Wit, Virtue, and Emotion: British Women's Enlightenment Rhetoric: Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms
Autor Elizabeth Tasker Davisen Limba Engleză Paperback – 25 noi 2021
Women’s persuasion and performance in the Age of Enlightenment
Over a century before first-wave feminism, British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric prefigured nineteenth-century feminist arguments for gender equality, women’s civil rights, professional opportunities, and standardized education. Author Elizabeth Tasker Davis rereads accepted histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British rhetoric, claiming a greater variety and power of women’s rhetoric. This recovery of British women’s performative and written roles as speakers, spectators, authors, and readers in diverse venues counters the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric. Davis broadens women’s Enlightenment rhetorics to include highly public venues such as theaters, clubs, salons, and debating societies, as well as the mediated sites of the periodical essay, the treatise on rhetorical theory, and women’s written proposals, plans, defenses and arguments for education. Through these sites, women’s rhetorical postures diverged from patriarchal prescriptions rather to deliver protofeminist persuasive performances of wit, virtue, and emotion.
Davis examines context, the effects of memory and gendering, and the cultural sites and media of women’s rhetoric to reveal a fuller ecology of British Enlightenment rhetoric. Each chapter covers a cultural site of women’s rhetorical practice—the court, the stage, the salon, and the printed page. Applying feminist rhetorical theory, Davis documents how women grasped their rhetorical ability in this historical moment and staged a large-scale transformation of British women from subalterns to a vocal counterpublic in British society.
Over a century before first-wave feminism, British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric prefigured nineteenth-century feminist arguments for gender equality, women’s civil rights, professional opportunities, and standardized education. Author Elizabeth Tasker Davis rereads accepted histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British rhetoric, claiming a greater variety and power of women’s rhetoric. This recovery of British women’s performative and written roles as speakers, spectators, authors, and readers in diverse venues counters the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric. Davis broadens women’s Enlightenment rhetorics to include highly public venues such as theaters, clubs, salons, and debating societies, as well as the mediated sites of the periodical essay, the treatise on rhetorical theory, and women’s written proposals, plans, defenses and arguments for education. Through these sites, women’s rhetorical postures diverged from patriarchal prescriptions rather to deliver protofeminist persuasive performances of wit, virtue, and emotion.
Davis examines context, the effects of memory and gendering, and the cultural sites and media of women’s rhetoric to reveal a fuller ecology of British Enlightenment rhetoric. Each chapter covers a cultural site of women’s rhetorical practice—the court, the stage, the salon, and the printed page. Applying feminist rhetorical theory, Davis documents how women grasped their rhetorical ability in this historical moment and staged a large-scale transformation of British women from subalterns to a vocal counterpublic in British society.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809338276
ISBN-10: 0809338270
Pagini: 240
Ilustrații: 8
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.32 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms
ISBN-10: 0809338270
Pagini: 240
Ilustrații: 8
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.32 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms
Notă biografică
Elizabeth Tasker Davis is a professor of English and coordinator of graduate studies at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches courses on British literature, satire, and writing. Her scholarship has appeared in Women’s Writing, Rhetoric Review, Peitho, South Atlantic Review, Re/Framing Identifications, and the Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies.
Extras
INTRODUCTION
We shall say what has not been said before, or if the substance is old, the mode & figure shall be new.--Elizabeth Montagu, “Letter to Elizabeth Carter” (1769)
Despite the subordination and suppression of women as a group under patriarchy, individual women throughout history have spoken out on a wide range of subjects through the means available to them. During the age of Enlightenment, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these means increased significantly for British women. Increasingly higher levels of literacy and new venues (private and professional) led them to pursue many diverse avenues of intellectual society and persuasive discourse. Myriad writings and artifacts—such as the large corpus of letters by and to famous Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu—stand as extant evidence of women’s Enlightenment rhetoric. In Montagu’s letters, we can discern her knowledge of rhetorical theory and practice. As Tania Smith argues, Montagu’s construction of her own rhetorical identity reflects a careful study of Cicero’s moral character and his blending of public and private rhetoric (“Elizabeth Montagu” 165). Certainly, Montagu was a highly educated member of the intellectual elite; however, middle-class eighteenth-century women also engaged in self-reflexive rhetorical practices, such as the activities of the teenage girls of the Fair Intellectual Club of Edinburgh who documented their protocols in their charter, published in 1721. Unsurprisingly, these types of rhetorical acts did not elevate women to equal public standing with men. Montagu could not hold a seat in parliament (as her husband Edward Montagu did), and the Fair Intellectuals felt the need to keep their society secret and to protect their reputations by carefully maintaining their members’ anonymity.
With its expansive, yet subtle, historical development, British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric presents an intricate and challenging subject of study. Contextualizing the contributions of British women to the history of rhetoric during the age of Enlightenment is the mission of this book. The scope of this history includes contributions by women as individuals and as an impactful demographic within British Enlightenment culture. This introduction provides the background necessary to set up this conversation, starting with a gendered description of the Enlightenment and a brief review of cultural studies scholarship on British women during this era. I then move into the disciplinary subfield of Enlightenment rhetoric and, within that, review the scholarship on women’s rhetorical activities within the context of eighteenth-century Britain.
The Enlightenment refers to the evolution of progressive socioeconomic and scientific ideas that emerged across Western Europe and North America from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Forming a segue between the Renaissance world of church and state and the modern world of science and industry, the Enlightenment worldview privileged individual experience and inductive reasoning over the auspices of classical authority and deductive logic. Enlightenment thought coheres around the premises that humans are 1) rational, sentient beings; 2) relatively equal in cognitive capability; and 3) alike enough to work together on social, scientific, and economic projects for the progress of society. Along these lines, Enlightenment theory is greatly concerned with cognition of empirical evidence; moral reasoning and benevolence; capitalist models of government and commerce; and new appraisals of social class, education, religion, and gender roles.
The umbrella term of the European Enlightenment includes both the English and Scottish Enlightenments (among other national subdivisions), and it also encompasses the disciplinary subarea of Enlightenment rhetoric, all of which occurred in Britain during what is called the long eighteenth century—from 1660 to approximately 1800. During this era, people in Britain held strong ideas about sex and gender identity, including qualities of masculinity and femininity. Some of these assumptions were based on biology—male strength and female softness were considered part of nature—and oftentimes perceptions of these biological differences extended to religious and moral antecedents, such as the notions of males possessing God-given rationality and females being driven more by emotion and a mysterious sense of intuition. Many people believed that these qualities were, indeed, biological facts. In addition and contrast to these stereotypes of biological predeterminism, many members of eighteenth-century British society recognized gender identity as a socially-conditioned construct, and it was widely acknowledged that people could possess qualities of gender deemed opposite their biological sex (although this was not encouraged). In fact, gendered identities and behaviors constituted a topic of ongoing discussion. As Karen O’Brien explains, “the issue of the ‘distinction of sex’ was central to the Enlightenment attempt to understand the role of women…, yet it was also one of the areas of most fundamental disagreement” (“Sexual Distinctions” 3). Debates about the influences of nature and nurture in establishing gender identity proliferated. Popular opinion tended to conflate gender identity with the two recognized biological sexual identities (male and female), but many people—especially intellectuals and scholars—also recognized gender as a multiplicity of socially-constructed roles and behaviors.
The textual legacy of the Enlightenment, however, has long exhibited a male bias. The Enlightenment canon consists of ideas and works by a group of geographically-dispersed, white, western European and American men—philosophers and professors whose diverse theories find unity in their views of modern social progress. Historical narratives about the Enlightenment, although usually focused on the eighteenth century, often begin earlier with Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597) and Nova Organon (1605), Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), and Hobbes’ The Leviathan (1660). From these seventeenth century roots, a diverse group of modern philosophers emerged across Europe and America, including John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Anthony Ashley Cooper in England; Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France; David Hume, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair in Scotland; Baruch Spinoza in Holland; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany; and Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin in America.
Broad as this international list of elite historic figures seems, participation in the Enlightenment was even broader and included intellectual performances of women as well as men. As Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor explain in Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, “Enlightenment was a living world where ideas were conveyed not only through ‘high’ philosophical works but also through novels, poetry, advice literature, popular theology, journalism, pornography, and that most fluid of eighteenth-century genres, the ‘miscellaneous essay” as well as “conversation, reading (both private and communal), pedagogy,” and many sociable contexts (xvii-xviii). The conveyance of Enlightenment ideas naturally partook of rhetoric in many forms: persuasive appeals, argumentation, oratory, composition, and the training and theory necessary to underpin these performances and practices.
In The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whatley, James Golden and Edward Corbett call the Enlightenment “one of the most prolific eras in rhetorical history” (7). Their landmark collaboration analyzes the masculine lineage of Enlightenment rhetoric from its classical Greek and Roman foundations, to its branching out in the eighteenth century (in Britain and North America) to encompass more modern, empirically-based theories of human interaction, both for oratory and written composition, and its hybridized blossoming into the new scholarly disciplines of psychology, composition, and speech communications in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Golden and Corbett’s study of rhetoric as a hybrid and cross-disciplinary field is further supported by Mark Longaker who more recently has argued that a major innovation of British Enlightenment rhetoric was its alignment with the disciplines of economics and ethics into a “cohesive vision of free-market capitalism, rhetorical style, and bourgeois virtue” (2). Longaker’s term of “bourgeois virtue” emphasizes Enlightenment rhetoric’s dual focus on social class and moral value. I would add to this that Enlightenment rhetoric, and the era’s notion of virtue, also included considerable discourse on gender definitions, which in turn created new opportunities for women to theorize and practice rhetoric.
This book excavates British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric—by which I mean proto-feminist genres, methods, and acts of persuasion—in a variety of sites across the social spectrum of eighteenth-century British society. To take a feminist, multi-gendered view of Enlightenment rhetoric requires rethinking received notions about the discipline. While I agree with Miriam Brody’s description of Enlightenment rhetoric as adhering to the classical “tradition of rhetoric and its long-standing project of discovering probable truths with the tools of human language,” I also challenge the current historical narrative of Enlightenment rhetoric, a tradition which Brody critiques as an elite intellectual activity strictly “empowered by a male body” (106, 111). The Enlightenment not only revised masculine rhetorical theory and produced new academic fields, it also significantly expanded women’s situated ethos (phronesis) as well as their rhetorical practices (techne). As Tania Smith describes, the classical term of phronesis, or acknowledged possession of practical wisdom, refers to “a meta-rhetoric” that includes “social contexts, rhetorical intentions, and ethos” while she describes techne as “strategic rhetoric” consisting of “discursive tools and conventions for achieving rhetorical aims” (“Elizabeth Montagu” 166-167). Over the course of the long eighteenth century, significant enhancements to British women’s phronesis and techne (fostered by increases in literacy) kindled the slow process of women’s largescale transformation from subalterns to fully participating citizens—an end goal that would take two more centuries to reach fruition.
Although women did not realize equal legal and political rights in Britain until the twentieth century, during the long eighteenth century, British women engaged vocally in the major Enlightenment debates. Women intellectuals, or learned ladies as they were known, brought a feminine perspective to the forefront in their engagement with elite discourses on individual cognition, virtue, taste, feelings, and economic independence, and on women’s roles in the larger community. Serious philosophical writings from English intellectuals of the early eighteenth century, such as John Locke and Mary Astell, energized British public discourse about human nature, the rights of individuals, virtuous citizenship, and gender role prescriptions. The idea that women had the capacity to excel intellectually and professionally took hold amongst mixed-gender circles of the intellectual elite, within middle-class venues of public sociability, and even in private, feminine, and domestic settings. The later eighteenth-century emphasis on feelings and sympathy, as found in the work of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and David Hume, perpetuated an even more multi-gendered view of modern civilization (DeLuccia 9). With the influential voices of the earlier English and later Scottish Enlightenments encouraging more egalitarian social theories and practices, ignoring concerns of gender and social class increasingly came to be perceived as immoral. These developments of Enlightenment philosophy perpetuated developments in women’s rhetoric.
Nevertheless, locating evidence of British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric presents difficulties, mainly because women’s communicative and persuasive practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not occur within traditional venues of rhetoric. Prior to the very late nineteenth century, British law barred women from attending universities where rhetoric was taught, and, even into the twentieth century, cultural customs discouraged women from participating in professional disciplines, especially in activities involving public speech, written argumentation, and other displays of so-called masculine reasoning. Nevertheless, historical evidence shows that, in eighteenth-century Britain, girls did study the style and mechanics of writing and elocution, and it was not uncommon for educated women to participate in a variety of intellectual and rhetorical activities within feminine and mixed-gender venues and genres.
Mary Astell (1666-1731), for example, was well-versed in neoclassical theories of rhetoric, and her numerous published treatises, pamphlets, and letters written in a variety of rhetorical styles on a wide variety of social and philosophical subjects demonstrate her ability to put rhetorical theory into practice. Best known for A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II. Wherein a Method is offer’d for the Improvement of their Minds (1694, 1697), Astell’s writing synthesizes the influential epistemological and moral philosophies of her times and applies them to women’s needs and situations. Part II of her Serious Proposal is where she most directly details her rhetorical theory and advocates for feminine rhetorical practices. Just about a century after Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) gained notoriety for her politically radical publications and henceforth achieved lasting fame for her arguments on the rights women and men. In her progressive treatises, most notably her Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792), Wollstonecraft critiques the rhetoric of patriarchy and espouses proto-feminist models for gendered conduct, education, and interpersonal communication. Bracketing the start and close of the eighteenth century, Astell and Wollstonecraft are the best-known proto-feminist British women intellectuals of the Enlightenment era. A few other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British women appear in current anthologies on the history of rhetoric and in scholarship examining women’s rhetorical activities within intellectual circles and theatrical performance. However, the volume of scholarship on British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric is extremely small in comparison to the substantial body of work on the rhetoric of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women.
