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.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
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?
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?
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
"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.
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.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
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?
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?
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
