Remembering Women Differently

Remembering Women Differently Refiguring Rhetorical Work

Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-61117-979-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-980-4 (ebook)

Front cover illustration: Photograph of Crystal Eastman and Amos Pinchot, 1915, with Eastman replaced with background painted by Maria Martin, detail, plate 395, Birds of America, John James Audubon Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons ”Rest assured, dear friend, that many noteworthy and great sciences and arts have been discovered through the understanding and subtlety of women, both in cogni- tive speculation, demonstrated in writing, and in the arts, manifested in manual works of labor. I will give you plenty of examples.” Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: Re-Collection as Feminist Rhetorical Practice 1 Letizia Guglielmo

Part One: New Theoretical Frameworks Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change: Women in the History of Medicine and Computing 21 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher From Erasure to Restoration: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the DNA Structure 39 Alice Johnston Myatt Taming Cerberus: Against Racism, Sexism, and Oppression in Colonial and Postcolonial Nigeria 56 Maria Martin Afterlives of Anna Komnene: Moments in the History of the History of Byzantium 73 Ellen Quandahl

Part Two: Erased Collaborators Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight”: Rewriting the Reductive History of U.S. Military Women’s Achievements on and off the Battlefield 91 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart The Audubon-Martin Collaboration: An Exploration of Rhetorical Foreground and Background 109 Henrietta Nickels Shirk viii Contents

“Please cherish my own ideals and dreams about the School of Expression”: The Erasure of Anna Baright Curry 118 Suzanne Bordelon

Part Three: Overlooked Rhetors and Texts Remembering Women: Florence Smalley Babbitt and the Victorian Family Photograph Album 137 Kristie S. Fleckenstein “I have always been significant to myself”: Alice James’s Pragmatic Activism 155 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald Defying Stereotypes: An Indian Woman Freedom Fighter 170 Gail M. Presbey

Part Four: Disrupted Public Memory The Rhetorical Reputation of Forgotten Feminist Lois Waisbrooker 189 Wendy Hayden Not So Easily Dismissed: The Intellectual Influences and Rhetorical Voice of Dorothy Day—“Servant of God” 206 Laurie A. Britt-Smith Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife: Private Interventions and the Public Memory of Crystal Eastman 222 Amy Aronson Turning Trends: Lockwood’s and Emerson’s Rhetoric Textbooks at the American Fin de Siècle 242 Nancy Myers Afterword 257 Lynée Lewis Gaillet

Contributors 263 Index 267 Preface

This collection began in Savannah, Georgia, when we attended the 2013 Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference and over a bowl of she-crab soup began discussing local artifacts and archives. During our stay in Savannah, Helen had become fascinated with the story of Florence Martus, “The Waving Girl,” the subject of endearing local stories, public memorials, and touristy souvenirs. Local legend tells us that Martus—who lived on nearby Elba Island with her brother, the Cock- spur Island lighthouse keeper—became the unofficial greeter for all ships arriving to the port of Savannah between 1887 and 1931 and that not one ship was missed by Martus, who would wave her handkerchief (or at night a lantern) to welcome sailors home. Martus has been cast as a young lover, awaiting for forty-four years the return of her sailor, although Martus herself never commented on the merits of this story. However, she did become a beacon of hope for all sailors who returned to the port, and she is memorialized in poetry (Edward T. Brennan, Poet Laureate, Hibernian Society of Savannah) and in the famous statue of her located on River Street in Savannah (designed by Felix De Weldon, best known for his Iwo Jima monument in Arlington, Virginia). Martus even had a ship named after her, the SSFlorence Martus, a Liberty ship built in Savannah in 1943 (Mayle). As Helen was sightseeing and shopping for “Waving Girl” memorabilia, she discovered that some locals informally referred to the statue as a monument to the city’s first prostitute. Martus was most likely a lonely woman, living a sequestered life with her brother on the lighthouse island. This misrepresentation of Martus’s life struck a feminist nerve, and we began comparing this local rumor (despite enduring public memorials to Martus) to that of Mary Magdalene, the much-maligned subject of Lynée’s research at the time. We wondered how many other women had been misrepresented, recast, or just forgotten in ways that obfuscate their legitimate actions and motivations. We issued a call for papers to find out, hoping that we would receive a variety of proposals, not only tales of women publicly recast as prostitutes in order to diminish or dismiss their accomplishments. Our call yielded scores of submissions, all fascinating in myriad ways and collectively complicating how women’s work had been erased from or (re)cast in public memory. While we wanted to accept many more narratives than you will find included here, we accepted investigations of historical women based on archival data, x Preface omitting submissions that examined living figures or purely biographical profiles. The result is a wide-ranging collection of essays that reveal erasures and omissions of women’s accomplishments, remappings and recastings of female rhetorical action, and new theories for examining women’s work. Since the conception of the project in 2013, this collection has become even more timely and important given the recent presidential campaign and election, the threatened legislation against women, and subsequent rhetorical activism that has led tens of thousands of women across the planet to literally take to the streets to make their opinions and objections known. We look forward to other collections and volumes that address contemporary female reputation and activist work. Once we decided upon the scope of this collection, we struggled mightily to come up with an organizational structure. We considered subdivisions based on chronology, categories of work, race, education, and even religion but settled on the following four categories because they all focus on the concept of remembering differently. Building on essays in Michelle Ballif’s collection Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric and David Carroll’s injunction to “never forget that in all memory there is ‘the Forgotten’—to which we are obliged as much as, if not more than, to the remembered past” (qtd. in Ballif 3), some contributors engage traditional recovery and revisionist methodologies to revisit existing reputations in some cases and in other instances to reclaim voices and contributions. Other contributors adopt the “rhetorical practice of remembering and the rhetorical process of gendering,” as described by Jess Enoch in “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography without the Tradition,” also published in Ballif’s collection. Yes, the essays collected in Remembering Women Differently recover gendered voices, but, more importantly, they challenge traditional conversations, not merely inserting women into existing understandings of the rhetorical tradition. For many of the subjects under investigation in this volume, their entrance into a public sphere was either sponsored by or in opposition to men. In many instances, the women’s success (or silencing) has been measured by patriarchal standards, and in still other cases women’s actions fall completely outside the purview of a rhetorical tradition. Enoch tells us that one way to build upon traditional recovery methodologies is to “shift attention to the rhetorical work of recovery writ large, investigating the rhetorical work that goes into remembering women and, consequently, examining how women’s memories are composed, leveraged, forgotten, and erased in various contexts and situations” (62). The contributors to this collection present narrative accounts of overlooked figures and highlight the significance of each woman’s contributions to her respective field. On the basis of archival investigation, scholars from a variety of humanities disciplines—rhetoricians, historians, educators, com- positionists, and literary critics—employ feminist research methods to examine women’s work, rhetorical agency, and construction and memory of female reputation. Preface xi

The resulting subheadings within the table of contents correspond to Enoch’s list of ways women’s memories have been forgotten, but readers could easily shift the arrangement of essays, depending on the focus of their research or pedagogical goals—you will find in the afterword suggested alternative tables of contents. Letizia Guglielmo’s brilliant introduction to this collection fully introduces and couches within recent scholarship the categories we adopt in arranging the essays of this work. Many of our contributors in this volume cite Royster and Kirsch’s enormously influential Feminist Rhetorical Practices. Building on this monumental work and on the recent surge in efforts to find novel ways to examine and map women’s accomplishments and rhetorical agency, contributors in the first section of this collection, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women and offer case studies as illustrations. The first essay in this section, Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Fancher’s “Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change: Women in the History of Medicine and Computing,” further explores Kirsch and Royster’s “social circulation” analytical framework for examining women’s professional lives. Kirsch and Fancher investigate two communities of women working in male-dominated fields: American female physicians and the women scientists of Bletchley Park. Examining a wide array of textual and material artifacts and records, Kirsch and Fancher demonstrate ways in which the concept of “social circulation” can help us understand the accomplishments of women not only as historical figures but also as important contributors to developments in their respective disciplines. Likewise, Alice Johnston Myatt addresses the accomplishment of perhaps the most well-known professional figure in this collection. In “From Erasure to Restoration: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the DNA Structure,” Myatt delineates steps researchers can take to reclaim women from erasure and ensure their rightful places in disciplinary histories. Myatt uses the case of the scientist Rosalind Franklin to illustrate this theoretical approach and demonstrates how in the process of reclaiming Franklin’s specific work in mapping the structure of DNA, researchers also restored Franklin’s status as a first-rate researcher and scientist in broader areas of molecular biology and crystallography. In “Taming Cerberus: Against Racism, Sexism, and Oppression in Colonial and Postcolonial Nigeria,” Maria Martin offers an analysis of how twentieth-century Ni- gerian women’s autonomy and collective activism working against colonial racism, sexism, and oppression have been silenced. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti organized thousands of women to protest colonial rule under the auspices of the Nigerian Women’s Union; however, the work of this group has been ignored and erased in narratives of African nationalism on two fronts, both through internal narratives that create a politically elite, male-centered view of African nationalism and by Western historians and researchers adopting a Western lens to view the African women’s movement. Martin offers a model for theorizing African women’s feminist xii Preface agency in this essay, demonstrating ways to make room for historical women to speak for themselves through extant archival materials. Rounding out this section and drawing on cultural memory scholarship, Ellen Quandahl in “Afterlives of Anna Komnene: Moments in the History of the History of Byzantium” examines how the reputation of Komnene (1083–c.1153 c.e.) has been constructed by three notable scholars: Naomi Mitchison, Georgina Buckler, and Julia Kristeva. Quandahl’s close reading of these accounts of Komnene reveal three distinct “Annas” resulting from disparate rhetorical views of cultural Byzantium. Quandahl suggests that in the process of reclaiming Komnene, these reconstructive works, viewed collectively, may instead diminish the accomplishments of the figure they intended to illuminate. Quandahl’s framework for viewing ancient female figures through competing histories and narratives offers a cautionary tale and reveals the impossibility of fully reclaiming or representing historical women’s accomplishments. The next section of Remembering Women Differently, “Erased Collaborators,” explores the ways in which women’s work and contributions have been forgotten or silenced when they collaborated with men. While collaboration is a hallmark of feminist rhetorical action, historically women’s novel contributions in female–male partnerships have often been unacknowledged or viewed as ancillary or supportive of men, who are given credit for the work. For example, Alexis Hart and Mariana Grohowski in “Not Simply ‘Freeing the Men to Fight’: Rewriting the Reductive History of U.S. Military Women’s Achievements on and off the Battlefield” offer historical examples of the inequality twentieth-century military women endured, con- cluding that although social, political, and economic power structures have changed, twenty-first-century female soldiers still face inequalities and discrimination. Exam- ining archival materials, including physical memorials to military women’s achievements, interviews with military women, and Web 2.0 spaces that have emerged in recent years, Hart and Grohowski demonstrate the ways in which archival retrieval and preservation of military women’s narratives can stem the tide of misogynistic patterns of diminishing these women’s significance and accomplishments. Henrietta Nickels Shirk in “The Audubon-Martin Collaboration: An Explora- tion of Rhetorical Foreground and Background” brings to light the artistry of Maria Martin (1796–1863), illustrator of background habitats and foliage for Audubon’s famous portraits of birds. Martin was written out of history and not given credit for her collaborations with Audubon, as was typical of the time period. Shirk provides a critical framework focused on domestic, personal, and artistic spheres for examining Martin’s contributions to nineteenth-century art and speculates why her work has been erased within the patriarchal American society of the period. Using Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism as a starting place, Shirk begins the recovery process of Maria Martin’s artistic contributions to ornithology and natural habitats. Similarly, Anna Baright Curry’s professional contributions to Preface xiii speech education and elocution in collaboration with her husband are forgotten. In “‘Please cherish my own ideals and dreams about the School of Expression’: The Erasure of Anna Baright Curry,” Suzanne Bordelon examines challenges to construction of female ethos in the work of Curry, who founded the School of Expression (now Curry College) in 1879. Curry directed the school with her husband, who subsequently received credit for her accomplishments. Furthermore, she was denied legal rights to the school following his death. Bordelon not only illuminates Curry’s role in establishing and directing the school but also examines the significance of the curriculum she designed for training female clergy. This dual investigation addresses broader questions of gender, erasure, historiography, and elocution pedagogy. In “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts,” the third section of this work, contributors offer us a glimpse into works and figures that haven’t been included in traditional histories of women’s work because the genre or category of work wasn’t valued or seen as significant at the time, because the woman’s work was overshadowed by that of her famous male counterpart, or because her accomplishments didn’t fit the prescribed definition of “women’s work.” Kristie S. Fleckenstein in “Remembering Women: Florence Smalley Babbitt and the Victorian Family Photograph Album” examines memory work performed by women as image-smiths, not wordsmiths. These visual domestic acts permeate the boundary between the private and the public, highlighting the complexities of “remembering.” Fleckenstein views the genre of the everyday family photograph album as an invitation to remember and as a collective memory bank. She argues that the photograph album and scrapbooks of Babbitt (1847–1929) and other “remembering women,” who worked across class, race, and geographical lines, illustrate two insights into women’s rhetorical history: women as highly skilled practitioners of visual rhetoric and as accomplished archivists. Moving from the realm of the everyday to that of the famous, Hephzibah Ros- kelly and Kate Ronald in “‘I Have Always Been Significant to Myself’: Alice James’s Pragmatic Activism” examine the diary of Alice James (1848–1892) to redefine her role in history. James was the daughter of the renowned religious philosopher Henry James and the sister of William James and Henry James, towering figures in Ameri- can thought and letters in the nineteenth century. In the diary, James talks about her work with rural women in correspondence courses and her attempts to foster discussion groups and partnerships with other women. But it is the diary itself that suggests how brilliant women lived in a world that regularly refused to recognize them. Finally, Ronald and Roskelly argue that Alice James helps redefine what counts as experience, the constant preoccupation in Henry’s fiction and William’s psychology. In the last essay of this section, “Defying Stereotypes: An Indian Woman Freedom Fighter,” Gail M. Presbey recounts her meeting in 2005 with the female Indian activist and protester Rukshmani Bhatia (born in 1928). In this extensive interview, Presbey brings to light the accomplishments of Bhatia, the little-known armed guard xiv Preface for the freedom movement in India, and engages in gender analysis of the seven independent female freedom fighters listed among the forty-four fighters included in governmental record. Unlike the rest of Gandhi’s female followers—who are typically portrayed as unfailingly devoted and unquestioning—Bhatia engaged in independent thought and public boycotts, was arrested and defied her parents, and threw bombs and fought for her country’s liberation. Ultimately, she took counsel from men but refused to follow orders. While other Indian female freedom fighters have been recognized in recent years, Bhatia has not. Presbey begins the process in this interview and subsequent analysis. In the final section of the collection, “Disrupted Public Memory,” contributors remind us of women who were significant and recognized during their time, but whose memories have been distorted or diminished during the intervening years for a variety of reasons. Wendy Hayden in “The Rhetorical Reputation of Forgotten Feminist Lois Waisbrooker” traces the career and reputation of the nineteenth- century anarchist, spiritualist, and feminist Lois Waisbrooker, who identified as a “fallen woman” and crafted a reputation as the antithesis of the “respectable woman” through her prolific writings on suffrage, temperance, and sexuality. Hayden’s analysis reveals the benefits of such a reputation to Waisbrooker’s career during her lifetime but demonstrates how those very strengths led to Waisbrooker’s erasure from feminist history and complicated issues of agency and public memory for women working outside the mainstream women’s rights movement. Similarly, Laurie A. Britt-Smith in “Not So Easily Dismissed: The Intellectual Influences and Rhetorical Voice of Dorothy Day—’Servant of God’” recovers Dorothy Day’s authorial importance by examining how her understanding of social justice developed, thus revealing the extraordinary scope of Day’s experiences and the philosophical, literary, and political influences that inform the intricacies of her rhetorical style and writing. Day faces a double bind; she is silenced by the prospect of sainthood and shunned by an academic community that has often glossed over her work as being too religious in nature to warrant serious study. Her writing, which connects seemingly disparate voices, presents a vision of social justice that continues to be relevant in discussions of social reform. In “Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife: Private Interventions and the Pub- lic Memory of Crystal Eastman,” Amy Aronson explains that more than a hundred years ago Crystal Eastman was a conspicuous progressive reformer in the United States. A century later she is virtually unknown, nearly lost to American memory despite an institutional legacy in the most epochal social movements of the modern era—labor, feminism, civil rights, free speech, peace. Using newly discovered biographical materials, Aronson suggests that Eastman’s reputation was significantly undercut by the personal choices she made and the gendered circumstances of her private life—no matter how powerfully she tried to overcome that perception. In Preface xv fact, a sequence of private and interpersonal interventions came at the most pivotal junctures in Eastman’s professional life, one after the other eroding her institutional authority and momentum and, ultimately, the public recognition she yearned for and deserved. In the last essay of Remembering Women Differently, Nancy Myers in “Turning Trends: Lockwood’s and Emerson’s Rhetoric Textbooks at the American Fin de Siècle” explores the contributions of two nineteenth-century female writers of high school textbooks. These women influenced both publishing and educational practices in America, and Myers contends that the longevity of their texts situates them as competitive in a male-dominated publishing field, positions their rhetorics at the forefront of pedagogical trends for more than twenty-five years, and privi- leges student engagement pedagogy over the rote learning typically found in male- authored texts. The content and approach in each edition of the textbook represent the changing pedagogical orientations across that time period. Myers speculates that Lockwood and Emerson’s accomplishments and their texts were forgotten following their deaths because of enduring conceptions of the genre: textbooks were not appreciated or lauded, were dismissed as pedagogical rather than scholarly treatises, and were associated primarily with assessment—a set of circumstances that hasn’t changed much in subsequent centuries. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work is well timed given current interests in feminist and historical research methodologies, increased access to archival materials, and expanding notions of what constitutes rhetorical action and venue. Along with recent collections like Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones’s Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric and Bruce McComiskey’s Microhistories of Composition, contributors to the present volume suggest new frameworks for and case studies illustrating how we might remember differently. Readers will find in the brief afterword to this volume a discussion of ways in which readers might reorder the essays given varying research interests, speculation about future scholarship building on these collected essays, and a discussion of pedagogical implications for remembering differently. We hope this collection will appeal to experienced and novice researchers alike, those interested in rhetoric and composition, history and cultural studies, gender issues and historical women’s lives, and research methodologies.

Works Cited Ballif, Michelle, editor. Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric. Southern Illinois UP, 2013. Enoch, Jess. “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography without the Tradition.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif, Southern Illinois UP, 2013, pp. 58–73. Mayle, Mary Carr. “Waving Girl Coming out of Shadows.” Savannah Morning News, January 22, 2016, http://savannahnow.com/exchange/2014–04–24/waving-girl-coming -out-shadows. xvi Preface

McComiskey, Bruce, editor. Microhistories of Composition. Utah State UP, 2016. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. Ryan, Kathleen J., Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones, editors. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric. Southern Illinois UP, 2016. Acknowledgments

No work stands alone, but in particular an edited collection serves as a monument to the act of collaboration. We wish to thank Jim Denton and Linda Fogle (who quickly emerged as a “kindred spirit”) at the University of South Carolina Press for seeing promise in this work in its early form and also the outside reviewers for making thoughtful and detailed suggestions for fleshing out our initial conceptions of the project. Letizia Guglielmo, a long-time collaborator and friend, who sponsors our work and lives in so many ways, not only provided an exceptional introduction to the collection but also helped us to think through the structure and organization of the project. Her fingerprints are on every aspect of the final product, from title to afterword, and her work is the touchstone for byproducts of the project as well, including two panels on feminisms and rhetorics that emerged from the collection and a resulting graduate course in feminist rhetorical theory. We thank Nathan Wagner, editorial assistant extraordinaire, for keeping us organized and on task and for his lightning fast and unflappable responses to our queries; and Sarah Bramblett for the index An edited collection doesn’t exist without contributors. This particular cohort of authors runs the gamut of academic researchers, from emerging scholars (some of whom were graduate students when this project began and now work as assistant professors in their disciplines) to acclaimed scholars at the height of their careers. We cherish the opportunity to work with scholars at these various stages and the friendships that began or strengthened along the way. As a mother/daughter editing team, we thank our husbands (dad and son-in-law) for their patience with our enthusiasm for the project and the hours it consumed. Helen and Stephen got married during the process of this collection; the wedding was another collaborative project for the whole clan! We also thank our immediate family members (especially Char- lotte) and our closest friends for listening to us wax on about both subject matter and our stories of mother/daughter editing processes. Finally, we are grateful for each other. Helen was born during the College, Com- position, and Communication Conference (CCCC) during the exact hour Lynée, a graduate student, was scheduled to deliver her first presentation at that meeting. Since then, Helen has spent nearly every birthday at one CCCC meeting or another, xviii Acknowledgments sitting in the back of countless sessions and hanging out with all Lynèe’s fabulous students and academic friends over the decades. Helen’s life has been intertwined with Lynèe’s academic pursuits literally since the day she was born. What a lovely, fruitful journey (thus far) between mother and daughter this project represents. Introduction Re-Collection as Feminist Rhetorical Practice

Letizia Guglielmo

The act of remembering calls upon the work of feminist historiographers and rhetoricians who have worked to recover women’s histories and their work as part of recorded history and public memory. The feminist rhetoricians Jessica Enoch and Jordynn Jack have reminded us that pedagogically, remembering “usually means that teachers bring recovered women’s rhetorics into the classroom, prompting students to come to know women as rhetorical agents by analyzing the rhetorical strategies they used to make their voices heard” (518). According to Enoch and Jack, this approach offers a version of remembering with two distinct parts: it “includes women rhetors” within the “revised and expanded rhetorical tradition” and expands what counts as rhetorical practice (518). This process of expandingwho is remembered and, in turn, creating subsequent opportunities for recovering or remembering other women is one significant way that remembering has served the goals of feminist rhetoricians and historiographers both within and outside classroom spaces. Engaging the “possibilities that envision the rhetorical practice of remembering as a complex and compelling site for feminist historiographic exploration” (Enoch and Jack 535), authors in this collection expand the definition and practice of remembering in ways that certainly write women into the histories that have excluded them; yet, beyond these acts of recovery, essay authors also introduce new versions of women’s narratives previously written into historic and public record—a recasting or remembering differently—and they bring to light or refocus the lens on women’s stories that may have existed in the shadows of another’s more convenient, accepted, or publicly sanctioned narrative. Related to the term “remembering,” “recollecting” suggests an act of recalling or of calling to mind with clear roots in classical rhetoric. Yet more fitting for the goals of this collection and the content of the essays 2 Letizia Guglielmo that follow, I suggest a repurposing of the term as re-collecting, a feminist rhetorical act of gathering or assembling again what has been scattered. This process of re- collecting, with connections to public memory and remembrance, highlights the agency of both the re-collector and the subject whose story is recovered or retold. Within the individual essays that follow, authors engage in re-collecting the details of the women’s stories profiled—some for the first time and some collected in new, illuminating ways—and, together, in an act of macro-level re-collection, these narratives offer theories and additional sites for ongoing recovery and analysis. In this introduction, I offer a definition ofre-collection grounded in scholarship on memory studies, feminist rhetoric, and classical rhetorical theory, and I illustrate the ways in which this collection both engages in and moves beyond feminist intervention by exploring broader “question[s] of public memory” and reputation (Enoch and Jack 534). Providing re-collection as a frame for this feminist rhetorical act, I argue for a plurality of remembering illustrated within the essays of this collection that suggest the nuanced ways in which women’s stories are written out of or written differently within public memory and what it can look like to recover or retell them in very different ways. The process of re-collecting women’s narratives theorized and performed by this collection’s contributors expands how and where we engage remembering as a feminist rhetorical act.

Memory, Recollection, and Re-Collecting As a canon of classical rhetoric, memory as a rhetorical device finds some of its earliest roots in the work of Plato and Aristotle, characterized by both as fallible and unreliable. The rhetoric and communication scholar Kendall Phillips clarified that for Plato, this distrust lies not with the possibility of forgetting but with the likelihood of misremembering and with a “broader concern for our capacity for false beliefs” (210). This disruption of the presumed binary relationship between remembering and forgetting suggests that memory requires a much more nuanced and multifaceted exploration. Continuing his analysis of Plato’s work, Phillips distinguished forgetting from “other-judging” or misremembering: “While forgetting is conceived as a kind of occlusion or even erasure, the process of ‘other-judging,’ or here misremembering, constitutes an active process of making claims about the past that are in error” (212). And here, while I would argue that erasure is, in fact, also an active process, a topic I return to in a later section of this essay, Plato’s placement of misremembering on a continuum between remembering and forgetting is particularly significant in understanding a plurality of the term “remembering” and its role in feminist historiography. As a reaction to their distrust of memory, first Plato and then Aristotle, in much more formalized terms, introduced recollection. For Plato, unlike remembering, recollection is an active process that involves sorting through a collection of information, a search. To illustrate this distinction, Plato offered a somewhat lengthy Introduction 3 metaphor of the bird and aviary, which Phillips summarized in his text (212), yet it is this primary distinction of an active search that I find most significant with regard to recollection. For Plato, recollection is more reliable than memory alone precisely because of this active and deliberative process. To be clear, memory does play a role in Plato’s recollection: it serves as the starting point or impetus for the search. Aristotle took up and formalized this distinction between memory and recollection, what Phillips described as a hierarchy, noting, “It is this concern for reasserting the potential for human (read: rational) agency to control the appearance of memories that leads Aristotle to distinguish memory from recollection, as recollection becomes a disciplined structure for containing and directing the unbidden and potentially disruptive effects of memories” (214). In other words, the deliberative process of recollection affords control over seemingly uncontrolled or undisciplined memories. Furthermore, Phillips explained, “The instrumentality of recollection then lies within individuals who through their own agency engage in the process of tracing the sequence of events backward to the memory sought” (215). This process then seemingly becomes more reliable and familiar through repetition, increasing the individual’s agency in shaping and directing memories. Aristotle’s approach to recollection becomes particularly significant to a study of public memories of women with its intersection of individual agency and repetition. Previous work in memory studies affirmed memory’s public nature, that “memory exists in the world rather than in a person’s head” (Zelizer 232), and Aristotle’s “disciplined structure for containing and directing” memory (Phillips 214) suggests a potential for instantiating and reifying public memories, a process, I would argue, that certainly is still fallible given its direction by individual human interest. As a canon of ancient rhetoric, memory involved repetition to train the mind, and similarly, public memory also can be trained through repetition to believe a specific version of a history or of a life. Calling on the work on Bradford Vivian, Phillips explained that public memories and rituals are similarly repeated in order to formalize cultural truths and to shape “public remembrance”: “In these repetitions we find not only an insistence that events, people or places be remembered but that they be remembered in the same way; in a repetition that serves to craft the same culture over and over again” (218). Recognizing the human agency that exists in Plato’s and Aristotle’s version of recollection and Phillips’s public remembrance, I invoke recollection as a frame for the essays that follow in order to highlight each author’s agency in deliberately creating a memory of the woman profiled. However, I aim to repurpose the term as re-collecting both to highlight the active process of searching through a collection of information to (re)make those memories, to remember differently, and to acknowledge the ways in which re-collecting is also an active process of disrupting seemingly stable, “disciplined” memories of women’s lives and of cultural truths. As a feminist rhetorical act, re-collecting creates opportunities to expand the process of recovering women’s work 4 Letizia Guglielmo by also looking for opportunities to disrupt or destabilize established memories created by prior acts of recollection and public remembrance. Furthermore, processes of re-collecting within this text also demonstrate how acts of recollection often lead to women being forgotten or misremembered. Remembering, Memory, and Reputation Previous work in women’s rhetoric and women’s history indicates that how women are remembered—their public memory or lack thereof—is connected to the social realities and the contexts in which they were living and often influenced by a specific cultural moment or development leading to their recovery. It is clear that “remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall” (Zelizer 214). Beyond writing women into history, historiographers and rhetoricians also have called upon other scholars to theorize the often limiting ways in which women have been remembered or recovered. Writing in the 1970s, for example, Gerda Lerner argued, “The literature concerning the role of women in American history is topically narrow, predominantly descriptive, and generally devoid of interpretation” (“New Approaches” 349). She suggested a fresh approach to this recovery work and offered various directions by which to approach the narratives of women’s lived experiences, including moving past women’s rights movements as predominant sites of inquiry and, instead, investigating women’s varied economic and social roles despite the prevailing belief that women were expected to occupy a single “proper place” (“New Approaches” 354). Responding to Lerner’s call for more critical work, scholars have continued to address much of what was missing from women’s history at the time, yet there remains more work to be done. One more recent call to which this collection responds called on scholars to “interrogate the strategies of forgetting and modes of ‘remembering differently’ that have erased or downplayed women’s rhetorical presence in public memory” and to “investigate the constraints groups have faced and the negotiations they have made to commemorate women in the public sphere” (Enoch and Jack 535). In “Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective,” Lerner framed her overview of early forays into women’s history as a field of study with questions: Who are the women missing from history? Who oppressed women and how were they oppressed (357–58)? Similarly, this collection is framed by questions intended to explore how and to what extent women are remembered as part of public history and to what extent they are forgotten: 1. Why was this figure left out of existing historical narratives? 2. What has been the status of her reputation or our knowledge of her? 3. What are the challenges to understanding her ethos and rhetorical agency? 4. What did the figure do (or not) to contribute to her existing reputation or absence in existing narratives? Introduction 5

We know that prevailing value systems play an important role in shaping history and public memory and may often determine who is remembered and when. Lerner claimed that “society’s attitudes toward women and toward gender role indoctrination can be usefully analyzed as manifestations of a shifting value system and of tensions within patriarchal society” (“Placing Women” 359). Within these patriarchal societies, we also recognize that women’s lives were constrained in a variety of ways that both limited their rhetorical agency and determined their reputations. If, then, memories are created through the act of recollection and may become, in turn, part of public memory, a figure’s reputation may become fixed by the historical record produced within that very same patriarchal society. By virtue of gender, race, or class, marginalized groups may find a collective reputation similarly determined by acts of remembering. “Pondering the moral and political merits of collective forgetting [as] a compelling topic of rhetorical inquiry,” Bradford Vivian explained, “the premise that discursive or symbolic representations of the past are inherently selective, fragmentary, and protean is commonplace to memory scholarship, whether inside or outside rhetorical circles” (90). Vivian, here, was generally complicating the binary relationship between memory and forgetting, positing “the notion that forgetting need not amount to amnesia, erasure, or loss of memory— that it may, as an available trope of public deliberation, constitute a principled and judicious response to the past” (91). Although I am not suggesting that the omission of the women’s narratives included in this collection constituted a “principled and judicious response,” Vivian’s comments do prompt us to consider the nuances of remembering that are central to this collection. To be sure, we can call up numerous instances of women and their work deliberately and purposefully destroyed, buried, silenced, erased, Sor Juana de la Cruz offering but one example. In a recent issue ofPeitho, Amy Gerald explored the public memory (or lack thereof) of the feminist rhetoricians and abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké in Charleston, South Carolina. Sharing the exigency for her work, Gerald explained that “there had been almost no public acknowledgment of the Grimkés in their home town, a city famous for historical tourism” (100). She continued, “The public opposition they faced during their lifetimes was followed over time by an erasure from Charleston public memory, remarkable in its completeness” (100). The constraints of what was considered proper activity for and the limited spheres available to the daughters of a Southern slave-holding plantation owner (and judge on the South Carolina Supreme Court) certainly shaped the Grimkés’ reputation both during their lifetimes and in the many years following their civic work. Yet, Gerald’s piece offered readers an opportunity to read the Grimkés’ omission in two ways: as deliberate erasure, for which she provided a great deal of evidence, and as the result of the city’s choice to remember its own history differently. Participating in the historical tourism that she described, Gerald discovered the constructed narrative of “Charleston [as] a colonial city” (114), which she described as an attempt 6 Letizia Guglielmo to “get past” and to “whitewash” the city’s significant role in American slavery (115). Gerarld argued that “the suppression of connections between the Grimké sisters and the South was at one time purposeful on an institutional level, not merely an accident of history” (101), a claim that can inform the act of remembering and of recovering women’s histories as contributors to this collection do. Yet the act of remembering differently and, in turn, of erasing by omission provides space for a very different kind of recollection. In the sections that follow, I draw from the narratives within this collection to posit how and why women are remembered differently or obscured from public history. It is important to remember here as well, however, that even my reading and categorizing of the women’s narratives involves a kind of remembering that can be fruitfully disrupted and re-collected.

Constraints on Memory and Reputation Scholarship in feminist rhetoric and recovery, as earlier sections of this essay suggest, reminds us that women’s voices, their work, and their histories have often been obscured or excluded from the historical record. Scholars in rhetoric and women’s studies also demonstrate that feminist interventions, foregrounding issues of gender, race, sexuality, and class, may help to uncover these exclusions and silences and to expand our notions of how and when women contribute to public discourse. “In the feminist tradition of consciousness raising, personal narratives have been powerful catalysts in prompting political action and fostering social change, reminding us that the personal is, in fact, political,” and as a significant part of that process, “personal narratives offer opportunities to gain agency while intervening in essentialist descriptions of women’s experiences” (Guglielmo and Wallace Stewart 20). At various points throughout history, women have written from and about the realities of their lived experiences to talk back against misogyny and the cultural norms that constrain their agency. Through collective practices of interruption, women also have created spaces for women’s stories and for other women’s voices. Looking at the work of proto- feminists during the early modern period in Europe, for example, we find women who blended their stories with the stories of other women’s lives to expose the realities of patriarchy; who created space for other women’s voices by serving as patrons for their writing; and who argued for the education of all women regardless of class, often repurposing or retelling cultural narratives to make their arguments (see Cereta; Fonte; Tarabotti). For many of these women, their goals were not simply rhetorical but activist as they worked to improve the lives of women and “to make a connection between misogynistic cultural assumptions and concrete social abuses” (Cox 14). Despite the critical mass of women who were writing and publishing their work in Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that work virtually disappeared until it was recovered by feminist scholars and activists who continued and reinvigorated this work previously silenced through a cycle Introduction 7 of backlash. Within the essays of this collection, we witness a similar move toward inclusion and connection by each of the authors; yet, beyond simply adding these narratives to women’s histories, the authors provide a multidisciplinary exploration of recollection that theorizes why and how women are forgotten or remembered differently. However, even in suggesting the reasons for erasure or remembering differently, it is important to note that the essays within this collection themselves construct a version or a specific re-collecting of the individual women’s lives— a theorizing and performing of re-collecting simultaneously. Alice Myatt’s essay on Rosalind Franklin serves as a useful case study of this dual purpose. Within the essay, Myatt explains how Franklin’s work on DNA was dismissed by male colleagues who took credit for her work and how her reputation was then restored within scientific history by rhetoricians who recollected the details of her life and professional work. In her own act of recollecting, however, Myatt further demonstrates the role of remembering differently by highlighting other areas of Franklin’s work for which she is not remembered: “Her work with coal and the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses are [sic] seldom mentioned in histories of her, though some of her work still provides foundational scholarship for scientists entering those fields” (this volume). In addition to this act of re-collecting, Myatt theorizes for readers the process of restoration through Franklin’s narrative, one that can shape future acts of feminist recovery. Through her essay on Anna Komnene, Ellen Quandahl demonstrates how multiple versions of recollecting Komnene’s public memory become part of writing a history of Byzantium inevitably shaped by the individual authors’ “present concerns” (this volume). These acts of remembering differently, “of three women’s ways of writing [Komnene] into memory,” she explains, “aler[t] us to the impossibility of fully re-collecting and representing women’s reputations” (this volume). This volume then, offers both possibilities for re-collecting women’s reputations and invitations to add complexity to those public memories through ongoing recollection.

Negotiating Ethos and Agency As a facet of classical rhetoric, discussions of ethos “traditionally [have] not included a space for women whose sex is visibly marked on their bodies” (Ratcliffe 93) and whose sex alone often determined their reputations. In the face of thousands of years of misogyny, grounded in intellectual, medical, legal, religious, and social systems, silencing of women’s voices has been rooted in dominant perceptions that women were inferior to men. Aristotle’s dualities exemplified the Greek tradition that men embody “judgment, courage, stamina” and women “irrationality, cowardice, and weakness”; women were subordinate to men—fathers, brothers, and husbands— and, later, Roman law ensured that women played no public role (King and Rabil vii–xi). Ratcliffe reminds us, “As scholars too numerous to name have claimed, Aris- totle’s brilliantly conceived systematic art of rhetoric has greatly influenced Western 8 Letizia Guglielmo culture. Yet . . . Aristotle’s rhetoric also poses potential pitfalls for women and feminists and, hence, suggests many possible starting points for revisionist theories” (92). Women in the nineteenth century, as many of this collection’s contributors illustrate, like women rhetors before them, were forced to make creative arguments in order to advocate for themselves and for their right to speak, particularly when they were confronted by unwelcoming or outwardly hostile audiences. Recent work on ethos by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones suggests that “many women rhetors find that there is not comfortable ethos to employ if they want to shift the dominant discourse on a particular topic” (2). Furthermore, they explain, “everyday definitions of ethos tend to assume the composing subject is a solitary individual crafting his or her character to firm up reputation and persuasive power” (5), yet we know that women often have not been solitarily in control of their perceived or constructed reputations given social and gender norms and recollections of their lives and work. This collection’s contributors reveal that as they worked to establish a professional ethos, many of the women profiled found that men still played a significant role in reinforcing or damaging that ethos no matter the creative, deliberate appeals women made. Moreover, Nedra Reynolds acknowledges “the importance of location, of one’s place or perceived location in the world” and argues that “female knowers adapt to their marginalized positions in a male-dominated culture by seeing differently—and learning different things” (325, 330). She acknowledges, as other feminist have, “the value of moving away from the center to find different perspectives” (326, 331). Demonstrating this move toward the margins in their essay, Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Fancher explore the concepts of social circulation and of collective ethos through case studies of “a group of turn-of-the-twentieth-century American women physicians and a group of mid-twentieth-century British women who worked at Bletchley Park as mathematicians, computer operators, and code breakers,” both groups working in male-dominated spaces for which women were often deemed unsuitable (this volume). Examining evidence of collective activism within the margins of archival material, Kirsch and Fancher uncover “the important role of professional networks as a powerful force for change, allowing women to educate, mentor, and support one another, to exchange knowledge and resources, and to establish their professional identity, authority, and ethos” (this volume). With a theoretical lens for future acts of memory and recovery, “[the authors] argue that the notion of social circulation can enrich the way we understand the accomplishments of professional women not only as historical figures in their own right but as actors in larger social circles whose ideas and actions shaped developments in the medical profession and in computer science that circulated across time, locations, and generations” (this volume). In claiming the right to speak, women have throughout history faced severe consequences for speaking publicly and for occupying spaces traditionally reserved for Introduction 9 men. Gerald’s work on Angelina and Sarah Grimké illustrates how these perceived violations of gender and social norms led to the women’s reputations being fixed and their public memory limited or erased. According to Vicki Tollar Collins(Burton), “when women’s lives are formed and women’s voices are managed and silenced by the ways a production authority uses their discourse and the forms and forums in which it is published, who is speaking and who controls the materiality of the message matters very much—culturally, rhetorically, and ethically” (146). The violence of silencing women’s experiences is also evident in how and whether those experiences have been named. Women’s contributions in male-dominated fields often have been minimized or unrecorded, particularly with regard to how they have been portrayed within traditional texts and widely circulated media. In the case of women in the military, as demonstrated in Hart and Grohowski’s essay, the force of the dominant narrative has led to a view of women’s military service as ancillary or “helping” and frequently to women not naming themselves and their experiences as veterans. The act of re-collecting women’s stories that Hart and Grohowski engage in, then, is not only one of recovering and of acknowledging women’s contributions within military history but also one of securing their compensation, benefits, hon- ors, and status as veterans. Scholarship exploring digital and social media literacies within the past two decades highlights participatory possibilities of these environments, particularly the opportunities for collaboration and community-building and the potential to “offer marginalized groups a forum in which to discover their own voice, to reinterpret and reconstruct their experience, and to make meaning that reflects their own cultural and intellectual contributions” (Selfe 127), while also cautioning users against utopian ideals for universally egalitarian spaces. Daniell and Guglielmo explain, “Within digital and social media, women now have greater opportunities not only to control the context of their messages but also to distribute and access them. With increased opportunities to reach audiences of women, women’s appeals to ethos have shifted. In digital spaces, they do not ask permission to include themselves in the conversation or justify their right to speak” (100). As evidence of this shift, Hart and Grohowski demonstrate how online social networks have begun to remedy historical limitations and omissions by affording a platform for female military personnel to share their stories with one another and with the public more broadly in an effort to alter the power patterns in the U.S. Armed Forces. Through the use of digital and social media, women as production authorities now have greater control over whether and how they are remembered, and, as Hart and Grohowski illustrate, “digital archives and Web 2.0 spaces have benefited military women’s ethos by providing them with platforms and audiences with whom to share their stories” and “thereby re-writing themselves into public memory” (this volume). As a significant rhetorical strategy, naming by others with the authority to name or naming by the women themselves determines how and whether they are remembered, and Hart 10 Letizia Guglielmo and Grohowski’s essay offers readers an opportunity to seek out other digital spaces where this naming and re-collecting are taking place. The women’s narratives presented in this collection also make clear, however, that the construction of ethos is never uncomplicated and that women’s marginalization often has occurred at the hands of other women and marginalized groups. While communities of women might offer more welcoming, supportive audiences, the women profiled in this volume often were marginalized even by those women who were perceived to work on their behalf, as illustrated in the next section of this introduction.

Intersectionality and Marginalization Referring to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and its central argument, Adri- enne Rich described “[her] own luck . . . being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged [her] to read and write” (Rich 272). Rich’s acknowledgment of privilege and, throughout the rest of the text, of exclusion even within movements for liberation offers a significant and common criticism of U.S. women’s rights movements and still another opportunity to consider how women’s stories are remembered and remembered differently. Further developing this critique in its 1977 statement, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) “addressed the racism of white feminists in the women’s movement—the racism that forced many black women to reject feminism altogether” (Ritchie and Ronald 291) and an articulationof intersectionality “that major systems of oppression are interlocking” (CRC 292). Within this volume, contributors point to a variety of marginalizations even within liberation movements presumed to be inclusive. In her essay on Rukshmani Bhatia, a participant in India’s freedom movement, Gail M. Presbey shares Bhatia’s narrative as a disruption of the male-centric public memory of the movement. Presbey’s recollecting of Bhatia’s story not only expands the history of who walked with Gandhi but also complicates the idea that all of Gandhi’s followers blindly obeyed his doctrine of nonviolence. Bhatia did not. As a young woman, she not only “took up arms,” a practice which in and of itself violated social convention, but also engaged in violence as part of the movement. Presbey argues, “In contrast to this posture of blind obedience, Bhatia showed she was a thinking person, accepting or rejecting guidance according to whether or not she saw merit in it” (this volume), and readers are led to consider how these individual choices contributed to the silencing of Bhatia’s narrative and how they now add to a re-visioning of India’s freedom movement. Moreover, within her essay, Maria Martin notes, “Histories of African nationalism tend to focus on men’s roles and therefore typically lack the new perspectives and theoretical developments that an analysis of women’s activisms would yield” (this volume). Identifying multiple levels of oppression and exclusion, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the subject of the essay, carefully worked against racism Introduction 11 and classism as part of her activism, ever aware of her own privilege and of the ways in which common conceptions of Western (that is, U.S.) feminism failed to acknowledge the realities of women’s lives within her community. In her essay on Lois Waisbrooker, Wendy Hayden asks us to consider “the complicated issues of agency and reputation for communities of women outside mainstream women’s rights movements” and for those “without the education and class-status of many suffragists” (this volume). Waisbrooker’s narrative illustrates the challenges nonelite women faced in becoming accepted participants—and therefore members of historic records—in mainstream women’s movements. Reminding readers that systems of oppression are multiple and overlapping, Wais- brooker’s profile feels particularly contemporary as she connects social issues (birth control, in this case) to economic class. Hayden argues, “Waisbrooker challenges our conceptions of ethos and agency for nineteenth-century women in several ways” because “[her] reputation was partially imposed by others and partially constructed by her,” and she used her status as a “fallen woman. . . . to engage with topics other, more ‘respectable’ women avoided” (this volume). Particularly noteworthy in Wais- brooker’s narrative is the collaborative, communal construction of ethos and agency that Hayden articulates, providing readers with a theoretical lens for future re- collecting of women’s histories. Waisbrooker’s story, similar to that of other women throughout the text, affirms that women are still responsible for managing their own reputations despite the varying realities of women’s individual lives. For women presumed to have access and agency because of class status and participation in social movements, performance of simultaneously appropriate femininity and activism also shapes the ways in which they are remembered as part of those movements. There is danger, as Amy Aronson and other contributors to this volume suggest, in making the decision to live a woman’s life on her own terms. Crystal Eastman’s narrative speaks to the inherent hierarchies within women’s movements and Eastman’s perceived inability to reconcile private life with public activism in a way that leaders of the movement believed essential. Aronson’s essay investigates why Eastman is not remembered despite her wide-ranging, long-term international activist work and demonstrates how women are still limited by proscriptive gender roles: “Her story emphasizes anew the critical interplay between private life and public stature and between gender ideology and female reputation, dynamics that still, more than a century after Eastman mounted the chariot, more readily disrupt women’s advancement in the directions they have wanted and endeavored to go” (this volume). Furthermore, the individual narratives also remind readers that there are no single narratives of privilege and poverty, access and restriction to public life. For Alice James, “economic and cultural privilege limited her access to the world” (Ron- ald and Roskelly, this volume). And still, she acknowledges her class and privilege, “recogni[zing] that she must listen to others—especially those others who often go 12 Letizia Guglielmo unheard—to know any truth” (Ronald and Roskelly, this volume). As a memorable example of the feminist intervention and re-collection present throughout this collection, James herself appears to enact an ethic of hope and care in her own work just as Ronald and Roskelly do the same in their re-collecting of her story.

Enacting an Ethic of Hope and Care In a 2015 article in Rhetoric Review, Charlotte Hogg raised “questions about research subjects who are valued and who are overlooked” within feminist research (392). “Presentism,” she argued, “contributes to the broader tendency in our scholarship to focus on feminist women (even when we are the one labeling them as such) and disregard certain women who don’t fit into our feminist frameworks” (395). Like Hogg, contributors to this volume help to disrupt assumptions about whose voices do and do not deserve attention and to prompt feminist rhetoricians and researchers to rethink the ways in which women’s experiences have been given voice and have been silenced by men and also by other women. In the first essay of Feminist Rhetorical Practices, Gesa Kirsh explained: “I have had a long-standing interest in and concern for including women’s voice, vision, and experiences in our work, for allowing them to be heard—in their manifold expressions, well beyond the ‘museum pieces’ they so easily become when we impose our values, views, and judgments upon them, speaking only for or about them, not with them” (Royster and Kirsch 4). The essays in this collection also acknowledge women’s responsibilities to other women contemporaries, to future women, and to broader women’s movements, and in doing so they create space for other women’s voices and promote social circulation (Royster and Kirsch 23–24), specifically what Kirsch and Fancher take up as a lens for analysis in their essay. Throughout this collection there exists a multilevel social circulation both within the work of the individual women profiled and also in the act of re-collecting these stories within each essay. Essay authors remind us that simply telling the story or remembering the women is not enough; often the way that story is told matters, too. Writing about the life of Alice James, Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly prompt readers not only to rethink the “texts” examined as the site of feminist rhetorical practices (a published diary as well as family letters and autobiographies of other family members) but also to consider how James’s story has been shaped—or recollected—by other writers, even though the story is a diary written by Alice herself. Publishing the diary, Ronald and Roskelly explain, “Anna Robeson Burr . . . did more than edit and introduce: she removed all the newspaper clippings, omitted whole days, changed words, sentences and punctuation” (this volume). Writing to those researching feminist rhetorical practices, Royster and Kirsch ask their readers to “look and listen carefully and caringly, contemplate [their] perceptions, and speculate about the promise, potential, and realities of these rhetors’ lives and work” Introduction 13

(147), and what we see in this volume is contributors applying this ethic of hope and care as a framework for analyzing women’s stories already told. In the case of Dorothy Day, as Laurie Britt-Smith illustrates, “her history is in danger of being rewritten and voice silenced by the prospect of sainthood, and she is also shunned by an academic community that has often glossed over her work as being too religious in nature to warrant serious study” (this volume). This “double bind” that Britt-Smith identifies is an illustration of remembering differently, of recollecting the details of Day’s life in different ways with different purposes for different audiences and in response to particular exigencies. Day’s own writing suggests an awareness of this power in remembering and its role in securing a reputation: “The lives of saints . . . are too often written as though they were not in this world. We have seldom been given the saints as they really were, as they affected the lives of their times. We get them generally only in their own writings. But instead of that strong meat, we are too generally given the pap of hagiographical writing” (qtd. in Britt-Smith, this volume). Yet, like the recollections of saints’ lives she describes, for Day, Britt-Smith argues, “All incidents of conflict and confrontation are forgotten, and her intellectual contributions are made small as she is presented as yet another example of the ‘fallen woman’ trope—the whore who through divine intervention became a Madonna” (this volume). Instead, Britt-Smith works to re-collect the details of Day’s life with an expanded version of her social justice activism and feminist rhetorical practice.

Re-collecting Rhetorical Practices and Texts Beyond who is left out historically and what version of her life is preserved, the essay authors ask us to consider what is left out: which rhetorical acts are valued, investigated, and remembered and which are not and, as a result, which women continue to be silenced. Arguing for “the ways in which Victorian women . . . performed rhetorical roles in their everyday lives,” Kristie S. Fleckenstein, in her essay on Florence Smalley Babbitt, explains: “Through their responsibility for the family photograph album, Florence and other women of her generation operated as visual power brokers. Moreover, Fleckenstein identifies Babbitt “as a ‘remembering woman’: an adroit practitioner of vernacular visual rhetoric aimed at creating and memorializing a particular familial ethos” while “practicing her everyday art of persuasion in the parlor, a site positioned on the cusp between the public and the private” (this volume). Engaged in a process of macro-level remembering—a rhetorical remembering of a woman responsible for the rhetorical remembering of her family’s genealogy—Fleckenstein creates space for identifying Victorian women as rhetorical agents and for considering the role that the visual plays in memory work (this volume). This re-visioning of photograph albums and of the parlor, more broadly, contributes in a meaningful way to previous studies that shifted and expanded the 14 Letizia Guglielmo site of feminist rhetorical practices to include cookbooks and diaries, among other texts (Collings Eves; Harrison). Furthermore, Myers’s essay in this volume illustrates that how and when more traditional genres such as textbooks are valued as sites of scholarly inquiry also contribute to the exclusion or misremembering of women’s rhetorical work. Analyzing the reputations of the teacher-scholars Sara Elizabeth Husted Lockwood and Mary Alice Emerson, Myers articulates for readers the lasting impact of Lockwood’s text (and her later collaboration with Emerson on future editions) as a rhetoric for a high school audience despite the fact that rhetorics in the nineteenth century were written only by men and primarily for use in college and university curricula. Im- portantly, Myers explores how the two women built reputations in their lifetimes through the textbook even thought those reputations remain relatively unknown today, and she attributes this silencing of public memory and reputation to three historical views of textbooks: their ongoing role in assessment, the positioning of scholarship on women textbook writers, and the stigmas attached to textbooks in academe. Particularly significant are the text’s pedagogical and rhetorical interventions, “emphasizing student engagement in literacy development rather than . . . replicating the content-focus and rote-learning of the male-authored textbooks” (Myers, this volume) and its largely feminist pedagogy, which promoted collaboration, individual choice, and agency for teachers and students while acknowledging local constraints that could be accommodated by the text’s flexibility.

Costs of Collaboration A hallmark of women’s rhetorical practices and of women’s activism more broadly, collaboration exists at both a micro- and a macro-level throughout this collection: the individual essays narrate stories of women who work with and on behalf of other women and, collectively, present a multivocal narrative of women re-collected and remembered. As a collaborative discursive practice, Daniell and Guglielmo claim, and “as a part of discourse about women’s rights or social justice in particular, the first-person plural pronoun seems to be a mark of women’s rhetoric—to claim sister- hood, to express grievances that not only are private but shared, to set themselves apart from men” (93). Despite the importance of a collective we, us, and our in women’s attempts to create space for other women’s voices, professional and activist collaboration with men, as contributors to this volume illustrate, was often detri- mental to a historical record and memory of women’s contributions, leading in some cases to complete “erasure.” Suzanne Bordelon in her essay on Anna Baright Curry narrates the story of a woman who, like many of the other women profiled in this collection, faced challenges constructing an acceptable ethos given her presumed failure to fit a very narrow role as wife and mother. The founder of the School of -Ex pression and Elocution, whose name was later changed to the School of Expression by her husband and collaborator, Baright Curry, receives no credit for this work or Introduction 15 for the publications on which she was a significant collaborator as much “has been largely negated or attributed to her husband” (Bordelon, this volume). Bordelon’s re-collecting of Baright Curry’s reputation includes both writing her into the history of schools of elocution and re-collecting the work of the school as rhetorical, “address[ing] broader scholarly questions related to gender, erasure, historiography, and the pedagogy of elocution/expression and its unacknowledged cultural and rhetorical effects” (Bordelon, this volume). Baright Curry’s story, as Bordelon claims, “suggests the need to investigate the work of other women whose efforts have been erased,” particularly those who worked in collaboration with men (this volume). These narratives of collaboration, in demonstrating how women are constrained by, work to fulfill, and often deliberately violate the roles created for and expected of them, also suggest ways to rethink how we characterize collaboration and what models of collaboration are typical of feminist rhetorical work. Henrietta Nickels Shirk’s essay on Maria Martin, who collaborated with the French-American ornithologist and painter John James Audubon, further demonstrates how often women’s work is “essentially written out of history” and “examines why Martin’s art has been ignored” (this volume). Significantly, the essay offers readers a way to understand this collaboration by using Mary Daly’s rhetorical background and foreground as a lens for analyzing the paintings and, in turn, Martin’s life: “Rhetorical background and foreground in the Martin-Audubon collaboration are not separate from and in conflict with each other but find their full meaning in a relationship of mutual dependency” (this volume). Shirk’s essay highlights the significance of nineteenth-century values in understanding this collaboration and provides readers with new ways to theorize collaboration more broadly in recollecting women’s narratives.

Conclusion Together, this collection’s essays call on readers to consider the deliberate and consequential ways in which women have been obscured from and remembered differently within public memory and the cultural and social norms—always evolving —that often constrain and shape women’s reputations and memories. Beyond recovering the individual narratives of activists, of women in science and the military, of women speaking and composing, and of women artists and philosophers, essay authors call on feminist and rhetorical scholars to continue reimagining the ways in which our own scholarly and activist practices may contribute to the further silencing and misremembering of women’s voices. And in demonstrating acts of recovering, recasting, and refocusing, the women’s stories captured here also suggest significant sites for future research while theorizing acts of re-collecting.

Works Cited Cereta, Laura. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Translated and edited by Diana Robin, U of Chicago P, 1997. 16 Letizia Guglielmo

Collings Eves, Rosalyn. “Recipe for Remembrance: Memory and Identity in African-Ameri- can Women’s Cookbooks.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 24, no. 3, 2005, pp. 280–97. Collins (Burton), Vicki Tolar. “The Speaker Respoken: Material Rhetoric as Feminist Meth- odology.” Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan, Parlor Press, 2007, pp. 144–67. Combahee River Collective. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), edited by Joy Richards and Kate Ronald, U of Pittsburgh P, 2001, pp. 291–300. Cox, Virginia. “Moderata Fonte and ‘The Worth of Women.’” The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, Moderata Fonte, edited and translated by Virginia Cox, U of Chicago P, 1997, pp. 1–23. Daniell, Beth, and Letizia Guglielmo. “Changing Audience, Changing Ethos.” Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric, edited by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones, Southern Illinois UP, 2016, pp. 89–109. Enoch, Jessica, and Jordyn Jack. “Remembering Sappho: New Perspectives on Teaching (and Writing) Women’s Rhetorical History.” College English, vol. 73, no. 5, 2011, pp. 518–37. Fonte, Moderata. The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men. Edited and translated by Virginia Cox, U of Chicago P, 1997. Gerald, Amy. “Finding the Grimkés in Charleston: Using Feminist Historiographic and Ar- chival Research Methods to Build Public Memory.” Peitho, vol. 18, no. 2, 2016, pp. 99–123. Guglielmo, Letizia, and Kimberly Wallace Stewart. “16 and Pregnant and the ‘Unvarnished’ Truth about Teen Pregnancy.” MTV and Teen Pregnancy: Critical Essays and 16 and Preg- nant and Teen Mom, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013, pp. 19–34. Harrison, Kimberly. “Rhetorical Rehearsals: The Construction of Ethos in Confederate Women’s Civil War Diaries.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 22, no. 3, 2003, pp. 243–63. Hogg, Charlotte. “Including Conservative Women’s Rhetorics in an ‘Ethics of Hope and Care.’” Rhetoric Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 2015, pp. 391–408. King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil Jr. “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Introduc- tion to the Series.” The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, Moderata Fonte, edited and translated by Virginia Cox, U of Chicago P, 1997, pp. vii–xxvi. Lerner, Gerda. “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History.” Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, edited by Berenice A. Carroll, U of Illinois P, 1976, pp. 349–56. ———. “Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective.” Liberating Women’s History: Theo- retical and Critical Essays, edited by Berenice A. Carroll, U of Illinois P, 1976, pp. 357–68. Ryan, Kathleen J., Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones. “Introduction: Identifying Feminist Ecological Ethē.” Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric, Southern Illinois UP, 2016, pp. 1–22. Phillips, Kendall R. “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remem- brance.” Western Journal of Communication, vol. 74, no. 2, 2010, pp. 208–23. Introduction 17

Ratcliffe, Krista. “Bathsheba’s Dilemma: Defining, Discovering, and Defending Anglo- American Feminist Theories of Rhetoric(s).” Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, reprinted in Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 80–107. Reynolds, Nedra. “Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 1993, pp. 325–38. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English, vol. 34, no. 1, 1972, pp. 18–30. Ritchie, Joy, and Kate Ronald. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). U of Pittsburgh P, 2001. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. Selfe, Cynthia L. “Technology in the English Classroom: Computers through the Lens of Feminist Theory.” Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Carolyn Handa, Boynton/Cook, 1990, pp. 118–39. Tarabotti, Arcangela.Paternal Tyranny. Edited and translated by Letizia Panizza, U of Chicago P, 2004. Vivian, Bradford. “On the Language of Forgetting.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 95, no. 1, 2009, pp. 89–104. Zelizer, Barbie. “Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies.” Critical Studies of Mass Communication, vol. 12, no. 2, 1995, pp. 214–39.

Part One New Theoretical Frameworks

“Peter said to Mary, ‘Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.’ Mary responded, ‘I will teach you about what is hidden from you.’ And she began to speak these words to them.” Mary Madgalene, The Gospel of Mary (Nag Hammadi Library)

Social Networks as a Powerful Force for Change Women in the History of Medicine and Computing

Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher

In this essay, we employ the analytical concept of social circulation as proposed by Royster and Kirsch to explore the life and work of professional communities of women in male-dominated careers. We focus on two case studies: a group of turn-of-the-twentieth-century American women physicians and a group of mid- twentieth-century British women who worked at Bletchley Park as mathematicians, computer operators, and code breakers. These two distinct groups of women, we contend, help illuminate the different ways in which we can trace the social circulation of knowledge, resources, and everyday practices that shaped women’s lives and professional identities. We argue that the notion of social circulation can enrich the way we understand the accomplishments of professional women not only as historical figures in their own right but as actors in larger social circles whose ideas and actions shaped developments in the medical profession and in computer science that circulated across time, locations, and generations. We draw on a range of different archival materials, including textual evidence, such as the Woman’s Medical Journal, medical records, correspondence and memoirs, and material records such as work schedules, clothing choices, and oral histories. Drawing on Royster and Kirsch’s definition of social circulation, we pay particular attention to the evolutionary and revolutionary aspects of women’s professional networks as these allow us to trace the formation of professional identities in relation to work, location, and community: “The notion ofsocial circulation invokes connections among past, present, and future in the sense that the overlapping social circles in which women travel, live, and work are carried on or modified from one 22 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher generation to the next and give rise to changed rhetorical practices. Here, then, we are talking about evolutionary relationships—not just revolutionary ones—and more mediated legacies of thought and action” (Kirsch and Royster 660). These two case studies are especially rich, we suggest, because the differences between the communities highlights the usefulness of social circulation as an analytic frame: one community is dispersed and we trace the community through texts, while the other community is local and we trace the community through everyday practices. The early women physicians represent an internationally dispersed community that often communicated via correspondence, print journals, or other text-based artifacts. In contrast, the women of Bletchley Park offer a glimpse of a local community where shared everyday practices evolved within a discrete time and place. Through these differing communities, we illustrate how social circulation can be used as an analytic concept for historical recovery that foregrounds community-based activism as well as the actions of individual women. While the social circulation of knowledge, resources, and ideas operates differently in these two communities, our analysis traces the evolution of these women’s professional identities, their progress and setbacks in two distinctly male-dominated fields. We also emphasize that social circulation is an analytical concept that encourages ecological approaches to rhetoric. Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones define an ecological approach to ethos as “negotiated and renegotiated, embodied and communal, co-constructed and thoroughly implicated in shifting power dynamics” (11). For both of these communities, the ethos of the women is never individual but always collective, shared, performed, and shifting depending on shifting cultural and political power dynamics. As we trace women’s professional identities and social networks, we are particularly interested in two key questions: How did these women collaborate, mentor one another, and share resources, knowledge, and everyday practices? What was the role of social and professional networks in allowing women to enter the workplace, navigate the public sphere, and advocate social change? These questions signal a shift in how we think about women in male-dominated professions and their accomplishments—not as exceptional cases or individuals with extraordinary determination, energy, and persistence, although many did possess these qualities, but as a closely knit group of women who shared knowledge, resources, and everyday practices, and, in the process, forged professional identities and created social networks. Kirsch has researched the Women’s Medical Journal (WMJ) for several years and published aspects of her research in the edited collection Rhetoric, Writing, and Circulation. Fancher studied gender and technical communication at Bletchley Park in her dissertation and is now developing that research to focus on communities of women at Bletchley Park. In this article, we leverage our knowledge of these two communities Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 23

of women, using social circulation as an analytic frame that foregrounds the evolutionary nature of progress.

Social Circulation in the Woman’s Medical Journal To illustrate the evolution of professional networks among early women physicians, we turn to the WMJ, a publication that offers insights into the first successful cohort of women in medicine, the first small “bubble” in the profession.1 Founded in 1893, the WMJ grew rapidly in size, readership, contributors, and advertisements and reveals traces of the burgeoning network of early, predominantly white, women physicians at the turn of the twentieth century. The WMJ offers insights into how women educated and mentored one another; shared resources, knowledge, and advice; and used professional networks to collaborate across geographical regions and generations. Kirsch argues that a number of features in the WMJ actively supported the exchange of knowledge and the creation of women’s professional identities. These included a growing “miscellany” section that featured medical women’s achievements, setbacks, and travels and news about medical schools and training; a series of editorials aimed at dispelling gender stereotypes, prejudices, and obstacles that women in the profession were likely to encounter; and a series of biographical portraits of successful women physicians. The journal also published medical news in an international context as many women physicians were forced to travel abroad if they wanted to receive advanced medical training (Abram; Bonner; Furst; More). Further, the WMJ encouraged women physicians to participate in professional venues, such as medical conferences, medical associations, and research publications, and it actively modeled how women physicians could become effective rhetoricians. While progressive in many respects, the WMJ served a predominantly white readership and neglected to document, support, and promote the achievements of women of color, with only an occasional editorial addressing the struggles faced by women of color (for example, Vandervall).2 The miscellany section is particularly significant but easily overlooked, Kirsch contends, precisely because it is located in the margins. While other journals of that era published many announcements, none highlighted items of particular interest or concern to women, nor did they feature editorials meant to educate, support, and encourage women physicians. They also did not illustrate the use of rhetorical strategies for defending or justifying women’s career choices, gender roles, morality, and intelligence.

Mapping Success and Struggle in an International Context By reading the Miscellany section with attention to patterns of social circulation— rather than as a conglomeration of random notices—we can identify circles of social engagement, noticing the growing presence of women in medicine and their evolving professional identities and tracing movement across time and space.3 We can 24 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher begin to map women’s movements across medical schools, teaching hospitals, and internship opportunities along with movement across regions, states, and foreign countries. Women physicians would announce relocation of offices, professional advancements, new positions, and plans for travel—often abroad—to seek out professional development opportunities because advanced medical training could be limited (for example, Bonner). We begin to understand how early women physicians, especially those who contributed to the WMJ, saw themselves as actors in a historical moment, sharing information in an international context. A close reading of the miscellany items further reveals that progress was not as steady, linear, and forward moving as one might imagine. Instead, many notices showcase both success and struggle, reporting progress made in some venues and setbacks experienced in others. To illustrate, we turn to one example of the “Miscellany” section, page 292 in the November 1896 WMJ issue (Volume 5.11). Here, we find five entries that reveal the rich contours of social circulation.

Excerpt from Woman’s Medical Journal November 1896. Photograph retrieved from Hathi Digital Trust. Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 25

Dr. Maud J. Frye, of Buffalo, has been appointed to the staff of the Erie County (N.Y.) Hospital. Dr. Frye is in charge of the children’s department. Dr. Elisha lngalls and Dr. Mary Leonard have opened a free dispensary for women and children under the auspices of the W.C.T.U. at the Noon Rest. Portland, Ore. Winifred Dawson, M.D., has been appointed examiner in midwifery to the Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland). The appointment of a lady examiner does not seem to have met with the approval of the medical students. Miss [?]. I. de Steiger, a medical woman of London, was recently appointed third medical officer to the Essex County Lunatic Asylum, Brent- wood. In order to make the appointment of a woman to this office regular it was necessary to alter the rules. England is coming on despite the fact that her two leading universities still refuse to confer degrees upon women. It is stated in The Hospital that the gentle Sultan of Turkey has forbidden women physicians to attend upon his subjects, and that Dr. Grace Kimball, who had established herself with success in Turkey and worked there for fourteen years, has now returned to London. Reading these entries for patterns of social circulation, we begin to see that many women physicians saw themselves as historical actors and global citizens as they reported news about their achievements, struggles, travels, and advanced training. We also see the journal editor’s work behind the scenes, compiling miscellany notes from many sources that highlight the opportunities and challenges awaiting white women physicians. The first entry highlights Dr. Frye’s success and location; she had been put in charge of the children’s department at the Erie County Hospital. The second entry describes a collaborative venture led by Drs. Ingalls and Leonard: the opening of a free dispensary for women and children, not only an important venue for patients of little or no means but also a venue that allowed women physicians to train, mentor, and offer internships to women medical students (Chen). The third entry describes success within the context of an ongoing struggle; it offers an international context and provides a cautionary tale of resistance. While Dr. Dawson was able to pursue a professional opportunity in Ireland with her appointment as an examiner of midwifery, she was met with resistance from medical students (the majority of whom, we would assume, were male). This notice serves both to record progress for medical women and to highlight continuing challenges, pointing to the evolution of medical women’s professional communities. The fourth entry is equally cautious in tone and international in scope: it an- nounces the appointment of a woman physician as medical officer in Essex County, England—a step forward—but offers cautions about the challenges involved; the 26 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher rules needed to be changed for such an appointment. Here, we see how women’s entry into the medical profession challenged the status quo. Further, this entry provides a cautionary tale; it reminds readers that “two leading universities” still did not grant medical degrees to women. In the fifth entry, we learn about a setback—not an incremental progress or challenge to the status quo but a defeat for women in medicine in an international setting. Dr. Grace Kimball, a British woman physician who had run a successful practice for more than a decade in Turkey, was denied access to her patients because of her gender by the Sultan of Turkey. As a consequence, she was forced to close her practice and return to London. As this sample page from the WMJ in November 1896 illustrates, we find struggle on every page. The WMJ provided a rich source of news, information, resources, encouragement, and cautions, an important task because the terrain for women in medicine was uneven, unpredictable, and hazardous—abroad and at home. The journal seems to have served as a guide for weary travelers in the world of medicine. Women physicians were making strides in some settings, some cities, and some countries, only to face challenges, resistance, or setbacks in other institutions, locations, or contexts. The WMJ provided an important service for its readers, offering a tool for sharing resources, information, and cautionary tales and subsequently creating an international professional community. Yet we notice once again the absence of women of color, especially African American women, in the pages of the WMJ journal. Challenging Gender Norms and Celebrating Women’s Achievements Women physicians in the late nineteenth century had to overcome many prejudices as they entered the medical profession, such as being considered physically, emotionally, and mentally unfit for the medical profession. Often, women’s characters were impugned as a medical education was said to compromise feminine virtues— modesty, piety, and morality. The editors of the WMJ knew these challenges intimately and were determined to publish material that would challenge stereotypes, showcase successful women, and offer advice on how to justify changing gender roles. Thus, we can deduce that another rhetorical function of the many miscellany items published in the WMJ was to challenge gender norms and expectations not only with regard to women in the medical profession but also with regard to women in the culture at large. This would explain why some of the miscellany announcements included many “firsts” for women, achievements regardless of profession, and why the journal listed individual women who displayed qualities often attributed to men, such as a courage, strength, tenacity, and bravery. To illustrate we turn to these examples published in the 1899 volume: Dr. Julia Holmes Smith was installed as dean of National Medical College, of Chicago, on September 13 [1899]. This is the first instance in a coeducational medical college in the United States, which a woman has been elected dean of the faculty. (Volume 8, 1899, p. 427, emphasis added) Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 27

Miss Ella McCarthy, of Vincennes, Ind., has the distinction of being the first woman lawyer in her home city. She was admitted to the bar on September 26. (Volume 8, 1899, p. 426, emphasis added) Mrs. A. Immogene Paul, superintendent of street cleaning for the down town district of Chicago, was highly commended by the city press for the manner in which she handled her crews of men and disposed of the great amount of debris in the streets during the recent fall festival. (Volume 8, 1899, p. 382, emphasis added) A Proper Recognition for the heroism of Miss Frances Troop, who at the risk of her own life saved that of her patient during the late New York horror, the burning of the Windsor Hotel, has been recognized by the trustees of St. Luke’s Hospital in a resolution expressing their gratification that a former pupil had so bravely stood at her post of duty. All honor indeed to this brave woman. (Volume 8, 1899, p. 160, emphasis added) The cumulative effect of publishing long lists of women’s accomplishments, promo- tions, leadership roles, and character traits served to illustrate—by example and by magnitude—that gender norms could readily be challenged and that women were just as capable of professional, moral, and intellectual accomplishments as their male counterparts, regardless of class, creed, or profession. To emphasize these points further, the WMJ regularly published editorials that offered advice to women physicians, rehearsed rebuttals to challenges they might face, and dispelled prejudices they might encounter. A focus on social circulation, we want to suggest, allows us to see the larger contours of women’s evolving professional identities. It moves us away from a focus on individual achievement—a singular figure who overcomes obstacles against all odds—and toward a sense of community, collaboration, and collective ethos, what Ryan, Myers, and Jones describe as an ecological approach to ethos. We are able to trace how social and professional networks enabled members to create and transmit knowledge, share resources, and challenge gender norms. Using social circulation as an analytic framework, we are able to see a community coming together and working for change.

Tracing Textual Evidence of a Professional Network We can further trace the power of professional networks by turning to medical articles published in the WMJ. For example, in an article published in 1894 by Dr. Mary Delano Fletcher, a California physician whose report was titled “A Case of Infantile Scorbutus” (an infant disorder caused by nutritional deficit), we can observe how the author invoked her professional network to establish her own authority as well as to showcase the expertise of her colleagues, thereby reinforcing medical women’s professional identities. Reading for rhetorical strategies (rather than medical 28 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher information), we can identify evidence that illuminates how professional networks worked in everyday practice. In this article, Dr. Fletcher highlighted the importance of her professional network when she wrote, “to satisfy myself [of the diagnosis], I requested further consultation. Being told to select whom I would I telephoned for Dr. Buckel and Dr. Shuey, who responded at once. These ladies were most kind in their interest in what was, to me, a unique case, and while satisfied with my treatment of the case, suggested my giving minute doses of oromatic sulphuric acid” (139). Here, Dr. Fletcher identified by name the two women physicians with whom she consulted: Dr. Buckel and Dr. Shuey. Further, Dr. Fletcher noted that she found her colleagues’ advice particularly helpful, a rhetorical move that confirmed their professional authority and identity. This passage functions rhetorically in a number of ways: it establishes the medical knowledge and expertise of Dr. Fletcher’s colleagues: “being told to select whom [she] would,” Dr. Fletcher turned to these two women. The passage also establishes her colleague’s professional ethos: “they responded at once,” and “the ladies were most kind in their interest” in the case. Further, it establishes these women’s medical and scientific knowledge without undermining Dr. Fletcher’s diagnosis and treatment plan: “while satisfied with my treatment of the case, [they] suggested giving minute doses of oromatic sulphuric acid.” Dr. Buckel’s and Dr. Shuey’s treatment recommendation is represented as supplemental, not essential. The fact that this article was published in theWoman’s Medical Journal, a journal with a national and international circulation, further am- plifies the importance of professional networks. Dr. Fletcher’s writing highlights how consultation and exchange of medical knowledge worked in her professional circle, thereby solidifying her colleagues’ professional ethos and credentials among the readers of the WMJ. Dr. Fletcher’s article provides significant evidence of the power of professional networks and the social circulation of medical treatment plans among this particular group of early California women physicians. Kirsch has identified further evidence of this particular professional circle in the autobiography of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter. Dr. Ritter and Dr. Fletcher were classmates at Cooper Medical College (now Stanford School of Medicine) and the only two women in the medical class of 1886. These two women became lifelong friends and collaborators, and together with Dr. C. Annette Buckel and Dr. Sarah Shuey they formed an informal network of women physicians who practiced medicine in the San Francisco Bay area. In her memoir, More Than Gold in California, Dr. Ritter wrote: “Thus we four women physicians were near enough to work together when necessary, and relieve each other when one took a vacation” (194). These women consulted with one another when they encountered difficult medical cases and covered each other’s duties during vacations, illnesses, or other absences from their practices. When we examine textual traces—in the margins of archival materials—we begin to understand how knowledge, resources, and ideas circulated in different regions Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 29 of the country, across different generations of women physicians, and in particular historical, cultural, and international contexts. What becomes evident is the important role of professional networks as a powerful force for change, allowing women to educate, mentor, and support one another, to exchange knowledge and resources, and to establish their professional identity, authority, and ethos. We now turn to another professional network—that of women mathematicians, computer operators, and cryptographers. Once again, we attend to traces in the margins of archival materials, but, instead of examining textual traces, we examine the everyday practices that shaped women’s professional identities, specifically work habits and forms of dress.