In Wit, Virtue, and Emotion: British Women’s Enlightenment Rhetoric, I aim to delineate a proto-feminist ecology of British women ’s Enlightenment rhetoric, which, I argue, is currently a buried cornerstone of modern feminism. British women’s rhetorical activities were instrumental in expanding the role and the reach of the female individual in the age of Enlightenment. The accumulated acts of embodied, spoken, and written proto-feminist rhetoric by and for seventeenth and eighteenth-century British women translated to a groundswell of persuasive power, which set in motion new developments in feminine gender roles and education and created opportunities for women within British society in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond. Examining artifacts of these mediated activities by British women in the long eighteenth century reveals numerous proto-feminist historical precedents—before the first-wave of feminism in Britain (or anywhere else). Women’s Enlightenment rhetoric prefigures feminist arguments for gender equality and future legal and moral reforms, including the formalized campaigns for women’s civil rights, abolition, standardized education, child-labor protections
This narrative, then, elucidates the origins of Anglo-feminist rhetoric, thereby highlighting an understudied and very significant era in the historical development of women’s persuasive voices and feminine power. This book addresses feminist scholars and advanced students in the field of rhetoric and composition and urges them to attend more closely to the Enlightenment era within the broad history of women’s rhetoric. In addition, scholars of eighteenth-century studies will find feminist rhetorical methods of analysis provide a novel lens for analyzing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers, intellectuals, education theorists, and actresses as purveyors of Enlightenment rhetoric. Students in a variety of fields in the liberal arts—including literature, rhetoric and writing, history, theater, and women’s studies—can gain insight and inspiration from rhetorical analyses of eighteenth-century British proto-feminism and the many women writers and performers this book describes.
Many of the themes addressed by eighteenth-century British women—restrictive gender roles; the inequities for women in courtship, marriage, divorce, and child-rearing; the need for comprehensive education for girls; and women’s desire for more fulfilling professional opportunities—still persist today as relevant feminine rhetorical topoi, and thus resonate strongly with twenty-first century readers. This cultural relevance helps explain the reason for the present (booming) state of scholarship on eighteenth-century British women in literary and cultural studies. In contrast, the lack of women’s representation within current histories of Enlightenment rhetoric stems partly from the legacy of classical rhetoric as a masculine discipline ensconced in elite intellectual history. As preparation for approaching and remedying this scholarly void, I will first review the current historical model of Enlightenment rhetorical theory and then suggest the application of feminist methodologies for studying Enlightenment rhetoric, particularly for analyzing women’s rhetorics of this era.
Entering the Conversation
Geological metaphors convey the possibility of change even amid deeply entrenched habits of mind. Writing in 2001, Derek Hughes used the phrase “fissuring a monolith” to describe the impact of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers on the British Enlightenment (8-9). Appearing for centuries as a solidly masculine body of cultural history, the Enlightenment upon closer study is heavily veined with traces of the feminine. The vast hegemony of the modern West has viewed the outcomes of the Enlightenment as enabling democratic capitalist civilization and life as we know it today, but a trend to question whether or not Enlightenment progress has been ethical or desirable has emerged over the last fifty years or so, as postmodern, Marxist, and feminist theorists have contested the validity of Enlightenment thinking. Although its critics claim that the Enlightenment’s replacement of religion and monarchy with the newer authorities of science and business merely tradedv one set of biased, positivist narratives for another, many cultural historians of the Enlightenment believe these critical assessments are too narrow.
In the field of eighteenth-century studies over the past few decades, the notion of the Enlightenment as a monolithic intellectual movement of prominent white male philosophers has received further critical scrutiny (Roy Porter, J.G.A. Pocock, Clifford Siskin and William Warner, Sankar Muthu). As Porter has argued, it is now possible to see the Enlightenment writ large as “a revolution in mood . . . advanced by a range of protagonists, male and female, of various nationalities and discrete status, professional and interest groups” (3). Porter states, “in place of the old emphasis on superstars” scholars need to consider “wider enlightened circles” (11). But there are also reasons that the Enlightenment has been historicized as a tenaciously male-centric movement. As Rebecca Merrens explains, the culture of seventeenth-century England encompassed “the seemingly disparate discourse communities of literature, science, theology, and political philosophy [which] all worked to create a stable space for patriarchal authority by variously constraining, rejecting, and dissecting the feminine” (32). Countering these stable masculine spaces, feminist historians and literary scholars have re-visioned the European Enlightenment to more accurately portray the cultural contributions of women working, writing, socializing, and participating in public activities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Margaret Hunt, Michele Cohen, Karen O’Brien, Clarissa Orr, JoEllen DeLucia, and Anna Clark).
Recovery of the European women’s Enlightenment has been a major project spanning many academic disciplines (literature, cultural history, women’s studies) and national cultures (British, French, Spanish, etc.) Publications, such as Taylor and Knott’s magisterial collection Women, Gender, and Enlightenment and Volumes 4 and 5 of The History of British Women’s Writing series by Palgrave Macmillan have expanded our knowledge of the professional, political, intellectual, and social opportunities open to British women of the era while also emphasizing the limitations dictated by the combination of gender and social class. There has been a recent surge in scholarship examining the multi-generational Bluestocking culture and its connections to the English, Scottish and French Enlightenment in works such as Elizabeth Eger’s Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism, Karen O’Brien’s Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, JoEllen DeLucia’s A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759-1820, and Deborah Heller’s collection Bluestockings Now!: The Evolution of a Social Role. Many of these works touch on rhetorical theory and practice, although their primary focus is cultural and literary history.
Meanwhile, feminist historians working in the field of rhetoric and composition also have used geological metaphors to describe women’s contributions to the history of rhetoric. In 2011, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsh in Feminist Rhetorical Practices compared the changes wrought by feminist scholarship within the field of rhetoric and composition to “tectonic shifts” (17). As Royster and Kirsh explain, geological metaphors “offer generally familiar language for describing a historically under-interrogated academic terrain” (15). Expanding upon these geological metaphors, researchers in the history of rhetoric recently have adopted the metaphor of ecology to emphasize the human agents and actors within a cultural terrain. In Rethinking Ethos, Kathleen Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones define rhetorical ecology as a method of rhetorical analysis focused on how “the rhetor accounts for her subject position relative to others, as well as shifting material, cultural, and historical situations circulating around rhetorical acts” (viii). In Rhetorical Feminism and a Thing Called Hope, Cheryl Glenn further develops the ecological model by surveying the history and present state of feminist rhetoric and rhetorical feminism as a vast and expanding organic continuum, characterized by cresting waves (first, second, third, fourth . . . ) of feminist activism, dialog, and scholarly inquiry over time and across cultures. This scholarship has allowed many advances in the history of rhetoric, especially of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Within the ecology of feminist rhetoric, it is logical to imagine small waves of proto-feminism appearing before the so-called first wave of feminism. Yet, the methods of feminist rhetorical ecology, which re-imagine the conditions, methods, and practices of women and other subaltern speakers in broad cultural contexts, have yet to be applied to studies of Enlightenment rhetoric. Despite the recent surge in feminist scholarship in the history of rhetoric, researchers in the field of rhetoric have not tapped the immense mass of primary and secondary resources available on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers, even as researchers working in Enlightenment literary and cultural studies are culling these materials meticulously. A sizable rift separates rhetoric from other areas of eighteenth-century studies. Evidentiary of this divide, the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric, as it was defined by twentieth-century scholars, such as Golden and Corbett, remains largely intact and exclusive of women.
Current anthologies and collections of rhetoric include only a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women who worked in traditional rhetorical genres, such as the treatise and the sermon—including Bathsua Makin on rhetorical education, Margaret Fell on women preaching in public, and Hannah More on conversation practices. In Michael Moran’s Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetoricians, which claims to cover “all major and many minor eighteenth-century British and American rhetoricians,” for example, of the 34 brief academic biographies presented, only two are of women: Margaret Askew Fell and Mary Wollstonecraft (1). However, this assessment is far too narrow. As Linda Ferreira-Buckley notes in The Present State of Historical Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric, during the eighteenth century, the study of rhetoric extended beyond politicians, attorneys, clergy, and scholars to an activity practiced by “an increasing number of gentlewomen and gentlemen, and of course, the teachers, tutors, and governesses responsible for instructing them at home or at sundry educational institutions,” as well as by “individuals—indeed whole factions” in formal and informal oral and written venues (115). New mixed-gender rhetorical venues and practices emerged in urban centers and spread across western Europe. As historian Margaret Hunt explains, women’s older oral traditions, including storytelling, competitive singing, and popular healing, existed “side-by-side” with the new “world of reading, writing, books, newspapers, commercialized concert going, opera, fine art, and the like,” with the newer traditions rapidly dominating in urban areas while the older traditions persisted in rural areas (263). Consequently, evidence of women’s rhetorical activity lies preserved in a wide variety of eighteenth-century manuscripts and print media, including treatises, letters, lecture notes, periodicals, pamphlets, petitions, plays, dedications, prologues, epilogues, poems, novels, and memoirs, and in other artistic and cultural artifacts of the period.
Scholars of the history of rhetoric know there is a gap to be filled and have clearly stated that women’s contributions to Enlightenment rhetoric remain an understudied area. Tania Smith speculates that “a subculture favoring women’s rhetorical education and practice was stronger than previously supposed” (351). As Thomas Miller notes, the “unprecedented number” of women who began to write and speak publicly in the eighteenth century offers myriad opportunities to study “the rhetorical practices that oppressed groups used to speak against prevailing conventions” (235). Linda Ferreira-Buckley recommends that the recovery of eighteenth-century women’s rhetorics “should be a clear priority in the years ahead” (118). Jane Donawerth concurs and explains that “the trends and categories advanced by canonical histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American rhetoric do not adequately account for the genres and strategies emphasized in women’s rhetorical theory” (Conversation 41). In Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900, Donawerth cites over a dozen scholarly studies on the history of women’s speech-making and composition during the period 1600 to 1900; however, most of the studies Donawerth names cover nineteenth-century American women, and none focus on eighteenth-century British women (Conversation 158.n1-5).
Although the volume of scholarship on eighteenth-century British women’s rhetoric is slim, a small group of feminist scholars have made inroads. In her chapter on Hannah More’s conversation theory, Donawerth establishes parameters for eighteenth-century British women’s rhetorical practices in her contextualization of the Bluestockings model of conversation. Other scholarly studies on eighteenth-century British women’s rhetoric include Christina Mason Sutherland’s The Eloquence of Mary Astell; multiple essays by Tania Smith on the rhetoric of Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot; and Miriam Brody’s work on Mary Wollstonecraft, most specifically her article, “The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric.” Additionally, Lyndal Buchanan, Angela Escott, and I have contextualized eighteenth-century British actresses and women playwrights as proto-feminist rhetors, and Lynee Gaillet has examined the rhetorical legacy of Susannah Wesley. Also, studies on the rhetoric of Mary Wollstonecraft, particularly herVindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), have been done by Miriam Brody, Nancy Weitz Miller, Jamie Barlow, Anne K. Mellor, and Julie Monroe. The body of work currently theorizing British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric is a good start, but there is much more to do.
To further uncover the rhetorical activities of eighteenth-century British women, this study draws from and extends recovery efforts of feminist scholars working in eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies. A vast corpus of British women’s writing, including an extensive body of rare published books and unpublished archived manuscripts increasingly available in digital form, awaits scholarly study for its rhetorical theories and practices. The twenty-first century has seen the publication of new critical editions and anthologies of eighteenth-century women authors, as well as databases and online tools such as Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Adam Matthew Digital, and Texas A&M’s 18thcentury Connect, which provide access to numerous eighteenth-century texts in a wide array of genres, including essays, treatises, dialogs, defenses, letters, magazines, and other miscellaneous writings. The task of the scholar in search of women’s Enlightenment rhetoric is also facilitated by numerous works of cultural and literary criticism in specialized journals and on websites dedicated to eighteenth-century studies and women’s writing. With the ubiquity of digital access, scholars interested in women’s Enlightenment rhetoric can now locate and view primary sources online and read about the social contexts surrounding these sources. The sheer volume of primary documents represents a massive and complex rhetorical ecology.
To help contextualize this body of historical material into a coherent rhetorical ecology, this book relies on a set of specialized terms, starting with the phrase progressive proto-feminist women’s rhetoric, which I will break down and define here. By progressive, I am referring to a dual trend in Enlightenment thought toward liberatory and commercially motivated ideas and institutions. Progressive thinking connoted both the movement toward the ideal of social class and gender equality and the pursuit of new capitalist economic models. I use the second term, proto-feminist or proto-feminism, to describe activities and ideas supporting women’s rights and opportunities during the long eighteenth century (1660-1800) because this period obviously precedes the so-called first-wave of feminism that began in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As for the third term, women, this word collectively describes a socially-constructed gender identity with a deep set of connotations, including a complexity of social roles and practices, that in eighteenth-century usage (and even today) maintains an underlying association with the female biological sex. Rhetoric, the final term in the phrase, I define broadly as any non-violent act of communication. Taking these words together collectively as a term, by progressive proto-feminist women’s rhetorics, I mean any spoken, written, or embodied public performance, document, or display that occured prior to the feminist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that argued for expanding the roles, rights, and opportunities for women within society. In other words, proto-feminist women’s rhetorics consist of pro-woman acts of persuasion before 1800, which were ideologically or economically motivated.
