06/11/2014

Rhetoric, History, and Women's Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak

David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs

Series Title: Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication

Routledge (04/2013)

ISBN- 0415661056

Description: This collection traces the shifting arc of women's oratorical training in the US as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth. Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking.