_ that it's easier to recall a child's toy than it is to recall tainted meat that can kill people. So we have our own problems. But the lack of regulation in China is serious business, and it is garnering serious media attention. I wonder what the global impact will be? How quickly will China address the regulation issue? What economic losses will be incurred for these exposes? How will the public discourse on the issue impact production, distribution, and buying?

Anyway, it's late. I'm exhausted. More another time!

April is the cruelest month: The Killing Frost

What is a killing frost to those of who live largely indoor lives? It's probably not much to us other than turning up the heat or putting an extra blanket on the bed. Maybe if we're gardeners, we worry about our spring plants. As food consumers, we may see higher prices in the grocery store for food. But it's so much more to those who cultivate the earth for a living. As I've noted in other blog entries, the weather has stayed with me as a constant concern after growing up on an apple orchard in eastern Washington State. A killing frost can mean the difference between money in the bank and foreclosure. Recently, there was a spectacularly bad killing frost in Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky and other states that wiped out the pecan, peach, and apple crops among others. This on the heels of a horrible killing frost in CA for the citrus crop--see my January blog entry on that and on crop insurance. Perhaps some of you heard the NPR interview with Robert Chapman from Zebulon, GA who lost his whole peach crop. I've included a link below the audio file of the NPR interview plus an overview CNN interview. You won't forget it soon if you listen to Chapman talk about the fate of his crops, the role of the weather in farming, and his fatalistic attitude.


Peach crop is a 90% disaster

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WEATHER/04/12/frozen.crops.ap/index.html


Go to NPR and listen to peach farmer Robert Chapman from Zebulon, GA
http://216.35.221.77/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9554303

"
"A 25-degree freeze on Easter Sunday blackened the insides of Chapman's peach crop, which provides most of his income.
While Chapman's bushes and trees will still bear fruit next year, he says he may have to find another job in the meantime. Farmers throughout the region report heavy crop losses and are bracing for another expected cold snap next week."


Here's a typical April and May night on the Schell and Schell apple and pear orchard when it was in business:

In the morning, the radio broadcast the fruit farm report and in the spring the fruit frost forecast, which we listened to intently because all depended on its predictions about wind and air temperature and the likelihood of a killing frost. When the temperature dropped near freezing, often at 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning, my parents took measures to save the crop. To keep the apple and pear buds from freezing, my father, mother, and the hired men set out smudge pots, large blackened pots full of heating oil that resembled a cross between a genie’s bottle and a stove pipe. The pots sat squarely in the rows and when the temperature dropped, they lit the pots with a punk, a wick on a butane canister, resembling a giant-sized cigarette lighter. The fuel caught fire and produced a blue flame and smoke, which was piped through the pot’s chimney and burner holes. The heat emitted by the pots warmed the air and protected the precious buds. We called it "firing season."

For my mother and father and any of us on frost patrol, the nights were filled with watching the pots, a lonely exercise of walking the darkened rows of apple and pear trees illumined by the pots’ eerie orange glow. If the temperature continued to drop, the burner holes were opened to full capacity and the fire sucked in the oxygen and omitted more heat. Out in the orchards, one’s mind could wander and noises were magnified; a crash a few rows away could be a coyote or a neighbor’s dog or perhaps a cougar prowling its territory. A satellite blinking overhead could become a UF0. At first the chill and the uncertainty brought on by sudden noises kept one awake. As the night waned into the early light of morning, it was easy to become languid, the orchard rows warming and causing one to feel a pleasant, distant sensation while walking. Periodic checks of the thermometer stations positioned at key points in the orchard indicated whether the temperature was rising sufficiently or if there would be damage to the crops. A few hours of frost meant the buds were diminished and the fruit would be light or even non-existent.


Later came the electricity powered wind machines, the $15,000 towers with airplane-like propellers that circulate the air at night. The thwock-thwock-thwock of the machines could be heard across the valley all night, circulating the cooler air with the warm air. Even then, losses were still possible.