Social Circulation at Bletchley Park During World War II, Bletchley Park was the base of England’s information warfare, including intercepting, deciphering, and encoding messages. Although the accomplishments of men like Alan Turing and Max Newman have received the most attention, the community at BP was predominantly composed of women. By 1943 women outnumbered men four to one. In total, between six thousand and eight thousand women worked at Bletchley Park at different times from 1938 to 1945 (Mason). Bletchley Park recruited, trained, and employed women to contribute British information warfare. Initially, these women were exclusively recruited from among the upper classes of British society. The daughters and wives of generals, government officials, and aristocrats were thought to be the most fit for this secretive work. For the most part, these women were “computers,” which was a common job title for a person, typically a woman, who did computing and calculating work before much of this work was done by digital computers. As more men went to the battlefield and BP expanded, women were increasingly recruited to work as specialists in translation, cryptography, and mathematics. Later, BP recruited women from many branches of military service, especially the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). BP paid these women one-third of what they paid men for doing the same work. Still, working at Bletchley Park was a desirable position for women. Even at one- third pay, the women’s salaries were considerably higher than those in any other branch of military service and higher than those for most of the civilian work available to them (Dunlop 121). From the official postwar report on “medium and low grade labour” at Bletch- ley Park, the male managers patronizingly reported, “It is astonishing what young women could be trained to do” (Dunlop 111). However, the women did not recall their work with the same element of surprise. Rather, these women were eager to participate in the war effort in some substantial way (Dunlop 117–18). Many of the women sought work at Bletchley Park because they were told that this work was of vital importance. Other women pursued this opportunity because they were already trained as mathematicians or translators. Women studying math would very 30 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher quickly meet barriers to work: they were excluded from advanced graduate training at universities. But World War II opened up opportunities for specialized work. Ann Mitchell is one woman for whom Bletchley Park opened up work that she had previously been denied. Mitchell was one of only five women studying mathematics at Oxford in 1940. Before finishing her undergraduate education, Mitchell began working at BP programming instructions for the Bombe, an electric code-breaking machine developed by Alan Turing and his team. It was really her dream job (Dun- lop 115–17). Amid this social change and global turmoil, upper-class British women were given access to specialized, professional training and work that they had previously been denied. Recently, researchers have begun to recover the histories of women working at Bletchley Park through several published biographies featuring the life experiences of individual, exceptional women (see Smith; Russell-Jones and Russell-Jones). Joan Clarke has received the most attention, in part because of a special fascination with her brief engagement to Alan Turing, which was featured in the 2014 movie The Imitation Game. Previous recovery efforts had unveiled the unique contributions of a few exceptional women, but more research is needed to understand the “Bletchley Girls” as a large, diverse community of professional women. In 2015, Tessa Dunlop’s Bletchley Girls began to create an historical account women at BP. Drawing on interviews with twelve living veterans of BP, Dunlop painted a rich and diverse portrait of these women’s lives before, after, and during World War II. Importantly, Dunlop’s book is the only text in which a group of “Bletchley Girls,” now in their nineties, recall their lives and work at BP. From these histories, we have begun to recollect and recover stories of women’s work and lives at Bletchley Park. However, there are still many questions left to address: How did these women work together to support, encourage, and mentor one another as they developed professional identities? To what extent did their work at Bletchley Park shape their identities, authority, attitudes, and values, both personally and professionally? To address these questions, we trace the evolution of everyday practices and their effect on the professional identities of women at Bletchley Park. Drawing on interviews published in Dunlop’s book as well as archival research, Fancher argues that we can better understand this community and its effects upon evolving gender roles when we attend to social circulation of everyday practices within this community. Doing so allows us to reframe Bletchley Park as a key site for British women looking to develop professional identities and to create a community that fostered progressive gender norms. Importantly, social circulation becomes visible primarily in evolving everyday practices, including day-to-day decisions around dressing, commuting, and working in the unusual environment of Bletchley Park. The importance of these everyday practices reverberates in the archival materials and through women’s memories Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 31 decades later. However, in order to identify everyday practices, our archival research methods must once again shift to the margins: we pay attention not only to women’s work at Bletchley Park but also to their everyday practices—what they wore, how they traveled, and how they built friendships. With this shift in focus, Fancher identifies women sharing knowledge, articulating values, and creating professional identities. Again, critical imagination helps us to build connections between the everyday practices of women’s lives and the consequences of these practices.

Evolving Community The concept of social circulation offers an important framework for historical -re covery, in part because, with the shift from a person to a community, we see that communities are far from stable. Communities and actors are adjacent, overlapping, and evolving. Before Bletchley Park, these well-to-do white women were most often restricted to the social circles of their fathers, their husbands, and their local community. Shortly before the start of World War II, many of these women were debutants entering public spheres while being presented as “in the market” for a husband. Their primary social role was as an eligible wife. However, with the social shifts of World War II, women were actively recruited from among the aristocracy, the professional classes, the military services, and the universities to work at Bletch- ley Park. In this environment, women were no longer under the watchful eye of their parents or other adult supervisors. They lived in apartments of their own or in cramped dorms with other women. Although many of the women remember the challenges of their living and working conditions, Rozanne Colcherster (née Medhurst) recalled, “you see, everything is terribly exciting when you are young and away from home” (Dunlop 163). These women met and worked closely with a relatively diverse group of women and men with expert knowledge and from different social circles and economic classes, though this was an exclusively white working environment. Gwen Watkins (née Davies) recalled that her mother was “horrified and worried about me a lot,” but for Watkins the experience was an introduction to a world of professional expertise: “We were meeting people all the time and there were lectures about things you never knew anything about: the history of the Royal Air Force, Nazi philosophy and theories about what was going on in Germany. It was a complete revival” (Dunlop 81). As they moved in and out of these social circles with greater freedom and relatively little oversight from authority figures, women were exposed to new ideas and identities. Importantly, they learned to make names for themselves on the basis of their work and separate from their families. When we focus on the everyday practices—work schedules and clothing choices, in particular—of women of Bletchley Park, we begin to see how this evolving community shaped the women’s identities personally and professionally. 32 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher

Everyday Practices Circulate through Work Because so few documents on the lives of these women exist, we pay particular attention to what was shared, common, and moving within this community. One of the most important shared experiences was that of the demanding work schedule at Bletchley Park. The work needed to go on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for several years. At BP, the confidential nature of the work prevented women from talking about what they were doing, even with other members of Bletchley Park. However, this community did circulate the everyday practices of adjusting to working fifty to seventy hours a week. The women of BP recalled the demanding work schedule, some with more relish than others. To keep up with demand, the women worked in shifts around the clock. One anonymous member of WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) recalled, “The scene that I remember most of all is a night watch, working on the Bombes in Hut 11, walking in the dark along the tennis court wire in the middle of the night, to the Mansion . . . there was a mixture of Code breakers, Wrens, anyone who worked there, and you had coffee and sat anywhere. Everyone read The Times. You talked to anyone, high or low, but no-one knew what anyone else was doing. After about half an hour you walked back . . . to the “hell-hole,” the Bombe Hut, where there was noise, smell, no air and poor lighting, to complete your eight hour watch” (Mason). The women were out of their homes and traveling at all hours of the night for the first time in their lives. The women at Bletchley Park laid to rest any stereotypes about female fragility. Ann Mitchell remembered, “If there was known to be something important you were harried. You could feel under a lot of pressure. I personally work better under pressure” (Dunlop 116). They speak proudly of their discretion, diligence, and commitment. From these interviews, we can also see the significance of this work for the women: they shifted from private care work into public spaces with specialized and top-secret work. And with this shift in work, the women’s professional identities also evolved. They saw themselves a crucial aspect of the war effort and contributors to cutting-edge technologies. Joanna Chorley recalled the moment when she first saw the Colossus, the world’s first programmable, electric, digital computer: “I met the Colossus just after I had signed the Official Secrets Act. I saw this astonishing machine the size of a room. It was ticking away, and the tapes were going around and all the valves, and I thought, what an amazing machine. . . . Like magic and science combined . . . I did love the beast” (Dunlop 125–27). In this narrative, Chorley, a young woman, fell in love at first sight with a massive computer. Entering Bletchley Park created shifts in values and priorities by introducing women to work that would become their passions and specialties. What is more, the women began to see themselves as specialists, skilled workers, and even heroes who were making meaningful and active contributions to the British war effort. Through the shared experience of Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 33 the demanding work schedule, these women performed and circulated an identity of a Bletchley Park girl as a hardworking, serious, committed professional.

Wardrobe Choices and Professional Identities A second way that this community cultivated professional identities was through clothing choices. What one wears may seem somewhat trivial, but that is precisely the point. Professional identities didn’t circulate in any published, textual form. However, through day-to-day experiences such as deciding what to wear, professional identities circulated as embodied practices. Their choices in clothing embodied shifting values. Many of these women entered BP through some form of military service, which required military uniforms. Kathleen Godfrey, of the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF), recalled the social importance of her uniform: “[My father] had never seen me in uniform before and I suppose that must have been quite a surprise. ‘What are you doing with yourself, Kathleen?’ he asked. ‘I can’t possibly tell you, Father. It’s a secret,’ I answered. He was of course delighted” (Dunlop 82). This feeling of shock at seeing his daughter out of her fine dresses and in her uniform was a point of pride. Godfrey entered BP as a teenager; her work and her uniform were part of her growing up. We can also see the significance of clothing in this account from Dun- lop: “Rozanne [Colchester] had a bicycle and controversial pair of slacks, which she wore to pedal through the snow. Her over secretary did not approve. ‘You can’t wear those trousers, you must wear a little black dress!’ Rozanne protested: ‘I haven’t got a little black dress.’ The Command’s General Hog entered the room and declared: ‘I love your slacks!’” (71). The women’s identities were evolving from ones primarily tied to cultivating beauty, delicacy, and domesticity into identities that allowed for greater physical as well as social mobility. Mobility was a key value for clothing because women needed to move more freely in order to commute to work and move around the workplace. They needed to be able to move, walk, sit, bike, and stand for long hours. Their clothing choices shifted to value functionality over appearance. In many ways, these women started to dress like professional men, sporting ties, pants, and comfortable shoes. By making these clothing choices, women associated their professional ethos with the traditional appearance of the male professional. Although men were the minority at BP, they were the authorities and gatekeepers to promotion and professional advancement. By dressing like these professional authorities, BP women linked their own identities with visual cues of authority, professionalism, and masculinity. Finally, we turn to one detailed visual analysis that reveals the social circulation of professional identities in finer grain. In particular, the sketch reproduced here reveals a link between two women as they supported and circulated their emerging professional identities. The image, “Our Hats: Then and Now,” was drawn by Jean Hind, a 34 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher

“Our Hats! Then and Now,” drawn by Jean Hind, December 6, 1943. Photo- graph retrieved from Hathi Digital Trust.

member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1943 and saved by a friend and fellow WAAF, Eleanor Milnes. Milnes saved this sketch in her autograph book, which was a book that women commonly used to save signatures, quotes, messages, and mementos from friends and family. The genre of the autograph book is significant for understanding the social circulation of this sketch. This sketch functioned as Hind’s “autograph” to remind Milnes of their friendship and their time at Bletchley Park long after they had parted ways. Before social media and selfies, when photographs were still expensive, women collected drawing, notes, quotes, and other mementos to preserve lasting traces of their friendships and experiences. In this context, Hind chose to record her experience and trace their relationship through this sketch of their clothing choices. By including this sketch in the autograph book, Hind and Milnes circulated their values for professional women beyond the walls of BP and long after the end of World War II. Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 35

These clothes metonymically represent the women’s transitioning values and emerging professional identities. Before Bletchley Park, it was expected that upper- class white women would adorn themselves in fashionable clothes, frilly hats, and jewelry. The woman on the top of the sketch has highly styled hair, a dress with a stiff, high-necked collar, and several ornate styles of hats to choose from. It is important to note that the woman on top may have made many wardrobe choices: she has many hats to choose from and each is quite distinct. In the bottom frame, the woman drawn represents the life and wardrobe choices at Bletchley Park. The woman is wearing the standard-issue uniform for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). The eagle is the emblem of the WAAF. Her hair is pulled under her hat and is almost unnoticeable. Unlike the woman at the top, this woman has no wardrobe choices. She wears what she is assigned to wear. And with this lack of choice, her daily routine shifts away from styling her outward appearance and toward performing the important work at Bletchley Park. The gazes of these women are also significant. In the top image, the woman is looking down, focused on the hat. Fashion, frills, and her physical appearance hold her attention. Before BP, most of her social engagements would have centered on presenting herself as a desirable partner for marriage. However, as we shift to BP in the bottom frame, the woman’s gaze also shifts. She gazes straight back at the audience. Her blue eyes and her confident position draw us in. She leans her head slightly to the side, comfortably making eye contact with her viewer. In this detail, we see the emergence of a confident, hardworking, professional woman. Again, we emphasize that progress is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Though this community celebrated and thrived in these new professional environments during the unusual circumstances of World War II, most of the women returned to personal and family pursuits instead of pursuing professional ambitions after the war. In addition, as computer science became a more specialized profession, women fund education, training, and employment in these professions harder to access. Women were often barred from entry into graduate training and jobs that would have allowed for further professional development. However, some of these women, including Margaret Rock and Joan Clarke, two of the most professionally successful women at BP, did continue to build careers. As we analyze the social circulation of professional identities in Bletchley Park, Fancher argues that the sudden ecological shift that the women experienced—as the women left their home communities and entered the unique environment of Bletchley Park—allowed for the social circulation of progressive gender identities. Importantly, the social circulation of ideas and identities was not composed in text but was embodied: they performed the professional identities when they got dressed and when they worked at all hours of the night and day. The embodiment of this professional identity was practiced every day, evolved, and circulated in their community. 36 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher

Conclusion In this essay, we argued that we can best understand the legacy of early professional women by examining how their work circulated—and changed—through time and space and in the social networks that shaped their knowledge, values, and professional identities. The two case studies we selected—early women physicians and women at Bletchley Park—highlight significant differences as well as points of overlap, which allow for comparison. By paying attention to social circulation in the margins, we recovered not just strong determined individuals but communities of women who worked together, celebrated their collective successes, and shared ongoing struggles. In both cases, women’s rhetorical practices grew out of their lived experiences. The women physicians did not just cite one another’s work. They were friends who collaborated, net- worked, and assisted one another as doctors and activists. The women of Bletchley Park built their professional identities through long days of arduous work, and they built their ethos through everyday practices such as their choice of clothing. We found that these communities differed in their affiliation with feminist causes, but in both cases the progress that women achieved as professionals was evolutionary at best, involving recursive development. In the WMJ, we found that women were writing specifically to educate, support, and mentor one another and to advocate for professional advancement opportunities. In this way, the discourses were at times explicitly feminist, activist, and even revolutionary in tone. In Bletchley Park, however, women’s purposes for coming together into a community were first and foremost to contribute to the British war effort, not explicitly to support women as professionals. Nevertheless, these women did create professional networks that implicitly supported their identities as professional women. While we identified these differences, for both communities progress was rarely revolutionary; rather, it functioned as a gradual, messy, and recursive evolution. In the WMJ, women celebrated and advocated for women physicians while at the same time they frequently announced regressive trends, setbacks, and increasing restrictions for professional women. Similarly, the women at Bletchley Park supported and influenced one another, but this did not mean that they all aspired to professional careers or succeeded as professionals. The opposite is true: after the war most of the women returned to their primary roles as wives and mothers, while only a few successfully built professional careers. In both communities, our focus on social circulation helped us compose nuanced historical narratives in which progress did not move along a straight line but meandered in an always complex, recursive process, something that remains as true today as then, especially in male-dominated professions. Both of these case studies represent relatively unparalleled moments of success and access for professional women in these fields: the number of women physicians actually decreased from Social Network as a Powerful Force for Change 37

1920 to 1950, and the number of women in computer science and engineering has only decreased from 1950 until now. By recovering the social circulation of knowledge, resources, and everyday practices, our analysis recovers the importance of communities and collective action as women continue to work and fight to establish a place for themselves within male dominated professions. While we look to these historical examples, we also draw upon them to equip ourselves for contemporary struggles. Certainly, the challenges that these women faced are not exclusively historic challenges. We face many of the same challenges today in our civic and professional communities. By studying these historical case studies, we hope to underscore the importance of community building and collaboration among women and feminists. By working in coalitions of women and allies, we amplify and circulate our professional ethos as we continue to work as feminists in patriarchal structures.

Notes 1. According to Ellen More, Elizabeth Fee, and Manon Parry, “The creation of all-women’s and coeducational schools, regular and sectarian, became the engine behind a noticeable increase in the number of women medical graduates in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century, with their numbers increasing from a few hundred in 1860 to approximately three thousand five hundred by 1900” (2). 2. Gesa Kirsch would like to thank Carolyn Skinner for bringing this item to her attention. 3. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch speculate about the possibility—and challenges—of using tools of the digital humanities to identify, sort, and map the social circles and professional networks of early women physicians in their chapter, “Social Cir- culation and Legacies of Mobility for Nineteenth Century Women: Implications for Using Digital Resources in Socio-Rhetorical Projects.”

Works Cited Abram, Ruth, editor. “Send Us a Lady Physician:” Women Doctors in America, 1835–1920. W. W. Norton, 1985. Bonner, Thomas Neville. To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine. Harvard UP, 1992. Chen, Constance M. “Women’s Admissions.” Stanford Medicine, vol. 17, no. 3, Fall 2000, http://med.stanford.edu/centennial/women.html. Dunlop, Tessa. The Bletchley Girls: War, Secrecy, Love and Loss: The Women of Bletchley Park Tell Their Story. Hodder & Stoughton, 2015. Fletcher, Mary Delano. “A Case of Infantile Scorbutus.” Woman’s Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 6, 1894, pp. 138–40. Furst, Lillian R., editor. Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill. UP of Kentucky, 1997. 38 Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher

Kirsch, Gesa E., editor. More Than Gold in California: The Life and Work of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter. Globe Pequot P, 2017. Kirsch, Gesa E., and Jacqueline Jones Royster. “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 4, 2010, pp. 640–72. “Miscellany.” Woman’s Medical Journal, vol. 5, no. 11, 1896, p. 292. Mason, Gillian, curator. “The Women of Bletchley Park.”Google Cultural Institute, https://www .google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/the-women-of-bletchley-park/QQZ2YSRa (accessed July 11, 2017). More, Ellen S. Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850– 1995. Harvard UP, 1999. More, Ellen S., Elizabeth Fee, and Manon Parry. “Introduction: New Perspectives on Women Physicians and Medicine in the United States, 1849 to the Present.” Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine, edited by Ellen S. More, Elizabeth Fee, and Manon Parry, Johns Hopkins UP, 2009, pp. 1–20. Ritter, Mary Bennett. More Than Gold in California, 1849–1933. Professional P, 1933. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. ———. “Social Circulation and Legacies of Mobility for Nineteenth Century Women: Implications for Using Digital Resources in Socio-Rhetorical Projects.” Rhetoric, Writing, and Circulation, edited by Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke, Utah State UP, 2018. Russell-Jones, Mair, and Gethin Russell-Jones. My Secret Life in Hut Six: One Woman’s Experi- ences at Bletchley Park. Lion Hudson, 2014. Ryan, Kathleen J., Myers, Nancy, and Jones, Rebecca. “Introduction: Identifying Feminist Ecological Ethē.” Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric, edited by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers and Rebecca Jones, Southern Illinois UP, 2016, pp. 1–22. Smith, Michael. The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories. Aurum Press, 2015. The Imitation Game. Directed by Morten Tyldum, Black Bear Pictures, 2014. Vandervall, Isabella. “Some Problems of the Colored Woman Physician.” Woman’s Medical Journal, vol. 27, no. 7, July 1917, pp. 156–58. From Erasure to Restoration Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the DNA Structure

Alice Johnston Myatt

“Since feminist research has also been concerned with women as practitioners of science, it is essential to distinguish writings concerned with gender from those that reclaim forgotten women scientists and restore their lost voices.” Ludmilla Jordanova, “Gender and the Historiography of Science”

Those who seek to restore or reclaim “forgotten women scientists and restore their lost voices” may find in Rosalind Franklin’s involuntary journey from forgotten woman scientist to acknowledged brilliant scientist (note the absence of the descriptive word “woman”) a rich exemplar of the rhetorical processes involved in restoration projects. In this essay, I posit that Franklin’s story is a complete representation of the different phases involved in reclaiming women (regardless of discipline or contribution to society) from erasure or loss of public memory to their rightful place in the history of their fields. In the case of Franklin, her restorers first move her from her marginalized, even erased, contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA to a rightful place among the male scientists who were publicly lauded and awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for their work in mapping out the structure of DNA. During the process of restoration to scientific history, she also gained recognition for her entire body of work, which included work on the microstructure of coal and viruses that is still referenced today. In short, re-collecting the details of her work with DNA also restores her status as a first-rate researcher and scientist in the fields of molecular biology and crystallography, recognition that was for many years obscured by the way in which her work with DNA was dismissed and ignored by influential male colleagues. 40 Alice Johnston Myatt

Portrait of Rosalind Franklin. Image courtesy Robin Stott, CC BY SA 2.0. Franklin had a strong ethos, certainly, that guided her in the development of her own research agendas and that shaped her interactions with others. However, she was no rhetor, and the writing and speaking she did were focused on her professional work and research. Scientific historiography has collected the details of her life into a representative whole, and it is that historiography that makes Franklin an essential part of this collection. Her biographers used powerful rhetoric to persuade public memory to acknowledge the valuable and lasting work she had done during her brief career. Thus, the value of her narrative to this collection, which seeks to recollect and make visible the work of women rhetors and orators, is that the restoration of her status as an eminent scientist rests on the rhetorical work of her biographers:1 they did archival research of her letters and her lab notes; they drew on the power of pathos by describing her relationships with family, friends, and students; and they restored the credibility that had been taken from her by men who presented the work she did as their own. Not all of those she worked with participated in her erasure from scientific history. In 1958, when Franklin died at the age of thirty-seven of ovarian cancer, the noted scientist J. D. Bernal wrote in his obituary for her that “as a scientist, Miss From Erasure to Restoration 41

Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in every thing she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken” (qtd. in Uberoi 5). Less known and, in fact, lost to public memory was the fact that she was a major player in the discovery of the DNA structure, which for many decades was attributed solely to the work of Maurice Wilkins, James Watson, and Francis Crick, the three scientists who received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work in proving the helical structure of DNA. Among the “most beautiful X-ray photographs” she took was Photo 51, which revealed to human eyes for the first time the helical structure of DNA. The photograph was later appropriated by her male colleagues and used to develop the models of the DNA structure that would ultimately lead to their Nobel Prize. Franklin’s erasure from the story of the discovery of DNA illuminates the challenges faced by professional women—many of which still plague women who seek to find their place within fields that are often dominated by “a male approach to the world” and an “androcentrism that permeates biology in general and its subdisci- plines,” including evolutionary biology (Rosser xii; xiii). Rosser included Franklin among the “classic examples of the loss of the names of women scientists and the values of their work” (4). Yet, recovering the “lost history of women biologists,” noted Rosser, “is difficult because frequently the significance of the work of women biologists is not appreciated, is misunderstood, or was attributed to the m[e]n with whom they worked” (xiii–xiv). By articulating and understanding the circumstances around the types of effacement that Franklin’s work on DNA underwent, we can hope to avoid future instances of the same. Thus, we do well to ask, “Why was this figure ‘misremembered’ (Phillips 211) by her colleagues?” For misremembered she was, especially when presented to readers of James Watson’s memoir, The Double Helix. Equally beneficial would be an examination of what she did (or did not do) to contribute both to her obfuscation and to her current status in scientific history and how she was able to establish her own ethos and rhetorical agency in spite of the appropriation of her work by Crick, Watson, and Wilkins. Because of the high degree of competitiveness in scientific fields, professional reputations are sometimes victims of burial, neglect, and discredit—not through any action or agency of the person whose reputation is lost but through the words, actions, and manipulation of others. Reclamation projects that restore to the public record the characters and reputations of female professionals who have experienced such erasure are therefore necessary to an accurate understanding of history writ large. I use the restoration of Rosalind Franklin’s deserved status as a case study for understanding four different processes involved in restoration projects: erasure (status/public memory lost), refutation, reclamation, and restoration (status/public memory restored). Tracing out the beginning of Franklin’s marginalization and following the path to her current acknowledged status as one of the twentieth century’s noteworthy scientists may provide for others involved in such projects helpful 42 Alice Johnston Myatt characteristics that can reveal where in the stream of restoration a figure may be. At the same time, this project itself becomes part of the restoration of Franklin’s work to its deserved place. The processes of restoration are not linear processes wherein one stage must end before the next begins. Rather, the processes are often concurrent and are perhaps represented more accurately as phases rather than processes. Before describing and mapping out the processes just enumerated, we need to understand the social context surrounding Franklin’s work on DNA and how that connected to the person she was. Her biographers have ably demonstrated how she developed her own agency and ethos, beginning with her World War II work with Dr. Donald Bangham of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. Let us begin with the most controversial segment of her career: her work at London’s King’s College in the early 1950s.

Rosalind Franklin and the Structural Discovery of DNA Many people attribute the discovery of DNA’s structure to Francis Crick and James Watson’s collaboration in the science laboratories of the Cavendish Lab of Cam- bridge University with Maurice Wilkins of King’s College London Physics department during the early part of the 1950s. Crick and Watson published an article on the DNA structure in the July 1953 issue of Nature. While their article was given priority of place, the same issue also included two other entries related to the structure of DNA: one from Dr. Maurice Wilkins and another jointly written by Dr. Rosalind Franklin and her graduate assistant, Raymond Gosling. All three of these scientists studied and worked on the structure of DNA at King’s College London under the direction of James (later Sir James) Randall, but most accounts of the discovery of DNA’s structure gave credit for what is now recognized as one of the most important advances in scientific discovery in our modern era to the work of the three men; Franklin, for the most part, was relegated to a minor role. While Crick, Watson, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their contributions to the research on DNA, no such recognition was ever given to Franklin, who died in 1958 of cancer (Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously). Although she was a fellow scientist and colleague of Wilkins, neither Watson or Crick acknowledged her existence when they received the Nobel Prize; in fact, until the publication by Anne Sayre of a biographical book about Franklin, few people connected her to the groundbreaking work on DNA and its structure and significance to genetics. In their acknowledgments at the time, neither Crick nor Watson mentioned the work of Franklin, though Wilkins gave her a brief mention (Glynn, “The Art of Medicine” 1094). Maureen Julian wrote, “Watson, Crick, and Wilkins’s three Nobel Prize lectures contain a total of 98 references, and not one of Franklin’s papers is specifically mentioned” (362). She went on to note that only Wilkins included Franklin in his acknowledgments (363). From Erasure to Restoration 43

Yet, Franklin contributed much to the work on determining the structure of the DNA molecule. Lynne Osman Elkin, a professor of biological science, wrote that Franklin’s “work yielded critical data that Watson and Crick used to determine DNA’s structure” (42). Additionally, Franklin “identified two distinct configura- tions, called by her the A and B forms, in which DNA could exist” (43), and most important, it was Franklin who in May 1952 “presented her clearest evidence of the helical backbone, with her diffraction photograph #51” (44), which gave Watson the needed impetus to build the DNA structural model. Prior to the restorative work of Franklin’s biographers Anne Sayre and Brenda Maddox, her work was often presented as minimal or marginal; she was represented or misremembered as an un- attractive, abrasive bluestocking. This aligns with K. R. Phillips’s scholarship on the failure of memory; he noted that “there is a clear distinction between the prospects of forgetting and the prospects of misremembering, or remembering differently” (211). As will be seen in the profile section of this essay, most of the “remembering differently” came from James Watson, whose memoir,The Double Helix, propagated an image of Franklin very different from the one known and appreciated by her family, friends, and colleagues outside King’s College.

Rosalind Franklin in Context Rosalind Franklin was born on July 25, 1920, to Muriel and Ellis Franklin, and she died a mere thirty-seven years later of ovarian cancer. As an adult, both before and after her time working with X-ray diffraction studies of DNA, Franklin did work in vital research fields such as carbon and coal, RNA, and virus research. Her voice remains vital and alive through the research she published, her scientific notes, and the letters she wrote to friends and family. Her deep, regular, and lifelong habit of writing letters to her family has provided us with insight into her daily life, enthusiasms, and feelings. In her letters (found in all three biographies of her life; see note 1), she is chatty and often blunt, but, at the same time, one gets a sense of a real person who seldom hid how she felt or thought, someone who appreciated opportunities to work with people who challenged her to articulate and support her conclusions. It was always important to her that she work with people from whom she could learn, and this may account somewhat for her later uneasy relationship with Wilkins during her King’s College London years, for she seldom had the opportunity or need to learn from him. In most ways, she was his equal, and in some areas, such as in X-ray crystallography, her level of achievement surpassed his skills. This was a time, however, when women who worked in professional settings (such as science, medicine, and engineering) were considered abnormal. Marriage and family were still thought of as the premier goals any women could achieve. Franklin, however, chose otherwise, using her mathematical and scientific skills to develop her own research agendas. 44 Alice Johnston Myatt

A prominent characteristic from her early childhood on was her persistent logic and her expectation that anything presented to her as fact or a required activity be accompanied by evidence and support. A lifelong friend of hers, Anne Piper, described her as “powerful, able and formidable,” noting that “although when relaxed Rosalind was far from that, she was one of those very able people of great sensitivity who tend to mask their shyness with a brusque, abrupt manner. She never suffered fools gladly!” (151). She applied herself industriously to her academic work, with the result that she was accepted at Newnham College, a woman’s college within Cam- bridge University, “a year earlier than was normal” (Piper 151). After leaving Cambridge with her bachelor’s degree, Franklin decided to apply for a Cambridge fellowship, which she received, and she went to work under the supervision of R.G.W. Norrish, with whom she did not get along. According to her American friend and, later, biographer Anne Sayre, “Norrish considered Rosalind a feminist activist, while Rosalind simply wanted to be evaluated on the basis of her work, not her sex, and she was willing to fight for such recognition. Consequently, she referred to him as an ‘ogre,’ while he viewed her as ‘stubborn and difficult to supervise,’ and ‘as not easy to collaborate with’” (58). While Franklin did not align herself with feminism (what is called “the first wave” was in its early stages), her wish to be evaluated on the merits of her work without gender bias was characteristic of the approach taken then and since by feminist activists and scholars. She considered herself equal and in some ways superior to her male colleagues, and her sense of personal agency would support her through the challenges of working in the male- oriented environment she later found as she conducted research at King’s College. During the Second World War, Franklin faced the real possibility of being called to perform war work. One aspect of war work assignments that she found particularly worrisome was its randomness: women had a tendency to be assigned according to the needs of particular departments, not necessarily according to the skills and abilities of the women being assigned. However, in 1942, Dr. Donald Bangham of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (pronounced by its acronym: B’CURA) invited her to join his team; he “made a point of recruiting young graduate chemists and physicists to tackle a range of carbon problems” (Glynn, My Sister 69). The position included the opportunity to complete a Ph.D. dissertation, which she did in 1945, and Franklin appreciated the opportunity to have responsibility for developing her own research agenda. She did some important and still-referenced work there, developing the meticulous work habits that stayed with her the rest of her life. Although Franklin did not share many specific details of her work with her family, she did attempt to explain why she focused her energies on scientific research at a time when few women worked in scientific fields. For example, in describing her work with the teams in France, and as reported by her sister, Jenifer, she wrote: From Erasure to Restoration 45

You enquire about the importance of my job. Perhaps it misleads you that it is called a job. The place where I work is purely a research establishment, and my particular work has no immediate industrial objective (some people would call it ‘pure research’, while others argue that there is no such thing as ‘pure research’, since all scientific advancement is ultimately useful). The position, therefore, is that I am paid and given facilities to work on my own ideas—and anybody else’s I may be able to borrow. Its importance depends, of course, on what I make of it-what results I get, if any. (qtd. in Glynn, My Sister 89) After the war ended, and as mentioned earlier, Franklin went to work in France for a few years. It was there that she learned crystallography and X-ray diffraction techniques. Additionally, she learned how to plan and execute her own research agendas. However, her family—and the conditions she saw developing politically in France and Spain—compelled her to return to London, which she did by accepting work offered to her by J. T. Randall, head of the Physics Department at King’s Col- lege London. Franklin’s sister, Jenifer Franklin Glynn, summed up the situation that developed at King’s College: The original plan was that she was to work on the structure of proteins in solution, but she was asked by Professor John Randall, the Director of the Biophysics Research Unit at King’s, to use her skills to investigate ‘the structure of certain biological fibres’ which would, he said, be ‘more immediately profitable and perhaps fundamental’. In fact, therefore, it was Randall who directed her to the DNA problem. His letter gave her the impression that she would be in charge of the work—a point that Randall failed to explain to Maurice Wilkins, who was away on holiday at the time. . . . What Wilkins had not suggested was that Rosalind, who he had thought would be his assistant, would be in charge of the DNA research, which he considered to be his own province. But that was what he found when he came back from his holiday. So the relations between Wilkins and Rosalind started off badly, and never recovered. Temperamentally, too, they were almost bound to irritate each other, with Rosalind’s quick direct manner conflicting with Wilkins’ slow deliberate- ness. (My Sister 119–20) At King’s College London, Franklin was the first scientist to formally note that DNA presented in two forms: she described them as A and B. For a time, Franklin took X-ray photographs of both the A and B forms of DNA. However, when it became clear that she and Wilkins would be unable to develop a working partnership, Randall gave her the choice of which form she would work with. Having seen the now-famous Photo 51 of the B form (which she took), Franklin knew that she had recorded evidence that the B form was helical in nature. For the last half of 1952 and 46 Alice Johnston Myatt in early 1953, she focused her studies on the B form. At the same time, in search of more a congenial and rewarding work environment, she planned to transfer to the noted scientist J. D. Bernal’s research team at Birkbeck College. Rosalind prepared her move from King’s College to Birkbeck College in the early weeks of March 1953. During the first two weeks of March, she wrote her draft -pa per on the B form of DNA. According to her Birkbeck colleague Aaron Klug, who undertook extensive and meticulous reviews of her notebooks and other archival material after her death, she actually completed her draft detailing the double helical nature of the B form of DNA on March 17, 1953, a day before Crick and Watson’s manuscript for Nature reached King’s College (16). According to Maddox, as Frank- lin prepared to leave King’s, John Randall placed several conditions on her departure. He told her to “stop thinking about DNA entirely” (Rosalind Franklin Perennial Edition 212). She could leave and take her Turner-Newall Research Fellowship with her, but she would not be permitted to work with DNA anymore because DNA studies were exclusive to King’s College. In 1953 Franklin was invited by the noted scientist J. D. Bernal to join his research team at Birkbeck College, London, working on X-ray diffraction studies of plant viruses, particularly the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and the polio virus. During her research, she determined the configuration of the TMV and the location of its RNA. In the summer of 1954, Franklin first visited the United States; she delivered presentations at a coal research conference and visited various virus research labs in the United States. She made a second visit to the United States for conference presentations and visits to colleagues in virus research labs; during this visit, she first experienced the symptoms that would lead to her consulting doctors in the U.K., resulting, in the fall of 1956, in a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Ever the conscientious researcher and team leader, Franklin wanted to ensure that the research she had begun continued on. When funding was not forthcoming in Britain, she obtained funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health for continued research into viruses, specifically the structure of the polio virus (Maddox, Rosalind Franklin HarperCollins Edition 290–91). Her team, which included Aaron Klug, who later won the Nobel Prize, contributed much to modern understanding of RNA and viruses. She died in London on April 16, 1958, at the age of thirty-seven. Often, Franklin’s contributions in areas outside the area of DNA research are overlooked. For example, her work with coal and the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses is seldom mentioned in writings about her, though some of her work still provides foundational scholarship for scientists entering those fields. Counting from the time she joined Norrish’s team in 1941–42 until her death in 1957 yields a career of some sixteen years, only two of which she spent researching the structure of DNA (she spent eight months setting up the X-ray lab at King’s College); her DNA research thus represents only 12.5 percent of her entire working career. The majority From Erasure to Restoration 47 of her work was devoted to understanding the properties of coal, graphite, and plant viruses. Writing about Franklin’s contribution to the field of crystallography, Maureen Julian summed up Franklin’s accomplishments, noting, “She had an uncanny ability to work with poorly crystallized materials. . . . She began her professional career as a physical chemist studying coal and graphite, then turned her attention to DNA, and finally made contributions to the structure of plant viruses” (359). The book Women in Science accords her status in the fields of biology and crystallography. And even though the amount of time Franklin devoted to DNA structural research was a minor portion of her life’s work, during that time she designed a micro-camera capable of taking “an unrivaled series of X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA”; she also “defined the conditions under which the two distinct reversible phases, A and B, existed”; and she “showed that the sugar phosphate backbone was on the outside of the DNA molecule and that hydrogen bonding played an important role” (Julian 361). A truly impressive body of work! She was, given her short life, amazingly prolific. Lynne Osman Elkin, professor of biological sciences at California State University, remarked on the body of work Franklin left, writing: “In the period 1946–49, she published five landmark coal- related papers, still cited today, on graphitizing and nongraphitizing carbons. By 1957, she had published an additional dozen articles on carbons other than coals. Her papers changed the way physical chemists view the microstructure of coals and related substances. . . . She published 14 papers about viruses between 1955 and 1958, and completed the research for three others that colleague Aaron Klug submitted for publication after her death” (42). Given the breadth and depth of her work in the thirteen years between the completion of her dissertation and her death, one can only imagine what she might have accomplished had her life not been so sadly short.

Public Memory Lost to Public Memory Reclaimed In this section, I look beyond the biographical data of Franklin’s life to the various historiographical processes that I argue are hallmarks of biographical reclamation projects. For ease of reference, I refer to these processes as erasure (status lost), refutation, reclamation, and restoration (status restored). We find exemplars of these processes in the various accounts of Franklin’s work and life. This is not an exhaustive list but rather a representation of Franklin historiography that demonstrates the different processes described here. Although these processes need not happen independent of one of the other processes, it is useful to review examples from each type of process, using digital and print documents that have been published about Franklin. While in this instance Rosalind Franklin the woman and Franklin the scientist are both objects of restorative efforts, an appreciation of these categories and processes will be useful to those 48 Alice Johnston Myatt undertaking such projects to correct gender, class, or other cultural markers that may incite or contribute to loss of public memory and status.

Erasure (Loss of Public Memory) The process of erasure represents work that hides, discredits, marginalizes, or elimi- nates the history of an individual, leading to a loss to public memory, regardless of when such loss occurs. The first and certainly unplanned erasure for Franklin -oc curred with her early demise. Because she had no spouse or children to advocate for her memory, her work, though still cited, was known only to those within her fields of research, which ranged from coal and carbon to DNA and viruses. And Franklin and her work might have been forever erased had not additional marginalization and perhaps even outright discredit taken place by means of Watson’s caricature of Franklin in The Double Helix. Her sister, Jenifer Franklin Glynn, wrote, “The book gave an insulting portrayal of Rosalind. With such lines as ‘clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place,’ it made her into an obstructive belligerent bluestocking, churning out results secretively and without understanding” (Glynn, “The Art of Medicine” 1095), and she also noted that Crick was not innocent of this erasure, having written to Watson “that he wanted to avoid ‘anything in the way of a historical account’” when accepting the Nobel Prize (Glynn, “The Art of Medicine” 1094). In the journal Resonance, C. Uberoi noted that, “as an effective device to avoid acknowl- edgement, Watson promoted the idea of her inability to interpret her own data and that it is they who rescued the DNA data” (5). Thus, erasure, marginalization, and distortion of memory served to obscure Franklin’s deserved scientific status. The least flattering presentation and depiction of her is that by Watson, who, in writing The Double Helix, picked up and used an informal nickname that Maurice Wilkins used when talking about Rosalind, a nickname that no one in her circle of family or friends ever used: Rosy. To her family and friends, she was Ros, not Rosy. Watson’s tone when discussing Franklin ranged from dismissive and patronizing to absurd, but it was rarely respectful. In fact, so disturbed were the first book reviewers by his treatment of Franklin that Oxford University Press declined to publish the volume, and only after Watson added a one-paragraph epilogue acknowledging Franklin’s work was the book published by Atheneum Press in 1968 (Bryson 405). Watson wrote of Franklin with little to no knowledge of her as a person. Franklin’s biographer Maddox noted that some reviews of the book when it was published clearly recognized the misogynistic attitude revealed by Watson (Rosalind Franklin Perennial Edition 313–14), and that actually seems a generous interpretation of his treatment of Franklin. Wherever possible, he glosses over her work, and where he must mention her, he often does so in unflattering and denigrating terms. Accord- ing to her biographer Anne Sayre, he even went so far as to embellish an encounter with her to the point of almost pure fiction (129). Earlier in this essay, I asked, “Why was this woman so misremembered?” Maddox offered a reasonable answer when From Erasure to Restoration 49 she wrote, “A plausible hypothesis holds that the [misrepresented] character was a rationalization of Watson’s guilt—a creature so hostile and uncooperative that there was no alternative to taking what you need by stealth. And of course, Franklin was not alive to speak for herself when the book was published, though several highly respected scientists spoke out on her behalf, countering the narrative Watson so carefully construed” (Rosalind Franklin Harper-Collins Edition 313–17). Watson also made much of “Rosy’s” insistence on taking an “anti-helical” stance, thus marginalizing her contribution while elevating his. Yet, in a 1951 report drawn from her notes, Franklin wrote, “The general characteristics of the diagram suggest that the DNA chains are in a helical form” (qtd. in Sayre 125). Later in the same report, she noted, “The results suggest a helical structure (which must be very closely packed) containing probably 2, 3, or 4 co-axial nucleic acid chains per helical unit, and having the phosphate groups near the outside” (qtd. in Sayre 126). Later, in 1951, she recorded her interpretation as either “a big helix or a smaller helix consisting of several chains,” with the phosphates “on the outside so that phosphate-phosphate inter-helical bonds are disrupted by water. In this external position the phosphates would be available to proteins” (qtd. in Olby 349–50). These observations, however, were in her lab notes and were unpublished. Watson, “remembering differently” (Phillips 211), promoted his own view of Franklin, compounding the marginalization of Franklin that is consistent in his memoir. In fairness, candidates for restoration are at times their own worst enemies. For example, we still have access to Franklin’s handcrafted obituary notice that she and her assistant Gosling posted on their work door announcing the death of the helix and inviting Maurice Wilkins to preside over the burial ceremony (Maddox, Rosa- lind Franklin Harper-Collins Edition 184–85). She could be prickly and defensive, quick to perceive a slight when none was intended. Maddox described her as “having steady eyes like X-rays on the human specimen before her. She positively liked hot and heavy debate” (Rosalind Franklin Perennial Edition 146). In short, she was a dynamic and complex individual who resisted the notion that she should be a quiet, decorative, and sweet support to her male colleagues.

Refutation Refutation often takes the form of resistance or pushback against a particular aspect of an individual’s character or contribution or role in history. Anne Sayre’s 1975 book Rosalind Franklin and DNA was by her own admission written primarily in response to Watson’s denigration of Franklin’s work. While biographical in scope, the book focuses on Franklin’s work, especially her contribution as a first-rate crystallographer and chemist in endeavors beyond the study of DNA. Wilkins and Franklin differed in their approach to resolving differences. Franklin enjoyed her work with a passion, and Gosling describes her style, saying, “She had a very sharp debating style of discussing. . . . If you believed what you were saying, 50 Alice Johnston Myatt you had to argue strongly with Rosalind if she thought you were wrong. . . . Rosalind always wanted to justify herself, or, if she was discussing with me, she always expected me to justify myself very strongly indeed” (qtd. in Sayre 103). Wilkins, however, was the opposite of Franklin. As Gosling described, “Maurice would simply shut up. He wouldn’t really go out on a limb and justify himself” (qtd. in Sayre 103) Wilkins himself mentioned his tendency to remove himself from verbal confronta- tions when he described Franklin as being “very fierce, you know. She denounced, and this made it quite impossible as far as I was concerned to have a civil conversation. I simply had to walk away” (qtd. in Sayre 105). Sayre also refuted the characterization of Franklin as a humorless bluestocking, writing, “She never, to the end, lost her capacity to be amused, even when she was in pain it was possible to raise a smile by recounting some comic episode or observation” (Sayre 187). Fortunately for her legacy, quite a number of people who really knew her were willing to push back against Watson’s portrayal of Franklin. A number of such works fall thus into the category of refutation, pushing back in one way or another. For example, in her afterword, Sayre raised some challenging questions and pushed back against the “robbery” of Franklin’s loss to public memory, writing, “Rosalind has been robbed, little by little; it is a robbery against which I protest” (191). Shortly thereafter, she wrote, “The average reader will buy the package, and come up in the end full of sympathy [for Watson]. . . . If you have a secretary around the office who is like that Rosy woman you are perfectly justified either in exploiting her or firing her. Was this why ‘Rosy’ was invented? To rationalize, justify, excuse, and even to ‘sell’ that which was done that ought not really have been done?” (194). This harks back to Phillips’s description of “misremembering” or “remembering differently.” What was repeated (via publication) publicly became the accepted memory, pending the re-collection of the more authentic Rosalind Franklin. Without careful explication, refutation may at times have the effect of marginalization, as occurred for a period of time with Franklin’s status. For example, Sayre, while offering a strong refutation of Watson’s erasure, nonetheless at times presented Franklin’s marginalization as simply the result of prejudice against her gender and a consequence of the cultural mores of the time that often viewed women professionals as stealing income from a more deserving man. She wrote, “She was over and over again a victim of the sort of thinking that not only prefers women to confine themselves to kitchen and nursery and possibly church, but is outraged by their presence anywhere else at all; she suffered from this often and long, in its subtle forms as well as its overt ones; she bore with it not always calmly, not always meekly, not always sweetly, but always with dignity. . . . She was a very good scientist and a very productive one, a very honest one of unimpeachable integrity, and she was not the less of any of these things because she was a woman, and often opposed on no better grounds than her sex” (197). Several times, those writing about Rosalind Franklin noted that she would not have appreciated being a symbol of feminist activism. For From Erasure to Restoration 51 example, her younger sister, Jenifer Franklin Glynn, wrote, “She was never a feminist—she would have thought of herself simply as a scientist whose achievements should be judged on their own terms, not as a ‘woman scientist’ striking a blow for the rights of women. Watson’s portrait of her may have made some worried parents see her career as a warning, but in reaction they now see her as triumphing against all the odds, and put her on an unrealistic pedestal. Many parents in Britain and in America now hope her career will inspire their scientific daughters” My( Sister 158). Other works of refutation appeared. In 1998 Anne Piper, who knew Franklin well from childhood on, wrote “Light on a Dark Lady,” and, later, in 2004, C. Uberoi wrote the short “Article-in-a-box—Rosalind Franklin: The Woman Scientist of DNA”; both refute Franklin’s marginalization. In 2003 Lynne Osman Elkin published “Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix,” which again situates Franklin’s work more realistically within the scientific community.

Reclamation Works in this category move beyond specific and sometimes biased efforts at refutation; they generally move beyond one-dimensional presentations of their subjects. Often, these works fall into the genre of biography or profiles, perhaps memoir, in which a sustained effort is made to advance the overall status of an individual. As seen in Sayre’s book on Franklin, it is possible for refutation and reclamation to coexist within one work. This excerpt from a piece in Nature, written by J. D. Bernal of Birkbeck after Franklin’s death, also shows how extensive Franklin’s work was aside from the DNA project: “The combined methods of chemical preparation and X-ray examination in the hands of Miss Franklin and her associates was a valuable, and indeed a decisive, weapon in the analysis of these complex structures. As a scientist Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken. . . . She did nearly all this work with her own hands. At the same time she proved to be an admirable director of a research team and inspired those who worked with her to reach the same high standard” (qtd. in Sayre 180–81). During this phase, perceptions of the subject may clash, as some will favor one interpretation of the person, while others will accept the message shared by those refuting the false memory.

Restoration Restoration occurs when the work and contributions of someone formerly obscured or overlooked or even discredited resurface to become commonplace. Once refutation has revealed hidden or marginalized information and once reclamation has foregrounded enough information and aspects of an individual’s lost status to allow an understanding of the complete individual, restoration pulls together aspects of an 52 Alice Johnston Myatt individual’s life and work, presenting the person as a whole unit, a three-dimensional being deserving of recognition and respect. Restoration has been effected when the default representation closely matches as much of reality as can be known. Both Maddox’s and Glynn’s biographies are good examples of this category of restoration. Additional entries in this category of reclamation work include Aaron Klug’s very strong presentation of his research into Franklin’s journals, notebooks, and lab sheets, “The Discovery of the DNA Double Helix,” in 2003, published in the prestigious Journal of Molecular Biology. Lynne Osman Elkin’s work on Franklin’s life and contributions to scientific history fit in well here, though her work certainly fits into the preceding category of refutation as well. While still much less well known than Crick, Watson, and Wilkins, Franklin is no longer excluded from standard accounts regarding the structure of DNA, and the body of work about her ensures that those who are learning about her for the first time will find her to be much more than the unlovely bluestocking termagant of Watson’s making. Franklin is no longer seen as a figure of fun or an obstacle to scientific discovery. More than that, her work outside King’s College has earned her high repute, and her published work continues to be part of the fields of crystallography and chemistry. For example, in reference to Franklin’s performance with BCURA, Peter Hirsch, a professor at Oxford University, called her work “remarkable. She brought order into a field which had previously been in chaos” (qtd. in Sayre 64). Following are a few more examples of the way in which Franklin’s status has been restored: • In Robert Olby’s 1974 The Path to the Double Helix,Franklin is included most carefully in the account of the years and days preceding the revelation of the model Watson and Crick built of the DNA structure. In fact, Francis Crick contributed much to Franklin’s restoration in his forward to Olby’s book, where he wrote, “the structure was there waiting to be discovered—Watson and I did not invent it. It seems to me unlikely that either of us would have done it separately, but Rosalind Franklin was getting pretty close. She was in fact only two steps away. She needed to realize that the two chains were anti-parallel and to discover the base-pairing” (vi). Later, in his 1988 memoir, Crick would repeat this view, recognizing that Franklin was, in her own way, coming close to solving the structure of DNA (Olby 75). • Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), presented Franklin’s part in the DNA research matter-of-factly, part of the fabric woven about that time. He observed, “victory fell to an unlikely quartet of scientists in England who didn’t work as a team, often weren’t on speaking terms, and were for the most part novices in the field. . . . Maurice Wilkins . . . had spent much of the Second World War helping to design the atomic bomb. Two of the others, Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick, had passed their war years working on From Erasure to Restoration 53

mines for the British government. . . . The most unconventional of the four- some was James Watson, an American prodigy” (403). • On April 22, 2003, the PBS show Nova presented the TV program “Secret of Photo 51,” running as a teaser this brief description: “‘Secret of Photo 51’ un- ravels the mystery behind the discovery of the double helix and investigates the seminal role that Rosalind Franklin and her remarkable X-ray photograph played in one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.” As part of that program, Nova presented a special interview with Lynne Osman Elkin (mentioned earlier). The Franklin biographer Brenda Maddox was a consultant for the program, and Nova maintains a website with an interactive series of activities and images connected to Franklin and her work on DNA. Other evidence abounds that Franklin, if not well known, has at the least been restored to public memory. At St. Paul’s Girls’ School there is now a Rosalind Frank- lin Technology Centre. A U.K. Heritage Plaque (equivalent to America’s Historical Markers) adorns the wall outside the flat she lived in while working at Birkbeck College until her death. In Britain, King’s College London recently inaugurated the Franklin-Wilkins building and a distinguished series of lectures in Franklin’s name (see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/campus/waterloo.aspx); the King’s College website includes Franklin and Wilkins among their most famous faculty. Her sister wrote, “There are Rosalind Franklin Buildings in Cambridge for Newnham Col- lege, and in Brussels for Louvain University, while a whole university has adopted her name in Chicago” (Glynn, “The Art of Medicine” 1095). In Britain, the Royal Society has honored Franklin’s research with the establishment, in 2003, of a funded medal (the first to carry a woman’s name) of £30,000 (approximately $42,000), one of the more well-funded awards available to women seeking funding for careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. And the recognition of her work continues. The entry written for Rosalind Franklin’s profile on the National Library of Medicine well demonstrates the categories of erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration found in public writings about Franklin. The profile begins appropriately, with statements belonging to the restoration category, for Franklin’s status, while still widely underappreciated, is finally getting the balanced representation it always deserved. With my inserted taxonomy, the profile reads: Franklin’s scientific achievements, both in coal chemistry and virus structure research were considerable. Her peers in those fields acknowledged this during her life and after her death. But it is her role in the discovery of DNA structure that has garnered the most public attention [Restoration]. Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medi- cine for their work on the structure of DNA. None gave Franklin credit for 54 Alice Johnston Myatt

her contributions at that time [Erasure]. Franklin’s work on DNA may have remained a quiet footnote in that story had Watson not caricatured her in his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix. There he presented Franklin as “Rosy,” a bad-tempered, arrogant bluestocking who jealously guarded her data from colleagues, even though she was not competent to interpret it [Misremember- ing, Marginalization]. His book proved very popular, even though many of those featured in the story—including Crick, Wilkins, and Linus Pauling— protested Watson’s treatment of Franklin, as did many reviewers [Refutation]. In 1975, Franklin’s friend Anne Sayre published a biography in angry rebuttal to Watson’s account, and Franklin’s role in the discovery became better known [Refutation]. Numerous articles and several documentaries have attempted to highlight her part in “the race for the double helix,” often casting her as a feminist martyr, cheated of a Nobel prize both by misogynist colleagues and by her early death [Refutation]. However, as her second biographer, Brenda Maddox, has noted, this too is caricature, and unfairly obscures both a brilliant scientific career and Franklin herself [Reclamation].

Conclusion It is only by continued efforts on the part of interested persons within and without the field of science and biology that projects such as this one can succeed. Being a part of this collection affords further recognition of the person who was scientist, loving family member, and stimulating companion. It also shows the value of undertaking rhetorical restoration projects, regardless of the subject’s discipline. As I dug into the different resources available, I realized that I was seeing evidence of restoration—that others, like me, had seen value in representing Franklin as someone deserving of her place in the annals of science and medical history. This has been a rewarding journey, and my hope is that by tracing out Franklin’s journey from erasure, discredit, and marginalization to restoration, I have shared some worthwhile tools that will assist others who, regardless of field, discipline, class, gender, or other cultural marker, wish to contribute to restoration projects

Note 1. While there are many articles and several well-researched books about Rosalind Franklin and her contributions to science, for those interested in learning more about her life as a whole, I recommend Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA along with Jenifer Franklin Glynn’s memoir My Sister Rosalind Franklin. Together, they present a well-balanced description that authentically reveals Franklin as a dedicated scientist, stimulating companion, and loyal and devoted family person. Another well-balanced account is Horace Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation. From Erasure to Restoration 55

Works Cited Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Broadway Books, 2003. Crick, Francis. “Foreword.” The Path to the Double Helix, edited by Robert Olby, U of Wash- ington Press, 1974, pp. v–viii. Elkin, Lynne Osman. “Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix.” Physics Today, vol. 6, no. 3, 2003, pp. 42–48. Glynn, Jenifer. “The art of Medicine: Remembering My Sister Rosalind Franklin.” Lancet, no. 379, March 24, 2012, pp. 1094–95. ———. My Sister Rosalind Franklin. Oxford UP, 2012. Jordanova, Ludmilla. “Gender and the Historiography of Science.” British Journal for the His- tory of Science, vol. 26, no. 4, 1993, pp. 469–83. Judson, Horace Freeland. The Eighth Day of Creation. Simon & Schuster, 1979. Julian, Maureen A. “Women in Crystallography.” Women of Science: Righting the Record, edited by G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, Indiana UP, 1990, pp. 335–83. Klug, Aaron. “The Discovery of the DNA Double Helix.”JMB Journal of Molecular Biology, vol. 335, no. 1, 2004, pp. 3–26. Maddox, Brenda. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. Harper/Collins, 2002. ———. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. Perennial edition, Harper/Collins, 2003. Olby, Robert. The Path to the Double Helix. U of Washington Press, 1974. Phillips, Kendall R. “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remem- brance.” Western Journal of Communication, vol. 74, no. 2, 2010, pp. 208–23. Piper, Anne. “Light on a Dark Lady.” Trends in Biochemical Sciences, vol. 23, no. 4, 1998, pp. 151–54. Rosser, Sue V. Biology & Feminism: A Dynamic Interaction. Twayne, 1992. Sayre, Anne. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. W. W. Norton, 1975. “Secret of Photo 51.” Nova, April 22, 2003, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/ 3009_photo51.html. Uberoi, C. “Article-in-a-box—Rosalind Franklin: The Woman Scientist of DNA.”Resonance, vol. 9, no. 3, 2004, pp. 3–5. Watson, James. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. Atheneum, 1968. Taming Cerberus Against Racism, Sexism, and Oppression in Colonial and Postcolonial Nigeria

Maria Martin

On November 29, 1947, a mass of thousands of Egba women stormed the courtyard of the afin (palace) of the Alake (king) of Abeokuta, Nigeria, to protest excessive taxation by the colonial administration. The British district officer exclaimed that the women were lazy and that they needed a kick in their idle rear ends. He turned to the leader of the protest, Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and demanded, “Shut up your women!” Mrs. Kuti looked at him and replied, “You may have been born, but you were not bred! Could you talk to your mother like that?” The crowd became angry and shouted to the Alake to “get rid of the insolent white man at once, within minutes” or they would “cut off his genitals and send them to his mother” (Soyinka 211). The cruelties of colonialism may be compared to the acerbic nature of Cerberus, the vicious three-headed dog and guardian of the underworld in Greek mythology. In Abeokuta the colonial officials, like Cerberus, constrained and oppressed the people by instituting laws, court systems, taxes, and collection procedures that especially humiliated and impoverished women and heightened gender discrimination. Mrs. Kuti mobilized thousands of women to wage war against the insidiousness of the British colonizers. They used protests, songs, and civil disobedience to wage a successful women’s war on the British colonial administration. In time their activism grew from a local protest to a nationwide movement of women nationalists under the banner of an umbrella organization, the Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU). The tripartite anticolonial battles of Nigerian women against colonial and postcolonial racism, sexism, and oppression represented a proverbial taming of Cerberus. Women’s autonomy as nationalists within organizations has been largely overlooked in the narrative of African nationalism. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti is known Taming Cerberus 57 for her activism and for organizing of women against the malfeasance of traditional community leaders and colonial mandates that negatively impacted women’s position in society. However, there was a whole organization of working-class poor women that was behind her but that is seldom centered in conversations about her accomplishments. This presents a major challenge to understanding the rhetorical agency of the masses of women who supported figures such as Mrs. Kuti while also understating her commitment to collective activism among women. In addition to this, Western historians, political scientists, and feminist researchers have all created silences for these women. Historians and political scientists have done this by constructing a politically elite male-centered narrative of African nationalism, and feminist researchers have done so by applying Western feminist constructs to an African context to analyze this women’s movement. In these two ways, Nigerian women have been marginalized in important ways and denied rhetorical agency to shape the broader narrative of African nationalism with their own articulations of nationalism and feminism. The establishment of the United Nations Decade for Women in 1975 ushered in a new era in the historiography of Nigeria. Some of the seminal works on Nigerian nationalism, such as Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism, and Sklar, Nige- rian Political Parties, do not address women in any deeply meaningful way other than to point to their involvement. However, Van Allen, in Sitting on a Man, produced the first account of Igbo women’s activism, and more recently Falola and Paddock, in The Women’s War of 1929, gave a more substantive assessment of the Igbo women’s war that portrayed them as autonomous actors and forebearers of anticolonialism. Works such as those by Cheryl Johnson-Odim (for example, Odim and Nina Mba For Women and the Nation) speak to Yoruba women’s anticolonialism. Catherine Newbury, Iris Berger, Cora Presley, and Susan Geiger have focused on women’s anticolonialism in countries other than Nigeria. While these works are important for considering women’s anticolonial initiatives, they do not lead to an emphatic understanding of how women developed a philosophy and an agenda that were very distinct from the mainstream forms of nationalism. The bibliography on women in African nationalism is growing, yet there needs to be more theorization of women’s rhetorical agency and contributions in shaping nationalist discourse, philosophy, and principles. In addition, historians must discuss ways in which African women’s stances problematize the ubiquitous application of Western feminist theory to figures such as Mrs. Kuti and the NWU. Last, the voices of working-class women, who made these movements possible, should be brought to the fore through a focus on the development of autonomous women’s organizations. “Taming Cerberus” highlights the intersection of nationalist consciousness and feminism among Nigerian women throughout the development of the NWU umbrella organization. For this reason the essay is divided into six sections: Theorizing 58 Maria Martin

African Women’s Feminist Agency, Colonialism’s Impact, The Rise of Funmilayo, Waging War, Full Circle, and Half the Sky. The first discusses the concept of African feminism, while the second speaks to how colonialism exacerbated patriarchy and degraded women. The third gives an account of Mrs. Kuti’s transition into political activism and the evolution of nationalist and feminist consciousness in the women’s organization she founded. The fourth gives an account of the women’s war. The fifth speaks to Mrs. Kuti’s transnationalism and humanitarianism, which shaped her women’s union, and the sixth examines women’s experiences in the militarized state postindependence.

Theorizing African Women’s Feminist Agency African gender relations cannot be characterized by theories grounded in Western culture. As a result, any historian who focuses on African women must be aware of what is associated with the term “feminism” before applying it to African women. Prior to applying the feminist label to African women’s struggles for equality, one must seriously consider the ways in which culture and cosmology operate to shape gender relations in that context. In addition, Western scholars must also be aware of their own positionality as researchers, for it is all too easy to superimpose one’s own social cultural understanding onto the interpretation of data. There must be a more African-centered approach to naming and defining women’s motives and movements in Africa, and it must come from the perspective of African women themselves. Obioma Nnaemeka, in an article titled “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,” identified the practice of telling women’s stories from below as a means of giving them agency to shape theory that will ultimately be used to analyze their realities. This allows for the existence of multiple African feminisms and not one monolithic or generalized concept: I will use the different features and methods of feminist engagement in Africa to propose what I call nego-feminism (the feminism of negotiation; no ego feminism) as a term that names African feminisms. Aware of a practice (feminism in Africa) that is as diverse as the continent itself, I propose nego- feminism not to occlude the diversity but to argue, as I do in the discussion of “building on the indigenous” in the last section of this article, that a recurrent feature in many African cultures can be used to name the practice. The diversity of the African continent notwithstanding, there are shared values that can be used as organizing principles in discussions about Africa, as Daniel Etounga-Manguelle aptly notes: “The diversity—the vast number of subcul- tures [in Africa]—is undeniable. But there is a foundation of shared values, attitudes, and institutions that binds together t he nations south of the Sahara, and in many respects those of the north as well” (Etounga- Manguelle 2000, 67). (Nnaemkea 360–61) Taming Cerberus 59

The paradigm that she established, building on the indigenous, was central to nego-feminism. She said that building from the indigenous establishes a process of theory building that is more democratic and that encapsulates the worldviews of the people. It allows them to have fluid and even hybrid identities. Nnaemeka argued that theoretical development must center an authentic representation of the people as they see themselves and must prioritize those factors that are most important to them (360–61). With this in mind, Nnaemeka quoted Filomina Chioma Steady, who said, “African patterns of feminism can be seen as having developed within a context that views human life from a total, rather than a dichotomous and exclusive, perspective. For women, the male is not ‘the other’ but part of the human same. Each gender constitutes the critical half that makes the human whole. Neither sex is totally complete in itself. Each has and needs a complement, despite the possession of unique features of its own” (379–80). Nnaemeka went on to say that “African women’s willingness and readiness to negotiate with and around men even in difficult circumstances is quite pervasive” (379–80). African feminisms are not nearsighted in the sense that they do not champion their struggles and celebrate their triumphs selfishly. They are a part of a synergism that creates a stable and unified society when men as well as women are involved in resolving issues. Nnaemeka asserted: “First, nego-feminism is the feminism of negotiation; second, nego-feminism stands for ‘no ego’ feminism. In the foundation of shared values in many African cultures are the principles of negotiation, give and take, compromise, and balance” (377–78). According to Nnaemeka, nego-feminism is definitively a practice of negotiating expressed in language of compromise instead of the Western feminist language of agitate, challenge, and disrupt. This is the definition of feminism that this essay uses to analyze the organizing of Nigerian women during and after colonialism.

Colonialism’s Impact Prior to colonial rule in western Nigeria, the area was the home of the Yoruba people for more than a thousand years. The Egba are a Yoruba ethnic group whose women enjoyed political and economic autonomy and social mobility in the precolonial period. According to Oyeronke Oyewunmi, notions of gender based on biology were not intrinsic to Yoruba culture. Rigid ideas of gender came with colonialism.1 However, there was still a power disparity between the sexes in this period. Even with this degree of inequality that favored men, Nina Mba concluded that women generated much if not most of the wealth, could become wealthier than the men, and “largely controlled their economic activities” (14–15). The office Iyalode,of leader of women, allowed them to have representation in male-oriented government groups (Johnson-Odim and Mba 3). There were also other offices that conferred authority on women, such as the Iya afin (highest office in palace administration), Iyaloja (head of market women), and Ayaba (wife of the king) (Afonja and Aina 12). These positions gave women political power (Mba 60 Maria Martin

12–13). Some of the Iyalode were very influential and even became king. In the area of Sabe, Ondo, and Ilesha there are lists of rulers that include the names of five female Obas or kings of the Yoruba people (Afonja and Aina 12). The advent of colonialism in 1900 drastically changed the status of women. Mba said colonialism “is not just a system of administration but a way of living and thinking.” In Europe, women were “considered unsuitable for the rigors of public life; hence they were not allowed to vote, to contest elections, to sit in Parliament, or to be employed in the civil service” (39). Thus, the colonial officials favored elite male governments and marginalized the office of Iyalode. The voice and concerns of women were no longer important to the political agenda. Their economic mobility stagnated because of the overshadowing of women’s groups and unions that protected their interests in production, trade, and the market place. Women’s perceived importance in society waned as their economic, social, and political representation diminished (Simola 99). The colonial system of indirect rule further disenfranchised women.2 It included the establishment of a number of subordinate indigenous advisory boards that had no real judicial power. Women could not hold positions as judges in the Egba Native Authority court, and they were not consulted when the government was forming policies, even those that directly affected them. For example, in the Abeokuta Prov- ince Annual Report of 1937, the Rules of Marriage and Divorce were created without input from women (Mba 40). The British imposed many mandates on Egba society, but the tax laws especially exploited women. In precolonial Egba culture it was customary for women to be exempt from paying taxes to ensure their economic self-sufficiency. The colonials taxed income heavily. Girls were taxed at age fifteen and boys at seventeen. The process of determining whether a girl was old enough to pay taxes was utterly degrading. Mrs. Kuti remarked about this process in a speech in Abeokuta in 1947: “Young girls are sometimes stripped naked in the streets by the [Egba] men officially designated as collectors in order to ascertain whether they are mature enough to pay tax or not. The members of the assessment committee work on a commission basis: the more money they are able to collect, the greater their commission, so they relentlessly extort money from those who can ill-afford to pay” We( Had Equality 247). Wives and husbands were taxed separately, but the women bore the brunt of taxation and also paid taxes for unemployed husbands and male relatives. The records of the Abeokuta Women’s Union grievances show that many more women than men paid taxes in 1946 and 1947 (Egba Council Record Book). These numbers may have been affected by lack of employment in the area as men left to find jobs. However, women left Abeokuta for the same reasons. Additionally, women also had the responsibility of feeding and educating their children (Awe 140). Colonialism undermined women’s financial stability and undermined the relationship between Nigerian men Taming Cerberus 61 and women by appointing the men as tax collectors, thereby linking men’s economic mobility to women’s denigration.

The Rise of Funmilayo On October 25, 1900, at 2:55 a.m., Mrs. Kuti was born Frances Abigail Olufunmi- layo Thomas to Christian parents in Abeokuta. Her parents placed great emphasis on education, and she accredited her accomplishments to them: “my mother who brought me up in a way that made me what I am today and also to my father who worked so hard to be able to give me the education” (Autobiography 5). She went to St. John’s Anglican School for her primary education and was the first girl to attend the Abeokuta Grammar School for secondary education, in January 1914. It was not customary for girls to be educated, but her father pushed for her to receive a quality education and to be self-sufficient. When she graduated in 1918 she went to Win- cham College in Cheshire, England, and studied music, education, and domestic science. In 1922 she returned to Nigeria, became a teacher at the Abeokuta school, and married her husband, Reverend Israel Olodotun Ransome-Kuti, on January 20, 1925. They had four children together. Mrs. Kuti had an extensive political career. She founded the Nigerian Union of Teachers and the West African Students Union with her husband. In 1947 she was appointed a delegate to the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) and participated in talks in Britain for Nigerian independence (Johnson- Odim 54; Falola and Aderinto 370–71). She was released from her NCNC position after being denied the right to be nominated, refusing to give her position to Mr. J. Akande in 1959. As a result she started her own party, the Nigerian Commoner’s Party (Johnson-Odim and Mba 113–14). In 1944 she founded the Abeokuta Ladies’ Club (ALC). Influenced by her father’s liberal attitude toward the value of educating girls, she asserted that women’s work is essential to the development of society and the nation at large. The ALC consisted of Christians, educated women, teachers, and traders. A market woman told Mrs. Kuti of her desire to read and said that she saved old newspapers in hope that she would be able to read them one day. This moved Mrs. Kuti, who had a close friend who held her hymnal upside down every Sunday because she was illiterate. In 1944, the central goal for the ALC became “to help in raising the standard of womanhood in Abeokuta . . . to help in encouraging learning among adults and thereby wipe out illiteracy” (Johnson-Odim and Mba 64). As a result, she called on women to help other women and to rally together across perceived class lines in 1944 as she did in 1961: “It is still more lamentable that even the few educated women look down upon the uneducated ones, instead of encouraging them to pull their weight and shake off their slavish ideas. They ignore and render them no help to improve the condition of these unfortunate ones” (The Status of Women in Nigeria). The introduction of 62 Maria Martin market women pushed the ALC to develop a more poignantly feminist approach to analyzing women’s issues through their centering of women’s economic and civic rights and through mobilizing women across class lines. In order to further demonstrate the ALC’s solidarity with and support of working-class women, Mrs. Kuti, who was fluent in English, used the Yoruba language and wore traditional dress during talks with colonial officials. This was significant for women because it created an autonomous space for non-English-speaking women. Language is power. By conducting business in a language that all the women (though not all the colonials) could understand, the ALC ensured that these market women were not denied information that would help them to develop the political consciousness needed to make informed decisions for their collective benefit. She always dressed in the traditional clothing of the Egba women because this helped her peers to relate to her as one of their own. In fact, her biographers Odim and Mba state that no pictures of her in Western attire can be found after 1940. This is indicative of the fact that sustaining cultural pride was also important to her. She refrained from using her Western names as early as her college days while in England, when British people perceived her dark skin and African identity as markers of inferiority (Johnson-Odim and Mba 66; Johnson-Odim 55). In 1946 the ALC changed its name to the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU). The AWU became militant when its focus organically shifted from “alleviating hardships of the poor to the removal of the cause of hardship” (Awe 138). Mrs. Kuti grounded the group’s campaign upon a feminist critique of colonialism. She believed that colonialism was the perpetrator of the degradation that women experienced in all aspects of life: “Before the British advent in Nigeria, . . . women owned property, traded, and exercised considerable political and social influence in society. With the advent of British rule . . . instead of women being educated and assisted to live like human beings their condition has deteriorated. . . . even though they are the main producers of the country’s wealth” (We Had Equality). The only way for women to call attention to their issues was to lead an aggressive campaign against the colonial administration in a public and political manner (Mba 146). Mrs. Kuti vowed “to defend, protect, preserve, and promote the social, economic, cultural, and political rights and interests of the women in Egbaland and to cooperate with all organizations seeking and fighting genuinely and selflessly for the economic and political freedom and independence of the people” (Mba 146). On November 30, 1947, Mrs. Kuti led a group of working-class and elite women into the afin (palace) to formally state their grievances to the Alake (king). One poor woman, Mrs. Amelia Osimosu, argued that the tax burden was so high that she could not make a profit from her market wares. She said: “Many had to go on loan in order to be able to carry on the trade and the result always landed them in debt” (Egba Council Record Book 2). She could not pay the flat rate or the income tax. She also said that women were jobless and were exploited by the authorities, who told them they needed birth Taming Cerberus 63 certificates for their children. The certificates were priced according to the age of each child. Mrs. Wura Fagbemi asserted that she had come to protest the flat rate and income tax because “women were poor as church rats.” She went on to say that women had to sell the offspring of goats they borrowed in order to pay taxes. Then the owner of the goat would take it back because “her share of the offspring had been sold against customary practice” (Abeokuta Women’s Union 3). This demonstration at the afin shows that the women of the ALC had already begun to present a unique articulation of the relationship between colonial political economy and gender equity. They argued that women were not able to experience upward mobility because of the harsh constraints placed on them by colonial tax mandates. Their mo- bilization across class lines helped to strengthen their campaign to increase gender awareness among the rulers of the day.

Waging War The series of attacks that the AWU made against the colonial administration constituted the Egba women’s war. The organization first employed intellectual initiatives by writing letters to newspapers and speaking with the media to expose the debilitating effects of colonialism on women (Awe 141). They also wrote many appeals and sent petitions to the colonial government offering a rationale for the repeal of taxation on women. The group delegated members to do thorough research and write proposals that contained solutions to the problems they highlighted. For example, the AWU had an accountant go over the reports of the Egba Native Authority (ENA) treasury and catalog the spending of funds. After locating excessive expen- ditures, the women created a formula to cut unnecessary spending. They presented this evidence and posited that women would not have to pay taxes if the ENA could save some of the money that went to frivolous purposes. In 1946, they asserted that there should be “no taxation without representation” (Mba 148). In the next phase of the women’s war, women engaged in civil disobedience, refusing to acknowledge colonial policies. In this stage of the resistance movement Mrs. Kuti and others refused to pay their taxes. The women were charged with breaking the law and were summoned to court, which in turn attracted media attention to their cause and complaints. However, prior to sentencing, an anonymous person paid Mrs. Kuti’s tax debt and she did not have to spend time in prison (Awe 141). The final stage of the war was mass demonstration. On November 29, 1947, thousands of women marched to and flooded into the courtyard of the palace of Alake Ademola II (Awe 141). They were furious that none of their appeals were taken seriously. Their voices rose as they chanted “No more tax.” The Alake came out of his palace onto a balcony and asked, “Why it is that you people always have to be made to pay your taxes?” (Soyinka 208–10). During this showdown between Ademola II and the protestors, Mrs. Kuti demanded that he address the taxation problem once 64 Maria Martin

and for all. The district officer said, “Go on, go home, and mind your kitchens and feed your children. What do you know about the running of state affairs? Not pay tax indeed! What you need is a good kick in your idle rumps” (Soyinka 210–12). The women remained there for twenty-four hours and finally dispersed to plan an even larger protest on the palace grounds. The market women closed their shops and stalls to store food, water, and other supplies and set up restroom facilities so that all protesters could commit to the forty-eight-hour sit-in. The second mass protest was held on December 8, 1947. The organizers held mock sacrifices that culturally signified funeral rites to demonstrate to the Alake that his days in office were coming to an end (Awe 141–42). The demonstrators also used music as a weapon to criticize the malfeasance of Ademola II and the ENA council members: Ademola Big man with an ulcer Your behavior is deplorable Alake is a thief Council members are thieves Anyone who does not know Kuti will get in trouble. (Johnson-Odim and Mba 83) In her autobiography, Mrs. Kuti said that Ademola II used his position of authority in the community to falsify leases and steal land from poor farmers (18–21). The colonial administrators who spoke dismissively to the women were also addressed: White man, you will not get to your country safely You and Alake will not die an honorable death. . . . You pale-faced one keep off That we may have a chance To chat with Father Alake. (Johnson-Odim and Mba 83) The deeper symbolism in the song was a critique of colonial interference, which caused a degradation in the relationship between Egba men and women. It also sent the message that the British had no business managing the affairs of Nigerians because they neither understood nor respected indigenous cultural traditions. TheAlake called upon the male priests of the Oro, a secret society, to disperse the protesters. Women were not allowed to see or take part in Oro ceremonies. When the priests came through the crowd, Mrs. Kuti snatched their sacred staff and displayed it in her home (Johnson-Odim and Mba, 81). She supported the end of traditional beliefs and practices that were oppressive to women. The women attacked the priests and tore their garments. The protesters then sang the secret chant of the Oro as the men retreated. Soyinka recalled the women shouting: Taming Cerberus 65

Oro o, a fe s’oro Oro o, a fe s’oro E ti’lekun mo kunrin A fe s’oro This translates to “Oro-o, we are about to perform the Oro, lock up all the men, we are about to perform the Oro” (Soyinka 214). The women sang many songs during the forty-eight-hour demonstration, but one song seems to summarize their movement: O you men, vagina’s head will seek vengeance: You men, vagina’s head shall seek vengeance Even if it is one penny. If it is only a penny Ademola, we are not paying tax in Egbaland If even it is one penny. (Mba 150) This is a blatant statement that women will seek retribution no matter what the consequences. The women’s efforts were rewarded when the Alake abdicated in January 1949. Even so, Mrs. Kuti maintained, “I didn’t really attack Ademola” during the women’s war; “I attacked imperialism” (Johnson-Odim and Mba 72). Another judicial council was developed, to which women were appointed. The first act of the Egba Interim Council was to ensure that all taxation on women was repealed immediately.