Another key term that I refer to throughout this text is feminizing or feminization. Cultural and literary scholars in eighteenth-century studies use feminizing to describe a modernizing trend “in which emotions are tempered by a feminine desire to reflect on the needs and feelings of others” (DeLucia 8). Similarly, feminization refers to a conscious rise in the cultural significance of the woman. The usage of feminization as a term—at least as I have encountered it in the field of eighteenth-century studies—usually does not hold the negative connotation of something being devalued or weakened (although this connotation exists today). Rather, the feminization of British culture in the early to mid-eighteenth century refers to a move toward virtue, a consideration of individual feelings, and a civilizing influence on culture. The eighteenth-century emphasis on the importance of feelings reflects not only the Enlightenment focus on cognition and sympathy but also a new type of feminine influence on mainstream cultural practices. The feminization of Enlightenment culture is a well-documented phenomenon in the fields of literary and cultural history, but it has received little to no attention in the history of women’s rhetoric. And yet feminization was a highly rhetorical force of the Enlightenment.
The gradual but steady trajectory of feminization in the eighteenth-century British rhetorical ecology is also highlighted in this book’s title: Wit, Virtue, and Emotion. These words emphasize the appeals and postures that gained respect at various points and became focal points of the rhetorical landscape. I argue that wit, virtue, and emotion are the primary postures of women’s Enlightenment rhetoric and that they echo the Aristotelian elements of logos, ethos, and pathos. As I will show through a wide range of extant writings across literary, ephemeral, public, and personal genres, the three postures of wit, virtue, and emotion built upon each other in a trajectory of overlapping, gendered rhetorical appeals.
The first posture, wit, while denoting clever wordplay, also refers to evidence-based reasoning skills. Witty wordplay and solid reasoning were both considered masculine skills and essential displays of intellectual capital throughout the long eighteenth century. As Manushag Powell explains, “Wit happens, in part, when an author embraces his or her ability to construct a ‘creditable’ written expression of him or herself as an author worth hearing” (28). Thus, wit forms the mainstay of eighteenth-century ethos. Masculine wit, in the form of logical evidence, is the backbone of the treatise genre. Wit also denotes a confident style of conversing and punning, which often involves power metaphors, such as in this dialog between two male libertine characters, Harcourt and Dorilant, in William Wycherley’s outrageous comedy The Country Wife (1675):
Harcourt: Mistresses are like books: if you pore upon them too much, they doze you and make you unfit for company, but if used discreetly, you are the fitter for conversation by ‘em.
Dorilant: A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the Town, not to dwell in constantly but only for a night and away, to taste the Town the better when a man returns. (Wycherley 1.1.236-242, italics added)
These misogynistic similes demonstrate the swaggering and cavalier style of libertine wit, as well as displays of masculine domination. As I will show in Chapters 1 and 2, women in the late seventeenth century purposefully appropriated this masculine rhetorical and styled flipped it into powerful acts of proto-feminist persuasion. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture, wit was a dangerous but important skill for a woman to possess. Displays of wit were essential to feminine power; however, any woman who exuded wit, logic, and learning ran the risk of appearing unladylike.
More gender appropriate, the second posture of British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric, virtue, describes the demonstration of one’s moral worth and lack of corruption, and, thus, was an intrinsic measure of credibility. Reversing the early modern trend of perceiving women as Eve-like (weak and depraved by original sin), over the course of the eighteenth century, virtue increasingly signified as a feminine strength and gendered trait. The combination of masculine wit and feminine virtue denoted a higher capacity for moral reasoning. Women aspired to demonstrate wit balanced by virtue in their conversations and in their writings. This trend became the voice and the path for women who desired to make and publish serious public statements about women’s unequal positions in society. Strong notes of wit and virtue are evident in women’s treatises, defenses, plans, letters, poems, proposals, and many other written genres of complaint and protest.
The third posture, emotion, encompasses not only feminine expressions of mood but also the fine feelings of discernment that we commonly call “taste,” a cultivated, sensitive, and moral understanding of human nature, of beauty, and especially of the arts and letters. Desirable in both the masculine and feminine genders, the notion of taste in the eighteenth century required expertise and education, and so the highest level of taste had to be masculine; however, the intuitive feelings of emotionality associated with taste were gendered as feminine traits. The rising public valuation of feminine emotion inspired, and was inspired by, the increasing popularity of sentimentalism in literary and artistic culture in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Thus emotionality fueled the related late eighteenth century cultural trend of sensibility, which involved strong displays of sympathy, love, friendliness, compassion, and sometimes even fear. One emotion that was not acceptable in the realm of sensibility was that of feminine anger or any other form of aggressive feeling and behavior by women.
Wit, virtue, and emotion as the ordered postures of British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric, furthermore, illustrate a gradual shift in rhetorical ecology wherein the inherited deep rhetoric of early modern culture naturally and necessarily adjusted to more accurately represent changing beliefs about gender, class, and other stereotypes of identity and sociability, which—fixed as these may appear in any given era—are always in a state of metamorphosis. In every rhetorical ecology, exigencies for change exist as constant pressures on deep rhetoric. Transformations of deep rhetoric are wrought by what I call ground truth, which consists of real events that are empirically observable in the present moment and preserved in writing and images. Thus, while ground truths often reflect deep rhetoric, the two forces can also be at odds with each other when subversive events, identities, and activities stray away from mainstream ideology. In these divergencies, the margins of culture can exert transformative influence on the material practices of the mainstream, as shall become evident with Enlightenment rhetoric as explored in this book.
Impressed by the new ideas of the Enlightenment, women working in intellectual and professional networks began to see themselves as cohesive groups with collective aims and interests. Applying the language of feminist rhetoric, we might view their collective situation somewhat like “members” of a “border tribe” within their local and national cultures, and note that they began to use “the ecology of speaking situations . . . to shift values determined by dominant [masculine] publics” (Ryan, Myers, and Jones 7). As education and literacy increased for eighteenth-century British women, their identities and methods for gaining ethos became more developed. Thus, women’s Enlightenment rhetoric paved the way for more egalitarian education of the sexes, which enabled progressive social movements that later became associated with and supported by nineteenth-century feminism. Undoubtedly, proto-feminist cultural transformations and acts of public persuasion by women during the British Enlightenment warrant examination and treatment by scholars of rhetoric and a more acknowledged place within the history of rhetoric.
As I have stated, the exclusion of women from universities and other public rhetorical venues and the lack of texts by women conforming to the paradigms that currently constitute Enlightenment rhetorical theory are two reasons why the eighteenth century remains a neglected area in the history of women’s rhetoric. A third barrier that also warrants mentioning is that nineteenth-century myths of femininity—such as the angel in the house and the cult of true womanhood—formed a deep rhetoric that cast the image of eighteenth-century woman into a restrictive domestic sphere. Until recently, the nineteenth-century idealization of the woman’s domestic role has served to erect inaccurate idols of the homogenous eighteenth-century British woman and to neglect the range of activities performed by real eighteenth-century women. Yet, despite these constraints, women’s writing and other proto-feminist rhetorical activity grew naturally as part of the British Enlightenment.
One more impediment to the investigation of eighteenth-century British women’s rhetorical activities is the current and historical scholarly framework for describing Enlightenment rhetoric, which I refer to as the five-fold paradigm of Enlightenment Rhetoric. The remainder of this introduction provides a working definition of the five-fold paradigm, discusses the limitations of this paradigm with respect to women’s rhetorics, and instead proposes feminist ecology as a more effective model for studying women’s contributions to Enlightenment rhetoric.
The Five-fold Paradigm of Enlightenment Rhetoric
In the late twentieth century, scholars of Enlightenment rhetoric divided works by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western European male academics into a four-fold paradigm consisting of the neoclassical, belletristic, elocutionary, and philosophical epistemic movements of rhetoric (Howell; Golden and Corbett; Horner; Bizzell and Herzberg; Kennedy; Moran; Sloan; Gaillet). Both the second and third editions of Bizzell and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition contain chapters on Enlightenment Rhetoric, describing it as consisting of these four overlapping movements—with the recent addition of conversation as a fifth feminine movement associated with women’s rhetoric. Similar content appears in other anthologies under the category of eighteenth-century rhetoric with these same paradigmatic divisions. The original four-fold paradigm is especially useful for comparing the theoretical components of Enlightenment rhetoric to those of classical rhetoric, including similarities such as their close connection to philosophy; adherence to five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery); and view of rhetoric as a formal, civic, and masculine occupation.
However, in contrast to classical rhetoric, each movement of the four-fold paradigm of Enlightenment rhetoric tends, in its own way, to deemphasize lofty style and the profusion of rhetorical tropes and to advocate more for plain or perspicuous style and taking an individualized approach to crafting discourse for particular audiences and occasions. During the long eighteenth century, the purview of rhetoric broadened to include not just formal oratory but “all forms of discourse [as] rhetorical,” and to encompass “the study of correct grammar and syntax, appropriate style and diction for types of discourse or occasions for speaking, taste or standards of literary and moral judgement, and the means of effective communication in general” (Bizzell and Herzberg 806). Toward these ends, the four-fold approach of studying Enlightenment rhetoric begins with the neoclassical foundation (based on classical rhetoric’s models for speakers, audiences, appeals, and tropes) and then proceeds to view belletristic, elocutionary, and philosophical-epistemic expansions, including new ideas about human understanding and will, and of virtue as the hallmark of good taste. Scholarship on the four-fold paradigm illustrates an increasing range of possible styles and occasions for rhetoric during the Enlightenment, but it still gives little attention to nontraditional genres, venues, and speakers.
British women’s rhetorical practices during the age of Enlightenment most often fell well outside the generic and academic boundaries that define the four-fold categorical paradigm. The most significant revision to this paradigm is the conversationmovement, which is now recognized as a fifth, predominantly feminine, paradigm. This addition has occurred in the past twenty years in the work of feminist scholars (such as Jane Donawerth, Christina Mason Sutherland, and Tania Smith) who have identified cirmo or sermo (Latin for conversation) as a separate and distinct form of Enlightenment rhetoric appropriated from the humanist tradition by seventeenth-century European women intellectuals and adapted into proto-feminist forms of persuasion throughout the eighteenth century. In The Eloquence of Mary Astell, Sutherland describes sermo as the feminine milieu of eighteenth-century rhetoric. Donawerth’s most recent book, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900, characterizes many forms of women’s spoken and written interactions as conversation and examines “significant moments” in which seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century women adapt conversation theory to informal, small-group rhetoric by “looking at details of each woman’s life and each moment’s era, registering the differences as well as the similarities” (9-10). With the addition of conversation, the canonical landscape of Enlightenment rhetoric has broadened from a four-fold into a five-fold paradigm, which is now more inclusive of women. However helpful, this categorical model inevitably imposes some inaccurate subdivisions. To help tease out some of the overlap, I offer a brief explanation of each movement.
First, the neoclassical movement, a tradition inherited from French theorists such as Fenelon’s Dialogues sur l’ Eloquence (1717), generally upholds the Aristotelian/Ciceronian focus on the public man as orator. British neoclassical theories of rhetoric adapt the five classical canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery for usage in the English language and combine classical ideas with empiricism, rationalism, and a new branch of study known as natural philosophy (later psychology). Eighteenth-century neoclassical treatises on rhetoric include John Holmes’ The Art of Rhetoric (1739), John Lawson’s Lectures Concerning Oratory (1752), and John Ward’s Systems of Oratory (1759). Few eighteenth-century British women wrote academic treatises like these, and only two known works—the anonymously authored The Lady’s Rhetoric and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II—are dedicated solely to theorizing the rhetorical practices of women.
The belletristic movement, which developed from French neoclassical rhetoric, focuses on rhetorical theory’s intersections with the criticism of the literary, liberal, and fine arts. Belletristic theory combines the study of rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics with painting, architecture, drama, art, and history—all of the disciplines concerned with and requiring knowledge of taste, style, and criticism—under the umbrella of belles lettres. Belletristic theory gained popularity in conjunction with early eighteenth-century British works on virtue and taste by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Frances Hutcheson but reached its greatest scholarly expression in the latter half of the century when Scottish intellectuals, including Adam Smith, David Hume, Hugh Blair, and Lord Kames published philosophical treatises on rhetoric, taste, and belles letters. Bluestocking women were heavily involved in the discourse on Belletristic theories and their applications to literature, art, and architecture. Montagu’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760) and An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) are two examples of Bluestocking-authored works concerning belletristic topics. Critics of the belletristic approach, however, saw it devolve into the purview of amateur scholars, autodidacts, and ladies.
The elocutionary movement presents a third paradigm, one that is focused on the principles, practices, and professional uses of oratory. Derived from the classical term elocutio, which stood for “style” in Roman rhetorical theory, the eighteenth-century termelocution came rather to mean “delivery or performance.” Enlightenment elocution was largely gendered as masculine and tied to civic duty. Works of British elocutionary theory, including Thomas Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution (1763) and Lectures on Reading (1775), John Walker’s Elements of Elocution (1781), and Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia or Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery(1806), focused on voice and body control to achieve the most persuasive and effective oratory. The elocution theorists drew their examples from the contemporary theatrical stage as well as from ancient descriptions of classical orators. Thus, the first English actresses are important, but little credited, contributors to this movement.
The fourth paradigm consists of what was then a new branch of rhetorical theory that emerged in late eighteenth-century Britain, which Golden and Corbett have identified as the philosophical epistemic movement. This heavily theoretical movement, also known as the new rhetoric, focused on moral reasoning and the will of the audience. Influenced by Bacon, Locke, and Hume, examples of this theoretical model include Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Exemplary of the new rhetoric, Campbell aligns rhetoric with the new discipline of psychology and its scientific analysis of the processes of the mind. As the collections of their letters show, Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot were highly informed readers and contemporaries of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers who were the chief proponents of new rhetoric. Montagu corresponded regularly with Lord Kames, and Talbot composed works of proto-feminist Christian philosophy, which Carter published after Talbot’s death.
