Including Conservative Women’s Rhetorics in an “Ethics of Hope and Care”

Abstract

The significant remapping of the rhetorical terrain within women’s rhetorical studies has created well-worn grooves toward the same destination: women participating in feminist endeavors in traditional, subtle, or surprising ways. Amid smart calls for and descriptions of expansiveness by feminist scholars, binary constructions of women as either feminist or not persist, perpetuating the practices we strive to dismantle and restricting possibilities for meaning-making, particularly with regard to conservative women who may not seek to empower themselves or others but still hold rhetorical sway. Employing Royster and Kirsch’s “ethics of hope and care” can bring opportunities for the field’s greater capaciousness.

Notes

1. ¹I’m most grateful for the careful and productive suggestions from RR reviewers Anne Demo and Lynée Lewis Gaillet. Thanks also to Rich Enos, Betsy Flowers, Theresa Gaul, and Ann George for valuable feedback.

2. ²The Greek system has certainly been studied in other fields, primarily sociology and higher education. Lisa Handler, Lisbeth A. Berbary, and Amy L. Stone and Allison Gorga are a few scholars who situate their studies within a framework of normative femininity or heteronormativity.

3. ³I don’t want to imply that all sorority women are conservative—I interviewed some who identify as feminist activists—but the National Panhellenic Conference and many sororities within that umbrella organization generally would not be considered spaces of feminist ideologies.

4. ⁴In earlier versions of this piece, I described at length how what we call the field—women’s rhetorics or feminist rhetorics—may influence decisions about what and whom we study. The discussion expanded beyond the scope and length of this piece and has since become what I consider a companion piece tracing how feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition has discussed—or, notably, not discussed—what we call ourselves as a field. I focus on definitional and methodological discussions of the field from Campbell to Royster and Kirsch as well as what terms scholars employ in conference titles and scholarly articles in our professional journals. I describe how we have—and haven’t—talked about the nomenclature of the field itself when scholars discuss how terms like feminist, feminism, and women are rendered and shape the work scholars do.

5. ⁵As Steven Mailloux said, “Though organizations like the Rhetoric Society of America attempt to bring these English and Communication rhetoricians together at national conferences, each group carries on its teaching and research quite independently of the other” (5). Other efforts, such as the formation of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies in 2003, have sought to foster connections. See Roxanne Mountford’s “A Century after the Divorce: Challenges to a Rapprochement between Speech Communication and English” for a useful overview and bibliography.

6. ⁶Participants housed in communication studies included Bonnie Dow, Tasha Dubriwny, Sara Hayden, Kristy Maddux, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Kristan Poirot, and Cindy Koenig Richards.

7. ⁷See also Wu; Sutherland.

8. ⁸The field is already doing this work and calling for more, particularly with regard to globalization and transnationalism. I don’t want to imply that conservativism and globalization are opposed; in fact, I’d contend that some of the same issues leading us to overlook Western conservative women—our comfort level with our cultural feminist ideologies—lead us to miss opportunities for research in non-Western spaces.

9. ⁹See also Tasha Dubriwny’s work on Laura Bush, Mary Douglas Vavrus’s work on Lifetime’s Army Wives, and more.

10. ¹⁰See further nuances of the term in Dow’s “Feminism, Difference, and Rhetorical Studies” and Sara Hayden’s “Negotiating Femininity and Power in the Early Twentieth Century West: Domestic Ideology and Feminine Style in Jeannette Rankin’s Suffrage Rhetoric.”

11. ¹¹See Hayden’s “Family Metaphors and the Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care through the Million Mom March” for more on maternal appeals.</EN>

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Hogg

Charlotte Hogg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at Texas Christian University. Her publications include From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community (U of Nebraska P, 2006), Rural Literacies, coauthored with Kim Donehower and Eileen E. Schell (SIUP, 2007), and Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, coedited with Donehower and Schell (SIUP, 2012), and scholarly and creative work in Women and Literacy: Inquiries for a New Century, Western American Literature, Great Plains Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her current book project is on sorority rhetorics.