Full Circle During and after the mass working-class campaign, the AWU experienced physical and ideological growth. Mrs. Kuti received letters from women throughout Nigeria and the Cameroons who hoped to begin organizations for women’s rights. By 1949, the AWU became the Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU) in order to accommodate all of the groups of women throughout the country who wanted to join the fight for equality and gender awareness (Johnson-Odim 56). In the same year, Nigerian women began to expand their philosophy and develop a pan-African concept to inform and strengthen their brand of nationalism. The NWU began to articulate an early philosophy of transnational blackness as a means of fighting against global sexism, racism, and oppression when the organization reached out to African American women. In 1949, Mrs. Kuti wrote letters to both Amy Ashwood Garvey and Mary McLeod Bethune asking them to form a transnational alliance with the NWU for the support of black women’s rights as well as black liberation. In the letter to Mrs. Garvey on August 9, 1949 she asked for a copy of the United Negro Improvement Association constitution so that she could interrogate whether the philosophy of the two groups aligned (Handwritten Letter to 66 Maria Martin

Amy Ashwood Garvey). She wrote to Mary McLeod Bethune on December 5, 1949, and Channing Tobias, the director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a New York City foundation concerned with securing educational opportunities for African Ameri- cans, replied to her saying that Mrs. Bethune would be interested in hosting her in America (Handwritten Letter to Mary McLeod Bethune). Mrs. Kuti’s letters to African American women shed light on the race consciousness of the NWU. The organization’s African feminist concept of collective action made it more natural for them to reach out to other black women even outside the continent because they were of the ideology that a threat to black women anywhere was a threat to black women everywhere. The only means of ensuring that this danger would be avoided was for all women to form strong bonds of solidarity by which they could form a more formidable force with which to fight for equality and womanhood. These types of connections to transnational black women were also important because they helped to increase awareness of racial inequality and to begin a conversation on how to combat it on a broader scale. African American women understood the intersectionality and convergence of multiple oppressions, which is characteristic of the experiences of women of color in colonized societies.3 Allying with African American women would have allowed the NWU to garner new perspectives and approaches with which to strengthen its movement for racial and gender equality. The pan-African outreach of the NWU began to articulate the foundations of a global black women’s movement in this era. The NWU spoke emphatically on the issue of race with regard to the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 and again in 1959 when it sent an open letter to Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain concerning the test dropping of another atomic bomb in the Sahara desert. In a debate with a colonial officer in 1945, Mrs. Kuti vocifer- ously said that the bomb would have never been dropped on Germany “because Germany is a white race, the Germans are your kinsmen. While the Japanese are just a dirty yellow people. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop a bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you!” (Johnson-Odim and Mba 41; Soyinka 244). She highlighted the fact that a racial dichotomy was inherent in colonialism. People of color were seen as “subhuman” to the colonial mindset. In 1959, her racialized theory of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to be corroborated by the French general Charles de Gaulle. He proposed to test an atomic bomb in the Sahara to examine ways in which it would affect the land because he wanted to use it on Algerians to stop them from fighting for independence from French colonialism. In her letter to Queen Elizabeth II, Mrs. Kuti said, “With our independence next October we should rather develop our resources and raise our living standards than be maimed and rendered useless” (Daily Service Newspaper 1). She pointed to the fact that there existed a European perception of African colonies as disposable. Her point was that freedom fighters and nationalists should not be vilified; they deserved Taming Cerberus 67 to rebuild their countries without the utter chaos and devastation that the atomic bomb would bring. General de Gaulle preferred to bomb Algeria rather than hand the country over to its indigenous people. Mrs. Kuti asked whether this proposal would have even been considered had Algeria been a white country. Race was a part of the nationalist philosophy of the NWU because the group realized that racism was intrinsic to colonialism. Early in life, Mrs. Kuti saw that the British colonizers saw Nigerians as inferiors and that the only way for Africans to have freedom was to eradicate colonialism. Thus, her personal radical philosophy was informed by an understanding of the intersections of race, power, and colonialism. The fervor with which Mrs. Kuti spoke out against the atomic bombs attests to her devotion to humanitarianism, which is a characteristic of her brand of feminism. Cheryl Odim refers to her first and foremost as a human rights activist, highlighting her efforts on behalf of the rights of working-class people, whether male or female (53). The single most comprehensive biography of Mrs. Kuti, Johnson-Odim and Mba’s For Women and the Nation, calls her a feminist and a democratic socialist. The latter of the two terms captures her zeal for freedom and equality without asserting that the underlying principles of her activism were solely feminist. Raisa Simola, in her article “The Construction of a Nigerian Nationalist and Feminist, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti,” casts her as a feminist, but it is important to draw attention to tenets of her ideology that did not align with Western feminist concepts. For example, in 1961, she said: “With independence on October 1, 1960 a new day dawned in Nigeria. . . . One of our greatest tasks is to learn tolerance. We have to be silent at times when we have the right to talk for the sake of peace; not to be too firm in demanding our rights when dealing with our husbands. We should try to forego [sic] our personal interest for our husbands. . . . It should be realized that our Nigerian Independence could only be felt in every home where wives tolerate their men because we must build happy homes for our children. . . . Our homes must be clean and healthy. Cen- ters should be created where women, married and young, could learn house crafts” (The Status of Women in Nigeria). The values she cited here do not exactly align with broader ideas of Western feminism such as the contestation of male privilege in the domestic sphere as well as the disruption of male hegemony in the public sphere. Instead of centering women’s individual rights and interests, she told them that they must now put their needs on hold in order to achieve national freedom through solidarity in every household and family. She apparently centered the wellbeing of the family and charged women to learn “house crafts” and be tolerant of male privilege, especially in the home. These ideas align more with African feminist concepts, which center culture, family and a concerted effort with men and affirm the nurturing, caring, family-supporting role of women in society.4 Mrs. Kuti’s activism embodied a delicate balance between women’s work in the public and domestic spheres. There needs to be more theorization on her gender ideology before one can truly understand her positioning. 68 Maria Martin

Half the Sky The Chinese ruler Mao Zedong, whom Mrs. Kuti met while in China, once said that women hold up half the sky, and the NWU would agree.5 One year after the end of the British rule in Nigeria, Mrs. Kuti observed the connection between women’s activism and progress toward independence: “Our women’s organization was founded in 1944 when oppression of the citizen, especially women, was becoming acute through the sole native authority system which was one man rule. . . . Women organized and broke down this power from its highest seat, and they demanded its eradication all over this country. Before they could achieve this many women had to be jailed for periods ranging from seven days to three months; they had tear gas thrown in their midst; they were beaten with batons; dragged on the ground. It was the beginning of our struggle towards constitutional freedom. The women faced the struggle fiercely and courageously with their men folks and they were victorious” (The Status of Women in Nigeria). They had made significant progress and continued to make strides in the postcolonial era. According to Mrs. Kuti, “Now the orders have changed. . . . Our men are learning that their women are no longer their slaves but their immediate associates. Our women try to pull their weights with men in all spheres of Nigerian life. It is our ad- age now that in some of life, woman can do what men can do. We have now women doctors, police, athletes, lawyers, artisans, teachers, scientists, and many women are kept at key posts in many government and commercial offices” (The Status of Women in Nigeria). Women were reaching their goal of having greater gender equality in their society thanks to the struggles of women like those of the NWU. In fact, beginning in 1953 the NWU aimed to equip women with entrepreneurial skills, to address poor health during pregnancy, and to lower the child mortality rate to help working-class women enhance their quality of life. Member dues funded those initiatives (Kuti, Autobiography 14–15). Women’s organizations such as the NWU did much to advance the needs and issues of women in Nigeria in both the colonial and the postcolonial eras. The NWU was also concerned with infrastructure development in its communities (for the benefit of both men and women) but faced considerable obstruction from the traditional rulers who wanted to preemptively avoid another upsurge in women’s activism. In the 1970s the organization was collecting contributions of one English shilling from each of its members in order to save and restore an important historical location, Olumo Rock (where the Egba people had fought off other indigenous invaders) (Kuti, Autobiography 12). One shilling at this time was equal to one-twentieth of an English pound. There were 240 pence in one pound, and so one shilling was equal to 12 pence (related to pennies). The contribution from each member was not much money, but it was a cost that the poor NWU members could afford. Their goal was to prepare Olumo Rock to be opened to the public for Taming Cerberus 69 tourism, which would bring in extra income that could be used to help the community in Abeokuta. On September 25, 1973, two chiefs, one elder and one junior, came to Mrs. Kuti to tell her that the current Alake wanted her to stop the collection of money.6 Alake Lipede was concerned that her collection of funds was preparation for another upsurge in women’s activism. She told the chiefs, “our organization was organizing self help schools for the improvement of our women’s health, good birthing, and to create good care for our babies and the public in general. . . . I told him that we established a maternity center where a pregnant member with her shilling membership would receive free maternity care, free delivery, free medicine, and the child would be registered in the government’s baby registry, and the baby would be looked after free until he was one year old. We were doing this to combat infant-mortality rate but we had to pack up through the victimization our poor members were receiving from the members of our civilian government” (Autobiography 14). The traditional government imposed a high income tax on working-class women seen wearing cloth that was woven in the NWU’s weaving center and those seen entering or leaving the maternity center. Due to intimidation from the government, the NWU had to shut down the weaving center, which, with sixteen power and hand-wound machines, taught women useful entrepreneurial skills and provided them with cloth to sell. In addition, all the medicines, formulas, and supplies for pregnant women and new- borns went unused when the maternity center had to be shut down. These initiatives had been on hold since 1953 (Kuti, Autobiography 15). Since they could not operate their maternity and weaving center without harassment, the women wanted to move on an environmental improvement project that would help the whole society. In essence, women were still facing repression. Mrs. Kuti said in her autobiography that she was being watched by the police. During the meeting with the chiefs, they asked her to come and tell the Alake the women’s reasons for collecting the one- shilling dues from each NWU member. She agreed to go down to the palace in thirty minutes’ time. Before she left, some of the women approached her and told her that one or two police officers were walking up and down her street and that a police car was also seen on her street (Autobiography 15). Three days before the chiefs came to talk to her, a friend told her that there was a rumor that she was going to hold another tax protest for women (Autobiography 15). However, according to Mrs. Kuti, “This act of opposition by the police or the chiefs did not discourage us to stop our collections” (Autobiography 16). Mrs. Kuti continued to be a dynamic force for women and a leader of women until her death, in 1978. Her son Fela was a very famous musician known for his critiques of the government. He made an album called Zombie with a song of the same name that caricatured soldiers as mindless drones for the government (Veal 154). In response to the release of the album, the military stormed his home, which he called Kalakuta Republic, where his family, band members, and recording studio 70 Maria Martin were housed (Veal 155). Mrs. Kuti moved to Kalakuta after the government, led by Obasanjo, seized control of her Abeokuta Grammar School (Veal 161). She was in her room in Kalakuta with her son Beko when “we began to see bottles, sticks, and different kinds of things thrown at us from outside . . . breaking the glass windows” (Kuti, Autobiography 23). When she looked out, she “saw that many soldiers had surrounded the house” (Kuti, Autobiography 23). The soldiers broke down the door and came into her room: “One of them pulled my hair but the other one said ‘don’t let us hurt the old woman but get her out before we burn the house.’ They tried to get me out through a window but the place was rather too high for me to reach the ground safely” (Kuti, Autobiography 23). The soldiers ultimately threw her out of the window. The final words of her autobiography state that she “did not know how she got to the hospital” (23). On the next page someone wrote that the autobiography was not concluded because Mrs. Kuti died (months later) from complications from her injuries.

Conclusion Gender equality, race consciousness, transnational outreach, and music radicalism were distinguishing factors of women’s nationalism beginning in the late 1940s. However, this can be realized only through a substantive assessment of women’s contributions to nationalist theory and practice. Histories of African nationalism tend to focus on men’s roles and thus lack the new perspectives and theoretical developments that an analysis of women’s activism would yield. When thoroughly considered, the experiences of women add depth and nuance to the understanding and interpretation of events and structures in society. Acknowledging women helps to cultivate a deeper knowledge of nationalist ideologies, decenter the narrative from its overwhelming focus on politically elite males, and highlight women’s contributions to the paradigmatic foundations of African nationalism. The lesson here for current researchers is that women’s experiences help to build more complete narratives and also to theorize about novel approaches to analyzing those narratives. This is what the history of the Nigerian Women’s Union does for the historiography of African nationalism. It not only genders the narrative but also adds complexity to understandings of nationalist theory and practice in West Africa and, in doing so, challenges ideas about the era of anticolonialism in Africa.

Notes 1. For more on the lack of gender concepts in pre-colonial Yorubaland see Oyeronke Oyewunmi, Invention of Women. 2. For more on indirect rule see Adiele Eberechukwu Afigbo, Nigerian History; Assa Okoth, A History of Africa; and Samuel Okafor, Indirect Rule. 3. For a discussion of the theory of intersectionality see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Femi- nist Thought. Taming Cerberus 71

4. In line with this idea, Obioma Nnaemeka’s article “Mapping African Feminisms” in Readings in Gender in Africa speaks to some of the specific differences between the philosophical foundations of African feminism and western feminism. She said that African feminism is not radical, does not abandon or dismiss motherhood or maternal politics as un-feminist, the language is one of compromise, it is not focused primarily on sexuality, and champions concerns such as clean water and food availability which are not concerns of the western feminist agenda. 5. See Bao’s Holding Up More Than Half the Skyfor reference to this quote by Mao Zedong. 6. For more on Alake Lipede see Lipede and Odunoye’s A Great Egba Monarch.

Works Cited Afigbo, Adiele Eberechukwu. Nigerian History, Politics and Affairs: The Collected Essays of Adiele Afigbo. Africa World Press, 2005. Afonja, Simi, and Bisi Aina. Nigerian Women In Social Change. Programme in Women’s Stud- ies, Obafemi Awolowo University, 1995. Awe, Bolanale. Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective. Sankore Publishers, 1992. Bao, Xiaolan. Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948–1992. U of Illinois P, 2001. Coleman, James. Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. University of California P, 1958. Daily Service Newspaper. July 27, 1947, p. 1. Egba Council Record Book. Abeokuta Women’s Union Grievances, 1947. Falola, Toyin, and Adam Paddock. The Women’s War of 1929: A History of Anti-Colonial Resis- tance in Eastern Nigeria. Carolina Academic Press, 2011. Falola, Toyin, and Saheed Aderinto. Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History. U of Rochester P, 2010. Johnson-Odim, Cheryl. “‘For Their Freedoms’: The Anti-Imperialist and International Feminist Activity of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 32, 2009, pp. 51–59. Johnson-Odim, Cheryl, and Nina Emma Mba. For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria. U of Illinois P, 1997. Kuti, Funmilayo Ransome. Autobiography, 1977. ———. The Status of Women in Nigeria, 1961. ———. “We Had Equality till Britain Came.” The Essential Feminist Reader, edited by Estelle B. Freedman, Modern Library, 2007, pp. 247–50. ———. “Letter to Amy Ashwood Garvey.” 9 August 1949. K.O. Dike Archives, Ibadan, Nigeria. 7 April 2017. ———. “Letter to Mary McLeod Bethune.” 5 December 1949. K.O. Dike Archives, Ibadan, Nigeria. 7 April 2017. Lipede, Oba Oyebade, and Oladipo Odunoye. Oba Oyebade Lipede: A Great Egba Monarch. Opeds, 1997. 72 Maria Martin

Mba, Nina Emma. Nigerian Women Mobilized. Institute of International Studies, 1982. Nnaemeka, Obioma. Mapping African Feminisms in Readings in Gender in Africa. U of Indiana P, 2005. ———. “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way” Signs, vol. 29, no. 2, 2004, pp. 360–61. Okoth, Assa. A History of Africa: African Societies and the Establishment of Colonial Rule 1800–1915, vol. 1. East African Educational Publishers, 2006. Okafor, Samuel. Indirect Rule: The Development of Central Legislature in Nigeria. Thomas Nelson, 1981. Oyewunmi, Oyeronke. Invention of Women. U of Minnesota P, 1997. Simola, Raisa, “The Construction of a Nigerian Nationalist and Feminist, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti.” Nordic Journal of African Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1999, pp. 94–114. Sklar, Richard L. Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation. Princeton UP, 1963. Soyinka, Wole. Ake: The Years of Childhood. Rex Collings, 1981. Veal, Michael E. Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon. Temple UP, 2000. Afterlives of Anna Komnene Moments in the History of the History of Byzantium

Ellen Quandahl

“Memory history, unlike historiography, must . . . not treat memories as fictions, dismissing them with a condescending smile and confronting them critically with the facts that emerge from research into the past. For from the standpoint of the history of memory, these fictions are themselves facts.” Jan Assman, Religon and Cultural Memory 179

“[The emperor] added, moreover, that it was not for his own safety that he endured such things, but for the [good reputation] (eukleias) and glory of [the Romans].” Anna Komnene, Alexiad 444

Anna Komnene (1083–c. 1153 c.e.)1 is well known to anyone who studies Byzan- tium. Her achievement was that she wrote a multivolume history of her father, the Emperor Alexius I Komnenos, which is a principal source for this period of Byzan- tine history and the only eastern source for the period of the first Crusade (Franko- pan 60). TheAlexiad has long been available in Greek, Latin, and various modern languages, and excerpts have appeared in anthologies since the late nineteenth century.2 Yet anthologies of rhetoric and the many splendid collections of work by and about rhetorical women do not to my knowledge include the writing of Anna Komnene, and only a few studies to date have dealt in particular with her rhetorical practices of history writing (Neville Heroes; Quandahl and Jarratt).3 While rhetoric was certainly “the primary discipline of language” for Byzantine writers (Papaioan- nou 21), it has until recently been a little used resource for investigation. Its features are both familiar and strange to those of us schooled in the rhetorical canon: heavy 74 Ellen Quandahl citationality, with veiled and explicit references to the texts of Greek pagan and Christian paideia; polyglossia, the uses of past forms of Greek language (M. Jeffreys 89); theoretical anchors in Aphthonius, Hermogenes, Menander Rhetor, and the Christian fathers rather than Aristotle or Cicero; and a profoundly performative, agonistic, and self-referential rhetorical culture (Mullett 154).4 Moreover, Byzan- tium itself, arguably because of questions of periodization, naming, geography, and evaluation of what is “byzantine,” is not familiar terrain for most rhetoricians. As Averil Cameron has suggested, “Byzantium . . . occupies an uncertain place in historiography, which is to say no-one knows what to do with it. Was it part of Europe? Or does it belong to the East?” Is it “late antiquity’s extension or its contrast” (ix–x)? Are its inhabitants Romans (Romaioi)—peoples of the eastern Roman Empire—as illustrated in the epigraph from the Alexiad, or are they Byzantines, the name used by western European scholars after the sixteenth century (Herrin 25)? The category of gender poses additional questions with respect to a time and place often reputed to be feminine, exotic, and obscure. Thus, where Anna Komnene, a writer who has been both visible and invisible, is concerned, the question of reputation (kleos) offers significant openings for study. Like Herodotus, she wrote so that deeds worthy of speech (axia logou) would not fade from memory (3), and, like the rhetorical models whom she revered, especially Homer, Thucydides, and her near contemporary Michael Psellos, she drew attention to links between excellence in rhetorical ability and excellent repute. Her encomi- astic history constructed Alexios as an emperor who acted for the good reputation (eukleias) of his people (Rōmaioi). But, as we know, reputation is a rhetorical concept inflected with norms of gender and culture. So it is not surprising that the reputation of Anna herself, a historian under the signs of rhetor, Byzantine, and woman, with their continuing connotations of overcomplexity, ornament, and irrationality, has reverberated with these topoi. Following the recommendation of Jessica Enoch for engaging historiography that pushes the boundaries of reclamation and reinterpretation, we might then well ask how memories of Anna Komnene have been “composed, leveraged, forgotten, and erased in various contexts and situations” (62). Such work, Enoch suggested, extended the fifth canon of rhetoric, emphasizing memory, as Anna’s history did, “as a rhetorical act in and of itself” (65). Following Enoch and drawing on scholarship on cultural memory, this essay looks at how Anna has been composed by three women scholars, Naomi Mitchison, Georgina Buckler, and Julia Kristeva, whose modes of selection and perspective have written her into memory in radically different ways. These woman, each of notable reputation in her own right, responded to the questions posed by Cameron with visions of the past that spoke to differing present concerns. On the one hand, their texts show the significant work of women in shaping and transmitting knowledge about a formidable woman historiographer. On the other hand, as we will see, their texts complicate the notion that women Afterlives of Anna Komnene 75 writing women into our histories sufficiently challenges modes of interpretation that keep women apart from political and rhetorical history. From a strictly feminist perspective (if there is such a thing), these three versions of Anna Komnene may appear to be texts divided against themselves, mostly enhancing but also diminishing the reputations of the Annas that they bring into view. One reason for this is that they recognize but do not inquire into “how and why rhetoric held its central position in . . . the Byzantine world” (Whitby 239). But they alert us to the cultural and individual desires mobilized when boundaries are crossed and to rhetorical terrain richly available for inquiry. I first take up books by Mitchison and Buckler, published in 1928 and 1929, respec- tively, which, along with an English translation of the Alexiad by Elizabeth Dawes (also 1928), drew early attention to Anna Komnene just as the field of Byzantine Studies was coalescing.5 Their books differently show the hold on British memory of the work of Edward Gibbon, who famously excoriated the culture and peoples of Byzantium, comparing them unfavorably with those of Greek and Roman antiquity and Europe,6 and also, curiously, of Sir Walter Scott, whose novelCount Robert of Paris is set at the court of Anna’s father and features her as a character. I then move to a speech and novel by Julia Kristeva, which offer an utterly different orientation, claiming Anna as “the first European intellectual” (“Thinking” 5). I use the metaphor of memory here as Astrid Erll outlined it, transferred from an idea of individual remembering to broader practices by which people construct a past “according to present knowledge and needs” (5). Erll defined cultural memory as the “interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts” (2) in the interest of attending to “the quality and meaning the past assumes” (7). While much of the new work on memory by rhetoricians, as Enoch noted, attends to material sites such as museums and monuments, Erll included written history as another mode of memory, dissolving distinctions between more and less official versions of the past. In this spirit, the point of the essay is not to approve, dismiss, or correct variations in these scholars’ Anna Komnenes but to recognize their projects as facts in the history of the history of Byzantium. Their work then becomes a metonym and Anna Kom- nene a case study for how Byzantium lives in and is absent from our understandings.

Naomi Mitchison The Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison lived from 1897 to 1999, producing more than seventy books—novels, short stories, science fiction, children’s books, memoirs, travel writing—and scores of articles on political, feminist, and environmental topics. She was an advocate of birth control and women’s rights and a critic of conventional marriage, a traveler who opposed British imperial rule, and a writer whose “carefully researched fiction acquired cult status among Oxbridge classicists between the wars” (Jannou 296). Her best-known work, the seven-hundred-page historical novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen, published in 1931, explores the 76 Ellen Quandahl

quest of a female hero through various geographies and cultural developments and draws on some of the same historical sources used by Anna Komnene, including Polybius and Plutarch (Benton 64, 68). Mitchison was not herself a classicist, and the historical novels were seen by her friend Auden as “parables” of contemporary Europe. Maroula Joannou suggested that “In the manner of her precursor, Sir Walter Scott, Mitchison [chooses] a central character . . . caught in the middle of social and political turmoil, and through whose experiences the impact of social forces can be revealed” (296). Joannou’s words could be extended to Mitchison’s biography, Anna Komnene, with Anna as the central character who is caught in “a doomed civilization” and whose experiences are cautionary, since Europeans after the Great War, “like the Byzantines, are living at the end of an epoch” (22). Fluent in French, Mitchison may have read the Alexiad in the 1675 translation by Louis Cousin, which is mentioned in her bibliography, as well as working in the Greek. But more imagined sketch than textual study, the book was published in London for a series called “Representative Women.” This series, as described by its editor, Francis Birrell, aimed (as this volume does nearly a century later) to “give in biographical form a picture of female accomplishments throughout the ages” and to counter the idea that “women, after centuries of claustration, are at last coming into their own” (qtd. in Sproles 111–112). The subjects of the brief volumes, each about ninety pages, included names such as Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina of Sweden and were clearly designed to reshape and enhance female reputations. With that as its purpose, Anna Komnene gives the effect of internal division, a fascinating blend of scorn for everything Byzantine and cautiously admiring comments about the education of Anna and the imperial women before her. The book relies heavily on Gibbon and shows Sir Walter Scott not only as precursor but as influence, projects that Mitchison’s feminism did not overcome. As an epigraph to the biography, Mitchison took a passage from Gibbon that has haunted the memory of Anna: “Instead of the simplicity of style and narrative which wins our belief, an elaborate affection of rhetoric and science betrays, in every page, the vanity of a female author” (v). The opening “Background” chapter reflects on “Constantinople as not Europe,” though once “a good Greek city-state founded by Megara” (9–10), emphasizing the separateness of this Greek-speaking region, “the remains of the Roman Empire” (16), both from its classical forbears and from “the earlier civilised parts of Europe” (10). The whole chapter is shot through with the vitriol of Gibbon’s view of Byzantium as a declining and decadent civilization, “a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery” (17, quoting Gibbon), even suggesting, as Gibbon did, that the slaves of ancient Athens produced work superior to the slaves of Byzantium (19). Her descriptions of Byzantium are much like those of Walter Scott. In hisCount Robert of Paris,7 Byzantium is a graft from an old tree, containing the decay of the parent spreading within it. In Mitchison, “all [the] rest of Europe was like a tree in bud” (10). In Scott, Alexios’s rule was “closely allied to Afterlives of Anna Komnene 77 imbecility” (6). Of Anna, Mitchison said, “I am afraid she was stupid” (22). Mitchi- son saw a great gap of excellent history writing between Thucydides and Gibbon and suggested that Anna Komnene herself wrote “a curiously bad history book” (22). One element of her argument was to suggest that the Byzantines and Anna Komnene were blind both to internal decay and to Constantinople’s role of guard- ing “the young Europe against Asia” (16). Thus for Mitchison “Anna Komnene was certainly a representative woman; but the thing she represents is dead.” Still, her aim was to show Anna “making at least one moderately clear figure . . . in the grand chain of Byzantine imperialism” (23). The remaining chapters of the biography take the titles of the men around Anna—her father, first betrothed, husband, father’s enemy, and brother. They reconstruct events from the Alexiad, very freely novelizing and imagining what cannot be known. Of Anna’s marriage, for example, Mitchison made this comment, trace- able neither to the Alexiad nor to any Byzantine source: “Anna finished growing up after her marriage . . . but [her husband] never changed her at bottom, though I am certain she did her hair the way he liked it” (53). In general, Mitchison contributed to what became the predominant memory of Anna—that she was romantically attached to her first betrothed, with whom she expected to take the throne; that she married a second-rate husband (“he wrote worse history than Anna, though it is quite conceivable that she thought it better” [52]); that she hated her brother and with her power-hungry mother engaged in a “vast plot” (89) against him. This conventionally gendered portrait, what Joan Scott might call a “fantasy-echo” of Gibbon’s topos of Anna as embittered woman kept from power, has been remembered and repeated, I think it is safe to say, in every treatment of the Alexiad.8 Mitchi- son’s version is romantic and full of imagined scenes that call attention to the fact that this echo, as Scott would say, repeatedly transforms historical sources (53). For all that, Mitchison called attention to the ways in which constructions of the past speak to present concerns. For example, she was alert to the education Anna received, the tradition of women governing, and the line of imperial women who were said to be more ambitious than men. She paused to editorialize about the in- compatibility of education for women who lack opportunity to use it: “If women are to be kept behind bars it is silly to compromise about it as the later Byzantines did and allow them to be intelligent beings at all. It must lead to discontent and when possible violent ambition. One sees all of her predecessors in Anna; much of her life stands for them all” (57). Mitchinson likewise editorialized on what we might call the rhetoric of history writing, which she wanted to be as internationalist as Thucydides, aware of a point of view and process of selection, and “as readable as a detective story” that gives pattern to the “mass of accumulated history-stuff” (21–22). She used her narrative of Anna to show that “Europe is at present remarkably full of rules of one sort and another, stone walls against which the unwary are constantly finding their heads or hearts 78 Ellen Quandahl bumped” (18), just as those educated and rule-bound Byzantine women did (and as Mitchinson herself did, for example in her work advocating birth control and frankly describing the sexual lives of women). She was fully of the view that Byzantine writing was static and antiquarian. She wrote: “There was no fresh creation; the impulse to it was so discouraged” (45). As a fact in the history of the history of Byzantium and Komnene, Mitchison’s book participated in a moment when Byzantine practices of referencing the already-said of Greek paideia were viewed as “all rather obscure and difficult” (90), rather than, as Jeffrey Walker has suggested, polyvalent, yielding for insiders a “semiotic cloud” of significance and even participating in notions of the sublime (58). Paradoxically, when the very central role of rhetoric in Byzantine education is viewed as “affection” rather than mode of invention, it is unavailable as a mode of analysis. One preliminary conclusion, then, is that the reputations of Anna, Byzantium, and rhetoric are linked.

Georgina Buckler When Georgina Buckler (1868–1953) published her book Anna Komnene: A Study with Oxford University Press in 1929, she was among the first British classicists to turn to Byzantium. She was aware of Mitchison’s book, which she described in a footnote as “a charming little sketch” (5), and Mitchison likewise referenced Buck- ler’s forthcoming study, acknowledging her book as the more authoritative (95). The two works could not be more different. Buckler opened by suggesting (as Averil Cameron did in 2006) that Byzantine writers have not been adequately studied and are mostly unfamiliar to well-educated people. She added, “most Englishmen would be driven to confess that their notion of Anna Komnene was taken from Gibbon or from Scott’s Count Robert of Paris” (3). She meant to write into this absence, noting that “If Sappho excites our admiration as the first woman poet, Anna is the first woman historian” (4). Turning Mitchison’s picture of a decadent Byzantium on its head, she argued that in the Alexiad we find ourselves in “a pleasant, cultured, and courteous world” (5); she noted Anna’s learnedness—“[she] could quote Homer and the Bible copiously and appositely, draw telling analogies from Greek history true or mythical, and handle terms of theological philosophy with at least perfect as- surance”—at a time when Crusader counts could not write their signatures on trea- ties (4). She rightly noted that the Alexiad is the only Greek account of parts of the period of the Crusades. And her reading of sources was that “it is not necessary to assume that [Anna] contested the legitimacy of [her brother’s] claim” to the throne, dispensing with the much-repeated story (27). According to Charlotte Roueché, who holds her original diaries, Buckler had been nourished by an intellectual circle engaged in investigating geographies of the Middle East, often as they related to Christian sacred history and the Eastern Church and with an interest in the concept of “national character” (177). She studied languages as a child, read Greek at high school, and enrolled at Girton to read Afterlives of Anna Komnene 79

Classics in 1888. Roueché gleans from her papers a comment about the deliciousness of this work, tempered by a view that inflects Christians’ encounter with Greek paideia from antiquity on: “There is any amount of it that is simply too coarse and improper for words in all these worthies. It is the great drawback of Classics, I think” (182). Buckler raised a family, traveled with her husband while he was in the diplomatic service, and worked for the Red Cross during the war years, so it was not until she was fifty-five that she began her work toward a D.Phil. at St. Hugh’s College,- Ox ford. The title of her thesis was “The Intellectual and Moral Standards of Anna Kom- nene” (Roueché 189). This became the 1929 Oxford book, a phenomenally learned and wide-ranging study, and one also oriented to propriety and national character. Henri Grégoire, the founding editor of Byzantion, wrote a long and admiring review, calling the book brilliantly written and solidly documented (685).9 Retaining the emphasis of her thesis, Buckler’s project was to consider the Alex- iad and “the moral and intellectual standards of its writer” (11). After an introduction that admirably summarizes the main arc of events in a work that, as she noted, “in length exceeds the History of Thucydides,” Buckler evaluated Anna on the basis of personality, character, and education and as historian and writer. Three qualities stand out. First, Buckler was at ease with making a moral evaluation of Anna and even of her emotions, especially her “carking sorrow” (45) whose representation in the Alexiad she found worthy of sharp critique. Second, unlike Mitchison, she dis- pensed with unfavorable comparisons of Constantinople to classical Athens, placed Komnene within the tradition of Greek history writing, and, interestingly, translated Anna’s Rōmaioi as Greeks (241n1), emphasizing their language and, perhaps, Anna’s classicism. Finally, on each point of investigation, Buckler analyzed her primary text, Byzantine contexts, and the available scholarship of her own day, so that the work became an indispensable sourcebook, something of a bibliographic goldmine. As Buckler’s reviewers noted, both favorably and unfavorably, her material on Anna as a personality is organized around “the three theological virtues”—faith, hope, and charity—and “the four cardinal virtues”—temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice. Buckler left implicit that the ancient categories for praise and blame together with the Christian virtues, key topoi for a rhetorically trained Christian writer of the twelfth century, are Anna’s categories. Thus she did not quite draw out a rhetorical thread that has been of great interest in recent scholarship—evidence of Byzantine writers’ training in the progymnasmata, especially the exercises of ethopoiisis and praise and blame, which allowed rhetors to practice creatively transforming material in their repertoire of logoi to construct the ethos of themselves and others in complex and emotional scenes. But Buckler used the categories to range over Anna’s moral evaluations of actions and also to evaluate Anna’s own moral orientations. I can offer here only a few of many notable examples. In her section on charity, Buckler considered not only Anna’s representations of the beneficence of the emperor toward enemies and friends but also the charity of Anna herself, 80 Ellen Quandahl including affection for family and what can be gleaned from her about the life and the positions of women. She concluded (always based on her own translations) that Anna’s ideal woman combined compassion with “feminine soft-heartedness, with the virile qualities of watchfulness, sharpness, activity, steadfast faith, and good counsel” (120); that she had “on the whole a poor opinion of her sex” (120); and that “the importance of women in Anna’s day . . . was great enough to compare very favorably even with our own times, certainly greater than in many of the intervening centuries” (115). As for warriors, Anna was impressed by inventiveness as much as by courage and fortitude (144), taking Thucydides as her standard for praising the sharpness of generals (139, 141). Buckler noted that Anna’s men (and women) “give vent to their emotions” (144). Whereas a rhetorical approach might use this material to describe Anna’s construction of her father as a polytropic Odyssean figure, appealing to an audience that expected such references in their narratives, Buckler suggested that this was a “Homeric trait” that Anglo-Saxons might find inconsistent with Anna’s stress on dignity (144). The following is typical of one of Buckler’s summarizing passages: “Temperance is her watchword, and she admires Justice, but Fortitude and Wisdom are inextricably mixed in her mind with cunning and decep- tion, while of honour in our sense of the word she has no conception” (155). As Roueché suggests, “In a way that separates her immediately from those of us who write only a few decades later, [Buckler] wrote within a firmly defined moral framework which makes the assessment of ‘intellectual and moral standards’ a straight-forward matter” (191). This is nowhere more evident than in Buckler’s assessment of Anna’s emotionality, especially her representations of the sorrows of losing a betrothed, a husband, a brother, and a father and of the pains of Alexius’s reign. Buckler said, “we talk a different language . . . and we cannot gauge the depth of feeling beneath her hysterical bombast. One thing is, however, self-evident; if, as experience teaches, great sorrows are dumb . . . then Anna’s were emphatically not great except in her own self-centred, self-satisfied mind” (46). As Roueché’s comment suggests, we speak a different language, too. But this work offers much material for, perhaps even sets up, the historical investigation of the differing concepts of virtues and emotions and how we experience them over time, which is now a rich node of investigation for rhetoricians (Hintenberger; Quandahl; Neville “Life”). At the same time, it establishes a thematic approach to the Alexiad that has been powerful in scholarly memory even until the present: the interest in women’s roles, the court, and the persona and truthfulness of Anna herself in relation to the throne. Paradoxically, reverberations of this thematic at once challenge and solidify Anna’s absence from considerations of rhetorical and political history, showing that Anna was a woman who wrote history but attending more to details of her life than to the expansive historical record that she left. If, however, one brackets Buckler’s interest in Anna as moral and emotional being, whose history does indeed offer a rare window onto the lives of imperial Afterlives of Anna Komnene 81 women, it’s possible to see that her study also shows Anna drawing on rhetorical traditions of praising an empire and spanning a vast political territory. Buckler’s section on education brings to the fore every passage in which Anna described the state of learning, her own and that of persons in her history, both Byzantine and foreign. Though under the heading of studying her “qualifications for producing a valuable History” and her truthfulness (209), Buckler compared Anna’s attitudes and accounts with those in other Byzantine texts. She took up the question of quotation and the ethics of quotation and tracked down and verified each and every reference to Homer and classical writers and prose writers of her day, as well as biblical allusions. She described documents transcribed and summarized by Anna and procedures of writing in diplomatic missions. In her section on Anna as writer, she offered a patient study of syntax and lexicography, praised by Grégoire for speaking into an area where there had been much ignorance (690). In short, Buckler embedded a whole history of Byzantine education in the book.10 Without taking a specifically rhetorical approach, she laid out the terrain of rhetoric and Anna’s and her contemporaries’ profound esteem for eloquence. Thus, at nearly the same moment when Naomi Mitchison echoed Gibbon’s pairing and dismissing of rhetoric and female vanity, Buckler offered detailed documentary evidence of Anna’s and other Byzan- tines’ rhetorical practices. Finally, Buckler’s material on Anna as historian documents Anna’s discussions of history writing, her use of oral and written sources, and her accounts of military affairs. Buckler noted inconsistencies in the history, which have been used to slight Anna, and offered a picture of the composition much like the one we have of Aristotle’s Rhetoric: “The whole composition of the work inclines us to believe that it was not written, as the French would say, tout d’un trait, and that the different parts were not necessarily composed in their chronological order; secondly that the revision was never completely carried out” (255). Explicitly using Anna’s categories, Buckler treated Anna’s representation of ecclesiastical, military, and foreign as well as domestic affairs, suggesting that “the fact remains that if we want to understand the Byzantine Empire of 1081 to 1118 we have no other picture which for vividness and detail can be mentioned in the same breath with the Alexiad” (256). That section, patiently tracing the geography of Alexius’s encounters with foreign powers, including Crusaders, might be said to show Anna engaging in what Hawhee and Olson call “pan-historiography,” writing history that spans geographic space, peoples, and movements. This is the Anna Komnene whose memory Julia Kristeva begins to construct.

Julia Kristeva In 2004, during her speech in acceptance of the Holberg prize, the semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva announced her discovery, during the research for her trilogy on female genius (about Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette), that 82 Ellen Quandahl

the first female intellectual was none other than Anna Komnene, whom she designated as a European woman from her native region, Bulgaria (“Thinking” 5). With this unusual identification, Kristeva, contra Mitchison, suggested that among the cultural identities of Europe today is its past as part of the Eastern Roman Empire. That same year, Kristeva also published Murder in Byzantium, continuing the series of mystery novels in which she explores themes known from her critical essays under the trope of detection. The novel interleaves passages from and flights of fancy and speculation about Anna Komnene in a twenty-first century tale about the political, economic, religious, and psychical present. One of the killers is a professor of “mi- grations,” whose musings are sometimes odd doubles of Kristeva’s work; his secret obsessions are Byzantium, Anna’s history of the first Crusade, and a search for a lost ancestor imagined to have met her. He reveres Anna as “the first modern historian” (18). So here are two trajectories concerning the reputed Anna, one realized and one in nuce—the topos of Byzantium and figure of Anna in the novel and a hint in the speech that Anna may exemplify Kristeva’s notion of female genius. The setting of the novel is not Byzantium but a place called Santa Varvara, apparently somewhere between Paris and the Balkans.11 It comes to stand variously for the new Europe, the United States, and the globalized world of production, commerce, and spectacle, which Kristeva has described elsewhere as the backdrop for efforts to construct a European Union in which differences will have to be rec- onciled (“Europe” 114). This is the rhetorical scene into which the novel speaks. The detective-journalist, Kristeva’s alter ego, reads both the Alexiad and the professor’s notes for a novel about Anna. She calls Byzantium an “odd future anterior” (83), impossible to locate, the “everywhere where foreigners . . . try to survive” (64). In fact, the term Byzantium is refracted in the novel in so many ways as to become a polytrope, naming the past and future of the rhetorical scene of Santa Varvara, glimpses of the unconscious and the semiotic,12 and a theme of questioning and deep thought. For anyone interested in the historical Byzantium, one of the most engaging and legible strands of the novel is geographic, or what one might call the chōric, not with Kristeva’s usual inflections but in the more common meaning of the Greek term chōra as land or region. There are maps of the routes of medieval Crusaders from what are now France, Germany, and Italy toward the Byzantine Empire, from the old Europe to the borderlands of the new Europe. The professor imagines an ancestor who dropped out of the first Crusade to settle in Philippopolis (now Plovdiv, in Bul- garia) and had an eroticized encounter with Anna Komnene. His road trip through this geography is a veritable tour of Byzantine World Heritage sites, complete with maps and photographs. This stretch of the novel offers history in artifacts— in churches, monuments, paintings, archives (163)—offering the reader a geography lesson about places that have “passed into the blind spot of history” (166–67) and displacing the traditional topoi of Byzantium, described aptly enough by the Afterlives of Anna Komnene 83 narrator: “rugs and samovars, a maze of legends, and half-knowledge” and “too much complexity” (84). Tracking events and texts takes the detective into this geography and “to another European era, nine centuries before the problematic ‘Union’ of the present day that still hesitates to extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, with or without Turkey.” As the alter ego remarks, “Against a past rediscovered, the present recomposes itself differently” (80). But this emplaced Byzantium is overpowered in the novel by chōra as Kristeva has used it to theorize a preverbal realm of emotions, sensations, and traces of psychical experience (Rickert 57–61). The detective speaks of “my Byzantium . . . not the land of plenty that is popularly associated with this somewhat jarring name. My Byzantium resolutely names the unnamable or whatever it is that you wish not to reveal. . . . Intimacy speaks indirectly, transmuted into figures and parable, numbers, symbols, and allusions and all that is Byzantine” (69). Asked in an interview what it would mean to be Byzantine today, Kristeva herself responded, “To thwart identities and complicate uncertainties. . . . Uncertainty is my Byzantine memory and the novel a flowering of questions” (305). Thus, also displacing the old topoi of an Orientalized, overcomplicated “Byzantium” is a new trope of strangeness. Read- ing generously, there is perhaps here a hint of a way to read differently, seeing the figuration in Byzantine writing as a window onto precisely what is not static but, to cite Walker again, a cloud of meaning, both communicable and incommunicable, a window onto affect. As for Anna, there are passages in Kristeva’s novel from her history, but these are mostly overtaken by the professor’s fictional one, a love story. But the book is not, after all, a study of theAlexiad or even a conventional detective story that gets to the bottom of things but a novel of the subject, “diffracted into a mosaic of confessions, associations and slips that destabilize the Ego’s [and the reader’s] uncertainties” (Kristeva, “Voyage” 274). So the novel calls attention—as I hope this essay does—to the operations of desire and fantasy that make impossible the professor’s and detective’s—our—adequate representation of Anna.13 Still, Kristeva’s curious, hyperbolically lyrical novel breaks into memory’s suc- cessive iterations of Anna’s fame as a woman—Byzantine, bitter, emotional—with other descriptions. Characters note her devotion to rhetoric (120), her training in the trivium and quadrivium (113), her style recalling Homer (19), her reading of Aristotle and Plato (81). One might imagine Kristeva finding in such writing the essence of the symbolic or an ethic of purity or ethnocentrism, as her mentor Roland Barthes did in his description of the Old Rhetoric (Clark 310). We find instead attention to Anna’s “scrupulous geopolitical observation” (18) and the significance of her “not being enclosed in a Latin perspective” (19). She is “a one-woman show—rather surprising, don’t you think, at the beginning of the twelfth century. One person who was already, despite what the critics of Orthodox faith say, a crossroads, a shock of civilizations, a clash of cultures, woman and man, weeper and warlord, singular and universal, unconsoled and proud” (86). 84 Ellen Quandahl

It is a tantalizing prospect, then, to consider how Anna Komnene might be, along with Kristeva’s Arendt, Klein, and Colette, “a female genius whom the future Europe would do well to discover” (“Thinking” 6). Kristeva’s question “Is There a Feminine Genius” is a complex project in which she dissociated herself from “mass feminism” and its ambitions for “all womankind” (494–95) and attempted to inquire into the ecceitas, the uniqueness of individual women who, in addition to sharing certain traits of “feminine psychosexuality,”14 negotiate some “original and unprecedented advance” (503). That is, in and despite their social situations, these women, out of their “irreducible subjectivities,” realized some creative initiative (“Genius” 496). Thinking along the lines of her work on Arendt, one might imagine Kristeva seeing in Anna the achievement of turning events and deeds into remembrance in an expansive narrative of political and imperial life.

Conclusion What Anna announced in the prologue to her history is that training in rhetoric qualified her to write it. What she did not announce was that although Greek paideia was normally forbidden to women (Dyck 113)—because of the very “drawback” that Buckler noted in reading classics—she was going to use it anyway in order to write history, surely an “unprecedented advance” in Kristeva’s sense. We have seen that rhetoric haunts the memories of the Anna Komnene composed by Mitchison, Buckler, and Kristeva. Their Annas are aligned with views of rhetoric that are in turn aligned with views of Byzantium and of aspirations for forwarding, understanding, and theorizing women’s achievements. Naomi Mitchison, with her investments in feminism and anti-imperialism, echoed and amplified a cultural memory of a Byzantine society bound by prejudices and precedents (18) and of rhetoric without invention. She saw Byzantium as divided from and inferior to Europe, and her Anna was a fierce and bitter subject of biography. Buckler, with her commitment to the new field of Byzantine studies, through sheer evidence collecting, provided massive data on Byzantine rhetorical practices without taking a specifically rhetorical interest in their conserving or rejuvenating features. Her Byzantium was aligned with the Greek paideia studied by classicists. Her Anna was dramatic and emotional and nevertheless a learned and skilled historian, worthy of being called a “Tenth Muse” (522). Kristeva, a self- described “creature of the crossroads” (“Europe” 113), was interested in Byzantium and its traditions as the past of the New Europe and her native Bulgaria. Her Anna was a female genius, placed in a novel that underscores the phenomenon that gives such different and culturally distinct Annas—the transforming passions, fantasies, and aspirations of people who wrote her into scholarship, geography, and the back story of the present. This account of three women’s ways of writing her into memory, I hope, alerts us to the impossibility of fully re-collecting and representing women’s reputations. Afterlives of Anna Komnene 85

Notes 1. Following Frankopan’s updated translation of the Alexiad and the recent trend toward Greek spellings, I use Anna Komnene instead of Anna Comnena. 2. Anthologies include Krumbacher’s History of Byzantine Literature, Wilson’s Anthology of Byzantine Prose, and A Web Companion to the Norton Anthology of English Literature. 3. Since this writing, Neville published Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian. She reads Anna as deploying a woman’s rhetorical genre, lamentation, in order to perform the male discourse of historiography. Buckley, discussing the Alexiad as literary artifact, describes Anna’s debt to the rhetoric of Michael Psellos. 4. These features are explored in Kustas, the essays in E. Jeffreys, ed., Walker, Valia- vitcharska, and Quandahl and Jarratt. 5. The start of Byzantine Studies as a field may be marked by the first International Con- gress of Byzantine Studies in 1924 and the appearance of journal Byzantion that same year (Harrer 20). 6. Gibbon asserted that the Byzantines “assume and dishonor the names both of Greeks and Romans, [and] present a dead uniformity of abject vices” (Chapter 48). Harrer traces this line of thinking through, among others, Voltaire, Adam Smith, David Hume, Hegel, and Napoleon I (11–12). 7. Sir Walter Scott’s novel, 1831, includes a parody of the Alexiad, in a scene in which Anna Komnene reads aloud from a supposed fragment of the work not previously “republished in the Byzantine historians” (47). 8. Quandahl and Jarratt treat the “phantasmagoric transformations” of Anna’s biography through “the topos of the angry woman’s body” (304–10). 9. The review is glowing; a footnote attributes “to the influence of Mr. Buckler the exhaustive method, the patient and generous erudition.” This parallels scholarship on Anna that attributes her history to her husband, Nicephorus Bryennius (for example, Howard- Johnston). 10. Buckler also wrote an article, “Byzantine Education,” for the collection Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization. 11. Helena Bodin points out that the name Santa Varvara may allude to “the Greek and Byzantine way of referring to all people who did not speak Greek. . . . They were the barbar- ians; the b later softened into a v in the Greek and Slavic languages” (34). 12. Suzanne Clark’s “Julia Kristeva: Rhetoric and the Woman as Stranger” is an excellent introduction to this term as a rhetorical category. 13. Here I have in mind, again, Joan Scott and her work on the fantasy of feminist history (19–22). 14. These common characteristics are the permanence of attachments (political, psychical, sensory, amorous), the identification of life with thought, and an emphasis on temporality (“Genius” 498–501). 86 Ellen Quandahl

Works Cited Assman, Jan. Religion and Cultural Memory. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, Stanford UP, 2006. Benton, Jill. Naomi Mitchison: A Biography. Pandora Press, 1990. Bodin, Helena. “Seeking Byzantium on the Borders of Narration, Identity, Space and Time in Julia Kristeva’s Novel Murder in Byzantium.” Nordlit: Tidsskrift i llitteratur og Kultur, vol. 13, no. 1, 2009, pp. 31–34. Buckler, Georgina. Anna Komnene: A Study. Oxford UP, 1929. ———. “Byzantine Education.” Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization, edited by Norman H. Baynes and S. St. L. B. Moss, Oxford UP, 1969, pp. 200–220. Buckley, Penelope. TheAlexiad of Anna Komnene: Artistic Strategy in the Making of a Myth. Cambridge UP, 2014. Cameron, Averil. The Byzantines. Blackwell, 2006. Komnene, Anna. Alexiad. Translated by E.R.A. Sewter, revised by Peter Frankopan, Penguin Classics, 2009. Clark, Suzanne. “Julia Kristeva: Rhetoric and the Woman as Stranger.” Reclaiming Rhetorica, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, U of Pittsburgh P, 1995, pp. 305–18. Dyck, Andrew R. “Iliad and Alexiad: Anna Komnene’s Homeric Remniscences.” Greek, Ro- man and Byzantine Studies, vol. 27, 1986, pp. 113–20. Enoch, Jessica. “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography without the Tradition.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif, Southern Illinois UP, 2013, pp. 58–73. Erll, Astrid. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning, De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 1–15. Frankopan, Peter. “Perception and Projection of Prejudice: Anna Komnene, the Alexiad, and the First Crusade.” Gendering the Crusades. Edited by Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert, Other Press, 2000, pp. 59–67. “From The Alexiad of Anna Komnene.”Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online, W .W. Norton, https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/middleages/ topic_3/comnena.htm (accessed May 2, 2017). Gibbon, Edward. “Defects of the Byzantine History.” Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap48.htm (accessed January 30, 2014). Grégoire, Henri. “Georgina Buckler, Anna Komnene, a Study.” Review, Byzantion, vol. 4, 1929, pp. 684–92. Haarer, F. K. “Writing Histories of Byzantium: The Historiography of Byzantine History.” A Companion to Byzantium, edited by Liz James, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 9–21. Hawhee, Debra, and Christa Olson. “Pan-Historiography: The Challenges of Writing History across Time and Space.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif, South- ern Illinois UP, 2013, pp. 90–105. Herrin, Judith. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Princeton UP, 2007. Afterlives of Anna Komnene 87

Hintenberger, Martin. “Emotions in Byzantium.” A Companion to Byzantium, edited by Liz James, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 124–134. Howard-Johnston, James. “Anna Komnene and the Alexiad.” Alexios I Komnenos, edited by Margaret Mullett and Dion Smythe. Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1966, pp. 260–301. Jannou, Maroula. “Naomi Mitchison at One Hundred.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1998, pp. 292–304. Jeffreys, Elizabeth. Rhetoric in Byzantium. Ashgate, 2003. Jeffreys, Michael. “`Rhetorical’ Texts.” Rhetoric in Byzantium, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 87–100. Komnene, Anna. Alexiad. Translated by E.R.A. Sewter, revised by Peter Frankopan, Penguin Classics, 2009. Kristeva, Julia. “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion.” Crisis of the European Subject, Other Press, 2000, pp. 113–62. ———. “Is There a Feminine Genius?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 493–504. ———. Murder in Byzantium. 2004, translated by C. Jon Delogu, Columbia UP, 2006. ———. “Murder in Byzantium: Of Why I ‘Ship Myself on a Voyage’ in a Novel.” Hatred and Forgiveness, Columbia UP, 2010, pp. 273–305. ———. “Thinking about Liberty in Dark Times.” Hatred and Forgiveness, Columbia UP, 2010, pp. 3–23. Krumbacher, Karl. Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur von Justinian bis zum Ende des oströ- mischen Reiches, 527–145. Beck, 1891. Kustas, George. Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric. Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, 1973. Mitchison, Naomi. Anna Komnene. 1928, Kennedy and Boyd, 2009. Mullett, Margaret. “Rhetoric, Theory and the Imperative of Performance: Byzantium and Now.” Rhetoric in Byzantium, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 151–70. Neville, Leonora. Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium. Cambridge UP, 2012. ———. Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian. Oxford UP, 2016. Quandahl, Ellen. “Andreia in the Nunnery: Rhetorical Learnedness in Twelfth-Century Byzantium.” Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy, edited by Antonio De Valasco and Melody Lehn, Waveland Press, 2012, pp. 200–209. Quandahl, Ellen, and Susan Jarratt. “‘To Recall Him . . . Will Be a Subject of Lamentation’: Anna Komnene as Rhetorical Historoiographer.” Rhetorica, vol. 26, no. 3, 2008, pp. 301–35. Papaioannou, Stratis. Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium. Cambridge UP, 2013. Rickert, Thomas.Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being.U of Pittsburgh P, 2013. Roueché, Charlotte. “Georgina Buckler: The making of a British Byzantinist.” The Making of Byzantine History: Studies Dedicated to Donald M. Nicol, edited by Roderick Beaton and Charlotte Roueché, Variorum, 1993, pp. 174–96. Scott, Joan Wallach. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Duke UP, 2011. Scott, Walter. Count Robert of Paris. Edited by J. H. Alexander, Edinburgh UP, 2006. Sproles, Karyn Z. Desiring Women. U of Toronto P, 2006. 88 Ellen Quandahl

Valiavitcharska, Vessela. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium. Cambridge UP, 2013. Walker, Jeffrey. “These Things I Have Not Betrayed: Michael Psellos’ Encomium of His Mother as a Defense of Rhetoric.” Rhetorica, vol. 22, no. 1, 2004, pp. 49–101. Whitby, Mary. “Rhetorical Questions.” Companion to Byzantium, edited by Liz James, Wiley- Blackwell, 2010, pp. 239–50. Wilson, Nigel. An Anthology of Byzantine Prose. Walter de Gruyter, 1971. Part Two Erased Collaborators

“To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.” Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818

Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” Rewriting the Reductive History of U.S. Military Women’s Achievements on and off the Battlefield

Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart

“For more than a century, American women have been volunteering to serve in the U.S. military in combat areas, have suffered wounds or been killed performing their duties, and yet were left out of U.S. history books and out of the history preserved and passed on by each branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.” Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee, A Few Good Women

Upon the establishment of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1901, women officially began serving in the Unites States military, even though they had willingly served in unofficial capacities (“camp followers”) or even disguised as men in every conflict beginning with the Revolutionary War. Today’s all-volunteer force (AVF) boasts the greatest percentage of women (approximately 16.5 percent of the total military force) in uniform since the end of World War II (Defense Manpower 6). Despite their steadfast service, women have seen their contributions to the country’s defense efforts burdened with modifiers such as “temporary,” “auxiliary,” or “noncombatant” or demeaned as “freeing the men to fight.” As a result, not only has women’s involvement in military missions on and off the battlefield been downplayed, overlooked, and neglected, but also such terminology has marginalized military women, limited their career progression and advancement, and sustained a culture of hypermascu- linity in which women are seen at best as peripheral to the advancement of national defense and at worst as sexual objects or in need of male protection.1 92 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart

In an effort to reexamine how women’s involvement in the U.S. military has been rhetorically constructed as merely supporting the historically and publicly lauded efforts of military men, we follow Louise Tilly’s suggestion regarding feminist history: “if we wish to understand power, what we need is an analysis of the patterns of power in terms of causes and consequences, asking under what conditions inequality is more or less prevalent and what factors are associated with this variation” (452). We begin by briefly sketching patterns of male power and historical conditions of inequality that U.S. military women faced throughout the twentieth century. We then demonstrate that although positive progress has been made as social conditions and political and economic power structures have changed, twenty-first-century military women continue to face disproportionate inequalities and discrimination within a male-dominated workforce that frequently maintains sexual hierarchies and continues to privilege men’s status as war fighters and combat veterans; consequently, military women’s work is overlooked or rhetorically undercut. Next, we reflect upon how the development of physical memorials and archives in the 1990s specifically dedicated to women in military service and the creation of Web 2.0 spaces in recent years have begun to increase military women’s rhetorical agency and intervene in their historical erasure by recovering and preserving narratives that demonstrate the value of their military contributions. Here we echo Kathleen Ryan, who noted, “The act of storytelling can itself change reality. Not only does the story assert the teller’s importance, but it also has the potential for transformation. The telling of a story can establish a reconstructed world” (27). As we show, digital spaces that preserve and present military women’s stories have helped to alter the misogynistic patterns of power at play in the U.S. military. Consequently, meaningful transformations of previous stereotypical and uninformed conceptions of military women and veterans are developing and leading to meaningful actions.2 Cognizant that “archival research and strategic contemplation are core practices of feminist rhetorical historiography [as is] the work of listening closely and carefully to our subjects” (Enoch and Bessette 642) and that an “integral part of practicing feminist approaches includes fashioning spaces for a variety of voices to be heard, considered, and valued” (Deneker et al.), we include the voices of women who have shared their stories in these archives. By including military women’s voices, we give them rhetorical agency to recast themselves as worthy of recognition, to demonstrate their ethos as military members and veterans.

Rhetorically Framing Women’s Service: A Brief History Since the Army Nurse Corps was established as a “quasi-military” unit whose members were given “no military rank, equal pay, or other benefits normal to military service such as retirement or veterans’ benefits,” the public, servicemen, and even women who serve are conditioned by this language and the accompanying dismissive attitudes to consider military women as ancillary to the “real” military, long Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” 93 understood to be staffed by the war fighters, typically portrayed as men—the fabled “bands of brothers” who preserve the country’s freedoms through their sacrifices on the battlefield (Holm 9). Applying Kenneth Burke’s observation that “a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” (49), we provide a brief historical account of how the predominant focus on combat operations and the men who fight on the frontlines (object A) has involved a neglect of military women (object B), who have until recently served primarily behind the frontlines or on the home front. We also demonstrate how this pattern of rhetorically privileging the work and highlighting the narratives of military men not only has marginalized women’s stories of service but also has facilitated inequalities in pay, limited women’s advancement in rank and status, and encouraged a culture of discrimination and sexual misconduct. World War I was the first major conflict for which the U.S. military recruited women in significant numbers, albeit rather reluctantly. Personnel shortages compelled the military to expand job opportunities for women, though only in temporary, “stopgap” status. During the course of the war, more than twenty thousand American women served as nurses, clerical workers, and telephone operators (known revealingly as “Hello Girls,” a gross diminishment of the long hours and technical skills provided by these talented bilingual women);3 but following the war, all the women (excepting the nurses) were swiftly discharged, reinforcing their temporary military status as necessary only to “free a man to fight.” Furthermore, the initial World War Adjustment Compensation Act, which provided bonuses to veterans that were based on length and location of service, excluded women because of the insertion of the word “male” before the word “veteran” (Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee 15), creating yet another condition of inequality growing out of a focus on object A (men) and the resultant neglect of object B (women). Although the act was later amended to define “veteran” as “any individual who was a member of the military or naval forces” (Godson 84), most Americans (including most women who had served in the Armed Forces) accorded the honorific term “veteran” only to men—particularly men who had served in combat. This stereotype and the resultant exclusion persist today, in part because of the historical pattern of the U.S. military employing women only temporarily, only in times of need, and only in “quasi-military” or “civilian” status. Indeed, the women who served in World War I were themselves influenced by the rhetoric of recruitment posters and society’s expectation that they would serve only as long as the war necessitated it. Therefore, they tended to characterize their work as “merely ‘helping’ men and not of any value in and of itself” (Ryan 27). In an interview for the Veterans History Project in 2002, for example, Captain Alice L. Duffield, who served in the Army Nurse Corps during World War I, downplayed the importance of her contributions: “The boys trained. We didn’t do anything except work . . . when you’re in the military, you’re in the military! And I didn’t know that. I didn’t think it was important! It was just nursing. 94 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart

Be a Marine. Free a Marine to Fight. World War II Recruitment Poster. National Archives Image (513679). Creator: Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information, Domestic Operations Branch, Bureau of Special Services. 3/9/1943-9/15/1945.

I told the chief nurse that I . . . that the Armistice was over, been signed, I wanted to go home . . . and so I left, went home. And I was perfectly satisfied. I was engaged to be married.” By allowing themselves to be “perfectly satisfied” with the option of marriage and domesticity over a career in the service, women like Duffield inadvertently contributed to patterns of power that resulted in inequitable conditions not only for themselves but also for the women who followed them into military service. Furthermore, because of its low cultural value, women’s military service was subsequently absent from historical records, and women veterans often didn’t share their stories because, like Duffield, they assumed they “weren’t important”; as rhetorically constructed, their contributions were “just” mundane work—not praiseworthy contributions like combat. When the United States became fully involved in World War II, military com- manders once more faced severe manpower shortages, and, as in World War I, they called on women to “release the men to fight,” as seen in this Marine Corps recruiting poster. While more than 350,000 women served during World War II, the military leadership and general public continued to regard women’s service as temporary, as “an Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” 95 exception born of emergency need” (Roth 24). Toni Arkle, a Marine cryptographer, reflected this attitude in her description of her World War II service: “Well, there weren’t too many [women Marines] when I joined. But I didn’t feel like I was a— I don’t feel that I was all that important. . . . I was assigned—to classified records. And I worked—well, we handled anything from confidential on up to top secret. And there were two women in my office, and the rest were men, and we were next- door to the general. It was either General Carlson or General Edison. I’ve forgotten which one. But I worked as a cryptographer. . . . I felt like I was doing my part. I really did. . . . We relieved a lot of men to go.” Despite the technical nature of her cryptography and her Top Secret clearance, Arkle, like Duffield, characterized her work as less important than the combat missions of the men she “relieved.” The American press also denigrated women’s military service. For example, at the Women’s Corps’ director’s first press conference, “reporters focused on either the trivial or the sensational—underwear, makeup, whether women would salute, whether enlisted women could date male officers and vice versa” (Holm 51). The mainstream media also ran stories on the “Petticoat Army” and “Fort Lipstick” that resulted in gross misconceptions of the highly skilled services women provided— including as test pilots, flight instructors, chemical engineers, mechanics, code breakers, and cryptographers, like Arkle. Worse still, in 1943, “a campaign of slander descended upon the U.S. military women that was of unexpected viciousness and scope,” further reducing the women’s morale and increasing the men’s mistrust (Holm 51–52). Though servicewomen were “dogged by rumors that they were either camp followers (prostitutes) or sexual deviants (lesbians)” (Ryan 31), these women continued to enlist and to serve proudly. For example, Marine Corps reservist Mar- ian Krugman recalled: “Once the Marines were accepting women I knew that’s where I wanted to go. There was no question in my mind. . . . Because it was the best. . . . I mean for one it was the hardest to get into for women. . . . Part of it is, like my father, I want to be where the action is, and part of it was my own feeling that we had family who were at that point we didn’t know about. All the information we have now about the concentration camps, but my father had family in Poland, and we knew how difficult it was for Jewish people in Europe, and I felt a sort of a family obligation to do my part.” Despite their willingness to “do their part,” most women were summarily discharged upon the cessation of armed conflict, just as their predecessors in World War I had been. After their discharges, few maintained their connections to the military, received public acknowledgments, or accrued any tangible benefits from their veteran status. Not only were Veterans Administration (VA) officials “either unsympathetic to the needs of female veterans or unaware that women were entitled to the same benefits as male veterans” (Holm 128–29), but also, unlike the men who were overwhelmingly greeted as heroes after the war, most women discovered that their service “was not universally applauded . . . and was in fact often derided. 96 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart

Consequently, many women veterans concluded that the less said about their military service the better” (Holm 128). Along with their self-imposed silence, many female veterans essentially disappeared from public records because their “individual footprints [were] wiped out when they became Mrs. John Jones” (Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee 230–31). Women were denied veterans’ benefits beyond pay and health care, however; higher education also failed to recognize or reward their veteran status. While the country was understandably eager for veterans to attend colleges and universities, in public forums such as a 1946 New York Times radio show titled “Should Women Stay Away from College to Give Veterans a Chance?” participants suggested that women should willingly forgo higher education to accommodate returning combat soldiers, overlooking the fact that many women themselves were also military veterans with distinguished service records.4 As a result, in 1947, while “nearly half” of the eligible male veterans had used the G.I. Bill, “only 2.9%” of the eligible female veterans had (“GI Bill”). In 1948, the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act officially removed the stigma of temporary status for servicewomen but kept the distinction between male and female personnel by maintaining separate reporting and support structures. Women officers were also precluded from having command authority over men and advancing past a certain rank (Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee 239). Despite the bill’s ostensibly positive rhetorical language of “integration,” this de facto administrative separation maintained the ideology that women merely served to support their male counterparts. In the decades following passage of the Integration Act, the continued prominence of “separate and unequal” status was readily apparent in military training; female recruits were “taught nothing about firing weapons or living in the field” but were instead “taught how to apply makeup properly and what shades of lipstick and nail polish would blend best with their uniforms” (Breuer 71).5 Wendy P. Gellert, a member of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service), recalled this aspect of her training in the 1960s: “Back in the sixties, the WAVES were separate from the men. . . . So there was a lot of—all of the recruits were treated like little ladies and, you know, everything was ladies this and ladies that. I’d never worn makeup or anything in my life; I had to learn how to wear lipstick.” Though the Integration Act ostensibly provided servicewomen with equal pay and benefits, the continued categorization of women as noncombatants (not A, in Burke’s terms) in an organization whose central function was still considered to be armed combat—combined with the emphasis on women’s femininity, their presumed need for male protection, and the injunction against women having command authority (that is, having authority over men)—constrained women’s professional options, limited their advancement, and kept them in a subordinate status relative to their male counterparts. Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” 97

The gendered power differentials also remained firmly in place. The fact that women were obligated to leave the service upon becoming mothers (whether through childbirth, adoption, or marriage)—while men were not similarly obligated by their status as fathers (Holm 124–25)—sent yet another message that seeking a career in the military was somehow “unnatural” for women. Army Nurse Corps officer Irene Rich recalled a distinct shift in her supervisor’s support when she got pregnant in the 1970s: “So I reported in and my supervisor liked me and I was getting good assignments and I was being groomed to do well in the Army Nurse Corps. At that time, if you were pregnant, you were processed out immediately upon getting a positive pregnancy test. You weren’t allowed to be pregnant in the Army Nurse Corps. . . . So career nurse corps officers were pretty generally not parents and not married, and there was a real bias against married [female] officers . . . so when I got married. . . . I noticed a distinct difference in relationship, from being groomed and have a promising career to, ‘Oh, are you pregnant yet,’ kind of thing.” Given such attitudes, perhaps it is not surprising that relatively few women served on active duty during the Korean War or the Vietnam War; most of the women who did serve were medical or clerical personnel. While it is true that male Vietnam veterans did not often receive warm welcomes upon their return, Major General Jeanne Holm (USAF, Retired) recounted that women who made it safely home after serving in Vietnam felt even more compelled to hide their experiences due to society’s incomprehension of “why any woman volunteered to serve in the military, much less go to Vietnam” and the widespread assumption “that those women who went must have had other motives, that they must have been there to ‘service the troops’” (Holm 241). Red Cross veteran Linda Morgan Maini offered a counternarrative to such culturally reinforced assumptions: “We would put together recreation programs. They were a vehicle to allow us to go and visit with the troops—to take their mind off the situation, their living conditions, and the war, and remind them of home. So we really tried to be sisters, which was a little bit hard to do sometimes. [We] were outnumbered a hundred and seventy-five thousand to one, you had to really kind of walk a fine line[;] this was not a sexual kind of thing, it was not a flirtatious kind of thing. It was, ‘I’m here to do my job, and I’m here to make you feel better, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you.’ That kind of thing.” After the Vietnam War, the political fallout brought an end to military conscription in the United States. The shift to an all-volunteer force followed the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v. Wade, and resultant changes in personal and professional opportunities for women. The late 1970s ushered in the admission of women to the federal service academies, the inactivation of the separate women’s service corps, and the gradual opening of assignments in aviation and sea duty for women. Throughout the 1980s, opportunities for women continued to expand, as did the persistence of “a deep well of resistance and even resentment toward women 98 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart and their growing incursions into previously all-male preserves” (Holm 387). As Lieutenant Colonel Carol Anne Barkalow, one of the first women to attend West Point, recalled: “When I went to West Point it was all male except for the women in my class. . . . There were three categories of guys at West Point: there was the category of guys who were okay with us being there and they kinda left us alone. Then there were the set of guys who said, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter to me, so I’m not going to bother with you.’ But then there was that third category, who really tried to give us a hard time. Now, even though it was a minority of the total number, they gave us a hard time. There were a number of guys who didn’t want us to be there because they didn’t think that we deserved to be there with them.” Despite lingering pockets of resistance to military women in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the First Gulf War broke out, in 1990, the number of women in the military had grown exponentially. In fact, women constituted 7.2 percent of the forces deployed in support (Holm 441). Army Colonel Kathleen Lynch Simpson was serving in the Pentagon at the time. As she recalled, “The issue of preg—women and pregnancy in the military really came to a fever pitch during the—during and after the Gulf War. . . . Now, when we were getting ready to go into Iraq, it really—that’s when it really reached its fever pitch. Congress was saying all these women—and it’s like it’s all the woman’s fault. . . . And they wanted to punish women for getting pregnant. . . . But when it came to punishing, that’s when every- body started—all the women started to scream and said, ‘Well, then you’re going to punish the father of the baby as well as the mother of the baby.’ That’s when women really started taking a more active—we didn’t have any women—mothers who were generals at that point. We had some female generals, but not very many.” Not only were politicians and the public raising concerns about military women becoming pregnant while deployed to a war zone, they were also raising concerns about mothers being deployed and leaving their children behind, as military fathers have always done with little to no public outcry. As a result, the media quickly dubbed the Gulf War the “Mommy War.” Once again, we see Burke’s claim that “a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” (49) play out in media depictions and cultural expectations of military women. Such gendered discrepan- cies drew the ire of scholars such as the feminist Carol A. Stabile, who criticized the “powerful hegemony of the U.S. media” for constructing “a highly particularized version of reality” of female and male military service personnel during the Persian Gulf War (104). Furthermore, Stabile chided the U.S. media’s complicity in down- playing women’s inevitable role in combat by striving to ensure that civilians did not see “images of wounded or dead female soldiers” for fear of losing public support for the war (118–19). However, not only did women encounter the risks of combat during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield—some servicewomen made the ultimate sacrifice. Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” 99

Notwithstanding the negative effects of the media’s limited depictions of women serving in Desert Storm, Holm contended that “had it not been for the press, the extent of women’s involvement in the Persian Gulf would probably have never been known” (442). According to Holm, it was through press coverage that the American public for the first time “began to realize that women had become an integral and significant part of the new military, serving side-by-side with the men in the field, doing the tough, dirty, risky jobs of war” (441). Indeed, public awareness and official military acknowledgment of women’s vital role in the success of combat operations eventually resulted in President George H. W. Bush’s decision to sign the National Defense Authorization Act into law in 1992, lifting the restrictions on women serving on combat ships and flying in combat aircraft, though retaining restrictions on ground combat. Acknowledgment of women’s direct contributions to “the fight” during the First Gulf War also altered some of the patterns of power within the military and allowed the public’s gaze to focus more equitably on military women alongside military men. After Desert Storm, a more conscious effort was made to recognize the veteran status of women as well. For example, the Veterans Care Act, which offered “a variety of gender-specific services and programs to care for women veterans” (Depart- ment of Veterans Affairs 28), was initiated in 1992. The following year, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. In 1994 the Veterans Improvement Act set into law the establishment of a Center for Women Veterans. Both the Women Veterans Health Program Office and the Women in Mili- tary Service for America Memorial (WIMSA) were opened in 1997. Having ended the twentieth century on a positive note, the U.S. military found itself once again engaged in combat operations overseas early in the twenty-first century, landing troops in Afghanistan in November 2001 and declaring war on Iraq in March 2003. As for women’s involvement in “The Global War on Terror,” more than 250,000 women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, at least 145 women died fighting overseas, and more than 860 were wounded (Biank 5). Army Sergeant Connie Rose Spinks was one of those women who was wounded: “Now the accident occurred when we was heading back to camp. . . . I was doing left-to-right security. So at the particular time of the incident, I had my weapon positioned to the left, because that was the heavy full of traffic. I noticed we was coming up to a ramp, to where a vehicle was trying to get into our direction. . . . He hit the gas so hard to where, before I even had a chance to pull the trigger, he was already . . . he had ran into my vehicle, and that’s when it had exploded. . . . I was ejected from the turret. . . . I had a lot of injuries. . . . When they say women should not be in combat, honestly, the women are already in combat. They don’t have to be on the front lines, because there are no front lines. . . . If you go out, anywhere that you go to, you have the opportunity to be attacked.” Though “officially” barred from infantry positions, women contributed directly to ground combat operations. For example, Iraqi Women’s Engagement Teams 100 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart

(IWETs) and Female Engagement Teams (FETs)—all-women teams assembled to perform duties their male counterparts could not due to cultural norms (for example, searching Iraqi and Afghani civilian women and girls) (Von Luen 28)—have proved invaluable to the war efforts in an era in which enemy combatants do not wear identifiable uniforms and combat operations are not confined to clearly demar- cated battlefields but are characterized by urban combat within and among citizens’ homes and businesses. Sergeant Michele Greco-Lucchina, a Marine Corps FET member, described this disconnect between the official policy and her lived experience: “Halfway through my deployment, the female engagement team had gotten pulled back to Camp Dwyer because Congress had gotten wind of this. It was apparent that we were essentially performing combat functions, and they basically had to find loopholes for us to stay out there.” In February 2012 the Pentagon officially lifted the combat ban. And by 2016 eleven thousand combat positions opened to women, including billets on submarines. Despite the numerous contributions and sacrifices of servicewomen from Op- eration Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the media have been slow to highlight these contributions and instead have tended to focus on the challenges servicewomen face during and after their military service. Arguably, media representations tend to focus on the troubles faced by military women, such as limited career advancement and the continued challenges of balancing military careers with marriage and child care (Mulhall), not to mention the slow progress in providing adequate health care for women and the “occupational hazard” of sexual assault and harassment many women confront during their military careers (West and West 15). Fortunately, media reports of the prevalence of military women’s exposure to sexual assault and harassment have resulted in more open and honest acknowledgment of such abuses by former servicewomen from previous eras, suggesting that patterns of power had previously kept most of these women (object B) silent (see Brookshire’s Soldier Girl). While we see these conversations as necessary and powerful, given Burke’s admonition that “a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” (49), we regret that the numerous tactical contributions of U.S. military women who have been exposed to the same dangers as their male counterparts while engaging in combat operations are not more adequately represented and commended and that those members of the military (female and male) who do not serve in combat are still often not regarded as “real veterans.” However, we are encouraged by the efforts of current and former female military service personnel to use digital archives and social networking sites to alter the culture of silence and to share stories beyond those released by the mainstream media. These efforts are increasingly resulting in more public awareness of the multifaceted experiences not only of contemporary military women but also of women who silently served in previous eras. Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” 101

Digital Archives, the Social Web, and Military Women’s Storytelling The Web has afforded minority groups like military women a vital platform for both coalition building and the recovery of women’s histories. D. Alexis Hart’s analysis of two online groups for female military service personnel asserted that online communities provide participants opportunities to establish and maintain connections with other military servicewomen, thereby fostering personal and collective rhetorical agency. Indeed, digital spaces afford military women a means of rhetorical agency because such groups are, as Wendy Hayden puts it in her essay (in this collection) “outside [the] mainstream.” Going further, Hart explained that digital spaces uniquely afford military women a means of sharing their stories and experiences “in a safe space,” free of the potential for male voices to take over and/or silence women. In other words, the digital affordances of a closed, online environment ensure that these women can exchange and make meaning of military experiences they may otherwise be reluctant to share, while at the same time providing a way for them to support one another more broadly (86). Hart’s research, like Hayden’s and Lynée Lewis Gaillet’s, suggests that although these women’s rhetorics have yet to appear in traditional archives, they should not be overlooked. In fact, the proliferation of social media groups dedicated to military women and veterans’ community building, professional development, and social justice suggests that the Web has benefited this minority group (see Hart and Gro- howski). Such efforts were preceded and have been amplified by the creation of nationally recognized digital archives—archives that attempt to recover and preserve military women’s contributions. Jessica Enoch and David Gold offer exigency and rationale for the advancements of digital archives in service of historiography. According to the authors, digital historiography does “not employ the digital for its own sake but seeks to use digital tools to answer extant and evolving historical and historiographic questions” (112). In other words, Web 2.0 makes space available to create and preserve military women’s narratives, thereby intervening in the erasure of women from military history. Arguably, digital environments have ushered in a shift from a narrow focus on military men to a broader vision that includes military women. The presentation of military women’s digital archives we share here substantiates that the affordances of digital tools or, as James Purdy has termed them, the “gifts of digital archives” have been invaluable for the recovery of women’s devalued contributions to U.S. military history and service. Drawing on Susan Well’s three gifts of archival research, Purdy posits that the three gifts digital archives provide to researchers are “integration, customization, and accessibility” (28). Purdy’s articulation of how digital archives foster customization is particularly relevant to our study of digital archives devoted to the niche population of military women. While the 102 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart mainstream media share far too few stories of military women’s empowerment, the Web—specifically, digital archives of oral histories—provides us with a unique opportunity to hear stories like those included in this essay. Indeed, the affordances of digitization bring “object B” into focus, allowing a rich variety of military women’s stories to finally be heard and shared with a broader audience. Furthermore, Purdy contends that while the customization of digital archives enables greater access by potential researchers, it also fosters an abundance of potential material (see also Enoch and Bessette 638–39). Thus, Purdy cautions digital archivists that “the huge quantity of materials available in digital archives [can] be overwhelming” (40). Even within the relatively niche area of U.S. military women’s rhetorics, sifting through the information in digital archives can be a daunting task for a single researcher—as digital archives are ever changing and, for all intents and purposes, infinitely expandable. Our brief showcase of gender-specific digital archives of female veterans’ history focuses on the ways in which online archives not only have given military women the opportunity to share their stories with one another and with the public but also enable meaningful collective action; these digital archives draw attention to the contributions women have made to the defense of the United States, potentially serving to spur legislation to remove rhetorical stigmas (for example, pejoratives like “interlopers” and “support personnel”) from the women who are currently serving. We fervently agree with Kathleen Ryan that digital archives provide women veterans a means for the “historical reclaiming” of their role in military and national history; “through telling their stories” and by sharing news clippings, journal entries, military uniforms, and other artifacts, “the women are saying they, and their work, mattered” (Ryan 40–41). Furthermore, gender-specified archives have helped to extend the definition of “veteran” to be more inclusive of women, not just men, thereby expanding cultural understandings of “the veteran” and “military service.” The sluggish response of the U.S. military and society to efforts to increase recognition of women as veterans has likely resulted in former military women’s silence. Conversely, open-access digital archives focused on women’s contributions to U.S. military service provide spaces to honor military women’s contributions, efforts, and sacrifices, which ultimately subvert negative stigmatization. Though we are aware of other noteworthy digital archives and oral history collections online, our brief analysis focuses on just two archives: the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project and the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project. We argue that these digital archives are significant advancements in the recovery of military women’s contributions and in the rewriting of our nation’s limiting, patriarchal history.

