Campbell and Biesecker

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Campbell and Biesecker

Dr. Katherine Heenan

English 472

Spring 2007

April 3, 2007

Campbell, Karly Kohrs. “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973) 74-86.

Women in the Rhetorical Tradition

Over the last 30 years, the notion that the rhetorical tradition is based or even should be based on the rhetorical tradition, that canon of texts and traditions deemed as suitable for rhetorical study has come under fire. The challenge to the rhetorical tradition coincides with a broader call to challenge any and all canons, from within English and other humanities disciplines, from within colleges and universities (in the form of debates over Western civilization), and from within various social groups in the U.S.

Until the late twentieth century, the rhetorical tradition had been constructed as a history of "good men [of dominant cultures] speaking well. For much of its history, rhetorical history has closely followed the history of conquering hero-orators, it has subordinated lower-caste citizen-orators, no matter how important their contributions. Even when women rhetors made significant contributions in their day, historians often worked either to erase them, or to cast doubts about their moral character, as in the case of Aspasia. As a result, historiographers have been challenged both to identify women who should be named as part of the tradition and to critique the dominant narratives that have made them invisible.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron” was published in 1973 in The Quarterly Journal of Speech

· Karlyn Kohrs Campbell could be said to be the pioneer of efforts to include women who have been excluded from the rhetorical tradition.

· This article, her study, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, along with the anthology that accompanied it, brought to light numerous women rhetoricians who had been forgotten and/or ignored

· For Campbell, the rhetorical tradition simply neglected these women, mainly because their rhetorics did not coincide with common understandings of rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition. She writes: “Because any attempt to define a rhetorical movement or gene is beset by difficulties. . “ and suggest that among these difficulties is the fact that men have an honorable rhetorical tradition, but women, on the other hand, have been excluded from the rhetorical tradition mainly because they are women (perhaps a more sophisticated way of saying this is that their subject positions marked them as women, a positionality that excluded them from being considered as rhetoricians) (74).

· Campbell notes that she “rejects historical and sociopsychological definitions of movements as the basis for rhetorical criticism on the grounds that they do not, in fact, isolate a genre of rhetoric or a distinctive body of rhetorical acts—instead, she argues for criteria used to define a rhetorical movement that is rhetorical—from an Aristotelian point of view such criteria might include modes of proofs (74)

· She then offers two possibilities: substance and style

· the rest of the essay presents her argument for the inclusion of the rhetoric of women’s liberation as a unified, separate genre of rhetoric with distinctive substantive-stylistic feminism

· The characteristics of these rhetorics include the struggle for the right to speak (a negotiation of power relations that forced some women to excel and others to be more ambiguous about speaking) and consciousness-raising.

· Since Campbell’s pioneering work, numerous books, book collections, essays, and anthologies of women’s rhetoric have been produced, too many to list here.

· The sheer number, however, should be noted, since it demonstrates the “success” of this type of scholarship and criticism,--a kind of first-order recovery and second-order criticism (criticism of the texts recovered).

· Andrea A. Lunsford’s collection, Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (1995), was another watershed in the movement to recover women and include them in the rhetorical tradition.

· Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance (1997) was another.

· These books, just as Campbell’s book and anthology, sought two strategies of recovery, and oftentimes both at once.

· The first strategy is the simple inclusion of women into the dominant tradition;

· the second is inclusion with a difference, either the inclusion of women into an alternative tradition or the reinterpretation of men and women already within the tradition.

· The vacillation between these two strategies marks much earlier scholarship on the recovery of women rhetoricians.

· At least three problems have emerged in terms of recovering women in the rhetorical tradition, two of which I will deal with here.

1. The first, which I cannot deal with here, is the question of research methods, how to actually recover women in the rhetorical tradition. This is a problem that has been taken up most notably by Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt.

2. One of the other problems is a corollary of this problem. It is the problematic of recovery itself. Michelle Ballif has written quite persuasively on this matter. Her essay, “(Re)Covering Women Laid Bare by Our Gaze,” argues that trying to insert women into a tradition, any tradition (whether it is a feminist rhetorical tradition or The Rhetorical Tradition) is problematic in that it uses a system of exclusion (the canon, tradition, patriarchy) that excluded women in the first place. Not only that, but recovery projects cover just as much as they recover; in the works that Ballif cites, works such as those of Campbell, Glenn, Lunsford, and others, there is no account for the problematics of such recovery. This is indeed a problem for any history of rhetoric.

some other books to consider:

· Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005.

· Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997.

· Johnson, Nan. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002

· Mattingly, Carol. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

· Mountford, Roxanne. The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.

· Ritchie, Joy and Kate Ronald. Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.

· Sharer, Wendy B. Vote and Voice: Women's Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915-1930. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.

Biesecker, Barbara. "Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric." Philosophy and Rhetoric. 25:2 (1992): 140-161.

Biesecker

· The other problem that has emerged in terms of recovering women in the rhetorical tradition is one that Barbara Biesecker focuses on, and it is the problem of individualism.

· In a 1992 response to Campbell that sparked a heated debate in Rhetorical studies, (Biesecker’s claim that “as feminists we cannot want to be on the side of Campbell’s revisionist history” (141) set the argument in motion) Biesecker suggests that work such as Campbell’s promotes tokenism and offers a form of affirmative action, and that we must move away from models of individual rhetorical action and toward “collective rhetoric” (a term she never really defines, a point which Campbell makes in her response to Biesecker, humorously entitled “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either”).

· She also argues that we must “radically contextualize all acts of rhetoric,” meaning that we should not locate rhetoric as an agential act residing in a “great” person who “struggles” to “speak” on the behalf of others.

· What she suggests, and I agree, is that we must move away from notion of the “great” rhetorician and examine the conditions of rhetorical practice, the actual material conditions that make it possible for certain subjects to speak.

· Biesecker writes: “the danger in taking an affirmative action approach to the history of Rhetoric is that while we may have managed to insert some women into the canon (and, again, this is no small thing), we will have not yet begun to challenge the underlying logic of canon formation and the used to which it has been put that have written the rhetorical contributions of collective women into oblivion” (144).

· argues that Campbell supports notions of individualism (145-46), but that in some ways was on the right track in her 1973 article in her attempt to “cut loose from the prevailing tendency on the part of critics to posit rhetorical categories on an a priori basis” (145)

· calls for a different kind of construction of the history of rhetoric, one not based on the utterances of individuals but on the “play of forces that made it possible for a particular speaking subject to emerge” (148)

· calls for “a gender-sensitive history of Rhetoric that, in working against the ideology of individualism by displacing the passive/active oppositions, radically contextualizes speech acts” (156-57)

· and argues that we need to learn to read the canon differently

My take:

· The rhetorical tradition is a construct that has outlasted its usefulness.

· I would argue that we should move away from the rhetorical tradition (or even rhetorical traditions) and toward the rhetorics of tradition.

· We will get nowhere if all we do is try to read new things in old ways or old things in new ways.

· We need more social and cultural histories of rhetoric. If we are truly going to move beyond the rhetorical tradition, then we need to move beyond recovering just individual rhetoricians. We need to look at the actual material conditions that allow some people to speak and disallow others from speaking. This would be a true social and cultural history of rhetoric.

· how should we go about including historical women's public address within the mainstream while simultaneously recognizing the ways in which historical women's public address may differ from men's?

· In methodological terms two questions emerge:

o by what standards and in what ways are feminist rhetorical scholars to judge historical women's public address?

o how will those methods stand the test of mainstream scrutiny while recognizing and validating the often distinct rhetorical obstacles encountered by women?