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The House of My Sojourn
Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority
By Jane S. Sutton
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1715-7
Chapter One
In the Palindrome of the
Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of form. -Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
The story around the Portrait Monument-its celebration in the Rotunda and its authorization in the basement-alerted me to the existence of another movement, one of women going down at the same time as they are recognized and ostensibly included within the house. My personal experience of seeing the statue in the basement led me to think about the house I am in: it is rhetoric. Yet the Capitol remains part of the complex that offers a vision of rhetoric as a small house where people assemble and use its process for making decisions.
During my first visit as well as subsequent visits to the Capitol, the awareness that women-Mott, Stanton, and Anthony-are in the basement is always immediate to me. But then someone would say, "Oh, it's just a statue." To this, some part of me would agree. But as I began to connect my perception of being in the basement with my imagination of seeing the Capitol as the house of rhetoric, I discovered another staircase. Besides the one in the Capitol, there is one housed in the scholarship. So, it isn't just a statue; rather, the statue is emblematic of women as they are written down in rhetoric.
I begin again on a staircase, but this time I focus on an imaginary one. To bring it into view, I give an extended example, consisting of a brief summary of the academic climb up and down of women in rhetoric during seventy years of scholarship. Let the stairs begin with the 1930s and end at the top with the 2000s.
In the 1930s, the question of women in public life compelled Doris G. Yoakam to write a dissertation surveying the public-speaking activities of more than fifty women and then to argue that they had made a significant contribution to the field of speech. Yoakam hoped her findings would help provide future students, including "thousands of girls in universities and colleges ... who are studying speech," with texts that more accurately reflected the past. Also produced during the 1930s were two major textbooks on public speaking for women. Both establish a need for women to study public speaking on the grounds that change and great reforms are the fruits of women speaking in the public forum. Similarly, Eudora Ramsay Richardson's text justifies the teaching of public speaking to women, stating, "Women in our country stand the chance of losing all that has been gained." There is reason to believe the ground "that seemed so solid" is slipping "under our feet," Richardson said. She counts the number of women in state legislatures and in political organizations and finds nineteen fewer women in 1935 than in 1931. She contributes some of the decline to section 213A of the National Economy Act: "School boards and businesses, as well as governmental and state departments, were ruling out married women and giving preference to men, particularly in executive and administrative appointments."
After Richardson came J. V. Garland's Public Speaking for Women, arguably one of the best collections of speeches by women in the early part of the twentieth century. When this text was published in 1938, it had the full support and backing of over two dozen women's organizations. A majority of the speeches in Garland's collection display women in politics, business, and education. For example, Ruth de Young, women's editor of the Chicago Tribune, wrote a speech in which she underscores the work of "12,000,000 business and professional women" on the American landscape as well as "30,000 women in the United States with the power of the vote." And there is a speech by C. Ormond Williams, honorary president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs. In her radio address, Williams imagines the political power of women through their work in the service industry, especially as telephone operators, propelling women into positions of authority. Given these inroads, Richardson's warning that the grounds of women's inclusion were slipping under their feet seemed pessimistic at worst and exaggerated at best.
In the 1940s, Jessie Haven Butler wrote a public-speaking text for women in response to the decline in the number of women studying public speaking. She emphasized the importance of mingling women's talk with men's talk, for "democracy is government by talk." In this vein, Butler said, "women should not let men write their speeches." At Butler's class on public speaking (held at Pierce Hall, Washington, D.C.) on January 9, 1941, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt (as Butler referred to the First Lady) addressed the importance of speech training by saying that women should augment their voting and the work they were doing in their parties with speech training in an effort to "enter into debate." From Roosevelt's talk, Butler concluded, "when these facts [the relation of public speaking to women's development] become more widely known to women, they will not hesitate to mount the public platform."
In the 1950s, the question of women and public life compelled Lillian O'Conner to gather material on twenty-seven women and their speeches from over forty libraries. Winner of the National Award of Pi Lambda Theta for research concerning the advancement of women, O'Conner's book evaluates the speeches on traditional principles. Her judgment of them is, she argued, based on Aristotle's Rhetoric because in the United States, it remains "the best known and most universally respected work on rhetorical theory." O'Conner observed that because John Quincy Adams himself declared Aristotle the best, she saw no reason for departing from his ideas.