The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project (BCWVHP) was established in 1998 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro by its curator, Beth Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” 103

Ann Koelsch. In 2002 BCWVHP received the North Carolina ECHO Digitalization Grant, allowing it to “make significant portions” of its physical archival collection available online (“About”). Four years later, the project’s website was redesigned, affording online researchers greater access to the online exhibitions, archival materials, and background information about military servicewomen’s lives and their respective artifacts. The BCWVHP’s online archival offerings are significant; they include “photographs, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, oral histories, military patches and insignia, uniforms, and posters, as well as published works” (“About”); the BCWVHP collection currently contains more than 550 artifacts including 350 oral histories (“About”). For novice archivists (like ourselves), BCWVHP’s extensive, open-access, online archive is quite accommodating. In fact, the “Search” function is an asset, allowing the researcher to narrow her search by military conflict or branch. Though the written transcription does foster ease for archivists, each woman veteran’s oral history is offered via written transcription only and is not available in audio format. In addition to the written transcripts, the site offers photographs of women’s military uniforms and scanned pages from a World War I nurse’s diary (among hundreds of other materials). The BCWVHP’s open-access, digital collection gives each of these military servicewomen and their contributions to our country’s history another life. These women’s stories (several of which we have included in excerpts in this essay) speak of the multitudinous ways women have served and sacrificed alongside men, ways that have often been overlooked or discounted.

Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project (LOCVHP) In 2000, the U.S. Congress established the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project (LOCVHP) (“About”). At the time of this writing, the LOCVHP “ha[d] more than 89,000” veteran oral histories, “13,000 [of which] are accessible online” (many of which have written transcripts) (Dawson 33). Unlike the BCWVHP, this archive makes available both audio (and sometimes video) and written transcripts, an invaluable contribution to researchers of oral history that allows researchers to investigate the role of silence or stuttering often inherent in personal interviews/ oral histories; for, as Burke, Gaillet, and Ryan argue, what is left out is as important as what is shared. Thus, the multimodal affordances of aural, visual, and alphabetic interview transcripts allow researchers to apprehend more fully both what is shared and how these women veterans share. As Ryan claims: “In oral history, the manner of telling the story is as important as the story told” (35). Similarly, Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher assert that oral history interviews involve a “collaboration” between interviewer and interviewee “in making meaning of their narratives” (42). Selfe and Hawisher testify that multimedia interviews “provide small but potent glimpses of the meaning people attach to the everyday practices of their literate lives” (42). These “glimpses” are not as easily attained through written transcripts alone. 104 Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart

The LOCVHP’s site search function allows visitors to search by gender, military conflict/era, or branch. At the time of this writing, the VHP collection consisted of “350 individual accounts from WWI; 53,000 from WWII; 11,500 from the Korean War; 15,500 from the Vietnam War; 2,900 from the 1991 Persian Gulf War; and some 2,500 from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars” (Dawson 33). In addition, the LOCVHP offers assistance to those contemplating a trip to the physical archives in Washing- ton, D.C., and provides guidelines for donating veterans’ oral histories.

Conclusion Our intention has been to show how digital archives and Web 2.0 spaces have benefited military women’s ethos by providing them with platforms and audiences with whom to share their stories. These spaces, we contend, generate what Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti described as “a new channel for activism” as military women “use the Internet to share their stories and analysis, raise awareness and organize collective actions, and discuss difficult issues” (6). In short, digital environments have fostered opportunities for current and former military women to share their stories and to connect over shared experiences, thereby rewriting themselves into public memory. Indeed, these digital platforms help us generate new interpretations for a fuller understanding of women’s contributions to national defense. We concur with Ryan’s insistence that “women’s histories accumulate into a social protest . . . against existing conventions” (41). As a form of collective social protest, the sharing of military women’s stories substantiates their sacrifices and contributions to U.S. military and national histories. Though much recovery work of women’s contributions to military and national history remains to be done, we are hopeful that the affordances of digital archives such as the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project and the Library of Congress’s Veterans History project, as well as other Web 2.0 spaces for allowing women veterans’ stories to be shared, will continue to advance this work until, as Kristie S. Fleckenstein has posited, “a breach in canonicity” of our military and national history can occur (928). Such change may finally result in much-deserved homages to military women’s contributions and accomplishments becoming as commonplace as those enjoyed by men.

Notes 1. As Frank Bruni notes, the armed services tend to be “all about aggression, summoning and cultivating Attila the Hun and then asking him to play Sir Walter Raleigh as well.” 2. For example, the United States Navy Memorial declared April 2013–April 2014 the “Year of the Military Woman.” In addition, as veteran and women veteran activist BriGette McCoy revealed in her testimony at the U.S. Senate Subcommittee hearing on sexual assaults in the military, “social media and grassroots community activism has been the single most important thing that brought [veterans] together . . . for peer support and suicide prevention” (35–36). Not Simply “Freeing the Men to Fight” 105

3. “When men call women ‘girls,’ they infantilize them and call into question women’s competence and authority” (P. Martin 268). 4. A report published in 2012 in the journal Women in Higher Education found a similar situation among twenty-first-century women veterans: “Following reintegration, military women don’t think of themselves as ‘veterans.’ Whether through denial or pride, they believe that they don’t need special assistance. Often their service is misunderstood or discounted.” In addition, “women vets take on an invisible role when coming back to school. . . . They want to disconnect from their military experiences” (“Women Veterans” 25). 5. It is worth mentioning here that in November 2013, a female Army colonel wrote a memo in which she suggested that it might “behoove” the Army “to select more average looking women” for their public communications because photos that show “a pretty woman, wearing make-up while on deployed duty” might “undermine the rest of the message (and may even make people ask if breaking a nail is considered a hazardous duty” (Arhart qtd. in Brannen). This public affairs approach is markedly different from the mid-twentieth-century focus on femininity among women in uniform.

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Henrietta Nickels Shirk

Maria Martin (1796–1863) was a painter of background habitats and foliage for the famous French-American ornithologist and painter John James Audubon (1785–1851); she painted many of the flower, plant, and insect backgrounds in which Audubon’s birds appeared as though in their natural environments, especially in the Birds of America, Volumes 2 and 4, 1827–1839. Yet, Martin’s art has received little recognition. Audubon referred to Martin’s contributions to his paintings in only two formal footnotes, and in several letters he called her “my sweetheart” (Hollingsworth). Martin was not mentioned again in any significant way until 1952, when she was mentioned in a study by Alice Ford. Before 1952, she was essentially written out of history. This essay examines why Martin’s art has been ignored and seeks to recover her historical status as an artist in her own right. I examine historical and critical contexts relating to Martin and her work to provide a framework of the domestic, personal, and artistic spheres through which to understand Martin’s place in the nineteenth century. The critical contexts offer a framework for reframing present- day rhetorical, communication, and feminist theories to assist in recovering and understanding Martin’s previously unrecognized contributions as an artist. Audubon’s foreground artistic techniques arose as a response to the American nineteenth-century patriarchal culture. As a male naturalist, Audubon enjoyed a privileged status in the collaborative artistic process. He was in charge of the entire artistic production process, giving directions to Martin about his needs for her artwork and typically taking the credit for her work by subsuming it into his own pieces of art (his drawings of birds). Martin’s background rhetorical techniques were 110 Henrietta Nickels Shirk visually obvious. She was, after all, the painter of backgrounds, and she seems to have willingly (perhaps even joyfully) served in the background within the personal relationship of her artistic collaboration with Audubon (for this interpretation, see Bonta; Arnold; Hollingsworth). Rhetorical background and foreground in the Martin-Audubon collaboration are not separate from and in conflict with each other but find their full meaning in a relationship of mutual dependency. Audubon’s renditions of birds could not effectively exist without being anchored by Martin’s depictions of foliage, and Mar- tin’s art was created for the specific purpose of including Audubon’s birds. The two artists maintained a personal relationship and an artistic collaboration for twenty years, until Audubon’s death, in 1851. This relationship, however, has not yet been fully documented or accurately interpreted. One must first begin to examine this collaboration from the perspective of Martin’s personal life within the patriarchal structure of nineteenth-century America. The external events of Martin’s life are rather straightforward, although the facts are somewhat scanty. Martin was born in 1796 near Charleston, South Carolina, to John Jacob Martin and Rebecca Murray. Although there are no existing records of Martin’s obtaining any formal schooling, she was known to be gifted in both art and music. She most likely obtained her knowledge of the natural sciences (especially botany) from her father, from her brother-in-law and eventual husband, John Bach- man (a clergyman who was famous naturalist in his own right), and from her own personal self-education. At the age of thirty-one, Martin began living with her sickly sister Harriet, who was married to John Bachman. Eleven of Harriet’s children were in the household at that time, and Martin took over the responsibilities connected with their care and supervision, becoming the housekeeper and nurse for the family, as well as the educator for the girls. Martin also found time to travel on botanical outings with Bachman. Perhaps she learned the scientific names of plants from Bachman, or she may have learned them on her own. In either case, she acquired the habit of referring to plants and animals by their scientific names. Later, she was to sign her drawings with the name of the genus and species depicted, rather than her own name. In 1849, three years after the death of her sister and at the age of fifty-two, -Mar tin married Bachman, and they spent the remaining years of her life together. She devoted herself to Bachman’s publications on the natural world and to some of Audubon’s works on birds. Martin met John James Audubon in 1831, when he visited Bachman at their home and spent several months as a guest of the family. Audubon was affectionate, exuberant, enthusiastic, and industrious—all personal characteristics that were demonstrated in his passion for painting birds. When he discovered that Martin had artistic talents, he tried to teach her how to paint birds. However, not being intimately knowledgeable about avian behavior, Martin was not able to produce work at Audubon’s level of expertise. Fortunately, it was soon discovered The Audubon-Martin Collaboration 111 that she did possess a natural talent for painting flowers and plants, and thus began the long personal friendship and collaboration between Audubon and Martin. The first tangible record of this collaboration of friends was written by Bachman in a letter to Audubon soon after his 1831 visit. When Audubon departed the Bach- man household, he left all his completed drawings with Martin for safekeeping. Bachman wrote to him on November 11, 1832: “Maria has figured for you the ‘White Hibiscus,’ and, also, a red one, both natives, and beautiful; a Euonymus in seed, in which our Sylvia is placed; the white Nondescript Rose; the Gordonia, a Begonia, etc. She is prepared to send them to you—shall she ship them at once to Boston?” (qtd. in Arnold 28). Martin continued to produce these vegetative drawings for Audubon. However, it is not known how many of Audubon’s paintings contain portions of her work. Martin’s life was one of service to others. In keeping with this cultural attitude, she first helped her sister, her nieces and nephews, Bachman, and, ultimately, Audubon. One modern-day commentator referred to Martin as “a naturalist, illustrator, and associate of John James Audubon” (Arnold 14). Her personal roles were those expected of a woman of her day. Regardless of the labels we place on Martin’s roles, she was fundamentally a traditional nineteenth-century woman. Generally, this womanly role meant that she was part of American culture during the Victorian era, which placed great value on the notion of “The Cult (or Ideal) of True Womanhood.” These cultural assumptions for American women included four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity (Welter; Cogan). Her focus was on the individual, the private, and the home. She viewed herself as a helpmate, first assisting in her sister’s household, then assisting Audubon with her foliage artwork for his paintings, and finally assisting her husband with his scientific and publishing efforts. Martin’s face itself visually exhibits a certain softness and compassion, combined with determination and properness that reflect these cultural and personal values. In addition to her other personal domestic roles, Martin was most likely an avid gardener, illustrating the nineteenth-century historian Thomas J. Schlereth’s claim, “Victorian Americans devoted much attention to amateur gardening” (136). Gardening was a tradition in the Martin family, and Maria most likely followed in her family’s footsteps with both flower and vegetable gardens around the home in which she lived. She knew plants intimately, and this knowledge is reflected in her artistic work. As a botanical artist, Martin has not yet been fully recognized. Her work has not been completely identified, although there are several pieces currently located at the Museum of Charleston. Although she is frequently referred to as an illustrator, this term has an artisan quality to it that lessens her artistic impact. Martin was, above all, a painter (the same descriptive term that we apply to Audubon without hesita- tion). In fact, Audubon himself perceived Martin as an artist. In an 1833 letter from 112 Henrietta Nickels Shirk

Charleston to his son Victor, Audubon wrote: “Miss Martin, with her superior talents, assists us greatly in the way of drawing; the insects she has drawn are, perhaps, the best I’ve seen” (qtd. in Ford 82). The talented artist Audubon was honest enough to recognize the talent of a fellow artist. There are fragments in the historical record that point to Martin’s contributions to The Birds of America, published in 1838. Audubon’s letters to Bachman spoke of her as “Your Sister our Dear Sweetheart,” and in them he would plead for more fine floral backgrounds (Ford 82). In a letter to his engraver from Charleston on November 24, 1833, Audubon wrote: “John, myself and Miss Martin . . . are drawing constantly, to finish all the unfinished Drawings now on hand; I think that 30 days hence, that task will be accomplished” (qtd. in Ford 82). There was a constant pressure for the aspiring Audubon to meet his publisher’s deadlines. The urgency of his June 1836 letter to Bachman provides evidence of the results of this demand. Audubon had just finished the 350th copper plate of his great work, and he wrote: “I much wish your Dear Sister, our Sweetheart, would draw plants and branches of Trees for me to the number of fifteen or twenty drawings for the small plates [the miniature edition of The Birds, then planned]. Anything not published in my Two first Volumes would prove a valuable acquisition, and she should send five or six at a time . . . care of Havell. . . . Our Victor would know how to use them by placing them [with] Birds which I have drawn without plants” (qtd. in Ford 83). Without question Martin’s artistic endeavors were important and a significant part of Audubon’s works. After her death, in 1863, publishers forgot to include her name in books that she had helped to illustrate. Audubon himself did not mention her in his publications, except in a few scattered footnotes. Her associates simply wrote her out of history (Lienhard). Moving from cultural, individual, artistic considerations to the public scrutiny of Martin’s work, we can begin to reframe our understanding of her contributions to the collaboration with Audubon from several critical perspectives. Martin may be viewed from the perspectives of rhetorical, collaborative, and feminist theories. The metaphorical spaces of Mary Daly’s twentieth-century rhetoric offer a rhetorical context for interpreting Martin’s work. The field of communication studies also provides a method for examining the collaborative space occupied by Martin and Audubon. Finally, feminist theory makes available a space for recovering Martin as an artist. Martin’s artwork itself provides a visual image for grounding all aspects of this critical analysis. The theory of rhetorical foreground and background that was developed by the radical feminist Mary Daly (1928–2010) offers a starting point for an analysis of the collaborative relationship between Martin and Audubon. According to Daly, there are two metaphorical spaces that are essential for the study of rhetoric and gender. The “foreground” is the space where rhetoric is used by men to oppress women, and “background” is the space where women use specific rhetorical techniques to free The Audubon-Martin Collaboration 113 themselves from this oppression. Although Daly’s theories were originally intended for application to modern-day rhetorical analyses, they can readily be applied to the nineteenth-century relationship between Martin and Audubon, with some modi- fications. In making these changes, I attempt to integrate the historical and critical contexts into an interpretation of the rhetoric of artistic collaboration that provides a rhetorical feminist space for reclaiming Martin’s reputation. The two metaphorical spaces that Mary Daly defined as essential for the study of rhetoric and gender become literal in the relationship of Audubon and Martin. These are the spaces of “foreground” and “background.” If one were to apply Daly’s theory to the Audubon-Martin collaboration, Audubon’s birds themselves are the main purpose and “foreground” of his famous artistic works, while Martin’s floral, plant, and insect surroundings are the “background” of several of his paintings. Whether Audubon as a man knowingly and willingly oppressed Martin as a woman is questionable. Whether Martin as a woman knowingly and willingly used her backgrounds as a means of freeing herself from Audubon’s oppression as a man is questionable as well. A close examination of the paintings themselves provides a starting point for a consideration of these issues. At first glance, one hardly notices the birds at all, since the foliage surrounding them seems to be overpowering the subject matter of the painting. The foliage is what the viewer sees immediately. Actually, an initial glance may result in the viewer’s perception that these works are botanical illustrations, rather than avian depictions. In works such as John James Audubon’s Warbler (Vermivora bachmanii), from the “Birds of America Paintings” collection housed at the Charleston County Public Library, one notices upon further and more focused scrutiny that the colorful male birds are often foregrounded in the foliage and the less colorful female bird is rendered in the background of the foliage. The birds are probably not noticed immediately because their general shapes mirror the shapes of the many leaves that surround them. A kind of double entendre results in terms of perspective. The foliage becomes a background for the entire painting, but it is also a background for the birds themselves, and especially for the male bird. In Warbler, for example, we see not only that the somewhat drab female bird is placed lower in the plant’s branches than the more flashy male bird but also that she is also more distant in three-dimensional space. These visual perspectives allow for some additional interpretive perceptions about the painting itself. In fact, the twig upon which the female bird perches is not even green. It appears to have been deliberately placed in the shadows. If one were to visually deconstruct this painting, one could begin on a basic level by asserting that overall it accurately depicts these birds in their natural setting. Both birds are somewhat concealed in the foliage, as is natural for many small birds. Additionally, female birds are typically even more concealed because of their less flamboyant coloring and seemingly more apparent cautiousness than the male birds. However, if these birds were removed to leave only the foliage, and if the foliage 114 Henrietta Nickels Shirk were removed to leave only the birds, different perspectives on the painting would emerge. Without the birds, Martin’s foliage could exist on its own as a botanical painting, although it would not be as rich with visual meaning. Without the foliage, Audubon’s birds would not be effectively or artistically presented because the birds would have no place to perch. Without the foliage that visually holds the entire painting together, there would be a lack of its integrity as a whole. The birds would exist in a vacuum of white space. Audubon and Martin clearly needed each other’s contributions to their collaboration in order to be visually effective as artists. In the case of the Audubon-Martin collaboration, Daly’s theory must be understood within the specific cultural and personal contexts of Martin’s era. As a woman, Martin was socialized to be a helpmate; as a man, Audubon was socialized to expect women to help him. As a nineteenth-century woman, Martin wanted to be helpful and useful wherever and whenever she could. She had a talent for drawing and painting plants; Audubon had a talent for drawing and painting birds. Each of them needed and benefited from the other, although in different ways. The rhetorical space of the Audubon-Martin relationship was perhaps not so diametrically opposed as Daly’s rhetorical theory suggests but instead mutually constructed according to the values of nineteenth-century America. Additionally, relying solely on this dyadic rhetorical construction prevents Martin’s contribution to the artistic relationship from receiving the full recognition it deserves. Daly’s theory may be broadened to include a rhetorical “third space” where collaboration can be fully valued and analyzed, as well as a feminist framework from which Martin’s artistic talent can be recovered and given appropriate historical recognition. These issues are the focus of the next two sections of this essay. Artistic collaboration has not been given much theoretical attention until recent times; it was certainly not discussed in the nineteenth century with its emerging emphasis on individuality. Communication scholars of the twentieth century have described how the communication process requires an understanding of how writers/speakers and readers/listeners maintain a reciprocal relationship in the social construction of understanding and knowledge. However, they have focused mainly on identifying what can go wrong in this process and how to avoid or fix the deficits. These theories are therefore more often prescriptive rather than accurately descriptive of the collaborative process. In the twenty-first century, sociologists (for example, Farrell, Collaborative Circles) and psychologists (for example, Sawyer, Group Genius) have contributed to a growing literature on the function of collaboration in the creative process. Their theoretical work suggests that creative accomplishments are rarely done by a lone genius and that artists, among other kinds of professionals, do their most creative work when collaborating within a circle of like-minded friends. Experimenting together and challenging one another, they develop the courage to rebel against the established traditions in their field. Working alone or in pairs, then meeting as The Audubon-Martin Collaboration 115 a group to discuss their emerging ideas, they forge a new, shared vision that guides their work. When creative circles work well, the unusual interactions that occur in them draw out creativity in each of the members. While these artistic communication theories are useful in helping to understand our postmodern times, they do not accurately describe the Audubon-Martin collaboration. Most artists in the nineteenth century did not collaborate on individual works, although they did occasionally participate in loosely collaborative groups of friends who often socialized and even painted together in the same settings but on their own creations (for example, the French Expressionists). One could maintain that Audu- bon and Martin were an “odd artistic couple.” While this statement is true of the artistic works that Audubon produced, it was also true of other kinds of creative and scientific activities in which many nineteenth-century women engaged. There were other areas of nineteenth-century endeavors in which female amateurs remained in the background while contributing to male professional endeavors. A major area for collaboration was the emerging science of botany. American women often served as collectors of plants, which were then handed off to men who were cataloguing new findings and establishing names for themselves. “Amateurs remained committed to self-improvement, the study of God’s creations, and the pleasant but worklike character of botanizing throughout the century” (Keeney 7). Most of these amateur botanists were women like Martin. By midcentury, widely popular journals for women, such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, offered numerous articles about plants, gardening, and the collecting and display of plants; one example is “Botany as a Study for Young Ladies” (1859). The “spaces” of the Martin-Audubon relationship were perhaps neither so diametrically opposed as Daly’s rhetorical theory suggests nor so closely intertwined as current communication theories predict. Rather, their relationship was mutually constructed within the cultural and social constructs of their time. This relationship also had aspects of a feminine approach to interpersonal communication. When commenting about postmodern feminine friendships, the communications scholar Julia T. Wood observed that “most women are socialized to be at- tentive, emotionally supportive, and caring” (190). It is not unusual for women friends to talk explicitly about their relationship, with the friendship itself and the dynamics between friends being matters of intense interest and discussion. As Wood concluded, “many women’s friendships give center stage to communication, which fosters disclosure, verbal expressiveness, depth and breadth of knowledge, and at- tentiveness to the evolving nature of the relationship” (190). These characteristics were true of the Audubon-Martin friendship, and they define the particular kind of collaboration that they developed between them as professional artists. It appears that Audubon shared many of his most personal feelings with Martin, and she did the same with him. For example, in a letter on April 6, 1834, Audubon confessed to Martin: “I am delighted that you all are interesting yourselves in botany 116 Henrietta Nickels Shirk

& drawing, nothing starts the blues so effectually than constant employment—for myself who have done next to nothing since I left you, have had the horrors all around me—Dreams of sinking & burning ships at night—fears of lost drawings & failures of subscribers by day have ever and anon been my companions—Not even the Bustle of this Large town can dissipate these unpleasant fancies” (qtd. in Arnold 31–32). Martin was clearly not merely a hardworking background artist for Audubon; she was also his friend. Audubon exhibited many of the qualities that Wood specifies as particularly characteristic of feminine friendships. He shared his innermost feelings and fears with Martin. Although much more reserved than Audubon, Martin, like Audubon, was often consumed by negative thoughts. In a letter to a friend written on July 23, 1839, Martin voiced similar complaints: “I hope every thing is going on well at home. The thought of it sometimes comes over me as the song says, ‘like a storm in the night,’ when I am surrounded by everything to delight me. But I try to shake off gloomy reflections and hope for the best. Heaven grant that I may not be disappointed” (qtd. in Arnold 32). The sensibilities of these two collaborators were indeed much the same. What- ever may have been their similarities, Martin and Audubon were able to work effectively in a collaborative mode because of the strong friendship that formed the foundation of their relationship. This feminine mode of friendship was the major context in which the artistic collaboration of Audubon and Martin could successfully occur. Perhaps collaboration did not result in fairness or visibility for women such as Martin during the nineteenth century. This situation occurred especially because her culturally prescribed private domain did not allow for recognition to be expressed in the public domain. Nonetheless, on a personal and artistic level, collaboration was certainly a joyously creative experience. Katherine Grovier has speculated about this intimate friendship between Audubon and Martin in the novel Creation. Whatever our speculations about the Audubon-Martin collaboration, Martin’s work deserves further consideration and examination. In order to understand Martin’s artistic reputation, one must re-create the cultural milieu in which her collaboration with Audubon occurred. Both artists were products of Victorian-era American society. The patriarchal aspects of this society afforded Audubon a privileged position in their artistic collaboration, and it relegated Martin to the role of helpmate. However, by applying and expanding upon the modern rhetorical theories of foreground/background, communication analysis, and gendered friendship, we can begin to reclaim Martin’s significance as an artist of her time. The method of reclaiming the reputation of Martin employed here has been that of broadening current historical and critical contexts to include other kinds of spheres and spaces, where the personal and the public can be more accurately understood—and honored. In his 1997 radio broadcast “Engines of Our Ingenuity” on the topic of Maria Martin, commentator John Lienhard concluded: “We were still young in 1831 [the The Audubon-Martin Collaboration 117 year Martin first met Audubon]—still learning to be scientists. Bachman and Audu- bon were major players. So was Maria Martin, but we didn’t yet know how to make the women players visible” (Lienhard). While Lienhard’s comments were about nineteenth-century science as a profession, they could also apply to nineteenth- century art as a profession. Perhaps we did not yet know how to make women artists such as Maria Martin visible in 1831, but we do know how to do so now. The perspective presented here is one step toward the recovery of a talented nineteenth-century artist.

Works Cited Arnold, Lois Barber. Four Lives in Science: Women’s Education in the Nineteenth Century. Schocken Books, 1984. Audubon, John James. Warbler (Vermivora bachmanii). Foliage painted by Maria Martin Bachman. Charleston County Public Library, Charleston, S.C. Bonta, Marcia Myers. Women in the Field: America’s Pioneering Women Naturalists. Texas A&M UP, 1991. “Botany as a Study for Young Ladies.” Godey’s Lady’s Book, vol. 58, 1859, p. 562. Cogan, Frances B. All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth Century America. U of Georgia P, 1989. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. 1978. Beacon Press, 1990. Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work. U of Chicago P, 2001. Ford, Alice. Audubon’s Butterflies, Moths, and Other Studies. Crowell, 1952. Grovier, Katherine. Creation: A Novel. Overlook Press, 2002. Hollingsworth, Buckner. Her Garden Was Her Delight. Macmillan, 1962. Keeney, Elizabeth B. The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America. U of North Carolina P, 1991. Lienhard, John H. Engines of Our Ingenuity. No. 891: Maria Martin, College of Engineering, University of Houston, http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi891.htm (accessed January 14, 2014). Sawyer, Keith. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Basic Books, 2008. Schlereth, Thomas J.Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life: 1876–1915. Harper- Collins, 1991. Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio UP, 1985. Wood, Julia T. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, & Culture. Cengage Learning, 2015. “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams about the School of Expression” The Erasure of Anna Baright Curry

Suzanne Bordelon

“The school was taken away from our mother, who founded it, and whose life and living it represented.” Mabel Curry Galassi, April 2, 1969, correspondence with her brother, Haskell Curry

In recent years, feminist scholars have reconceived traditional understandings of ethos.1 For instance, in Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America, Carolyn Skinner asserted that more recent concepts of ethos acknowledge “the social and material constraints on rhetors and so offer better tools for understanding the rhetorical choices of a range of speakers” (11). That is to say, although some aspects of ethos are controlled by the rhetor, other elements are shaped by the material and social surroundings. Likewise, in Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric, collection editors Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones stressed the complexities of ethos—“the cultural, historical, and social positions that restrain and invigorate women’s rhetorical prospects as agentive rhetors” (vii). Given this reconceptualized perspective, I examine challenges to ethos construction in the work of Anna Baright Curry, who founded the School of Expression (now Curry College) in 1879 in Boston and directed it with Samuel Silas Curry from 1885 to 1921. According to Mary Margaret Robb, the school was “one of the most famous and most important of the professional schools” of its time (Oral Interpretation 129). Extending the research of Amy Pinney, this analysis highlights the work of Baright Curry, whose contributions have tended to be disregarded or attributed to “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 119 her husband. However, Baright Curry, a talented dramatic reader, established the School of Expression, managed its correspondence and its financial burdens, over- saw its publishing company, and taught various courses. As former student Mary Margaret Chester recalled, Baright Curry was the “back bone [sic] to the school” (28). Baright Curry’s knack for pointed criticism, though, and her failure to play the socially accepted role of the subservient woman, may have played a part in her erasure. Her lack of legal rights to the school after the death of her husband also appears to have played a significant role in negating her efforts and ethos. In addition to detailing Baright Curry’s erasure, the analysis attempts to remedy this situation by illuminating the school’s curriculum and the ways it related to its largely female student population. Although it trained both males and females as potential clergy, actors, and teachers, an important facet of the school was oral reading and interpretation, which helps to explain its attractiveness to female students, an attractiveness not limited to the School of Expression. Scholars such as Paige V. Banaji, Jane Donawerth, David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs, Paul H. Gray, and Edyth Renshaw have noted women’s significant participation in elocution during the nineteenth century.2 According to Donawerth, “Indeed, although there has been little scholarly attention given to them, women were a major force in the late-nineteenth-century elocution movement, taking and giving lessons, founding schools, organizing local performances, touring as elocutionists, and writing textbooks” (107). The hierarchical nature of traditional speech histories and the association of these schools with women are the most likely reasons they have been overlooked. However, expressionists such as Baright Curry and S. S. Curry developed a pedagogy that we today would regard as promoting reflection, critical thinking, “deep” reading, and “assimilation,” not simply artificial gestures and memorization, as some historians might have us believe.3 Stressing rigorous mental training and regular public performance, the school promoted physical and vocal self-confidence and control. This emphasis is evident in Baright Curry’s teaching and writing, in everything from her courses on pedagogy to pantomime. During the late nineteenth century, women faced numerous restrictions, including everything from the tight- fitting corsets that limited their physical mobility, to the prominent medical notions of a period that proclaimed women’s “intellectual and physiological inferiority,” to “the still-powerful prohibitions on women who spoke in public” (Rudnick 69–70). The Currys’ training pushed against this cultural backdrop by fostering self-reliance in the white middle-class women who made up the majority of the school’s population during this time. “In Remapping Revisionist Historiography,” David Gold made several cogent arguments, including the point that such research “must not simply recover neglected writers, teachers, locations, and institutions, but must also demonstrate connections between these subjects and larger scholarly conversations” (17). Since little has been 120 Suzanne Bordelon

Portrait of Anna Baright Curry (1915), taken by Alice Austin. Courtesy of Levin Library, Curry College.

written on Baright Curry, this analysis is about recovery to some degree. However, by considering the different ways Baright Curry’s work as well as the school’s curriculum have been negated, this investigation addresses broader scholarly questions related to gender, erasure, historiography, and the pedagogy of elocution/expression and its unacknowledged cultural and rhetorical effects. In so doing, this essay hopes to avoid what Gold referred to as “historiographic myopia” by using the School of Expression as a means of illuminating these broader issues (25).

Anna Baright Curry: Overview Similar to many late nineteenth-century women who worked with their husbands, Anna Baright Curry has typically been overlooked by scholars and her efforts attributed to her spouse, Samuel Silas (S.S.) Curry (1847–1921). However, Baright Curry played a vital role in the founding and the ongoing success of the School of Expres- sion. Of Quaker ancestry, Baright Curry (1854–1924) was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated in 1873 from Cook’s Collegiate Institute in Poughkeepsie. She attended the Boston University School of Oratory, studying under Lewis B. Monroe, dean of the school and “a pioneer credited with exerting power in changing “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 121 the emphasis in oratory and declamation from outward form to inner cause” (Crai- gie; Renshaw, “Three Schools” vii). Following her graduation, she served as first assistant to Monroe, who had planned to direct and have Baright Curry assist him at the first summer school of oratory in the nation, to take place during July and August 1879 at Oak Bluffs on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. However, Monroe became sick and died, and Baright Curry took over for him and successfully directed the five-week session. Despite the positive outcomes, Boston University discontinued its School of Oratory after Mon- roe’s death. The cessation of the school underscores the assumption that a woman could not teach oratory, even given the evidence suggesting otherwise. In response, Baright Curry contacted her sister, Helen Dean Baright, who had been teaching in California, to see if she would assist her in opening in October 1879 the School of Expression and Elocution, based on a two-year program similar to that offered by the Boston University School of Oratory (Craigie). During the time Baright Curry was at Boston University, Monroe sent the Rev- erend Samuel Silas (S.S.) Curry, then a student in Boston University’s Theological School, to Baright Curry for voice lessons (Craigie). This point is significant because it suggests that Baright Curry influenced her future husband’s education. In 1879, the Theological Department at Boston University offered S. S. Curry the Snow Professorship of Oratory (Marquis 687–88), and in 1882 Baright Curry married him. According to Baright Curry’s sister, Helen Dean Baright (later Craigie), after they were married S. S. Curry incorporated his private students into his wife’s school and taught evening classes (Craigie). The School of Expression and Elocution was incorporated in 1888; however, its name was changed to the School of Expression, given S. S. Curry’s objections to the term “elocution.” S. S. Curry was named president and Baright Curry dean of the school (Craigie). As is apparent from this brief overview, Baright Curry played an integral role in founding the School of Expression since it developed out of the school she had established, a point often neglected in conventional speech histories.

The Erasure of Baright Curry’s Work at the School of Expression As noted, Baright Curry’s work at the School of Expression has been largely negated or attributed to her husband. For instance, in her 1950 dissertation, which focused on the Emerson College of Oratory, the School of Expression, and the Leland Powers School of the Spoken Word, Edyth Renshaw asserted, “The major ideas in the five areas covered in this study were formulated by Emerson, [S.S.] Curry, and Powers themselves” (“Three Schools” 448, emphasis added). Although she acknowledged that “Mrs. Powers” was a coauthor of one of the school’s three textbooks and thus may be “an exception” (448), Renshaw made no mention of Baright Curry’s contributions or the fact that she had both Leland Powers and S. S. Curry as private students (Bacon 115; Craigie). Instead, she concluded, “So while their co-workers may 122 Suzanne Bordelon have been helpful, it is appropriate to discuss the schools in terms of their founders” (448). Although a dated yet excellent source on these schools, Renshaw’s work demonstrates the ways women’s efforts have been rendered invisible. Baright Curry also seems to have had difficulty validating her work within her own time. Despite her efforts in originating and running the school, Baright Curry was not able to maintain ownership after S. S. Curry’s death, in 1921. According to former student Elizabeth Stahr Halsell, the school’s board of trustees apparently “retired” Baright Curry and “engaged a very attractive woman,” Florence Lutz, to serve as dean of the school in 1923–24 (83). A 1907 graduate of the School of Expression, Lutz served as an instructor there from 1907 to 1914. Although other factors were obviously involved, the change seems to reflect a degree of ageism and sexism on the part of the board. Baright Curry died on February 22, 1924. According to her death certificate, the cause of death was heart disease and a nervous breakdown (“Curry, Anna Baright Record”). After visiting Baright Curry after her retirement, Halsell commented on her situation. Halsell said she found Baright Curry “still shaken at the late discovery that under Massachusetts law, and in spite of the years of effort she had spent in building the school, she had no legal rights, after Dr. Curry’s death, in directing its future. She was as close to bitterness as anyone of her Quaker faith could be, and more concerned for other women who could, and did, find themselves in such a helpless situation as she was” (83–84). In an April 2, 1969, correspondence with her brother, Haskell Curry, Baright Curry’s daughter, Mabel Curry Galassi, seemed equally infuriated about what had happened to their mother: “The school was taken away from our mother, who founded it, and whose life and living it represented” (1). Curry Galassi’s letter concerned whether a portion of her father’s estate, as outlined in the final distribution of his property, should go to the School of Expression or its successor. Contending that the school had “not yet earned this,” Curry Galassi disagreed with this dispersal (1). However, if Haskell Curry did decide to make a gift to the college, Curry Galassi asserted, “you should at least in so doing point out that while the funds come from your father’s estate that you think the college should give greater emphasis to the contribution of our mother not merely over the years but in the very fact that the original idea for the School of Expression was hers” (1). The correspondence that I reviewed does not indicate whether Haskell Curry followed through on his sister’s suggestion. Not only was Baright Curry integral to the founding and operation of School of Expression, but she also appears to have managed and contributed to the school’s publishing venture, the Expression Company. (The company published the school’s textbooks, which were sold at the School of Expression.) This type of unacknowledged work by women was not unusual. Although Bonnie G. Smith was talking about male historians of the nineteenth century, her words seem relevant to S. S. “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 123

Curry and men in the emerging speech field. She explained that many of these men “were themselves ‘fashioned’ not only by their own efforts but also by an array of women helpers and women relatives including daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, sisters-in-law, and cousins, who copied their manuscripts, took notes for them, did their research, and edited and even wrote their books” (663). Between 1891 and 1918, S. S. Curry published fifteen books under the Expression Company.4 Although he was listed as the sole author of these books, on the basis of her comments, it seems likely that Baright Curry played a significant role in the creation and drafting of some of these texts. For instance, in a May 13, 1921, letter to her son Haskell Curry after the death of S. S. Curry, Baright Curry offered suggestions related to the distribution of her husband’s will, which was to be carried out by Haskell Curry. She wrote, “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams about the School of Expression and the books. There is an enormous number of manuscripts which are in a more or less chaotic state . . . you are left free to use your judgment as to which shall be finished with the aid of Secretaries, and I am sure you can do it well” (“To My Son” 2, emphasis added). Baright Curry’s words highlighting her “own ideals and dreams” for the School of Expression suggest her deep commitment to the school and its future. They indicate the sense of ownership she felt in the school. In her letter, Baright Curry also told her son about new editions of books that were ready and the need to renew the copyright on existing texts. She noted that there was “a list of nearly 50 books that have been started, but many of these may never be finished” (2). One that was started was a book on pantomime, which included “a lot of manuscripts of Delsarte and Mackaye [sic], all of which should be credited to these authors” (2). Baright Curry continued: “My own Pantomime notes, some of which have been lost, are not in as good a condition as I wish they were. It may be that the subject of Pantomime may be taken up by one of my grand- children or by you. In that case the subject should be investigated very thoroughly, and if desired quotations can be made from Delsarte and Mackaye [sic] and my own notes used. I had hoped to put in something of the higher work I have done to show the Psychology of Pantomimic Expression, and to indicate the mechanical elements in Delsarte and Mackaye [sic], and how this can be found by working on the fundamental principles of the School of Expression ‘From within outward,’ making impression always precede and determine expression” (2–3). Baright Curry’s words suggest her management of the school’s publications as well as her own intellectual contributions to S. S. Curry’s books. For instance, both The Province of Expression and the article “Where Shall the Teacher Begin to Develop Expression?” discuss a psychological approach to pantomime and how it differs from the approach of Delsarte and MacKaye. Baright Curry’s letter, which mentioned this same topic, suggested that her ideas were integral to the discussion of pantomime in S. S. Curry’s book and article. They reveal that Baright Curry was keenly aware of the ways her 124 Suzanne Bordelon work contributed to the contemporary understanding of pantomimic expression and are yet another indicator of the diverse ways she contributed to the school. Besides being a talented public reader and founding the school, Baright Curry was instrumental to its success, in her own way. At the 1966 commencement exercises, many former Curry students wrote about their memories of the School of Expression. Several noted Baright Curry’s keen intellect as well as her propensity for giving students “an overdose of criticism” (Cunningham 37). She regularly pushed her students beyond their comfort zones. For instance, when some students felt they shouldn’t accept reading engagements because of minimal payment, she would respond, “If you want to be a Reader, read,—read every time anyone is fool enough to ask you!” (Halsell 82). Likewise, when drama students asked whether it was necessary to have experienced all the types of circumstances, “even sordid or immoral ones,” that they might be asked to depict, “her eyes would flash, and with a stubby finger stabbing the air she would demand—‘What’s your imagination for?’” (Halsell 82). Challenging what was viewed as “typical” for women of her period, Baright Curry taught students to “use their imaginations” and to work around conventional limitations and boundaries. Baright Curry’s former students also pointed out the many duties she shoul- dered, both at school and at home. According to Annie-Maude Wilbur (Mrs. Arthur Ives Brown Jr.), formerly of Greenville, South Carolina, who received her General Culture diploma in 1918: “Mrs. Curry was a veritable phenomenon! Teaching, consulting, administrating the myriad facets of the School while being wife, mother and maintaining a large beautiful home. . . . Here was a commanding presence whose very approach electrified her students. Everyone felt the power of her genius but not many realized the Herculean yoke under which she performed yet always steadfast and always so womanly” (25). As is evident from Wilbur’s comment, Baright Curry was responsible for many aspects of the School of Expression while also serving as a mother to her own children. Baright Curry had six children, with two dying in infancy (Bacon 20), one being developmentally disabled, and her last, Haskell B. Curry, being born when she was forty-six and S. S. Curry was fifty-three. In a 1959 article, Haskell B. Curry (1900–1982), who became a noted mathematician and logician, described the complex nature of his parents’ collaboration: “The contribution which she made to the success of his [S. S. Curry’s] program was certainly immense. Her students considered her a really great teacher; whereas he was entertaining and stimulating, she was remarkable for penetrating criticism which drove the point home. It was said that she was the practical business manager of the school whereas he was the creative idealist; but although there is some truth in this, it is certainly an oversimplification” (7). Haskell Curry acknowledged that his mother spent the majority of her time in the office managing the school, while his father, when not teaching or out of town, was “apt to be found in his ‘den’ with a “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 125 stenographer working on his manuscripts” (8). In their relationship, Baright Curry upheld, with some success, “a common-sense point of view against the more extreme forms of his [S. S. Curry’s] asceticism.” Yet, he added, there were times when Baright Curry, “rather than he, had wild ideas” (8). In Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors, Lindal Buchanan demonstrated the ways that antebellum women’s collaborations assisted them in gaining a public voice. She also introduced a new model, a continuum for analyzing collaboration, which includes productive (direct contributions), productive/ supportive (direct and indirect contributions), and supportive (“indirect, ‘invisible’ contributions”) (135). In assessing the Currys’ collaboration, it appears that, in managing the school and the household, Baright Curry offered supportive or indirect contributions by providing S. S. Curry with the time and assistance (a stenographer) he needed so that he could complete his books. However, unlike many of the collaborative relations that Buchanan analyzed, this partnership did not assist Baright Curry in gaining a public voice. Instead, the invisibleness of her contribution seemed to contribute to her erasure. Although Baright Curry’s support, in many instances, may have been of the invisible type, it seems to have been appreciated by S. S. Curry. In Poems (1922), S. S. Curry dedicated the verse “My Helper” to Baright Curry. In this poem, the speaker describes being on a boat at night during a severe storm and losing his or her “guid- ing star” (78). But through the blinding mists by storm-winds blown I heard a soft though steadfast voice afar, And soon I saw thee pass my tossing spar And take the spray-washed place beside mine own. (78) Throughout the night, the “helper” keeps the speaker and the boat safe from storm, rocks, and “siren’s song” (78). Finally, in the early morning the lighthouse beam reap- pears, and the speaker realizes the boat is near its destination. Although the poem appears to depict Baright Curry as an equal and a guide who kept her husband safe during life’s storms, their collaboration was not perhaps as ideal as S. S. Curry’s verse suggests. Both Currys were strong-minded individuals, an attribute that seemed to become more pronounced as they aged. As Haskell Curry explained, “their collaboration was not achieved without friction; and it seemed that the sparks from their discussions, which took place largely at home, flew more thickly as time went on” (8). This emphasis on independence of thought had long been part of Baright Curry’s personality. According to a biography of Baright Curry, “Belief in inspiration was Mrs. Curry’s birthright, and the inalienable right of self- activity was her heritage” (“Anna” 390). As will become evident, this stress on the development of the individual mind from within was integral to the Currys’ teaching 126 Suzanne Bordelon approach (Renshaw, “Three Schools” 205). In this section, I have detailed the various ways Baright Curry’s ethos was negated. The next segment attempts to remedy this erasure by underscoring her pedagogical contributions.

Highlighting Rigorous Thinking, “Deep” Reading, and “Assimilation” Historians have generally depicted elocution as limited to artificial gestures, emotions, and parroted readings of literature. However, when we investigate the “Curry Method,” we see that the approach to oral interpretation favored by the Currys explicitly involved thought. A central tenet was that speaking and gestures should be “spontaneous” and “natural,” emerging from “the inside,” instead of “the stilted exercises imposed by ‘the outside’ by many of the teachers of ‘elocution’ of that time” (Mather 1–2). Their method stressed that the mind, voice, and body should be trained simultaneously since they are interconnected; however, it put special emphasis on thinking and developing the individual and her “inner fullness” (Bacon 65). In articles in Expression: A Quarterly Review of Art, Literature, and Spoken Word, published by the school, the Currys explained that thinking and feeling directly controlled the voice (“Question Box” 264); thus, they believed, the “development of a vigorous process of thinking, the development of power of attention” was foundational to all expression (“Where Shall” 102). Training, then, began with the mind, which the Currys viewed as the “cause” of expression (“Question Box” 264). This focus on mental causes is demonstrated in common tenets of the Currys, prominent in Foundations of Impression: Studies and Problems for Developing the Voice, Body, and Mind in Reading and Speaking (1907): “impression must precede and determine all expression” (11). As S. S. Curry explained, “As the leaf manifests the life at the root of the tree; as the bobolink’s song is the outflow of a full heart; so all expression obeys the same law; it comes from within outward, from the centre to the surface, from a hidden source to outward manifestation” (Foundations 10). Therefore, expression emerges naturally from the “inner depth” of the individual, not from “imitation or mechanical rules” (11). The Currys associated such mechanical approaches with followers of James Rush such as James E. Murdoch, whom they felt overemphasized the role of the voice (Robb, “The Elocutionary” 195).5 This stress on the mind is evident in the teaching of Anna Baright Curry. For instance, it is apparent in former student Rowena Belle Waterman’s January 12, 1900, notes from Baright Curry’s class on methods of teaching: “Teaching expression is preparing and training students to think. . . . In the teacher’s preparation, he must consider what thinking is; how to teach students is the most important step of their methods” (111). These notes suggest that Baright Curry believed that prospective teachers needed to be self-reflective, understanding their own reasoning process, so that they, in turn, could help students. Waterman’s notes also explain how such an approach can be accomplished: “Teach them to think, to concentrate, so that they may know the pleasures of thinking—is the way to get at the problem” (112). “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 127

Instead of asking students to complete technical exercises, Baright Curry aimed at a more inductive approach—stimulating students by having them directly engaged in problems related to expression (Davis 305). That way, they could begin to develop a more rigorous thought process. In a 1968 article, Olive B. Davis, a former Curry student who served as chair of the Department of Speech at Hunter College High School, explained that this approach is apparent in S. S. Curry’s books, which “are almost half made up of problems and illustrative material” (305). The aim was to promote a sharper thought process, which would be reflected in better vocal and body control. As Robb emphasized, although previous elocutionists such as Rush, Murdoch, Ebenezer Porter, James Barber, and William Russell underscored “the need for thought and feeling in the interpretation of literature, [S.S.] Curry was the first one to devise exercises for mental training as a necessary part of the teaching program” (“The Elocutionary” 196). The Curry approach, in the classroom, in recitals, and in texts, specifically emphasized learning by doing, a key pedagogical tenet of the progressive educator John Dewey. This focus was particularly evident in Baright Curry’s approach to studying literature through vocal expression. As she explained, such a study “implies a vivid imaginative realization in the reader of the environment of the poetic thought, life, character of the poem. . . . Whatever will develop the power to think with the poet through a series of circumstances or situations, will furnish such training” (“A Practi- cal” 53). In learning a piece of literature, a student was to “assimilate” the reading— not just to memorize it. “Vocal expression,” according to S. S. Curry, “is the most direct revelation of the processes of thought and emotion” (Imagination 17). Hence, to assimilate the reading, the student needed to grasp it on both an intellectual and an emotional level. The student then demonstrated this insight in recitals, which Baright Curry referred to as “studies in art,” that were a vital element of the training that students received at the School of Expression (“An Introduction” 293). In the article “A Practical Lesson in Literature and Expression,” Baright Curry explained how a student could learn to read and begin assimilating Milton’s “L’Allegro.” She urged the student to “read the poem through thoughtfully and receptively. Be open to whatever is potent in its influence. This kind of artistic or intense attention to thought can be cultivated by actual use” (53). After silently reading the poem, the student was to “speak aloud to [herself her] own spontaneous opinion of the poem” (53). The student was then to write down her impression and “preserve it with care. It is of more value to you at this stage of your study than the most elaborate judgment of scholars” (53). Here again, we see Baright Curry’s stress on rigorous reflection and the development of the individual’s own thought process, not the mere acceptance of the judgments of others. The student’s critical study of the poem began only after she had developed her own ideas about the poem (Baright Curry, “An Introduction” 291). Baright Curry’s method assumed an active reader who worked out her own response to the text. 128 Suzanne Bordelon

Students then completed another reading, which also was a mental silent reading. During this reading, students were to identify every unknown reference and to study all classical allusions or illustrations in the poem. Therefore, classical study was important; furthermore, such study has conventionally been linked to rhetorical knowledge. In addition, students were to identify each word they did not understand and “make it the subject of a line of thorough study” (54). That is to say, the reading process was also an intellectual process involving research. Baright Curry placed particular emphasis on having students understand the meaning of similes, or, as she explained, “discover the thought in the use of the simile; remember that a simile may be as a word in the mind of the poet, and in the understanding of the meaning of that word may be the key to his thought” (54). Baright Curry didn’t view similes as mere adornments meant to embellish speech, historically a common perspective among rhetoricians. Instead, she saw them as powerful clues to the poet’s mental process, something modern rhetoricians emphasize. For instance, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson assert that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action” (3). This notion that metaphors structure our conceptual system—the way we think and act—mirrors Baright Curry’s understanding. In keeping with viewing metaphors as mental clues, Baright Curry also suggested that the reader needs to work things out, once again suggesting the active, synthesizing aspect of the reading process For the third reading, students were to recite the poem aloud, which indicates students were to form their own mental understanding of the poem before speaking it aloud. When reciting the poem, they were to pay particular attention to any lines that caused them difficulty: “Are they lines where the thought is illustrated by a classical allusion?” Baright Curry asked (54). If there were such allusions, she urged students to “dig deeper into the classical illustrations, catch the life, the soul of a dead language, and its art” (55). Students were then to return to the poem once again to achieve Milton’s meaning: “When the meaning comes to you, it will come like a flash, bringing with it a responsive joy that will in its responsiveness find for itself natural expression” (55). Baright Curry believed that the process of more deeply grasping the author’s meaning provided its own form of epiphanic experience that was pleasurable to the reader. Once the student had reached this level, she still might not be satisfied with her rendering of the poem. Baright Curry suggested that the next step was to “study the poem again; think with the poet”: “Live his life and thought in imagination so har- moniously and so intensely that your own untried feelings, your own crude thinking, are changed by inspiration into sympathetic understanding of the thoughts and delights of the scholar poet. This is the difficult step” (55). Through reading “great” literature and assimilating it, individuals elevate their own thinking and develop a sympathetic imagination. The process clearly fostered “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 129 rigorous mental training, careful study, deep reading, and patience. As Baright Curry acknowledged, “It may take years to read ‘L’Allegro’ adequately” (55). She concluded by urging students to “meditate over every line, contemplate every conception, and so cultivate spiritual insight, by which the spirit of the poetry is revealed” (56). Baright Curry’s deep-reading exercise, with its stress on an active reader who resists the conventional power structure, suggests Louise M. Rosenblatt’s “transactional” theory of reading, in which both the text and the reader shape each other during the reading process. As Elizabeth A. Flynn explains, Rosenblatt’s purpose was to improve classroom teaching: “Rosenblatt wants to empower student readers to disrupt the traditional hierarchy whereby critics and teachers have greater interpretive authority than professional readers” (109). Baright Curry’s objective also seemed to be empowerment. She similarly challenged the more “mechanical” or prescriptive approaches of the time and instead underscored the role of the reader (not the scholar) and the way she merged the intellect and the emotions in the reading process. In so doing, Baright Curry authorized her female students to challenge the status quo. It’s difficult to determine the impact of such teaching methods on the school’s largely female student body or whether Baright Curry’s students achieved the spiritual awareness that she highlighted. Nevertheless, some former students viewed the approach—with its stress on mental training and assimilation rather than mere imitation—as ultimately fostering self-reliance. Florence Cunningham (School of Expression 1914) recalled her experience watching a young woman read at a recital: “Suddenly—she stopped, forgetting what came next. No prompter came to the rescue. The audience at first sympathetic, grew restless, then tittered. . . . The silence went on for several minutes and finally the girl remembered and continued reading, this time with applause. I learned afterward that this was the method. If you are dependent on yourself for finding the answer you will find it and never depend on a prompter” (38). As is apparent from this passage, studying literature through vocal expression promoted a type of independence in the Currys’ female students. Around the turn of the twentieth century, women faced numerous constraints—in everything from their dress to their right to vote. In fostering self-sufficiency, the Curry approach helped women to stretch and refashion these conventional boundaries.

Conclusion My intention in focusing on the work of Anna Baright Curry has not been merely to valorize her efforts and, in so doing, create a “Great Woman” theory of history. In- stead, in analyzing her erasure, I hope to underscore the various challenges women faced in constructing an authoritative ethos during this period. In so doing, I hope to draw scholars’ attention to these private schools of expression/elocution and the pedagogical work of women like Baright Curry and the way their efforts have 130 Suzanne Bordelon been overlooked or erased. As noted, the faculty of these schools often featured women, and the schools themselves were chiefly oriented toward the education of women. Other couples and women ran similar schools in the late nineteenth century, as Renshaw has pointed out. For instance, Rachel Hinkle Shoemaker and her husband, J. W. Shoemaker, ran various schools, including the School of Elocu- tion and Penmanship, the Philadelphia Institute for Elocution and Languages, and the National School of Elocution and Oratory. Jessie Eldridge Southwick and her husband, Henry Lawrence Southwick, operated the Boston School of Oratory and in 1903 were primarily responsible for the Emerson College of Oratory after Charles Wesley Emerson retired. In 1890 in Chicago, Mary Blood and Ida Riley, graduates of Emerson, established the Columbia School of Oratory, Physical Culture, and Dramatic Art. And in 1904 Carol Hoyt Powers and Leland Todd Powers opened the School of the Spoken Word in Boston. Leland Powers had studied under both Anna Baright and S. S. Curry (Renshaw, “Five Private” 303–07). Women also operated and held important positions at other private schools in Boston and at other cities. For instance, Clara Power Edgerly was the principal at the Boston College of Oratory and Delsarte Ideal Training School (at the time, the only school in Boston with a female principal). The Conservatory of Aesthetic Physical Culture was operated by Orissa J. Smith, a graduate of Emerson and the Thomas Psycho-Physical Culture Conservatory, and Winifred G. Martin, a Boston School of Oratory graduate (“Song” 121–22). In addition, Hallie Quinn Brown, who published books and articles on elocution, was a professor of elocution at Wilberforce Uni- versity and a prominent teacher in African American communities (Kates 57–58). Although this analysis has been aimed at reclaiming the contributions of Baright Curry, to a more significant degree it suggests the need to investigate the work of other women whose efforts have been erased and to examine the pedagogy that they developed. In Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900, Jane Donawerth raised a question about elocution that we could ask more specifically about the work of Baright Curry: “What kind of cultural work is the School of Expression doing?” (124). I would like to expand this question by addressing not only the cultural but also the rhetorical work of this school. As we have seen, in having women study “great” literature, the school helped students to gain the cultural capital associated with the middle class. In so doing, such training upheld societal ideals associated with class and the type of education that was needed to “advance” in society. In addition, the Currys emphasized vigorous mental training, deep reading, research, classical understanding, regular public recitals, and trust in one’s own thought process, not mere conformity to or acceptance of the ideas of others. Thus, the Currys’ training included elements often associated with rhetorical training. In this way, Baright Curry’s training resisted the traditional gender “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 131 ideology of the day by fostering self-reliance in her female students. It encouraged women to reimagine themselves as capable individuals, providing impetus for a broader social presence.

Notes 1. I would like to thank David Miller, professor and head of Technical Services at Curry College’s Levin Library, for his wonderful assistance in locating and scanning an abundance of materials on the Currys. I also would like to thank MaryAnne Curry Schults for providing primary materials on the Currys and for taking the time to address my questions. 2. Gold currently is completing a broader study of women’s involvement in the elocutionary movement of the late nineteenth century. 3. For connections between the analytical approach of elocution/expression and New Criticism, see Sloane. 4. This is based on Christine Anne Drake’s bibliographic list in her 1943 thesis (111). 5. As Robb points out, Murdoch saw himself as “following nature.” He supported Rush’s approach because he thought it “gave him a firm scientific base from which to work to develop a natural delivery” (“The Elocutionary” 195).

Works Cited “Anna Baright Curry.” Representative Women of New England, edited by Julia Ward Howe, New England Historical Publishing Co., 1904, pp. 388–91, archive.org, archive.org/details/ representativew00elligoog (accessed May 1, 2017). Bacon, Lenice Ingram. The Currys of Copley Square. TS. Box 23, Record Storage Box: Bacon, Lenice Ingram [was Lenice Woods Ingram] Dr. C.C. Courtesy of Levin Library, Curry College (accessed June 11, 2013). Banaji, Paige V. “Womanly Eloquence and Rhetorical Bodies: Regendering the Public Speaker through Physical Culture.” Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s College, 1884–1945, edited by David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs, Southern Illinois UP, 2014, pp. 154–76. ———. “Women’s Compilations of Recitations, Dialogues, and Tableaux: Building Feminist Rhetorics for the Twentieth Century.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 2013, pp. 250–70. Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Chester, Mary Margaret. Correspondance to Bacon. Box 23, Record Storage Box: Bacon, Lenice Ingram [was Lenice Woods Ingram] Dr. C.C., Levin Library, Curry College (accessed June 11, 2013). Craigie, Helen [Dean Baright]. “Baright: Anna (Curry, Mrs. Samuel Silas.).” 1925, Box 1, Folder 8, Levin Library, Curry College (accessed June 11, 2013). Cunningham, Florence. TS. Box 23, Record Storage Box: Bacon, Lenice Ingram [was Lenice Woods Ingram] Dr. C.C., Levin Library, Curry College, 36–41 (accessed June 11, 2013). 132 Suzanne Bordelon

Curry, Anna Baright. “An Introduction to a Kipling Recital at the School of Expression.” Expression: A Quarterly Review of Art, Literature, and the Spoken Word, vol. 5, no. 2, 1899, pp. 291–93. ———. “A Practical Lesson in Literature and Expression.” Expression: A Quarterly Review of Art, Literature, and the Spoken Word, vol. 1, no. 2, 1895, pp. 53–56. ———. “To My Son, Haskell B. Curry.” May 13, 1921. TS, Courtesy of MaryAnne Curry Shults (accessed August 9, 2013). “Curry, Anna Baright Record of Death.” Box 8, Document Case Boxes, Archives, Box 8, Folder 3, Levin Library, Curry College (accessed June 15, 2013). Curry, Haskell B. “Memories of S. S. Curry.” Today’s Speech, vol. 3, no. 4, 1959, pp. 7–8. Copy of article included in Box 23, Record Storage Box: Bacon, Lenice Ingram [was Lenice Woods Ingram] Dr. C.C. Courtesy of Levin Library, Curry College (accessed June 11, 2013). Curry, S. S. Foundations of Expression: Studies and Problems for Developing the Voice, Body, and Mind in Reading and Speaking. Expression Co., 1907. ———. Imagination and Dramatic Instinct. Some Practical Steps for Their Development. Expres- sion Co., 1896. ———. “My Helper.” Poems, Expression Co., 1922, p. 78. ———. The Province of Expression: A Search for Principles Underlying Adequate Methods of Developing Dramatic and Oratoric Delivery. School of Expression, 1891. ———. “Question Box.” Expression: A Quarterly Review of Art, Literature, and the Spoken Word, vol. 2, no. 3, 1896, pp. 264–65. ———. “Where Shall the Teacher Begin to Develop Expression?” Expression: A Quarterly Review of Art, Literature, and the Spoken Word, vol. 1, no. 3, 1895, pp. 95–105. Davis, Olive B. “Samuel Silas Curry—1847–1921.” Speech Teacher, vol. 12, no. 4, 1968, pp. 304–8. Donawerth, Jane. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. Drake, Anne Christine. “The Elocutionary Theories of S. S. Curry and Their Application.” M.A. thesis, Louisiana State U, 1943. Flynn, Elizabeth A. Feminism beyond Modernism. Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Galassi, Mabel Curry. Letter to Haskell Curry, April 2, 1969, TS. Haskell Curry, Box 11, AX2627: Galassi, Pasquale & Family folder includes correspondence among Mario, Mabel, Virginia, Gerard, and “Uncle Haskell” (1938–1969). Courtesy of Penn State University (accessed June 15, 2013). Gold, David. “Remapping Revisionist Historiography.” College Composition and Communica- tion, vol. 64, no. 1, 2012, pp. 15–34. Gold, David, and Catherine L. Hobbs. Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s College, 1884. Southern Illinois UP, 2014. Gold, David, and Catherine L. Hobbs, eds. Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Educa- tion: American Women Learn to Speak. Routledge, 2013. “Please cherish my own ideals and dreams . . .” 133

Gray, Paul H. “The Uses of Theory.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 11, 1991, pp. 267–77. Halsell, Elizabeth Stahr. “Vignettes of 1918,” January 25, 1966, TS. Box 23, Record Storage Box: Bacon, Lenice Ingram [was Lenice Woods Ingram] Dr. C.C. Courtesy of Levin Library, Curry College, pp. 78–84. Kates, Susan. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937. Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. U of Chicago P, 1980. Marquis, Albert Nelson. “Curry, Samuel Silas.” Who’s Who in America: A Biographical Diction- ary of Notable Living Men and Women of the United States, vol. 11, A. N. Marquis and Co., 1920, pp. 687–88. Mather, Kirtley F. “Foreword.” The Currys of Copley Square, by Lenice Ingram Bacon, TS. May 15, 1970, Box 23, Record Storage Box: Bacon, Lenice Ingram [was Lenice Woods Ingram] Dr. C.C. Courtesy of Levin Library, Curry College, pp. 1–4. Pinney, Amy. Archiving Anna Baright Curry: Performances of Evidence and Evidentiary Perfor- mances. Dissertation, Southern Illinois U, 2007. Renshaw, Edyth. “Five Private Schools of Speech.” History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, edited by Karl R. Wallace, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954, pp. 301–25. ———. Three Schools of Speech: The Emerson College of Oratory; the School of Expression; and the Leland Powers School of the Spoken Word. Dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia U, 1950. Robb, Mary Margaret. “The Elocutionary Movement and Its Chief Figures.” History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, edited by Karl R. Wallace, Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1954, pp. 178–201. ———. Oral Interpretation of Literature in American Colleges and Universities: A Historical Study of Teaching Methods. Revised edition, Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Southern Illinois UP, 1978. Rudnick, Lois. “The New Woman.”The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, edited by Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, Rutgers UP, 1991, pp. 69–81. Ryan, Kathleen J., Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones, editors. Preface. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric, Southern Illinois UP, 2016, pp. vii–xii. Skinner, Carolyn. Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America. Southern Illinois UP, 2014. Sloane, Thomas O. “From Elocution to New Criticism: An Episode in the History of Rheto- ric.” Rhetorica, vol. 31, no. 3, 2014, pp. 297–330. Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Harvard UP, 1998. 134 Suzanne Bordelon

“Song, Speech, and Physical Culture in New England,” Werner’s Magazine, vol. 16, no. 4, 1894, pp. 115–32. Waterman, Rowena Belle. [Notebook.] Box 3, Document Case Boxes, Archives, Courtesy of Levin Library, Curry College (accessed June 11, 2013). Wilbur, Annie-Maude. Box 23, Record Storage Box: Bacon, Lenice Ingram [was Lenice Woods Ingram] Dr. C.C. Courtesy of Levin Library, Curry College (accessed June 11, 2013). Part Three Overlooked Rhetors and Texts

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Remembering Women Florence Smalley Babbitt and the Victorian Family Photograph Album

Kristie S. Fleckenstein

With his chubby cheeks aglow and a mop of curls combed into a top knot, the infant Theodore Babbitt gazes out at the camera seemingly content with, even intrigued by, his first photographic experience. Dressed in a long, white christening gown and nestled against a velvet backdrop, the baby verges on smiling, imbued with the joy of life just beginning. The vertical 4½ x 6½ cabinet print framed in a rectangular gilt- decorated mat gestures not only to the family past leading in an orderly sequence to his birth but also to the family future spinning forth from Theodore himself. He represents the possibility of a next generation, of carrying the Babbitt name into the new century. The third child and only son of Florence Smalley Babbitt and J[ohn] Willard Babbitt, the image of Theodore attests to the parents’ delight both in his birth and in their hopes for tomorrow. (See fig. 1). But Theodore also represents sorrow, a future deferred, for, two pages later, he again appears in the family photograph album. However, instead of celebrating a life beginning, this image memorializes a life ending, as the poignant horizontal cabinet print depicts Theodore heartbreak- ingly nestled in a small open coffin, his still body framed not by gilt but by cut flowers tucked around his quiescent figure. Neatly penciled at the bottom of the page, the words baldly record the child’s demise: “Theodore Babbitt Died at Two Years.” Two of the more than eighty-six professional photographs, compiled, indexed, and arranged by Florence Smalley Babbitt (1847–1929) in a forty-three-page album, these formal images satisfy what Elizabeth Siegel has called “the desire of everyday Americans to possess a visual genealogy” (4). A genre that emerged in the 1860s and maintained its hold on the Victorian imagination and home until the invention of the Kodak snapshot camera in 1888, family photograph albums served to “memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of Fig. 1 Theodore Babbitt (infant). Photograph taken by Kristie S. Fleckenstein.

Fig. 2. Cover of the Babbitt Family Album. Photograph taken by Kristie S. Fleckenstein. Remembering Women 139 family life” (9), as Susan Sontag noted. But, more than a record of familial history, I argue that the Babbitt family album illuminates two important insights into women’s rhetorical histories. First, the visual genealogy attests to Florence Babbitt’s identity as a “remembering woman,” an adroit practitioner of vernacular visual rhetoric aimed at creating and memorializing a particular familial ethos. Like other Victo- rian women who assumed primary responsibility for the family’s visual genealogy, Babbitt operated within her milieu as a visual rhetor, practicing her everyday art of persuasion in the parlor, a site positioned on the cusp between the public and the private. Second, the existence of the Babbitt album in conjunction with the immense popularity of the family album across class, race, and geography in the late nineteenth-century United States points to the need to recognize—to remember—the women who, through the auspices of the photograph, acted as the family’s archivist and thus warrant recognition for the quotidian rhetorical work they did. To address both aspects of this dual argument, I draw on Babbitt family papers, letters, scrapbooks, and one photograph album to offer Florence as an example of the postbellum visual rhetor who constructed and controlled a personal and familial ethos via the family photograph album. Addressing this little-known woman, one who left few traces of a national footprint and who influenced no historically significant political events, uncovers the ways in which late Victorian women like Babbitt performed rhetorical roles in their everyday lives. This essay’s double agenda complements the work in feminist historiography that seeks to redraw the boundaries of rhetoric by remembering women practitioners in their various guises. First, it integrates the visual into the efforts of feminist historians to enrich our understanding of rhetoric’s canon and history. For instance, within the past four decades, feminists in rhetorical studies have systematically redressed the misperception that “women have played no part in the rhetorical tradition” (Sutherland 9) by disinterring women rhetors, spotlighting the obstacles they surmounted, and reclaiming the range of texts these exceptional women created. However, throughout all this valuable work, scholars have focused almost exclusively on women as wordsmiths, whether those words were deployed through letters, speeches, manifestoes, editorials, petitions, conduct books, elocutionary manuals, or similar texts. Left unexplored is the work, especially the memory work, performed by women as imagesmiths—significant figures in the visual rhetorical tradition—as their use of images circulates across the permeable boundaries of the private and the public. In addition, this focus on the visual rhetorical work of women underscores the complexities of remembering; photography secures memory. By testifying that “the thing has been there” (Barthes 76)—”at once the past and the real” (82)—the photograph becomes an invitation to remember and the photographic album, a collective memory bank. Furthermore, caught on the cusp of the past and present, photography highlights the ambiguity—the contingency and constructiveness—of remembering. There is an “abyss between the moment 140 Kristie S. Fleckenstein recorded and the moment of looking,” John Berger pointed out, and meaning, thus memory, takes shape in that troubled space between documenting a past event, a place, a person, and seeing that event, place, person in the present (89). Remember- ing is the process of negotiating the abyss, an insight important to feminist rhetorical histories. Second, this essay’s double argument also complements traditional feminist histories by focusing on women in their everyday domestic roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. While the admirable recovery work of feminist scholarship has rescued from obscurity women who moved in the public realm to shape and reshape political policy, less attention has been paid to the vernacular rhetorics practiced by women in their daily lives. Gerard Hauser defined the vernacular as “mundane transactions of words and gestures” (11) that form the “ceaseless conversation of society” (9). However, rather than the “formal exchanges of the podium,” vernacular expressions occur in “quotidian encounters” (11) among participants in a community. It is through these mundane transactions that we shape “our public lives as citizens, neighbors, and cultural agents” (11). Thus, the quotidian verbal encounter merits scholarly attention because it resists, informs, and enables “podium” rhetoric. By the same logic, so, too, does the quotidian visual encounter call for investigation. While the iconic photograph as an agent of the liberal-democratic sphere has accrued significant notice (Hariman and Lucaites), the everyday images generated by community members in the course of their daily lives have elicited little to no consideration (Batchen 57). However, like vernacular verbal rhetoric, these visual common expressions also operate as a subtle dialogizing force infiltrating authoritative discourse at the level of the lived experiences and functioning perhaps as a more potent rhetoric than that afforded by the iconic images circulating in a highly charged public sphere. My examination of Florence and her family photograph album emphasizes the importance of the everyday visual rhetorics crafted by Victorian women who conducted their lives not in the spotlight but behind the half-closed doors of the home. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to explore the visual rhetorical act of remembering performed by late nineteenth-century women and, in the process, to remember them. To achieve that aim, I focus on Florence Smalley Babbitt as my exemplar of the remembering woman, beginning with her identity as a visual agent, an identity necessary for her work as the family’s imagesmith. I situate Florence biographically to highlight three qualities that enabled her visual agency: a passion for family, a talent for organization, and a mania for collecting historical artifacts. Next, I turn to her deployment of that visual agency in her visual communication, focusing on her favored genre: the family photograph album. I describe the status and stature of the family photograph album between 1860 and 1890, establishing the social function and context of Florence’s remembering. Then, I address Florence as visual rhetor by exploring the ways in which she constructed a familial ethos by memorializing a laudable ancestral history, commemorating virtues, and celebrating Remembering Women 141 emotional connections. I conclude by underscoring the degree to which the historically obscure Florence, like other women of her period, crafted everyday visual rhetorical performances through their compilation of and devotion to the family photograph album. In visually honoring and remembering their families, these women also earned the honor of being remembered themselves as everyday visual rhetors.

