Rhetoric and a Body Impolitic: Self-Definition and Mary Mcleod Bethune's Discursive Safe Space

ABSTRACT

Mary McLeod Bethune is one of the most profound and influential African Americans in the history of American democracy. To some, she was often characterized as the “female Booker T. Washington,” because she was held in high regard by both White and Black audiences. She is notably respected for her avid persistence to uplift the race, advocating quality education and civil rights for Blacks. However, though her life and work single-handedly changed U.S. race relations, Bethune is not well known as a rhetor. With all the speeches, presentations, lectures, meetings, and conversations she had, most scholarship on her life is primarily concentrated in history or there is a one-to-two page overview of her entire life in almanacs or biographical sources, still excluding scholarly explication of Bethune's rhetoric. The goal of this article is to provide this rhetorical examination. To continue to build, as rhetorical scholar Olga Davis noted a Black female rhetorical tradition, my aim is to demonstrate the rhetorical strategies employed by Bethune to self-define herself, extol Black womanhood, and reclaim Black female humanity, challenging the dominant White supremacist narrative of femininity.

KEYTERMS:

• African American studies
• Black feminism
• gender
• Mary McLeod Bethune
• Race