The Bluestockings are also the central focus of the conversation movement that scholars now recognize as a fifth, and feminine, branch of Enlightenment rhetoric. Rooted in the humanist genres of the dialog, the defense, and the philosophical letter, conversation became a socially acceptable form for women’s participation in private intellectual debates and correspondence. Feminist scholars trace conversation, as a semi-formal, private rhetorical practice back to the rhetorical theory of Mary Astell at the beginning of the eighteenth century and even further to seventeenth Parisian salons. Salon conversation practices continued throughout the eighteenth-century with Bluestockings, such as Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Talbot, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney, and Hannah More. The claiming of conversation as a rhetorical movement has opened a window into women’s contributions to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetoric. However, adding the conversation movement as a fifth category, or paradigm, of Enlightenment rhetoric is also an oversimplification. While the deep rhetoric of the eighteenth century deemed conversation as the only appropriate usage of women’s speech, delineating conversation as a movement of women’s rhetoric implies an artificial restriction on a universal and multi-gendered communication practice. The “conversation movement” effectively isolates women’s body of work and their concerns from the larger culture and exacerbates the problems of overlap and exclusion inherent in the original four-fold paradigm.
Furthermore, although the divisions of the fivefold paradigm usefully organize major trends in Enlightenment rhetorical theory, this model strains to fit works, authors, and practitioners neatly into prescribed categories. Even without the addition of conversation theory, the original four divisions “do not serve well as fixed categories into which we can unambiguously place individual treatises” (H. Lewis Ulman 5). The ambiguity of this system of classification is apparent in works that theorize across the paradigms, such as works that cover literary tropes (a focus of neoclassical rhetoric) as well as literary aesthetics and taste (a focus of belles lettres). Thomas Miller adds that the four paradigms do not align with the eighteenth-century practice of oratory, noting that “the epistemological emphases of the ‘new’ rhetoric have tended to overshadow the civic relations of rhetoric and moral philosophy” and “how citizens translate received beliefs into practical action to address public needs” (228). The current paradigms are more focused on rhetorical theory than rhetorical practice, which creates a methodological limitation by excluding non-academic materials, such as ephemeral and performative examples of proto-feminist Enlightenment rhetoric.
The overall inability of the fivefold paradigm to accurately describe women’s Enlightenment rhetoric exposes the limitations of such categorizations and serves as an entrée to try differing approaches. Traditional tactics of recovering figures and movements through the close reading of treatises and essays, while still valid, should be accompanied by interdisciplinary methods that can help to identify historical materials related to progressive forms of women’s communication and persuasion and to contextualize the social relationships, networks, and communities that promoted the expansion of women’s roles, rights, and professional life within the societies that they inhabited, and for posterity.
New Methods for Studying Women’s Rhetorics
New methodologies for exploring women’s rhetorics, such as venue-based, cultural materialist, thematic, and reception research, are now available, and researchers have employed them successfully in many studies of nineteenth-, twentieth, and twenty-first century women’s rhetorics. However, as Kate Ronald observes, with respect to new methods centering on rhetorical sites and strategies, “nineteenth-century North American rhetoric predominates” (145). The comparative neglect of British eighteenth-century women by rhetoric and composition scholars may stem from the fact that researchers in the field have more access, experience, and interests related to the history of American rhetoric, but the existence of considerably more and lengthier studies of Classical women’s rhetoric (Jarratt, Swearingen, Graban) and Renaissance European women’s rhetoric (Lunsford, Glenn, Donawerth, Wertheimer) seem to undercut this rationale. Over the past twenty years, new methodologies in feminist rhetorical historiography have made possible the rediscovery not just of female figures to add to the existing canon but previously unidentified realms and forms of women’s rhetoric.
Several strong examples of venue-based and interdisciplinary scholarship on nineteenth-century women’s rhetorics inform my approach. First, in her ground-breaking work on American women’s rhetoric Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life: 1866-1910, Nan Johnson focuses on the cultural site instead of concentrating on select figures (1). Johnson makes an important point: not all historic women’s rhetoric is feminist liberation rhetoric; much of it involves particular groups of women finding voices and the means to speak within their cultural circumstances. Cultural context is also a major factor in Lindal Buchanan’s Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors, in which she recommends examination of six topoi: 1) education—the rhetor’s training in delivery, 2) access to public platforms, 3) space between a rhetor and her audience(s) as a the physical tool for managing audiences’ perceptions, 4) genre and its accessibility and taboos in relation to gender, 5) bodylanguage and gendered physical attributes involved in delivery, and 6) rhetorical career or the impact of public speaking skills and professions on women’s lives (160 -163).
Carolyn Skinner applies a similar heuristic focused on the rhetorical speaker in Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-century America in which she analyzes “education and professional affiliations, the professional’s performance of expertise, authority, and status in rhetorical interactions with colleagues, patient/clients, and the public” (9). Like Buchanan, Skinner stresses the importance of considering situatedness and public perception in studying women’s professional ethos. Skinner asserts that we can better understand professional women’s “struggle to claim a persuasive ethos” by analyzing 1) the accessibility of the communication medium to women, 2) the attitudes about women in professions at that time, 3) the negotiation of moral values between the woman speaker and the audience, and 4) the power of the genre to grant rhetorical authority that supersedes the normal gender identity of the woman speaker (173-177). Skinner’s and Buchanan’s topoi are productive for understanding how cultural sites, professional institutions, and social mores impact a speaker’s delivery. As Skinner notes, women as “marginalized speakers and writers have developed persuasive ethe despite the belief that they were not supposed to be effective or authoritative communicators” (Skinner 4). Success as a speaker, or a writer, begins with a belief in oneself, a concept that we take for granted today but which traces back to the Enlightenment philosophy of individualism.
In addition to methods focused on speakers and contexts of delivery, another type of feminist methodology that informs my research is the study of rhetoric’s effects after initial delivery, in other words, how acts of persuasion extend beyond the immediate rhetorical situation. For example, Jessica Enoch’s article “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography Without the Tradition” explores remembering and gendering as two methods of analysis in the study of women’s rhetoric. Enoch’s first paradigm, remembering, is a material approach concerned with objects of public memory and the rhetorical purposes driving the historical preservation of women’s stories. The second paradigm, gendering, as Enoch explains, “relies on discursive, material, and embodied articulations and performances that create and disturb gendered distinctions, social categories, and asymmetrical power relationships” and extends beyond the human body to “a host of historical subjects, spaces, and activities” (68-69). Enoch explicitly connects her notion of gendering to Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance, citing Butler’s argument that masculinity and femininity are social constructions of identity that can and will change over time. The human body, as Butler argues, is “a surface whose permeability is politically regulated,” and “the various acts of gender create the idea of gender” (2499-2500). As Royster and Kirsch also note, in recent decades gender studies has moved well “beyond female-male binaries” to consider a wide repertoire of “social, political, and cultural realities of gender” (44). Gender studies as a postmodern field recognizes that individual gendered performance and gender fluidity have always coexisted as factors of the rhetorical ecology, alongside hegemonic norms of gender, in all cultures and historical ages. The study of gendering is highly pertinent to my project for examining repeated progressive acts, which slowly granted more rhetorical power for women within the Enlightenment rhetorical ecology.
The transference of rhetoric over time is yet another phenomenon that feminist researchers have studied. The concept of rhetorical accretion examines the effects and later appropriations of persuasive performances and displays. As Vicki Tolar Collins describes in “The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Methodology,” rhetorical accretion consists of the ripples of intended meanings that occur during reception and the appropriation and repackaging of a rhetorical performance by others, such as publishers and critics. The study of rhetorical accretion is particularly important when the speaker has no direct power. Women and other marginalized groups have made persuasive impressions by repeated linguistic and bodily displays, which then carry forward beyond the original audience to other groups. By expanding the focus of her study beyond the immediate rhetorical performance, Collins investigates larger rhetorical impacts. Collins’s work, in fact, presages recent ecological methodologies, such as reading a rhetor’s ethos as interruption, advocacy, and relation (Ryan, Myers, and Jones).
Keeping in mind these site-based, performative, and ecological analyses, my study follows other feminist historians of rhetoric in taking a context-driven approach. Using a combination of primary materials from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, along with current scholarly analyses from the fields of eighteenth-century historical, literary, and cultural studies, I conduct a rhetorical analysis of new and traditional British women’s roles, and their written and embodied methods of persuasive communication, across the long eighteenth century. My undertaking has involved a decade-long journey in research,encompassing a broad array of venues, public and private, in search of, as Andrea Lunsford suggests, the “forms, strategies and goals used by women as rhetorical” (6). In order to situate women from diverse backgrounds, professions, and social statuses into the larger conversations of British Enlightenment rhetoric, my methodology involves working with their primary texts, as well as secondary analyses of their lives and work, to identify significant sites, occasions, delivery methods, and watershed moments of progressive proto-feminist persuasion.
Like Johnson, my method of recovery centers on the cultural sites that created opportunities for women’s rhetoric. By cultural sites, I mean the physical space of the rhetorical venue, be it a place of real-time live performance or the virtual performance enacted by a written document that a speaker produces at one point in time and is then later received by readers. My examination adapts Lindal Buchanan’s methodology of studying rhetorical delivery as “a regendered fifth canon [that] . . . views rhetorical performance as the moment when dominant cultural values are enacted and, sometimes, are resisted and revised” (160). These performances may be oral or written, but, by keeping in mind the sites of delivery and reception, I attend to context and to audience as much as to text.
To consider the broader ecology in which proto-feminist rhetorical sites operated, I use gendering as a method to examine the sociopolitical contexts and the deep rhetoric that regulated the sites. To show the ground truth and trajectories of women’s rhetoric amid the larger ecology of the Enlightenment, my study interprets rhetorical accretions, which I see as not only the appropriation of rhetorical theory and performance by women rhetoricians but also as the audience’s reception of women’s rhetoric. By examining selected cultural artifacts, excerpts of primary texts, and anecdotes regarding speakers, audiences, and messages, my feminist methodology deconstructs rhetorical venues in which women operated and the accepted traditional feminine roles of queen, courtier, and mother, as well as innovative identities of actress, woman writer, and woman intellectual or learned lady. While broad and holistic coverage of British women’s rhetoric in the age of Enlightenment is my mission, the sheer volume of spoken, written, and embodied discourse that is available for study requires some restriction of scope. My focus is on predominantly secular rather than religious rhetorical performances. Although Quaker and Methodist women did lead as rhetorical speakers in their communities, preaching and church venues are beyond the scope of this study. However, many eighteenth-century British women claimed spiritual ethos and their duty to God as a defense for speaking out in secular contexts to argue on topics that were not primarily theological, such as women’s moral virtue, expansion of women’s roles, and the societal need for education and professional opportunities for women. This study also does not examine the voices Others that may have emerged from colonial counterflow, which brought women of color and other immigrants to the British Isles during the long eighteenth century. In selecting my examples for study, I have gravitated to those venues, speakers, acts, and artifacts that are striking and exemplary for their performance, argumentation, debate, dialog, or deliberation of Enlightenment values by, to, or focused on British women.
While some of these women were successful in publishing arguments in the masculine genres of the treatise and other traditional rhetorical forms, many more adopted feminine forms of communication, such as conversation, letters, novels, journals, and other literary projects, for rhetorical and didactic purposes. Still others took a more performative approach to persuasion through acting, teaching, leading or speaking at salons and clubs, and even through fashion statements. However, the theoretical notions of equality that emerged in the discourse of the British Enlightenment did not guarantee that all people, and certainly not all women, were granted equal public access. The opportunities that women had to participate in venues for rhetoric were dependent on their social class, family, professional, religious, and political affiliations; their occupations, education, and pastimes; and even their physical appearance and personality traits.
We shall say what has not been said before, or if the substance is old, the mode & figure shall be new.--Elizabeth Montagu, “Letter to Elizabeth Carter” (1769)
Despite the subordination and suppression of women as a group under patriarchy, individual women throughout history have spoken out on a wide range of subjects through the means available to them. During the age of Enlightenment, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these means increased significantly for British women. Increasingly higher levels of literacy and new venues (private and professional) led them to pursue many diverse avenues of intellectual society and persuasive discourse. Myriad writings and artifacts—such as the large corpus of letters by and to famous Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu—stand as extant evidence of women’s Enlightenment rhetoric. In Montagu’s letters, we can discern her knowledge of rhetorical theory and practice. As Tania Smith argues, Montagu’s construction of her own rhetorical identity reflects a careful study of Cicero’s moral character and his blending of public and private rhetoric (“Elizabeth Montagu” 165). Certainly, Montagu was a highly educated member of the intellectual elite; however, middle-class eighteenth-century women also engaged in self-reflexive rhetorical practices, such as the activities of the teenage girls of the Fair Intellectual Club of Edinburgh who documented their protocols in their charter, published in 1721. Unsurprisingly, these types of rhetorical acts did not elevate women to equal public standing with men. Montagu could not hold a seat in parliament (as her husband Edward Montagu did), and the Fair Intellectuals felt the need to keep their society secret and to protect their reputations by carefully maintaining their members’ anonymity.
With its expansive, yet subtle, historical development, British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric presents an intricate and challenging subject of study. Contextualizing the contributions of British women to the history of rhetoric during the age of Enlightenment is the mission of this book. The scope of this history includes contributions by women as individuals and as an impactful demographic within British Enlightenment culture. This introduction provides the background necessary to set up this conversation, starting with a gendered description of the Enlightenment and a brief review of cultural studies scholarship on British women during this era. I then move into the disciplinary subfield of Enlightenment rhetoric and, within that, review the scholarship on women’s rhetorical activities within the context of eighteenth-century Britain.