Florence as Visual Agent Remembering as a rhetorical act requires agency, and remembering as a visual rhetorical act requires visual agency. As her life reveals, Florence carved out a degree of agency remarkable for her time and gender. “To think, with Mrs. Babbitt, is to act,” an 1896 Ypsilanti Sentinel article claimed, and that descriptor provides insight into the life of a woman who was born more than a decade before the Civil War and died within sight of the Great Depression (“Praiseworthy Enterterprise [sic]”). The mother of five, the wife of a lawyer and probate judge for thirty-five years, and a self-supporting widow for twenty-eight years, Florence Smalley Babbitt lived a historically insignificant life with a name meaningless to even the majority of Ypsi- lantians (“Florence” 1). As local historians noted, “during her life she was relatively unappreciated by the general public for her scholarly knowledge of antiques and her meticulous endeavors to educate others to appreciate the value of collecting” (“Yp- silanti’s”). But, despite her anonymity, she was a “remarkable woman” (“Florence” 1) who lived a life dominated by service to her family, her community, and the arts. This tripartite devotion permeated, perhaps even motivated, her compilation of the Babbitt photograph album, a project that both attested to and displayed her visual agency. Three qualities central to her performance as a remembering woman—her pride in family, her talent for organization, and her passion for collecting—formed the foundation of her visual agency. The cultural positioning of the family photograph album within the realm of women emphasizes the agentive function and potential of Victorian women. Through their responsibility for the family photograph album, Florence and other women of her generation operated as visual power brokers. In her study of nineteenth-century British photograph albums, Patrizia Di Bello claimed that album- keeping was “part of a feminine culture (and a culture of femininity) constructed by and through the image of the ‘lady’” (32). Furthermore, beyond the gentility of the lady, album-keeping was associated with the maternal role (Langford 27), bringing the offices of album-keeping out of the realm of the aristocrat and into the realm of the everyday woman, especially in the United States. Josephine Gear argued just this point, claiming that rural and urban American women, both working and middle class, operated as visual agents, shaping and using “photographic conventions and images to assert a sense of their own importance in the reproduction of the family and its public representation” (419). Although Florence and other women of her day 142 Kristie S. Fleckenstein rarely produced the actual photographic portraits enshrined in the family albums, they did collaborate in the design of those portraits. As Gear noted, women “pre- sided as patrons over the production of these cultural images” (421). No portrait ever ensued from a single source; instead, every portrait emerged as a product of “a shifting collective of commercial photographers and consumer keepers of albums” (Siegel 2). Richard Rudisill emphasized the necessary collaboration between a “knowing sitter and a purposeful cameraman” who colluded “by design and choice” to craft an image that attached an affected value to the subject and thus to the photographic image (32). But equally important were the women who, behind the scenes, masterminded the contents of the portrait photographs, especially those of children, and selected which of several poses to memorialize within the pages of the family record.1 Through these nearly invisible activities, Florence constructed her identity as visual agent, and that agency owed its genesis, first, to Babbitt’s pride in family. Perhaps the primary prerequisite for a Victorian remembering woman consists of esteem for family, for without family to memorialize there would be no impetus for visual agency. Florence had abundant resources in this regard, for she could draw on two highly respected family trees: her own lineage and her husband’s. Born March 19, 1847, to Mortimer and Nancy Lewis Smalley, in Friendship, New York, Babbitt was the first of two children, joined by her brother, Albertus, three years later. In 1852, when the children were barely out of infancy, the Smalleys moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, a thriving village in a state barely fifteen years old. Situated in Washtenaw County in lower east Michigan, Ypsilanti began life in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a trading post that eventually grew into a city, incorporating just six years after the Smalleys arrived at their River Street home. Here in this growing hub on the east side of the Huron River, the Smalleys made friends with their neighbors, especially the socially and politically prominent Doctor John Winthrop Babbitt, his wife, Philinda, and their three sons. In fact, the eldest son, John Willard, or “Will,” twelve years older than Florence, was sometimes enlisted as a babysitter for the Smalley children, a prosaic beginning that later bore more romantic fruit (“Flor- ence” 1). The connection Will and Florence established in those early years on River Street blossomed in 1866 when Florence, after graduating from Union School and attending the Ypsilanti Seminary, married Will. Both family trees offered Florence a wealth of material to inspire her visual agency and her remembering. For instance, the Smalley lineage reached back to the Revolutionary War, in which Babbitt’s ancestors fought for the infant republic. Con- tinuing that tradition of patriotic service, Babbitt’s father enlisted at the outbreak of the Civil War as a member of the 27th Michigan Infantry, for which service he received a government grant of six hundred acres in Caseville, Michigan, where he later relocated his family (“The Babbitt Family” 3). The Babbitt clan provided even more topoi for photographic invention. Descended from “good old New England stock,” the Babbitts traced their family tree back to the Mayflower through the Remembering Women 143 maternal line (The Babbitt Family History 338). The patriarch John Winthrop Babbitt practiced medicine for nineteen years in New York, where he also secretly participated in Masonry, before moving his family to Ypsilanti in 1848 (“The Babbitt Fam- ily” 1). He also ran for and was elected to a variety of public offices, including service as the second mayor of the newly incorporated Ypsilanti (“Babbitt St. Named”). An author and amateur astronomer (“The Babbitt Family” 1), Babbitt senior was, as the family history celebrates, a “power for the good” during his tenure in Ypsilanti (The Babbitt Family History 196). Thus, both sides of the family offered Florence a rich rationale for claiming her visual agency and using it in service of remembering. But Babbitt’s decision to exercise that visual agency also possessed an emotional dimen- sion as well. Remembering relies on more than salient source material. It also relies on emotions evoked by that source material, particularly as those emotions—and material —are mediated by images (Bartlett 53). For Florence, family and family photograph albums were more than ancestral lines or genealogical charts. Both were about emotions where representing pride in family intertwined with representing love of family. Martha Langford has noted that the social function and meaning of “the real-life domestic experience [of the album] is loaded with compensatory pleasures—intimacy, conviviality, emotional investment, perhaps a slice of cake” (5), underscoring that the material texture of a family’s emotional life circulates through the stiff, thick pages of a nineteenth-century album. Geoffrey Batchen concurred, arguing that vernacular photographs made or bought by “everyday folk . . . preoccupy the home and the heart” (57), an insight central to Florence’s life. After wedding Will in 1866, she and her young attorney husband took up residence in Ypsilanti above a drug- store, eventually purchasing “the oldest house in Ypsilanti,” which had originally belonged to the Babbitt family. They literally moved their new home to the corner of South Huron and Race Streets and transformed it into “a veritable museum full of surprises” (“Florence” 2). In that twelve-room home, the Babbitts lived together for the next thirty-five years, greeting the arrival of five children: four daughters and one son. There they mourned the death of their son, and there they lovingly poked fun at each other. Florence’s visual agency thus evolved from her passionate desire to create a narrative of family life in and out of photographs marked by humor and affection. If family pride in ancestral sagas colored with affection was the first element of Florence’s visual agency, then the ability to organize constituted the second necessary component. Crafting a photograph album provides a wealth of opportunities for creative intervention (Batchen 68–69), and acting on those opportunities demands the ability to envision a goal and to devise a means to achieve that goal: it requires organization, a trait Florence possessed in abundance, as her community service reveals. In addition to a full family life, one in which Florence situated herself as the daughter-in-law of Ypsilanti’s second mayor and the wife of an increasingly prominent lawyer who eventually served as probate judge for Washtenaw County 144 Kristie S. Fleckenstein from 1888 until his death, in 1901, she also carved out an equally rich community life for herself. An avid clubwoman with an ingrained service ethic, Babbitt found the time and energy to contribute to her community in myriad ways, which included local work such as her lifelong membership in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, where she faithfully contributed her energies to St. Luke’s Parish Aid Society. Her organizational abilities also found an outlet through her active role in the 27th Michigan Infantry Auxiliary, the division within which her father served during the Civil War (“The Babbitt Family” 3). As the president of the auxiliary in 1902, Florence coor- dinated the unit’s fortieth anniversary and encampment in Ypsilanti (“Ypsilanti’s”). On a more national level, this mother of four was a charter member of the Ypsilanti Order of the Eastern Star, where she served as chaplain. Florence also contributed her organizational abilities to patriotic groups, such as the all-white and highly traditional Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), collaborating with her oldest daughter, Nora Babbitt Harsh, to establish a DAR chapter in Creston, Iowa. But, more than any of her other projects, Florence immersed herself fully in the multiracial and patriotic Woman’s Relief Corps, an order of the Grand Army of the Republic. Throughout her lifetime, Babbitt held every possible office in the Michi- gan chapter, including the office of president, achieving a variety of goals. She raised money for a Civil War monument in Ypsilanti’s Highland Cemetery, an accomplishment celebrated in the pages of the National Tribune in 1895, which noted her ardency and patriotic spirit (“The Relief Corps” 6). She lobbied for the flag salute and a pledge of allegiance, displaying her ability to envision a goal, determine the strategies necessary to achieve that goal, and then efficiently execute those strategies. The organizational abilities that enabled her successful community activism also constituted an essential catalyst for her identity as visual agent as she systematically devised, designed, and memorialized her family through a photographic record. Finally, in addition to family pride and organizational talent, Babbitt’s identity as visual agent and a remembering woman relied on a third quality: a bent for collecting. The ability to organize remained of little use to the Victorian imagesmith without the resources—the photographs—to organize. Thus, visual agency and remembering relied on the archival impulse, and here Florence excelled. Despite her extensive community service, she is best known as “the earliest collector of historical Americana in the state” (“Mrs. Babbitt”). After Will’s death, in 1901, Flor- ence was recognized as “the first and foremost collector of Americana, particularly of Michigan” (“Ypsilanti’s”). Starting as a child of thirteen, Florence pursued throughout her life a habit that eventually garnered her a collection consisting of more than three thousand pieces of china, “all carefully identified,” as well as a china toy collection “second in the world only to that of King Edward V” (“Ypsilanti’s”). To support herself in the wake of Will’s demise, Babbitt transformed avocation into vocation, becoming the “official collector” for the State Historical Society, a buyer and consultant for the Chicago Art Museum, and a consultant for Henry Ford as he Remembering Women 145 acquired materials for his historical Greenfield Village. It is no surprise that her passion for the artifacts of her country’s past aligned with her passion for collecting the visual artifacts of her family’s past, a fervor that manifested itself in her meticulously maintained family photograph album and served to transform visual agent into visual communicator so that Florence not only remembered but also shaped and circulated those memories.

Florence as Visual Communicator Pride in family, a talent for organization, and a love of collecting provided the foundation for Florence’s visual agency. She mined her own life and her family’s life to find resources for the visual act of remembering, and that action found its expression within a particular genre: the family photograph album. Understanding Florence as the visual agent who subsequently became the visual communicator, then, requires an understanding of the potential offered by her chosen genre. The photograph album evolved out of curiosity albums, a genre that traces its line of descent to bound collections of prints or drawings dating from the Renaissance and popularized during the 1700s as commonplace books containing aphorisms, prayers, poems, and keepsakes. Essentially externalized forms of memory, these albums, akin to scrapbooks, were the “cabinets of nineteenth-century curiosity” (Langford 18) wherein people collected and exhibited items meaningful to them and their families, aligning with the compulsions to “accumulate, document, and preserve that were already at work in the Victorian parlor”: in sum, to remember (Siegel 127). Florence developed and refined her identity as visual communicator through the various scrapbooks she kept throughout her life. One scrapbook, begun in 1876, soon after her marriage to Will, features an array of articles, poetry, and family memorabilia. Composed of yellow, blue, and beige pages, the scrapbook includes a fascinating array of articles on marriage, including one detailing the contribution men need to make to homemaking as well as one reporting—approvingly—a legal case in which the presiding judge refused to grant the husband’s request for divorce. Rather, the judge insisted that the husband spend his evenings at home and treat his wife and seven children well or the judge would send him to prison. A second scrapbook, circa 1893, with an Egyptian motif, gesturing to Florence’s Eastern Star connection, records through articles, reports, programs, and other artifacts this visual communicator’s extensive community activities. Finally, a third scrapbook, dated 1901, chronicles in a nonlinear fashion Florence’s interests following Will’s death. It includes newspaper clippings, some with commentary handwritten by Florence, on her husband’s death and the professional and personal testimonials that followed. Here she included articles on her work as a collector as well as her work with the Woman’s Relief Corps. Reflecting the intensely personal nature of curiosity albums, these scrapbooks also manifest their social function, for Florence’s collections emphasized the public 146 Kristie S. Fleckenstein as well as the private in content and circulation. They were designed to be shared with family and guests, a location of individual accomplishments and thinking that spotlighted family identity. Florence’s commitment to the curiosity album as a form of visual communication designed to memorialize is borne out by her efforts to infect her daughters with scrapbooking fever. In 1890 Nan, the Babbitts’ third daughter, received her first scrapbook as a Christmas gift from her mother. Here, Nan included little clippings from the society page of the local newspaper reporting on her social activities and her illnesses. She included poetry and the stamps from letters written to her by her father in 1896, as well as cartoons, newspaper photographs, a school recitation, and other items, many with notations from Nan pointing out her contribution. These scrapbooks, filled with evidence of family activities in and out of the home, constitute the curiosity albums as a set of invention strategies for Florence’s remembering. The informal but extensive evidence of the family’s internal values and public deeds provided a foundation for the more formal and almost exclusively visual compilation of the Babbitt family photograph album, a species of personal album that extended the visual communication of the scrapbooks more fully into the public realm. Florence took the memory work of her scrapbook training and translated it into the more substantive visual expression of the Babbitt photograph album, a message reflecting the influence of the cartes-de-visite craze that erupted at midcentury and served as a precursor to the more solemn family photograph album. The mania for cartes de visite established the cultural habit of individuals memorializing and visually displaying portraits of their intimates. The first commercial photograph albums were created for cartes de visite, or photographic portraits pasted to a cardboard calling card, a product patented in 1854 by the French photographer A.A.E. Disderi. The miniature 2½ x 4 portraits became a sensation in Europe and in the United States, where everyone “bought them, swapped, them, and displayed them” in albums crafted by Disderi for that very purpose (Henisch and Henisch 150–51). As the Scientific American marveled in 1863, “Never since Daguerre succeeded in making the first sun picture, have daguerreotypists or photographers been so overwhelmed with business as they are at the present time” (“The Photograph Albums” 216). People wanted not only their own portraits but also the portraits of family, friends, the famous, and the infamous, all of which they collected and exhibited in the first photographic albums (Welling 169–70). “Luxuriously bound, the album quickly claimed a place among the appointments of the Victorian home,” Langford claimed (24), an insight the Scientific American confirms: “every young girl expects to receive one of these books” (216). But more than a site for collecting images, the carte-de- visite album was also a site for communication. Social communication, especially a participatory communication, characterized the material use and the material site of cartes-de-visite albums. Early expressions of the family photograph albums, cartes-de-visite collections were considered forms Remembering Women 147 of social entertainment. “Etiquette manuals and home decorating guides classed albums with games, philosophical toys, and other objects of amusement for entertaining guests in those awkward periods after dinner, or simply during ordinary visits” (130), Elizabeth Siegel noted, and the entertainment derived from the joint engagement in visual communication. Guests were expected not only to admire the array of portraits but also to contribute by writing or drawing in the album. They also frequently left their own cartes de visite to be incorporated into the album, integrating the visitor into the fabric of the family and extending the family beyond its immediate circle. The material site of both albums and interaction also emphasizes their communicative function. Visitors engaged in carte-de-visite merriment within the parlor, a permeable realm wherein private and public existed coextensively. Defying the conventional separation of the spheres, the parlor, a mainstay of the Victorian middle-class home, opened outward to the world and inward to the intimacy of family life. As Thad Logan described, the parlor existed simultaneously as both an “inner sanctum for the family and the public face of the home,” shaped by a paradoxical desire to connect to the public world while remaining safely within the confines of the private one (124). Here, “social networks were cultivated, status was on view, and home met world” (Siegel 127). Within the parlor, the family performed, displaying itself to others in a variety of ways, including the genre of the carte-de- visite album, “a source of pride and a repository of identity” (Logan 126). Florence drew on the carte-de-visite tradition for her visual communication but integrated an element of the sacred into her visual message and into her remembering. The Babbitt album points to the influence of the carte-de-visite mania and its -par ticipatory social communication, for it includes pages with five oval or rectangular slots designed for small portraits. However, whereas cartes-de-visite albums shared a visual connection to the family photograph album, the former functioned as entertainment while the latter evolved as a solemn record, a weightier form of social communication. While encompassing the delight in visual display that characterized the carte-de-visite album, the family photograph album eschewed its predecessor’s frivolity and assumed an almost sacred stature in the parlor, a stature well represented by the dignity of the Babbitts’ weighty tome. Bound in rich brown leather with a clasp integrated into the design of a belt, the album’s precious contents are guarded by the protective power of a strap and hook. Each of the forty-three thick gilt-edged pages is slotted for pictures of varying sizes and arranged in a specific pattern: two facing pages with five gold-framed small oval or rectangular openings for cartes de visite followed by a series of pages designed to hold one larger cabinet image, popular in the 1870s. Prefaced with a detailed index, the material presence of the album confirms its importance and dignity, confirming as well the importance and dignity of Florence as a remembering woman. The significance of the family photograph album as a visual statement about the family’s identity and stature gestures to the significance of Florence herself as 148 Kristie S. Fleckenstein the visual communicator who created, compiled, and curated the family album. Like the cartes-de-visite albums, the family photograph album featured portraits. But, unlike the cartes-de-visit albums, the family photograph album, including the Babbitt album, more closely resembled the family Bible than a parlor toy. Siegel hypothesized an intimate association between family album and family Bible, pointing out that one enterprising Bible publisher in Philadelphia devised a Bible in 1862 with special pages for family photographs (116). In addition, many Bible publishers moved into the album business and “often advertised both sorts of books together” (117). As the nineteenth century wore on, Siegel recounted, the “photograph albums gradually replaced Bibles,” making their way “to the parlor’s center table and, by extension, into the family’s center” (119). The Babbitt photograph album aligned with this trend, “blurring the distinction between photography’s secular and spiritual capacities” (Batchen 68). Situated at center stage in the parlor, the Babbitt family album acquired meaning within “the context of a reciprocal relationship between the public, commercial sphere and the private, domestic one” (Siegel 2). As a result, it possessed “cultural authority, religious respectability, and a sense of permanence and preservation” (Siegel 120), and Florence, the visual agent and communicator, used that authority, respectability, and permanence to become Florence the visual rhetor.

Florence as Visual Rhetor Propelled by visual agency and visual communication, Florence as a remembering woman became Florence the visual rhetor, someone who employed the affordances of the photograph album to shape a specific set of visual claims. Within the complex and powerful site of the parlor, Florence constructed a visual argument about the Babbitt family’s laudable ancestral history, its familial virtues, and its performance of communal virtues, circulating that tripartite argument publicly and privately. She made these claims manifest through her rhetorical decisions. Rather than a static form, albums are mobile, replete with temporal and spatial possibilities, abounding in options for composition (Batchen 69). In responding to this mobility, Babbitt, like other remembering women of her generation, exercised what Lawrence Prelli called “rhetorical selectivity,” or a process of selection that determines what to include and exclude in response to a particular occasion and audience (2). Such selectivity, Prelli claimed, transforms the artifact into visual rhetoric and the creator into a visual rhetor (11). That rhetorical selectivity surfaces in various ways in the composition of the Babbitt family photograph album, from Florence’s selection of specific individual poses to the arrangement of those poses. Siegel confirmed this rhetorical selectivity, arguing that “how individuals organized and displayed these family collections mattered to different degrees” (125). What to include and where to position particular photographs all constituted decisions Bab- bitt made. To illustrate, the twelfth image in the Babbitt album features Florence’s Remembering Women 149

Fig. 3. Nora Babbitt (two years old, with puppy) and Nora Babbitt (two years old, in carriage). Photographs taken by Kristie S. Fleckenstein. daughter Nora as a two-year-old; she sits with a dog in her lap. (See fig. 3.) Loose photographs in the family papers, however, reveal multiple poses of this photograph, suggesting that Florence exercised her own judgment in choosing which pose to include. Notes on the back of the photograph confirm that surmise. One brief entry alludes to a possible disagreement, for Florence wrote that she liked one of two poses “as well as the other.” She resolved the disagreement by making the executive decision to include both disputed poses because, as she wrote on the back of the contested photograph, the pose of Nora in a carriage (as opposed to Nora with a puppy) emphasized her young age. Such historical traces reveal the extent to which Florence tapped into her visual agency and grappled with the affordances of a genre to craft an argument about her family’s ethos. More specifically, the Babbitt family album can be viewed as a three-part visual claim designed and executed by this remembering woman to celebrate her family’s good character. Florence’s most sustained argument as a visual rhetor concerned the family ethos. “The varied practices of arranging, displaying, and sharing the first photograph -al bums in the domestic parlor allowed albums to present the self and create a visible past and future,” Siegel contended (116). The family ethos Florence constructed for public view emphasizes ancestry, civic virtue, and emotional well-being, elements 150 Kristie S. Fleckenstein that collectively assert the respectability—the social credibility—of the family. The first move in Florence’s three-part visual argument began with her arrangement of the photographs to emphasize the propriety of their family lineage. For instance, the first picture in the album features Mrs. Susannah Martin Smalley, Florence’s grand- mother on her father’s side. The photographic evidence of an ancestor whose birth occurred in the late eighteenth century performs three functions: it attests to the existence of that known ancestor, it underscores the presence of a family that prizes the visual record of that ancestor, and it highlights the survival of that visual record as well as, by extension, the survival of that ancestral line. Continuing this argument, Florence then matched the image of “Grandma Susan” with a photograph of Dr. John W. Babbitt, Will’s father, joined on the following page with Will’s mother, Phil- inda Walker Babbitt. The Smalleys again appear immediately after, with Florence placing her father’s and mother’s portraits next. Thus, by means of visual arrangement within the album’s first five pages, this remembering woman “introduced” the two branches from which her immediate family stemmed, celebrating the present by situating it within the past, a move she emphasized by positioning her own picture and then Will’s immediately after those of the parents and grandparent. Finally, Florence completed this segment of the argument’s visual arc by chronologically arranging fifteen portraits of Nora, the firstborn daughter, chronicling her evolution from infancy (two months old) to the late adolescence of her fifteenth birthday. Here, in Nora, as the culmination of the line visually extending back to Grandma Susan, the album demonstrates the family’s august past, its fruitful present, and its hopeful future, all of which conspire to highlight the second visual claim: the familial performance of civic virtues. Florence employed the Babbitt family photograph album to celebrate the virtu- ous nature of her family, reflecting the family’s adherence to and performance of communal values. More than a visual mnemonic for one’s lineage, the photograph album also narrated a specific story of one’s familial identity. Marianne Hirsch referred to this as the existence of a “familial mythology, of an image to live up to, an image shaping the desire of the individual living in a social group” (8). Women as the family’s visual rhetors used the albums as “advertisements for their owners’ character, social networks, and status” (Siegel 10). Florence emblazoned the family’s civic virtues and the need to replicate those virtues, especially through her framing of Nora’s and Alice’s portraits. The two oldest of four daughters are bookended by the social and civic importance of their nearest ancestors. For instance, Nora’s fifteen portraits are preceded at one end by seven pictures of one great-grandparent, four grandparents, and two parents; at the other end of the sequence, Nora is contained by two formal portraits of Dr. Babbitt and his wife, Philinda, the only repeated images of grandparents to appear so close to the beginning of the album. The arrangement evokes the salience of the civic virtue that characterized Dr. Babbitt’s Remembering Women 151 life and to which Nora must aspire. “Honored for his integrity and sterling worth,” Dr. Babbitt served Ypsilanti in myriad capacities, and that service was recognized when a short street was named after him (“Babbitt St.”). With his image at the beginning and the end of Nora’s array, the album not only emphasizes the reality of his repute but also signals Nora’s responsibility to live in the light (and shadow) of those Babbitt virtues. A similar dynamic characterizes the position of a cluster of five portraits of Alice, the family’s second daughter. Alice is framed at one end by the Babbitt grandparents and Will’s younger brother George and at the other end by Florence’s brother Albertus and the Smalley grandparents. If Dr. Babbitt evokes the ethic of communal service, then the Smalley father and son evoke the ethic of patriotic service. Mortimer Smalley volunteered for service in the 27th Regiment of the Michigan Infantry, for which service he was subsequently rewarded a land grant. But equally if not more significant is the portrait of Babbitt’s younger brother Albertus, who accompanied his father as Michigan’s youngest drummer boy (“Florence Smal- ley Babbitt” 1). From 1863, when the unit was formed, until it mustered out, in 1865, the Smalleys—father and son—saw action in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. At this point in the family photograph album, Albertus is, in fact, pictured as a youth in his infantry regalia, armed with only drum and drum sticks, a rhetorical decision emphasizing that Smalley-Babbitt virtue begins not in adulthood but in childhood. By situating Nora and Alice within the embrace of those virtues, Florence made them heirs to, witnesses of, and vehicles for similar virtues. Finally, Florence crafted a visual argument that moved beyond middle-class respectability in which “family members comported themselves with upmost propriety” (Siegel 128); she selected and arranged photographs to argue visually for the emotional heart of the family. Hirsch pointed out that family consists of more than a compendium of people related by blood. It consists of people related by emotions. “Family,” she said, “is structured by desire and disappointment, love and loss” (5). Photographs, she continued, and, by extension, photograph albums, “as the only material traces of an irrecoverable past, derive their power and their important cultural role from their embeddedness in the fundamental rites of family life” (5). The Babbitt family album celebrates these emotional connections. For Florence, the family identity extended beyond ancestral roots and good breeding. It concerned more than civic virtue and patriotic service. Rather, it embraced the joys and sorrows of family life. Perhaps the most poignant evidence of this are the photographs of the children that dominate the album. While Nora as the firstborn receives the lion’s share of visual attention, the four daughters all feature in various ways throughout the album. The album testifies to the importance of emotional bonds between parent and child and to the importance of those bonds holding together the disparate images that compose the family album. It is the logic of love that drew Florence to include the lost Theodore, nestling him between portraits of 152 Kristie S. Fleckenstein his great-aunt Marryette, sister of “Grandma Susan,” and his own sister Nan, born a year after his death. The pain of his death—the grief exemplified by the image of Theodore in his flower-strewn coffin—visually testifies to both the pain of deep loss and the comfort derived from family connections. It testifies, as well, to the importance of remembering both pain and comfort. In Florence’s hand, the family album became an emotional tapestry wherein portraits were stitched together by threads of love. Here in these pages, Florence wove the pathetic appeal of family affection throughout the logos of family lineage and the ethos of family virtues, in the process composing a multilayered visual argument that interlaced affection with ancestry. In doing so, she performed an act of remembering through the art of rhetoric.

Conclusion Patricia Bizzell contended that to find women in the rhetorical tradition, we must look where those women were speaking and writing, even if those venues deviate from the traditional public sphere (54). So, too, must we look to where women were crafting visual arguments, even if such a search takes us into such nontraditional rhetorical sites as the parlor. In this way we accrue much of value, as this examination of the Babbitt family photograph album demonstrates. First, a focus on Florence as a remembering woman illuminates the oft-overlooked influence of the everyday and the value of women as agents of vernacular visual rhetoric. It highlights the visual agency of women, who, like Florence, have left few traces in the annals of the public sphere. Second, this essay has stressed the importance of women as visual communicators and has underscored the power of women to represent themselves and their worlds, a power typically controlled and deployed by men. Not only did women seize the genre of the family photograph album to make visual statements about their families, but they also shaped and reshaped the genre conventions of the personal album to better facilitate their communication goals. Third, attending to Florence as a remembering woman highlights new venues of and for visual rhetoric. Rather than on the podium, Florence delivered her visual arguments in the parlor, using the genre of the photograph album to bridge the private and the public, rendering permeable the two spheres of influence in the Victorian era. By conceiving of the parlor as a stage for rhetorical performances and the photograph album as one such performance, this essay recovers sites, rhetors, and texts traditionally excluded from the rhetorical canon, thus changing how we understand that canon. It helps scholars honor remembering, and it helps them differently.

Note 1. While women organized the photograph in front of the camera, women also operated behind the camera, especially in postbellum America. In fact, many of the photographs of the Babbitt children were produced by Mrs. J. H. Parson of Ypsilanti, Michigan, who owned and operated her own studio in downtown Ypsilanti. Remembering Women 153

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“The Relief Corps.” National Tribune, July 18, 1895, Library of Congress, http://chronicling america.loc.gov/lccn/sn82016187/1895–07–18/ed-1/seq-6/. Rudisill, Richard. Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society. U of New Mexico P, 1971. Siegel, Elizabeth. Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photography Albums. Yale UP, 2010. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Women in the History of Rhetoric: The Past and the Future.” The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, edited by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe, U of Calgary P, 1999, pp. 9–31. Welling, William. Photography in America: The Formative Years 1839–1900. Thomas V. Crowell, 1978. “Ypsilanti’s Florence Smalley Babbitt 1847–1929.” Babbitt Family Papers, The Family Collec- tion, Fletcher-White Archives, Ypsilanti Historical Society, Ypsilanti, Michigan (accessed August 2, 2012). “I have always been significant to myself ” Alice James’s Pragmatic Activism

Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald

In 2010 Paula Marantz Cohen published a mystery novel entitled What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper. It’s a lively tale of how Alice James solved the case of the notorious Jack the Ripper while she lay on her invalid bed in the heart of London in 1889. Alice was able to accomplish this feat by using what she had learned from a lifetime of travel and conversation surrounded by the brilliant men who were her father, Henry, and her brothers, Henry and William, from her long, debilitating illnesses, and, most of all, from her writing—the diary she kept by her side. Cohen’s portrayal of Alice as a brilliant and witty observer of the cultural scene who solves the baffling crime that demoralized Scotland Yard and terrified all of London is a fair representation of what readers of her diary learn about the real Alice. Although the novel exaggerates the qualities of the James brothers and sister for the fun of the story, making Henry an indolent gourmand, William a restless workaholic, and Alice a detective, it’s clear Cohen knows her subjects, and her portrayal of Alice is illuminating. Alice’s condition prevents her from physically following out the clues left by the killer, but she knows what must be done to identify him. William, called on the case because of his fame as a psychologist, arrives at Alice’s apartment, and she lectures him on what to look for when he examines the Ripper’s letters to the police, the quality of the paper and ink, and the patterns of the letters. He protests that she’s hardly trained in murder investigations. “No,” Alice responds. “But I’ve had more time to think about it. I lie in bed and imagine what might have happened. I have been doing such things since childhood” (Cohen 65). Alice’s emphasis on the imagination, on the mind, requires that her brothers and her readers understand that the activity of the mind indeed constitutes experience, 156 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald as useful as visiting the scene of the crime. Throughout the novel, Alice reverts to this idea of mind as unique experience, an action to hold dear. “We must bear whatever pain we have and keep our minds sharp,” Alice says as she describes her detection method to the orphaned boy she’s taken on as a servant. “Because our minds are the one thing we have that is truly ours—that no one can take away from us. To be able to think is a rare and precious thing” (Cohen 150). As Cohen has her assert, Alice had reason to value the mind above everything else and not simply because of the physical limitations that prevented much overt physical action. She was born in 1848, the youngest child of five and the only girl in the James family. Her father was the philosopher and renowned writer and lecturer on religion; her two eldest brothers were the remarkable William, Harvard professor and developer of the field of psychology and the philosophy of pragmatism, and Henry, one of the most important American novelists of the nineteenth century. Growing up, the two younger brothers, “Wilkie” and Rob, were lively and adept at conversation and disputation, although their service in the American Civil War scarred them both and blighted their lives and careers. Her mother and her Aunt Kate appeared to be strong women, but their strength was perhaps muted by their Victorian sensibilities and the dominance of Henry Sr. in the family, and the diary and letters make clear that Alice was not given much part in the witty dinner conversations or deep philosophic study the others engaged in. Instead, she was by all accounts alternately teased and ignored, though indulged. Henry, the brother most sensitive to Alice, wrote in his Autobiography, “In our family group, girls seem scarcely to have had a chance” (Edel 2: 49). On the surface, perhaps. But, as Jean Strouse pointed out in comparing Alice James to Virginia Woolf’s imaginary Shakespeare’s sister, “The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science, Alice simply lived” (xiv). Constricted by the expectations of her culture and her family, Alice resolutely used her own experience to give herself a chance, expanding and challenging those constraints and the very definition of what might count as experience. Little has been written about the only daughter in the James family. Jean Strouse published the only biography in 1980, providing the details of her life and personality: her birth in New York, her travel with family, her life in New England after the deaths of her parents in 1882, her meeting Katharine Loring, with whom she lived until her death in England, in 1892. There is one full collection of her letters as well as an edited collection. A book written by her niece and titledAlice James: Her Brothers/ Her Journal goes on for seventy-five pages with only one mention of its principal topic. Most information about her comes from various mentions by her brothers, friends, and family members in letters and autobiographies. This absence is one reason the mystery novel is so intriguing: it suggests Alice as a person noteworthy enough to deserve the kind of afterlife that Jane Austen, Dorothy Parker, and Vir- ginia Woolf have been given in popular novels that feature them as personalities.1 “I have always been significant to myself” 157

Unlike these women, Alice never had a public life. And yet, very much like them, she used writing to craft her life and to record her experience. Her diary leaves a clear record that not only notes her experience but demonstrates how the act of writing became experience to her. Writing itself gave her an understanding of the world that allowed her to sit at the same intellectual table as the brilliant men in her family. Alice asserted her intellect in letters as well as in the diary. After she heard her father say that none of his children “save William” showed any intellectual taste, she declared in a letter to William in mock horror: “just fancy that now! and me among the group—who all unconscious, constantly give birth to the profoundest subtleties and am ‘so very clever’” (A. James, Her Life 256). Or, in a letter to Aunt Kate about her London visit, “Forgive all this egotism but I have to be my own Boswell and it would be a pity for you to lose a little local colour by artificial bashfulness” (A. James, Her Life 201). Cohen’s mystery novel plays on Alice’s extraordinary intellect of course, depicting Alice as a savant who both deduces and intuits solutions and suggesting the amateur sleuth’s method: experiencing ideas by in some fashion trying them out, learning from the world the truth of the experience, and only then drawing conclusions. A description early in the novel indicates how Alice acquired her opinion on Home Rule for the Irish state: “She was the most Irish of the children and, since settling in London, had acquired the hint of a brogue, as though intent on making her loyalties clear at once. She also voiced those loyalties directly whenever she could: her admiration for Gladstone, her passionate support for Irish Home Rule, and her outrage at the condition of workhouses and orphanages. She read three newspapers a day, received a steady stream of visitors, and wrote frequent letters to Parliament and regular entries in her diary” (Cohen 19). Cohen’s description is taken almost directly from the diary (except for the brogue): “Alice puts herself in the position of the poor Irish by listening to those around her; she reads everything and talks with those who come to visit her. Most of all, she writes.” This grounding in experience and the testing of that experience as a path toward practical reality was an idea that her brother William had advanced twenty years before Alice’s residence in England. In 1867 William and a group of Boston intellectual men had formed what came to be called the Metaphysical Club, which met to consider philosophical and cultural issues of the day. Including men like the mathematician and logician C. S. Peirce, the paleontologist Louis Agassiz, and the writer and publisher Richard Henry Dana, as well as several other notable Boston Brahmins, the group wrestled with how to reconcile faith and new science and how to confront the horror of the recently ended Civil War. William and Peirce together derived a philosophical approach to ideas that attempted to explain and guide understanding of the bewildering facets of postbellum American life. The philosophy they came up with, which they called “pragmatism,” was based on the principle of experience as philosophy. The idea of what somethingis, they thought, is what that something 158 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald does. Thus, action and experience not only reflected ideas or truths but also tested and created them. William described Peirce’s definition of pragmatism this way in his essay on the topic twenty years after Peirce first proposed it: “Our beliefs are really rules for action,” and “to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance.” -Wil liam emphasized the importance of individual use and choice in deciding matters of truth: “You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience” (W. James, Pragmatism 4). As he saw it, pragmatism offered not so much solutions as a method for movement, “a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities might be changed” (4). With this new kind of epistemology, James and Peirce hoped to help engage thinkers in “right conduct” that would lead to better action and hence better ideas about cultural and political matters such as war, science, spirituality, and democracy. The pragmatists offered principles that would help people thinkpragmatically, that is, in ways that aligned beliefs and actions, actions and consequences. They insisted that experience, not a priori assumptions, determines the use or the “truth” of an idea and that therefore “truths” are contingent rather than static. Experience and experiment alter conceptions, and the wider the experience the greater the grounds for holding a belief. Since humans can’t experience or investigate everything, the pragmatist cautions humility, a willingness to recognize human fallibility that comes with a willingness to change. Alice’s life shows that the philosophy her brother helped initiate moved far beyond the meditations of the Metaphysical Club and in ways that those male thinkers, for all their emphasis on an understanding of consequences, might not have anticipated. William often wrote letters to Alice that indicate he paid some attention to her opinions, and he may have talked about his pragmatic ideas with his younger sister as they were forming. Whether he did so or not, the diary indicates that she not only understood the principles of pragmatic thought but acted on them. The diary, imbued with pragmatic action of the kind that James and Peirce delineated, is a record of how those principles of experience, testing, and belief get worked out in the life of a woman without vocation and with the limiting experience of nearly constant and lifelong sickness and confinement. The story of Alice’s life is in some ways a tragic one. But if it presents a kind of cautionary example of how the constraints on women in the nineteenth century prevented them from acting fully in the world, it is also an illustration of how a powerful will and intellect can choose to confront those constraints. Alice’s experience, captured in her little book, suggests that her brother’s powerful pragmatic idea should and must account for her experience too. Writing the diary constituted action, an activism demonstrated by an intense engagement with the world around her and within her. The will she exercised in writing it was an assertion of herself as someone “I have always been significant to myself” 159 who mattered, a woman who counted, if only to herself. As we’ve argued elsewhere, the contributions of many women who were part of the American pragmatist movement at the end of the nineteenth century were ignored or misinterpreted. Alice James is only the most dramatic example of this omission. Not only was she never published; she was never a public figure at all. In this essay, we argue that she should be influential, not that she has been. Her insistence on the value of her own experience, her own significance as a thinker, is a hallmark of her writing. James asserted that her experience mattered to her and should have mattered to others. As Peirce describes it, the value of pragmatic thinking lies in the fact not only that it is based in experience but that it is communal: “if there were an infinite community of inquirers and an infinite amount of time, inquiry would result in truth (xx).” Alice James’s insistence that her experience add to inquiry gives feminist rhetorical theorists a way to claim the one and the many, the individual experience that can alter the thinking of the group. That will and her need for worth were heightened no doubt by her physical ailments. The defining element of Alice’s life appeared to be illness—hysterical fits and tantrums, short-term paralysis, suicidal depressions—from the time she was eighteen. For more than two decades, doctors variously diagnosed maladies such as neurasthenia (an unspecified nerve ailment suffered by many nineteenth-century middle-class women), rheumatic gout, cardiac complication, nervous hyperesthe- nia, spinal neurosis, and spiritual crisis. Early in her series of diagnoses came this assessment from a doctor: he said her condition stemmed from “depression because. . .she read and thought too much” (Fisher 235). As the medical experts of the day would have it, Alice’s spinal problems, her suddenly paralyzed limbs, and her depression resulted from study. Her illnesses at least provoked the attention of parents whose primary interest lay in their sons, especially Henry and William. The suggestion from a number of family biographers is that Alice’s illnesses were at least in part a reaction to being ignored. As one of those biographers, Paul Fisher, put it in describing Alice’s illnesses, “an illness could be a formidable asset for a nineteenth century woman” (237). But Alice’s primary asset was not her illness but her mind. Despite the medical prescription that would have her avoid mental activity, Alice persisted, even during the Boston years when she was so often ill, reading voraciously in her father’s study, talking with her brothers and her female friends, and thinking. She did think a lot; the mind, after all, was the primary commodity of the James family. The family’s almost incessant traveling between Europe and America had given her a broad, if largely self-taught, education. She was expert in French, and she read many of her brothers’ books whether they wanted her to or not. She continually commented in letters and in the diary on her own right to think. As she joked, “What I have always maintained against strenuous opposition, [is] that my Mind is Great!” (Diary 61). 160 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald

It’s true that Alice had examples around her that might have given her restless intellect a more direct outlet. In 1868 Julia Ward Howe and other Boston women had founded the New England Women’s Club, which was modeled on the social and intellectual male clubs such as the Saturday Club and the Metaphysical Club. Women writers including Harriet Beecher Stowe had opened the door for many others to submit work for publication. Annie Fields, the wife of the publisher James Fields, conducted her own salon, which attracted famous writers and thinkers. And Katharine Loring, who was to become Alice’s lifelong friend, could, as Alice noted, do anything: “There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood and drawing water to driving runaway horses and educating all the women in North America” (Diary 10). While still in Boston, and between bouts of sickness, Alice began the exercise of will as she attempted what her parents would see as normal female life. Like many well-heeled women of her generation in Boston, she joined a number of charitable organizations and clubs, including the Bee, a social and charity group that sewed garments for Union soldiers and orphans. She served as president. She became friends with Elizabeth Peabody, a reformer and speaker (who was disapproved of by her father), and in 1868 joined the Female Humane Society of Cambridge, which provided relief to women who were indigent or ill (Strouse 136). Most interesting was her work with the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, one of the first distance learning projects, where she met Katharine Loring. Begun by Anna Eliot Ticknor to foster women’s education and independence, the Society offered courses in languages, history, geography, and other fields to women in rural, isolated areas to help them eventually achieve degrees. Katharine recruited Alice to teach history. Alice’s diary entries on the Society constitute one of the most detailed records we have of this educational experiment. This activity was one of the few instances of outside work that Alice engaged in, and she didn’t do it long. But all of her activities in her youth from the late 1860s until her most serious breakdown, in 1878, suggest Alice’s preoccupations and desires, her beginning understanding of class and economy, her belief in education, and her desire to raise consciousness among women of their own need to become more self-sustaining. “When will women begin to have the first glimmer,” she asked as a rhetorical question in the diary, “that above all other loyalties is the loyalty to Truth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and country are as nothing to that” (Diary 60). Even as she felt herself to be increasingly dependent on the ministrations of others, her doctors, her parents, her brothers, and Katharine, she worked to act on what experience was teaching her to believe. None of these understandings was more important than the last: the duty to self as a route to truth. Ironically, Alice’s economic and cultural privilege limited her access to the world. As Janet Wolff has pointed out, women of particular class situations were caught in the private sphere: “The cult of domesticity was strong among the middle class by the 1830s, emphasizing the sanctity and purity of family life, and the moral task “I have always been significant to myself” 161 of women as mothers and wives” (13–14). Her father attested to it. In an essay in 1853 titled “Woman and the Woman’s Movement,” Henry Sr. wrote: “Women are [the] inferior of man . . . in passion, inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength.” Learning was not only unnecessary but a positive handicap for women. “Learning and wisdom do not become her,” Henry Sr. claimed; the woman’s role was to bear children and “simply to love and bless the man” (284). Alice’s strong emotional ties to both her father and her brothers made her persist in at least partially conforming to an ideal that they had assigned to the female sex, even when she knew herself to be far from that ideal and knew the ideal to be far from ideal. The family sentiment was of course far from rare in Victorian America, but it was especially frustrating to a brilliant woman in a household full to overflowing with male intellect and male disdain for women’s intellect. The irony of being a woman both smart and powerless was clear to Alice. Alice wrote to her sister-in-law Alice after the birth of a third son, “I am sorry he has chosen the inferior sex, though I suppose it is less on one’s conscience to have brought forth an oppressor rather than one of the oppressed, and you won’t have to look forward to evenings spent in Lyceum Hall trembling lest he should not be engaged for the German [a dance] or left dangling at supper time” (Gunter 80). Although Alice understood women’s need for independence and escape from the humiliating role of waiting to be asked to dance, her debilitating physical condition and continual emotional ailments in some ways sealed a fate that she might have es- caped otherwise, even with male family disapproval. But as her letters and the diary show, in spite of all the constraints placed on her, she knew how to act. She could use her mind. And, by her own definition, Alice was a success. Writing to William about her impending death after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she responded to his notions of her “tragedy”: “You must also remember that a woman by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied; so when I am gone, pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born. Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumble along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?” (Diary 15). Alice saw herself as successful because she understood her own “significance for myself.” In the private sphere to which she was confined, she defined for herself a radical philosophy that allowed her to live a difficult life and to die with courage. She used the fact of her chronic illness to forge new conceptions—ones that complemented and expanded William’s own—about what experience might consist of and how bigger definitions of experience might illuminate usable truths about human life. Alice’s life after l885, when she departed America for the last time, moved to England, and began to keep her diary, became an assertion of an activism located in writing, reflection, and self-awareness. More necessarily mental than physical, 162 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald

this activity could be called by one of the male Jameses’ favorite words: will. In 1912 William had written The Will to Believe, a study of how belief itself depends on a willingness to act. Decades earlier, Henry Sr. had exercised unrelenting will in giving up alcohol for good sometime around 1850 after his “vastation” and half a lifetime of al- coholism. In a revealing essay, “Temperance” (1851), Henry described a plan to combat his problem: “Like all habits, its [drunkenness] strength lies in a diseased will,” he determined (Fisher 108). “Will,” a man’s moral character, can cure disease. When Alice left for England twenty years later, after years of hysterical fits and black depressions, she exercised a will no less determined than her father’s had been to find a way to confront what her brother Henry had termed her “practical problem of life.”2 Alice began her diary on the last day of May 1889. She was to keep it until the day before she died three years later. Once in England, she moved several times in London near Henry but finally found a small house in the seaside town of Leaming- ton. Attended by a nurse and the faithful Katharine, she experienced weakness and illness so pronounced that she seldom left her bed. She depended entirely on her mind to create experience, relying on her conversations with those who, like Henry, visited her, on her wide reading, and, once she began, on her writing. Her diary is, to use lines from Emily Dickinson, Alice’s letter to the world, a demonstration of her will, the struggle she faced between, as Leon Edel said, “the claim of life and the claim of death” (Introduction 16),3 a “triumph of self assertion,” as Strouse called it (326). The great literary critic F. O. Matthiessen, who published the influential group biography The James Family in 1947, claimed that Alice had “come to a more incisive understanding of some of the forces in modern society than either of her brothers” (275). The diary allowed Alice to use experience to reach understanding: “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen,” she wrote with wry humor in her first entry in 1889, “I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but one syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations” (Diary 25). The diary displays a remarkable self-knowledge and a powerful will to confront disability, in fact, to turn weakness into experience that she could use to comment not only on her own situation but on the situation of others, especially women. She wrote, “Owing to muscular circumstances my youth was not the most ardent, but I had to peg away pretty hard between 12 and 24 ‘killing myself,’ as someone calls it—absorbing into the bone that the better part is to clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters, and possess one’s soul in silence” (95). In October of the same year, she documented this struggle even more vividly. Writing about William’s treatise on hysteria, “The Hidden Self,” Alice put her own spin on the nature of that experience: As I used to sit immoveable reading in the library with waves of violent incli- nation suddenly invading my muscles taking some one of their myriad forms “I have always been significant to myself” 163

such as throwing myself out the window, or knocking off the head of the be- nignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table, it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon me, too. Conceive of never being without the sense that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie and that at some given moment you must abandon it all, let the dykes break and the flood sweep in, acknowledging your self abjectly impotent before the immutable laws. When all one’s moral and natural stock in trade is a tempera- ment forbidding the abandonment of an inch or the relaxation of a muscle, ‘tis a never-ending fight. (149) The dramatic description highlights both Alice’s violent impulses and the crushing difficulty of hiding desire. In the diary, she hid nothing, allowing her reader to see her attitude about the “immutable laws” of restraint placed on women by society and about family roles, the “natural stock in trade” that forbade an inch of abandonment in its women, especially in a family that so gloried in its remarkable men. One might expect self-revelation in a diary, but Alice’s words continually look outward as well, observing from her bed and wheelchair both the momentous and the ordinary events of her time; always paying attention to how experience, hers and others’, alters meaning; always alert to shifting contexts, local and global; and always ready to redefine the concept of “experience” more expansively: “I have an exquisite 30 seconds every day: after luncheon I come in from my rest and before the window is closed I put my head out and drink in a long draft of the spring—made of the yellow glory of the daffodils on the balcony, the swelling twiggery of the old trees in front, the breathless house-cleaning of the rooks, the gradation of the light in transition, and the mystery of birth in the air. What hours of roaming could give more intense absorption of the ever-recurring Miracle than these few moments which sink into my substance!” (106). Experience, she implied, lies in absorbing the small, immediate world: roaming to find it is unnecessary. What to others is a limitation can actually be a freedom, Alice suggested, an ability to free the mind, the seat of experience, to act. The pragmatic test of meaning-making lies in close observation, and Alice observed with a wide-angle and a close-up shot as she saw the “swelling twiggery,” the rooks, and the light as small instances of the “ever-recurring Miracle” in action. “Even in my microscopic field,” she said in July, two months after beginning the diary, “minute facts are perpetually taking place illustrative of the broadest facts of human nature” (Diary 48). The diary both illustrates and expands William’s developing ideas about pragmatic thought that had begun to be part of the intellectual conversation on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century and in which William was an active participant.4 In the diary, Alice took up the challenge that pragmatism presented: to make experience the test of ideas, to look to action and consequences 164 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald to determine meaning, to remain open to possibilities. Full of trenchant critique, of often radical thinking about timely issues of the day from the Irish question to imperialism, and of philosophical speculation about the nature of human existence, the diary shows how Alice made her own experience useful to the world of ideas, building and developing new experience as she listened, read, and wrote. One way to see the development of experience that alters ideas is in her persistent attention in her writing to the struggles of the working classes in England, which she witnessed and read about in newspaper and magazine accounts that told of the grinding poverty that was the lot of so many. Frequently, passages in the diary reflect on the contrasts between rich and poor. Writing in March 1890 about a police court hearing, as she read about it in the Times, Alice recounted the testimony of a housing inspector who visited a poor family that had not paid school board fines. The mother and all the children were filthy, and there was no food, for, although the father worked as a carpenter, he earned almost nothing. The inspector ended by reporting “quite proudly,” Alice noted, that the father and mother were “now undergoing two months’ hard labor.” The pitiful story haunted her, and she returned to it, reminded of another tale of poverty, another child taken away from its squalor to a home “of some sort, laid in a spotless crib and all the comfortable layer of soil removed when it began and roared all night and kept all the other children roaring for three days” (108). She used this story to “measure,” as she said, the first one: “The matron in despair sent off for the mother, who, on seeing it, immediately said: ‘Why, lay it on the floor’; which, being done, the child went sound asleep all night. But what could wring the hearts of pious old maids more than a baby lying on the floor of squalor?—baby meanwhile in bliss” (108). Widening the experience widens the basis for understanding, and Alice juxtaposed these vignettes of displaced children and desperate parents in the diary in a pragmatic illustration that abstract principles like cleanliness or even charity shouldn’t and cannot trump experience. The commentary Alice expressed in the diary came from her recognition that she must listen to others—especially those others who often went unheard—to know any truth. She spoke often of conversations with the children who lived close to her and with her nurse and maid, as well as with women who visited. All this observing and listening led Alice to new understandings, usually progressive ones, about not just private issues but also public ones: economics, politics, and nationhood. Just as Cohen has the amateur detective Alice claiming her allegiance to Ireland, Alice in fact became passionate about what was the burning cultural issue of the time in England, the question of home rule for Ireland. A devoted supporter of the Irish nationalist John Stuart Parnell and of William Gladstone, the Liberal British prime minister who favored home rule, she increasingly took the Irish cause as her own. Her passionate aversion to the rigidity and timidity she associated with the British class system and her denunciation of the consequences of colonial rule in Ireland “I have always been significant to myself” 165 and elsewhere that marked the system form many of the strongest passages in the diary. She wrote about the British colonial troops in Egypt quelling a rebellion of Dervishes, nomad Islam friars, by first firing on them and then cutting off water supplies: “We have just, with ‘great valour and skill,’ annihilated 1,500 more Dervishes, a ‘brilliant’ victory. After seven hours of fighting the starved naked wretches were cut to pieces” (53). Her biting sarcasm makes her position on British power clear. Whether reflections on human nature, on poverty and the class system, or on politics, Alice’s varied reading, her understanding of the importance of context, and her insistence on engaging alternate perspectives made her deeply knowledgeable about the world around her. “There is a very amusing distinction in the Nation about Mr. Parnell’s ‘fib’ in the House of Commons,” she noted, writing about Parnell’s troubles, “the blackness of which seems to consist of his having confessed to it. Other statesmen lie but have always had the virtue to deny doing so; such bad ethics must be good politics!” (30). She was especially critical always of those whose hypocrisy and position caused them to refuse to listen to those other perspectives and to use experience to make change. She didn’t leave herself out of considerations of class privilege and poverty. Conscious of her own privilege and position, Alice refused to gloss over her place in the system: “I shall always be a bloated capitalist, I suppose, an ignominy which, considering all things, I may as well submit to gracefully, for I shouldn’t bring much body to the proletariat; but I can’t help having an illogical feminine satisfaction that all my seven percents and six percents with which I left home have melted into fours; I don’t feel as if four percent is quite so base!” (Diary 88). But she commented that it was her “illogical” female perception that allowed her an insight that those even more privileged than she—the ruling male patriarchy—missed. One can do with less to provide more to others. This awareness of privilege and simultaneously of the special privilege afforded to those who are constrained by the limitations of class, economics, or gender offers a key to the power of the diary itself. Alice wrote often in letters and in diary entries about the peculiar impotence women must feel as they are consigned to roles of marriage or cheerful spinsterhood, that they can do no real work in the world and have no effect upon that world. In a letter to William’s wife, Alice, on the birth of their daughter, she wrote: “I feel as if I must hurry home and protect the innocent darling before she is analyzed, labeled and pigeonholed out of existence” (Her Life 161). It’s hard not to imagine that she was speaking of herself in that comment. The diary often meditates on the limitations imposed on women. Alice noted, for example, that her friend Constance Maud wanted to become a professional musician, “but as she is a daughter and not a son her tastes are set aside and she has to do parish work” (67). And joking with Katharine about temptation, she remembered a time when she had “one of those longings to commit sin that come over us every now and 166 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald then. All but gastronomic vice being denied by my miserable sex, I sent Nurse for some éclairs” (212). The diary is both a record of a developing sense of self-worth and a source for a method for how women might attain it. In her emphasis on writing and reflection as the path toward an understanding of worth, she, like Woolf after her, claimed self-worth and the exigence that commands it. The diary as a genre is an especially appropriate way for a woman such as Alice to lay claim to self-worth. Diaries were traditionally a site for women’s writing, a private and therefore presumably acceptable outlet for expression. Alexandra Johnson’s The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Lifeinvestigates several women’s diaries, including Alice’s, noting that women’s diaries, unlike men’s, most often preceded public writing. Women kept diaries to find a voice or to give themselves permission to speak. For Alice, the Diary was not a prelude but the main event. She experimented with the traditional diary genre, playing with the distinction between the private form and the public tone and content. Occasionally, she wrote directly to some imagined audience beyond herself as she described an event or sharing an insight. “You would be amused,” she says, “if you saw the paces thro’ which I put poor little Nurse.” Then she laughed at herself, sharing the joke with the reader: “In winter she has to applaud me Mind, in summer me beauty” (76). That she intended an audience is made clear at the end of the diary. During the last months of her life, she was forced to dictate entries to Katharine because of her failing strength. Two days before she died, she wrote her last entry, recording meticulously until the last her experience, now of pain and coming death: “I am being ground slowly on the grim grindstone of physical pain, and on two nights I had almost asked for K.’s lethal dose, but one steps hesitantly along such unaccustomed ways and endures from second to second” (Diary 232). Katharine herself wrote the last entry and attested to Alice’s need to write: “All through Saturday the 5th and even in the night, Alice was making sentences” (Diary 232). Pragmatist to the last, Alice ended with hope that her words might matter. She died on March 6, 1892. After Alice’s death, Katharine Loring had four copies of the diary published privately in 1894, one for each of Alice’s living brothers (Henry, William, and Rob) and one for herself. William received his copy first, in March, and, after reading it straight through, wrote to Henry: “The diary produces a unique and tragic impression of personal power venting itself on no opportunity. And such really deep humor! . . . It ought someday to be published. I am proud of it as a leaf in the family laurel crown, and your memory will be embalmed in a new way by her references to your person” (WJ to HJ March 24, 1894). But Henry was, as he wrote to William when the diary finally reached him in Italy, “terribly scared and disconcerted—I mean alarmed—by the sight of so many private names and allusions in print” (Letters of Henry James 1: 214–16). Worried about how he himself might come off through the pages and embarrassed by Alice’s distaste for the British, Henry would soon burn his copy. “I have always been significant to myself” 167

Yet, in that same letter, he admitted: “I find an immense eloquence in her passionate ‘radicalism’—her most distinguishing feature almost—which, in her, was absolutely direct and original (like everything was in her); un-reflected, un-caught from entou- rage or example. It would really have made her, had she lived in the world, a feminine ‘political force’” (Letters of Henry James 1: 214–16). William kept his copy of the diary, and his family eventually gave it to the Houghton Library at Harvard. Katharine, “less than pleased” by the older brothers’ reception, packed away the original and the two other copies (Strouse 323). In 1923, when William, Henry, and Robertson were all dead, she gave one copy to William’s elder son, Harry. For the next three decades, Katharine kept her one copy and the original handwritten diary. In 1933, when Katharine was eighty-four years old, Robertson’s daughter, Mary Vaux, asked for a copy to publish in a book about the James family. The result, Alice James: Her Brothers, Her Journal, with an introductory essay and editing by Anna Robeson Burr, was published in 1934. Burr did more than edit and introduce: she removed all the newspaper clippings, omitted whole days, and changed words, sentences, and punctuation. In 1964 Leon Edel published the original complete diary, including the newspaper clippings and annotations of all the people Alice observed. At the height of the novel What Alice Knew, Alice is of course the first to discover the Ripper’s true identity and to trace for her brothers the false trail the Jameses had been led down. As she reveals the last clue, “William seated himself on the edge of the bed. Henry drew his chair closer, and Alice leaned forward so that their heads were almost touching. Calmly and carefully they pieced the thing together” (Cohen 316). Years later, after William and Alice were long dead, the novel puts Henry at an art opening facing what might be yet another serial murderer: “If only William and Alice were here, he thought wistfully, they would turn it all over, the three of them. Who knows where it would lead?” (Cohen 341). The willingness to “turn it all over” together, using experience and reflection and speculation, defines the pragmatist. At the end of the novel, Alice supersedes her brothers in that role. And at the end of her life, her diary made her experience matter as much as theirs

Notes 1. Stephanie Barron’s detective series features Jane Austen as a Miss Marple–like detective, and Dorothy Parker has occasioned a series of detective novels as well (J. J. Murphy and Agatha Stanford). Virginia Woolf was the inspiration for and a starring character in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. 2. Two years after her death, Henry wrote to his brother about the diary, which Katha- rine had recently copied and sent to both brothers. Neither had known of its existence before. Commenting on her writing, he noted her strong will: “the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a ‘well’ person—in 168 Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald the usual world—almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life—as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc.” (H. James, Letters 1:215.) Henry clearly saw the “element of equality” missing in the life of Alice and her illness as in part willed response to that fact. 3. Alice wrote about Dickinson, whom she admired, in her diary this way: “It is reas- suring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate, they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle.” She quoted Dickinson’s poem “How dreary to be somebody” and noted that it “expresses the highest point of view of the aspiring soul” (227). 4. William traveled to Europe often for professional as well as personal reasons. In 1889, he gave a series of lectures on his Principles of Psychology, discussing philosophy and psychology. He visited Alice and Henry at Leamington, which Alice recorded in the diary (Fisher 500). See also R.W.B. Lewis’s study of the family, The Jameses, for William’s professional travels to discuss philosophical positions in America and Europe (405).

Works Cited Burr, Ann Robeson, editor. Alice James: Her Brothers/Her Journal. Dodd, Mead, 1934. Cohen, Paula Marantz. What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper. Sourcebooks, 2010. Edel, Leon. Henry James. 5 volumes, J. B. Lippincott, 1953–1972. Fisher, Paul. House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family. Henry Holt, 2008. Gunter, Susan. Alice in Jamesland. The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James. U of Nebraska P, 2009. James, Alice. The Diary of Alice James. Edited by Linda Simon, Northeastern UP, 1999. ———. Her Write/His Name: Her Life in Letters.Edited by Linda Anderson, Thoemmes, 1996. ———. The Death and Letters of Alice James. Edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Exact Change, 1997. James, Henry, Sr. The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James. Edited by William James, James R. Osgood & Co., 1884. ———. “Woman and the Woman’s Movement.” Putnam’s Monthly, no. 1, 1853, pp. 279–88. James, Henry. Henry James Letters. Edited by Leon Edel, 2 volumes, Harvard UP, 1974. ———. “Notes of a Son and Brother.” Henry James’ Autobiography, edited by F. W. Dupee, Criterion Books, 1956. James, William. Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909). Harvard UP, 1975. ———. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Longmans, Green, 1912. Johnson, Alexandra. The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Hidden Life. Anchor Press, 1998. Lewis, R.W.B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. Anchor Press, 1991. Matthiessen, F. O. The James Family. Knopf, 1961. “I have always been significant to myself” 169

Pierce, Charles Sanders. Selected Writings: Values in a Universe of Chance. Edited by Philip J. Wiener, Dover, 1958. Strouse, Jean. Alice James: The Life of the Brilliant but Neglected Younger Sister of William and Henry James. Houghton-Mifflin, 1980. Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. U of California P, 1990. Defying Stereotypes An Indian Woman Freedom Fighter

Gail M. Presbey

What images arise in our minds when we think back on India’s freedom movement? Perhaps we remember Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, and Mu- hammad Ali Jinnah, the key characters in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 epic film, Gandhi. The film also featured Mirabehn (Madeline Slade) and Gandhi’s devoted wife, Kasturba. It portrayed Sarojini Naidu leading a key nonviolent protest. Lala Lajpat Rai and Abdul Ghaffar Khan are also well known. But the women freedom fighters who defied the State are seldom portrayed. Likewise, when we think of freedom fighters who did not espouse nonviolence, we think of Bhagat Singh or the Bengali Terrorists in the Maniktala Secret Society, all men (Heehs 20). In India there have been attempts to remember both men and women freedom fighters for their valiant efforts, violent or nonviolent. To what extent are the women’s stories known and lauded? Are they recognized as central to the freedom struggle? This essay looks in depth at one such freedom fighter, then takes stock of women’s reputation as part of the freedom struggle in India. When I was traveling in India in 2005 looking for people who had known or met Gandhi and had continued to live out a philosophical and applied practice of liberation and nonviolence, I found many remarkable women and men, but one woman stood out for her embodiment of personal values of her own choice. Rukshmani Bhatia told me about the stage of her life when she was a daring bomb-thrower and later an armed guard for the freedom movement. Born in 1928, from the age of fourteen she was a precocious, brave, and dedicated activist for India’s liberation from British imperialism. Early on, through Gandhi’s influence, Bhatia decided to live a celibate life. To share her story now is an act of historical recovery. Her contribution to the movement is not well known; even chronicles of peace movements often focus on the men in the movement (Rassool 28–30). In the Government of India’s collection Defying Stereotypes 171 of narratives of forty-four freedom fighters, only seven are women (Joshi). When are our sheroes going to get the attention they deserve, so that they can become role models for others? I have found no scholarly report on Bhatia in print. However, it is not enough at this point in scholarship merely to note that women played a role in history. Previous scholars have pointed out that mere “recovery of buried narratives” and “ahistorical celebrationism” of women who are no longer invisible is not enough; we need gender analysis as well (Andrade 93). I take great interest in the fact that Bhatia found a way to exercise her power and agency without allowing men—whether husbands, gurus, fathers, or grandfathers—to have the final say as decision makers in her life. To be self-directing and self-governing, she chose a path other than marriage and child rearing. However, my study is qualitative and is not intended to make general claims about single women in India. Nor do I intend to suggest that married women in India cannot find liberation and autonomy for themselves. Rather, I present Bhatia’s story simply to challenge some of our preconceived ideas about the restricted roles of women in the liberation struggle and India’s current context. Uma Narayan has explained that the image of the devoted Indian wife practicing sati and going willingly to her death upon her husband’s death has become popular in the Western imagination, out of proportion to the small degree that this “traditional” ritual was ever practiced in India (61–69). In contrast, we haven’t heard much about independent Indian women. Likewise, in the literature that explores Gandhi’s relationship to women, the emphasis is often on the devoted women who gave their all to him. We hear mostly about the unfailing devotion of such women as Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), who dedicated herself to Gandhi’s cause from the time she left her home in England until the last years of his life, and his grandnieces Manu and Abha, who served as his “walking sticks” and 24/7 nurses in his old age. Bhatia is not in this company. For one, she was not as close to Gandhi; perhaps this distance helped her to critique him and his proposals more objectively. On some issues she followed his advice to the letter; on others, she parted ways with him. She showed an independence of thought and was not cowed by male authority figures.

