Bradford 1

Natalie Bradford

WRI 306

Dr. Erin Branch

The 19th century saw a rise of female rhetoricians advocating for a variety of movements

including Temperance, abolitionism, and suffrage. A lack of formal education in rhetoric,

combined with the restricting imposition of gender roles, led the women involved in these

movements to develop specific rhetorical moves to adapt to and overcome societal limits. Female

rhetoricians during this period were barred from engagement in the public sphere, as speaking in

public, especially in front of audiences that contained men, was seen as shameful and unchaste. It

is my intention to examine the means through which female rhetoricians in this historical

moment adapted gender norms to overcome these limitations and forward their rhetorical aims,

particularly as writers. I will first look at the forms of rhetorical educations which were available

to women and how concepts of gender such as republican womanhood provided an avenue into

public concerns and activist engagements. I will then look at the rhetorical work of women

composed during the nineteenth century, including Sarah Grimké, Ann Plato, Charlotte Forten,

and various novelists. I will conclude with a brief analysis of the function of the rhetorical moves

made by these women, particularly how they shape our perception of their work in the present.

Rhetorical Educations for Women

In “Nineteenth-Century United States Conduct Book Rhetoric by Women,” Jane

Donawerth examines the writing of conduct books by women during this century as a “tradition

of nonacademic rhetoric for women” through which women taught other women and girls how to

speak, read, and write (5). These conduct books provide context for how women during this

period were educated—what genres they were given access to and what reasoning they were
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given to motivate their studies. They were addressed to a middle-class audience united by an

emphasis on the domestic ideal of gender roles and theorized the roles that women writing and

speaking could take in the culture of the time they were written (Donawerth 5-6). Authors, such

as Lydia Sigourney, then used such concepts as the republican ideal of womanhood to craft a

sphere of rhetoric for women that would include instruction in topics deemed appropriate such as

conversation skills, letter-writing, and reading aloud for entertainment (Donawerth 7).

Women’s education was designed to enable them to “properly influence their children”

and to render them “agreeable” and “knowledgeable” conversationalists (Donawerth 10).

Through the separate spheres theory that dominated gender concerns, women were able to argue

for their own education so that they might better care for their children, especially their sons, and

because teaching was thought of as natural to women. Though this theory was limiting in many

ways for the women of this period, it also allowed them to claim “a major role in passing on the

cultural capital of knowledge and values,” which would in turn provide for their increasing

presence in activist causes (Donawerth 7). This incentive for study required that women’s

education take particular note of correctness. To this end, conduct books adapted some of their

formative ideas from classical rhetoric. As women’s primary rhetorical obligations were to have

sensible contributions to conversation and to ground such contributions in morality, an approach

based on Quintilian’s “good man speaking well” was befitting for their instruction (Donawerth

8).

Female rhetorical theorists, such as those responsible for writing conduct books,

gradually recognized that there was power in domestic speech, delivered privately, in addition to

public speeches (Donawerth 11). The persuasive abilities of women, particularly as granted to

them by the rising sentimental culture, was acknowledged by Sigourney in her urging of young
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women to direct their conversational partners, especially young men, in such a way that would

be beneficial to their characters. A “good conversation,” according to the writers of conduct

books, is one that is “useful,” industrious, proper, elegant, and respectful of others, qualities that

“amount to a sentimental adaptation of traditional rhetoric to new purposes in United States and

feminine society” (Donawerth 9). In providing such “good conversations,” women became

influential in the shaping and continuation of societal values. As the century progressed, conduct

books began to take on increasingly radical projects. Jennie Willing, herself a methodist

preacher, used her conduct books to claim a “private and a public voice” for women, urging

those who felt called upon to take up preaching and separating the rather conservative genre in

which she was working from its previous promotion of separate spheres (Donawerth 14). This

move was able to succeed as it drew upon the labors of her predecessors, as well as from cultural

movements to assign women greater clout in matters of virtue and spirituality.

These texts demonstrate that women were, in fact, given access to a very particular form

of rhetorical education, though it differed decidedly from that received by their upper-class male

counterparts in universities. The conduct books analyzed by Donawerth indicate how the female

rhetoricians of the nineteenth-century came to claim some of their most effective rhetorical

strategies such as letter-writing. Because they had been educated in these forms, and because

they were well-suited to negotiate the gendered limitations placed on women as speakers, women

could take up these genres in their work as activists. As more women rhetoricians became

engaged in their causes in increasingly public ways, so to did conduct books become

increasingly reformist. These changes are reflective of the fact that, over the course of the

nineteenth-century, women were able to carve for themselves a greater and more varied place in

public discourse.
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In Regendering Delivery, Lindal Buchanan looks outside of the conduct books treated by

Donawerth for ways in which young women’s education prepared them, perhaps inadvertently,

for entry into public discourse. Prior to the twentieth century, reading was treated as an oral skill,

rather than something to be practiced silently (Buchanan 12). The inclusion in conduct books of

chapters on reading aloud for parlor entertainment is one example of how such an oral skill could

have been practiced, but it would have been put to more consequential use as well, such as with

the reading of sections of the Bible, a skill deemed necessary for all Christians by the Protestants.

