I'm just asking--gotta ask!

I especially like Burton/Collins' work on Susanna Wesley, Hester Rogers, and all the Methodist women she writes about. I think her work on John Wesley is wonderful as well. I want to raise the question, though, of how to think about locating the subjects of the book. Women are interwoven into the fabric of Vicki's study of John Wesley. The two articles and Ch 2 we read are about women. Vicki's project starts with a vivid dream about Hester Rogers' spiritual journal. So given that, why focus a literacy study on John Wesley with him in the foreground and women in the background and why not focus it on Methodist women in the foreground with Wesley in the background?

This may seem like a cranky question (picture me in a high chair pounding a spoon and yelling), but I don't think it is. It's a sincere question (picture me in a chair looking thoughtful). Vicki offers a response on p. xv of the preface. This is a study of Wesley, but it is a study of looking at the "complex relationships between men and women in which women gain public agency with the assistance and support of a powerful man--relationships both fraught with power differentials and brimming with opportunity" (xv). This study is named for John Wesley, but it's also about "the roles of Methodist women and their relationships to Wesley as complicated and sometimes contradictory cases" (xv).

This is a book about Wesley's literacy and his sponsorship of literacies among the women and working classes of Methodists. Wesley is both supporter and controller, as noted (see Brandt on literacy sponsors). Given that, though, I do want to think about the title of the book--the word woman or even gender is not in the title. At the same time, Vicki points to the scholarship where Methodist scholars are asked to "stand with women." Her book clearly stands with women.

So what does this choice about the title and foreground/background mean? I know it is a principled choice, and I also know Vicki's study is a feminist one, and it may have been a particularly tough choice to make. John Wesley needs to be read into the rhetorical tradition. He is the most visible proponent/literacy sponsor. At the same time, there are many women who need to be read into the rhetorical tradition along with Wesley. So maybe we get the best of both worlds?

Coming back at this a second time after rereading Vicki's 1996 article in _Rhetoric Review_, I'm aware, too, of how she was/is trying to complicate our picture about 18th century Methodist women and the feminist impulse to recover feminist foremothers. She issues a caveat "proceed with caution." Vicki argues at the end of the piece that feminist rhetors looking at 18th century Methodist women need to proceed with caution and understand the complicated rhetorical situation faced by Methodist women: "Yet for some time I have been cautious about the feminist urge to automatically credit newly discovered rhetorical foremothers with bold, iconoclastic resistance that overwhelmed and destabilized the resident patriarchal power, for I believe the politics of such rhetorical situations is usually considerably more complicated." And then:
"The complexity of the Methodist women's rhetorical situation invites scholars to survey rhetorical territory with care, noting the roles powerful men and institutions have played historically in nurturing, controlling, and silencing women's discourse" (352).

So a point here is that the interaction of Wesley and other male agents authorized or sanctioned (again, literacy sponsors) women's speech, silence, and textual presences. These quotations really set up the work to follow--while Vicki's work is feminist recovery, it's also feminist recovery that fully acknowledges the fraught patriarchal contexts Methodist women were operating within and under. It also urges scholars not to over assign feminist agency and read 20/21st century feminist ideologies on to historical women (an important methodological caution about historical rhetoric/rhetorical recovery work). How do we avoid anachronisms and assigning our political agendas to historical figures? This is a critique we can find all over scholarship on feminist historiography. How do we resist appropriation of historical texts and voices? How do understand them in their own time and culture?

Finally, I think my question here is a question for all of us as we think about methods and methodologies and our own current and future research. How do we make difficult choices about how to foreground and background specific elements in our research? How do we make decisions about what will be the most important contribution we can make? How do we do historical work that allows for interarticulations across difference (the flux and flow and complex power relations between Wesley and Methodist women)?