Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors.

AuthorPerkins, Sally
PositionBook review

Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. By Lindal Buchanan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005; pp. xiv + 202. $30.00 paper.

The antebellum period posed rhetorical challenges to women whose responses cannot be accounted for by the fifth canon, concerned with pronunciatio and actio, as traditionally understood. This readable critique of delivery draws from an impressive range of university experiences, school readers, correspondences, and speeches by antislavery, suffrage, and religious rhetors in order to reconstruct a canon that heretofore inadequately has reflected antebellum women's delivery problems and strategies.

Buchanan first considers the rhetors' school days. She analyzes the readers used in women's elocutionary training and shows how oral reading and recitation both opened and closed rhetorical doors. The eighteenth-century readers acknowledged women as students, instructed them in eloquence, and justified female education, introducing them to models of oratory and civic rhetoric. From them women acquired newfound rhetorical competency and became public orators. Their unintended consequence, however, was a backlash. In the nineteenth century, new textbooks curbed this energy by emphasizing pronunciatio (voice) but not actio (body), steering women toward passive reading rather than expressive speaking in body on stage.

These readers are placed in their larger academic context as Buchanan next examines the educational settings in which women practiced elocution. The academy, and religious contexts to a lesser degree, provided a valuable training ground because women, unlike men, were largely excluded from legal and legislative rhetorical venues. Although the arrangements for women's oratory differed from institution to institution, women gained competence and confidence to push the narrow boundaries of women's public speech outside the academy. Buchanan discusses another aspect of the nineteenth-century backlash, in which academic curricula shifted from an oral to a theoretical focus that included, but also limited, women's opportunity for skill development.

From women's education, Buchanan next moves to their participation in civic discourse. Antebellum women typically used one of two styles, she argues. A "feminine style" masked women's engagement in public discourse, allowing them to maintain an appearance of femininity. This style was employed in venues of indirect influence; rather...

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