According to Buchanan, the study of how to properly use voice, expression, and gesture in their

reading was a source of rhetorical education for antebellum women that, though crucial to the

development of the female rhetoricians of the nineteenth-century, is oft disregarded (12). With

the development of such elocutionary abilities, both young men and women were prepared to

shift their practice from reading to speech-making, though women were not encouraged to do so

(Buchanan 12).

Buchanan also examines the ways through which women’s educations were purposefully

manipulated to limit women’s functionality in society. In quoting Avril McMelland’s

observation that “women have generally been excluded from whatever education was perceived

to be of the most value,” Buchanan argues that the cultural coding of specific areas of study as

“masculine” contributed to the development and enforcement of separate spheres (14). She

credits the economic changes associated with industrialization with driving the creation of the

cult of true womanhood, a feminine gender ideal based on piety, purity, submissiveness, and

domesticity, which she considers to have severed even further what little connection to the public

sphere women had under the republican motherhood ideal (26). Female rhetorician’s increasing

presence in the public sphere led to changes in educational material for girls intended to decrease
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their exposure to the skills that enabled them to competently address civic issues and thereby

maintain the status quo separation of spheres (13).

Women’s Rhetorics in Practice

Women developed various strategies to incorporate that which they had learned in their

limited educations, and that which they knew of society, into their work as rhetoricians. Because

it was their character that was attacked when they engaged in public speaking, women devised

ways of performing identities that enabled them to deliver their messages in familiar, non-

threatening language. The implementation of traditional rhetoric made their arguments far more

effective than they otherwise might have been, by rendering them acceptable to the ideologies

held by their audiences. The identities that women were able to invoke through their rhetoric

were influenced by their class, race, age, and physical appearance, but tended to center around

ideas of modesty, religion, and motherhood. Women carefully curated their speech, dress, and

body language to enact such personas as the “noble maid” and “wise mother” as both were non-

threatening and fell well within acceptable, even laudable, roles of traditional femininity.

Women also made efforts to bring their rhetoric more into the sphere of the “private,” such as by

writing epistles.

In 1836, Sarah Grimké, an ardent abolitionist, published a scathing epistle addressed to

the clergy of the south, urging them to take up the abolitionist cause. Grimké was raised in the

south in a wealthy, slave-owning family, and, as such, benefited greatly from the privilege

afforded to her race and class. One such benefit was her access to tutors, whom she shared with

her brothers, though she was denied the formal education that they received (Carlacio 250). This

education worked to prepare her to advocate for her cause with the rhetorical adeptness that she

demonstrated in crafting her epistle.

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Through the epistle form, Grimké was able to circumvent the limitations placed on

women as speakers and advocates in a society that would have her be seen and not heard.

Because it was considered shameful for women to speak publicly, especially for audiences

comprised of both men and women, such an address would not have been in Grimké’s best

interest. Indeed, despite her reputation as a staunch supporter of the causes in which she engaged

herself, Grimké seldom spoke publicly, and instead articulated her views in writing (Carlacio

250). Her choice of the letter form cleverly navigates this fraught space between the private

sphere in which society would have had women contain themselves and the public one which she

needed to enter in order to be heard.

Historically, women in the upper- and middle-classes were frequently called upon in

epistolary communication to fulfill their responsibilities as family managers and in guild affairs,

so that the genre gave women an opportunity to voice their opinions and concerns where they

would otherwise be neglected (Carlacio 252). Grimké seized upon this tradition of personal

address to present her critique to an empowered audience through a form of communication that

was ostensibly private. As the leading figures within the church, her audience was one in

possession of power and privilege and it would have been unthinkable for her to directly engage

with them in a public forum had she even had access to one (Carlacio 248). She balances the

usage of a more traditionally “feminine” against some of the more masculine moves that she

makes within her argumentation. Her intention to reach a broader audience than the one she

directly addresses through the publication of her epistle and her direct discursive style step

outside the conventionally approved forms of rhetoric for female writers, but this is tempered by

her positioning of her work as a confidential exchange. This also aided her in crafting an

effective ethical appeal. In modeling her address after the epistles of St. Paul, Grimké associates
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herself with those working to spread the Christian message and also indicates the depth of her

knowledge on Christian doctrine (Carlacio 253). The epistle genre also enables her to craft her

rhetoric in response to the kairotic moment that she constructs alongside her audience (Carlacio

254).