The Enlightenment refers to the evolution of progressive socioeconomic and scientific ideas that emerged across Western Europe and North America from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Forming a segue between the Renaissance world of church and state and the modern world of science and industry, the Enlightenment worldview privileged individual experience and inductive reasoning over the auspices of classical authority and deductive logic. Enlightenment thought coheres around the premises that humans are 1) rational, sentient beings; 2) relatively equal in cognitive capability; and 3) alike enough to work together on social, scientific, and economic projects for the progress of society. Along these lines, Enlightenment theory is greatly concerned with cognition of empirical evidence; moral reasoning and benevolence; capitalist models of government and commerce; and new appraisals of social class, education, religion, and gender roles.
The umbrella term of the European Enlightenment includes both the English and Scottish Enlightenments (among other national subdivisions), and it also encompasses the disciplinary subarea of Enlightenment rhetoric, all of which occurred in Britain during what is called the long eighteenth century—from 1660 to approximately 1800. During this era, people in Britain held strong ideas about sex and gender identity, including qualities of masculinity and femininity. Some of these assumptions were based on biology—male strength and female softness were considered part of nature—and oftentimes perceptions of these biological differences extended to religious and moral antecedents, such as the notions of males possessing God-given rationality and females being driven more by emotion and a mysterious sense of intuition. Many people believed that these qualities were, indeed, biological facts. In addition and contrast to these stereotypes of biological predeterminism, many members of eighteenth-century British society recognized gender identity as a socially-conditioned construct, and it was widely acknowledged that people could possess qualities of gender deemed opposite their biological sex (although this was not encouraged). In fact, gendered identities and behaviors constituted a topic of ongoing discussion. As Karen O’Brien explains, “the issue of the ‘distinction of sex’ was central to the Enlightenment attempt to understand the role of women…, yet it was also one of the areas of most fundamental disagreement” (“Sexual Distinctions” 3). Debates about the influences of nature and nurture in establishing gender identity proliferated. Popular opinion tended to conflate gender identity with the two recognized biological sexual identities (male and female), but many people—especially intellectuals and scholars—also recognized gender as a multiplicity of socially-constructed roles and behaviors.
The textual legacy of the Enlightenment, however, has long exhibited a male bias. The Enlightenment canon consists of ideas and works by a group of geographically-dispersed, white, western European and American men—philosophers and professors whose diverse theories find unity in their views of modern social progress. Historical narratives about the Enlightenment, although usually focused on the eighteenth century, often begin earlier with Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597) and Nova Organon (1605), Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), and Hobbes’ The Leviathan (1660). From these seventeenth century roots, a diverse group of modern philosophers emerged across Europe and America, including John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Anthony Ashley Cooper in England; Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France; David Hume, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair in Scotland; Baruch Spinoza in Holland; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany; and Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin in America.
Broad as this international list of elite historic figures seems, participation in the Enlightenment was even broader and included intellectual performances of women as well as men. As Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor explain in Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, “Enlightenment was a living world where ideas were conveyed not only through ‘high’ philosophical works but also through novels, poetry, advice literature, popular theology, journalism, pornography, and that most fluid of eighteenth-century genres, the ‘miscellaneous essay” as well as “conversation, reading (both private and communal), pedagogy,” and many sociable contexts (xvii-xviii). The conveyance of Enlightenment ideas naturally partook of rhetoric in many forms: persuasive appeals, argumentation, oratory, composition, and the training and theory necessary to underpin these performances and practices.
In The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whatley, James Golden and Edward Corbett call the Enlightenment “one of the most prolific eras in rhetorical history” (7). Their landmark collaboration analyzes the masculine lineage of Enlightenment rhetoric from its classical Greek and Roman foundations, to its branching out in the eighteenth century (in Britain and North America) to encompass more modern, empirically-based theories of human interaction, both for oratory and written composition, and its hybridized blossoming into the new scholarly disciplines of psychology, composition, and speech communications in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Golden and Corbett’s study of rhetoric as a hybrid and cross-disciplinary field is further supported by Mark Longaker who more recently has argued that a major innovation of British Enlightenment rhetoric was its alignment with the disciplines of economics and ethics into a “cohesive vision of free-market capitalism, rhetorical style, and bourgeois virtue” (2). Longaker’s term of “bourgeois virtue” emphasizes Enlightenment rhetoric’s dual focus on social class and moral value. I would add to this that Enlightenment rhetoric, and the era’s notion of virtue, also included considerable discourse on gender definitions, which in turn created new opportunities for women to theorize and practice rhetoric.
This book excavates British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric—by which I mean proto-feminist genres, methods, and acts of persuasion—in a variety of sites across the social spectrum of eighteenth-century British society. To take a feminist, multi-gendered view of Enlightenment rhetoric requires rethinking received notions about the discipline. While I agree with Miriam Brody’s description of Enlightenment rhetoric as adhering to the classical “tradition of rhetoric and its long-standing project of discovering probable truths with the tools of human language,” I also challenge the current historical narrative of Enlightenment rhetoric, a tradition which Brody critiques as an elite intellectual activity strictly “empowered by a male body” (106, 111). The Enlightenment not only revised masculine rhetorical theory and produced new academic fields, it also significantly expanded women’s situated ethos (phronesis) as well as their rhetorical practices (techne). As Tania Smith describes, the classical term of phronesis, or acknowledged possession of practical wisdom, refers to “a meta-rhetoric” that includes “social contexts, rhetorical intentions, and ethos” while she describes techne as “strategic rhetoric” consisting of “discursive tools and conventions for achieving rhetorical aims” (“Elizabeth Montagu” 166-167). Over the course of the long eighteenth century, significant enhancements to British women’s phronesis and techne (fostered by increases in literacy) kindled the slow process of women’s largescale transformation from subalterns to fully participating citizens—an end goal that would take two more centuries to reach fruition.
Although women did not realize equal legal and political rights in Britain until the twentieth century, during the long eighteenth century, British women engaged vocally in the major Enlightenment debates. Women intellectuals, or learned ladies as they were known, brought a feminine perspective to the forefront in their engagement with elite discourses on individual cognition, virtue, taste, feelings, and economic independence, and on women’s roles in the larger community. Serious philosophical writings from English intellectuals of the early eighteenth century, such as John Locke and Mary Astell, energized British public discourse about human nature, the rights of individuals, virtuous citizenship, and gender role prescriptions. The idea that women had the capacity to excel intellectually and professionally took hold amongst mixed-gender circles of the intellectual elite, within middle-class venues of public sociability, and even in private, feminine, and domestic settings. The later eighteenth-century emphasis on feelings and sympathy, as found in the work of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and David Hume, perpetuated an even more multi-gendered view of modern civilization (DeLuccia 9). With the influential voices of the earlier English and later Scottish Enlightenments encouraging more egalitarian social theories and practices, ignoring concerns of gender and social class increasingly came to be perceived as immoral. These developments of Enlightenment philosophy perpetuated developments in women’s rhetoric.
Nevertheless, locating evidence of British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric presents difficulties, mainly because women’s communicative and persuasive practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not occur within traditional venues of rhetoric. Prior to the very late nineteenth century, British law barred women from attending universities where rhetoric was taught, and, even into the twentieth century, cultural customs discouraged women from participating in professional disciplines, especially in activities involving public speech, written argumentation, and other displays of so-called masculine reasoning. Nevertheless, historical evidence shows that, in eighteenth-century Britain, girls did study the style and mechanics of writing and elocution, and it was not uncommon for educated women to participate in a variety of intellectual and rhetorical activities within feminine and mixed-gender venues and genres.
Mary Astell (1666-1731), for example, was well-versed in neoclassical theories of rhetoric, and her numerous published treatises, pamphlets, and letters written in a variety of rhetorical styles on a wide variety of social and philosophical subjects demonstrate her ability to put rhetorical theory into practice. Best known for A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II. Wherein a Method is offer’d for the Improvement of their Minds (1694, 1697), Astell’s writing synthesizes the influential epistemological and moral philosophies of her times and applies them to women’s needs and situations. Part II of her Serious Proposal is where she most directly details her rhetorical theory and advocates for feminine rhetorical practices. Just about a century after Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) gained notoriety for her politically radical publications and henceforth achieved lasting fame for her arguments on the rights women and men. In her progressive treatises, most notably her Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792), Wollstonecraft critiques the rhetoric of patriarchy and espouses proto-feminist models for gendered conduct, education, and interpersonal communication. Bracketing the start and close of the eighteenth century, Astell and Wollstonecraft are the best-known proto-feminist British women intellectuals of the Enlightenment era. A few other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British women appear in current anthologies on the history of rhetoric and in scholarship examining women’s rhetorical activities within intellectual circles and theatrical performance. However, the volume of scholarship on British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric is extremely small in comparison to the substantial body of work on the rhetoric of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women.
In Wit, Virtue, and Emotion: British Women’s Enlightenment Rhetoric, I aim to delineate a proto-feminist ecology of British women ’s Enlightenment rhetoric, which, I argue, is currently a buried cornerstone of modern feminism. British women’s rhetorical activities were instrumental in expanding the role and the reach of the female individual in the age of Enlightenment. The accumulated acts of embodied, spoken, and written proto-feminist rhetoric by and for seventeenth and eighteenth-century British women translated to a groundswell of persuasive power, which set in motion new developments in feminine gender roles and education and created opportunities for women within British society in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond. Examining artifacts of these mediated activities by British women in the long eighteenth century reveals numerous proto-feminist historical precedents—before the first-wave of feminism in Britain (or anywhere else). Women’s Enlightenment rhetoric prefigures feminist arguments for gender equality and future legal and moral reforms, including the formalized campaigns for women’s civil rights, abolition, standardized education, child-labor protections
This narrative, then, elucidates the origins of Anglo-feminist rhetoric, thereby highlighting an understudied and very significant era in the historical development of women’s persuasive voices and feminine power. This book addresses feminist scholars and advanced students in the field of rhetoric and composition and urges them to attend more closely to the Enlightenment era within the broad history of women’s rhetoric. In addition, scholars of eighteenth-century studies will find feminist rhetorical methods of analysis provide a novel lens for analyzing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers, intellectuals, education theorists, and actresses as purveyors of Enlightenment rhetoric. Students in a variety of fields in the liberal arts—including literature, rhetoric and writing, history, theater, and women’s studies—can gain insight and inspiration from rhetorical analyses of eighteenth-century British proto-feminism and the many women writers and performers this book describes.
Many of the themes addressed by eighteenth-century British women—restrictive gender roles; the inequities for women in courtship, marriage, divorce, and child-rearing; the need for comprehensive education for girls; and women’s desire for more fulfilling professional opportunities—still persist today as relevant feminine rhetorical topoi, and thus resonate strongly with twenty-first century readers. This cultural relevance helps explain the reason for the present (booming) state of scholarship on eighteenth-century British women in literary and cultural studies. In contrast, the lack of women’s representation within current histories of Enlightenment rhetoric stems partly from the legacy of classical rhetoric as a masculine discipline ensconced in elite intellectual history. As preparation for approaching and remedying this scholarly void, I will first review the current historical model of Enlightenment rhetorical theory and then suggest the application of feminist methodologies for studying Enlightenment rhetoric, particularly for analyzing women’s rhetorics of this era.
Entering the Conversation
Geological metaphors convey the possibility of change even amid deeply entrenched habits of mind. Writing in 2001, Derek Hughes used the phrase “fissuring a monolith” to describe the impact of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers on the British Enlightenment (8-9). Appearing for centuries as a solidly masculine body of cultural history, the Enlightenment upon closer study is heavily veined with traces of the feminine. The vast hegemony of the modern West has viewed the outcomes of the Enlightenment as enabling democratic capitalist civilization and life as we know it today, but a trend to question whether or not Enlightenment progress has been ethical or desirable has emerged over the last fifty years or so, as postmodern, Marxist, and feminist theorists have contested the validity of Enlightenment thinking. Although its critics claim that the Enlightenment’s replacement of religion and monarchy with the newer authorities of science and business merely tradedv one set of biased, positivist narratives for another, many cultural historians of the Enlightenment believe these critical assessments are too narrow.
In the field of eighteenth-century studies over the past few decades, the notion of the Enlightenment as a monolithic intellectual movement of prominent white male philosophers has received further critical scrutiny (Roy Porter, J.G.A. Pocock, Clifford Siskin and William Warner, Sankar Muthu). As Porter has argued, it is now possible to see the Enlightenment writ large as “a revolution in mood . . . advanced by a range of protagonists, male and female, of various nationalities and discrete status, professional and interest groups” (3). Porter states, “in place of the old emphasis on superstars” scholars need to consider “wider enlightened circles” (11). But there are also reasons that the Enlightenment has been historicized as a tenaciously male-centric movement. As Rebecca Merrens explains, the culture of seventeenth-century England encompassed “the seemingly disparate discourse communities of literature, science, theology, and political philosophy [which] all worked to create a stable space for patriarchal authority by variously constraining, rejecting, and dissecting the feminine” (32). Countering these stable masculine spaces, feminist historians and literary scholars have re-visioned the European Enlightenment to more accurately portray the cultural contributions of women working, writing, socializing, and participating in public activities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Margaret Hunt, Michele Cohen, Karen O’Brien, Clarissa Orr, JoEllen DeLucia, and Anna Clark).
Recovery of the European women’s Enlightenment has been a major project spanning many academic disciplines (literature, cultural history, women’s studies) and national cultures (British, French, Spanish, etc.) Publications, such as Taylor and Knott’s magisterial collection Women, Gender, and Enlightenment and Volumes 4 and 5 of The History of British Women’s Writing series by Palgrave Macmillan have expanded our knowledge of the professional, political, intellectual, and social opportunities open to British women of the era while also emphasizing the limitations dictated by the combination of gender and social class. There has been a recent surge in scholarship examining the multi-generational Bluestocking culture and its connections to the English, Scottish and French Enlightenment in works such as Elizabeth Eger’s Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism, Karen O’Brien’s Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, JoEllen DeLucia’s A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759-1820, and Deborah Heller’s collection Bluestockings Now!: The Evolution of a Social Role. Many of these works touch on rhetorical theory and practice, although their primary focus is cultural and literary history.