I remember one night in 1999 (late April/early May) when I was visiting Cashmere and on research leave, my mom was out of town, so I took her place as part of a two-person "firing" team that included my brother Mike and me. Earlier that night, Mike asked me to keep the phone by the bed and when he called, to check the temperature and turn on the wind machine on our Flowery Divide property, Later he asked me to come over to the Hansen place at around 3 a.m., one of our other orchards where he had pots set up to warm the buds. We kept adjusting the burners on the pots and trying to warm the air, but we couldn't get the temperature up over 30 in some places. The temperature just kept dropping. At one point, I started praying. At another point, I was swearing. Eventually, I was just numb and resigned, walking up and down the rows to check the pots. As the day dawned, we lost quite a bit of the crop on that place. I remember that we drove back to the farmhouse deflated and had breakfast. We did all we could to warm the air, and we still lost out against the elements that night. This was just one of many nights that Mike faced during his 20 plus years in farming.


Just a few memories. Even thinking about it gets the adrenaline going....

T.S. Eliot was right that April is the cruelest month.

The Myth of the Noble Farmer

Brad Andrews took Tom Kerr's Public Essay class at Ithaca College and produced this really interesting critique of the myth of the noble farmer. Brad is the son of a former dairy farmer. As Brad points out, there is a tendency to rhapsodize about farm life and romanticize it, especially from the outside perspective. Brad debunks the myths, points out the hard, unremitting labor of dairy farming and, ultimately, notes that he was banned from farming by his father even as the Andrews family farm was auctioned.

Yet farming is clearly in his blood--he remembers it all even while decrying it. Thanks for writing this, Brad, and thanks for your honesty. Many of us want to see small farmers stay on their land and stay in farming, but you've indicated the strenuous work, hardships and struggle involved in the daily life.

Keeping telling the story, Brad.




The Myth of the Noble Farmer
Brad Andrews

The noble farmer. Each day he rises with the sun to begin his daily routine. He feeds his animals, milks his cows, and cleans his barn. . .all before breakfast. Later in the day, he'll go into his vast fields and harvest his crops. As the sun sets, he'll be back in the barn, milking and feeding once more. Then it's off to bed, only to rise again in the morning and repeat the same process.

It's easy to wax poetic about farming. It's a "simple" life, and in a world in which technology is growing exponentially and life seems to be moving at a faster pace, there's something appealing about a life working in nature's splendor, far away from the hustle and bustle of urban city life.

Not only is farming a simple life, the work almost seems to be a divine calling. There's a sense that farming is what people were "meant" to do. Humans have been farming for several millennia, and the general process hasn't changed that much. Farmers reach into the fertile soil and pull out the fruits of God's bounty.

Having grown up on a dairy farm in New York state, I can tell you: the "simple" life isn't nearly as simple as it sounds. The myth of the "noble farmer" tends to leave out one important fact: being a farmer is hard. It's back-breaking, dangerous, low-paying work with brutally long hours.

Let's look at a typical day for a "real" farmer:

6 a.m. - Awake and out to the barn to start work (milking cows/feeding animals)

Here's the thing about waking up at 6 a.m. every morning: it sucks. If you're the type that needs eight hours of sleep every night, you're hitting the hay at 10 p.m. each and every day.

But not only are you awake at 6 a.m., you're working at 6 a.m. Morning chores aren't especially brutal: they mainly consist of milking the cows and feeding all the animals. But the farmer is still on his feet for most of the morning, and on top of that, the farmer is required to squat down to put on and remove the milking machine from the cow. You may be thinking, "Squatting down? Big deal." Consider this though: if a farmer is milking 100 cows, that's at least 200 deep knee bends every morning. That's probably not good for your knees.

8:30 a.m. - Home for a quick breakfast.

If the farmer is lucky, she will not only have time to eat, but to grab a quick nap. The farmer's still got a tough day ahead, so any sleep is golden.

9:30 a.m. - Back to the barn to feed the animals again and take care of various other tasks (ridding the barn of manure, etc.)