Many of these same rhetorical moves may also be seen in the efforts of Eleanor

Roosevelt, nearly a century later, as she worked to construct a space for herself in the role of first

lady. This position was, and continues to be, governed by the “prevailing social norms of

femininity,” and so enacted many of the same constraints on Roosevelt as Grimké had faced,

though society had progressed in the decades between the lives of these two women (Blair 417).

Like Grimké, Roosevelt used the form of personal letters to create a public space in which she

could share her own ideas and respond to her audience, while remaining appropriately within the

sphere of femininity (Blair 419). Her use of letters echoes many of goals which Grimké hoped to

achieve through the form, particularly in creating exigence and evoking her own presence and

that of her audience when both could not be in the same space, as well as addressing her own

ethos as first lady. Like Grimké, Roosevelt “reiterated and reinforced” traditional gender roles

but also expanded them in order to address her concerns (Blair 427). Not only does Roosevelt’s

adoption of the letter form illuminate to a greater extent some of what Grimké achieved through

her own use of the genre, the fact of its continued usage into the twentieth century underlines its

rhetorical effectiveness.

Women of the nineteenth century made use of other rhetorical strategies in addition to

epistles. Ann Plato and Charlotte Forten were African-American writers in the antebellum north

who incorporated European rhetorical traditions into their work to forward their own causes. As

they attempted to encourage anti-racist action on the part of white Americans, Forten and Plato
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utilized appeals to sympathy and sensibility, as they were conceived of by George Campbell as

“the means of exciting in the hearers a passion conducive to the speaker’s purpose” (Xavier 440).

The cultural feminization of sensibility functioned in favor of women rhetoricians—because

depth of feeling was seen as a proper trait of womanhood, they were able to make powerful

emotional appeals. As part of the cult of true womanhood, this feminization of sensibility

rendered their rhetoric conversant with the ideology of the culture in which they wrote even as

they challenged it. Due to their race, Forten and Plato had to accommodate their identities not

only as women, but as women of color within their rhetoric, making the importance of their

navigation of gender norms even more tantamount to their success than the privileged Sarah

Grimké. The appeals to sympathy deployed by these writers would have aligned themselves with

a white audience, seen then as more “civilized” and therefore more sensitive to the plight of

others (Xavier 440).

Forten, in her poetry and journals, makes use of rhetorical devices that, according to

Campbell, “operate chiefly by sympathy,” such as exclamation and apostrophe (Xavier 441).

Plato’s essays include conscientious invocations of Christianity, through which she extends the

idea of redemption expansively and ties her own accomplishments as an academic to her faith,

hoping to appeal to her audience’s religious sentiments and to grant herself a more authoritative

ethos (Xavier 448). Both writers also made use of the “rhetoric of democracy” and “conduct

book domesticity” alongside their pathetic appeals to present rhetorically effective personae

(Xavier 451). In doing so, these women were able to negotiate a space for themselves and their

rhetoric in the exclusionary society in which they were writing.

The presentation of female public speakers in contemporary fiction is another means

through which women were able to work through the societal constraints placed upon them as
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rhetoricians. According to Bizzell, the greatest threat that speaking publicly presented to women

was in undermining their sexual purity, a charge leveled against women who ventured outside of

the private sphere since the Renaissance (385). The Grimké sisters were examples of female

rhetoricians who were the recipients of such vitriol. Despite the fact that they appeared in public

exclusively in the modest dress of Quakers, it was hypothesized that their public engagement

with abolitionism would lead them to give speeches in the nude (Bizzell 386). To avoid

accusations of being “unwomanly,” rhetoricians could perform personae deemed suitably

feminine such as the “noble maid” for unmarried women, or the “wise mother,” for those who

were married (Bizzell 386). These roles were intended to emphasize the physical modesty and

sexual morality of the speakers to link their activism to acceptable, domestic values.

The female public speaker, when she does appear in fiction, is often used as a vehicle for

reasserting the risk to women’s chastity that speaking poses. Male authors such as Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Henry James, in their works The Blithedale Romance and The Bostonians,

respectively, used their narratives to present characterizations of women that expressed their

perturbation over women’s activism (Bizzell 387). In the hands of female authors, however, such

narratives were used to defend the female public speaker. Luisa May Alcott, Frances E. W.

Harper, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps were fiction writers who used their work to address activist

causes in which they were involved. One of the projects in which they became engaged was the

construction of narrative “chastity warrants” in defense of female public speakers (Bizzell 388).

Each writer presents her character with tests of her chastity, designed to answer concerns

that women speakers must be sexually impure, and has her overcome them, so that the narratives

may ameliorate the fears of society. The female characters’ speaking is excused by their reliance

on feminine tropes such as speaking “as a channel for the divine” or in an expression of empathy
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and by their enacting the noble maid and wise mother personas (Bizzell 395). The knowledge

that the authors provide on their characters’ virginity, morality, physical unattractiveness, and

appropriate, feminine goals help to construct these personas. Harper, as a woman of color, paid

particular attention to impressing the dictates of the cult of true womanhood as a means of

countering racist stereotypes about the sexuality of African-American women (Bizzell 391). The

women in the novels provide depictions of how women could be speakers without jeopardizing

their chastity, and so work to vindicate actual women speakers.