Rukshmani Bhatia I had a chance to meet Bhatia when both she and I marched for miles along the route that Gandhi took in 1930 during his historic salt march. The occasion was the seventy-fifth anniversary reenactment of the march, in 2005, led by Gandhi’s great- grandson Tushar Gandhi. It’s important to note that the original 1930 march and campaign to harvest salt in defiance of the British ban on the activity owed much of its success to women. While Gandhi specifically picked seventy-nine men from his ashram to be marchers, to the consternation of women who wanted to participate, women across India made salt and went to jail for it. As Usha Mehta, who spent four years in jail for the liberation cause (Joshi 175) explained, “6 April 1930 saw 172 Gail M. Presbey

Rukshmani Bhatia. Photograph taken by Gail Presbey.

thousands of women throwing off their veils and striding to the sea, undaunted, unprotected. All those who watched women carrying pitchers of sea-water and salt instead of deadly weapons stood awestruck. . . . As many as 17,000 women were convicted for the lawbreaking” (Mehta 103). While walking, I had a chance to get to know Bhatia informally and asked permission to interview her at length, which I did along the march’s route in Gujarat on March 14, 2005. She explained that she had been born in 1928 and began her life as an activist at age fourteen, in 1942. On August 15, 1942, she was first arrested for protesting. It was also the day that Mahadev Desai, the well-loved close follower and secretary of Mohandas Gandhi, died while imprisoned with Gandhi for their leadership in the Quit India Movement, which had just been launched on August 9, 1942. The Quit India Movement, led by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, was a nationwide protest against British imperialism. Indians wanted to rule themselves, so they courted arrest through acts of civil disobedience that challenged Britain’s right to rule India. As Bhatia explained, since Desai’s death was sudden and unex- plained, students in her school suspected that the British had killed him. In solidarity with the freedom movement, she and other students had boycotted school since Defying Stereotypes 173

August 9 and kept vigil outside instead of attending class. To commemorate and to protest Desai’s death in prison, they marched through the streets of the city, encouraging shopkeepers to close their shops. As she explained: RB: And since I was in the front carrying the flag . . . I don’t know why, out of the thousands of students, they arrested only eight of us. I was the youngest. So I did not know they would be arresting me. . . . It was wartime so soldiers used to land at Bombay, so there was a truck full of soldiers from Australia. We knew them by the red color of their face that they were soldiers from Australia. We used to call them “red faced monkeys.” They were escorting us to the police station. I used to keep a chalk in my pocket. It was wartime, the government made us stand in queue for everything, we used to convert this queue into “Quit India.” So I wrote “Quit India” on the back of the army uniform of the soldier who was standing in front of me. GP: Even after you were arrested?! RB: Yes. So I was given three more days of legal imprisonment. It’s important to note that carrying the flag was one way for a young person to stand out in a crowd. It was a leadership role. Less than two months after Rukshmani carried the flag, a seventeen-year-old girl named Kanaklata Barua was shot and killed while protesting with the flag in a Quit India demonstration in Gohpur, Biswanath District, Assam. A statue erected there in her memory shows her holding up the flag (March 14, 2005). Thus, Bhatia’s experience of courts and jails began at age fourteen. At her court appearance at Mazgaon Court in Bombay, she explained, “my case came last, we were eight people, all Gujaratis. They wanted to divide Hindus from Muslims, and those from Maharashtra and from other places. So our town was divided. At that time, getting arrested was a sort of glamour. We were the first from ‘Andheri’ where ‘students’ were arrested and in large numbers. Otherwise they had only arrested leaders and grownups by then. So they gave a lot of publicity to us. So others were upset, thought that they were doing all the work and we were getting all the glamour and publicity.” Because they were minors, they were put in a “children’s home” rather than jail. The home was run by Liawati Munshi, a Gandhi follower who nevertheless disagreed with the Quit India Movement. Her husband was a famous writer and leader. At the home, Munshi kept the eight juvenile political prisoners apart from the others in the superintendent’s quarters, which had furniture, showers, and good food. When people from town visited them in prison, they would bring food. But Bhatia remembered that it was quite a while before someone from her family, her grandfather, visited her: “He didn’t scold me at that time. He brought everything. I was very fond of my grandfather, and he was very fond of me. So I think he just took me as a child.” 174 Gail M. Presbey

Bhatia’s special treatment in the children’s home ended when the other children were released and she had to serve her three extra days. But Liawati Munshi had given her a copy of Gandhi’s autobiography. As Bhatia explained: She knew that we don’t know anything of the Congress movement, independence or anything of that sort. She used to come and meet us, bring some sweets, biscuits, books. She used to talk to us, encourage us, tell us her experiences of the movement. And she brought Gandhiji’s autobiography, though she had opposed Gandhiji’s Quit India Movement on principle. But she was not against Gandhiji. So she gave us that book. . . . So they put me in the real children’s home. It was rigorous imprisonment. They put me in an isolated small, dark room, away from the other children, full of big rats jumping all over. I was afraid, but that book gave me company and courage. I finished that book in three days because I had nothing else to do. They thought that was enough punishment. . . . The thing that struck me the most, I told you, is what he had said about celibacy, that if you want to do work for the nation, it is better that you remain celibate. (March 14, 2005) Gandhi’s exhortation to practice celibacy and vegetarianism really impressed Bhatia. She came out of prison a changed person. She abstained from cow’s milk and from sweets as Gandhi had advocated in his autobiography. She would soon have another opportunity to join in the freedom struggle. She had been skipping classes and attending political meetings. A year later, nearing the one-year anniversary of the Quit India Movement, the leadership of the movement in Bombay decided to go to Poona (now called Pune), where Gandhi was being held in prison in the former Aga Khan Palace. She and her younger sister decided they would catch the same train to Pune to participate in the protests there. Being good Gandhians, they felt they should tell their parents what they were going to do, and so they told their parents five minutes before the train was to depart that they were taking the train to Pune. As Bhatia recounted: RB: I never thought that they would come to Pune immediately by car, and they will be at the station. They came to Pune. Before our train reached Pune they were in Pune because they came by car. My father and my father’s sister. This happened on the eighth of August, one day before the launch of the mass-arrest program. GP: And they made you go back? RB: No! We saw that they were there on the platform, so we jumped from the other back door. On the other platform. But then the leaders were afraid that if they catch us, they too will get arrested because we were minors, and police will know the program of mass arrests before it is executed. They said no, no, you go back. We were successful coming out of the station and followed the leaders, so they took us back in the group. At night, we slept with Defying Stereotypes 175

them in a secret place. We had only one pair of clothes with us. To evade our parents, we were told to hide somewhere. At night to stay in somebody’s house. The next day we were told where to assemble. They gave me a saffron color sari. At that time I was putting on a frock and had no petticoat to tuck in the sari, nor knew how to wrap a sari but others helped. They gave my younger sister a white sari. Another was to put on green sari. Thus we three together were in Freedom color. But when we reached our destination I saw my papa was there with his sister. So we started running towards the police getting away from my papa, shouting slogans. Thus, we were arrested right there, even before the leaders! Police were wondering why we were going towards police and running away from the people! I was not afraid of my father, I was afraid of my aunt, my father’s sister. My grandfather used to do everything as per her advice. So I was more afraid of her than my father. I was fifteen. My sister was thirteen. GP: What happened to you when you got arrested? RB: They took us to the station, and by that time I already unwrapped my sari and gave it back to the person who had given it to me. We only used it for a uniform. So I just had my frock. I didn’t know how to wear sari also. I took it out and gave it to the lady when I got arrested. Because it was wartime, cloth was very rare, it was rationed. So parents had allowed us to have a white school uniform in khadi. So police didn’t believe my father’s story that we had run away from home without permission. They said, but they are wearing khadi! How can we believe you? They put us in jail. They didn’t take us to court immediately. They took us to a place twenty or thirty kilometers away in an unknown village and kept us there. Then we had to walk back, not knowing where to go. They just wanted to harass us, demoralize us. They will take us by car to some remote village. There were so many people getting arrested, the judge was not free to hear us in court. So they put us in a car and left us on the road. Then we walked back to town, got arrested again. We kept doing this for one month, getting out, going in . . . getting harassed. Not only were Bhatia and her younger sister young, but they were also young women. Was there any special vulnerability or restriction because they were young women? She described what happened: “When they see a small girl they said ‘Come, come’ and gave us chapatti, or something to eat, something sweet. At the time we didn’t realize that someone could take advantage, we were young girls. Se- nior girls took care of me. Some took me to a lady’s house, someone knew someone that way. But it was always walking, walking, sometimes ten kilometers, sometimes fifty kilometers. And not knowing where we are, so we had to walk, walk. Sometimes people tell us which way to go to Pune, sometimes not. But ultimately we would end up in Pune and we would do it again. Of course we were not doing anything concrete, just shouting slogans and telling people to close their shops, boycott the 176 Gail M. Presbey government, noncooperate with war efforts” (March 14, 2005). I was really quite impressed with the stridency of these two young women, age fifteen and thirteen, repeatedly being taken to places that were completely unfamiliar to them, and with great effort walking many miles, returning to denounce British rule. But I was not quite prepared for the next part of Bhatia’s story. In 1944, when she was sixteen, she wanted to do more seriously dangerous work for the movement. I had asked Bhatia to describe her insights as a young woman into Gandhi’s embrace of nonviolent means for the liberation struggle. She explained: RB: Even in 1944 when I was arrested with a bomb, I didn’t understand nonviolence. I was good at cycling. I was given work to distribute the Congress bulletins. People didn’t know what to do. So there were secret bulletins published without knowledge of the government. To be distributed to the other groups. I was given that work, thinking no one would suspect me as a school girl, just a child. Wherever I went they gave me a message which I had to convey, so I was sort of used as a messenger in between. So one day I asked why is it that you are making me work only as a postman? I asked, I was reading about bombs going off. So I told them, this work that I am doing is nothing, give me solid work! I want a bomb, otherwise I will not go, this is not useful work anymore. Yes, it was useful, they needed messages. But I was not satisfied, I thought it was not real work. So first they gave me a fictitious bomb, that wouldn’t work. A toy bomb. Just to test me, how brave I am. Whether I am getting nervous knowing it’s a bomb. I was supposed to put it in the science laboratory of my school. But it didn’t explode. I did exactly as I was told. Not to open it, to put it where . . . I was attending the school! I had to go after school hours, jump the wall of the school, everything was locked, then got to the laboratory, put the bomb properly. They said next time they will make a real bomb and give it to me. On 26 January, Independence Day of India. India was not independent, but Gandhiji chose that day. . . . The leaders of the Bombay Group decided they had to do something big on that day, so they decided they had to put a bomb on the railway line. Those days the railways were used to ferry the war material including the soldiers. So they thought it would make a big propaganda. So they gave me this bomb. I was given instructions what to do in case I was arrested. I was told to carry some chalk in my pocket, and write all the slogans. I had white paint also with me, I had to put it with the white paint. I did that thing also. But I was not successful on 25th January night. I saw one black person standing in front of my gate, and I was afraid so I went back home. And when I got there and looked from the terrace, I saw police surrounding our house. First they got the news that something was going to happen, our program was leaked out. We tried twice that night, but every time we tried to get out Defying Stereotypes 177

of our house, police were there. So we slept. Then we got up early morning. At that time no one was there. So we came out and the railway line was very much near our house. So we went to the railway line, and we did whatever we were told. First we wrote slogans with the chalk, then we put the slogans in white paint on the road, and then went to the railway line. They told me not to wait by the railroad crossing, go a little bit down the railway line so that no person would get injured. So they told me one particular place where the train will be. As I was going there, I saw the police coming towards me. And I remembered the instruction, if you see the police, don’t get arrested with the bomb in your hand, try to throw it as far as you can, so if you get arrested they can’t prove that you had a bomb, and I will be punished only for writing slogans in a public place. And it so happened that when I threw it there was a slope, so it went further than I threw it. It went one hundred feet. So police couldn’t prove. The judge argued how could such a small girl throw the small box so far away? GP: You mean they arrested you, and you went to trial, and they found you not guilty? RB: Yes, I went to trial, but they found me guilty because I had written all those things, but they couldn’t punish me for the bomb. That would have been years, and they would have tortured me to get the name of the person who gave me the bomb. They didn’t do anything to me. I was in prison three months. But on 26th January many persons were arrested. At that time I was the only political prisoner in Class III ward at Arthur Road jail. They arrested the leaders, so I was put in first class, with the Congress leaders. I got best of food, best of treatment, books. But they were only there for one or two weeks. Then they put me in the regular jail. Then I realized what real jail is. But examinations were coming, and they had already started releasing other leaders. And it was expensive for them to put me, an ordinary political prisoner, in a separate ward. They released Gandhiji too. So they released me also. . . . They tried to put pressure on me to apologize first, but I said nothing doing. Bhatia was not the only person in India engaged in bomb throwing to win the country’s independence. But I was amazed that she had read Gandhi’s autobiography and had taken the restrictions on diet and sexual activity so seriously but had paid relatively little attention to what I thought was the main theme of the book, the development of nonviolent action as a moral and practical method to redress wrongs. Her life story clearly conveys that, even as a young person, she wanted to live by her values. She was willing to play her part in winning India’s independence, and she would allow neither her age nor her gender to prevent her from taking on any important role in the fight. 178 Gail M. Presbey

At this stage in her life her parents wanted her to continue her education. She chose a Gandhian college, Banasthali University in Jaipur, for quite interesting reasons. RB: I came to know of a place with a Gandhian school where there was horse riding, sword fighting, and even shooting. It was actually not shooting but I thought it was shooting, because they were using that word “sanduk” in Hindi, even my parents thought “sanduk” meant shooting, that is, “banduk.” GP: You wanted to learn shooting? RB: We were in the middle of the freedom movement at that time, so I thought I should learn how to shoot. I didn’t understand nonviolence. If we wanted our freedom, the only way was to fight. So I wanted to learn how to use the sword. We thought “sanduk” [box] was “banduk” [rifle]. My parents agreed so I could have regular education. They realized if I stayed here more, all the younger brothers and sisters . . . I had one older brother, all others, one dozen of them in a joint family were smaller than me. They used to follow me. Whatever I did or told them they used to do. So they, the elders said better to keep her away and save the other children from her influence. So all agreed. We used to put on khadi also. All those things were there [at the school]. In 1944, before going off to Banasthali University, Bhatia met Gandhi in person. Her grandfather was concerned that her refusal to drink milk and eat sweets was making her sickly. At that time Gandhi had recently been released from prison and was staying with some of Bhatia’s relatives of hers at Juhu while he was recovering from his prison stay. RB: [Grandfather] put me before Gandhiji, and said, “See what an influence you are having on small weak children.” And I was very thin at that time. “So tell her to start eating salt, and sweet things.” My grandfather and Gandhiji are almost the same age, so they talked like two equals, two colleagues. My grandfather was the leader of his community. GP: And what did Gandhi say? RB: He told me to obey my grandfather. And that made me very wild. I quar- reled with Gandhi. I said, in your autobiography you are telling us do this and this, and when I do it you are now saying that this is not the time, obey elders. I just left the place, telling him I’m not going to obey this new thing. I’m going to do what is proper, and what you told us to do is what is proper. My attitude throughout has been critical of him, because of what he said just to please my grandfather. Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, for me it doesn’t make any difference who is the person. Rather, if what a person says con- vinces me and appeals to me, and I can verify it, then I follow it. Defying Stereotypes 179

And so she made a distinction between Gandhi’s wise counsel, which she had read, and what he said in her personal meeting with him, which she considered to be unduly influenced by her grandfather. She would take wise counsel from men but not just “follow orders” from men. This is significant. As Mark Thomson explained in his book Gandhi and His Ashrams, many who lived in Gandhi’s ashrams ended up following his many rules and vows “merely out of blind obedience to him” and therefore “tended to respond to difficult situations with a ritualized consistency that undermined their personal development” (125). In contrast to this posture of blind obedience, Bhatia showed she was a thinking person, accepting or rejecting guidance according to whether she saw merit in it. She kept to her diet at Banasthali University and did not modify it until she made it to Santiniketan in 1950. While at Banasthali University, she met Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and made a big impression on him from the start. She and the other women who had been learning horseback riding came to meet him on their horses. RB: And when Nehru came there, we went to receive him on the horses, and he was very much impressed. When we were coming back from Jaipur to Banasthali, where the school was, he saw a pond full of lotus flowers. He said this is a beautiful place, he couldn’t imagine such a flower in a desert. I asked him, do you want it? He said yes. I took off my sari (I was always wearing my frock inside, I was just wearing the sari as a uniform), and jumped in the pond, and brought a lotus to him. But there were a lot of thorns in the lotus plants, so my body was full of those things. He was very much concerned. This happened in 1946. . . . He remembered me afterwards, at Meerut Congress and all those things of Banasthali. Immediately his reaction was, “I wish I had a daughter like you,” that meant he was expecting something more. Many times when we met he used to come to me and say “my daughter,” and his daughter would make a face, she never liked to hear that. He didn’t want to say anything that may reflect derogatorily about his own daughter. So at the public meeting he said, “I wish I had been a girl, then I would have come here to study.” (March 14, 2005) This saying of Nehru’s, that is, that he would have wished to study at Banasthali if he had been a girl, is to this day proudly advertised on the university’s website. In 1946 Bhatia was one of five women from Banasthali who attended the first All- India Congress session in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. As she explained, the original plan was for one hundred students to attend, but the outbreak of riots kept most of the students away. She was in the advance party of five students who arrived before the riots. The situation was tense. She described what happened: Before independence I was once upon a time the head of the Bombay Con- gress Women volunteer section for girls. But here I am telling you the turning 180 Gail M. Presbey

point of my life, it was something new. If I had not attended the Congress I would not have understood the side of the communal violence. Muslims had already started direct action in Calcutta, they said this is the only language these Congress/Hindu people will understand. They started killing Hindus just because they are Hindus. Direct action they called it. The ripples were everywhere, wherever the Muslim majority people were there. Lots of riots. At night we used to hear war cries from Hindus and Muslims both, it was like a war. We were in the school, all lady volunteers were put up there. INA people said don’t worry, we will take care of you. They taught us rifle shooting, self defense, first aid, et cetera. (March 14, 2005) The Indian National Army (INA) were soldiers who had been serving under the British in the Indian army in Singapore. Under the influence of the Indian National Congress leader Subash Chandra Bose, they decided to accept help from the Japa- nese and fight the British. They were defeated, and the British brought those they thought most responsible to trial at the Red Fort in Delhi. During the trial, many Indian people, considering them patriots, rallied around them and forced the Brit- ish to drop charges or refuse to carry out court-martial sentences. The British finally released eleven thousand of them. It is notable that the INA had an all-female unit called the Rani Jbansi Regiment, consisting mostly of teenage women of Indian descent who had been working on rubber plantations in Malaya (Lebra; Joshi 5–15). Lakshmi Sahgal, who was trained in medicine and had opened a clinic for poor Indian migrant workers in Singapore, nursed wounded soldiers during the Japanese invasion there. When Bose came to recruit soldiers for his cause, he asked her to head a women’s army regiment. She was later imprisoned in Burma. After India got its independence, she became Minister of Women’s Affairs (“Lakshmi Sahgal”). It seems that some of these released INA soldiers were at Meerut and were able to teach Bhatia what she wanted to know, how to shoot. She further explained her roles as part of the volunteer force: “I was trained in self-defense, marching, shooting. To defend against Muslim rioters. We saluted the flag. My duty was to guard Nehru’s tent. During that time Nehru was a cabinet minister. We went to Delhi despite the riots and curfew, and he invited whole groups from Banasthali to visit Delhi on our return back so we saw the place from where Martyr Bhagat Singh had thrown a bomb in the Parliament in New Delhi. But it wasn’t a real bomb, he just wanted to open the eyes of the British government. He didn’t run away, he wanted to convey a message. I wanted to see that place so Nehruji made special arrangements for our group to visit the Parliament, Red Fort et cetera despite curfew in the city” (March 14, 2005). So, not only did Bhatia take on the role of an armed guard, but she also admired those in the liberation movement who used violence, like Bhagat Singh, widely hailed in India today as a freedom fighter. Indeed, he had thrown a “real” bomb, although he explained that he had done so because he wanted to draw attention to his message Defying Stereotypes 181 that India needed its liberation (Datta 107–8). The Red Fort was a significant site to visit because it was the place where the trials of the INA soldiers had recently taken place. By this point, Bhatia’s experience and responsibility in the freedom movement were extensive. After Gandhi was assassinated, in 1948, Bhatia decided that she wanted to go to Banaras Hindu University, which was a national university and not a Gandhian university. She chose it because it was the university from which a large number of the freedom struggle protestors had come. Bhatia explained that she did not want to be married, and she feared that her family might have such plans for her: “During the vacation when I went home I had a heart-to-heart talk with my mother. She said you are old enough for your marriage. What do you want? And I said marriage I certainly don’t want. And she said, what will you do if we don’t send you the money? What will you do? She just wanted to scare me a little. But when I went to Banaras it so happened that there was trouble in the family. And so there was no letter from home, no money from home and so I thought that they are going to do what mother was telling me. (Afterwards I came to know that nothing of the sort was there.) So I applied for a job at several places. I got a job and I wrote to my parents, I don’t want your money, I am working now” (March 14, 2005). She continued her education, being self-supporting for the most part. She never married. She and two of her sisters decided to live together and remain celibate, purposely choosing celibacy as their contribution to the freedom struggle. Even in 2005, at age seventy-seven, she still lived with her two sisters.

Analysis Here I would like to comment on two separate aspects of Bhatia’s story: the concept of women’s power and the issue of the use of violence in the Quit India movement. Making one’s own decisions and making decisions in a community of women are both ways of departing from the Hindu model of power, as explained by Reva Joshee and Karen Sihra. As they noted, they drew upon the work of Frank Morales for a “generous interpretation” of the relationship among men, women, and power (Joshee and Sihra 75). Morales explained that in the god-and-goddess couples that are so ubiquitous in Hinduism, the god is the wielder of power (shaktiman) and the goddess is power itself (shakti). In this relationship, each needs the other, since the male god’s role is to be the director of the force but the female goddess provides the ability to engage in action (Morales qtd. in Joshee and Sihra 75). Joshee and Sihra asserted that while this traditional view is partly negative insofar as it suggests that female power must always be under male control and guidance, nevertheless this emphasis on shakti having a female source allows contemporary women to feel powerful and engage in agency in their everyday lives (Joshee and Sihra 75) The Minakshi festival and the accompanying margali rituals in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, focus on women’s spirituality and devotion, which results in their 182 Gail M. Presbey winning devout and good husbands. C. J. Fuller has suggested that these rituals can tell us something about men and women’s relations in society (although it would be simplistic and inaccurate to think that the lives of gods and goddesses are straightforward role models for men and women). He wrote, “Marriage confers full maturity on females and transforms girls into sumangalis, personifications of auspiciousness” (200). Researchers have noticed for decades that an unmarried adult woman is a great strain on a family in India (Stein 468–69, 475, 484–85). Given the importance of marriage, I find it interesting to study Bhatia, who specifically eschewed marriage for herself. While social norms can be oppressive, the narrative of Bhatia attests to her ability, at least in certain political and spiritual circles, to be accepted for her talents and not relegated to or forced into narrow gender roles. There are of course also the single-women deities, often fierce goddesses such as Kali and Durga, who are worshipped in some places in India. In these contexts, Fuller noted, “they show women—in the image of autonomous goddesses—as far more powerful beings than their place in society normally allows . . . on such powerful women, men significantly depend, in spite of their superior social status and authority over women” (203). There are two interesting aspects about Bhatia’s use of arms, bomb throwing, and so on. First, she departed from social conventions that call only on men to take up arms. Additionally, she was part of a liberation movement that, under the influence of Gandhi, intended to reject violence as a means, and yet she used violent means. Addressing the first point, Amina Mama has noted that “women across the globe have adopted posters of women carrying guns as icons of revolutionary feminism” (55). Mama noted that in countries like Mozambique, most women “fighters” spent their time cooking and carrying loads and wondered why the image of women carrying guns was so appealing (54–55, 367 n. 13). Even those who might not approve of Bhatia’s chosen means for fighting for liberation could not help but approve of her courage and determination to make a difference and bring about major change in favor of liberation and justice. Indeed, that is often how Gandhi described those who, like Bhagat Singh, whom Bhatia admired, took up violent means; he commended the courage and then clarified that he regretted the way the courage had been expressed. Bhatia was not the only freedom fighter to neglect Gandhi’s admonition that resistance should be nonviolent. In fact, many involved in Gandhi’s Quit India movement saw their violent actions as condoned by Gandhi, even if he clarified that he never intended that to be the case. Chaudhari catalogued the many statements made by Gandhi or his close associates at the launch of Quit India that suggested that a person’s actions are at his or her own discretion and asserted that such remarks gave people the impression that Gandhi no longer insisted on nonviolent means (Chaud- hari 47–53, 76–78, 81–84, 135–38). Some of his followers chose this interpretation despite Gandhi’s exhortations to them to choose nonviolence. Were they free to choose violence? Mahadev Desai would say that “Gandhi has always said ‘ahimsa’ or Defying Stereotypes 183

‘himsa’ but no cowardice” (qtd. in Chopra 44). I interpret this to mean that violence was not Gandhi’s preferred way of acting courageously, but he did indeed admire courage, whatever form it took. And clearly Bhatia was courageous.

Public Reputation: Women Freedom Fighters as Portrayed on the Internet and as Public Statues A constant theme in contemporary coverage of freedom fighters is how their sacrifice is forgotten and neglected by today’s Indians. To rectify this neglect, individuals and groups have formed to create websites that archive interviews with freedom fighters or give short biographies of them so that they can be better known and their courage and sacrifice remembered. Rukshmani Bhatia appears on the Facebook page of one such group, Arise Free India, a nonprofit based in Troy, Michigan. The organization has conducted about 170 interviews with freedom fighters in India, many of them now octogenarians. Arise Free India’s founder, Deepak A. Parekh, interviewed Bhatia on January 26, 2010, and posted three minutes of the interview (which was conducted in Hindi) on his website. In this interview she had the chance to tell the story of how she attempted to bomb the train at age sixteen. Parekh told me that Bhatia passed away in 2013. The homepage of Arise Free India says that it has collected and shared these interviews so that they can inspire a new generation of Indians who might be having an identity crisis. While the majority of the interview- ees on the website are men, there are a few women. Other websites, many of them blogs, popularize Indian freedom fighters in general and sometimes women freedom fighters specifically. One website published “30 Indian Freedom Fighters Who Disappeared in the Pages of History”; half of those featured are women, and top billing is given to a woman named Matangini Hazra, who had been involved in India’s independence movement since 1905. Akarsh Meh- rotra explained, “During one procession, she continued to advance with the Indian flag even after being shot thrice.” According to the account of Arindam Bhowmik on his website Matangini Hazra (midnapore.in), the procession, made up mostly of women, went to the Criminal Court building; police fired on Hazra as she continued to advance with the flag in hand. She died from her wounds at age seventy-one on September 29, 1942. There is a statue of her at the Maidan in Kolkata, as well as a statue at her place of death in Medinipur. There is also a commemorative stamp with her picture on it, and a road in Kolkata is named after her. To turn attention back to Akarsh Mehrotra’s website, he also tells the story of Raj Kumari Gupta, who supplied revolvers to those involved in the Kakori train robbery associated with Chandrashekhar Azad. Another website, Mapsofindia.com, has a page, “Unknown Women Who Inspired India’s Freedom Struggle,” that mentions Raj Kumari, calling her a “woman of steel” and explaining how she had been inspired by Gandhi before turning to Azad’s group (Debu). The site also mentions Tara Rani Srivastava of Bi- har, who marched to the Siwan police station with her husband and others to place 184 Gail M. Presbey an independence flag on its rooftop. When her husband was shot, she took the flag from him and marched on. When she returned to her husband, he had died. Many admire her resolve. The site also highlights two other brave women who aided their activist sons (Debu). This is just a small sample of the many blogs posted by Indi- ans, not necessarily trained as historians, who seem determined to ensure that these brave women are remembered as patriots and held out as role models for contemporary times. Most of the women mentioned in this text (as well as Kanaklata Barua and Lakshmi Sahgal, mentioned earlier) are profiled in Wikipedia pages, and many are honored with statues. Still, there is no statue or Wikipedia page for Rukshmani Bhatia, at least not yet. That her story is so remarkable (and yet unknown in comparison to the stories of these other icons of the freedom struggle) hints at the many stories of others yet unknown. Her story is an important part of the history of India’s struggle.

Works Cited Andrade, Susan Z. “Rioting Women and Writing Women: Gender, Class, and the Public Sphere in Africa.” Africa after Gender?, edited by Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, Indiana UP, 2007, pp. 85–107. Arise Free India. “Ruskshmani Bhatia.” Facebook, January 26, 2010, https://www.facebook .com/permalink.php?story_fbid=552020418209888&id=114481861963748. Accessed Janu- ary 31, 2017. Bhatia, Rukshmani. Personal interview. March 14, 2005. ———. “Interview with Deepak Parekh.” Facebook, uploaded August 14, 2011, https://www .facebook.com/Arise-Free-India-114481861963748/. Accessed January 31, 2017. Bhowmik, Arindan. Matangini Hazra, http://www.midnapore.in/freedomfighters/ matangini_hazra.html (accessed January 31, 2017). Chaudhari, K. K. Quit India Revolution: The Ethos of the Central Direction. Popular Prakashan, 1996. Chopra, Pran Nath. Quit India Movement: British Secret Report. Thomson Press, 1976. Datta, V. N. Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. Rupa, 2008. Debu, C. “Unknown Women Who Inspired India’s Freedom Struggle.” Compare Infobase, uploaded August 14, 2014, http://www.mapsofindia.com/my-india/history/unknown -women-who-inspired-indias-freedom-struggle. Accessed January 31, 2017. Fuller, C. J. The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India. Revised and expanded edition, Princeton UP, 2004. Gandhi. Directed by Richard Attenborough, Sony Pictures, 1982. Heehs, Peter. Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism: Essays in Modern Indian History. Oxford UP, 2008. Joshee, Reva, and Karen Sihra. “Shakti as a Liberatory and Educative Force for Hindu Women.” Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World, edited by Zehavit Gross, Lynn Davies, and Al-Khansaa Diab, Springer, 2012, pp. 73–82. Defying Stereotypes 185

Joshi, Naveen, editor. Freedom Fighters Remember. Publications Division, Ministry of Informa- tion and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1997. “Lakshmi Sahgal, Indian Freedom Fighter.” Jupiter Infomedia, uploaded August 6, 2012, http://www.indianetzone.com/61/lakshmi_sahgal.htm. Accessed January 31, 2017 Lebra, Joyce C. Women against the Raj: The Rani of Jhansi Regiment. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. Mama, Amina. “Sheroes and Villains: Conceptualizing Colonial and Contemporary Violence against Women in Africa.” Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Routledge, 1997, pp. 46–62. Mehta, Usha. The Multi-Dimensional Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Mani Bhavan, 2003. Mehrotra, Akarsh. “30 Indian Freedom Fighters Who Disappeared in the Pages of History.” ScoopWhoop Media, uploaded June 22, 2015, https://www.scoopwhoop.com/inothernews/ unknown-freedom-fighters/. Morales, Frank. “The Concept of Shakti: Hinduism as a Liberating Force for Women.” Edited by Jagbir Singh, Adishakti.org, uploaded March 13, 2014, http://www.adishakti.org/forum/ concept_of_shakti_hinduism_as_a_liberating_force_for_women_1-18-2005.htm. Acces- sed January 31, 2017. Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. Rout- ledge, 1997. Rassool, Ciraj. “Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography.” South African Review of Sociology, vol. 41, no. 1, 2010, pp. 28–55. Stein, Dorothy. “Burning Widows, Burning Brides: The Perils of Daughterhood in India.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 61, 1988, pp. 465–85. Thomson, Mark. Gandhi and His Ashrams. Popular Prakashan, 1993. “Vision.” Arise Free India, http://arisefreeindia.azurewebsites.net/vision. Accessed January 31, 2017.

Part Four Disrupted Public Memory

“I walk beneath your pens, and am not what I truly am, but what you’d prefer to imagine me.” Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, “In Acknowledgment of the Praises of European winters”

The Rhetorical Reputation of Forgotten Feminist Lois Waisbrooker

Wendy Hayden

The nineteenth-century forgotten feminist Lois Waisbrooker (1826–1909) once thought a woman should not speak in public (Waisbrooker, Suffrage for Woman 12). Fifty years later, she had several arrests for obscenity. What happened to transform this woman into the feisty octogenarian rhetor she became? What happened to make Waisbrooker, whose ideas about women’s issues remain relevant, not even a footnote in most discussions of nineteenth-century women? This essay tells the story of Waisbrooker’s unique rhetorical career to reveal the complicated issues of agency and reputation for communities of women outside mainstream women’s rights movements. A prolific writer on suffrage, religion, economics, birth control, and sexuality— among other topics—Waisbrooker challenges our conceptions of ethos and agency for nineteenth-century women in several ways. First, she subverts traditional ways women established reputations. While other nineteenth-century women rhetors highlighted their respectability in their ethical appeals, Waisbrooker contradicted this strategy. Rather than the “good [and chaste] woman speaking well” appeals to ethos that the scholars Patricia Bizzell, Susan Zaeske, and Nan Johnson found in their work on nineteenth-century women, this essay depicts a woman who cultivated a reputation as the antithesis of the respectable woman. Second, she embraced a reputation imposed upon her and created an ethos that addressed the marginalization of women who lacked class privilege. Waisbrooker’s reputation was partially imposed by others and partially constructed by her. Her lower-class background, lack of education, and forced marriage because of pregnancy led to her status as a “fallen woman.” This reputation allowed her to engage with topics other, more “respectable” women avoided. Scholarship on nineteenth-century women rhetors highlights how women had to conform to gendered norms in order to cultivate an ethos that would protect them 190 Wendy Hayden from censure for speaking in public. The movements that saw women taking on public roles—abolition, suffrage, and temperance, for example—allowed women to show how these activities did not negate their femininity, an argument Waisbrooker would also endorse in the early stages of her writing career. Scholarship on women’s rhetoric has emphasized how women increasingly used what Arlene Kraditor has called the argument from expediency to justify their presence in the public sphere, highlighting their moral influence, rather than equal rights or the argument from justice. The participation of women in the suffrage, abolition, and temperance movements defined these as “feminine” enterprises. But speaking and writing about women’s sexuality—Waisbrooker’s most common topic—could not often be framed as a moral duty, like other women’s rights topics. Some women’s rights advocates, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard, critiqued women’s lack of status within marriage—in Stanton’s February 8, 1861, speech to the Judiciary Committee of the New York Senate and Willard’s 1890 “A White Life for Two,” for example—but did not discuss women’s sexuality explicitly, only alluding to it. Nineteenth-century women physicians addressed sexual topics more explicitly and used their medical ethos—as well as their feminine moral duty—to protect them from accusations of impropriety (Skinner 106). Other women, though, found themselves outsiders to organized women’s rights movements because of their interest in discussing sexual relationships between men and women. In addition to Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, Angela Heywood, and Elmina Slenker, Waisbrooker became a target of the 1873 Comstock law banning “obscene” material from the mail (Hayden 52). And it is these women’s careers that highlight agency and ethos as more than individual attributes. Finally, Waisbrooker adds to our discussions of ethos, agency, and reputation because her rhetorical techniques were community-based. Discussions of rhetorical agency can lead to viewing it as an individual trait, with stories of heroic women overcoming strictures against public speaking to assert their rights. Scholarship in women’s rhetoric has always been conscious of the need to refrain from creating a “great woman rhetor” canon. Recent scholarship on women’s rhetoric has challenged us to interrogate the factors involved in rhetorical agency, revealing that examining these attributes as individual traits is limiting. For example, the editors of the recent collection Feminist Rhetorical Resilience adopted the definition of agency as “a strategic rhetor marshalling the available means of public action and responding efficaciously to the demands of immediate circumstances and larger historical- structural forces” (Flynn et al. 7). However, in adding their concept of rhetorical resilience to the concept of agency, they showed that both attributes are not “[qualities] of the heroic individual but . . . relational, not only because individuals learn moral qualities and derive social and material support through ‘a web of relationships’ but because resilience is in itself a form of relationality. Resilience . . . entails The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 191 an ongoing responsiveness” (7). Sarah Hallenbeck similarly theorized that agency should not be ascribed to individuals but described within changing relationships and networks (19). She proposed “a posthuman theory of agency that rejects the human agent as the primary source of change but redeems that agent as a participant in the larger network of which he or she is a part” (19). Debra Hawhee and Diane Davis also endorsed this model because of the need to move beyond what Hawhee called “the hero-centric tendencies of feminist historiography” (123) to what Davis described as a “nonheroic notion of rhetorical agency” (88). The subject of female reputation seems a natural fit for challenging an idea of the heroic woman rhetor. Reputation, after all, is not often something a speaker assigns to herself but is often ascribed to her. That is not to say, however, that examining female reputation in this manner relegates women to passive roles. Waisbrooker, for example, capitalized on a reputation first ascribed to her. Even then, we must view her actions not as part of a heroic narrative because she did not undertake them in a vacuum. Waisbrooker’s rhetorical career, spanning the breadth of topics and techniques of nineteenth-century women, illustrates a narrative on women’s agency celebrating not individual women who rose above restrictions on their rights but analyzing how communities of women outside mainstream women’s rights movements responded to and empowered one another to capitalize on their “bad” reputations. She claimed several outsider identities, such as anarchist, spiritualist, and free-love advocate. These identities made her part of communities with similarly maligned reputations that aided her development as a rhetor. Examining Wais- brooker’s rhetorical career in this way fits Royster and Kirsch’s model of feminist historiography that makes “more visible the social circles within which [women] have functioned and continue to function as rhetorical agents” (24). Therefore, this essay reads Waisbrooker’s agency and reputation not as individual attributes but as products of her radical communities.

Waisbrooker’s Reputation and the “Respectable Woman” Born Adeline Eliza Nichols in 1826 in Catharine, New York, Waisbrooker would not rename and reinvent herself until the 1860s. Her father, a day laborer, pressured her to marry at age seventeen. She was widowed by the time she was twenty, and her father pressured her into another marriage at the age of thirty. Waisbrooker bore two children from her first marriage whom she could not raise because of her financial circumstances. She then gained employment as a domestic servant with a family that encouraged her to become educated, an education she used to teach African American children in Ohio in the 1850s (Passet, Sex Radicals 114; Waisbrooker, May- weed Blossoms). She later rose to prominence as a writer of spiritualist, anarchist, and free-love tracts, beginning in the 1860s and ending in 1907. By the 1900s, she earned all of her money through the sale of her writing, which was not enough to sustain her 192 Wendy Hayden through frequent arrests for obscenity. She died penniless in the home of her son in Antioch, California, in 1909. Waisbrooker had her own heroic narrative surrounding her call to speak. De- scribing herself as from the “the lower strata of life” (qtd. in Sears 231), she would say, “I did not come of a literary stock. . . . My parents worked hard for daily bread, had but little education, and less time to use it; consequently I grew up with . . . little idea of the world’s greatest literary riches” Suffrage( for Woman 12). In a quest to educate herself, she attended public lectures in the early 1850s, and it was at one of these lectures, listening to a man “of scholarly attainments,” that she was “cured . . . of [the] folly” of the “[prejudice] against woman’s speaking in public” (12). She described her thinking this way: “I was a teacher of children, he of men and women; but while listening to the platitudes that fell from his lips, the conviction would force itself upon me that I was better qualified to teach the people than he was [and] ‘Why should the fact that I am a woman be a reason that I should not?’” (13) Yet without the education and class status of many suffragists, Waisbrooker lacked the ethos to establish herself as a speaker and writer on women’s rights until she identified with spiritualist, anarchist, and free-love communities. These identifications, while aid- ing her rhetorical agency, led to her erasure from women’s rights history. She is not included in any publications by first-wave feminists preserving their movement, and she has gone mostly neglected by historians as well. Waisbrooker earns only a brief mention in most historical accounts of nineteenth- century women activists. For example, Linda Gordon’s comprehensive history of birth control advocacy in America mentions her only three times, each time in only a single sentence (100, 113, 124), despite Waisbrooker’s prolific writing on the topic. Many histories of free-love advocacy in America ignore her (Stoehr, Spurlock), with Hal Sears’s The Sex Radicals and Joanne Passet’s work being notable exceptions. Pam McAllister, who recovered and wrote the introduction for Waisbrooker’s 1893 novel, A Sex Revolution, in 1985, attributes the lack of critical attention paid to Waisbrooker to the difficulty of categorizing her interests (3). Historians have described her as an anarchist (Sears, Marsh), a sex radical (Sears, Passet), a freethinker (Gaylor), and “a feminist novelist and moral reformer” (Gordon 113), but, as McAllister accurately observed, “Researchers stumble over themselves when trying to name her primary area of concern” (4). Other historians have struggled with what they deemed Waisbrooker’s confusing views on sexuality, describing them as so radical, yet “so Victorian” (Marsh 75; Willburn 73). Her concerns with spiritualism and other esoteric topics have also led to contemporary critics’ confusion. Indeed, Mar- garet Marsh’s history of anarchist women describes Waisbrooker’s novels as “lacking literary merit” (73) and also calls her religious writings “bizarre” (74). Recent work has read her in the context of spiritualism (Willburn) and characterized her as a “grassroots” feminist (Passet, “Power through Print”). It is not a mystery why her The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 193 current reputation is as an obscure and unique feminist since her areas of concern went beyond the topics we usually expect from women of the time. According to McAllister, “Waisbrooker was almost doomed to obscurity by her dedication to the odd integration of anarchism, feminism, free love, and spiritualism” (3). During her own time, however, Waisbrooker provoked more interest. Though she was dismissed by organized women’s rights movements because of her views on sexuality and even often marginalized within anarchist communities (Marsh 118, 172), she did have a following. In these accounts, she earned unique and flowery descriptions. Her contemporaries describe her as “the ablest champion of woman’s cause . . . the still undaunted, unflinching and determined pioneer heroine and prophetess of the better time coming” (qtd. in McAllister 3–4). One person wrote, “‘I believe that future state will reveal that Mrs. W. has done more to elevate the standard of pure morality, has done more to help bind up the broken heart, and to show men and women how to live and bless the world than nine-tenths of the clergy have done in the past forty years’” (qtd. in McAllister 4). The British birth control journal New Generation described her as “the strongest personality among Ameri- can feminists” (qtd. in McAllister 3). Ezra Heywood, a famous anarchist and labor reformer, recollected: “I . . . met what seemed to be a Roman Sibyl, Scott’s Meg Mer- rilies, enacted by Charlotte Cushman, Margaret Fuller, and Sojourner Truth rolled into one. . . . She rose, went up the aisle, mounted the platform, and the tall, angular, weird, quaint kind of a she Abraham Lincoln was introduced to the audience as ‘Lois Waisbrooker’” (qtd. in McAllister 4). Waisbrooker served as a leader in several reform organizations, including acting as president of the anarchist colony in Home, Washington, for a time (Marsh 118) and holding office in labor reform leagues (McElroy 83). She was respected within these communities as an activist, and they described her work as “philanthropic and ill-paid” (qtd. in McAllister 43). Moses Harman, writing to his readers in 1897 and asking them to buy Waisbrooker’s books to help support her through a time of financial hardship, noted, “If any one of our many reform writers and lectures deserves to retire from active service on a life pension it is she” (301). These communities reveled in Waisbrooker’s lack of respectability and called her work “pure” and “noble,” even as she was called “vile” and accused of “corrupting and ruining the youth of this fair country” (Waisbrooker, “The Wail of Ignorance” 59), was depicted as “a wanton, frivolous, impure woman’” by those attempting to prosecute her for obscenity (qtd. in McAllister 42–43), and was publicly accused of trying to break up a marriage in 1893 (Waisbrooker, My Century Plant 85–86). Such characterizations of her often helped rather than hindered her rhetorical reputation. When Moses Harman sought a woman to serve as editor of his periodical, he was advised by a contributor, “I regard pugnacity as a [requirement] and Lois Waisbrooker has it. . . . Don’t call a ‘respectable’ woman to your aid” (qtd. in Sears 229). 194 Wendy Hayden

Waisbrooker’s Feminine Rhetoric These depictions of Waisbrooker seem incongruous with the persona she adopted early in her rhetorical career. Though she did not share the same educational and class privilege as the most prominent female rhetors addressing these topics, Waisbrooker threw her voice into discussions of suffrage, temperance, and religion—topics popular for female speakers and writers by the time Waisbrooker began her rhetorical career, in the late 1860s. In these arguments, Waisbrooker departed from some of the more respected speakers on these topics, taking unpopular arguments. However, she first found her voice through an argument not seen as particularly groundbreaking today because it relies on a premise seen as essentialist: the inherent difference between men and women and women’s higher morality. Yet, she offered something new to our understanding of such arguments because of her unique ethos. In Suffrage for Woman: The Reasons Why, a pamphlet published in 1868, Wais- brooker made what by then was a popular argument: that women would exert a moralizing influence on politics if granted suffrage and that advances for women had not made them “less womanly” (10). She began the pamphlet with a defense of women entering the public sphere, which included their public speech; it is here that she related the story of how she had changed her view on women’s public speech. This defense noted the accomplishments of women who had lectured in public and added herself to these voices as she maintained that these accomplishments had not taken women out of their “proper” roles: “But could I for a moment believe that I had retrograded, that I was less a woman in the high and holy sense of that term, I would never stand before an audience again. . . . I have not belied my nature as a woman by cultivating my talents, and lifting up my voice in behalf of justice, liberty and human fraternity” (13). Her arguments—both for women’s speech and for woman suffrage—relied on the premise of separate spheres. In fact, she admitted a belief in an inherent difference between men and women but used that premise to assert women’s rights: I am only reiterating what you have so often asserted, but with the intention of making an entirely different application thereof. You assert that there is an essential difference between man’s work and woman’s. I agree with you most fully. You claim this difference as a sufficient reason for excluding her from the ballot-box, from having a voice in those laws by which she is to be governed: I, on the contrary, claim this difference as one of the strongest reasons why she should have the ballot and all its attendant rights. If her work was the same as man’s she could easily be represented by him; as it is not, of course she cannot thus be represented; and, as carrying on any work whatever without the balance of power of the positive and negative, the male and female forces, God himself has never attempted it, as the sexuality of all nature abundantly proves. The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 195

Is it a wonder, then, that man does not succeed, does not inaugurate perfect governmental relations so long as he excludes woman therefrom? (22) Waisbrooker appealed to more conservative values here and seemed to blend the argument from expediency (based on women’s difference) with the argument from justice (based on women’s natural rights). Like earlier suffrage advocates, she asserted motherhood as women’s highest calling (29). These types of arguments explain why Waisbrooker was often ignored in the early days of feminist recovery, since, as Carol Mattingly noted, early efforts often recovered women whose feminism was similar to our feminism (100–101). Susan Zaeske and Lindal Bu- chanan have emphasized the popularity in the early days of women’s rights of arguments that relied on a “gendered morality” (203; 109). However, most arguments asserting women’s higher morality often came from a place of more privilege than Waisbrooker was able to claim. Her lengthy introduction to Suffrage for Women defending her right to discuss the topic despite her having less education and fewer advantages than some other suffragists, shows that she added more of a working woman’s voice into the suffrage debate but did so in a way that was unthreatening because it appealed to the same arguments as those made by women with more privilege. Suffrage for Women is one of the early examples of Waisbrooker’s rhetoric. Her other early works include didactic fiction. Again, she honed her voice in an acceptable venue for women while also reworking the genre for more marginalized women. From Alice Vale: A Story for the Times, published in 1869, to 1870’s Helen Harlow’s Vow, Waisbrooker offered stories of “fallen women” deserted by the fathers of their children, yet triumphing despite their perceived downfall. As a novelist, Waisbrooker experienced little success, though her 1893 feminist utopian novel,A Sex Revolution, received attention from twentieth-century literary critics. Her early novels are now digitally available through the Wright American Fiction database. The novels she produced throughout the 1870s led her to cultivate the voice that would find more success in nonfiction genres. She would later self-publish these novels and advertise them in the pages of periodicals catering to the radial communities she joined in the later decades of the nineteenth century, where she gained a wider readership and praise for the novels. In 1897, Moses Harman called her 1870 novel Helen Harlow’s Vow “a pioneer work, and one of the very best yet written, to show what woman can do to free herself, and to conquer opposition when she resolves that she will not be crushed by man nor yet by her own sex” (301). Waisbrooker dedicated this novel to “Woman everywhere, and to wronged and outcast women especially.” Her attempt to revise a popular women’s genre to find a place for the “wronged and outcast” woman with whom she identified added to her ethos in discussing sexuality. Finally, Waisbrooker began to write and speak about religion, which led her to even more controversial topics. Many feminist scholars have shown how women 196 Wendy Hayden speakers used religion, particularly Christianity, to take a more active part in religious worship, which often transformed into rhetorical agency and the development of activism for women’s rights. Waisbrooker found her religion not in Christianity but in spiritualism, a popular religious view in nineteenth-century America often ignored in discussions of women, rhetoric, and religion. Spiritualism was born in 1848 in New York, the same year and state that gave birth to another important women’s rights cause. The central tenet of spiritualists was their belief in the ability to com- municate with the dead. It was a philosophy that fit well with women’s rights, since they believed women were more appropriate mediums. In fact, many spiritualists played into stereotypes about women as weaker, more sensitive, and more pious, which they used to argue that women made better mediums (Braude 83). Women’s public speech and writing could then be justified by spiritual guidance (Braude 84), in a move one critic has described as contradictory, since it depicted women as “passive receptacles” (Guiterrez 190). Spiritualists welcomed those shunned by other circles because of their strong beliefs in equality. In her history of spiritualism and women’s rights, Ann Braude has even claimed that spiritualism could be the ticket to the upper classes for many lower-class women (30–31). Examples are Woodhull and Claflin, who made money off their “mediumship” that funded their entry into the more prominent classes of New York City. Spiritualism was compatible with other radical ideologies of the time, including anarchism—based on their dislike of organized religion and government interference in religion—dress and health reform, feminism, and free love, or the belief that men and women should be able to exercise their sexuality free of government, church, or public mores. Though not all spiritualists advocated free love—in fact, some were adamantly against spiritualists using the religion to promote it—most free-love advocates were spiritualists (Mc- Garry 11). The appeal of spiritualism had waned by the 1860s (Braude 98); by the time Waisbrooker found spiritualism, it was more about social reform than trances or mediumship (Passet, “Power through Print” 235). Rather than focusing on communication with the dead, Waisbrooker defined the “spirit world” as “simply that state of existence correlated to soul and intellect” (Waisbrooker, My Century Plant 42). She credited her rejection of Christianity and her embrace of spiritualism with empowering her critical stance and recalled how forsaking her Christianity had led her to overcome her fears of what was appropriate for women. She appealed to other women to look within themselves and to critically examine every “institute of society” “free from the bias of previous teaching,” rather than “measure [themselves] by man’s measure” (“An Appeal to Woman” 2). To her, spiritualism represented a way to promote equality, which for Waisbrooker meant a higher spiritual state. Her embrace of spiritualism also nurtured her interest in discussing women’s sexuality. In the late 1870s Waisbrooker produced speeches and pamphlets that merged spiritualism with the topic of women’s sexuality. She explored this connection in The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 197

From Generation to Regeneration, or The Plain Guide to Naturalism, a speech she gave that she printed as a pamphlet in 1879 and 1890. Waisbrooker used the spiritualist belief in “regeneration,” or life after death, as a starting point to discuss women’s sexuality and sexual rights. The goal of her inquiry was to find the “purifying” use of sex (35), that is, to show that sex is more than physical and is also spiritual (43). She also critiqued how marriage had precluded this inquiry into what she called “higher uses” of sex because women lacked rights within marriage (29, 15). She argued for women’s “right of sex association” and asserted that men who recognized women’s needs and who saw sex as more than a means for procreation would help both men and women reach a higher spiritual state (53–59). It was the first of her many nonfiction works, including Three Pamphlets on the Occult Forces of Sex (1890) and The Fountain of Life, or the Threefold Power of Sex (1893), that posited the “purifying” uses of women’s sexuality. Though her work on suffrage and didactic novels created space for a working woman’s voice within these debates, it did not show the kind of groundbreaking arguments for which Waisbrooker would later earn a reputation. It was her embrace of spiritualism that brought her to the topic of women’s sexuality, the topic she would spend the rest of her rhetorical career examining. But it was not just the ideology of spiritualism that brought her to the feisty rhetorical persona she would adopt but the community of spiritualists. Her early works, though interesting, probably did not get read extensively. Once she began to write about spiritualism, she found a new and captive audience. She published her later works through spiritualist presses and periodicals, using spiritualist platforms exclusively to promote women’s rights causes (Braude 80), particularly free love and women’s sexual rights. Did spiritualism bring Waisbrooker to the topic of sexuality, or did her interest in sexuality bring her to spiritualism? Whichever way it happened, we can say that joining spiritualist communities aided her development as a rhetor.

“Don’t Call a ‘Respectable’ Woman to Your Aid” As she began to embrace radical philosophies, Waisbrooker participated in vibrant, opinionated discourse communities that published their ideas in several periodicals. In fact, many of these groups disdained formal organization, so they shared their ideas through periodicals, creating and sustaining communities exclusively through reading and writing practices. Though many spiritualist periodicals began to distance themselves from free love, those who subscribed to the radical idea that women should be able to express their sexuality with or without marriage found other forums. In the 1870s periodicals such as Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, Hull’s Crucible, and The Word spread free-love ideology among small, dispersed groups of radicals. In the 1880s, the most popular, Lucifer, the Light Bearer began publication. Waisbrooker became a regular contributor to all of these periodicals. She served as editor of Lucifer in 1892 during Moses Harman’s imprisonment for obscenity. She 198 Wendy Hayden also produced two periodicals on her own: Foundation Principles from 1893 to 1894 and Clothed with the Sun from 1900 to 1902. These communities exchanged ideas on topics like free speech, birth control, and economics, and Waisbrooker’s voice often became a dissenting one in these debates. Even as an insider to these communities, she held some ideas that caused her to be an outsider as well. Free speech became a concern to these communities because at the same time these periodicals emerged, conservative factions sought to suppress “obscene material,” leading to the 1873 Comstock law, which banned obscene material from the mail. The self-appointed—and then government-appointed—obscenity watchdog Anthony Comstock arrested all of the editors of these periodicals during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The periodicals then became spaces to debate issues of free speech, especially speech about sex. Moses Harman, editor of Lucifer, served several sentences for obscenity for publishing discussions of marital rape and birth control. Waisbrooker also became a target of Comstock. Her first arrest, in 1892, was for reprinting a Department of Agriculture book titled Special Report on Diseases of the Horse. Waisbrooker pointed out that its descriptions, if applied to humans, would be considered “obscene” literature (Sears 229–30). Another arrest, in 1902, was occasioned by an article called “The Awful Fate of Fallen Women,” which appeared in Clothed with the Sun (McAllister 44). Defending what she called the “The Indicted Article,” Waisbrooker said the essay, “Has not a sentence in it that I am not ready to defend, with my life if need be. I said that there are no fallen women in the sense the world understands the term—that they are knocked down. . . . I feel so deeply the wrong done to my sex, and see so clearly that any abuse of the sex functions, no matter how law-protected, is a most bitter curse, that I cannot be silenced. If imprisoned, I will go out in my astral body and control others to talk—multiply my power” (1). Fortunately, however, Waisbrooker was never imprisoned for these transgressions. Her advanced age and ill health at the times of these court cases worked in her favor (“Mrs. Waisbrooker’s Case” 2). She continued to defend freedom of speech, equat- ing “the medieval charge of ‘heresy’ [to] the modern charge of ‘obscene literature’” (“The American Inquisition” 3) and naming Comstock “a chosen medium for the church hierarchy in spirit life” that insists on mandating an “arbitrary code of sexual morality” that goes against nature (My Century Plant 63, 48). Anarchist organizations rallied behind Waisbrooker, even helping to fund her defense (Clothed with the Sun 1). These communities were aligned with her goals of free speech, sex education, and frank discussion of sexual matters. But Waisbrooker often became a polarizing figure in these communities, particularly because of her views on economics and on birth control. For example, when Waisbrooker suggested that women in sexual relationships should receive economic compensation, other free-love feminists attacked her for advocating a system as similar to prostitution as they believed marriage was. Waisbrooker clarified that a woman should not demand money from her partner but that the partner should The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 199 be kind enough to realize that she needed it (“A Word to Lillian Harman” 269). She believed it was acceptable for women to accept money from men for the home if she controlled the home (“Woman and Economics” 238). Though many feminists in these communities criticized Waisbrooker for her views on women and economics, it was her views on birth control that caused the most contentious debates. Women’s right to birth control became a central tenet of the free-love and anarchist communities, and their discussions of contraception often brought them to the attention of Comstock. But Waisbrooker added an important voice to these debates. She dissented from the majority of these radicals with her objections to contraception. Her chief objection was that it placed the sole responsibility for birth control on women. In debating Moses Harman on his views, she asked, “Does not Mr. Harman know that no woman will bear a child unless man has first begotten it? It lies with him to limit the family, not with her, and when Mr. Harman . . . and others who advocate contracepts, will practice continence and rouse their brothers ‘to a sense of their responsibility,’ there will be no need for scientific, and so-called harmless appliances to prevent conception. I cannot speak for other women, but were I thirty instead of seventy, and life’s strong tide demanded expression I would seek self-relief before I would enter into a sex relation with a man and scientific appliances between” (“Woman’s Power” 125). Waisbrooker had proposed male continence or refrain from orgasm as the best option for birth control, and the “scientific appliances” she names were certainly unsafe but necessary options for women. Responding to Waisbrooker’s views, the free-love feminist Amy Linnett objected that there might not be men willing to practice continence. She attributed Waisbrooker’s rejection of contraception to an inferior view of sex. She elaborated: “many of our younger radical women [an obvious dig at Waisbrooker] are among those who are not ashamed to avow the deliciousness of their sex, as Walt Whitman puts it” (139). Finally, Linnett noted that “contracepts are the only means whereby some women can avoid having children, and should be recognized by our ‘continence’ advocates” (139). Another free-love feminist and Lucifer contributor, Elsie Cole-Wilcox, responded to Waisbrooker’s objections to contraception by ac- cusing her of adhering to the view that women were “devoid of sexual passion” (114). Waisbrooker replied, “I believe sex-association the natural right of the race” (“A Last Word” 150). She would continue to emphasize that women are not “less passionate than men” (“Who Protects the Wife” 385). Criticisms by those who stood with Linnett led Waisbrooker to produce a book- length treatise on the subject in 1895, the sarcastically titled Anything More, My Lord? In this piece, Waisbrooker presciently pointed out that the discussion of birth control should be a discussion of economics. She showed that advocates of birth control often highlighted its benefits to the poor, since they could limit the number of children in poverty, an argument later used by Margaret Sanger. Waisbrooker argued, “Contracepts and charity are both efforts to cover up the wrongs of our 200 Wendy Hayden present economic system by trying to fit people to conditions instead of conditions to the people” (8). She rejected the logic behind family limitation because it seemed to apply unequally according to social class. She pointed out that if the poor were being told to limit their families, why not limit the family size of the Queen of England, since the poor “are the real supporters of the queen’s children” (12). She continued, “Has not the miner’s wife as good a right to be a mother as the wife of the million- aire? Certainly she has, and a moral right to enough of the world’s wealth to make her comfortable as a mother, but after having robbed her of this right, it is now proposed that it be made the basis of still further robbery. When woman’s place and work, together with the higher uses of sex come to be rightly understood no prospective mother will lack any possible comfort” (14). Waisbrooker inserted an important qualification to this debate. Instead of rejecting birth control because of morality or advocating birth control with natural-rights arguments, as many anarchists and free lovers did, Waisbrooker showed that economic equality would correct the wrongs that others thought birth control would do. Like other radical feminists and anarchists, Waisbrooker noted how conversations on sexuality often neglected economic issues. Indeed, many of her later works focus on economic issues, including a book criticizing temperance advocates for ignoring the economic imbalances that lead people to become drunkards. In The Temperance Folly; or, Who’s the Worst, Waisbrooker lambasted temperance advocates for “dealing with effects instead of the causes which produce them” (1).1 Her rejection of temperance also contradicted the views of her contemporaries. Many spiritualists supported temperance, and free lovers often highlighted drunk husbands as one of the many abuses of marriage. Waisbrooker, though, found temperance advocacy misguided because it unfairly disadvantaged the poor. Drunkenness, she claimed, was an effect of the wrongs of society—especially economic inequality —not the cause (13). She characterized temperance advocates as the upper class trying to control the poor: “You who think yourselves so exempt from the vices of others, had you been born under the same circumstances would be just what they are; and to deal with this subject intelligently means that you stop trying to suppress effects while causes remain untouched. It means that you must go to the root not only of this evil, but also of the most if not all the other evils of which you complain—the root is the economic system which permits a few to absorb and control the wealth that the many produce” (11). She refuted an argument that prohibiting liquor sales would lead the poor to have more money since they would not spend it in saloons: “The accession to the labor market that would be thus produced would tend to lower wages and this would be another of the ways by which the money previously spent on beer or poor whiskey would be stopped on the way to his pocket” (10). Her views on birth control and temperance correlated with her views on eugenics. While many anarchists and free lovers supported eugenics because they believed that women’s sexual freedom would enable them to produce “better” children, The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 201

Waisbrooker was one of the few dissenters. Though she endorsed eugenics with the belief that “no well born child,—one born of a happy, satisfied, well-conditioned mother—will ever become a drunkard” (Temperance Folly 2), she disagreed with the many anarchists and free lovers who had moved from supporting women’s sexual freedom to supporting eugenics as a way to free women (Hayden 207). Waisbrooker made many statements that seemed to support eugenics. For example, she often emphasized that the proper treatment of women during sexual relations and during pregnancy would enable them to bear healthier children. But she focused such arguments on the rights and equal treatment women should receive, with “better” children being one of the outcomes. To the anarchists who placed eugenics at the center of their women’s rights arguments, she replied, “We want no money, time, nor talent ‘applied to the production’ of children, good or bad. What we need to do is to develop ourselves, to unfold and round out our own natures, to surround ourselves with all that tends to do this, and this not for the sake of children but because of the love of so doing, and we need to take no thought, to have no fear that our children will not follow the law of like producing like” (Anything More, My Lord? 8). She recognized that women’s rights arguments would be in the service of supporting eugenics, not the sole focus of calls to improve women’s condition. She would say, “The transformation from sex slavery to living for the next generation is not freedom” (Waisbrooker, Eugenics 65), an apt characterization of the ways free-love advocacy had subsumed women’s rights in favor of eugenics. Although communities of spiritualists, anarchists, and free-love advocates supported her, her ideas diverged from theirs in almost all cases, leading to a struggle among historians to place her within these movements and ultimately to her erasure. Waisbrooker’s writings on free love, free speech, birth control, temperance, and eugenics help us to show the importance of what Diane Davis called the “responsivity” of rhetorical agency (3). She embraced a reputation as disreputable not only within mainstream movements but also within the communities that celebrated the lack of respectability that empowered her. She alienated anarchists with her spiritualist views (Marsh 71, 172; Waisbrooker, My Century Plant 41), free-love advocates with her views on the purifying power of women’s sexuality, and free-love feminists with her views on economics and birth control. She pushed against some of their most cherished ideals of reform and heartily asserted, “I claim the right to think and act for myself independently of the arbitrary control of any personality or set of personalities in the universe” (“Woman’s Power” 125).

Conclusion Waisbrooker’s disagreements with her associates did not stop them from rallying around her when she was arrested by Comstock for obscenity or from viewing her as one of their pioneers and leaders (Harman 301). Though she would claim to disdain any organizations and by 1901 rejected invitations to join spiritualist or anarchist 202 Wendy Hayden organizations (“Organized Spiritualism” 2; “Organization” 1), these communities helped her to expand her ideas, distribute her writing, and become both a valuable leader and an important voice of dissent within them. Her inclusion within these communities allowed her to, in her words, “[scatter] liberalizing thought” (“Letter from an Old Contributor” 30). Royster and Kirsch noted the importance of social circulation to feminist rhetorical practices (24). The social circles of sex radicals and spiritualists, who conversed with one another as a community mostly through their writing in periodicals, help us to redefine the types of social circles women participated in. Waisbrooker can be seen as both an insider and an outsider to her intellectual circles—and both of these positions strengthened her rhetorical skill and reputation. If ever we could tell the story of a heroic woman rhetor, one certainly could be told about Waisbrooker, but I don’t think that is what is going on here, on the basis of my reading of her rhetorical career as a whole. She certainly had progressive ideas in the early days, but she did not express them wholeheartedly until she joined communities of first spiritualists and then anarchists, labor reformers, and free-love feminists. We could say she finally found the right audience for her ideas, but I think that takes away from her audience’s role in her development as a rhetor and reputation. Finding the right community isn’t just about finding a like-minded audience; it’s about finding those who will push one to develop one’s ideas and give one the strength to offer even wildly divergent views. Waisbrooker acknowledged the importance of these communities in a 1901 piece titled “My Critics Are My Friends,” where she mused, “they help me to think, prompt me to review my ground and to explain my thought more fully if not understood” (2).

Note 1. Though the pamphlet is undated, I have placed its publication around 1900 from Wais- brooker’s references to her age and to her novel A Sex Revolution being published seven years prior (16). The ideas in the pamphlet also correlate to the kind of arguments she was making around the turn of the century, more concerned with the connection between economic issues and sexuality than with only the spiritual side of sex.

Works Cited Bizzell, Patricia. “Chastity Warrants for Women Public Speakers in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, 2010, pp. 385–401. Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Beacon Press, 1989. Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her, Volume II: Key Texts of the Early Femi- nists. Greenwood Press, 1989. The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 203

Cole-Wilcox, Elsie. “The Limitation of Population, and Woman’s Freedom.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 1, no. 15, April 14, 1897, p. 114. Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. U of Pittsburgh P, 2010. Flynn, Elizabeth, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, editors. “Introduction: Feminist Rhetori- cal Resilience—Possibilities and Impossibilities.” Feminist Rhetorical Resilience, Utah State UP, 2012, pp. 1–29. Gaylor, Annie Laurie, editor. Women without Superstition. “No Gods—No Masters”: The Col- lected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1997. Gordon, Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. Penguin Books, 1977. Guitterez, Cathy. “Sex in the City of God: Free Love and the American Millennium.”Religion and American Culture, vol. 15, no. 2, 2005, pp. 187–208. Hallenbeck, Sarah. “Towards a Posthuman Perspective: Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies and Everyday Practices.” Advances in the History of Rhetoric, vol. 15, no. 1, 2012, pp. 9–27. Harman, Moses. “Lois Waisbrooker.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 1, no. 38, September 22, 1897, p. 301. Hawhee, Deborah. “The New Hackers: Historiography Through Disconnection.” Advances in the History of Rhetoric, vol. 15, no. 1, 2012, pp. 119–25. Hayden, Wendy. Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Femi- nism. Southern Illinois UP, 2013. Johnson, Nan. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Linnett, Amy. “Continence and Contracepts.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 1, no. 18, May 5, 1897, p. 139. Marsh, Margaret S. Anarchist Women 1870–1920. Temple UP, 1981. Mattingly, Carol. “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 1, 2002, pp. 99–108. McAllister, Pam. “Introduction: Women in the Lead: Waisbrooker’s Way to Peace.” A Sex Revolution, by Lois Waisbrooker, New Society Publishers, 1985, pp. 1–52. McElroy, Wendy. Individualist Feminism of the Nineteenth Century: Collected Writings and Bio- graphical Profiles. McFarland, 2001. McGarry, Molly. “Spectral Sexualities: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Moral Panics, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law.” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 12, no. 2, 2000, pp. 8–29. “Mrs. Waisbrooker’s Case.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 12, no. 28, May 8, 1896, p. 2. Passet, Joanne E. “Power through Print: Lois Waisbrooker and Grassroots Feminism.” Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand, U of Wisconsin P, 2006, pp. 229–50. ———. Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. U of Illinois P, 2003. 204 Wendy Hayden

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. Sears, Hal D. The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America. Regents Press of Kansas, 1977. Skinner, Carolyn. “‘The Purity of Truth’: Nineteenth-Century American Women Physicians Write about Delicate Topics.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 26, no. 2, 2007, pp. 103–19. Spurlock, John C. Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860. New York UP, 1988. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “‘On Divorce,’ Speech before the Judiciary Committee of the New York Senate, 1861.” Man Cannot Speak for Her, Volume II: Key Texts of the Early Feminists, compiled by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Praeger, 1989, pp. 235–50. Stoehr, Taylor. Free Love in America: A Documentary History. AMS Press, 1979. Waisbrooker, Lois. Alice Vale: A Story for the Times. William White, 1869, Wright American Fiction 1851–1875, http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/TEIgeneral/view?docId=wright/VAC8166 .xml. Accessed March 12, 2017. ———. “The American Inquisition.” Clothed with the Sun, vol. 1, no. 2, March 1900, p. 3. ———. “An Appeal to Woman.” Clothed with the Sun, vol. 2, no. 8, September 1901, pp. 2–3. ———. Anything More, My Lord? Independent Publishing Co., 1895. ———. Clothed with the Sun, vol. 3, no. 3, April 1902, p. 1. ———. Eugenics; or, Race Culture Lessons. 1907. ———. From Generation to Regeneration, or The Plain Guide to Naturalism. 1879. ———. From Generation to Regeneration: The Plain Guide to Naturalism; The Sex Question and the Money Power; and The Tree of Life between Two Thieves: Three Pamphlets on the Occult Forces of Sex. Murray Hill Publishing Co., 1890. ———. The Fountain of Life, or the Threefold Power of Sex. 1893. ———. Helen Harlow’s Vow. William White, 1870. Wright American Fiction 1851–1875, http:// webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/TEIgeneral/view?docId=wright/VAC8167.xml. Accessed March 12, 2017. ———. “The Indicted Article.” Clothed with the Sun, vol. 3, no. 3, April 1902, p. 1. ———. “A Last Word.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 1, no. 19, May 12, 1897, p. 150. ———. “Letter from an Old Contributor.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 1, no. 3, January 27, 1897, p. 30. ———. Mayweed Blossoms. William White, 1871. Wright American Fiction 1851–1875, http:// webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/TEIgeneral/view?docId=wright/VAC8168.xml. Accessed March 12, 2017. ———. My Century Plant. Independent Publishing Co., 1896. ———. “My Critics Are My Friends.” Clothed with the Sun, vol. 2, no. 4, May 1901, p. 2. ———. “Organization.” Clothed with the Sun, vol. 2, no. 7, August 1901, p. 1. ———. “Organized Spiritualism.” Clothed with the Sun, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1901, p. 2. http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/TEIgeneral/view?docId=wright/VAC8169.xml. Ac- cessed March 12, 2017. The Rhetorical Reputation of Lois Waisbrooker 205

———. A Sex Revolution. New Society, 1985. ———. Suffrage for Woman: The Reasons Why. Clayton & Babington, 1868. ———. The Temperance Folly; or, Who’s the Worst. c.1900. ———. “Things as I See Them.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 1, no. 51, December 22, 1897, p. 407. ———. “The Wail of Ignorance.”Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 4, no. 8, March 3, 1900, p. 59. ———. “Who Protects the Wife?” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 2, no. 48, December 3, 1898, p. 385. ———. “Woman and Economics.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 3, no. 30, August 5, 1899, p. 238. ———. “Woman’s Power.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 1, no. 16, April 21, 1897, p. 125. ———. “A Word to Lillian Harman.” Lucifer, the Light Bearer, vol. 3, no. 43, September 2, 1899, p. 269. Willard, Frances E. “A White Life for Two, 1890.” Man Cannot Speak for Her, Volume II: Key Texts of the Early Feminists, compiled by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Praeger, 1989, pp. 317–38. Willburn, Sarah A. Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-century Mystical Writings. Ashgate, 2006. Zaeske, Susan. “The Promiscuous Audience Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Women’s Rights Movement.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 81, no. 2, 1995, pp. 191–207. Not So Easily Dismissed The Intellectual Influences and Rhetorical Voice of Dorothy Day—“Servant of God”

Laurie A. Britt-Smith

The social justice icon Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897–November 29, 1980) is most familiar as an activist figure in the Catholic Church. She is remembered as the feisty cofounder of The Catholic Worker movement, a network of urban houses and rural farms where her ideals of justice for the poor were lived out, and as the primary writer for its newspaper, The Catholic Worker, which began its run in 1933. The paper continues today, as does the movement, which has more locations now than it did during her lifetime. However, her life story is much broader than that work. Taken in total, it reads like a chronicle of activism in the twentieth century. Day was first jailed with other “Iron Jawed Angels” as a suffragette and was last arrested, at age seventy- five, for protesting with César Chavez. Day wrote about everything she experienced, political and personal, with an honesty that continues to motivate her readers into conversations and activism concerning women’s issues, poverty, pacifism, faith, and the meaningful pursuit of societal justice. A trained journalist with more than 1,500 essays and journalistic pieces and author of six book-length works of fiction and nonfiction to her credit, Day used her writing often to serve as a response to the circumstances of her life, but it was also a stimulant for reshaping and redirecting it as well. Hesitant to make a distinction between “writing” and “doing,” she said, “Each is an act. Both can be part of a person’s response, an ethical response to the world” (Ellsberg xvi). Unfortunately, this sophisticated author faces a double bind; her history is in danger of being rewritten and her voice silenced by the prospect of sainthood, and she is also shunned by an academic community that has often glossed over her work as being too religious in nature to warrant serious study. Not So Easily Dismissed 207

In 1997 the Vatican officially recognized Dorothy Day as a “servant of God,” one of the necessary benchmarks in the process of sainthood. Another step was taken in November 2012 when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops unanimously voted to support the process, with Cardinal Timothy Dolan declaring Day “a saint for our times” (“The Life of Dorothy Day”). The creation of “Saint Dorothy” is very controversial, especially given that Day’s own reaction to the idea was “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily” (Jablonski 323). In a 1946 pamphlet, she addressed the problematic issue inherent in much of the literature produced about these religious models: “The lives of saints . . . are too often written as though they were not in this world. We have seldom been given the saints as they really were, as they affected the lives of their times. We get them generally only in their own writings. But instead of that strong meat, we are too generally given the pap of hagiographical writing” (Jablonski 323). In the cause of her sainthood, the bishops are presenting the kind of promotional “pap” that Day feared would be produced. Declaring her “the Right to Life Saint” and comparing her to the Apostle Paul, Dolan described her story as one of “sexual immorality” that resulted in an abortion; when she somewhat miraculously became pregnant again, in her gratitude to God she had her Damascus Road moment, turned to the Church, and began her ministry as an apostle to the poor (“Life of Dorothy Day”). This is partially true, but it completely dismisses the primary identity of Day as a lifelong political activist and dedicated pacifist and ignores the fact that she was often at odds with the policies and practices of the Catholic Church. All incidents of conflict and confrontation are forgotten and her intellectual contributions are made small as she is presented as yet another example of the “fallen woman” trope—the whore who through divine intervention became a Madonna. Dolan was not alone in this simplification. Day’s skill as a writer is woefully underexamined. The majority of what has been written about her focuses on the details of her life and her work as the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Move- ment and The Catholic Worker. This has a tendency to underplay her impact as an author, keeps her radicalism isolated to a particular time period, and significantly lessens, if not outright negates, the incubation of her ideas concerning social justice that occurred before her conversion to Catholicism at the age of thirty. This essay works toward recovering her authorial ethos and remembering her historical and contemporary importance by presenting the “strong meat” found in Day’s writing. It examines how her understanding of social justice developed through her experiences as a woman journalist. In doing so, it reveals the extraordinary scope of Day’s experiences and the philosophical, literary, and political influences that informed the intricacies of her rhetorical style and writing. Not only did her lifelong engagement with justice causes influence the practices and policies of one of the world’s most patriarchal institutions, but also her writing, which connected 208 Laurie A. Britt-Smith seemingly disparate voices, presents a vision of justice that continues to impact discussions of social reform.

Political and Intellectual Influences In his foreword to Day’s book Loaves and Fishes (1963), Thomas Merton wrote, “Dorothy Day never preaches, never pounds the table: she remarks quietly on the things she has seen, she points out their awful, as well as beautiful implications, and she passes on to something else” (ix). Day’s rhetoric was powered by her belief in communitarianism—an ideological model wherein everyone shares material goods, physical abilities, intellectual talents, and spiritual devotion toward the building and maintenance of the community. The locus of social change is found not in institutional or legislative mandate but within the heart of the individual. The result of such individuals coming to agreement is reformation of the community and the systems by which it operates. The motivation for her writing and activism was to promote the dignity of the individual, no matter his or her belief system, class, gender, or race. Her essays challenge us to define ourselves as individuals capable of changing societal conceptions of otherness. In order to understand Day’s particular rhetoric, it is important to understand her historical moment and the social circumstances that mediated her development as a thinker, writer, and activist. She was born in 1897 into a world that was steadily shifting toward the systemizing forces of modernity. The turn of the twentieth century was a moment of crisis in defining American purpose and character. The term “Manifest Destiny” had been coined in 1845 and was taken up as a call to arms to conquer the entire continent and, by 1895, to make incursions into foreign territory as well. As the century turned, it became very obvious that this stampeding spirit of nationalism that “regard[ed] the nation as the supreme value, the source of all life’s meaning, as an end-in-itself” (Krupa 192) had been fused to the economic system of the democratic experiment, capitalism. Left in the wake of this steady march were those trampled as a consequence of nationalism’s success. In the face of accelerat- ing poverty levels and quality-of-life issues among the lower classes, the national conversation was challenged by the question of what to do with the workers, those native-born and immigrant masses that were necessary cogs if the experiment was to continue. By the time Day was sixteen and a student at the University of Illinois, the debate concerning the sustainability of the American system was well under way as multiple forms of socialism and communism were discussed and promoted as ideological replacements in intellectual enclaves, public newspapers, and meeting halls. As a student she sought out other like-minded individuals who were experimenting with forms of social and political reform. Her autobiographical writing about the time reads like a “who’s who” list of radical political thinkers. Many of her friends Not So Easily Dismissed 209 from that period became involved with the Bolsheviks and eventually immigrated to Russia. Her interest in the debate was more than just youthful curiosity and idealism. One of her earliest memories was of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. In The Long Loneliness (1952), she described this event and its aftermath as the first time she had witnessed people truly in need. She was struck by the way the community pulled together to help those who were streaming out of the city (22). She returned to the memory on many occasions, pointing to it as the moment when she first became aware of the interconnectedness of humanity. In that period of crisis, the status quo was disrupted, cultural boundaries were in flux, and she saw, however briefly, that an alternative social pattern could exist. The earthquake also threw her happy childhood into temporary disorder. Her father lost his job with a local newspaper, and the Day family quickly relocated to the south side of Chicago, living in poverty in an apartment over a tavern for some time. Once the family recovered financially and was able to move to a house on the north side, the adolescent Day continued to seek out the poor, often taking long walks while pushing her infant brother in his carriage in order to observe the large immigrant families who lived in overcrowded tenements. As an avid reader of social reformers such as Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Feodor Dosto- evsky, among others, she was motivated in part to undertake this wandering by a desire to witness some of the events she had read about in her favorite novels. In From Rome To Union Square (1938), her first autobiographical work, which is addressed to her brother, she wrote about the effect these strolls had on her imagination and ambition: “When what I read made me particularly class conscious, I used to turn from the park with all its beauty and peacefulness and walk down to North Avenue and over West through slum districts . . . and ponder over the poverty of the homes as contrasted with the wealth along the shore drive. I wanted even then to play my part. I wanted to write such books that thousands upon thousands of readers would be convinced of the injustice of things as they were” (37). The importance of these authors on the formation of her rhetorical discourse cannot be overstated. There are numerous references to the works of those literary artists who inspired Day’s imagination in her writing and in the biographical writing about her. Robert Coles, a close friend of Day in her later years, wrote, “For Dorothy Day the connection between ‘art’ and ‘life’ was real, substantial, a powerful influence on her everyday actions” (Radical Devotion 21). Her childhood habit of connecting literary representations to the gritty reality of the circumstances of the lower urban classes in American society continued throughout her life. In Coles’s introduction to The Long Loneliness, he recounted a conversation Day had with a group of young people visiting from a nearby university. When asked what she’d like to be remembered for, she told them that in addition 210 Laurie A. Britt-Smith to the talks she’d had at the Catholic Worker House, the good soup, and the good guests, “I’d like people to say that ‘she really did love those books!’ You know, I’m always telling people to read Dickens or Tolstoy, or read Orwell, or read Silone. . . . I want to live by them! That’s the meaning of my life—to live up to the moral vision of the Church and of some of my favorite writers. It would have been a far lonelier life for me if I hadn’t ‘met’ Mr. Dickens or Mr. Tolstoy, and some others. . . . I get strength from the way those writers and artists portrayed the poor, that’s how I’ve kept going all these years” (4). During her childhood, Day received religious teaching and was baptized as an Episcopalian. However, her experience with members of that community and with others who were being affected by the promotion of the new “social gospel” left Day bitter toward organized religion. She wrote that, although she read and was inspired by the sermons of John Wesley and read the New Testament with “fervor,” she did not see evidence of those words being translated into action by those who claimed to believe them (Long Loneliness 41). Those types of observations, in combination with what she read in the works of Russian philosophers and of authors like Sinclair and London and what her professors told her about religion—that it is a crutch for those who needed to be comforted but that the strong would do well to leave it (Long Loneliness 43)—gave her the sense that her youth was to be a time of war against all the mechanisms of the status quo. Life as a journalist appealed to her more than academic study, and so she left college and relocated to New York, reporting on the activities of multiple political groups and engaging in a bohemian lifestyle. Her colleagues were an eclectic mix of artists and wordsmiths, including Eugene O’Neill and Kenneth Burke, and assorted political radicals who called Greenwich Village home. Her identity as a pacifist began in 1917 when she was a young reporter working for the socialist paper The New York Call. She joined her voice and body to the cause of protesting World War I. It was also common for those who took up the cause of conscientious objectors to also champion women’s voting rights (Klejment 16–17). Day was familiar with the powerhouse writers of the women’s rights movement. She read the works of Lady Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and participated in the same moment of protest as Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. She shared a jail cell with Lucy Burns, one of the cofounders with Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman of the Congressional Union, which became the National Woman’s Party (Long Loneliness 76). She wrote for the same paper, The Liberator, as Crystal Eastman and her brother Max Eastman. The persuasive style of these turn-of-the-twentieth-century feminists greatly influenced Day’s writing; although then a young unknown, she was one of them. Between her personal friendships and her experience as a professional observer of radicalism of all stripes, she was well versed in the discourses of the socialist and communist revolution. Although she later denounced the communist movement as Not So Easily Dismissed 211 a type of heresy, “a distortion of the truth” (Day, Union Square 12), the communistic grand narratives of the dignity of the individual worker and the inherent unfairness of capitalism remained firmly in place as philosophical touchstones in her writing after her conversion. In an early attempt to explain her connection between the two, she wrote to her former comrades, “Many Christians have lost sight, to a great extent, of the communal aspect of Christianity, so the collective ideal is the result. They have failed to learn a philosophy of labor, have failed to see Christ in the worker. So in Russia, the worker, instead of Christ has been exalted. . . . The proletariat as a class has come to be considered the Messiah, the deliverer” (Union Square 12–13). Day wrote that it was her concern for all people, particularly the working class and the poor, that drew her to the Catholic Church. She saw it as the church of the immigrant, of the people, and this idea of the “Mystical Body” appealed to the core of her identity. “My very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate myself with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God” (Long Loneliness 139). She later wrote, “I loved the Church for Christ made visible. Not for itself because it was often a scandal to me. . . . There was plenty of charity but too little justice” (Long Loneliness 150). In order to understand Day’s writing, it is crucial to understand that her definition of justice was grounded in the discourses of alternative political ideology, not scripture or religious training. To ignore this fact is to misunderstand the motivation for and purpose of her writing at all stages of her life. One of the reasons Day became an effective voice within the Catholic Church is that she was not born to it, had not acquired its theology or social literacy through her primary discourse community. When she forged her way into Christian discourse, she was able to reshape it by adding hers to it. Although many scholars have a tendency to examine how Catholicism changed Dorothy Day, what Day brought to Catholicism is equally important. Day continued to share some of the language and political ideology of socialism and communism in her writing about community and justice; however, her rhetoric was forever changed when she met Peter Maurin in 1937 and he introduced her to the ideology of communitarianism and the philosophy of Personalism as developed by the French Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) and Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950).1 Personalism celebrates the dignity and complexity of each person as a created being and opposes any system that diminishes the individual. Maritain and Mounier were concerned about the relationship of the individual to the community and the responsibility of the community to its individual members (Bokenkotter 357). Maritain believed that “the individual, that is man considered in the material aspect, was at the service of the community, which was in turn at the service of the person, who was in turn at the service of God” (Kelly 46). In 1936 Mounier produced his Personalist Manifesto, which lays out a series of reforms toward the development of communities that would be based on a lifestyle of simplicity and poverty. 212 Laurie A. Britt-Smith

This peaceful philosophy appealed greatly to Day, who had gradually become disillusioned with the communist movement. She was particularly distressed by the violence that she saw many of her comrades promoting in the name of the cause: “I will not deny that often the Communist more truly loves his brother, the poor and oppressed, than many so called Christians. But, when in word and deed the Com- munist incites brother to kill brother, one class to hate and destroy other classes, then I cannot feel that his love is true. He is loving his friend, but not his enemy, who is also his brother. There is no brotherhood of man there” (Union Square 153). Personalism emphasizes the worth of all people as members of the community, no matter how opposed their ideologies and beliefs are to one’s own. Day was aware that her journalistic training had made her see “the world in terms of class conflict;” however, she did not want to create more adversity than was already present but sought rather “to mitigate it” (Long Loneliness 181). She did this by admonishing her readers to see the beloved in all people, including those who propagate injustices, not to agree with them or support them—she was just as invested in the works of mercy that “enlighten the ignorant and rebuke the unjust” (Long Loneliness 181) as those who feed the poor and visits those in prison—but to see them as individuals who could be reformed. Complementing the work of Maritain and Mounier were the writings of Nicholas Berdyaev, who wrote a powerful commentary on the works of Dostoevsky that Day referred to often, and the theologian Vladimir Soloviev. Berdyaev wrote, “The possibility of the miraculous in human life presupposes human spiritual activity” (Zwick 77). In agreement with this, Soloviev claimed, “It is impious to wait upon God to do that which simple justice could bring about” (Zwick 77). Day believed that in order for faith to be real, it had to be expressed in active and visible ways. Hers was not a theoretical community but one that she and other Catholic Workers brought into a physical reality. Justice, love, and redemption were all tied together in the vision of an alternate reality that she created through her writing.

