Imagining rhetoric : composing women of the early United States

Using a wide array of documentary sources, Imaging Rhetoric examines how women learned to write in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and how they imagined using their education to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation.

In the late eighteenth century, proponents of female education appropriated the language of the Revolution to advance the cause of women's literacy.

Schooling for women - along with abolition, suffrage, and temperance - were the four primary arenas of nineteenth-century women's activism.

Following the Revolution, a spate of textbooks and fictions about schooling materialized that reveal ideal curricula covering subjects from botany and chemistry to rhetoric and composition.

A few short decades later such plans for literacy and rhetorical education changed under the pressure of threatened disunion.

Using a variety of texts, including novels, textbooks, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen chart the shifting ideas of how women should learn and use writing, from the early days of the Republic through the antebellum years. They also reveal how these models shaped women's awareness of female civic rhetoric - both its possibilities and limitations.