Conclusion

By privileging the characteristics of “true womanhood,” female rhetoricians effectively

presented their arguments to traditional audiences, but they also curtailed their own societal

progress by reinforcing and legitimizing oppressive standards. The domestic ideology of the

nineteenth-century was not universally applicable to all the women who comprised American

society. As the cult of true womanhood was, according to Buchanan, “designed to reconcile

women to their enforced leisure and endow them with a new sense of purpose” following the

Industrial Revolution, it mostly affected white women of the upper- and middle-classes, whose

families could afford for them to remain in the domestic realm (26-27). The focus on this identity

in rhetoric was especially detrimental for those who could not easily access this feminine ideal,

such as women of color and working class women, as can be seen through the intensive efforts of

Forten, Plato, and Harper to access even the same audiences as their white counterparts. In this

way, this mode of rhetoric contributed to women’s oppression even as it provided empowerment.

In her analysis of the humanitarian work of modern celebrities such as Angelina Jolie,

Emma Watson, and Nicole Kidman, Susan Hopkins examines how women position themselves

in accordance with extant systems of power to secure a receptive audience for their rhetoric.
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Hopkins treats this performance of hegemonic femininity as an example of activists failing to

challenge the logic that created the inequities of society in the first place. Although, of course,

social restraints change over time, and that which today registers as support of patriarchal

capitalism would have been revolutionary in the nineteenth-century, women presenting

themselves in alignment with these systems still has a dual effect. The orientation of their

rhetoric in accordance with dominant ideologies like the cult of true womanhood certainly made

their advocation more effective, but it also legitimized the systems they were working to critique.

Such considerations raise the concern expressed by Audre Lorde in 1984 that “the master’s tools

will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Considered from the other side, however, policing the efforts of women to improve their

own and the situations of others with the tools available to them does not seem to be the most

productive approach to studying historical women’s rhetorics. Nicole Kidman telling Australian

women that they are all sisters may seem to be a hollow, liberal feminist platitude, but Sarah

Grimké claiming sisterhood with the enslaved women of America is vastly different. Carol

Mattingly, in her discussion of the rhetoric used by women active in the Temperance movement,

addresses the “binarisms” applied to women’s rhetoric by nineteenth-century scholars as either

“conservative” or “radical” (2). While this dichotomy posits Temperance women as

“conservative and complicit in their own oppression,” Mattingly views them as “strong, sensible

women” who “strove, pragmatically, to improve life for themselves and for others” (1). This

position may easily be expanded to include abolitionist, suffragettes, and other women speakers

of the time who are dismissed by modern progressives for their representation of the cult of true

womanhood or religious causes (Mattingly 8). The “respectable” ethos built by nineteenth-

century women in their rhetorical efforts may, retroactively, seem to undermine their credibility
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as reformers, but, in the moment it was “part of an overall strategy for gradually reconstructing

and molding” societal preconceptions that gave women a voice where before they had none

(Mattingly 5).
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Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia. “Chastity Warrants for Women Public Speakers in Nineteenth-Century

American Fiction.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, Aug. 2010, pp. 385–401.

Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/02773945.2010.501050.

Blair, Diane Marie. “‘I Want You To Write Me’: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Use of Personal Letters as

a Rhetorical Resource.” Western Journal of Communication, vol. 72, no. 4, Oct. 2008,

pp. 415–33. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/10570310802446064.

Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery. SIU Press, 2005.

Carlacio, Jami. “‘Ye Knew Your Duty, But Ye Did It Not’: The Epistolary Rhetoric of Sarah

Grimke.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 21, no. 3, July 2002, pp. 247–63. Crossref,

doi:10.1207/S15327981RR2103_3.

Donawerth, Jane. “Nineteenth-Century United States Conduct Book Rhetoric by Women.”

Rhetoric Review, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2002, pp. 5–21. Crossref,

doi:10.1207/S15327981RR2101_1.

Hopkins, Susan. “UN Celebrity ‘It’ Girls as Public Relations-Ised Humanitarianism.”

International Communication Gazette, vol. 80, no. 3, Apr. 2018, pp. 273–92. Crossref,

doi:10.1177/1748048517727223.

Mattingly, Carol. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. SIU Press,

2000.

Xavier, Silvia. “Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy in the Rhetoric of Charlotte Forten and

Ann Plato, African-American Women of the Antebellum North.” Rhetoric Review, vol.

24, no. 4, Oct. 2005, pp. 438–56. Crossref, doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2404_4.