Paralleling O'Conner's book on women orators was Elsie E. Egermeier's children's book on the accomplishments and public activities of eighteen women, some of whom were orators, specifically Lucretia Coffin [Mott], Frances Willard, Mary Lyon, and Susan B. Anthony. In her preface, Egermeier recounts stories of women as counselors or mentors to their young "sisters" because, even though the world is now "more friendly toward [women] than it was toward your grandmother," it is not friendly enough. The idea of mentoring apparently has had great staying power; in the 2000s, the concept of mentor or counselor is once again being articulated as a solution to the absence or neglect of women in the realms of public spaces.
In the 1960s Robert J. Brake examined anthologies and critical essays in speech communication and reported that few had given much attention to women orators in the United States. By the decade's end, Brake's exclusionary sentiment reared its ugly head again. It is clearly evident in a book on the history of public speaking in the United States. Primarily devoted to the years 1761-1914, it includes eight women; however, the chapter "The Great Debates That Shaped Our Nation" does not mention any women. Notably absent was Frances Wright's "Fourth of July Oration, 1828," in which she points to "Negro Slavery and the degradation of our colored citizens" as the one evil not touched by the Constitution. This early speech against slavery anticipates one of the great debates that shaped the nation. The women in this text are located in the section on the professional lecturer. Susan B. Anthony and seven others are presented as speakers in the context of temperance, Chautauqua, James T. Pond, and the rise of the lecture bureau. In all, women account for twelve out of the text's 566 pages. In the conclusion of the twelve- page section on women, the author notes that the contributions of women in rhetoric must be seen as passionate advocates and agitators rather than as outstanding individual accomplishments. He closes, "After centuries in training in submission, and from the midst of a social situation that took their subordination for granted, it was too much to expect that they [women] could quickly produce eloquent orators equal to the best of men."
In 1977 Carla Brown, concerned about women, rhetoric, and public life, wrote a text for women and public speaking (reissued in the 1990s) because "we watch women in public life ... struggle to project authority and power." Keeping in mind individual contributions to rhetoric are details that I wash over in my effort to bring to the fore a staircase in rhetoric, I quickly go to the next decade.
In the 1980s, concerns about women and public life motivated Karlyn Kohrs Campbell to show the exclusion of women from a number of anthologies, including Famous American Speeches, Contemporary Forms of American Speeches, and Twentieth Century Issues, and to make available a critical study of early feminist rhetoric as well as twenty-six of their speeches.
Leaping to the mid-1990s, Janet Stone and Jane Bachner produced a public-speaking textbook for women but posted this warning: "Don't underestimate how growing up without a view of women in public inhibits the ability of women to speak." Here is how one poet put the problem regarding the habit of speech: "The habit of speech / is not like riding a bicycle, / something you never forget; / it dries up like the habit of tears." So Stone and Bachner's book means to preserve the habit of speech for women through pedagogical practices. As long as the habit of speech goes unpracticed or undeveloped by women, it does not go dormant and lie in wait for the right time to appear; it dies, killing their voices.
Similar concerns obligated Kristin Vonnegut to quantify the absence of women's speeches from the American public address classroom. Vonnegut noted that over four semesters of public address courses, students at one prestigious mid-western university read one hundred speeches of which only six were by women. At another university, no speeches by women were studied, although names of women were mentioned.
All in all, despite exhaustive reviews of literature (Yoakam's dissertation), nice critiques of that literature (O'Conner's award-winning research), and various rational arguments for the inclusion of women (Campbell's lifelong scholarship), this way of going about studying the relation between women and rhetoric is a return to my lived experience of graduate work, particularly studying about women in rhetoric, attending a convention, and going to the Capitol, mainly going down to the crypt to see where the women of rhetoric were kept. The statue is not just a statue. It marks the structure of recurrence-inclusion by exclusion- that troubles the relation of transformational activity between women and rhetoric. This recurrence is where the hall breaks open, existentially speaking, and where my sojourn begins. As I walk this hall- like pathway marked by a statue, the concrete space of the Capitol crypt all but disappears as I enter the ancient house of rhetoric.
