Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States by Janet Carey Eldred;Peter MortensenReview by: Pattie CowellLegacy, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2004), pp. 100-101Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679490 .

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of Piatt's place in the transition from sentimen

tality to modernism.

Bennett persuasively demonstrates that dif

fering views of sentimentality in recent critical

literature reflect fissures in sentimentality itself as a historical movement. Engaging with debates over the merits of the cultural work of womens

sentimental writing, Bennett highlights the in

justice of holding women fundamentally respon sible for sentimentality. Early in the book she

returns us to The Sorrows of Young Werther, and

women poets' ripostes to Goethe, to locate

domestic sentimentality as a male bourgeois fan

tasy of family, nation, and class, one that tends to

empty "woman" (in the person of Werther's

adored Charlotte). Womens productions of sen

timental discourse then represent their efforts to

negotiate compliance with and resistance to a

male discourse that does not recognize them as

subjects and agents. In the end, I read Poets in the Public Sphere as

a book about nation building, offering as it does a close record of how marginalized voices enter

ed public debate over the vexed intersections

between gender, race, ethnicity, and class amid

the evolving hegemonic stakes of "nation." Ben nett shows how even poets like high sentimen

talist Lydia Huntley Sigourney lost faith in and

ultimately undermined sentimentality as a strat

egy for political change and, decades later, how

the self-assured "new woman" qua modernist

poet, purging the sentimental-as-feminine from

her craft, rejected her foremothers' rhetoric and

wound up with tightly controlled expressiveness and no political practice or history?the same

absences that scholars who brought feminism

into the academy faced later in the twentieth

century. In a text full of new questions?some

perhaps rhetorical, but many that must impel new directions in scholarship?Bennett restores

the songs of a still incomplete emancipatory

project.

Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. By Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.279 pp. $34.95.

Reviewed by Pattie Cowell, Colorado State University

In An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (1992),

political scientist Benjamin Barber points to an

inextricable link between twentieth-century American schools and participatory democ

racy. He goes on to develop a persuasive case

that public education should be education for

citizenship. In Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, Janet Eldred

and Peter Mortensen explore the historical

roots of this connection between education and

democracy for women. Focusing on the dec

ades between the Revolution and the Civil War,

they ask how liberatory civic rhetoric in the

new nation shaped womens education, espe

cially as that education manifests itself in writ

ing pedagogy and practice. After an introductory chapter that sets his

torical contexts and defines a tradition of civic

rhetoric, Imagining Rhetoric uses fiction, essays, textbooks, and journals to explore the rhetori

cal and pedagogical ideas of Hannah Webster

Foster, Judith Sargent Murray, Mrs. A. J. Graves, Louisa Tuthill, Almira Phelps, and Charlotte

Forten. These six writers shared a belief that

neoclassical civic rhetoric should be a key com

ponent of education generally and womens

education in particular. They saw this libera

tory civic rhetoric as an attempt to foster a full

literacy, one that went beyond the passive

reception of ideas and values to develop female

expression as well.

Despite that common ground, however, these

women had remarkably divergent ideas about

how and why a civic rhetoric should be taught.

Writing in an era of revolutionary nationalism,

ioo legacy: volume 21 no. 1 2004

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Foster and Murray were part of a community that took for granted the value of the neoclassi

cal tradition. They wrote for an audience that

shared their concern with the cultivation of pub lic voices and argued strenuously that those

voices should be female as well as male. Unlike

Mrs. A. J. Graves, who sharply criticized institu

tional or professionalized schooling for girls in

favor of the home schooling at the heart of

Republican Motherhood, Foster and Murray created literacy narratives that turned teaching and learning into higher callings than the typical home was prepared to answer.

Tuthill and Phelps, by contrast, developed their ideas and curricula in an antebellum Amer

ica fearful of disunion. They were attracted to a

romantic (Eldred and Mortensen might say

escapist) aesthetic that grounded itself in bel

letrism and favored private over public dis course. They fostered female expression, but in

ways that subordinated civic participation to

properly gendered conduct and belletristic mea

sures of taste. Tuthill s pedagogy, for example, used writing as a tool for regulation of imagina tive excess rather than for original expression. She advocated a writing practice that valued

order above all, fearing both revolutionary and

romantic discourses that would lead to action,

chaos, and in the end, civil war.

In their concluding chapter, Eldred and

Mortensen draw on Charlotte Forten's journals as an example of the tension between civic and

belletristic rhetorics. The only African Ameri can girl in a Massachusetts school, Forten

anguished over her observation that even those

white students and teachers closest to her could not understand her passionate abolitionist pol itics. She sought a rhetoric that "sanction[ed] the articulation of strong emotions such as

hatred" in a community that turned away from

risks to national unity in favor of polite bel

letristic discourse (197). She would settle for

nothing less than a rhetoric that merged public and private voices working for social change.

Eldred and Mortensen have given their atten

tion to writers usually left out of the discussion

of early national life. In the process, they explore rhetorical standpoints that early national and

antebellum women created for themselves and

provide new insight into changing gendered

expectations for girls and women. They include a fascinating extended discussion of plagiarism and copyright and another of letter-writing as a

pedagogical tool. All this comes in a carefully edited volume that appends chronologies for

the key rhetoricians they discuss and includes

excerpts from all except Forten, whose journals are available in a modern edition.

In sum, Eldred and Mortensen have given us

a solid and useful study. As with any reader who

brings her own questions to a topic, I have some

issues I want to discuss with them further. Have

they, for example, created a sharper distinction

between civic and belletristic traditions than is

necessary, perhaps even a false dualism? Many writers then and now draw from both traditions

without pangs of cognitive dissonance. Should

they have given some attention to the power of

women's associations and networks as well as

schooling? These were, after all, key sites for the

practice of civic rhetoric, as Anne Ruggles Gere and David Shields have compellingly demon strated. But if I set aside for a moment my desire to continue the conversation Eldred and Morten sen have so ably opened, Imagining Rhetoricpro vides important evidence in support of Tocque ville s observation that there is nothing so arduous as the apprenticeship of liberty.

Book Reviews 101

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