Meanwhile, feminist historians working in the field of rhetoric and composition also have used geological metaphors to describe women’s contributions to the history of rhetoric. In 2011, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsh in Feminist Rhetorical Practices compared the changes wrought by feminist scholarship within the field of rhetoric and composition to “tectonic shifts” (17). As Royster and Kirsh explain, geological metaphors “offer generally familiar language for describing a historically under-interrogated academic terrain” (15). Expanding upon these geological metaphors, researchers in the history of rhetoric recently have adopted the metaphor of ecology to emphasize the human agents and actors within a cultural terrain. In Rethinking Ethos, Kathleen Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones define rhetorical ecology as a method of rhetorical analysis focused on how “the rhetor accounts for her subject position relative to others, as well as shifting material, cultural, and historical situations circulating around rhetorical acts” (viii). In Rhetorical Feminism and a Thing Called Hope, Cheryl Glenn further develops the ecological model by surveying the history and present state of feminist rhetoric and rhetorical feminism as a vast and expanding organic continuum, characterized by cresting waves (first, second, third, fourth . . . ) of feminist activism, dialog, and scholarly inquiry over time and across cultures. This scholarship has allowed many advances in the history of rhetoric, especially of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Within the ecology of feminist rhetoric, it is logical to imagine small waves of proto-feminism appearing before the so-called first wave of feminism. Yet, the methods of feminist rhetorical ecology, which re-imagine the conditions, methods, and practices of women and other subaltern speakers in broad cultural contexts, have yet to be applied to studies of Enlightenment rhetoric. Despite the recent surge in feminist scholarship in the history of rhetoric, researchers in the field of rhetoric have not tapped the immense mass of primary and secondary resources available on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers, even as researchers working in Enlightenment literary and cultural studies are culling these materials meticulously. A sizable rift separates rhetoric from other areas of eighteenth-century studies. Evidentiary of this divide, the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric, as it was defined by twentieth-century scholars, such as Golden and Corbett, remains largely intact and exclusive of women.
Current anthologies and collections of rhetoric include only a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women who worked in traditional rhetorical genres, such as the treatise and the sermon—including Bathsua Makin on rhetorical education, Margaret Fell on women preaching in public, and Hannah More on conversation practices. In Michael Moran’s Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetoricians, which claims to cover “all major and many minor eighteenth-century British and American rhetoricians,” for example, of the 34 brief academic biographies presented, only two are of women: Margaret Askew Fell and Mary Wollstonecraft (1). However, this assessment is far too narrow. As Linda Ferreira-Buckley notes in The Present State of Historical Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric, during the eighteenth century, the study of rhetoric extended beyond politicians, attorneys, clergy, and scholars to an activity practiced by “an increasing number of gentlewomen and gentlemen, and of course, the teachers, tutors, and governesses responsible for instructing them at home or at sundry educational institutions,” as well as by “individuals—indeed whole factions” in formal and informal oral and written venues (115). New mixed-gender rhetorical venues and practices emerged in urban centers and spread across western Europe. As historian Margaret Hunt explains, women’s older oral traditions, including storytelling, competitive singing, and popular healing, existed “side-by-side” with the new “world of reading, writing, books, newspapers, commercialized concert going, opera, fine art, and the like,” with the newer traditions rapidly dominating in urban areas while the older traditions persisted in rural areas (263). Consequently, evidence of women’s rhetorical activity lies preserved in a wide variety of eighteenth-century manuscripts and print media, including treatises, letters, lecture notes, periodicals, pamphlets, petitions, plays, dedications, prologues, epilogues, poems, novels, and memoirs, and in other artistic and cultural artifacts of the period.
Scholars of the history of rhetoric know there is a gap to be filled and have clearly stated that women’s contributions to Enlightenment rhetoric remain an understudied area. Tania Smith speculates that “a subculture favoring women’s rhetorical education and practice was stronger than previously supposed” (351). As Thomas Miller notes, the “unprecedented number” of women who began to write and speak publicly in the eighteenth century offers myriad opportunities to study “the rhetorical practices that oppressed groups used to speak against prevailing conventions” (235). Linda Ferreira-Buckley recommends that the recovery of eighteenth-century women’s rhetorics “should be a clear priority in the years ahead” (118). Jane Donawerth concurs and explains that “the trends and categories advanced by canonical histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American rhetoric do not adequately account for the genres and strategies emphasized in women’s rhetorical theory” (Conversation 41). In Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900, Donawerth cites over a dozen scholarly studies on the history of women’s speech-making and composition during the period 1600 to 1900; however, most of the studies Donawerth names cover nineteenth-century American women, and none focus on eighteenth-century British women (Conversation 158.n1-5).
Although the volume of scholarship on eighteenth-century British women’s rhetoric is slim, a small group of feminist scholars have made inroads. In her chapter on Hannah More’s conversation theory, Donawerth establishes parameters for eighteenth-century British women’s rhetorical practices in her contextualization of the Bluestockings model of conversation. Other scholarly studies on eighteenth-century British women’s rhetoric include Christina Mason Sutherland’s The Eloquence of Mary Astell; multiple essays by Tania Smith on the rhetoric of Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot; and Miriam Brody’s work on Mary Wollstonecraft, most specifically her article, “The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric.” Additionally, Lyndal Buchanan, Angela Escott, and I have contextualized eighteenth-century British actresses and women playwrights as proto-feminist rhetors, and Lynee Gaillet has examined the rhetorical legacy of Susannah Wesley. Also, studies on the rhetoric of Mary Wollstonecraft, particularly herVindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), have been done by Miriam Brody, Nancy Weitz Miller, Jamie Barlow, Anne K. Mellor, and Julie Monroe. The body of work currently theorizing British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric is a good start, but there is much more to do.
To further uncover the rhetorical activities of eighteenth-century British women, this study draws from and extends recovery efforts of feminist scholars working in eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies. A vast corpus of British women’s writing, including an extensive body of rare published books and unpublished archived manuscripts increasingly available in digital form, awaits scholarly study for its rhetorical theories and practices. The twenty-first century has seen the publication of new critical editions and anthologies of eighteenth-century women authors, as well as databases and online tools such as Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Adam Matthew Digital, and Texas A&M’s 18thcentury Connect, which provide access to numerous eighteenth-century texts in a wide array of genres, including essays, treatises, dialogs, defenses, letters, magazines, and other miscellaneous writings. The task of the scholar in search of women’s Enlightenment rhetoric is also facilitated by numerous works of cultural and literary criticism in specialized journals and on websites dedicated to eighteenth-century studies and women’s writing. With the ubiquity of digital access, scholars interested in women’s Enlightenment rhetoric can now locate and view primary sources online and read about the social contexts surrounding these sources. The sheer volume of primary documents represents a massive and complex rhetorical ecology.
To help contextualize this body of historical material into a coherent rhetorical ecology, this book relies on a set of specialized terms, starting with the phrase progressive proto-feminist women’s rhetoric, which I will break down and define here. By progressive, I am referring to a dual trend in Enlightenment thought toward liberatory and commercially motivated ideas and institutions. Progressive thinking connoted both the movement toward the ideal of social class and gender equality and the pursuit of new capitalist economic models. I use the second term, proto-feminist or proto-feminism, to describe activities and ideas supporting women’s rights and opportunities during the long eighteenth century (1660-1800) because this period obviously precedes the so-called first-wave of feminism that began in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As for the third term, women, this word collectively describes a socially-constructed gender identity with a deep set of connotations, including a complexity of social roles and practices, that in eighteenth-century usage (and even today) maintains an underlying association with the female biological sex. Rhetoric, the final term in the phrase, I define broadly as any non-violent act of communication. Taking these words together collectively as a term, by progressive proto-feminist women’s rhetorics, I mean any spoken, written, or embodied public performance, document, or display that occured prior to the feminist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that argued for expanding the roles, rights, and opportunities for women within society. In other words, proto-feminist women’s rhetorics consist of pro-woman acts of persuasion before 1800, which were ideologically or economically motivated.
Another key term that I refer to throughout this text is feminizing or feminization. Cultural and literary scholars in eighteenth-century studies use feminizing to describe a modernizing trend “in which emotions are tempered by a feminine desire to reflect on the needs and feelings of others” (DeLucia 8). Similarly, feminization refers to a conscious rise in the cultural significance of the woman. The usage of feminization as a term—at least as I have encountered it in the field of eighteenth-century studies—usually does not hold the negative connotation of something being devalued or weakened (although this connotation exists today). Rather, the feminization of British culture in the early to mid-eighteenth century refers to a move toward virtue, a consideration of individual feelings, and a civilizing influence on culture. The eighteenth-century emphasis on the importance of feelings reflects not only the Enlightenment focus on cognition and sympathy but also a new type of feminine influence on mainstream cultural practices. The feminization of Enlightenment culture is a well-documented phenomenon in the fields of literary and cultural history, but it has received little to no attention in the history of women’s rhetoric. And yet feminization was a highly rhetorical force of the Enlightenment.
The gradual but steady trajectory of feminization in the eighteenth-century British rhetorical ecology is also highlighted in this book’s title: Wit, Virtue, and Emotion. These words emphasize the appeals and postures that gained respect at various points and became focal points of the rhetorical landscape. I argue that wit, virtue, and emotion are the primary postures of women’s Enlightenment rhetoric and that they echo the Aristotelian elements of logos, ethos, and pathos. As I will show through a wide range of extant writings across literary, ephemeral, public, and personal genres, the three postures of wit, virtue, and emotion built upon each other in a trajectory of overlapping, gendered rhetorical appeals.
The first posture, wit, while denoting clever wordplay, also refers to evidence-based reasoning skills. Witty wordplay and solid reasoning were both considered masculine skills and essential displays of intellectual capital throughout the long eighteenth century. As Manushag Powell explains, “Wit happens, in part, when an author embraces his or her ability to construct a ‘creditable’ written expression of him or herself as an author worth hearing” (28). Thus, wit forms the mainstay of eighteenth-century ethos. Masculine wit, in the form of logical evidence, is the backbone of the treatise genre. Wit also denotes a confident style of conversing and punning, which often involves power metaphors, such as in this dialog between two male libertine characters, Harcourt and Dorilant, in William Wycherley’s outrageous comedy The Country Wife (1675):
Harcourt: Mistresses are like books: if you pore upon them too much, they doze you and make you unfit for company, but if used discreetly, you are the fitter for conversation by ‘em.
Dorilant: A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the Town, not to dwell in constantly but only for a night and away, to taste the Town the better when a man returns. (Wycherley 1.1.236-242, italics added)
These misogynistic similes demonstrate the swaggering and cavalier style of libertine wit, as well as displays of masculine domination. As I will show in Chapters 1 and 2, women in the late seventeenth century purposefully appropriated this masculine rhetorical and styled flipped it into powerful acts of proto-feminist persuasion. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture, wit was a dangerous but important skill for a woman to possess. Displays of wit were essential to feminine power; however, any woman who exuded wit, logic, and learning ran the risk of appearing unladylike.
More gender appropriate, the second posture of British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric, virtue, describes the demonstration of one’s moral worth and lack of corruption, and, thus, was an intrinsic measure of credibility. Reversing the early modern trend of perceiving women as Eve-like (weak and depraved by original sin), over the course of the eighteenth century, virtue increasingly signified as a feminine strength and gendered trait. The combination of masculine wit and feminine virtue denoted a higher capacity for moral reasoning. Women aspired to demonstrate wit balanced by virtue in their conversations and in their writings. This trend became the voice and the path for women who desired to make and publish serious public statements about women’s unequal positions in society. Strong notes of wit and virtue are evident in women’s treatises, defenses, plans, letters, poems, proposals, and many other written genres of complaint and protest.
The third posture, emotion, encompasses not only feminine expressions of mood but also the fine feelings of discernment that we commonly call “taste,” a cultivated, sensitive, and moral understanding of human nature, of beauty, and especially of the arts and letters. Desirable in both the masculine and feminine genders, the notion of taste in the eighteenth century required expertise and education, and so the highest level of taste had to be masculine; however, the intuitive feelings of emotionality associated with taste were gendered as feminine traits. The rising public valuation of feminine emotion inspired, and was inspired by, the increasing popularity of sentimentalism in literary and artistic culture in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Thus emotionality fueled the related late eighteenth century cultural trend of sensibility, which involved strong displays of sympathy, love, friendliness, compassion, and sometimes even fear. One emotion that was not acceptable in the realm of sensibility was that of feminine anger or any other form of aggressive feeling and behavior by women.
Wit, virtue, and emotion as the ordered postures of British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric, furthermore, illustrate a gradual shift in rhetorical ecology wherein the inherited deep rhetoric of early modern culture naturally and necessarily adjusted to more accurately represent changing beliefs about gender, class, and other stereotypes of identity and sociability, which—fixed as these may appear in any given era—are always in a state of metamorphosis. In every rhetorical ecology, exigencies for change exist as constant pressures on deep rhetoric. Transformations of deep rhetoric are wrought by what I call ground truth, which consists of real events that are empirically observable in the present moment and preserved in writing and images. Thus, while ground truths often reflect deep rhetoric, the two forces can also be at odds with each other when subversive events, identities, and activities stray away from mainstream ideology. In these divergencies, the margins of culture can exert transformative influence on the material practices of the mainstream, as shall become evident with Enlightenment rhetoric as explored in this book.