Protest Writing and Day’s Style of Rhetoric Closely reading Day’s work reveals that her method of constructing arguments connected her to the rhetorical tradition of women’s protest writing. Concerns about violence in the home and in the public realm and the effects of war are constant features of women’s rhetoric in the Western tradition. By the time Day began her career as a reporter, there was a growing list of American women whose entrance into the public sphere had started in earnest with the abolitionist movement and speakers such as Maria Miller Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and the Grimké sisters.2 In her text Man Cannot Speak for Her (1989), Karlyn Kohrs Campbell defined the feminine style of rhetoric by examining the oratory of these early feminist speakers who fought for abolition and suffrage. Their style of composition rose out of women’s Not So Easily Dismissed 213 experience as speakers whose first challenge was to persuade their audience, both male and female, that they had a right to speak at all. In order to achieve ethos in such a situation, these women developed a style that relied on relational strategies. Campbell identified the style as the process of craft learning as applied to the rhetorical situation. The feminine model she proposed is based on a long tradition of passing on life skills, of keeping traditions alive, and of sharing advice. The rhetorical voice is more personal in tone and relies heavily on personal experience and anecdotes, inviting the audience to test its experiences against the experience of the speaker/author in order to achieve agreement through identification with the author. The goal of feminine rhetoric is not to achieve a sense of victory over the audience, to persuade them that one’s position is the correct one, but rather to empower the audience—to inspire it to believe that it has a credible voice and thus to negate the insecurity that allows the status quo to operate unchal- lenged (12–15). Campbell’s model has been expanded by numerous scholars. Foss, Foss, and Griffin took the feminine model and placed it into the space of politicized “feminist” rhetorical theories. In their 1999 collection on feminist rhetorical theories they stated that feminist—and particularly feminist—rhetorical-critique functions to discover how individuals construct and make meaning of the world around them and then reimagine and redirect that world (7). They pointed to the work of Cheris Krama- rae, who called for the creation of “woman’s world” where “interconnection, safety, holism, trust, mutuality, adaptability, and equal access to information” are achievable (48). Although labeling Day a feminist in its current definition is problematic for many reasons, her purpose for writing was powered by these same community- based ideals. Day’s writing demonstrates what the feminist scholar Laura R. Mic- ciche claimed: that the act of writing has a particular power in disturbing the status quo and in reimagining and re-envisioning reality because it “establishes links between language, action, and consequences” (176). Because Day was the daughter of a newsman and was employed as a writer on several papers before founding The Catholic Worker in 1933, she was trained in the traditional rhetorical structure of journalism, and that structure influenced the style of her writing as well. However, as a woman writer, Day was not expected to write in the masculine style. She told Bill Moyers that if she wanted to get paid, she often had to write “feminine dribble” that revolved around human interest angles instead of the hard news. Although she was able to sneak in “real reporting” on occasion, most of her editors expected the majority of her work to be “women’s writing” (“Still a Rebel”). The influence of the feminine style on Day’s writing is evident in comments from several of her editors. Robert Ellsberg, who served as managing editor for The Catholic Worker from 1976 to 1978, stated that for Day the primary purpose of 214 Laurie A. Britt-Smith writing was to report what she had witnessed, which is in keeping with journalism, but that her presentation style (or rhetorical style) could not be easily defined. She moved from straight reporting, to editorializing, to almost academic writing, with the inclusion of long quotations from literature or other texts, to spiritual meditation and back again, often in the same piece. When one of her editors told her to “get to the point” and be more logical in her presentation, she replied that her writing was logical enough because “I go from one paragraph to the next” (Ellsberg xi–xii). Because of its nonconfrontational approach and its emphasis on building relationships, feminine-style writing may appear to be tangential, some might be tempted to say illogical, as it relays multiple anecdotes and other bits of evidence of social wrongs while also suggesting a corresponding number of solutions. However, this layering of information can also be extremely effective. As Ellsberg notes, “in many cases her digressions served in some mysterious way to make her most important points” (xii). Because of Day’s journalistic training, her best pieces, although packed with detail, musings, and argument, are usually rather short. Even her book-length works are for the most part cohesive presentations of short episodic essays, often four to ten pages long, within themed sections. Day explained the difficulty she had in producing longer works: “I am a journalist, not a biographer, not a book writer” (Long Loneliness 11, emphasis hers). A predilection for the brevity of journalistic structure seems incompatible with a rhetorical style that begs for a leisurely unraveling; however, this seeming contradiction is one of the reasons why Day’s ability as an author was so remarkable. Hers is the work of a prose artist able to create an incredible synthesis of style and philosophy.

A Closer Look—Day and the Ideology of Voluntary Poverty One of the most controversial facets of Day’s philosophy was the doctrine of voluntary poverty. She believed that as long as people are living in destitution and cyclical poverty, it is unethical and immoral to accumulate wealth or to participate in luxu- ries that are manufactured through the exploitation of others. Day considered the idea of charity to be condescending to the poor, as do many who live in poverty, and felt that the only way to avoid the appearance of such condescension was to become impoverished and to continue to give from the state of poverty. Day was well aware that not everyone would be able to live in this manner. Dur- ing a 1971 television interview she was asked why the lifestyle could be the cause of so much strife between those who practiced it and those who did not. She replied, “People feel resentment toward those who buck the system. Following another star does produce a certain arrogance, but if you generate a lot of hostility you need to figure out why. We are called to conciliate—to be reconcilers between warring brothers. However, voluntary poverty does require you to live off of people, so people in the system have a right to be aggravated. One has to approach it with a bit Not So Easily Dismissed 215 of humbleness. It is a little by little affair” (“Cornell-Day”). This admission that her utopian ideas needed some sort of external support gave the aggravated a credible voice in the conversation. As a reflection of the feminine style, no one got shut out of the discussion, and there was an avoidance of conflict. Granting those who did not agree or who took issue with voluntary poverty room to enter the dialogue gave her the space to try to convince them of her larger point. One of her most elegant essays about the topic appeared as “A Baby Is Always Born with a Loaf of Bread Under Its Arm” in Loaves and Fishes. This representative piece demonstrates how Day constructed her arguments without “pounding the table” or pointing a finger of blame directly at anyone, how her writing was influenced by philosophical traditions and journalistic conventions and was also connected to the historical tradition of women’s protest writing. The title of the essay is a Spanish folk saying. It means that the needs of a new child will somehow be taken care of and is meant to console new parents who may not be financially ready for their additional responsibility. After explaining where the saying comes from, Day stated, “It is this philosophy which makes it possible for people to endure a life of poverty” (82). She then remarked that people do not understand the difference between “inflicted poverty and voluntary poverty, between being the victims and the champions of poverty,” and that she referred to one as destitution and the other as what St. Francis called “Lady Poverty” (82). To be destitute is to be without hope. It is ugly and carries with it sickness and death. Poverty is a state of living as simply as possible without exploiting other people. Her introduction to the essay seems like the set-up for a fairly traditional rhetorical argument. One would expect that she would next offer a thesis about the benefits of voluntary poverty and why it should be practiced and then proceed with some type of evidence. However, Day did just the opposite; she began telling a series of stories that allow the reader to connect their experiences to those she was sharing. She was invoking narrative memory, not demanding they agree with her definitions of poverty or her ideology. She was not asking them to do anything, yet. Her stories were presented as true, not as fictions, so they were in keeping with the journalistic style of reporting but delivered as more than just a report; they were a means to eventually reimagine the status quo. This move located Day’s style of argument within the feminine style of rhetoric. She began the next section, “We know the misery being poor can cause” (82). The pronoun “we” is connective. As the linguist Anita Wenden stated, “the use of ‘we’ demonstrates adherence to the social group,” whereas “I” is “the manifestation of individuality and freedom from the collective view of self” (225). It could be read as “we all know about this issue, and ‘I’ am not telling you simply what ‘I’ think.” Orators and writers often use “we” to produce an affective response to their argument as well as to create a sense of unity among the communicator, audience, and theme (226). In using the word “we,” Day positioned herself as a member of the 216 Laurie A. Britt-Smith same social community as her audience while also connecting them to the discourse of the Catholic Worker movement and that specific community. She continued to strengthen the sense of unity between herself and her audience by refusing to step forward as the first voice of authority, referring instead to the model of St. Francis and the difficulty he initially had in embracing “Lady Poverty.” This was in keeping with the feminine style of rhetoric as well. In order to avoid direct confrontation and as a way to remain in the background, feminine-style speakers defer to others as their source of primary authority. Day was reporting, working toward a sense of mutual agreement, not directly confronting the audience with her position. She did this consistently in her writing, insisting she was simply relaying the words of Peter Maurin and the philosophers he had had her read or that she was only doing what needed to be done according to the writing of an author like Dosto- evsky or Dickens or some historic religious figure. Never mind that she was the one who was interweaving these ideas and producing very effective arguments for some extraordinarily radical ideas. She navigated between the example of St. Francis and her own experiences with the heartbreaking and unjust conditions poverty brings. In reporting these incidents she communicated that she understood why some people could not comprehend why or how she could be an advocate for poverty. In her agreement that poverty is ugly and unfair, she was building a connection with her reader. However, she did this knowing she would readjust their definition of poverty in a moment. This is another common feature of her writing that has been defined as “dialectical irony” (Jablonski 331). It is an idea based on Kenneth Burke’s description of true irony as being “humble” because of a recognition by the ironist that opposing elements of a contradiction need and depend on each other in order to clarify their position. Thus Day was able to be an advocate for poverty while also including examples demonstrating its devastating effects. In doing this, she clarified the difference between poverty and destitution. The instances she cited, such as families living in basements while working in sweatshops only to be evicted by a corrupt landlord demanding exorbitant rents and the indignity of having one’s possessions thrown into the street, are actually examples of economic abuse, of systemic mechanisms of impoverish- ment that leave people in a state of destitution. She then returned to her discussion of St. Francis and the report that he gained “freedom from fastidiousness and detachment from worldly things” by “kissing a leper.” She told another story of herself, acknowledging that her freedom and detachment from material objects were not attained in one step, nor was this true for anyone else that she knew, for that matter, even though she had “kissed a leper” twice. The details of those events are rather personal—she kissed a woman whose face had been partially eaten away by cancer and a drunk prostitute who would not leave the Worker House until she did (Loaves 84). Day shrugged off these incidents as small compared to the struggle to actually strip herself of those things that bring Not So Easily Dismissed 217 creature comforts. Acknowledging her own weakness and difficulty was another way to build a connection with her audience. These types of details appeared often in her work and were another indicator of women’s protest writing. Readers of this style expected and demanded honesty in order for the appeal to ethos to be fulfilled. Day then took a detour into antiwar rhetoric. She added a layer to her argument for voluntary poverty by declaring it a means of promoting peace: “Our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war, and this is surely one of the great arguments for poverty in our time. If the comfort one achieves results in the death of millions in the future, then that comfort shall be duly paid for. . . . Whatever you buy is taxed, so that you are, in effect, helping to support the state’s preparation for war exactly to the extent of your attachment to worldly things of whatever kind” (Loaves 86). Rhetorics of social justice are often interwoven with those of pacifism, and it would be unusual if Day did not find a way of tying that thread into her argument for voluntary poverty. This was a point of separation from the Catholic Church, which, like many Christian sects, believes that under certain circumstances the violence of war is justifiable. Day, believing in the brotherhood of all mankind, refused to make that distinction. She often wrote about theCatholic Worker’s steadfast commitment to pacifism in articles and essays, even if it meant refusing to go along with the Church with regard to the Spanish Civil War and the loss of two-thirds of the newspaper’s subscribers during World War II (Coy 48–49). This brief statement chastising workers for becoming too comfortable with the postwar economy is the most confrontational part of the essay and represents a departure from the narrative- based, nonconfrontational style of the rest of the essay but is in keeping with Day’s overall social literacy practices. The last portion of the essay focuses on the reality of living in voluntary poverty. She began again by allowing room for other’s doubts but countered them with stories of how it was easier to live in poverty; the Catholic Worker movement never worried about having to pay salaries for their regular volunteers, and their volunteers never needed to worry about paying room and board. She claimed because they lived simply and were doing the good work of faith, the people in the movements always had their needs met. Explaining how this could possibly be true became her focus of as she offered evidence, again in the form of storytelling and shared advice, that tied physical proof with spiritual belief. She was working her way toward the statement of her full thesis. There is a line of logic that runs through the piece, but the order of the stories seems a bit loose, the details web-like in their connectedness until finally Day stated, “We are our brother’s keeper. Whatever we have beyond our own needs belongs to the poor. . . . If we do give in this way, then the increase comes. There will be enough. Somehow we will survive; ‘The pot of meal shall not waste, nor the cruze of oil be diminished,’ for all our giving away the last bit of substance we have” (92). 218 Laurie A. Britt-Smith

The idea of being one’s “brother’s keeper,” especially to the degree that Day advocated, is beyond the comfort zone of most members of our class-based, capitalist society. Day knew this, just as earlier women speakers and writers knew that the positions they were advocating for would clash tremendously with societal norms. She brought her audience to a conclusion that was unified with the overall theme of family and communal care, which worked in concert with that all-important “we” that began her argument. She ended the essay by making a reference to a large family sitting down for cornmeal cakes and there always being enough. This echoed the image created by the title of the piece and its very practical, consoling advice; however, she added the caveat that “somehow everything works out. It works out naturally and it works out spiritually” (92). She thus closed the circle of her argument but added much to the initial thought. The essay is only ten pages long, but within its text Day presented an argument that twisted together contemporary and historical narratives, presented a model of a unified and intentional community that also stressed the importance of the individual, and championed an economic policy that appealed to those on the radical left, yet was governed by a moral ethic that sprang from a bastion of conservatism. Actually her economics were so left that they were practically also radically “right” because of her disavowal of big government. The fact that Day was able to juggle and connect so many seemingly contradictory thoughts and styles prompted one scholar to quip that if Day were ever canonized, she should be the patron saint of paradox (Jablonski 334). That seems much more appropriate than having her forever dismissed as the saint who had an abortion or glossed over as some historic religious figure, caught up solely in blind devotion and unable to articulate her ideology.

Conclusion Day considered the filtering and questioning of human ideas to be a primary reason for human existence: “God put us here to go through this kind of mental gymnastics. . . . He put us here to ask, to try and find out the best possible way to live with our neighbors” (Coles, Radical Devotion 24). In order to live with “our neighbors,” she had to be willing to listen to and interact with whomever appeared in the worker house or on one of the communal farms—be they the penniless and addicted street person, the highly idealistic college student, the wandering, purposeless veteran, the curious but concerned Church leader, or anyone in between. Her style of rhetoric enabled her to cross multiple social discourse boundaries in order to help members of different communities learn of one another and, in learning, become more tolerant of the diversity that makes up a living and vibrant society. Caring for others, sharing the self, and working with the members of the community was for Day the “only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel” (Long Loneliness 243). Through Day’s interaction with many politics-based communities, she acquired the languages (styles) of protest rhetoric and the memory of what those groups had Not So Easily Dismissed 219 done well, but she also learned from where they had faltered—particularly in the area of racial inequality and the use of violence as a legitimate means toward a goal. When she came to Christianity, she found a way to break from what she perceived as flaws without disregarding the entire vision and to connect what she saw as positive facets of those social movements to doctrines such as the Acts of Mercy and the early Christian model of community. She also remained an individualist, highly critical of the Catholic Church as an institution and of others who claimed to be Christian but did not practice the communal aspects of their faith. She was also her own harshest critic. Always sure that she could have done more, she wrote often of her own faults and asked forgiveness from her readers and coworkers for any slights or offense she might have caused. Invested in the individual’s responsibility to the community, she always sought in her writing to find deep connection with its audience. Because Dorothy Day’s initial moment of impact is fading into historic memory, there is a tendency to think of her as an icon of past radicalism; however, the issues she was most concerned with persist, as do the philosophies she held most dear. Through her writing and the work of those who continue to be inspired by her language/rhetoric of protest, Day makes her readers aware of the tremendous abuse suffered by the ranks of the forgotten and overlooked, but she also believed that simple awareness of a problem cannot solve anything. She educated her audience about the multiple systems of oppression at work in our society and challenged them to take action as informed and empowered individuals, to create their own interpretations and presentations of new ideas necessary to promote social reform in their own historic moment

Notes 1. There is an Anglo-American form of Personalism developed and promoted by the work of Brightman and de Wolfe at Boston University. The American version is more theological in nature, revolving around a discussion about the personality of God and how this personality is expressed in human beings. This is notable because it was a foundational theological concept taught to Martin Luther King Jr. This related form of the philosophy was as important to the development of his rhetoric as it was to Day’s. 2. Recommended texts include Lunsford, Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, as well as Werthheimer, Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Histori- cal Women, and Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth—Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Aboli- tion.

Works Cited Bacon, Jacqueline. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. U of South Carolina P, 2002. Bokenkotter, Thomas. Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice. Doubleday, 1998. 220 Laurie A. Britt-Smith

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her. Praeger, 1989. Coles, Robert. Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion. Addison-Wesley, 1987. ———. “Introduction to Loaves and Fishes.” Loaves and Fishes, 1963, Orbis, 1997, pp. xi–xviii. ———. “Introduction to The Long Loneliness.” The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day, 1952, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997, pp. 1–6. “Cornell-Day.” Christophers Close Up, October 20, 1971. YouTube, February 26, 2010, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZOOWZTaFNA. Coy, Patrick G. “Conscription and the Catholic Conscience in World War II.” American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, edited by Anne Klejment and Nancy L. Roberts, Praeger, 1996, pp. 47–63. Day, Dorothy. From Union Square to Rome. 1942, Orbis, 2006. ———. Loaves and Fishes. 1963, Orbis, 1997. ———. The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day. 1952, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Ellsberg, Robert, editor. Dorothy Day Selected Writings: By Little and by Little. Orbis, 1992. Foss, Karen A., Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin.Feminist Rhetorical Theories. Sage, 1999. Jablonski, Carol J. “The Radical’s Paradox: A Reflection on Dorothy Day’s ‘Legendary’ Resistance to Canonization.” Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement: Centenary Essays, edited by William Thorn, Phillip Runkel, and Susan Mountin, Marquette UP, 2001, pp. 323–35. Kelly, Michael. Pioneer of the Catholic Revival: The Ideas and Influence of Emmanuel Mournier. Sheed and Ward, 1979. Klejment, Anne. “The Radical Origins of Catholic Pacifism: Dorothy Day and the Lyrical Left During World War I.” American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, edited by Anne Klejment and Nancy L. Roberts, Praeger, 1996, pp. 15–32. Krupa, Stephen. “American Myth and the Gospel: Manifest Destiny and Dorothy Day’s Nonviolence.” Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement: Centenary Essays, edited by William Thorn, Phillip Runkel, and Susan Mountin, Marquette UP, 2001, pp. 184–200. “The Life of Dorothy Day.”Religion and Ethics News Weekly, PBS.com, February 8, 2013, http:// www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/14/february-8–2013-the-life-of-dorothy -day/14669/. Lunsford, Andrea, editor. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. U of Pitts- burgh P, 1995. Merton, Thomas. “Foreword toLoaves and Fishes.” Loaves and Fishes, 1963, Orbis, 1997, p. ix. Micciche, Laura R. “Writing as Feminist Rhetorical Theory.” Rhetoric in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods & Methodologies, edited by Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson, U of Pittsburgh P, 2010, pp. 173–88. “Still a Rebel.” Bill Moyers’ Journal, PBS, WNET, New York, February 20, 1973. Not So Easily Dismissed 221

Wenden, Anita. “Critical Language Education.” Language and Peace, edited by Christian Schaffner and Anita Wenden, Routledge, 1999, pp. 211–27. Werthheimer, Molly Meijer, editor. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Histori- cal Women. U of South Carolina P, 1997. Zwick, Mark, and Louise Zwick. The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins. Paulist Press, 2005. Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife Private Interventions and the Public Memory of Crystal Eastman

Amy Aronson

As a twenty-something woman embarking on both adult life and career-building, Crystal Eastman envisioned herself as “one of these circus-chariot-ladies” with one hand “driving a tandem of the arts and the law” and “the other hand holding aloft two streaming banners,—love and liberty” (Vassar). Crossing the “disciplinary” boundaries of “arts” and “the law,” she suggested what became an enduring theme of her multi-issue activism: you can’t fix one social problem without fixing the others. To her, class inequality, sexism, racism, militarism and war were all linked and mutually reinforcing social maladies. By 1910, the twenty-nine-year-old Eastman began to walk her multi-movement talk. After graduating from Vassar in 1903 and earning an M.A. in sociology from Columbia in 1904, she attended law school at New York University, finishing second in her class in 1907. Unable to find work as an attorney, she took a temporary job as a researcher investigating industrial accidents with Paul Kellogg’s now-famous Pittsburgh Survey. Her research, published as Work Accidents and the Law in 1910, led to an appointment by New York governor Charles Evans Hughes to chair the state’s Employers’ Liability Commission. There, Eastman drafted the first serious workers’ compensation law in the United States. The law would become a model for many other states. Always a feminist, in 1913 she joined with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to cofound what would become the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and later coauthored the Equal Rights Amendment. When war broke out in Europe, she cofounded the Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 223

Woman’s Peace Party (WPP), today the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), the antiwar group that became the most important voice for radical internationalism in the country and the only American peace organization to demonstrate that mediation can avert war. Using people’s diplomacy to avoid a war with Mexico in 1916, that work would make “a little less fantastic her effort, by similar means, to stop Woodrow Wilson from going to war against Germany” in World War I (M. Eastman 28). After the armistice, she joined with her brother, Max, to copublish the radical Liberator magazine and served as both managing editor and an investigative journalist, filing the only reporting from inside revolutionary Hungary to be published in the United States. And this she did soon after she had masterminded the founding of what would become the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Through it all, Eastman saw that no social movement with which she was involved—not suffragism, socialism, the antiwar movement, or even feminism after the vote—envisioned both public and private life—“love and liberty”—together on the agenda for change. And the private realm, she knew, was especially relevant for women. Eastman grasped at the dawn of the modern era that the feminist mantra coined in 1970 was true—“the personal is political” (Hanisch). Without policies and a culture that embraced equality in private life—including love, sex, marriage, the family—she believed “it is idle to talk of real independence for women” (C. Eastman, “Now” 23) Eastman was an expansive personality—some would say to a fault. But she came of age at a time of “a new temper of mind,” as Walter Lippmann told her brother Max, when old world ways were giving way to emerging hopes for new freedoms, new artistic directions, new ways of life (Lippman). And Eastman wanted it all. In that pursuit, she became one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. Yet a century later she is virtually unknown, nearly lost to American memory despite an institutional legacy within the most epochal social movements of the modern era—labor, feminism, civil rights, free speech, peace. How is it that a woman so central to the social movements that defined a century could be so obscure to us today?

Women, Politics, and Invisibility Part of the answer may be methodological. Eastman left relatively few documents behind. The only collection of her papers contains letters mainly from her adolescence, tapering off as her career began. Scattered materials from her adult and public life are buried in the records of organizations with which she was involved and in the collections of some of her friends, allies, and adversaries. These fragments and whispers, scattered through the archives of others, remain to tell her story. 224 Amy Aronson

Another part of the explanation must be simple sexism, blinders so culturally pervasive that many women, even those who managed to assert themselves at the center of the action, have been relegated to the margins or footnotes by the re- corders of history. Still, feminist scholarship over decades has successfully revealed this problem and redressed it through recovery of women’s stories and contributions. Today, myriad women have been restored to a rightful place in social and political history, including many of Eastman’s closest associates—Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, among others, in the militant suffrage movement; Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Emily Green Balch, and Florence Kelley, among others, in the international peace movement—but not Eastman herself. What has been different about Eastman? Blanche Wiesen Cook, whose pioneering work “discovered” Eastman in the 1970s, offered one explanation. Cook rightly sketched a bold and outspoken figure whose political identity became increasingly radical over the course of her life. Cook suggested that this turn accounts for East- man’s obscurity today, arguing that “history tends to bury what it seeks to reject” (Crystal Eastman 2). Eastman certainly was a left critic of U.S. policies both domestic and international, and she showed limited patience for polite diplomacy. She had a penchant for the sensational and repeatedly called for direct actions, especially in opposing the war. Later she not only supported the Russian Revolution but openly criticized President Wilson for his policies toward the Bolsheviks, particularly the economic blockade of Soviet Russia. Eastman’s radical positions, coupled with her willingness to confront even the highest levels of power, almost certainly contributed to the effacement of her political contributions over time. But Eastman was hardly the only militant suffragist, or radical internationalist, or anti-war activist, or supporter of the Russian Revolution in her day—or even the only woman to hold these positions. There must be more involved. What else might have happened, within these contexts or beyond them, to move Eastman from center to margin, then almost out of sight? This essay looks for answers from inside Eastman’s activism. Examining three biographical episodes, I explore the private and interpersonal dynamics that helped shape her organizational stature and public reputation. In each, I highlight tensions linked to her private life—her marriage, divorce and remarriage, pregnancy and motherhood, and work-family balance. Although the limited archival record leaves many questions open, I want to suggest that over the ten years of her most visible political activism, private interventions played an important part in helping to marginalize her within the very organizations she’d helped to found and to lead. Such concerns disrupted her public career at critical junctures, each time siphoning her energy from consequential institutional actions and helping to marginalize her within. The cumulative effect of these interventions was to erode her organizational standing, disrupt her momentum, and undermine a Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 225 solid connection to institutional identity and legacy—and so to the public recognition her involvement might have promoted for her the way it did for others.

Activist Wife: Marriage and Suffrage Movement “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously declared, “human character changed” (320). In many ways, Eastman exemplified the “New Woman” of the turn of the twentieth century, and by Woolf’s turning-point year, her star was on the rise. Her articles on work accidents appeared in big-city dailies and professional and scholarly journals. Profiles sprung up touting the charismatic young woman “with many irons in the fire of activity” who worked in an elegant Manhattan office tower (“Portia” 6). Papers across the country quoted and pictured her, calling her a “forceful and brilliant” (“Woman”) speaker and a “New York beauty” (“Women in Present”) of the suffrage movement. When the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) installed her as a rare, salaried organizer to run the pivotal Wisconsin suffrage campaign in 1911–12, the press covered her work regularly (“Mrs. Crystal E. Benedict”; “Mrs. Benedict Talks Suffrage”; “Ready for Struggle”). At the time, Eastman was also a newlywed. Married on May 5, 1911, to Wallace Benedict—“Bennie,” she called him—a Milwaukee native, she had been living in his hometown for several months and “pulling wires” to find a job practicing law. After a few weeks in town, Eastman dropped in to introduce herself to the governor, who “knew all about me and I asked his advice about my legal career!” (“Letter to Max Eastman” June 29, 1911). All the while she was “getting a lot of fun out of the suffrage situation here.” As she explained to her brother Max, the Political Equality League (P.E.L.), one of two suffrage organizations in the state, was wooing her. Eastman could become secretary of the League “and run the whole campaign for a good salary,” or she could be president and oversee the work without a salary. “But I prefer being ‘advisor’ in general,” especially if one of the law firms of interest “takes me in” (“Letter to Max Eastman” October 17, 1911). Although she searched for months, none of them did. The legal field remained more fiercely resistant to women’s entry than other professions (Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans 165), closing her out of the career she wanted most at the time. So, she accepted the offer to make $166 a month running the Wisconsin campaign. NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw personally contributed a chunk of Eastman’s salary, using the power of her purse to press for Eastman to integrate the P.E.L. and the older Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association (WWSA), long led by the Reverend Olympia Brown, and run one, centralized, energized, statewide effort. Eastman was “a live, splendid little woman,” Shaw said, who could “touch some live wires and set things going, and that, as far as I can learn, is what you need, someone with 226 Amy Aronson

enthusiasm, youth and hope to inspire and stir other people up to doing things” (“Letter to Ada James” November 9, 1911). At first, Eastman was pleasantly surprised at how well things were going in her two-career home. She had been deeply unsure about the marriage, telling Max on the eve of her courthouse wedding by a justice of the peace that it was “a thing you’ve got to do bravely all by yourself—without looking back” (“Letter to Max Eastman” April 3, 1911). But Bennie consistently supported her career. She was admitted to the Wisconsin Bar on September 28, 1911, and was sworn in before Judge Tarrant, on motion of Joseph E. Davies, chairman of the State Democratic Committee. Both Davies and Tarrant were Bennie’s fraternity brothers from the Delta Upsilon fraternity. The next week “Bennie did a little press-agent work for me,” which generated at least one newspaper article that she clipped and sent to her brother. Bennie also introduced her to his buddy Jim Blake, “a lawyer—very friendly and interested. He’s taking charge of my career just now and I’m expecting to get the right opening very soon” (“Letter to Max Eastman” October 4, 1911). On the home front, too, she enjoyed a partnership with her new husband. “Ben- nie has fine taste—it complements mine and braces it up where its [sic] weak.” Their lifestyle might have appeared traditional, but “together,” she told Max, “we are quite untrammeled by conventions and traditions in house-trimming” (“Letter to Max Eastman” July 25, 1911). By the end of her first month in Milwaukee, she was “feeling pretty good married” (“Letter to Max Eastman” June 29, 1911). A month after that, her spirits had risen further. “I’m . . . just young and glad and singing in the morning” (“Letter to Max Eastman” July 25, 1911). On the day she accepted the job with the P.E.L., she sounded fulfilled. “I am very well and happier than I’ve been in two or three years I guess. . . . Last summer I wasn’t quite so sure of us. . . . But now I am” (“Letter to Max Eastman” November 6, 1911). It was managing her job that proved the more daunting challenge. Eastman’s new colleagues resisted her leadership at every turn, first obstructing Shaw’s wish to combine the two suffrage organizations and have Eastman direct the integrated effort, then refusing to elect Eastman to chair a central coordinating committee. So deep was the local resistance that Shaw and the NAWSA eventually abandoned their push for Eastman to direct any kind of integrated effort and agreed to pay as promised merely to have her sit on the coordinating committee while acting as campaign manager for the P.E.L. (Shaw, “Letter to Ada James” November 17, 1911). Meanwhile, Eastman’s egalitarian marriage continued to thrive. She and Bennie “worked together night and day” to organize a major fundraiser involving the British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (“Letter to Ada James” November 6, 1911). “Bennie is doing it all—with lots of fun and success so far,” she told Max. “It has meant long days and some long evenings of hard work and hustling for both of us—but working it out together has been a lark” (“Letter to Max Eastman” November 6, 1911). Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 227

National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention, where the formation of what would become the National Woman’s Party was discussed. Crystal Eastman stands at lower mid-left. Photograph retrieved from the Library of Congress.

Yet by the time the Wisconsin suffrage bid went down hard to fickle constituen- cies and the powerful liquor interests in the state, Eastman had begun to feel trapped by the bourgeois trappings of an increasingly “successful” middle-class marriage that seemed to suit Bennie just fine. He had become a partner in a new venture, the insurance firm Topping, Benedict and Reidburg, which at first made him only “a more important citizen, but . . . not any richer” (“Letter to Max Eastman” October 17, 1911). The money would come soon enough, and that was the problem for her. “If we stay here,” she explained to Max, “Bennie will get rich so fast it will be hard for him to pull out . . . then the first thing you know we’ll be stuck out here, with expensive tastes formed and no freedom for either of us,—just regular fat Dutchmen” (“Letter to Max Eastman” January 15, 1913). After the loss in the vicious Wisconsin campaign, Eastman longed to throw herself into the new suffrage militancy brewing back East. Just weeks after the election, she joined with Paul and Burns to launch the Congressional Committee of NAWSA—the group that in 1916 would become the National Woman’s Party. Now she needed to convince her husband to give up his partnership, leave his hometown, and relocate with her to do it. 228 Amy Aronson

The Congressional Committee’s first big move would be a huge suffrage parade to coincide with Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. More than five thousand suffrage demonstrators would rally at the Columbia Theater on March 2, 1913, then march down Pennsylvania Avenue the next day. Five mounted heralds led the procession, with Inez Milholland, enrobed in white, leading the way on a stallion named Gray Dawn. The parade began late and was ended early by street violence. From the start, the huge crowd accosted marchers with jeers and sexualized epithets; within a few blocks, things got physical—the women were grabbed, tripped, and shoved to the ground with such growing intensity that the secretary of war was called in. Ambu- lances carried more than one hundred marchers through the crowds to local emergency hospitals. Helen Keller “was so exhausted and unnerved by the experience in attempting to reach a grandstand . . . that she was unable to speak” at the post-parade rally at Continental Hall (“Chaos”). That rally became a mass meeting of indignation and protest. A congressional investigation was called for. It began almost immediately—on March 6, President Wilson’s second day in office. In the end, the Washington, D.C., police chief was fired, and all officers along the procession route were censured for dereliction of duty. But the hullabaloo, even the minor injuries, pleased militant suffragist leaders, who saw the chaos as a media magnet that would attract national attention to their cause. The parade is now seen as the opening gambit in the seven-year struggle to win the Nineteenth Amendment. Eastman, an expert horsewoman, had been asked to ride as one of six “feminine Paul Reveres,” each draped in yellow silk and each carrying a trumpet to announce the arrival of the suffragists to the crowd (“Couriers”). But she did not attend. She had a boat to catch for Europe. She was to speak as a delegate of the NAWSA at the Seventh Congress of the International Woman Suf- frage Association (IWSA) in Budapest in June and had built a second honeymoon around the trip, probably designed to lure her husband into a new life back in New York. The couple had received an offer of $3,500 for Bennie’s share of the business, so Eastman had packed up the house in Milwaukee and headed East, sequestering $1,000 to start a life back in Greenwich Village when they returned. She told Max, “This is my last chance to get out” (“Letter to Max Eastman” 1913). The Budapest Congress promised to be a career-builder, introducing Eastman to international feminist activists with whom she would continue to work. Among them were Jane Addams, with whom Eastman shared the podium at her session, and the Hungarian-born feminist and pacifist Rosika Schwimmer, whose petition to organize neutral nations for mediation would help inspire Eastman to organize the WPP of New York in late 1914. Before the Congress, receptions for the delegations were held in Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere (“Women Gather”). Eastman didn’t attend any of these ancillary events. Indeed, her letters suggest she wouldn’t have considered them. No surviving documents mention the Congress, her speech Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 229

“How to Reach the Woman of Higher Education,” or the many prominent attendees; rather, letters conjure a trip that was “all kinds of a lark for us” (“Letter to Max East- man” 1913). They returned to New York in August 1913. Almost immediately, Eastman began making up for lost time. Through most of the next year, she almost singlehandedly lobbied Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for suffrage. When she intermittently traveled back East, she struggled to keep the fires burning on the home front, shuttling frequently between her husband in New York and the Congressional Union (formerly the Congressional Committee) offices on F Street in Washington or meetings on Capitol Hill. Indeed, she traveled to Washington at least every few weeks. In October 1913, she helped develop a suffrage school planned to follow the upcoming Congressional Union Con- vention; in December, she spent two weeks teaching in the suffrage school, training scores of new suffrage speakers and organizers; in January 1914, she met with other members of the Congressional Union executive committee and afterward attended a rally and reception; over the following weeks, she helped make arrangements for the Union’s tour of the Midwest in March 1914 (“New Jersey”; “Plans”; “Mrs. Benedict Due Today”). The intense pace took a toll on Eastman’s health. That spring, she was ill several times and hospitalized twice in different states. But by the summer of 1914 she was back in the center of action with the Congressional Committee, now an independent entity, the Congressional Union. After two defeats in committees, one in the Senate and one in the House, the Union called a summit to advance a bold approach for the next election. The Union decided to organize voting women to hold the party in power—Wilson and the Democrats—responsible for the failure of suffrage to move through Congress. Eastman spent the week before the meeting at the Newport mansion of Alva Belmont, mapping out strategy with Paul and Burns (“Newport”). And while the plan certainly would have its critics, she was not one of them. It was her kind of direct-action politics. Along with Alice Stone Blackwell, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Jane Addams, Eastman was one of the first to endorse it from the floor (Report). In fact, she had been a vocal backer of this confrontational approach since before she left for Europe, “throw[ing] down the gauntlet” by telling Congressmen point blank: “grant us woman suffrage throughout the United States—or 4,000,000 who vote in states where suffrage is already in effect will vote against you” (“Votes”; “Mrs. Benedict’s Challenge”). After Newport, she continued to press her cause, stating, “Oh, the Democrats know us. We have been at them in Washington for 18 months. We have sent seven deputations to Wilson; we have made endless overtures to Congress. We’ll give them a little while more, and then we’ll strike” (“Newport’s Conference”). Yet when Union leaders pleaded with her to go on the road to implement the strategy in the fall of 1914, she refused them: “I haven’t been home more than two 230 Amy Aronson

weeks at a time since Nov. 1 last year—except for when I was sick for six weeks,” she told Paul. “That doesn’t make much of a family” (“Letter to Alice Paul”). Despite her decision to stay home rather than organize voting women for the pivotal “party in power” plan, her marriage would soon unravel. Eastman would file for divorce on the basis of her husband’s infidelity. At that time, she famously told the papers that she wouldn’t accept alimony—“no self-respecting feminist would”; it was “a relic of the past,” she said (“Mrs. Benedict Gives Feminist Platform”). Months later, on November 14, 1916, the New York Times would vaguely announce that “some time ago” she had married the English pacifist Walter Fuller, but they “were reluctant to disclose the date and the place the ceremony was performed” (“Crystal Eastman”). Eastman’s career ultimately undercut her marriage, and her marriage had also introduced tensions in her career at the nascent NWP. Indeed, it strained her relationships with some in the suffrage movement from the start. While in the midst of running the Wisconsin suffrage drive, she told Max, “Some of my friends have dropped me since I got married” (“Letter to Max Eastman” July 15, 1911). After that, it seems her marriage could do no right. Although Bennie worked by Eastman’s side to organize suffrage events, after the election some Wisconsin suffragists impugned the marriage so widely that P.E.L. president Ada James wrote to Bela La Follette, wife of the U.S. senator from Wisconsin, to defend Eastman’s home life as “entirely decent” and “wholesome.” That point of tension may have followed her from the NAWSA into the NWP, where leaders held “an underlying assumption that all women should have jobs or careers outside the home, and a definite ambivalence toward marriage and motherhood, based on a distrust of men” (Becker 11). In her effort to have it all, Eastman sidelined her professional life in favor of her private life just a few times in these years—but they were crucial moments. The first time was in the consequential aftermath of the Congressional Union’s inaugural parade in 1913. Next she skipped the networking events surrounding the IWSA Con- gress in Budapest—her first such international conference. And finally, she chose marriage over work during the critical on-the-ground implementation phase of the “party in power” plan, which would become the defining political strategy of the NWP for decades to come. In missing these organizational turning points, perhaps especially to tend to her marriage, she distanced herself from other leaders, from the allies who did the work in her stead, and from ownership in the historical developments and accomplishments that work made possible.

“Mrs. Somebody”: Legitimacy, Intimate Relations, and the Women’s Peace Movement It was late 1918, and the Great War had finally ended. The Woman’s Peace Party had been planning to convene a women’s meeting simultaneously with the official postwar peace conference ever since the momentous International Congress of Women Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 231 at The Hague in 1915. But when the time came, Paris was closed to women of defeated countries, so they held the huge International Congress of Women After the War in Zurich, with delegations from the Allies and Central Powers, among other countries around the world. Eastman almost certainly expected to attend the Congress as part of the Ameri- can delegation. She was one of the most visible internationalists and peace advocates in the country, a founder of the WPP, and chair of its most active—if also most controversial—branch. But there was considerable debate within the WPP executive board about including her. Again, it was a crucial moment. The Congress would be consequential to historical memory. WILPF was formally founded there, and two women leaders involved, both longtime Eastman colleagues, would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize: Jane Addams (in 1931) and Emily Greene Balch (in 1946). Little more than a glance at the WPP records suggests how laden these discussions probably were. During a months-long debate, Eastman’s name appeared on list after list of potential delegates, suggesting a decision deferred from one meeting to the next. As late as December 1918, Eastman’s name appeared on the list of potential delegates marked with neither the “X” used for no nor a check for yes—but a dash, gone over and over, then circled many times (“International Congress”). Some board members worried that Eastman’s increasingly radical internationalism would undermine their political legitimacy. But concerns about the propriety of her private life also seem to have played a part in their thinking. Cook summarized the internal conflict, saying those who opposed Eastman’s candidacy “argued that her ‘extreme’ radicalism and her ‘casual sex life’ would con- fuse their mission and increase their difficulties” (Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution 22). John Fabian Witt saw the Zurich conference as an effort by the WPP to return to the prewar brand of internationalism that Eastman had never much scaled back; he therefore accorded more importance to qualms about her personal life. “Addams and the internationalist branch of the movement assembled in Zurich in a renewed showing of the radical internationalism that had characterized the WPP before the war,” he wrote. “Eastman did not attend; leaders of the Zurich conference feared the scandal of her divorce from Bennie and quick re-marriage to Walter would undermine the respect accorded the conference” (“Crystal Eastman” 757). Actually, Eastman did attend the Congress. She traveled under her British passport. At the time, American women lost their U.S. citizenship when they wed foreign nationals; they automatically took on the nationality of their husbands. Under surveillance during the postwar Red Scare, she had good reason to travel abroad under what was, in effect, a legal pseudonym in 1919. But she was highly visible once she arrived in Zurich. She drafted or strongly contributed to the two major resolutions of the Congress: the critique of the League of Nations as defined in Paris and the problem of violence in social revolutions. Eastman repudiated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the version of the League of Nations it configured, calling it 232 Amy Aronson

“an alliance of the past, and not any sort of league that we could use to lead humanity higher” (Report 986). She also introduced a resolution to “recognize the fundamentally just demands” and “declare our sympathy with” revolutionary movements around the world, while not only “re-assert[ing] our belief in the methods of peace” but also supporting the claim that it was women’s “special part in this revolutionary age to counsel against violence” (Report 124). The resolution was hotly debated, tabled, revamped, reintroduced, debated again, then adopted by a vote of 60–55, the tightest of the Congress. Some scholars suggest Eastman was already marginalized within the organization by the time of the Congress. “Many WILPF members,” Kathryn Kish Sklar and Beverly Palmer wrote, “were not displeased when Eastman was refused a passport in 1919 and could not attend the Zurich conference.” Eastman was disliked, they argue, for “not following up on tasks she agreed to do” (259). Although Eastman did, in fact, attend the Congress, if she was considered unreliable, the explanation could be rooted in her private circumstances: at the time, she had a toddler at home and was also the primary breadwinner in her household. Documentary evidence suggests the possibility that American delegates may have distanced themselves from overt affiliation with her. Eastman is listed but not pictured with the twenty-seven- member American delegation in the Congress Proceedings published by WILPF. Instead, she appears only in a photograph of “an international group of women” whose names are not given. Several “public” hypotheses might explain the resistance to Eastman’s inclusion in the delegation and her relative marginalization at the Zurich Congress. By this time, Eastman had made the revolutionary turn that marks the arc of her politics. Beginning in 1918, she began to copublish, with Max, the Liberator: The Journal of Revolutionary Progress. Her public identification with more radical political hues had a history of discomfiting some in the antiwar movement, notably Lillian Wald, with whom Eastman worked closely in the American Union Against Militarism, the other radical internationalist peace organization with which she was involved. Wald spoke both interpersonally and publicly about what she saw as Eastman’s “impulsive radicalism”; she had told the New York Times in 1917 that “much as I like [her] personally, [she is] more than I can manage single handed (“Letter to Crystal Eastman”). Nevertheless, critics in the WPP leadership at times relied on her private behaviors—or at least on that rhetoric—to register objections. That attitude also had a history, albeit a subterranean one, that seems to have followed Eastman to the Zurich Congress and beyond. Whispers of it emerge in professional correspondence, for example, dealing with Eastman’s WPP of New York, when the branch “accidentally” dropped NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt as honorary vice-chairman after Catt volunteered suffrage women to support the war effort. Suffrage was a hard-won plank of the WPP, and many New York members were angry at Catt’s nearly unilateral action in their name. Still, Catt was thought too Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 233 important to have been handled in this way, and Eastman was told to apologize and to rectify it, which she did. Yet in correspondence to Addams that otherwise affirms Eastman’s resolution of the matter comes the remark “It is rather amusing to see that Mrs. Post insists that Crystal shall now become ‘Mrs.’ Somebody.” Mrs. Post, wife of Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post and a longtime leader within the WPP, would be a leading critic of Eastman’s inclusion in the Zurich Congress delegation. Her offhanded comment, now shared among at least three women, had made its way to the very top of the organization, to Jane Addams herself (HPT). Two years later, at the Congress itself, similar personal jibes resurfaced. Despite Eastman’s visible participation in policy formation, Alice Hamilton, coauthor with Addams and Balch of Women at the Hague (1915) and a pioneer in the occupational health field closely allied to Eastman’s work on industrial accidents and workers’ compensation, mentioned Eastman only once, saying, “Crystal Eastman is here as Mrs. Walter Fuller. For once she has found husbands valuable” (qtd. in Wiltsher 206). The remark traveled to high places as well as across the Atlantic: it was made in a letter to Viscountess Ethel Snowden, one of Britain’s most prominent suffrage campaigners and wife of the Labour Party’s first-ever chancellor of the exchequer. Hamilton, a NAWSA suffragist who would oppose the Equal Rights Amendment and wholeheartedly endorsed women’s work in support of the war, consistently disagreed with Eastman politically, yet took note of her at Zurich only to take issue with her private conduct. Such fragments hint at a broader mindset within the WPP that perhaps affected Eastman’s status there. As Leila Rupp has discussed, many women’s organizations at the time were troubled by the sexual revolution and often censorious of intimate ir- regularities by heterosexual women. Feminism and the sexual revolution “came into conflict,” Rupp found, because the recognition of female sexuality “cast suspicion on the homosocial woman in the newly created female public sphere of women’s institutions” (“Feminism and the Sexual Revolution”209). Eastman was both a feminist and a sexually liberated woman. She consistently carried that banner of “love and liberty,” advocating through a range of specific issues that “public” rights and “private” parity must be achieved in tandem for women to be equal. And she not only wanted it all, she tried to live it, come what may. Eastman’s disregard for traditional gender norms and feminine proprieties could certainly have compromised the external reputation of an organization of women at this time. But, as Rupp suggested with specific regard to feminist and to international women’s organizations—and the WPP was both—”unorthodox heterosexu- ality crossed the line of respectability,” posing an internal threat to group identity and cohesion: “Women perceived as too involved—or in improper relationships— with men attracted harsh criticism” (“Sexuality and Politics” 585). In this context, Eastman may have been snubbed, even shunned, for controversial actions in her private life at least as much as in public affairs. 234 Amy Aronson

The fragmentary archival record makes it difficult to gauge how deeply Eastman’s critics objected to her divorce from Bennie and the circumstances surrounding her remarriage to Fuller, the father of her child born nearly a year after her divorce became final in April 1916 but well under nine months after her remarriage announce- ment appeared. Whatever the mix of personal conviction, practical gender politics, organizational ethos, and expedient excuse, Eastman’s sexual and family life intervened to some extent in her institutional stature, affecting her social marginalization in the organization and helping to promote or to justify her relative invisibility at the conference that not only produced Nobel Peace Prizes for two American women with whom Eastman had worked side by side but that also “presaged many of the doctrines adopted at the founding of the United Nations after World War II” that Americans know so well today (Freedman 199).

Working Mother in Wartime: The Founding and Losing of the ACLU When Woodrow Wilson presented the declaration of war to Congress on April 2, 1917, he also made it clear that dissent would no longer be tolerated. “If there should be disloyalty,” Wilson warned, “it will be dealt with a firm hand of stern repression.” By June, Congress would pass the Espionage Act, which suspended civil liberties such as free speech and assembly in the name of wartime national security. A year later, that law would be supplemented by the Sedition Act of 1918, which set prison terms for anyone convicted of obstructing the war effort, including by expressing antiwar opinions. The laws would hit Eastman very close to home. On the same day the Espio- nage Act passed, June 15, 1917, two issues of Four Lights, the official magazine of the WPP of New York, were seized from the mails. Two weeks later, two issues of Masses were declared unmailable; her brother and some of his colleagues would later be prosecuted—twice—for sedition. The AUAM would be investigated by the Post Office, too, and in September 1917 two of its pamphlets seized. From the moment of the U.S. Declaration of War, Eastman and her antiwar colleagues would face the most powerful censorship and propaganda campaigns ever seen in American history, a national campaign to enforce patriotism and support of the president during wartime. Immediately after the declaration, in April 1917, a vandal scrawled “Trea- son’s Twilight Zone”—cryptic yet accusatory—on the AUAM office door. That day, Eastman called an emergency meeting to determine a “logical, courageous and at the same time law-abiding” stance for the organization (“AUAM Memorandum”). Their “Wartime Agenda for the American Union Against Militarism” articulated a six-point program, now evenly divided into two distinct themes. The final three points concerned their enduring long-term goal of an early, negotiated peace; the first three stood for the more immediate work of safeguarding democracy during wartime: they would oppose “all legislation tending to fasten upon the United States . . . compulsory military training and service” and vowed to “fight for the complete Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 235 maintenance” of the right to speak, assemble, and protest while the country was at war (The Wartime Program). Yet, to some in the Union leadership, the pursuit of these goals seemed like a challenge to government authority, punishable under the new wartime laws. It touched off divisions within the organization that had been simmering in the months leading up to U.S. intervention in the war. Most of the high-profile leaders of the Union, including Eastman herself, had personal relationships and substantial clout in Congress and the White House. Key board members, including Lillian Wald and Paul Kellogg, one of Eastman’s oldest friends and her first champion at the Pittsburgh Survey, were not prepared to risk their political access by appearing to oppose the government. Wald, particularly, favored discreet advocacy with government officials and had become uneasy with Eastman’s irreverent and confrontational style. Now to apply those tactics to controversial civil liberties claims in time of war threatened everything Wald felt she needed to pursue her reform agenda after the war. “There are so many things that I must plead for,” she told Jane Addams, “that I cannot throw away any part of my reputation for good judgment” (“Letter to Jane Addams”). But Eastman saw civil liberties at the heart of both the AUAM’s goals and her vision of a postwar world. She abided the risks and convinced several others to continue and even expand the work they had started. When Congress passed the Selective Service Act instituting the draft on May 18, the Union swung into action, establishing a new bureau on May 19 to provide information and legal advice to those would seek exemption from the draft on the basis of “conscience,” a new standard. Eastman and others in the Union leadership argued that the language of the conscription bill opened the door to this new brand of exemption; she “felt sure the President would respect liberty of conscience.” Eventually, most of the executive committee concurred that Wilson would not want “conscription of the unwilling” (qtd. in Cook, Woodrow Wilson and the Antimilitarists 213). By June 1, Eastman was pushing for the Union to add a committee of lawyers to press the case for “conscientious objectors” to the draft in American courts (“AUAM Minutes” June 1, 1917). Within a month, “legal complaint” bureaus, staffed by volunteer attorneys, would be operating in large cities across the United States (“AUAM Minutes” June 1, 1917; June 4, 1917; July 2, 1917). Despite members’ unanimous opposition to conscription, the Union was divided over this confrontational approach, fearing it would appear to oppose government policy and obstruct the prosecution of the war. Eastman didn’t share these doubts. Indeed, she felt conscientious objection to war fell well within respected American traditions—traditions supported by President Wilson. However, just as the legal complaint bureaus for COs were formally launched across the country, Eastman received letters of resignation from both Wald and Kellogg. The resignations presented a major crisis to the Union. To lose Wald, the Union’s well-respected chair, and Kellogg, one of the best-known social welfare reformers in the country, would be to 236 Amy Aronson sacrifice not only their insight and guidance but also their credibility, qualities that had become even more essential to the organization since the Declaration of War. To save both the organization she cherished and the agenda she believed was right, Eastman proposed an eleventh-hour solution: separate all the civil liberties work into a separate bureau to be located in the same building but to function separately, as only a collaborating entity with the AUAM. The board voted overwhelmingly to approve the separation, creating the Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB) of the AUAM. By October 1917, the Civil Liberties Bureau would become the National Civil Liberties Bureau, with a directing committee and executive staff of its own. In 1920, the Bureau became the ACLU. Eastman had won the day in a high-stakes crisis, but she would soon lose out in the larger encounter with history. After engineering the organizational solution that kept the civil liberties agenda alive, she would lose control of the Civil Liberties Bureau—and, with that, much of her legacy in public memory connected with the ACLU. To Eastman, protecting civil liberties such as free speech and assembly and com- bating the enforced nationalism of wartime were necessary preconditions to the continued advancement of international cooperation, global citizenship, and world peace. Nongovernmental groups like the AUAM could pursue that agenda only if they maintained the ability to criticize the national government’s wartime policies. As Witt explained, “If radical antimilitarists were to carry on their advocacy of a new internationalism to replace the nation-state, they would have to establish some kind of protection from the very authority they sought to displace” (Patriots and Cosmo- politans 195–96). Roger Baldwin, who came to the Union from the Civic League of St. Louis, was a very different person from Eastman. He described himself as a practical reformer and service provider, while Eastman was an activist, radical, and firebrand. Baldwin would later recall that the war and the AUAM forced him “to grapple with new and troublesome issues: problems of nation-states, capitalist rivalries, and the morality of warfare as a means to good ends”—questions Eastman eagerly sought to engage and confront (52). Both were committed to the protection of the right of dissent in wartime, but they saw the issue in different terms and had different endgames in mind. As Witt discussed in significant detail, Baldwin responded to the growing division within the AUAM by strategically locating the civil liberties fight in the U.S. Constitutional terms we know today (Patriots and Cosmopolitans 196–206). That was not Eastman’s perspective or approach. There was little in-house negotiation at the time about the direction the new Bureau would take; it was short-circuited by Eastman’s private life. On March 19, just two weeks before the United States entered the World War, she gave birth to her first child. It was a difficult pregnancy, and not until a week later did her friend and WPP ally Margaret Lane circulate news that Eastman was “out of danger.” Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 237

With Eastman sidelined at a time of great exigency, Baldwin enjoyed considerable authority within the organization. Eastman did not support a number of Baldwin’s decisions. He proposed “a constitution and program . . . which in a great many respects I don’t approve of,” she told Wald. Organizationally, she felt he was proceeding too quickly in her absence: “I don’t think we need such elaborate formal organization just yet. And in the statement of objects etc., I do want to have a hand, if possible” (“Letter to Lillian Wald”). Eastman struggled mightily to maintain her authority at the AUAM, especially over the new Bureau. After returning to work on June 1, she spent the summer working with Baldwin on strategies to protect antiwar activists and conscientious objectors and to develop test cases for the right of free speech in wartime. But in August Baldwin was given an assistant of his own. The Bureau was now fully his. Eastman’s absence for maternity leave at key moments and the strain of balancing such intense work with the intensity of caring for a newborn first child would cost her input into the Bureau for which she’d risked some of the most important alliances in her life. In November, she would resign from the Union entirely. The ACLU would forever bear Baldwin’s imprint, as proud as it has been—not Eastman’s. It would make his name in history, not hers.

Driving the Tandem: Private Interventions and Public Memory Crystal Eastman was a political initiator and a boundary breaker. In the decade of her most intensive activism, between 1911 and 1921, she bridged multiple social movements to literally try to change the world. She made many controversial public utterances, many choices that challenged the power structure. And she stayed true to her goals, even when the political ground shifted, sometimes violently, what her causes would connote. Yet to understand Eastman’s relative invisibility in history as solely the result of her political style and stands is to slight the ways the public and the private were connected in her life. Eastman saw herself as a “complete feminist” whose politics of private life was as radical as her public agenda (“Now” 23). She wanted a feminism that traversed both work and family, arguing for economic independence for wives, equality within marriage, wages for housework, and both policies and cultural practices to support feminist women like herself who wanted even more than economic independence through equal opportunity in the labor market. “Ninety-nine out of every hundred women want children,” she argued in 1920, just after the vote was won (“Now” 23). The vast majority of women, she believed, wanted balance, work and children, independence and devotion. Both dilemmas and controversies followed from her struggle to realize what was a remarkably contemporary vision of a feminist woman’s life. One after another, the concerns of private life—marriage, sexuality, motherhood—intervened in her public career, and at critical moments. Occurring at formative turns in the political 238 Amy Aronson organizations she had helped to found and to lead, these interventions, one after the other, helped edge her to the margins or even out of the very movements to which she committed her life. By also disrupting her professional identity and reputation within organizational networks, private interventions also helped diminish her ties and alliances, leaving her increasingly isolated and on her own—where it’s easier for a woman to be overlooked in history. Persistent and almost cruelly timed, private interventions destabilized Eastman’s progress toward the work, the life, and the world she hoped to usher into being. The tandem she was trying to drive dislocated beneath her feet. She lost organizational momentum and standing, along with the position of ownership and belonging from which historical legacies are built. She fell to the side as the wheels of history rolled on. Her story emphasizes anew the critical interplay between private life and public stature and between gender ideology and female reputation, dynamics that still, more than a century after Eastman mounted the chariot, more readily disrupt women’s ability to advance in the directions they have wanted and endeavored to go.

Works Cited “AUAM Memorandum to the Organization.” April 1917, Reel 1, Records of the AUAM, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa., Accessed March 2012. “AUAM Minutes.” June 1, 1917, Reel 1, Records of the AUAM, Swarthmore College Peace Col- lection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa., Accessed March 2012. ———. June 4, 1917, Reel 1, Records of the AUAM, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa., Accessed April 2012. ———. July 2, 1917, Reel 1, Records of the AUAM, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa., Accessed April 2012. Baldwin, Roger. “Recollections of a Life in Civil Liberties, Part I.” Civil Liberties Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 1975, pp. 52–56. Becker, Susan D. The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars. Greenwood Press, 1981. “Chaos at Women’s Procession.” Washington Post, March 4, 1913, p. 3. Cook, Blanche Wiesen, editor. Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution. Oxford UP, 1977. Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Woodrow Wilson and the Antimilitarists, 1914–1917. Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1980. “Couriers of Suffrage Host.” New York Times, January 28, 1913. “Crystal Eastman Married.” New York Times, November 14, 1916. Eastman, Crystal. “Letter to Ada James.” November 6, 1911, Reel 4, Woman Suffrage in Wisconsin, Part II: The Papers of Ada Lois James, New York Public Library, New York (accessed January 2013). ———. “Letter to Alice Paul.” September, 1914, Reel 12, National Woman’s Party Records, Manuscript Division, U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (accessed July 2013). Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 239

———. “Letter to Lillian Wald.” 1917, Reel 102, Lillian D. Wald Papers, New York Public Library, New York (accessed October 2015). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” April 3, 1911, Box 6, Folder 190, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (accessed November 2011). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” June 29, 1911, Box 6, Folder 190, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., Accessed November 2011. ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” July 15, 1911, Box 6, Folder 190, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (accessed November 2011). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” July 25, 1911, Box 6, Folder 190, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (accessed November 2011). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” October 4, 1911, Box 6, Folder 190, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (accessed December 2011). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” October 17, 1911, Box 6, Folder 190, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (accessed December 2011). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” November 6, 1911, Box 6, Folder 190, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (accessed December 2011). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” 1913, Box 6, Folder 192, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (Accessed January 2012). ———. “Letter to Max Eastman.” January 15, 1913, Box 6, Folder 192, Crystal Eastman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (accessed January 2012). ———. “Now We Can Begin.” Liberator, vol. 3, no. 12, 1920, p. 23. Eastman, Max. Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch. Random House, 1964. Freedman, Estelle B. “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom: Resolutions of the Zurich Conference (1919).” The Essential Feminist Reader, edited by Estelle B. Freed- man, Random House, 2007. Hanisch, Carol, “The Personal Is Political.” 1969, http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/ PIP.html. HPT. “Letter to Jane Addams.” March 14, 1917, Box 6, Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore Col- lege Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. (accessed May 2012). “International Congress of Women After the War Delegate List.” December 1918, Reel 12.15, Woman’s Peace Party Records, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore Col- lege, Swarthmore, Pa. (accessed May 2012). James, Ada. “Letter to Bela La Follette.” December 7, 1912, Reel 12, Woman Suffrage in Wis- consin, Part II: The Papers of Ada Lois James, New York Public Library, New York (accessed January 2013). Lane, Margaret. “Letter to Mrs. Louis F. Post.” March 23, 1917, Reel 12.4, Woman’s Peace Party Records, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. (accessed May 2012). 240 Amy Aronson

Lippmann, Walter. “Letter to Max Eastman.” April 2, 1913, Box 1, Max Eastman Papers, Lilly Library Manuscript Collections, Indiana University–Bloomington, Bloomington (accessed July 2014). “Mrs. Benedict Due Today.” Washington Herald, March 10, 1914. “Mrs. Benedict Gives Feminist Platform.” Washington Herald, February 19, 1918. “Mrs. Benedict Talks Suffrage.” Milwaukee Journal, November 15, 1911. “Mrs. Benedict’s Challenge.” Mahoning Dispatch, March 6, 1914. “Mrs. Crystal E. Benedict: Suffrage Worker Who Has Been Appointed Campaign Manager of Political Equality League.” Milwaukee Free Press, November 2, 1911. “New Jersey Women Will Be Honored.” Washington Times, October 28, 1913. “Newport Suffagists to Lash Wayward Congressmen.” Washington Herald, August 30, 1914. “Newport’s Conference Politically Momentous.” New York Herald-Tribune, September 6, 1914. “Plans of Suffrage Hosts Are Complete.” Washington Herald, January 10, 1914. “Portia Appointed by Governor.” New York Herald, April 24, 1910, p. 6. “Ready for Struggle.” Milwaukee Daily News, November 18, 1911. Report of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage: For the Year 1914, with Outline of Con- gressional Work for the Preceding Year. The Union, 1914. Rupp, Leila J. “Feminism and the Sexual Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of Doris Stevens.” Feminist Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1989, pp. 289–309. ———. “Sexuality and Politics in the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of the International Women’s Movement.” Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 1997, pp. 577–605. Shaw, Anna Howard. “Letter to Ada James.” November 9, 1911, Reel 12, Woman Suffrage in Wisconsin, Part II: The Papers of Ada Lois James, New York Public Library, New York (accessed February 2013). ———. “Letter to Ada James.” November 17, 1911, Reel 4, Woman Suffrage in Wisconsin, Part II: The Papers of Ada Lois James, New York Public Library, New York (accessed February 2013). Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and Beverly Wilson Palmer. The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley 1869– 1931. University of Illinois Press, 2009. Vassar 1903 Class Bulletin. 1907, Folder 2.10, Vassar College Archives, Vassar College, Pough- keepsie, N.Y. (accessed July 2013). “Votes or Fight, Women’s Threat; Remember the Ides of November, Suffragist Tells House Democrats.” Washington Herald, March 4, 1914. Wald, Lillian. “Letter to Crystal Eastman.” August 26, 1917, Reel 1, Records to the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. (accessed April 2012). ———. “Letter to Jane Addams.” November 13, 1917, Reel 11, Jane Addams Papers, Swarth- more College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. (accessed May 2012). Activist, Pacifist, Mother, Feminist, Wife 241

Wartime Program of the American Union Against Militarism. May 1917, Reel 1, Records of the AUAM, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. (accessed May 2012). Wilson, Woodrow. “War Message.” April 2, 1917, World War I Document Archive, Brigham Young University Library (accessed June 2015). Wiltsher, Anne. Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War. Pan- dora, 1985. Witt, John Fabian, “Crystal Eastman and the Internationalist Beginnings of American Civil Liberties.” Duke Law Journal, vol. 54, no. 3, 2004, pp. 705–63. ———. Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories in American Law. Harvard UP, 2007. “Woman Directing Campaign for Suffrage, Has Fine Training.”Madison State Journal, Febru- ary 5, 1912. “Women Gather to Aid ‘Cause.’” Washington Herald, June 15, 1913. “Women in Present Campaign Have Their First Fight.” Times Dispatch, October 6, 1912. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Report of the International Congress of Women in Zurich May 12–17, 1919. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1920. Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”Collected Essays, Hogarth Press, 1966, pp. 319–40. Turning Trends Lockwood’s and Emerson’s Rhetoric Textbooks at the American Fin de Siècle

Nancy Myers

In our disciplinary histories, neither women teachers nor their high school textbooks at the end of the nineteenth century seem particularly illustrious; however, Sara Elizabeth Husted Lockwood and Mary Alice Emerson managed to achieve a certain renown for both at least with the publisher Ginn and Company and with the academies, high schools, and colleges across the nation that adopted their textbooks. In his history of Ginn and Company, Thomas Bonaventure Lawler noted the popularity of Lockwood’s 1888 Lessons in English and its two successors in 1901 and 1912, Composition and Rhetoric, coauthored with Emerson: “Edition after edition, year after year, the pages of the book rolled from the presses. It was another landmark in the progress of the firm” (92). Yet, while we know of textbooks from that time by Adams Sherman Hill, David J. Hill, and John F. Genung, as well as many other male college professors, we know little of these two women and their rhetorical practices in textbook writing. In the discipline’s examination of nineteenth-century textbooks, the scholarship has focused primarily on those written for colleges, high schools, and academies authored by men, often college professors and high school principals (see Crowley; Johnson; Kitzhaber). While women across the nineteenth century compiled readers, letter-writing manuals, conduct manuals, and elemen- tary school textbooks (see Carr et al.; Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric), only a few higher-level rhetoric textbooks written by women found publishers before the end of the century. With merely a high school education and a dozen years of high school teaching, Lockwood authored and published Lessons in English, Adapted to the Study of American Classics. She turned trends, opening the door for herself and other women educators to build reputations by publishing high school and college textbooks. Emerson, in forming her own academic career, continued this turning Turning Trends 243 by coauthoring the next two editions and by moving from teaching in academies to teaching in the male-dominated English department at Boston University. Together, they turned trends both in textbook publishing and in women’s place in higher education. This essay recounts how Lockwood and Emerson built their reputations in traditionally male-dominated academic locations and demonstrates the pedagogies and curricula their textbooks anticipated. I contend that the long-term popularity of Lockwood’s and Emerson’s textbooks turned trends in three ways. First, it situated women high school teachers as competitive in an educated male-dominated publishing context. Second, it placed their textbooks at the forefront of three pedagogical and curricular shifts, anticipating in each case that change. Third, it approached those pedagogical and curricular changes by emphasizing student engagement in literacy development rather than by replicating the content focus and rote learning of the male-authored textbooks. Lessons in English and its transformations as Com- position and Rhetoric offer a particularly important study because of the longevity of the textbook starting in 1888 and going beyond 1912 and because of the coauthors’ sensitivity to national pedagogical and curricular trends in education. Each textbook version promoted a distinct pedagogical and rhetorical trend, yet each allowed teachers and students agency in their teaching and learning. The 1888 Lessons in English advances a college curriculum that blended the Harvard current-traditional rhetoric traditions with the Yale literary ones. The coauthored 1901 Composition and Rhetoric upended the word-to-whole-composition organization of the 1888 publication by promoting a Deweyian progressive pedagogy. Finally, the 1912 edition shifted the organization again by more systematically addressing theme writing through its various modes, thus firmly entrenching current-traditional rhetoric within its larger compositional forms, yet still supporting student literacy learning as agentive and choice-directed through what Robert Connors has referred to as a “thesis text” approach to theme writing (“Rise” 451). While each edition was situated in current-traditional rhetoric, each reflected an alternative pedagogical approach, and each was chronologically on the front edge of that alternative trend. In addition, the textbooks adapted the pedagogical philosophies and practices in the spirit of a female teacher deciding not only how to use the textbook in her classroom but also embracing the curiosity and interest of female and male students in learning to read, speak, and write well, an antecedent to what we now refer to as “student-centered” or “active” learning. These three reasons—women’s writing as competitive and marketable in textbook publishing, pedagogy and curriculum that changed and adapted to the needs of the time, and innovation in the textbook’s presentation and approach adapted to the needs of the audience—established and maintained Lockwood’s and Emerson’s reputations and locations in institutional history. In each way, these women substantiated the importance of women’s rhetorical practices in textbook construction. 244 Nancy Myers

Lockwood’s and Emerson’s textbooks competed for most of thirty years with textbooks written by male faculty from Harvard and Yale, as well as from other prestigious universities, as well as, after 1900, with textbooks written by college- educated women. Lessons in English went through at least twelve printings before its revision in 1901. For the coauthored second edition, Composition and Rhetoric, Em- erson added a teachers’ manual explaining how to use the textbook, and J. W. Sewell abridged the edition for the high schools of Tennessee. The coauthored textbook was again revised and republished in 1912. Given Ginn and Company’s continued support of the textbook’s revisions and reprintings, Lockwood’s and Emerson’s textbooks influenced the approach to English education nationwide. The women turned trends. To demonstrate Lockwood’s and Emerson’s innovation and reputation in rhetoric textbook authoring, the next section focuses on Lockwood and the educational contexts, pedagogy, and curriculum in Lessons in English. The following sections address the two versions of Composition and Rhetoric that supported Emerson’s academic career. The conclusion speaks to why these women’s accomplishments are unknown today and ascribes this fact to three historical views of textbooks: their role in assessment, the positioning of scholarship on women textbook writers, and the stigmas of textbooks in academe.

