Remembering Women Differently

Remembering Women Differently Remembering Women Differently Refiguring Rhetorical Work Edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet & Helen Gaillet Bailey © 2019 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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 collec- tively 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 in- cluded 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 collectionTheorizing 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 narra- tive 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

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