One thing about animals that it's hard to grasp until you raise a herd of them is the fact that they tend to defecate. A lot. And if the animals are in a barn, that manure piles up (quickly). One of the more unpleasant tasks for the farmer is removing this manure from the barn.

Most farms will have a "barn cleaner" in at least the largest barn on the farm. Basically, the barn cleaner is a conveyor belt of sorts that manure can be shoveled/scraped/pushed into. The cleaner will then (slowly) take the manure outside into a waiting manure spreader.

For smaller barns or barns with no cleaner, however, the manure-removal task is far more strenuous. As much fun as shoveling manure into a spreader is, I’d be very happy to never have to do it again. Let's just say that I don't enjoy cow manure splashing on my face. (An admittedly infrequent but still all-too-common occurrence while shoveling.)

Noon - Home for a quick lunch.

Same as breakfast: eat and then sleep if you can.

1 p.m. - Out to the fields for harvesting or related work.

The myth of the noble farmer makes it seems like growing crops is easy as pie, like the soil was just made for growing plants. Not true. Besides all the possible weather nightmares, the soil itself is less conducive to plant growth than one might think. This is because most soil is loaded with large rocks, which damage plows and other machines and hinder plant growth. These rocks must be removed from the field before plowing. Let me tell you something: you haven't experienced boredom until you've spent an afternoon picking rocks out of an empty field.

Once the crops are ready, it's time for harvesting. This is not enjoyable. Corn harvesting involves driving a tractor and a combine around in circles. Believe me, if you sit on a tractor (especially an older model) for an afternoon and drive around you will be at best bored and at worst insane. The tractor is noisy and it vibrates, which can cause great pain and headaches for the tractor operator after a few hours. (Yes, some larger farmers are lucky enough to have SuperTractors with air conditioning and radios and all kinds of cool stuff. I’ll assume that makes their lives a little easier.)

The hay harvest is even less enjoyable. First, there’s the drive-in-circles step, as with corn, but then there’s the fun of “unloading” the hay. After the hay bales are brought back to the farm in a wagon, they must be loaded into the barn or hayloft. Usually a few workers carry the bales off the wagon and place them on a conveyor belt of sorts (“elevator” in farm lingo) that takes the bales to the hayloft. The hayloft is where the real party’s at, as a few unfortunate workers stack the bales into neat piles while dealing with the triple-digit temperatures and general lack of oxygen in the loft.

4:30 p.m. - Home again for a very brief break.

Basically just a chance to catch one's breath before another milking session.

5 p.m. - Repeat the 6 a.m. routine.

The day ends with more milking and lots more deep knee bends to remove milking machines. It’s a rough experience after having worked the whole day already.

7:30 p.m. - Done for the day. Hopefully.

Let's do some math. What we see here is a 13 1/2 hour workday. Granted, there are breaks spread out through the day, but even removing those breaks it's still an 11-hour day. Yes, farmers are hardly the only occupation that works long days, but keep this in mind: farmers never get a day off. Ever. Animals need to be fed and milked and cared for each and every day. Even if a farmer decides to take a "day off," these tasks still need to be completed. Therefore, an "off day" for a farmer still consists of at least a 5 or 6 hour workday.

All this means that a farmer is pulling at least a 60-80 hour workweek. Every week. It's no wonder so many farmers require their children to come out to the barn and help out with chores; they'd barely see their own kids otherwise.

And even a working week as "short" as 60 hours requires that nothing goes wrong. Unfortunately, one of the many challenges with farming is that something is always going wrong. When I'm at school, I try to limit my phone calls home because they are always depressing. Every conversation with my dad starts with, "Let me tell you about the day I had today." He then proceeds to tell me how a tractor broke, or that a cow died for no reason, or that the cows broke a fence and wandered downtown, or that the water pipes exploded and flooded the barn or that it hasn’t rained in a month or....

The list goes on and on. So many things can go wrong on a farm; therefore a farmer has to be more than just a farmer. He must be a mechanic, a veterinarian, a carpenter, a meteorologist, a plumber, or anything else that the farm needs. And, really any disaster is possible.