House
The ancient Greeks imagined rhetoric as a house. There is a trace of this imagery in the idea of cosmos or order because the house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes, "our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word." In that cosmic sense, the Greek house of rhetoric is more like a hut, in space, something like a baking cover of air (atmosphere) as the ancient rhetorician Hyperides (322 BCE) suggests. Rhetoric covers an inhabited region (oikodom[ene]n). Like a house, rhetoric is a form of protection and a shelter. It aims to protect humans from settling difference with violence. It gives shelter to what is said, which means that it provides order or a system for doing so. Finally this baking cover of air gives humans a central hearth for gathering. In effect, the link that makes the fire equal to a hearth (for warming and cooking) is the imaginary stuff of the poet that dreams up a hearth in a house for gathering. By the Rhetorica Ad Alexandrum, the idea of house is less of a poet's fantasy than it is a carpenter's reality. Rhetoric is described as an oikodomematon, namely a house in the building process.
All the intellectual materials-terminology, images, speeches-that are stacked up and piled around do not make a house in which humans can gather and use its resources. Rather it is form, the house, that fulfills the potency of the material heap-the stuff lying around rhetoric. The house or form makes rhetoric real-like a gathering place. In another sense, the house is nowhere. It is a metaphor. Such a composite form, whether rendered as a cosmos, an atmosphere, or a building, draws attention to the architecture and to its existential status of order, arrangement, or disposition. The latter, in particular, implicates the body because it is through the body, the mouth/voice and hands/gestures, that another body is likely to experience something, including that of being put in place, as the Portrait Monument was disposed in the hands of Congress. It is through the literal body that outcomes are settled in courthouses, meeting places, or other various structures. Insight into the house of rhetoric can be had by deciphering its structure, which manifests what people do within it. Throughout this chapter, the house image articulates the parameter of two structures-ancient and contemporary-as well as two boundaries-building as house and body in house-to define the course of my journey.
As I begin my descent on the stairs through the years 1930-2000, I stumble on the last step over what appears to be a small cellar door. I open it and see that the little door opens into a subterranean vault. I enter it and immediately am aware that massive structural principles support everything above me. It is daunting to be here-down below. But soon it feels less intimidating as I become more irritated about a negative I spiraled through over the course of the last seventy years only to have the high point spiral be the basement. I linger in this dark, cold interior tomb with my frustration.
Turns out, I stayed for a decade. During that time, I dug in the ground and scraped at the foundation. I found bits and pieces of vocabulary, terminology, categories, all the intellectual weight- bearing things that supported the house above-that complex archi-technical system of rules, methods, and procedures used to tailor the body of speech, ensuring good reason, right action, moral choice, and authority for the execution of rhetoric's values. Many questions ran through my mind as I sifted through these ancient shards of the past. How is the house of speech built? How do sex and gender figure in the experience of being in this house? How do they constrain women as speakers? Could it be that there are principles of power written in the architectural script creating a boundary of authority, something that prefigures the notorious glass ceiling? If so, how does the boundary act as a constraint girding and inducing women to speak and act in places under the glass ceiling? Finally, could the design of the house induce a performance of its public authority in ways that are knowable? If women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton had understood the structure through and through, could they have foreseen how it would turn out for them-standing for a lifetime in the basement? What possibilities does the house hold for seeing any woman as a leader, person-in-charge, or decision maker? These are some questions that I carried around with me as I toured the parameter and tried to take it all in.
I discovered the foundation has four layers-actually planes-and for the sake of convenience, I have drawn up a blueprint to organize and present my findings. Figure 1.1 is a drawing of the model (house) that rhetoric possesses about its context or, actually, space. It shows four planes-topical plane, structural plane, plane of characterization, and tropological plane-with each connected to a motif: from "escape" to "civic discourse."
Figure 1.1 is the basis of this chapter's organization. As such, it is "escape," "political animals," "defeat tyranny," and "civic discourse." Each motif is a pattern, composed in staircase fashion from temporal to mythic to spatial orientation and thus the chapter is organized as a tetralogy. To read the first plane, the motif is escape and the pattern reveals rhetoric in its temporality, namely the need to escape violence as a frame of mind for civic engagement. From there, the buildup features escape as a turn from speaking and doing "just whatever" in a situation without a system. Ultimately the escape yields to a podium, acting as an architectural sign that order has erupted in the house.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The House of My Sojourn by Jane S. Sutton Copyright © 2010 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
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