“Monitoring Columbia’s Daughters: Writing as Gendered Conduct”
With greater access and attention given to educating women, textbooks written specifically for women appeared where “white women’s rhetorical training was closely aligned with a particular kind of moral and civic conduct – gendered conduct” (47). By tracing textbooks produced by Donald Fraser, including revisions and different editions of similar works, the authors show developments in gender biases as reflected in this instructional material. Civic rhetoric was viewed as integral to the maintenance of the Republic, with women’s training in these areas important for the upholding of American ideals, largely in their roles as mothers to sons who required this training as part of their civic duty. In this sense, though mothering is still viewed as a private, domestic affair, because of its potential effects upon the state and society, “such mothering is ultimately a public role” (52). Additionally, rhetorical training was deemed necessary for women in order to guard against the male persuasive powers of seduction, thus in America at this time was “the notion that seduction and illiteracy are linked” (53). Fraser’s texts somewhat surprisingly move from a substantial, rigorous rhetorical training for women in post-colonial American, to the more restrictive “learning as conduct” mode, then finally to simpler, morality-based education for women by 1800 (63). This trend of movement from expansion to constriction of rhetorical education for women somewhat mimics the move by formerly all-male colleges that admitted women to “change their minds” as women excelled, only to exclude them again. It also demonstrates a tacit knowledge of the powers of rhetorical training, where regulation of that knowledge, or a channeling of its strategies into more culturally-endorsed, gendered avenues, seemed important in order to maintain the status quo and stabilize the gender inequalities so prevalent at the time.
Works Cited:
Eldred, Janet Carey and Peter Mortensen. “Monitoring Columbia’s Daughters: Writing as Gendered Conduct.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23.3/4 (Summer-Autumn 1994): 46-69. Print.