The weather is a constant source of concern. Admittedly, a job in which one can work with nature is a special gift. When the sun is shining and the birds are singing, it's hard not to be grateful for the opportunity to work outdoors in the sun. Nature can be a very beautiful thing.

Nature can also be a bitch. One of the hardest parts of farming is the fact that the well-being of the farm is completely and absolutely at the mercy of nature. Too much rain and the farmer is screwed. Too little rain and the farmer is screwed. Too many cloudy days and the crops will die. Too many sunny days and the crops will fry.

To illustrate just much weather can make a difference, here's a story from Summer 2005. My family's farm is located about three miles from another local farm. The two farms planted their corn at roughly the same time and used the same brands of seed and fertilizer. For some reason, our farm got 2.5 moreinches of rain this summer. We got a 25% higher yield from the corn. Thanks to 2.5 inches of additional rain. That's nothing, but it shows just how vulnerable the crops are to any weather changes.

As bad as my phone calls with my dad can be when he’s complaining about the weather, I'm always glad to just be talking to my dad on a given night; it means that he survived the day. Farming is among the world's most dangerous occupations. Hundreds of farmers die each year in the United States.730 farm workers perished in 2002 alone. Farmers are seven times more likely to die on the job than the average American worker. In addition to the high death rate, a staggering 150,000 farmers suffer a disabling injury each year.

Danger lurks in every part of a farmer's day. Cows may seem slow-witted and generally benevolent, but they are large, powerful animals with the ability to seriously injure a person. Farmers are very often victims of a damaging kick (my own father has been kicked in the face more times than he'd care to remember). A stampede can also result in devastating consequences.

Machinery is also very dangerous. One of a farmer’s worst nightmares is getting an arm or a leg caught in a running machine. (A very real possibility, unfortunately.)

There are a million other ways to get hurt on a farm. One of my uncles had to have shrapnel removed from his face when a piece of equipment exploded, shooting hot metal into his head. My other uncle was nearly crushed by a full wagon that broke off from the tractor that was towing it and rolled back down a hill. Both were back at work the same day. To them, it’s all part of the job.

As bad as farming can be, maybe milking cows for a living wouldn't be so bad if it were, you know, profitable. Another thing about farmers that's not mentioned in the myth of the "noble farmer" is that farmers don't get paid squat. As of this moment, the companies buy milk for is $15.33 per 100 pounds of milk, which works out to just $1.22 a gallon. Not included in that price is the fact that farmers have to pay milk companies to come get their milk.

$1.22 a gallon. Less than half of what a gallon of milk goes for at the average store. Not to mention that milk companies can also use some excess butterfat from each gallon for other dairy products. The price milk companies are offering farmers remained more or less constant for nearly three decades until rising from the $12-$13/per 100 range up to its current $15-$16 range in only the past few years. Hardly keeping up with inflation (or what milk has been sold for in stores).

With these prices, an average dairy farmer will maybe bring home $20,000-$30,000 a year. There are lower salaries out in there in the American workforce, but not many workers are pulling 80-hour workweeks to get those low salaries.

So let's see: low pay, long hours, and a high risk of injury? It's no wonder so many small farms are closing down in this country. Who would want this job? My own father forbade me from even considering farming as a potential occupation. (Not that he really needed to worry about that.) And I know he's not the only farmer who has given that mandate to his children.

Even if my father hadn’t barred me from farming, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to take over the family farm anyway. In April 2006, Andrews Dairy Farm will hold an auction to sell its cows and milking equipment. Facing mounting debt, my father and my uncles decided it was best to sell out now while they still were young enough to find new careers.

The auction will be a sad and frightening day for our family. Farming is all we’ve ever really known, and the future is full of uncertainty and doubt for the Andrews clan.

But while I’m scared to death, I’m glad my father’s future won’t involve farming. If he hadn’t died on the job, he’d probably have worked himself to death eventually. Such is the life of the noble farmer.