Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. - Review - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Samantha Blackmon

Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 408. $49.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.

Through a variety of circumstances women have been excluded from the history of rhetoric. Molly Meijer Wortheimer has attempted to examine women's rhetorical history and the ways that women have affected traditional rhetorical theory from their positions of marginality. It is important to reclaim the voices of these marginalized women because by doing so we enrich our definitions of rhetoric and our understanding of rhetorical theory.

This text consists of eighteen essays that are thematically separated into five sections. The first of these sections focuses on the patriarchal conditions that historically rendered the voices of women silent. This includes Cheryl Glenn's essay, "Locating Aspasia on the Rhetorical Map," which focuses on Aspasia of Miletus, a 5th century B.C.E. female Greek subject-ally, who was uncommonly brilliantly educated and by whose works men were educated. Aspasia was one of the rare female intellectuals who was mentioned by her male counterparts. She colonized the patriarchal realm of intellectual activity, but her colony was quickly (re)appropriated by men. Glenn argues that if we take Aspasia's role in history into account, we acknowledge that history is not neutral territory and we also acknowledge that Aspasia, and women like her, challenge the history of rhetoric in a way that has ramifications for past studies as well as for future research.

Part 2 is a sampler of rhetorical practices and includes essays that address female rhetorical practices from Pharaonic Egypt to nineteenth-century black women. In her essay, "Black Women on the Speaker's Platform (1832-1899)," Shirley Wilson Logan argues that speaking of the rhetorical activities of African American women in the nineteenth century can be equated to speaking of their advocacy for change. She focuses on the speeches of Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Maria Stewart in an attempt to show how women used their rhetorical skills in the public realm to work at righting the wrongs they saw in society These women did not write books and left no written records but they did help to establish a tradition of political activism among African American women. Logan surmises that these women were the embodiment of their messages for social change.

The third part deals specifically with women's writing that was sanctioned by religious beliefs and includes Julia Dietrich's essay, "The Visionary Rhetoric of Hildegard of Bingen," which analyzes the rhetorical activities of Hildegard, an eleventh-century mystic and abbess who was a writer of visionary tracts, morality plays, medical handbooks, and Latin hymns. Dietrich points out the discrepancy between Hildegard's words and deeds. While she claimed that women were weak individuals created to bear and nurture children, and therefore unworthy of the priesthood, she fought, using her will and her strong familial connections, to separate her group of nuns from the male monastic foundation with which they had been associated. Through her espousal of the traditional weakness and necessary submissiveness of women, Hildegard created a rhetoric that allowed her to write with the authority of the divine and to use her marginality as a source of credibility According to Dietrich, Hildegard shows us that innovation within the traditional patriarchal realm was possible, even at the hand (and in the hand) of a woman. Hildegard helped to make northern Europe accustomed to hearing women speak authoritatively, and resuscitated the protest tradition through which the marginalized "Other" used her marginality as a platform from which to speak.

The fourth part of the text examines the strategies that women have used to appropriate intellectual and educational territories previously held exclusively by men. Contained within this section is Nancy Weitz Miller's essay, "Ethos, Authority, and Virtue for Seventeenth-Century Women Writers: The Case of Bathsua Makin's An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen," in which Miller considers Makin's authorial decision to write anonymously under the persona of a man interested in his daughter's education. Miller claims that Makin makes moderate demands and justifies them in a manner that would appeal to the self-interest of men. Specifically, Makin sets forth the argument that educated women make better wives, helpmates, and educators to their sons.

The fifth and final thematic section of the text discusses a variety of revisions that women have made to their recently inherited rhetorical traditions. This section includes Jane Donawerth's "Textbooks for New Audiences: Women's Revisions of Rhetorical Theory at the Turn of the Century," which analyzes the theories of female rhetoricians who wrote textbooks at the turn of the century in the United States. Through this analysis Donawerth attempts to ascertain the effect that race, as well as gender, has on theory. She examines the research of previous scholars and adds research of her own to compare and contrast the writings of Gertrude Buck at the turn of the century, and Hallie Quinn Brown and Mary Augusta Jordan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Donawerth finds, through this investigation, that these women wrote because there was a segment of the population that was not well served by texts written by and for white men, that they experimented with gendered pronouns, and that they relied more heavily on conversation as a model for discourse and teaching than did their male counterparts.