Lockwood Builds a Reputation with Lessons in English Lockwood and her textbooks’ reputations had a somewhat serendipitous beginning because she was a woman high school teacher at a time when women were publishing textbooks but not rhetorics and not copiously. Born in 1854 in Bridgeport, Con- necticut, she graduated from a high school in New Haven in 1873 and taught there from 1874 to 1890.1 She married Dr. William Ellison Lockwood, a medical doctor, in 1887, and they moved to Redlands, California, in 1892, raising a daughter and son. With no more than a high school education, Lockwood designed a pedagogy and curriculum that brought her first a book contract with Ginn and Company, then more textbook contracts. Each text built on and extended the reputation she established with the 1888 Lessons in English. While the content and approach to Lessons in English made it popular for academy and high school instruction, Ginn and Company’s size and advertising capabili- ties supported its visibility and widespread distribution. According to John Tebbel’s A History of Book Publishing in the United States, “by 1890, Ginn & Co. was the sixth largest educational publisher in the United States” (411) because of its high volume of sales and numerous titles for the high school, academy, and college markets. It attained this status partly through the efforts of Lewis Parkhurst, who in 1887 left his position as high school principal and joined Ginn and Company to become the “special agent” for “the growing high-school and college business of New England” (Lawler 86). Having heard of Lockwood’s impressive teaching at the Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut, Parkhurst attended Lockwood’s class and in a Turning Trends 245 later meeting examined her textbook manuscript, which was based on her pedagogy and curriculum. With his experience in the schools and his knowledge of students and teachers, he chose to publish “the book at once; for it came at a time when the schools were beginning to take up the study of English in earnest” (92). With Ginn and Company promoting the textbook, Lessons in English’s multiple printings between 1888 and 1900 demonstrated its viability within a male-dominated rhetoric textbook market. Archives of Instruction lists it as one of sixteen rhetoric textbooks, and the only one by a woman, with ten or more reprintings between 1866 and 1900 (Carr et al. 62). Notably, Lessons in English’s fifteen competitors were textbooks by college professors, including Alexander Bain, John Genung, John Hart, Adams Sher- man Hill, Brainerd Kellogg, and Barrett Wendell. A woman with only a high school education wrote a textbook that was as marketable as some of those written by the most famous college professors. As Carr et al. explained, Lockwood’s textbook was one of two high school rhetorics authored by women at that time, and these, along with the “near contemporaneous composition books by writers such as Mary Harper, Lucy Chittenden, and Harriet Keeler and Emma Davis, marked the emergence of women as producers of textbooks for formal writing instruction” (220).2 Lessons in English could not have been so successful or consistently marketable unless its contents provided teachers and students with curriculum and pedagogical support useful to them both. As Albert E. Egge’s 1895 review asserted, the textbook was well known and “widely recommended for use in high schools and academies” (286). In its selection of curriculum and pedagogy and in its innovative presentation of them, Lessons in English integrated the Harvard rhetoric curriculum on writing with the Yale literary focus on reading and interpreting and adapted both for a high school coeducational classroom by directly addressing students’ and teachers’ interests and agency.3 Even though the textbook focused on teaching English grammar, rhetoric, and composition, its introduction and further suggestions dispersed throughout the text specifically for teachers proposed that literature be combined with the instruction of the English language and writing, such as pairing Washington Irving’s stories with a study of Anglo-Saxon words (xv), incorporating substantial literature by seven American writers (xii–xiii) with consistent references to them, and interpreting poems and stories through strategies of amplification (300–305). This example of joining the teaching of writing with the teaching of reading in the high school classroom merges Harvard’s focus on writing instruction with Yale’s attention to literature. Lockwood’s inclusion of regular counsel for the teacher, which used verbs like “ought” instead of “must” and phrases like “discretion in determining” and “teacher guidance,” was a unique addition of pedagogical support allowing for individual teacher choice. She began the Introduction by acknowledging the importance of the teacher in making these curricular and instructional choices as well as of the institutional constraints that affected those decisions: “The choice of books for reading must, of course, depend largely upon circumstances, upon the taste 246 Nancy Myers of the teacher, and the capacity of the class” (xi). Lawler stated that explaining to “teachers what to do, and how to do it, by presenting plans,” advice, and suggestions was “an outstanding contribution, for that day” (144). Throughout the introduction and the text, Lockwood offered teachers choice and agency in determining how and when to teach the curriculum. While Lockwood drew on existing practices of rote memorization as beneficial for the student, overall the textbook rejected past instructional traditions in its innovative pedagogical approach. Even into the 1880s, as William J. Reese argued about high school instruction, “the teaching of English grammar and literature remained a bastion of conservatism. Students memorized the rules of correct usage, vocabulary, and verbatim selections from textbooks, imitating traditional practices once found in the Latin grammar school” (137). Lessons in English worked against that tradition by asking students to take agency and responsibility for their writing as active learners. For example, when discussing paraphrasing in the chapter on composition, Lockwood encouraged students to learn about not only synonyms but also syntactic style so that each paraphrase would be “a free translation” (284), and oral and written activities instructed students to compose paraphrases individually but as part of a larger class discussion comparing the strengths of each paraphrase to the original and to other paraphrases (286–87). An exercise in fiction writing asked that students use nursery rhymes as the starting point for writing unique stories that “have the same general plot” but are “as different as possible from the original” (324). Numer- ous student examples and models were included to show students what their peers had composed and indirectly valuing student work. These more expressive and synthetic activities provided student agency in their learning and thinking and their literacy development. Lessons in English’s emphasis on teacher and student choice and engagement and its merging of American literature with English rhetoric and writing instruction served as a counterpoint to its strong current-traditional rhetoric organization and its emphasis on correctness. Working from the premise that students first must learn the smallest components of the language (words) before they are able to write sentences, paragraphs, and themes, current-traditional rhetoric’s objective of instruction was to enable “students to use grammar correctly, to conform to formal and stylistic conventions, and to argue extensively from existing authority available through research in proper sources” (Burnham and Powell 113). Lessons in English’s organization began with words, their origins, and their appropriate uses, then moved to sentences and punctuation, and ended with various longer genres such as letter writing, types of essays, and biographical sketches; in other words, students learned to write as building blocks of more advanced literacy structures. Correct usage was emphasized in chapters 4, 5, and 6 with sections titled “Faulty Figures,” “Common Errors in the Use of English,” and “Purity, Propriety, and Precision,” re- spectively. In the Introduction, Lockwood recommended that students “copy their Turning Trends 247

corrected compositions into a notebook, for future reference” (xv). Thus, pedagogy and student activities and exercises offered a contrast with the text’s lockstep curricular organization. Even while paradoxical, the approach of integrating language and literacy instruction with literature proved accessible for teachers and students and successful. The success of Lessons in English led Ginn and Company to commission Lock- wood to revise W. D. Whitney’s The Essentials of English Grammar with the new title An English Grammar for Higher Grades in Grammar Schools. Lockwood’s name, now combined with that of the popular and esteemed Yale English professor Whitney, provided more success in sales for Ginn and Company and more prestige for Lock- wood. Between 1892 and 1902 the revised grammar went through at least eight printings. An 1893 review of An English Grammar summed up Lockwood’s ability to adapt and shape a textbook’s contents for the accessibility of the students. Referring to the earlier Lessons in English, the reviewer claimed that Lockwood had the skill and knowledge to include “those practical features so necessary to a successful text-book in America” (O. F. Emerson 53). Even with Lockwood’s relocation to Redlands, Cali- fornia, in 1892, her relationship with Ginn and Company continued, as over the following years she was commissioned to edit a collection of William Cullen Bryant’s poetry and an edition of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio for school use. Lockwood and her textbooks’ reputations held steady through the end of the century, making possible the 1901 coauthored Composition and Rhetoric. Emerson Cultivates a Reputation with Composition and Rhetoric By the turn of the century, Lockwood’s reputation was firmly established as a vi- able textbook writer and marketable name, so her name on the second edition of the textbook, known as Composition and Rhetoric, assured its success. Emerson’s name paired with Lockwood’s on this 1901 edition offered Emerson recognition in publishing and education. This coauthorship moved her closer to her career goals of attaining higher degrees and a position as a college teacher, both of which she did. Between 1886 and 1907, Emerson taught English at two academies and two normal schools, so, just as with Lockwood, her teaching experience gave her an understanding of her teacher and student audiences.4 Having received a B.A. in 1892 from Wellesley College, one of the Seven Sisters colleges, she went on to earn her M.A. from Wellesley in 1905, four years after Composition and Rhetoric appeared in print. Emerson received a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1912, one of the first women to do so. From 1907 to 1911 she was a member of the English faculty and a dean at Carleton College; in 1913 she joined the male-dominated Boston University faculty. While Emerson benefited from the association with Lockwood’s reputation from the 1880s and 1890s, her continuing professional advancement and advanced degrees brought authority and prestige to the book, for a college-educated woman teaching in a college environment had coauthored this edition. These changes in academic 248 Nancy Myers positions and degree attainment appeared on the reprintings ofComposition and Rhetoric, for while the copyright date remained 1901 on the title page, the information under Emerson’s name changed: in an early printing she was described as the “Head of the Department of English in the State Normal School, Bridgewater, Mas- sachusetts,” and in a later one she was credited as “Professor of Literature and Dean of Women, Carleton College.” This mutually beneficial name association provided Ginn and Company with more sales and Emerson with national name recognition.5 Emerson played a major role in the reformulation of Lessons in English into Com- position and Rhetoric and then again in the 1912 revision. The first reflected a Dewey- ian progressive pedagogy in its organization, its additions, and its separate Teacher’s Manual, all reflecting Emerson’s learning at Wellesley and the trends in publishing. In her listing in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, it states about the 1901 edition that “she wrote sixteen of the nineteen chapters” and the manual (146). The 1901Composition and Rhetoric increased in size from the original 400 pages to 470 with the addition of a 66-page teaching manual, for an addition of more than 130 pages of materials. Most of the suggestions for planning and teaching as well as the student examples and models shifted to a document only for teachers. This separate teacher’s manual, while a practical approach and a more common practice in textbook publishing by then, worked against the inclusive nature of Lessons in English, in which the students had access to the author’s direct address to the teachers and could read the included student’s writing. While the manual provided more instructional agency and control for the teacher, the students could now see student writing samples only when the teacher decided. The manual’s tone was one of mas- ter teacher to beginning teacher, and, as a metadiscourse on the textbook, it justified the inclusion of the specific curriculum and approach. In addition, it offered distinctions in instruction and lesson planning for students not planning on college and for those working toward that goal. Most important, Emerson offered instructions for responding to student themes with a teacher’s response to a student draft and the student’s revised product. While the goal and markings focused on correctness and style, the markers of current-traditional rhetoric, this teacher response also modeled a type of transaction associated with Deweyian progressive pedagogy (Mastrangelo 24). The student theme did not finish with the teacher’s markings but was then revised for a more polished and focused text. The student’s learning was assumed not by explaining what was wrong but enacted by showing that development through revision. The 1901 Composition and Rhetoric enacted a progressive pedagogy in its reorga- nization and additions, drawing on and extending the best of Lockwood’s Lessons in English. In Writing a Progressive Past, Lisa Mastrangelo employed the phrase “Dew- eyian progressive pedagogy” to describe an approach that enabled “self-expression and the development of the individual” (23) through a process of “transaction rather than transmission” (24). This radical revision from the 1888 one worked against a Turning Trends 249 current-traditional emphasis, focused on written prose and fictive genres, and subsumed sentences and words under a section on the paragraph. While grammar and punctuation constituted the first segment of four inComposition and Rhetoric, they were referred to as a review and were grouped with paraphrasing and retelling, con- densing ideas in written examinations, self-expression, and letter writing. Not only were students’ words, ideas, and thoughts valued in these various forms of writing, but also the activities included a set of sequenced heuristics of questions designed to help students discover what they knew about a topic, in this case their favorite animal (106), planning and drafting their themes (107), and, after drafting, revising through self-response questions (108). This scaffolded approach to teaching writing drew on self-knowledge, developed writing skills, and was a transaction among student, text, and teacher. The second section continued to support development in its approach to narrative and descriptive theme-writing as imaginative, and the following chapters on theme-writing employed art, with an image of Guido Reni’s “Aurora” as one of the topics for writing (211). Issues of style and coherence were activities of rewriting, as a means of developing writing and thinking through alternative ways of expressing the same concept. The third section on paragraphs included discussions on the value of varying sentence length and structure and the purposes of longer and shorter paragraphs and placement of the topic sentence or the implied topic sentence. Thus, one approach did not fit all purposes or genres, and the writer had to decide. The fourth section extended Lockwood’s use of literature by addressing various fiction and nonfiction forms, by including a chapter on the novel and drama, and by focusing on poetry as a genre with specific and varied features. Emerson’s emphasis on and additions of literary forms and the use of the imagination were in keeping with her training at Wellesley College (Palmieri 161–80) and demonstrated the ways she enhanced Lockwood’s original approach to teaching reading and writing together. Across the entire textbook, through its organization and activities, students were invited to interact with the concepts, strategies, and topics and to build their knowledge and thinking on the basis of what they already knew. Transaction with the text and teacher was the goal.

Lockwood’s and Emerson’s 1912 Composition and Rhetoric Holds True to Reputation With the third revision, in 1912, also titled Composition and Rhetoric, Emerson’s academic career had again moved forward; the title page displayed a Ph.D. after her name, and she was described as “Formerly Professor of Literature in Carleton College” because she joined the English faculty at Boston University shortly after publication of the book. For the third time, this textbook was at the forefront of educational theory and pedagogy as it moved more systematically toward current- traditional curriculum and instructional practices, yet offered that curriculum with a difference. While reinscribing the current-traditional practices to learn and write 250 Nancy Myers modal organizational patterns of narration, description, exposition, and argument and “to argue extensively from existing authority available through research in proper sources” (Burnham and Powell 113), it did not succumb to an organizational lockstep approach from word to whole composition, nor did it promote writing and speaking via absolute rules. Rather, it continued to value literary study, albeit in truncated form, student expression in writing and speaking focused on a central idea, and teacher agency in deciding what, how, and when to teach the curriculum. The preface referred to “recent changes in the methods of teaching English” that warranted a new edition, but the emphasis was on keeping, “though in a modified form, much of what gave the original book its individuality” (v). One major diver- gence from the two previous editions, the belief in the value of teaching reading and writing together was replaced by a belief in the value of learning to speak and write appropriately. This shift from reading to speaking was indicative of the growth of English literature study in colleges and schools and the subsequent separation of the teaching of reading from the teaching of writing. However, the value and appreciation of reading literature appeared in the first chapter in its focus on paraphrasing and retelling of literature and poetry (4–8). Most of the literature was gone except for a chapter on verse forms and a chapter on figures of speech, the last of which was a feature in all editions. Smaller than the 1901 edition, now under four hundred pages, this edition had fourteen chapters and three appendices. The appendices contained information on grammar, punctuation, and editing themes, thus operating as a reference and resource rather than promoting rote knowledge. Words, sentences, and paragraphs once again each had their own chapters, equal to and preceding the modal chapters. In addition to the planning of themes with special attention to outlining, individual chapters presented the modes of written themes: exposition, narration, description, and argument. This acknowledgment of modes as approaches to themes was paralleled in the letter-writing chapter, to which a section on business letters was added. New chapters encompassed the distinctions and separation between written and oral compositions, included debating in the argument chapter, and provided library research. Of the three editions, this one most reflected the current-traditional paradigm. However, this edition, like the other two, supported teacher and student engagement in its intent, approach, and activities. Teachers were to adopt and modify the contents to fit their own pedagogy and their own school-year needs, because the scope and arrangement were meant to be flexible and “free from any rigid system” (v). While addressing the new trends in writing instruction, the organization was meant “to arouse at once the pupil’s interest” (vi), which explains the shift of grammar and punctuation to the appendices and the new beginning focus on the distinctions between writing and speaking, emphasizing concepts and strategies as starting points, not rules. Student examples were included, and a balance of writing and speaking activities threaded throughout the chapters. In discussing unity Turning Trends 251

in exposition, argument, and outlining, Emerson explained that students should focus on the main point of their themes and that all of the information and material in their text should be tied to it. While this concept was drawn from what Connors labeled the “Bain-Wendell trinity of Unity-Coherence-Emphasis,” reflecting current- traditional rhetoric, it also foreshadowed the “thesis text” approach of textbooks in the 1930s (“Rise” 450, 451).6 Students controlled their ideas and their writing, and they made choices as to the materials and information tied to their main points that they included in their compositions. Like the other two editions, the 1912 Composi- tion and Rhetoric negotiated current-traditional rhetoric by valuing the teaching of reading or speaking as much as writing and by directly and indirectly promoting the self-expression and development of the student as an engaged activity among student, text, and teacher—one of transaction, not transmission. In both the 1901 and 1912 Composition and Rhetoric, the dedication read, “To our pupils whose apprecia- tive sympathy has made of our schoolroom days a delightful experience” as a direct acknowledgment of the educational transaction all three editions promoted.

The Lost Reputations of Lockwood, Emerson, and Their Textbooks Lockwood was one of a small number of women who turned the trend of a male- dominated textbook publishing industry by firmly establishing her presence through publication. Emerson was among the first women who turned trends by earning a doctoral degree in literature and by becoming a member of the faculty in male- dominated English departments. Both Lockwood and Emerson had long careers as textbook writers and educators. Emerson died in 1922 after attaining professor status at Boston University, Lockwood in 1923 in Oakland, California, at her daughter’s home. Having won national reputations through their multiple textbooks and other writings, both women were, as Lockwood’s obituary declared, “scholar[s] of more than local fame” (“Mrs. Lockwood”). So why were their reputations lost with their deaths? I suggest that one reason is that the women were writing textbooks, which have a depreciated status partly because of their role in assessment then and now. A second factor is current scholarly discussions about textbooks, which have given only limited attention to their work; a third one is the stigma attached to textbooks in academe. First, the commercial success and national presence of Lockwood’s and Emer- son’s textbooks, and ones like them in all disciplines, more readily allowed for the large-scale assessment of students’ discrete knowledge and skills, a practice that came about at the turn of the twentieth century. Widespread textbook use enabled school districts and state educational systems to establish a common curriculum for testing, enabling teachers “to compare student performance, and uniform examinations allowed administrators to compare different schools” (Reese 136). As Reese explained, for better and for worse, textbooks at this time “helped create a common curriculum, ordering the course of studies in a familiar way” (121). Mastrangelo 252 Nancy Myers

explained this as administrative progressivism, a hierarchical approach that was focused on raising the nation’s literacy rate and that sought to norm students culturally and socially by means of a standardized curriculum and the testing of it (9). The 1901 abridged edition of Composition and Rhetoric created by Sewell for the schools of Tennessee illustrates this possibility and potential for statewide assessment. His revision includes Southern authors to foster a cultural and regional approach and to “make the text-book more representative in its nature,” embracing cultural norming (Composition and Rhetoric iii). In abridging the textbook, he downsized it by 126 pages and eliminated many of the elements that made Composition and Rhetoric progressive. Gone were the chapters on imagination in description and narration and all of the genre chapters on prose forms, the novel, drama, and poetry. What remained was grammar, punctuation, paraphrasing, usage, paragraph development, and theme writing. While the organization was still the same, there were only three parts instead of four, and theme-writing was sandwiched between the grammar and punctuation section and the word, sentences, and paragraphs section. With this arrangement, larger compositions were deemphasized in the emphasis on parts. This was evident even with the page distribution, for of the textbook’s 350 pages, only 40 of them focused on theme and 20 on letter writing. Sewell’s myopic focus on the current-traditional paradigm was intended to serve the goal of “constructive work” for the student (iii). This “constructive work” became a common curriculum for a statewide high school system. Even more ironically than this stripping of progressive pedagogy and student- teacher engagement was the promotion of Sewell as the implicated author of the textbook. The title page listed J. W. Sewell as the author and his position as “Formerly of the Fogg High School, now Supervisor of Grammar Schools, Nashville, Tennes- see.” Only below that is the statement that this edition was “abridged and revised” from Lockwood’s and Emerson’s text for the “schools of Tennessee.” His position title showed that he had moved up in the Tennessee educational system since the year before, because in a 1900 report in The School Review on the teaching of English in secondary schools, in which listed Lockwood’s Lessons in English as useful to teachers of composition, he was listed as a high school teacher in Nashville, Tennessee.7 With one abridgement, Sewell became the authority of curriculum and pedagogy for high schools in Tennessee and a champion of administrative progressivism. Second, Lockwood’s and Emerson’s work as high school textbook writers has been acknowledged regularly but has been somewhat marginalized.8 Always mentioned but never thoroughly investigated, their textbooks demonstrated how widespread was their use. David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs in their 2014 book, Educating the New Southern Woman, documented that Lockwood’s Lessons in English was a regular textbook at Winthrop College in South Carolina, indicating that a textbook intended for high school was being used in colleges. John T. Gage’s 2007 study on textbooks between 1850 and 1914, which addresses letter-writing instruction, Turning Trends 253 included Lockwood’s Lessons in English and her coauthored 1901 Composition and Rhetoric, mentioning the textbooks briefly three times. Jean Ferguson Carr et al. in the 2005 Archives of Instruction championed Lockwood’s work but concentrated on her focus on rhetoric for high school audiences and on the multiple printings, signifying the popularity of the textbook. However, in juxtaposing Lockwood’s textbook with those of Adams Sherman Hill and John Genung, among others, the authors consistently misspelled her given name as “Sarah,” adding another layer of complication. Jane Donawerth provided the most information on Lockwood and her textbooks in her discussions of Lessons in English in the 2002 Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900 and the 2012 Conversational Rhetoric. While Donawerth offered important insight into a woman writing a rhetoric textbook, she also argued that it had limited use for teaching women’s rhetoric, given that the textbook was for a coeducational high school audience. Lockwood’s and Emerson’s textbooks are addressed in the literature but always within the historical rhetorical contexts of comprehensive textbook studies or women’s education; thus, their work has been depreciated and categorized even when this was not intentionally done. Third, in “Are Textbooks Contributions to Scholarship?” Gerald Alred and Erik Thelen suggested that the disparaging attitude toward textbooks carried across most departments and disciplines: “Textbook authorship has long been viewed as trivial at best and, at worst, as a form of faculty moonlighting” (466). Textbooks’ traditionally low status within postsecondary institutions seems to have stemmed from at least three types of shifts in American education over the past two centuries: a change in pedagogical approaches from lecture to question-and-answer; a diversify- ing and expanded student population; and a change in faculty focus from teaching to scholarship that resulted in a view of textbooks as commercial ventures rather than scholarly pursuits. From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, rhetoric textbooks became specialized, with compositions, grammars, readers, and books on sentences, paragraphs, and vocabulary development, among others. They also reflected the trends in rhetoric set at the end of the nineteenth century and as such were not only conservative but dated in their theories and practices (Connors, “Textbooks” 181–90). Because of their function to educate the masses in foundational material, textbooks contained the stable and basic knowledge that provided overviews of frameworks and taxonomies, key concepts and terms, and the means of inquiry for the discipline. However, textbooks often provided new knowledge through their immediate adaptability of that foundational knowledge, what Richard Young has called “established paradigms,” to contemporary environments and through their explication of new paradigms (31). Connors in “Textbooks and the Evolution of the Discipline” explained that textbooks have had a unique role in the discipline of rhetoric and composition. Because of the lack of professional journals in the field during the first half of the twentieth century, rhetoric and composition textbooks served as the sources 254 Nancy Myers for dissemination of new knowledge to writing teachers and students (190–92). Not all textbooks offer new knowledge, but many do through their adaptation of theory into practice, through the writers’ interpretations of the appropriated material, and through the writers’ desire to give teachers and students choice and agency in their teaching and learning. Lockwood’s and Emerson’s rhetoric textbooks appealed to both high school teachers and students for almost thirty years and offered them the expected content but a different approach, one based on literacy learning as student and teacher engagement. These two women turned trends in publishing and education. The success of a textbook is based not just on its statements about what to teach and learn but also on how those philosophical and practical precepts are applied and by whom. The textbooks’ popularity and longevity are the proof.

Notes 1. All biographical information for Lockwood is drawn from two sources: Donawerth’s “Sara Lockwood” and Lockwood’s obituary “Mrs. Lockwood Dies.” 2. For further discussion on specific textbooks authored by these women and others, see Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric 126–43. 3. For a detailed discussion of Lockwood’s integration of the competing ideologies of Yale and Harvard, see Myers. 4. Biographical information for Emerson comes from “Emerson, Mary Alice,” an entry in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. 5. The textbook was only one way Emerson earned status as a writer, for she was nationally renowned for her authorship of pageants, which also reflected well on the textbook. 6. Connors claims that Wendell’s English Composition (1891) was the first thesis text but that this genre reappeared only in the 1930s (“Rise” 451). 7. His authorship of the abridged and revised edition and his 1895 coauthoring of An Eng- lish Grammar, for the Use of High School, Academy, and College Classes with William Malone Baskervill were moving him forward in his educational career. 8. Although Bordelon and Mastrangelo addressed women educators and their writings, they too were looking at college textbooks, not ones intended for high school students.

Works Cited Alred, Gerald J., and Erik A. Thelen. “Are Textbooks Contributions to Scholarship?” College Composition and Communication, vol. 44, no. 4, 1993, pp. 466–77. Baskervill, William Malone, and James Witt Sewell. An English Grammar, for the Use of High School, Academy, and College Classes. American Book, 1895. Bordelon, Suzanne. A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck. Southern Illinois UP, 2007. Burnham, Chris, and Rebecca Powell. “Expressive Pedagogy: Practice/Theory, Theory/ Practice.” A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, second edition, edited by Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 111–27. Turning Trends 255

Carr, Jean Ferguson, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille M. Schultz. Archives of Instruction: Nine- teenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States. Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Connors, Robert J. “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 4, 1981, pp. 444–55. ———. “Textbooks and the Evolution of the Discipline.” College Composition and Communi- cation, vol. 37, no. 2, 1986, pp. 178–93. Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric. Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Donawerth, Jane. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. ———. “Sara Lockwood.” Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology, edited by Jane Donawerth, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, pp. 222–40. Egge, Albert E. “On the History of the English Language: Illustrations of How It Is Taught in a Much Advertised Book, with a Few Critical Remarks.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 10, no. 5, 1895, pp. 143–46. “Emerson, Mary Alice.” National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Being the History of the United States, volume 20, James T. White, 1929, p. 146. Emerson, Mary Alice. Teachers’ Manual to Accompany Lockwood and Emerson’s Composition and Rhetoric. Ginn & Co., 1902. Emerson, Oliver Farrar. “Rev. of An English Grammar for Higher Grades in Grammar Schools, by Mrs. Sara E. H. Lockwood.” School Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 1893, pp. 53–54. Gage, John T. “Vestiges of Letter Writing in Composition Textbooks, 1850–1914.”Letter- Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell, U of South Carolina P, 2007, pp. 200–229. Gold, David, and Catherine L. Hobbs. Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s Colleges, 1884–1945. Southern Illinois UP, 2014. Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America. Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Kitzhaber, Albert R. Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850–1900. Southern Methodist UP, 1990. Lawler, Thomas Bonaventure. Seventy Years of Textbook Publishing: A History of Ginn and Company, 1867–1937. Ginn & Co., 1938. Lockwood, Sara E. Husted. Lessons in English, Adapted to the Study of American Classics: A Text-Book for High Schools and Academies. Ginn & Co, 1888. Lockwood, Sara E. Husted, and Mary Alice Emerson. Composition and Rhetoric for Higher Schools. 1901, revised edition, Ginn & Co., 1912. Mastrangelo, Lisa. Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era. Parlor, 2012. “Mrs. Lockwood Dies in Oakland.” Redland Daily Facts, Redlands, Calif., October 29, 1923, p. 5. Myers, Nancy. “Adapting Male Education for a Nation of Females: Sara Lockwood’s 1888 Lessons in English.” In the Archives of Composition: Writing and Rhetoric in High Schools and 256 Nancy Myers

Normal Schools, edited by Lori Ostergaard and Henrietta Rix Wood, U of Pittsburgh P, 2015, pp. 167–84. Palmieri, Patricia Ann. In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley. Yale UP, 1995. Reese, William J. The Origins of the American High School. Yale UP, 1995. Sewell, Jas. W. “Proceedings of the Southern Association: English.” School Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 1900, pp. 80–86. Sewell, J. W. Composition and Rhetoric: Abridged and Revised for Use in the Schools of Tennessee, from “Composition and Rhetoric for Higher Schools,” by Sara E. H. Lockwood and Mary Alice Emerson. Ginn & Co., 1901. Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States: Volume II, The Expansion of an Industry, 1865–1919. R. R. Bowker, 1975. Whitney, William Dwight, and Sara E Husted Lockwood. An English Grammar for Higher Grades in Grammar Schools: Adapted from Essentials of English Grammar. Ginn & Co., 1892. Young, Richard E. “Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention.” Research on Composing: Points of Departure, edited by Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell, National Council of Teachers of English, 1978, pp. 29–47. Afterword

Lynée Lewis Gaillet

I find that the most useful afterword to an academic book considers practical matters, especially when written by the author or editor herself. An afterword— most often defined as a postscript, reflection, or addendum—should address the question “what’s next?” and invite readers to join in the scholarly conversations initiated by the work. To that end, I have included in this reflective section suggestions for alternative tables of contents, a discussion of future directions and projects needed in hybrid archival/feminist research, and implications of this research methodology for classroom pedagogy.

A Note on Using This Text Organizing a collection is always a challenging process, primarily because editors have difficulty anticipating readers’ needs or their reasons for accessing the work. The first impulse for me is to organize selections chronologically, perhaps because my generation of scholars was introduced to rhetorical history through first editions of now foundational works such as Winifred Bryan Horner’s The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric (1983) and Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Pres- ent (1990). Rhetorical history was introduced in the early rhetoric and composition programs in two or more history of rhetoric classes, all marching chronologically from the Sophists to Burke, a trend that continues at most institutions today. Recent scholarship, however, such as the 2014 special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly devoted to exploring “Untimely Historiographies,” complicates chronological views of rhetorical history, suggesting that the field needs to think more closely about “the rhetorical construction of the ‘timely’ and of temporality itself” (Ballif 201). While seeing the value in chronological readings, we quickly realized that a sequential listing of essays in this case would not fit the scope of our project, provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives, or create 258 Lynée Lewis Gaillet a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues—our overarching goals. However, reading the essays chronologically does answer other research purposes: discerning a trajectory of female reputation construction, discovering patterns of erasure and silencing across a particular period, or investigating the cultural role of women’s work (abolition, suffrage, or temperance, for example) within a specific time. Another useful way to read these essays is by genre or theme. Subheadings might include “Science and Military” (Grohowski and Hart, Kirsch and Fancher, Myatt, Martin, Presbey); “American Activism” (Aronson, Britt-Smith, Hayden); “Speaking and Composing” (Bordelon, Myers, Quandahl); and “Art and Philosophy” (Fleck- enstein, Ronald and Roskelly, Shirk). This schema is particularly useful for scholars researching female rhetorical agency and categories of women’s work. Other readers may be interested in exploring the nature of collaborative work: women working together (Aronson, Kirsch and Fancher, Myers, Presbey) and in partnership with or alongside men (Bordelon, Hart and Grohowski, Myatt, Kirsch and Fancher, Shirk). While research methodologies are not mutually exclusive and the research agendas of contributors to this volume are multifaceted, many of the contributors initially begin with traditional rescue and recovery research (Aronson, Bordelon, Kirsch and Fancher, Martin, Myers, Presbey, Ronald and Roskelly, Shirk); others revisit or reinscribe existing reputations (Britt-Smith, Hart and Grohowski, Myatt, Quandahl); and still others shine light on everyday women’s practices (Flecken- stein, Ronald and Roskelly) and non-Western collective female activism (Martin, Presbey) that are rarely explored. Authors then move on to more nuanced methods for imagining ways to remap female accomplishments, illustrated in case studies, microhistories, and models for adopting these various research lenses. One way to get at mappings that don’t merely insert women into existing categories is through archival investigation. While every essay in Remembering Women Differently includes archival investigation, discussions and case studies could be subdivided into specific facets of this research methodology in order to better understand methods for working with various artifacts and archival materials: interview, oral history, and speeches (Aronson, Hart and Grohowski, Hayden, Kirsch and Fancher, Martin, Presbey); public memorials, pamphlets, and print records (Aronson, Britt-Smith, Fleckenstein, Hart and Grohowski, Hayden, Kirsch and Fancher, Myatt, Ronald and Roskelly); diaries and sketch/scrap books (Fleckenstein, Ronald and Roskelly, Shirk); letters and memoir (Aronson, Bordelon, Fleckenstein, Kirsch and Fancher, Myatt, Shirk, Ronald and Roskelly); lectures and textbooks (Bordelon, Kirsch and Fancher, Myers, Myatt); clothing and textiles (Hart and Grohowski, Kirsch and Fancher); photographs and visual artifacts (Fleckenstein, Hart and Grohowski, Hayden, Myatt, Presbey); and digital archives and memorials (Hart and Grohowski, Presbey), among many other sources. A broad range of readers might find of interest these models for researching everyday archives, including conducting interviews Afterword 259 and oral histories, discovering ways to glean information from unpublished works, and writing historical narratives and microhistories from source materials. We hope readers will find other approaches for accessing the contents of this collection, tailoring reading patterns to their current research and teaching interests, disciplinary and perhaps regional concerns, and interests in public/political vs. private/domestic rhetorical acts.

Future Directions Remembering Women Differently invites readers to build on existing essays and theories for examining female contributions to a variety of disciplines. Letizia Guglielmo’s excellent literature review and essays in the “Theoretical Frameworks” section work together to provide general information and specific guidelines for re-collection as a lens for engaging in feminist research. We invite readers to adopt these methodologies when looking to new venues and archival sources for writing microhistories and case studies. With a few fascinating exceptions (Martin, Pres- bey, and Quandahl), this collection focuses on white Western women working in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We hope future projects will expand the scope of this work, adapting the research materials here for investigations of African American, Eastern, global, indigenous, Latina, and LGBTQI issues, among many others, occurring in a wide swath of places and times. Upon receiving abstracts in response to our call for papers, we were overwhelmed by the robust interest in the topic; clearly there is room for much more work in this area. We envision another collection focused on the work of contemporary women and issues, including essays in the same vein as Erin Frost’s “Complications of Transnational Feminist Apparency: The Ongoing Work of Nujood Ali,” one of the wonderful submissions we received. We so wanted to include this fascinating essay in our work, but it fell beyond the scope of our historical collection. We encouraged Professor Frost to submit her essay to Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, where it was quickly vetted and published. The field needs additional broad investigations like this one that address current international issues and nontraditional feminist rhetors. We hope other scholars will take up and expand upon Remembering Women Differently in these ways. We also received many abstracts proposing biographical essays of little-known figures and erased or forgotten female work. These narratives, while engaging and even shocking in some cases, were grounded in published or readily available materials. We limited the scope of our collection to archival investigations or new theoretical approaches to feminist research. However, we see the need for a collection of brief biographical/encyclopedic sketches of historical and contemporary female scientists, entrepreneurs, religious figures, politicians, protesters, environmentalists, orators, athletes, philanthropists, actors, publishers, community literacy sponsors, and more. Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 260 Lynée Lewis Gaillet

(2 vols., 2016, 2018)—inspiring collections for children featuring the stories of international and fascinating women, from the mathematician Ada Lovelace to the rocker Joan Jett to the astrophysicist Margherita Hack—is one of my favorite current models. Including full-page illustrations from sixty international artists, this work introduces a range of research possibilities, in addition to capturing the imagination of children and adults alike. An interdisciplinary scholarly sourcebook for researchers and students, modeled on this encyclopedic and narrative text for children, would serve as a welcome heuristic for feminist researchers. Finally, given my personal interest in archival research, I look forward to the ways in which future researchers will first identify and then interpret in novel ways nontraditional collections and materials ripe for scholarly investigation, as modeled in Kristie S. Fleckenstein’s investigation of domestic female archivists as visual rhetoricians and imagesmiths, found in this collection.

Pedagogical Implications I am most excited about the classroom implications that both the content and the hybrid methodological approaches that characterize the essays of Remembering Women Differently hold. Professors who teach graduate and undergraduate courses in methodology, rhetorical history, and gender studies will find these essays to be useful models for encouraging students to conduct feminist and archival research. Contributors illustrate for students the various ways in which professional researchers make sense of primary findings, and the volume’s focus on conversations across disciplines invites students to expand their conceptions of the boundaries of traditional research in order to discover new topics and research practices grounded in primary investigation. For me, a compelling research narrative encapsulates the components of a good story: narrator/researcher; setting/selection of data and research questions; plot/ ordering of research operations; climax/solution. The authors inRemembering Women tell engaging stories, in ways that introduce new research concepts in familiar ways, building on students’ existing knowledge and interests. Archival research— often thought of as dry, boring work conducted in basements and attics—becomes attractive to students when researchers acknowledge they are telling a tale, explaining their motivations for selecting specific research questions or subjects to investigate. Studying the research models of feminist figures serves as an excellent exercise in analyzing ways in which a researcher adopts an appropriate research method, selects primary data to investigate, and determines how best to arrange or order findings to be most convincing for a target audience. Primary research, central to academic investigations, is also ubiquitous in public and entertainment forums that are familiar to students: in the proliferation of historical fiction and memoir connecting interdisciplinary fields; digital genealogical Afterword 261 finding aids and family search engines such as Ancestry.com that are made possible by digitization of archives; documentary series such as Ken Burns’s films on a wide range of topics connected to artifacts and ephemera; and Henry Louis Gates’s Find- ing Your Roots, which connects celebrities and archival research, for example. These popular interdisciplinary projects are embedded in local stories and artifacts. Teachers need to take advantage of opportunities to blend fascinating research ideas and students’ personal interests with course goals. In 2017, the actress Viola Davis schooled us on the importance of studying local communities in her acceptance speech for the Academy Award for best supporting actress in Fences. She explained that the best stories are buried in the graveyard and thanked August Wilson (the playwright) for exhuming those bodies. Davis encouraged us all to tell the stories of ordinary people and their lives. Several essays in Remembering Women Differently demonstrate ways to engage in this recovery work, in fascinating ways. I also encourage teachers to help students find interdisciplinary local projects ripe for investigation. Illustrating Davis’s claim is a recent production of Temple Bombing staged in 2017 at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, my community. This play, based on a technique called Moment Work, is quite innovative: ten actors play a hundred local characters involved in the 1958 bombing of the Temple in Atlanta. Jimmy Maize, the playwright and director, discussed in the production’s Playbill the commitment he felt telling the story of a community to which he didn’t belong—and the care required in such an endeavor. The play is entirely based on archives surrounding the event, including newspaper articles, courtroom testimony, and letters, and these artifacts are enlarged and emblazoned as backdrop to the monologues and actions on stage. To further make the point of the significance of these events upon the lives of local citizens, the actors play roles that erase embodied stereotypes: male characters play female characters and vice versa; one actor may portray several characters of different races and religions so that attention remains on the events, keeping the artifacts and local history the focus of the play. As I watched this production, I immediately thought of applications for the classroom: students could engage in multimodal, as well as traditional, projects to bring to life community events and issues through examination of readily available archival materials and ephemera. Asking students to take on archival rescue, recovery, and reinscription projects is powerful, resulting in projects that both transcend the boundaries of a one-term course and actively engage researcher and reader alike. However, looking ahead, we can ask students to take their research to the next level, to engage in the feminist methodological approaches suggested by Royster and Kirsch (critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization) and illustrated in the essays of Remembering Women Differently. This research work has the potential for dramatically changing students’ critical thinking practices by helping them find ways to make knowledge rather than discover existing information. In this process, 262 Lynée Lewis Gaillet students gain signature experiences that can transform their thinking about both local communities and global issues—leading to increased rhetorical action and agency. Shouldn’t this be the ultimate goal of education?

Works Cited Ballif, Michelle. “Untimely Historiographies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, 2014, pp. 201–3. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 1990. “Viola Davis Oscars Acceptance Speech for ‘Fences’|Oscars 2017.” YouTube, uploaded Febru- ary 17, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHTXbGG68T8. Favilli, Elena, and Francesca Cavallo. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. 2 vols. Timbuktu Labs, 2016, 2018. Frost, Erin. “An Apparent Feminist Approach to Transnational Technical Rhetorics: The Ongoing Work of Nujood Ali.” Peitho, vol. 16, no. 2, 2014, pp. 183–99. Horner, Winifred Bryan. The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rheto- ric. U of Missouri P, 1983. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. Temple Bombing Playbill. Alliance Theater, Atlanta, Ga., 2017. Contributors

AMY ARONSON is an associate professor at Fordham University, where she studies media history with a focus on American magazines and periodical literature. Within that frame, her primary research interest is gender, including both femininity and masculinity studies. She is the author of Taking Liberties: Early American Women’s Magazines and Their Readers and an editor of the international quarterly Media History. Aronson is the coauthor or coeditor of five books, including a centennial edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic Women & Economics, The Gendered Society Reader, and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, which was honored with the “Best of Reference” Award from the New York Public Library in 2004. Aronson is a former editor at Working Woman and Ms., and her work has also appeared in such publications as BusinessWeek, Global Journalist, Working Mother, and the Boston Globe. Her recently completed biography of Crystal Eastman is currently under review. SUZANNE BORDELON is a professor in and chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University. Her research interests focus on women’s rhetorical practices and pedagogies of the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. She is the author of A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Ger- trude Buck. In addition, her writing has appeared in Advances in the History of Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, the Journal of Teaching Writing, JAC: A Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics, and other journals. LAURIE A. BRITT-SMITH received her Ph.D. from St. Louis University, was formerly an associate professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy, and is currently the director of the Center for Writing at the College of the Holy Cross. In addition to her work in composition studies and writing across the curriculum, she is interested in and has published work on rhetoric(s) of social justice and the intersections of identity, public discourse, and spirituality. PATRICIA FANCHER is a lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of Califor- nia Santa Barbara, where she teaches writing and rhetoric, with a focus on feminist rhetoric, rhetoric of science/technology, and digital composition. As a teacher and a scholar, she is committed to feminist rhetorical practices and focuses her research on scientific and technical communities. Fancher is a designer and media maker. Her research and design projects have been published in Peitho Journal, Present Tense, Enculturation, and multiple edited collections. She serves as the Director of Digital 264 Contributors

Media and Outreach for the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. KRISTIE S. FLECKENSTEIN, professor of English and director of the Graduate Pro- gram in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University, teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric and composition. Her research interests include feminism and race, especially as both intersect with material and visual rhetorics. She is the recipient of the 2005 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Outstanding Book of the Year Award for Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching (SIUP, 2003), and the 2009 W. Ross Winterowd Award for Best Book in Composition Theory forVision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom (SIUP, 2009). Her current project explores photography as a resource for visual rhetoric in nineteenth-century debates about racial identities. MARIANA GROHOWSKI teaches and researches the ways multimodal rhetorics facilitate community and agency for mis- and underrepresented rhetors. As an assistant professor of English at Indiana University Southeast, she teaches classes in first-year, digital, technical, and community-based writing. She is founder and editor of the Journal of Veterans Studies and has served as an associate editor for the Community Literacy Journal since 2009. She is also the senior chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Writing with Current, Former, and Fu- ture Members of the Military Task Force and treasurer of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Her scholarship on military women and multimodal rhetorics has been published in Women & Language, Compo- sition Forum, and Kairos. LETIZIA GUGLIELMO is a professor of English at Kennesaw State University, where she teaches courses in professional writing, rhetoric, and gender studies and coor- dinates the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. Her research and writing focus on feminist rhetoric and pedagogy, gender and pop culture, the intersections of feminist action and digital communication, and professional development for faculty and students. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Computers and Composition Online, and Composition Studies and in various edited collections. She is coeditor of Contingent Faculty Publishing in Community: Case Studies for Successful Collaborations (Palgrave, 2015), coauthor of Scholarly Publication in a Changing Aca- demic Landscape: Models for Success (Palgrave, 2014), author-editor of MTV and Teen Pregnancy: Critical Essays on 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), and author-editor of the two-volume set Misogyny in American Culture: Cause, Trends, Solutions (ABC-CLIO, 2018). ALEXIS HART is an associate professor of English and the Director of Writing at Allegh- eny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. A U.S. Navy veteran, Hart has published several articles related to the U.S. military and veterans’ issues. She was the corecipient, with Roger Thompson, of a Conference on College Composition and Communica- tion (CCCC) research grant to study veterans returning to college writing classrooms and served as cochair of the CCCC Task Force on Veterans. Contributors 265

WENDY HAYDEN is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches courses in rhetorical theory, feminist rhetorics, and composition theory and practice. Her book Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth- Century Feminism was published by the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series at Southern Illinois University Press in 2013. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Rhetoric Review. GESA E. KIRSCH is a professor of English at Bentley University, Waltham, Massachu- setts. Her research interests include feminist rhetorical studies, ethics and social responsibility, qualitative and archival research methodology, and environmental rhetoric. Kirsch’s publications are extensive; she has authored and coauthored three books and edited six others. With Jacqueline Jones Royster, she coauthored Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies, win- ner of the Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award. In 2017 she published More Than Gold in California: The Memoir of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter: An Early Califor- nia Physician, Civic Leader, and Women’s Rights Activist (Globe Pequot Press) and won a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend to support her current research on the rhetorical strategies, professional networks, and social activism of late nineteenth-century American women physicians. MARIA MARTIN holds a Ph.D. in African American and African Studies with a concentration in history and women’s studies from Michigan State University, where she developed her hip hop teaching methods. She completed her B.A. in Ancient Near East history and her M.A. in Greek and Roman history (focus on Africa) at the University of Toledo. Martin recently returned from Nigeria, where she conducted an oral history of women’s activism in the nationalist movement. Her most recent work is titled Ojo Nro: An Intellectual History of Nigerian Women’s Nationalism in Umbrella Organizations, 1947–1967, and her research interests include African and African American women’s activism, intellectual history, transnationalism, and black feminist theory. She is a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholarship alumna and has won three Ful- bright awards in addition to an honorable mention from the Ford Foundation for her research. Martin has mentored girls, grades 6–8, for the past six years. ALICE JOHNSTON MYATT is an assistant professor and assistant chair in the University of Mississippi Department of Writing and Rhetoric, which administers first-year and advanced writing and speech courses. In addition to teaching rhetoric and writing, she is the academic adviser for the minor in Professional Writing. She collaborates with Ellen Shelton, University of Mississippi Writing Project Director, in coordinating annual Transitioning to College Writing symposia, which foster cross-institutional dialogues about writing instruction in K–22 settings. Among her research interests are the intersections between writing program and writing center administration and assessment, the role of independent writing departments and programs in the field of writing studies, and the assessment of effective cross-institutional collaborations. Recent publications include the coedited collection (with Lynée Lewis Gaillet) Writ- ing Program and Writing Center Collaborations: Transcending Boundaries and a chapter 266 Contributors

(with Ellen Shelton) in The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing: Scholar- ship and Application. NANCY MYERS, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, specializes in feminist rhetorical studies and writing pedagogy and served as 2010–2012 president of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Recent feminist publications include essays in In the Archives of Composition; Political Women: Language and Leadership; Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Education; Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy; and Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts. She is coeditor with Kathleen J. Ryan and Rebecca Jones of Rethinking Ethos. GAIL M. PRESBEY is a professor of philosophy at the University of Detroit Mercy. Her areas of expertise are social and political philosophy, philosophy of nonviolence, and African philosophy. She has conducted research in Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and India, having received two J. William Fulbright grants. She has published four edited books and more than fifty articles and book chapters, including republications and translations in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. She is former executive director and past president of Concerned Philosophers for Peace (2002–2010). ELLEN QUANDAHL is an associate professor emerita of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, San Diego State University, where she directed the Lower Division Writing Program and the Graduate Program. Her essays in College English, Journal of Advanced Com- position, and Rhetorica include work on Kenneth Burke, writing studies, and Anna Komnene and Byzantine rhetoric. KATE RONALD, emerita professor, served as the Roger and Joyce L. Howe Professor of English at Miami University and taught graduate and undergraduate courses in composition and rhetoric. With Hepsie Roskelly, she published Reason to Believe: Ro- manticism, Pragmatism, and the Teaching of Writing (SUNY, 1998); she coedited, with Joy Ritchie, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s) (Pittsburgh, 2001). HEPHZIBAH ROSKELLY is professor emerita at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she taught courses in rhetoric and composition theory, American literature, and women’s studies. She now works with high school English teachers in Louisville, Kentucky. HENRIETTA NICKELS SHIRK holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Bryn Mawr Col- lege, Pennsylvania. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, risk communication, and gender communication in the Department of Technical Communication at Montana Tech of The University of Montana, Butte. Shirk’s -re search interests are currently focused on the history of technical communication, especially the contributions of nineteenth-century American women in the field of botany. She is also involved in research projects that address the effective teaching and evaluation of online writing courses. Shirk has published widely and presented papers at numerous conferences in the field of technical communication. Index

Abeokuta Ladies’ Club (ALC), 61–63 Babbitt, Florence Smalley, 13, 137–44, Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU), 60, 146–54 62–63, 65, 71 Bachman, John, 110–12, 117 Abram, Ruth, 23, 37 Bacon, Jacqueline, 219 access, 9, 11, 26, 30, 35, 36, 102, 103, 160, 213, Bacon, Lenice Ingram, 121, 124, 126, 131–34 235, 247–48, 257 Baldwin, Roger, 236–38 activist/activism defined, 6, 11, 14, 22, 44, 56, Ballif, Michelle, 86, 257, 262 67, 158, 193, 206, 222, 237 Banaji, Paige V., 119, 131 Addams, Jane, 224, 228–29, 231, 233, 235, 239, Banaras Hindu University, 181 240 Banasthali University, 178–79 Ademola II, 63–64 Bao, Xiaolan, 71 Afigbo, Adiele Eberechukwu, 70–71 Baright Curry, Anna. See Curry, Anna Afonja and Aina, 59–60, 71 Baright African nationalism, 10, 55–56, 70 Barkalow, Carol Anne, 98, 105 agency defined, 2–7, 11, 58, 190, 245; rhetori- Barthes, Roland, 83, 139, 153 cal agency, 4–5, 12, 41, 57, 92, 101, 190–92, Bartlett, Frederic, 143, 153 196, 201, 258; visual agency, 140–45, Barua, Kanaklata, 173, 184 148–49, 152 Baskervill and Sewell, 254 Alexiad, 73–83, 85–87 Batchen, Geoffrey, 140, 143, 148, 153 Alred and Thelen, 253–54 Becker, Susan D., 230, 238 anarchist, 191–93, 198–203 Benton, Jill, 76, 86 Andrade, Susan Z., 171, 184 Bernal, J. D., 40, 46, 51 Anthony, Susan B., 210 Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical anti-imperialism, 84 Project, 102, 104–7 archive (archival), 8–9, 16, 21, 28, 29–31, Bhatia, Rukshmani, 10, 170–84 40, 46, 82, 92, 94, 100–107, 139, 144, 183, Bhowmik, Arindan, 183–84 223–24, 234, 245, 253, 257–61 Biank, Tanya, 99, 105 Arise Free India, 183–85 biographical reclamation, 47 Aristotle, 2–3, 7, 8, 74, 81, 83 Birkbeck College, 46, 53 Arkle, Toni, 95, 105 birth control, 11, 75, 78, 189, 192–93, 198–201, Arnold, Louis Barber, 110–11, 116–17 203 Aronson, Amy, 11, 16, 222, 258, 263 Bizzell, Patricia, 152–53, 189, 202, 257, 262 Assman, Jan, 73, 86 Bletchley Park, 8, 21–22, 29–38 Audubon, John James, 15, 109–17 Bletchley Park Women, 26–28, 33–35 Austen, Jane, 89, 156, 167n1 Bodin, Helena, 85n11, 86 Awe, Bolanale, 60, 62–64, 71 Bokenkotter, Thomas, 211, 219 268 Index

Bonner, Thomas Neville, 23–24, 37 Cogan, Frances B, 111, 117 Bonta, Marcia Myers, 110, 117 Cohen, Paula Marantz, 155–57, 164, 167–68 Bordelon, Suzanne, 14–15, 118, 254n8, Coleman, James, 57, 71 258, 263 Coles, Robert, 209, 218, 220 Boston College, 130 Cole-Wilcox, Elsie, 199, 203 Boston University, 120–21, 219n1, 243, collaboration, xiv, 9, 14–15, 27, 37, 42, 103, 247, 249, 251 109–11, 113–17, 124, 125, 142 botany, 110, 115, 117, 266 Collings Eves, Rosalyn, 14, 16 Brannen, Kate, 105 Collins (Burton), Vicki Tolar, 9, 16 Braude, Ann, 196–97, 202 colonialism, 56–60, 62, 63, 66–67, 70 Breuer, William B., 96, 105 Combahee River Collective, 10, 16 Britt-Smith, Laurie A., 13, 206, 258, 263 commonplace book, 145 Brookshire, Cathy, 100, 105 communitarianism, 208, 211 Bruni, Frank, 104n1, 105 community, 9, 11, 13, 22, 26–27, 29–33, 35–37, Bryson, Bill, 48, 52, 55 51, 57, 64, 69, 101, 140, 141, 143–45, 159, 178, Buchanan, Lindal, 16–17, 125, 131, 195, 202 181, 190, 197, 202, 206, 208–13, 216, 218–19, Buckler, Georgina, 74–75, 78–81, 84–87 259, 261 Buckley, Penelope, 85n3, 86 Composition and Rhetoric, 242–44, 247–49, Burke, Kenneth, 93, 96, 98, 100, 103, 105, 210, 251–53 216, 257, 266 Connors, Robert J., 243, 251, 253, 254n6, 255 Burnham and Powell, 246, 250, 254 Constantinople, 76–77, 79 Burns, Lucy, 210, 222, 224, 227, 229 Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 224, 238 Burr, Anna Robeson, 12, 167–68 Cox, Virginia, 6, 16 Byzantium, 7, 73–76, 78, 82–88 Coy, Patrick G., 217, 220 Craigie, Helen, 121, 131 Cambridge University, 42, 44 Crick, Francis, 41–43, 46, 48, 52–55 Cameron, Averil, 74, 78, 86 critical imagination, 31, 261 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 202, 204–5, 212–13, Crowley, Sharon, 242, 255 220 Crusades, 78, 86 canon of rhetoric, 2–3, 73, 74, 125, 139, 152 Cult (or Ideal) of True Womanhood / Cult cardinal virtues, 79, 111 of Domesticity, 111, 160 Carr, Carr, and Schultz, 255 Cunningham, Florence, 124, 129, 131 Catholic, 206–7, 211–13, 216, 217, 219–21 curiosity album, 145–46 Catholic Worker movement, 206–7, 216–17, current-traditional rhetoric, 243, 246, 248, 220–21 251, 255 cautionary tale, xiv, 25–26 Curry, Anna Baright, 14, 15, 118–33 Cereta, Laura, 6, 15 Curry College. See School of Expression Chaudhari, K. K., 182, 184 Curry, Haskell B., 118–33 Chen, Constance M., 25, 37 Curry, Samuel Silas, 118–33 Chester, Mary Margaret, 119, 131 Curry’s students, 127, 130 Chopra, Pran Nath, 183–84 Christian(ity), 61, 74, 78–79, 196, 211, 217, 219 Daly, Mary, 15, 17, 112–15, 117 Cicero, 74 Daniell and Guglielmo, 9, 14, 16 civil disobedience, 56, 63, 172 Datta, V. N., 181, 184 Civil War, 16, 141–42, 144, 156, 157 Daughters of the American Revolution, 144 Clark, Suzanne, 83, 85n12, 86 Davis, Diane, 191, 201, 203 Clarke, Joan, 30, 35 Davis, Olive B., 127, 132 Index 269

Dawes, Elizabeth, 75 Female Engagement Teams (FETs), 100, 108 Dawson, Katherine, 104, 106 Female Humane Society of Cambridge, 160 Day, Dorothy, 13, 206–21 feminist; African feminisms, 58–59, 71, 72; Debu, C., 183–84 grassroots feminist, 192, 203; nego- Denecker, Blair, and Tulley, 106 feminism, 58, 59, 72; the first wave, 44, Di Bello, Patrizia, 141, 153 192; Western feminist, 57, 59, 67, 71; Dickinson, Emily, 162, 168n3 theory/research, 1–2, 6, 10, 12, 37, 62, 75, discrimination, 56, 92–93 109, 112–14, 118, 140, 159, 195, 202, 213, 224, disenfranchised, 60 259, 260 dispersed, 22, 64 Fisher, Paul, 159, 162, 168 DNA, 7, 39, 41–43, 45–49, 50–55 Fleckenstein, Kristie S., 13, 104, 106, 137, 258, domestic, 61, 81, 91, 109, 140, 143, 148–49, 260, 264 191, 259, 260; domesticity 33, 94, 111, 160; Fletcher, Mary Delano, 27–28, 37 domestic sphere, 67 Flynn, Elizabeth A., 129, 132 Donawerth, Jane, 119, 130, 132, 242, 253–55 Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady, 190, 203 Drake, Anne Christine, 131n4, 132 Fonte, Moderata, 6, 16 Dunlop, Tessa, 29–33, 37 Ford, Alice, 109, 112, 117 Dyck, Andrew R., 84, 86 Foss, Foss, and Griffin, 213, 220 Franklin, Rosalind, 7, 39–55 Eastman, Crystal, 11, 210, 222–41, 263 Frankopan, Peter, 73, 85n1, 86–87 Eastman, Max, 210, 222–41 Freedman, Estelle B., 71, 234, 239 Edel, Leon, 156, 162, 167–68 freedom fighter, xvi, 66, 170–71, 180, 182–83, Egba, 56, 59–60, 62–65, 68, 71 185 Egge, Albert E., 245, 255 friendship, xix, 31, 34, 111, 115–17, 142, 154, 210 Elkin, Lynne Osman, 43, 47, 51–53, 55 Frost, Erin, 259, 262 Ellsberg, Robert, 206, 213, 214, 220 Fuller, C. J., 182, 184 Emerson, Mary Alice, 14, 242–56 Furst, Lillian R., 23, 37 Emerson, Oliver Farrar, 255 Enoch and Bessette, 92, 102, 106 Gage, John T., 252, 255 Enoch and Gold, 101, 106 Gaillet, Lynée Lewis, 101, 106, 257 Enoch and Jack, 1–2, 4, 16 Galassi, Mabel Curry, 118, 122, 132 Enoch, Jessica, xii, 1, 16, 74–75, 86 Gandhi (Gandiji), Mohandas, 10, 170–85 Equal Rights Amendment, 97, 222, 233, 238 Gary, Paul H., 119, 133 erase (erased, erasure), 4–5, 9, 15, 39, 48, 74, Gaylor, Annie Laurie, 192, 203 89, 130, 259, 261 Gear, Josephine, 141, 142, 153 Erll, Astrid, 75, 86 Gellert, Wendy P., 96, 106 ethos defined, 7–8, 22, 36, 42, 79, 104, 118, gender, 5–6, 8, 11, 15, 22–23, 26, 27, 30, 35, 39, 149, 189, 192, 213 44, 48, 50, 54–56, 58–59, 63, 65–68, 70–72, everyday practices, 21, 22, 29–32, 36–37, 103, 74, 77, 86, 97–99, 102, 104, 107, 108, 112–13, 203 116–17, 120, 125, 130–31, 133, 141, 165, 171, 177, 182, 184, 189, 195, 202–3, 208, 233–34, fallen woman, 11, 13, 189, 207 238, 260, 263, 264, 266 Falola and Aderinto, 61, 71 gender analysis, xvi, 171 Falola and Paddock, 57, 71 gender bias, 44 family Bible, 148 genealogy, 13, 137, 139 Fancher, Patricia, 8, 12, 22, 30, 35, 258, 263 genre, 14, 34, 51, 85, 137, 140, 145, 147, 149, Farrell, Michael P., 114, 117 152, 166, 195, 246, 249, 252, 254, 258 270 Index

Gerald, Amy, 5, 9, 16 Hogg, Charlotte, 12, 16 GI Bill, 96, 106 Hollingsworth, Buckner, 109–10, 117 Gibbon, Edward, 75–78, 81, 85–86 Holm, Jeanne, 93, 95–99, 107 Global War on Terror, 99 Home Rule, 157, 164 Glynn, Jenifer Franklin, 42, 44–45, 48, 51–55 Homer, 74, 78, 80–81, 83, 86 Godfrey, Kathleen, 33 Horner, Winifred Bryan, 257, 262, 265 Godson, Susan H., 93, 106 Howard-Johnston, James, 85n9, 87 Gold and Hobbs, 119, 131–32, 252, 255 Howe, Julia Ward, 160 Gold, David, 119, 120, 131n, 132 Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, 259 Indian National Army (INA), 180 Gordon, Linda, 192, 203 Iraqi Women’s Engagement Teams Greco-Lucchina, Michele, 100, 106 (IWETs), 99, 100 Grégoire, Henri, 79, 81, 86 Iyalode, 59, 60 Grimké, Sarah and Angelina, 5–6, 9, 16, 212 Grohowski, Mariana, 9–10, 91, 101, 258, 264 Jablonski, Carol J., 207, 216, 218, 220 Grovier, Katherine, 116–17 Jack, Jordynn, 1–2, 4, 16 Guglielmo and Stewart, 6, 16 James, Ada, 226, 230, 238, 240 Guglielmo, Letizia, 1, 259, 264 James, Alice, 11–12, 155–69 Guitterez, Cathy, 203 James, Henry, 155, 166–69 Gulf War, 98–99, 104 James, Henry, Sr., 156, 161–62, 168 Gunter, Susan, 161, 168 James, William, 155–59, 161–69 Janet, 160, 169 Haarer, F. K., 86 Jannou, Maroula, 75, 87 Hallenbeck, Sarah, 191, 203 Jeffreys, Elizabeth, 85n4, 87 Halsell, Elizabeth Stahr, 122, 124, 233 Jeffreys, Michael, 74, 87 Hanisch, Carol, 223, 239 Johnson, Alexandra, 166, 168 harass(ment), 69, 100, 175 Johnson, Nan, 189, 203, 242, 255 Hariman and Lucaites, 140, 153 Johnson-Odim, Cheryl, 57, 59, 61–62, 65, Harman, Moses, 193, 195, 197–99, 201, 203 67, 71 Harrison, Kimberly, 14, 16 Jones, Rebecca, 8, 16, 22, 27, 118, 133, 266 Hart and Growoski, 9, 91, 258 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 39, 55 Hart, D. Alexis, 9, 91, 101, 106, 258, 264, Joshee and Sihra, 181, 184 Harvard University, 156, 167, 243–45, 254n3 Joshi, 171, 180, 185 Hauser, Gerard A., 140, 153 Judson, Horace Freeland, 54n1, 55 Hawhee and Olson, 81, 86 Julian, Maureen A., 42, 47, 55 Hawhee, Deborah, 191, 203 Hawisher, Gail, 103, 107 Kasturba, 170 Hayden, Wendy, 11, 101, 189, 258, 265 Kates, Susan, 130, 133 Hazra, Matangini, 183–84 Keeney, Elizabeth, 115, 117 Heehs, Peter, 170, 184 Kelly, Michael, 211, 220 Herrin, Judith, 74, 86 King and Rabil Jr., 7, 16 Hind, Jean, 33–34 King’s College (London), 42 Hindu (Hinduism), 173, 180–81, 183–85 Kirsch, Gesa E., 8, 12, 17, 21–22, 191, 202, Hintenberger, Martin, 80, 87 204, 258, 261–62, 265 historiography defined, 1, 40, 70, 73, 92, 101, Kitzhaber, Albert, 242, 255 191, 257 Klejment, Anne, 210, 220 Hobbs, Catherine L., 119, 131, 252 Klug, Aaron, 46–47, 52, 55 Index 271

Kodak, 137 Martin, Patricia Yancey, 105 Komnene, Anna, 7, 73–87, 266 Martus, Florence, xi Kraditor, Arlene, 190 Mary Magdalene, xi, 19 Kristeva, Julia, 74–75, 81–87 Mason, Gillian, 29, 32, 38 Krugman, Marian, 95–107 Mastrangelo, Lisa, 248, 251, 254n8, 255 Krumbacher, Karl, 85n2, 87 Mather, Kirtley F., 126, 133 Krupa, Stephen, 208, 220 Matthiessen, F. O., 162, 168 Kustas, George, 85, 87 Mattingly, Carol, 195, 203 Kuti, Funmilayo Ransome. See Ransome- Mayle, Mary Car, xi Kuti Mba, Nina Emma, 57, 59–66, 71–72 McAllister, Pam, 192–93, 198, 203 Lakoff and Johnson, 128, 133 McComiskey, Bruce, xvii Lane, Margaret, 236, 239 McCoy, BriGette, 104n2, 107 Langford, Martha, 141, 143, 145–46, 153 McElroy, Wendy, 193, 203 Lawler, Thomas Bonaventure, 242, 244, McGarry, Molly, 203 246, 255 Mehrotra, Akarsh, 183, 185 Lebra, Joyce C., 180, 185 Mehta, Usha, 171–72, 185 Lerner, Gerda, 4–5, 16 Merton, Thomas, 208, 220 Lessons in English, 242–48, 252–53, 255 Micciche, Laura R., 213, 220 Library of Congress’s Veterans History Milnes, Eleanor, 34 Project, 102–7 misogyny (misogynistic), 6–7, 48, 54, 92, Lienhard, John H., 112, 116–17 264 Linnett, Amy, 199, 203 Mitchell, Ann, 30, 32 Lipede and Odunoye, 71 Mitchison, Naomi, xiv, 74–79, 81–82, 84, Lippmann, Walter, 223, 240 86–87 Lockwood and Emerson, 242–43, 251, 255 Mommy War, 98 Lockwood, Sara Elizabeth Husted, 14, Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee, 91, 93, 96, 242–56 107 Logan, Thad, 147, 153 Morales, Frank, 181, 185 Loring, Katharine, 156, 160, 166 More and Parry, 37–38 Lunsford, Andrea, 86, 219n1, 220 More, Ellen S., 37–38 Mulhall, Erin, 100, 107 Maddox, Brenda, 43, 46, 48–49, 52–55 Mullett, Margaret, 74, 87 Madonna, 13, 207 Myatt, Alice Johnston, 7, 39, 258, 265 Maini, Linda Morgan, 97, 107 Myers, Nancy, 8, 14, 16, 22, 27, 38, 117, 118, 133, male-dominated, 8–9, 21–22, 36, 92, 243, 242, 255, 258, 266 245, 247 Mama, Amina, 182, 185 Narayan, Uma, 171, 185 margin (marginalization), 5, 8–10, 23, 28, 29, narrative defined, 1–2, 4–7, 40, 49, 56, 70, 31, 36, 39, 41, 43, 48–51, 54, 57, 60, 91, 93, 84, 92, 143, 182, 218, 259 189, 193, 195, 224, 232, 238, 252 National Woman’s Party, 210, 222, 227, 238 Marquis, Albert Nelson, 121, 133 Nehru, Pandit Jawaharlal, 170, 179, 180 Marsh, Margaret S., 192–93, 201, 203 Neville, Leonora, 73, 80, 85, 87 Martin and Valenti, 104, 107 New England Women’s Club, 160 Martin, Maria (contributor), 10, 56, 258, Newnham College, 44, 53 259, 265 Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU), 56–57, Martin, Maria (painter), 15, 109–17 65–70 272 Index

Nnaemeka, Obioma, 58–59, 71–72 public memory, 1–5, 7, 9–10, 14–16, 39–41, Nobel Prize, 39, 41–42, 46, 48, 53–54 47–48, 50, 53, 104, 187, 222, 236, 237 nonviolence, 10, 170, 176, 178, 182, 220, 266 public sphere, 4, 22, 31, 67, 140, 152–53, 184, 190, 194, 212, 233 Okafor, Samuel, 70n2, 72 Purdy, James, 101–2, 107 Okoth, Assa, 70n2, 72 Olby, Robert, 49, 52, 55 Quandahl and Jarratt, 73, 85n, 87 Oxford University, 30, 48, 52, 55, 78–79 Quandahl, Ellen, 7, 73, 87, 258, 266 Oyewunmi, Oyeronke, 59, 70, 72 Queen Elizabeth II, 66 Quit India Movement, 172–74, 181–82, 184 pacifist, 207, 210, 222, 228, 230 Palmieri, Patricia Ann, 249, 256 race, 5, 6, 21, 22–23, 25–30, 34, 54, 66–67, 70, pantomime, 119, 123 199, 204, 208, 255, 261, 264 Papaioannou, Stratis, 73, 87 radicalism, 70, 167, 204, 207, 210, 219, 231, 232 Parker, Dorothy, 156, 167 Randall, James, 42, 45–46 Passet, Joanne E., 191–92, 196, 203 Ransome-Kuti, Funmilayo, 10, 56–71 pathos, 40 Rassool, Ciraj, 170, 185 patriarchal, 5, 37, 102, 109–10, 116, 207 Ratcliffe, Krista, 7, 17 Paul, Alice, 210, 222, 224, 230, 238 re-collecting (re-collection), 1–4, 7, 9–10, pedagogy (pedagogical), 1, 14–15, 119–20, 12–13, 15, 39, 50, 84, 259 126–27, 129–30, 243–50, 252–54, 257, 260, recovery and revisionist methodology, 1–2, 263 6–8, 22, 31, 119, 132 personalism, 211–12, 219n1 Reese, William J., 246, 251, 256 Phillips, Kendall R., 2–3, 16, 41, 43, 49, 50, 55 remembering as an act, 1, 13, 43, 50, 54, 75, Photo 51, 41, 45, 53, 55 137, 140, 141, 207 photograph album, 137, 139–41, 145–53. See Renshaw, Edyth, 119, 121, 122, 126, 130, 133 also scrapbooks reputation, 2, 4–9, 11, 13, 15, 41, 73–78, 84, 113, Pierce, Charles Sanders, 169 116, 170, 183, 189–205, 224, 233, 235, 238, Pinney, Amy, 118, 133 242–45, 247, 249, 251, 258 Piper, Anne, 44, 51, 55 restoration, 7, 39–42, 45, 47, 49, 51–55 Plato, 2–3, 83 Revolutionary War, 91, 142 poverty, 11, 161, 164–65, 199, 206, 208–9, 211, Reynolds, Nedra, 8, 17 214–17 rhetorical resilience, 190, 203 power, 4, 6, 8–9, 13, 21–23, 25, 27–31, 40, 44, rhetorical tradition, xii, 1, 17, 81, 139, 152, 212, 59, 60, 62, 67–69, 72, 77, 80–81, 83, 92, 94, 219, 220, 257, 262 97–100, 102, 113, 119–21, 124, 126–30, 141, Rich, Adrienne, 10, 17 143, 147–48, 151–52, 158, 161–62, 165–66, Rich, Irene, 97, 107 171, 181–82, 192, 194, 196–99, 201, 208–10, Rickert, Thomas, 83, 87 212–13, 219, 224–25, 227, 229–31, 234, 237, Ritchie and Ronald, 10, 17 261 Ritter, Mary Bennett, 28, 38, 265 pragmatism, 156–58, 163, 168, 266 Robb, Mary Margaret, 118, 126–27, 131, 133 prejudice, 23, 26–27, 50, 84, 86, 192 Rock, Margaret, 35 Prelli, Lawrence J., 148, 153 Roe v. Wade, 97 Presbey, Gail M., 10, 170, 258, 259, 266 Roman Empire, 74, 76, 82, 86 presentism, 12 Ronald, Kate, 10–12, 16–17, 155, 258, 266 professional identity, 8, 29, 35, 238 Rosenblatt, Louise M., 129, 133 Psellos, Michael, 74, 85, 87–88 Roskelly, Hephzibah, 11–12, 155, 258, 266 Index 273

Rosser, Sue V., 41, 55 social circulation, 8, 12, 21–25, 27–30, 33–38, Roth, Tonya, 95, 107 202, 261 Roueché, Charlotte, 78–80, 87 social justice, 13–14, 101, 206–7, 217, 219, 263 Royster and Kirsch, 12, 17, 21–22, 37n3, 38, social reform, 196, 208–9, 219 191, 202, 204, 261–62 Society to Encourage Studies at Home, 160 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 265 Sontag, Susan, 139, 154 Rudisill, Richard, 142, 154 Sor Juana de la Cruz, 5, 187 Rudnick, Lois, 119, 133 Soyinka, Wole, 56, 63–66, 72 Rupp, Leila, 233, 240 Spinks, Connie Rose, 99, 107 Russell-Jones, Mair and Gethin, 30, 38 spiritualism, 192–93, 196–97, 202–4 Ryan, Kathleen J., 16–17, 92, 93, 95, 102–4, Sproles, Karyn Z., 76, 87 107, 266 Spurlock, John C., 192, 204 Ryan, Myers, and Jones, 8, 16, 22, 27, 38, 118, Stabile, Carol A., 98, 108 133, 266 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 190, 204, 210 Stein, Dorothy, 182, 185 sainthood, 206–7 stereotype(s), 15, 23, 26, 32, 93, 170, 196, 261 Sawyer, Keith, 114, 117 Stoehr, Taylor, 192, 204 Sayre, Anne, 42–44, 48–52, 54–55 Strouse, Jean, 156, 160, 162, 167, 169 Schlereth, Thomas J., 111, 117 suffrage (suffragette), xvi, 189–90, 192, School of Expression, 14, 118–25, 127, 129–30, 194–95, 197, 206, 212, 224–33, 238–41, 258 132–33 Sutherland, Christie Mason, 139, 154 Scott, Joan Wallach, 77–78, 87 Scott, Sir Walter, 75–78, 85, 87 Tarabotti, Arcangela, 6, 17 scrapbook, 103, 139, 145–46. See also photo- Tebbel, John, 244, 256 graph album temperance, 79–80, 162, 190, 194, 200, 205, Sears, Hal D., 192–93, 198, 204 258 Selfe and Hawisher, 103, 107 Thucydides, 74, 77, 79–80 Selfe, Cynthia L., 9, 17, 106 Tilly, Louise, 92, 108 self-worth, 166 topoi, 74, 79, 82–83, 142 Sewell, Jas. W., 244, 252, 254, 256 sex radicals, 191–92, 202–4 U.S. Army Nurse Corps, 91 sexual assault, 100, 104 Uberoi, C., 41, 48, 51, 55 sexuality, 6, 71, 84, 189, 190, 192–97, 200–202, United Nations Decade for Women, 57 233, 237, 240 Shaw, Anna Howard, 210, 225–26, 240 Valiavitcharska, Vessela, 85n4, 88 Shirk, Henrietta Nickels, 15, 109, 258, 266 Vandervall, Isabella, 23, 38 Siegel, Elizabeth, 137, 142, 145, 147–51, 154 Veal, Michael E., 69–70, 72 silenced/silencing defined, 5, 9, 13, 57, 96, visual rhetoric, 13, 139–41, 148, 152, 260, 264 100, 198, 206 Vivian, Bradford, 3, 5, 17 Simola, Raisa, 60, 67, 72 voluntary poverty, 214–15, 217. See poverty Simpson, Kathleen Lynch, 98, 107 Von Luen, Kelly, 100, 108 Skinner, Carolyn, 37n2, 118, 133, 190, 204 Sklar, Kathryn, 232, 240 Waisbrooker, Lois, 11, 189–205 Sklar, Richard L., 57, 72 Wald, Lillian, 224, 232, 235, 237, 239–40 Sloane, Thomas O., 131n3, 133 Walker, Jeffrey, 78, 83, 85, 88 Smith, Bonnie G., 122, 133 Warbler, 113, 117 Smith, Michael, 30, 38 Waterman, Rowena Belle, 126, 134 274 Index

Watson, James, 41–43, 46, 48–50, 52–55 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, “Waving Girl,” xi, xvii. See also Martus, 96 Florence Woman’s Medical Journal, 21, 23–24, 28, Web 2.0, 9, 92, 101, 104 37–38 Well, Susan, 101 Woman’s Relief Corps, 144–45 Wellesley College, 247, 249 Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), Welling, William, 146, 154 29, 32 Welter, Barbara, 111, 117 women’s war, 56–58, 63, 65, 71 Wenden, Anita, 215, 221 Wood, Julia T., 115–17 Werthheimer, Molly Meijer, 219, 221 Woolf, Virginia, 10, 17, 135, 156, 166–67, 225, West and West, 100, 108 241 Whitby, Mary, 75, 88 World War I (The Great War), 76, 93, 103, Whitney and Lockwood, 256 107, 210, 223, 230, 236, 241 Wilbur, Annie-Maude, 124, 134 World War II, 29–31, 34–35, 42, 44, 52, 91, Wilkins, Maurice, 41–43, 45, 48–50, 52–54 94, 95, 217, 220, 234 Willard, Frances E., 190, 205 Willburn, Sarah A., 192, 205 Yale University, 243–45, 247, 254 Wilson, Nigel, 85n1, 88 Yoruba, 57, 59–60, 62 Wilson, Woodrow, 223, 228–29, 234–35, 238, Young, Richard E., 253, 256 241 Wiltsher, Anne, 233, 241 Zaeske, Susan, 189, 195, 205 Wincham College, 61 Zelizer, Barbie, 3–4, 17 Witt, John Fabian, 225, 231, 236, 241 Zwick, Mark and Louise, 212, 221