Synthesis/Reflection

Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing:

Rhetorical Regulation and Resistance

During the nineteenth century, educational opportunities granted to women in composition and rhetorical practices increased exponentially, though these practices were largely gendered and in alignment with the prevailing conservative values ascribed to women and their “natural” sphere of domesticity, separated from the public world of men. Elementary level education was common and expected for women during this time, but near the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a greater push for furthering the education of women and making it complimentary, and in some cases equal, with that offered to men. The American ethos privileged educating women with “useful” knowledge, as opposed to the “ornamental” knowledge popular in Europe and amongst the upper classes, and thus more rigorous and academically challenging curriculums were designed and implemented at a variety of colleges that began to admit women at this time. Despite wider acceptance for women’s higher education, many critics feared that access to education would lead to women demanding inclusion in the male public sphere and/or contribute to dissatisfaction with their own “natural” sphere of home and domestic duty.

There were basically three different types of colleges open to women in the second half of the nineteenth century. Women’s seminaries (of which Western was one) admitted only women and based their curriculums on challenging academic instruction combined with religious piety, service, and domestic duties. In the early days, women as young as fifteen might have been admitted with proper preparation, and the education lasted only three years. But by the end of the century, many women’s seminaries became women’s colleges, as was the case with Western, and increased their course of study to four years. Though this type of institution satisfied cultural imperatives for women’s piety, domesticity, and service, critics feared the ramifications of “women left to themselves” without the overseeing authority of male guidance.

The other two types of college-level institutions were both co-educational. Normal Schools, which were designed to train teachers (later transitioning to Teachers Colleges), admitted both men and women, and are reputed by some to have offered more liberal, student-centered educational opportunities, though this assertion is contested. Other offerings for women were previously male-only colleges that, usually because of social or financial pressure, admitted women into their ranks, though sometimes continued to separate the sexes in particular areas. Though this type of education ostensibly offered more equal opportunities for women, they often reported hostile or marginalizing attitudes, making their experiences less than optimal. After a few decades of reticent inclusion, many formerly male colleges relegated women to “female colleges” within their campuses, often slowly defunding these segregated spaces to the detriment of women’s opportunities and success. Critics of co-educational colleges worried about possible compromises in women’s chastity, as well as the “feminization” of campuses and/or the “masculinization” of female students who attended them.

The discourses of containment and empowerment run together within the course of women’s higher education in the nineteenth century, both in the literature in general and in the Western experience in particular. Originally a seminary school designed after “the Holyoke System,” Western employed rigorous academics, religious dedication, and domestic service within a highly regulated environment of surveillance and control. At the same time, as the nineteenth century progressed, Western seems to have supported a broadening sense of womanhood, and broadened its rhetorical scope to include elocution (specifically for public speaking, rather than the popular “parlor rhetoric” of the time), structured debates, and the delivery of publically engaged lectures by its students. Though writing assignments were highly regulated and contained, the letters written by students show a greater variety of expression, and often contradict the “Western experience” as represented by the contemporaneous writings of faculty.

As outlined by scholars such as Nancy Cott, the segregation of women into a separate sphere allowed for bonds to form between them that often crossed class lines. The culturally held belief in women’s “natural superior morality,” and the acceptability of women joining church-related women’s groups, led to what would become more politically active women’s movements in the following century. The lack of regular interference by men within segregated groups of women may have facilitated greater focus upon women’s issues, and within educational settings such as Western, allowed full attention to be paid to the accomplishments of women, rather than having those accomplishments overlooked or denigrated as they were at some co-educational facilities.

In considering my own research into the Western Archives, as well as the secondary sources supporting it, I am struck by the multiple conflicting discourses that I find within these narratives where the “cultural party line” is espoused within some writings and resisted in others. Though I have found few verifiable composition assignment pieces done for the weekly writing assignments, I have learned that 1) these assignments were dreaded and despised but that 2) the level of writing I have found within letters and student-published essays is of a very high quality. Additionally, there is evidence that some of the writing conducted by students toward the latter part of the century engaged public issues and that rhetorical preparation was encouraged, specifically for entrance into the “masculine sphere” of public rhetoric. Given the pious, religiously centered focus found at the middle of the century, this seems like a notable transition to make in such a short time, especially given the deeply conservative values espoused by Western, at least as evidenced in its authorized writings.

Though Western’s early years appear to be extremely structured and regulated, there is also a seeming trend to encourage women to enter rhetorical spheres that were typically considered “masculine,” using texts designed for men, even when women’s rhetorical texts were available. Women were apparently encouraged to “write from their own experiences” in a somewhat proto-expressivist style, thus authorizing them to consider their experiences rhetorically, especially within the often conventionally gendered topics that appear to have been selected or suggested for them. Though writing about these experiences as women in some sense further inscribed these experiences upon them as gendered subjects, they also required a reflection and rhetorical distance from those experiences wherein critical considerations may have had space to take root. Through the act of writing, their gendered experiences were no longer invisible, intangible givens as they were translated into discursive objects during the dreaded three-hour composition sessions every Saturday morning. These composed experiences, then, were recited weekly and open to critique and feedback, while at the same time exposing within a semi-public space the similarly or differently gendered discourses of their peers.

Perhaps it is this transition from the wholly private domestic experience to semi-public academic one that allowed women students in the nineteenth century to begin to push the boundaries of their marginalized, silenced position in society into new territories. Within the relative safety of the all-female seminary or college, women were able to hone their rhetorical skills, reciting, orating, debating, and composing beyond the surveillance of male authority. The widening of the “women’s sphere” to include public spaces, then, can be viewed as a rhetorical, discursive act where the women at Western inadvertently found themselves “taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there” (Butler 185). These rhetorical tools, originally fashioned by men for men, contributed to a growing social and political agency amongst women, newly college educated, to find voice outside of their culturally sanctioned spaces. By studying the composition practices and rhetorical training received by women at Western, it is possible to map these transitions as they occurred in the interstices, disjunctions, and competing narratives found within the writings of the Western Archive.

Work Cited:

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.