Impressed by the new ideas of the Enlightenment, women working in intellectual and professional networks began to see themselves as cohesive groups with collective aims and interests. Applying the language of feminist rhetoric, we might view their collective situation somewhat like “members” of a “border tribe” within their local and national cultures, and note that they began to use “the ecology of speaking situations . . . to shift values determined by dominant [masculine] publics” (Ryan, Myers, and Jones 7). As education and literacy increased for eighteenth-century British women, their identities and methods for gaining ethos became more developed. Thus, women’s Enlightenment rhetoric paved the way for more egalitarian education of the sexes, which enabled progressive social movements that later became associated with and supported by nineteenth-century feminism. Undoubtedly, proto-feminist cultural transformations and acts of public persuasion by women during the British Enlightenment warrant examination and treatment by scholars of rhetoric and a more acknowledged place within the history of rhetoric.
As I have stated, the exclusion of women from universities and other public rhetorical venues and the lack of texts by women conforming to the paradigms that currently constitute Enlightenment rhetorical theory are two reasons why the eighteenth century remains a neglected area in the history of women’s rhetoric. A third barrier that also warrants mentioning is that nineteenth-century myths of femininity—such as the angel in the house and the cult of true womanhood—formed a deep rhetoric that cast the image of eighteenth-century woman into a restrictive domestic sphere. Until recently, the nineteenth-century idealization of the woman’s domestic role has served to erect inaccurate idols of the homogenous eighteenth-century British woman and to neglect the range of activities performed by real eighteenth-century women. Yet, despite these constraints, women’s writing and other proto-feminist rhetorical activity grew naturally as part of the British Enlightenment.
One more impediment to the investigation of eighteenth-century British women’s rhetorical activities is the current and historical scholarly framework for describing Enlightenment rhetoric, which I refer to as the five-fold paradigm of Enlightenment Rhetoric. The remainder of this introduction provides a working definition of the five-fold paradigm, discusses the limitations of this paradigm with respect to women’s rhetorics, and instead proposes feminist ecology as a more effective model for studying women’s contributions to Enlightenment rhetoric.
The Five-fold Paradigm of Enlightenment Rhetoric
In the late twentieth century, scholars of Enlightenment rhetoric divided works by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western European male academics into a four-fold paradigm consisting of the neoclassical, belletristic, elocutionary, and philosophical epistemic movements of rhetoric (Howell; Golden and Corbett; Horner; Bizzell and Herzberg; Kennedy; Moran; Sloan; Gaillet). Both the second and third editions of Bizzell and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition contain chapters on Enlightenment Rhetoric, describing it as consisting of these four overlapping movements—with the recent addition of conversation as a fifth feminine movement associated with women’s rhetoric. Similar content appears in other anthologies under the category of eighteenth-century rhetoric with these same paradigmatic divisions. The original four-fold paradigm is especially useful for comparing the theoretical components of Enlightenment rhetoric to those of classical rhetoric, including similarities such as their close connection to philosophy; adherence to five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery); and view of rhetoric as a formal, civic, and masculine occupation.
However, in contrast to classical rhetoric, each movement of the four-fold paradigm of Enlightenment rhetoric tends, in its own way, to deemphasize lofty style and the profusion of rhetorical tropes and to advocate more for plain or perspicuous style and taking an individualized approach to crafting discourse for particular audiences and occasions. During the long eighteenth century, the purview of rhetoric broadened to include not just formal oratory but “all forms of discourse [as] rhetorical,” and to encompass “the study of correct grammar and syntax, appropriate style and diction for types of discourse or occasions for speaking, taste or standards of literary and moral judgement, and the means of effective communication in general” (Bizzell and Herzberg 806). Toward these ends, the four-fold approach of studying Enlightenment rhetoric begins with the neoclassical foundation (based on classical rhetoric’s models for speakers, audiences, appeals, and tropes) and then proceeds to view belletristic, elocutionary, and philosophical-epistemic expansions, including new ideas about human understanding and will, and of virtue as the hallmark of good taste. Scholarship on the four-fold paradigm illustrates an increasing range of possible styles and occasions for rhetoric during the Enlightenment, but it still gives little attention to nontraditional genres, venues, and speakers.
British women’s rhetorical practices during the age of Enlightenment most often fell well outside the generic and academic boundaries that define the four-fold categorical paradigm. The most significant revision to this paradigm is the conversationmovement, which is now recognized as a fifth, predominantly feminine, paradigm. This addition has occurred in the past twenty years in the work of feminist scholars (such as Jane Donawerth, Christina Mason Sutherland, and Tania Smith) who have identified cirmo or sermo (Latin for conversation) as a separate and distinct form of Enlightenment rhetoric appropriated from the humanist tradition by seventeenth-century European women intellectuals and adapted into proto-feminist forms of persuasion throughout the eighteenth century. In The Eloquence of Mary Astell, Sutherland describes sermo as the feminine milieu of eighteenth-century rhetoric. Donawerth’s most recent book, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900, characterizes many forms of women’s spoken and written interactions as conversation and examines “significant moments” in which seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century women adapt conversation theory to informal, small-group rhetoric by “looking at details of each woman’s life and each moment’s era, registering the differences as well as the similarities” (9-10). With the addition of conversation, the canonical landscape of Enlightenment rhetoric has broadened from a four-fold into a five-fold paradigm, which is now more inclusive of women. However helpful, this categorical model inevitably imposes some inaccurate subdivisions. To help tease out some of the overlap, I offer a brief explanation of each movement.
First, the neoclassical movement, a tradition inherited from French theorists such as Fenelon’s Dialogues sur l’ Eloquence (1717), generally upholds the Aristotelian/Ciceronian focus on the public man as orator. British neoclassical theories of rhetoric adapt the five classical canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery for usage in the English language and combine classical ideas with empiricism, rationalism, and a new branch of study known as natural philosophy (later psychology). Eighteenth-century neoclassical treatises on rhetoric include John Holmes’ The Art of Rhetoric (1739), John Lawson’s Lectures Concerning Oratory (1752), and John Ward’s Systems of Oratory (1759). Few eighteenth-century British women wrote academic treatises like these, and only two known works—the anonymously authored The Lady’s Rhetoric and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II—are dedicated solely to theorizing the rhetorical practices of women.
The belletristic movement, which developed from French neoclassical rhetoric, focuses on rhetorical theory’s intersections with the criticism of the literary, liberal, and fine arts. Belletristic theory combines the study of rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics with painting, architecture, drama, art, and history—all of the disciplines concerned with and requiring knowledge of taste, style, and criticism—under the umbrella of belles lettres. Belletristic theory gained popularity in conjunction with early eighteenth-century British works on virtue and taste by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Frances Hutcheson but reached its greatest scholarly expression in the latter half of the century when Scottish intellectuals, including Adam Smith, David Hume, Hugh Blair, and Lord Kames published philosophical treatises on rhetoric, taste, and belles letters. Bluestocking women were heavily involved in the discourse on Belletristic theories and their applications to literature, art, and architecture. Montagu’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760) and An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) are two examples of Bluestocking-authored works concerning belletristic topics. Critics of the belletristic approach, however, saw it devolve into the purview of amateur scholars, autodidacts, and ladies.
The elocutionary movement presents a third paradigm, one that is focused on the principles, practices, and professional uses of oratory. Derived from the classical term elocutio, which stood for “style” in Roman rhetorical theory, the eighteenth-century termelocution came rather to mean “delivery or performance.” Enlightenment elocution was largely gendered as masculine and tied to civic duty. Works of British elocutionary theory, including Thomas Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution (1763) and Lectures on Reading (1775), John Walker’s Elements of Elocution (1781), and Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia or Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery(1806), focused on voice and body control to achieve the most persuasive and effective oratory. The elocution theorists drew their examples from the contemporary theatrical stage as well as from ancient descriptions of classical orators. Thus, the first English actresses are important, but little credited, contributors to this movement.
The fourth paradigm consists of what was then a new branch of rhetorical theory that emerged in late eighteenth-century Britain, which Golden and Corbett have identified as the philosophical epistemic movement. This heavily theoretical movement, also known as the new rhetoric, focused on moral reasoning and the will of the audience. Influenced by Bacon, Locke, and Hume, examples of this theoretical model include Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Exemplary of the new rhetoric, Campbell aligns rhetoric with the new discipline of psychology and its scientific analysis of the processes of the mind. As the collections of their letters show, Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot were highly informed readers and contemporaries of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers who were the chief proponents of new rhetoric. Montagu corresponded regularly with Lord Kames, and Talbot composed works of proto-feminist Christian philosophy, which Carter published after Talbot’s death.
The Bluestockings are also the central focus of the conversation movement that scholars now recognize as a fifth, and feminine, branch of Enlightenment rhetoric. Rooted in the humanist genres of the dialog, the defense, and the philosophical letter, conversation became a socially acceptable form for women’s participation in private intellectual debates and correspondence. Feminist scholars trace conversation, as a semi-formal, private rhetorical practice back to the rhetorical theory of Mary Astell at the beginning of the eighteenth century and even further to seventeenth Parisian salons. Salon conversation practices continued throughout the eighteenth-century with Bluestockings, such as Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Talbot, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney, and Hannah More. The claiming of conversation as a rhetorical movement has opened a window into women’s contributions to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetoric. However, adding the conversation movement as a fifth category, or paradigm, of Enlightenment rhetoric is also an oversimplification. While the deep rhetoric of the eighteenth century deemed conversation as the only appropriate usage of women’s speech, delineating conversation as a movement of women’s rhetoric implies an artificial restriction on a universal and multi-gendered communication practice. The “conversation movement” effectively isolates women’s body of work and their concerns from the larger culture and exacerbates the problems of overlap and exclusion inherent in the original four-fold paradigm.
Furthermore, although the divisions of the fivefold paradigm usefully organize major trends in Enlightenment rhetorical theory, this model strains to fit works, authors, and practitioners neatly into prescribed categories. Even without the addition of conversation theory, the original four divisions “do not serve well as fixed categories into which we can unambiguously place individual treatises” (H. Lewis Ulman 5). The ambiguity of this system of classification is apparent in works that theorize across the paradigms, such as works that cover literary tropes (a focus of neoclassical rhetoric) as well as literary aesthetics and taste (a focus of belles lettres). Thomas Miller adds that the four paradigms do not align with the eighteenth-century practice of oratory, noting that “the epistemological emphases of the ‘new’ rhetoric have tended to overshadow the civic relations of rhetoric and moral philosophy” and “how citizens translate received beliefs into practical action to address public needs” (228). The current paradigms are more focused on rhetorical theory than rhetorical practice, which creates a methodological limitation by excluding non-academic materials, such as ephemeral and performative examples of proto-feminist Enlightenment rhetoric.
The overall inability of the fivefold paradigm to accurately describe women’s Enlightenment rhetoric exposes the limitations of such categorizations and serves as an entrée to try differing approaches. Traditional tactics of recovering figures and movements through the close reading of treatises and essays, while still valid, should be accompanied by interdisciplinary methods that can help to identify historical materials related to progressive forms of women’s communication and persuasion and to contextualize the social relationships, networks, and communities that promoted the expansion of women’s roles, rights, and professional life within the societies that they inhabited, and for posterity.
New Methods for Studying Women’s Rhetorics
New methodologies for exploring women’s rhetorics, such as venue-based, cultural materialist, thematic, and reception research, are now available, and researchers have employed them successfully in many studies of nineteenth-, twentieth, and twenty-first century women’s rhetorics. However, as Kate Ronald observes, with respect to new methods centering on rhetorical sites and strategies, “nineteenth-century North American rhetoric predominates” (145). The comparative neglect of British eighteenth-century women by rhetoric and composition scholars may stem from the fact that researchers in the field have more access, experience, and interests related to the history of American rhetoric, but the existence of considerably more and lengthier studies of Classical women’s rhetoric (Jarratt, Swearingen, Graban) and Renaissance European women’s rhetoric (Lunsford, Glenn, Donawerth, Wertheimer) seem to undercut this rationale. Over the past twenty years, new methodologies in feminist rhetorical historiography have made possible the rediscovery not just of female figures to add to the existing canon but previously unidentified realms and forms of women’s rhetoric.
Several strong examples of venue-based and interdisciplinary scholarship on nineteenth-century women’s rhetorics inform my approach. First, in her ground-breaking work on American women’s rhetoric Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life: 1866-1910, Nan Johnson focuses on the cultural site instead of concentrating on select figures (1). Johnson makes an important point: not all historic women’s rhetoric is feminist liberation rhetoric; much of it involves particular groups of women finding voices and the means to speak within their cultural circumstances. Cultural context is also a major factor in Lindal Buchanan’s Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors, in which she recommends examination of six topoi: 1) education—the rhetor’s training in delivery, 2) access to public platforms, 3) space between a rhetor and her audience(s) as a the physical tool for managing audiences’ perceptions, 4) genre and its accessibility and taboos in relation to gender, 5) bodylanguage and gendered physical attributes involved in delivery, and 6) rhetorical career or the impact of public speaking skills and professions on women’s lives (160 -163).
Carolyn Skinner applies a similar heuristic focused on the rhetorical speaker in Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-century America in which she analyzes “education and professional affiliations, the professional’s performance of expertise, authority, and status in rhetorical interactions with colleagues, patient/clients, and the public” (9). Like Buchanan, Skinner stresses the importance of considering situatedness and public perception in studying women’s professional ethos. Skinner asserts that we can better understand professional women’s “struggle to claim a persuasive ethos” by analyzing 1) the accessibility of the communication medium to women, 2) the attitudes about women in professions at that time, 3) the negotiation of moral values between the woman speaker and the audience, and 4) the power of the genre to grant rhetorical authority that supersedes the normal gender identity of the woman speaker (173-177). Skinner’s and Buchanan’s topoi are productive for understanding how cultural sites, professional institutions, and social mores impact a speaker’s delivery. As Skinner notes, women as “marginalized speakers and writers have developed persuasive ethe despite the belief that they were not supposed to be effective or authoritative communicators” (Skinner 4). Success as a speaker, or a writer, begins with a belief in oneself, a concept that we take for granted today but which traces back to the Enlightenment philosophy of individualism.
In addition to methods focused on speakers and contexts of delivery, another type of feminist methodology that informs my research is the study of rhetoric’s effects after initial delivery, in other words, how acts of persuasion extend beyond the immediate rhetorical situation. For example, Jessica Enoch’s article “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography Without the Tradition” explores remembering and gendering as two methods of analysis in the study of women’s rhetoric. Enoch’s first paradigm, remembering, is a material approach concerned with objects of public memory and the rhetorical purposes driving the historical preservation of women’s stories. The second paradigm, gendering, as Enoch explains, “relies on discursive, material, and embodied articulations and performances that create and disturb gendered distinctions, social categories, and asymmetrical power relationships” and extends beyond the human body to “a host of historical subjects, spaces, and activities” (68-69). Enoch explicitly connects her notion of gendering to Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance, citing Butler’s argument that masculinity and femininity are social constructions of identity that can and will change over time. The human body, as Butler argues, is “a surface whose permeability is politically regulated,” and “the various acts of gender create the idea of gender” (2499-2500). As Royster and Kirsch also note, in recent decades gender studies has moved well “beyond female-male binaries” to consider a wide repertoire of “social, political, and cultural realities of gender” (44). Gender studies as a postmodern field recognizes that individual gendered performance and gender fluidity have always coexisted as factors of the rhetorical ecology, alongside hegemonic norms of gender, in all cultures and historical ages. The study of gendering is highly pertinent to my project for examining repeated progressive acts, which slowly granted more rhetorical power for women within the Enlightenment rhetorical ecology.
The transference of rhetoric over time is yet another phenomenon that feminist researchers have studied. The concept of rhetorical accretion examines the effects and later appropriations of persuasive performances and displays. As Vicki Tolar Collins describes in “The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Methodology,” rhetorical accretion consists of the ripples of intended meanings that occur during reception and the appropriation and repackaging of a rhetorical performance by others, such as publishers and critics. The study of rhetorical accretion is particularly important when the speaker has no direct power. Women and other marginalized groups have made persuasive impressions by repeated linguistic and bodily displays, which then carry forward beyond the original audience to other groups. By expanding the focus of her study beyond the immediate rhetorical performance, Collins investigates larger rhetorical impacts. Collins’s work, in fact, presages recent ecological methodologies, such as reading a rhetor’s ethos as interruption, advocacy, and relation (Ryan, Myers, and Jones).
Keeping in mind these site-based, performative, and ecological analyses, my study follows other feminist historians of rhetoric in taking a context-driven approach. Using a combination of primary materials from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, along with current scholarly analyses from the fields of eighteenth-century historical, literary, and cultural studies, I conduct a rhetorical analysis of new and traditional British women’s roles, and their written and embodied methods of persuasive communication, across the long eighteenth century. My undertaking has involved a decade-long journey in research,encompassing a broad array of venues, public and private, in search of, as Andrea Lunsford suggests, the “forms, strategies and goals used by women as rhetorical” (6). In order to situate women from diverse backgrounds, professions, and social statuses into the larger conversations of British Enlightenment rhetoric, my methodology involves working with their primary texts, as well as secondary analyses of their lives and work, to identify significant sites, occasions, delivery methods, and watershed moments of progressive proto-feminist persuasion.
Like Johnson, my method of recovery centers on the cultural sites that created opportunities for women’s rhetoric. By cultural sites, I mean the physical space of the rhetorical venue, be it a place of real-time live performance or the virtual performance enacted by a written document that a speaker produces at one point in time and is then later received by readers. My examination adapts Lindal Buchanan’s methodology of studying rhetorical delivery as “a regendered fifth canon [that] . . . views rhetorical performance as the moment when dominant cultural values are enacted and, sometimes, are resisted and revised” (160). These performances may be oral or written, but, by keeping in mind the sites of delivery and reception, I attend to context and to audience as much as to text.
To consider the broader ecology in which proto-feminist rhetorical sites operated, I use gendering as a method to examine the sociopolitical contexts and the deep rhetoric that regulated the sites. To show the ground truth and trajectories of women’s rhetoric amid the larger ecology of the Enlightenment, my study interprets rhetorical accretions, which I see as not only the appropriation of rhetorical theory and performance by women rhetoricians but also as the audience’s reception of women’s rhetoric. By examining selected cultural artifacts, excerpts of primary texts, and anecdotes regarding speakers, audiences, and messages, my feminist methodology deconstructs rhetorical venues in which women operated and the accepted traditional feminine roles of queen, courtier, and mother, as well as innovative identities of actress, woman writer, and woman intellectual or learned lady. While broad and holistic coverage of British women’s rhetoric in the age of Enlightenment is my mission, the sheer volume of spoken, written, and embodied discourse that is available for study requires some restriction of scope. My focus is on predominantly secular rather than religious rhetorical performances. Although Quaker and Methodist women did lead as rhetorical speakers in their communities, preaching and church venues are beyond the scope of this study. However, many eighteenth-century British women claimed spiritual ethos and their duty to God as a defense for speaking out in secular contexts to argue on topics that were not primarily theological, such as women’s moral virtue, expansion of women’s roles, and the societal need for education and professional opportunities for women. This study also does not examine the voices Others that may have emerged from colonial counterflow, which brought women of color and other immigrants to the British Isles during the long eighteenth century. In selecting my examples for study, I have gravitated to those venues, speakers, acts, and artifacts that are striking and exemplary for their performance, argumentation, debate, dialog, or deliberation of Enlightenment values by, to, or focused on British women.
While some of these women were successful in publishing arguments in the masculine genres of the treatise and other traditional rhetorical forms, many more adopted feminine forms of communication, such as conversation, letters, novels, journals, and other literary projects, for rhetorical and didactic purposes. Still others took a more performative approach to persuasion through acting, teaching, leading or speaking at salons and clubs, and even through fashion statements. However, the theoretical notions of equality that emerged in the discourse of the British Enlightenment did not guarantee that all people, and certainly not all women, were granted equal public access. The opportunities that women had to participate in venues for rhetoric were dependent on their social class, family, professional, religious, and political affiliations; their occupations, education, and pastimes; and even their physical appearance and personality traits.
Cuprins
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A Revolution in Mood: Emblems, Embodiment, and Ephemera
2. On the Stage: Dramatized Women’s Rhetoric
3. In Sociable Venues: Clubs, Salons, and Debating Societies
4. On the Page: Written Rhetoric and Arguments About Education
Reflection on Findings
Appendix A: Eighteenth-century Terminology for Sex and Gender Identity
Appendix B: Table of Precedency Among Ladies
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A Revolution in Mood: Emblems, Embodiment, and Ephemera
2. On the Stage: Dramatized Women’s Rhetoric
3. In Sociable Venues: Clubs, Salons, and Debating Societies
4. On the Page: Written Rhetoric and Arguments About Education
Reflection on Findings
Appendix A: Eighteenth-century Terminology for Sex and Gender Identity
Appendix B: Table of Precedency Among Ladies
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Recenzii
“As debaters, actors, and experts on education, women of the British Enlightenment engaged in complex rhetorical practices, as Tasker Davis demonstrates. Her lively text reveals the impact of these women’s rhetoric on intellectual history and on modern feminism.”—Katherine H. Adams, author of Women, Art, and the New Deal, and coauthor ofAlice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign
“Elizabeth Tasker Davis directs much-needed attention to British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric—an understudied period in women’s rhetorical development. By taking readers beyond traditional academic boundaries to examine a wide range of women, genres, and sites from eighteenth-century British society, Tasker Davis clearly illuminates essential origins of feminist rhetoric.”—Lisa J. Shaver, author of Reforming Women: The Rhetorical Tactics of the American Female Moral Reform Society, 1834–1854
“With a deft hand, Elizabeth Tasker Davis rewrites traditional understandings of the European Enlightenment by tracing protofeminist acts of persuasion across a range of rhetorical ecologies during Britain’s long eighteenth century. Royal women and ladies of court, actresses, elite socialites, middle-class club women, professional authors, educators, and teenage girls—all emerge in Wit, Virtue, and Emotion as intriguing practitioners and theorists of the arts of persuasion. With this monograph, Tasker Davis has issued a powerful call to historians of women’s rhetorics to look more deeply and more expansively into the roots of our twenty-first-century feminisms.”—Jane Greer, editor of Girls and Literacy in America: Historical Perspectives to the Present
“Tasker Davis’s engaging work fills an important and significantly underexplored gap in rhetorical history: women’s rhetorical activity in the eighteenth century. This book challenges and reframes current rhetorical histories by examining the presence of the active, speaking female body in places such as salons, debate societies, and clubs, as well as women’s proliferation of written documents. While people do not usually think of the eighteenth century as a significant period of rhetorical activity for women, this book reminds us that not only were women rhetorically active at this time but this activity helped to shape and define both enlightenment rhetoric and the rhetorical practices of the nineteenth century.”—Lisa S. Mastrangelo, author of Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era
“While the Enlightenment is often depicted as an era dominated by the voices of male intellectuals, Tasker Davis has persuasively argued that social, intellectual, and economic change during this period created space for women’s rhetorical intervention in public life. Tasker Davis’s careful analysis of women’s roles in the theater, salons, debating societies, and newly accessible print media illuminates the varied and complex ways in which the rhetorical presence of women significantly shaped the Enlightenment’s intellectual landscape. This book makes a strong contribution to the study of women’s rhetoric and, more broadly, Enlightenment rhetorical history.”—Lois Peters Agnew, author of Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetoric
“Defining and adopting a lens of ‘progressive protofeminist women’s rhetoric,’ Elizabeth Tasker Davis deftly redirects attention to sites of British women’s rhetorical activity (the stage, clubs, debating societies, tea rooms, and the page). Doing for the long eighteenth century what Nan Johnson’s Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 did for the subsequent American period, Wit, Virtue, and Emotion relies on accessible archival materials to expand conceptions of what counts as Enlightenment rhetoric. Tasker Davis offers the postures of wit, virtue, and emotion as feminist counterparts to Artistotle’s conceptions of logos, ethos, and pathos—and in the process provides contemporary readers with another lens for refiguring issues of gender (in)equality, social class, and rhetorical activity.”—Lynée Lewis Gaillet, coeditor of Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work
“Elizabeth Tasker Davis directs much-needed attention to British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric—an understudied period in women’s rhetorical development. By taking readers beyond traditional academic boundaries to examine a wide range of women, genres, and sites from eighteenth-century British society, Tasker Davis clearly illuminates essential origins of feminist rhetoric.”—Lisa J. Shaver, author of Reforming Women: The Rhetorical Tactics of the American Female Moral Reform Society, 1834–1854
“With a deft hand, Elizabeth Tasker Davis rewrites traditional understandings of the European Enlightenment by tracing protofeminist acts of persuasion across a range of rhetorical ecologies during Britain’s long eighteenth century. Royal women and ladies of court, actresses, elite socialites, middle-class club women, professional authors, educators, and teenage girls—all emerge in Wit, Virtue, and Emotion as intriguing practitioners and theorists of the arts of persuasion. With this monograph, Tasker Davis has issued a powerful call to historians of women’s rhetorics to look more deeply and more expansively into the roots of our twenty-first-century feminisms.”—Jane Greer, editor of Girls and Literacy in America: Historical Perspectives to the Present
“Tasker Davis’s engaging work fills an important and significantly underexplored gap in rhetorical history: women’s rhetorical activity in the eighteenth century. This book challenges and reframes current rhetorical histories by examining the presence of the active, speaking female body in places such as salons, debate societies, and clubs, as well as women’s proliferation of written documents. While people do not usually think of the eighteenth century as a significant period of rhetorical activity for women, this book reminds us that not only were women rhetorically active at this time but this activity helped to shape and define both enlightenment rhetoric and the rhetorical practices of the nineteenth century.”—Lisa S. Mastrangelo, author of Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era
“While the Enlightenment is often depicted as an era dominated by the voices of male intellectuals, Tasker Davis has persuasively argued that social, intellectual, and economic change during this period created space for women’s rhetorical intervention in public life. Tasker Davis’s careful analysis of women’s roles in the theater, salons, debating societies, and newly accessible print media illuminates the varied and complex ways in which the rhetorical presence of women significantly shaped the Enlightenment’s intellectual landscape. This book makes a strong contribution to the study of women’s rhetoric and, more broadly, Enlightenment rhetorical history.”—Lois Peters Agnew, author of Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetoric
“Defining and adopting a lens of ‘progressive protofeminist women’s rhetoric,’ Elizabeth Tasker Davis deftly redirects attention to sites of British women’s rhetorical activity (the stage, clubs, debating societies, tea rooms, and the page). Doing for the long eighteenth century what Nan Johnson’s Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 did for the subsequent American period, Wit, Virtue, and Emotion relies on accessible archival materials to expand conceptions of what counts as Enlightenment rhetoric. Tasker Davis offers the postures of wit, virtue, and emotion as feminist counterparts to Artistotle’s conceptions of logos, ethos, and pathos—and in the process provides contemporary readers with another lens for refiguring issues of gender (in)equality, social class, and rhetorical activity.”—Lynée Lewis Gaillet, coeditor of Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work
Descriere
Author Elizabeth Tasker Davis rereads accepted histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British rhetoric, claiming a greater variety and power of women’s rhetoric. This recovery of British women’s performative and written roles as speakers, spectators, authors, and readers in diverse venues counters the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric.