“Silent Work for Suffrage”: The Discreet Rhetoric of Professor June Rose Colby and the Sapphonian Society 1892–1908

Abstract

During the early twentieth century, Illinois State Normal University Professor June Rose Colby employed a number of discreet rhetorical strategies to counteract the moral panic over the feminization of education on her own university campus. In particular, this article analyzes how Colby used a women's literary society—the Sapphonian Society—to prepare her women students to confront the rhetoric of a perceived “woman peril in education” (Chadwick 109). Colby's “discreet rhetoric” suggests the continuing need for historical scholarship that may reveal the often tacit, yet wholly subversive, rhetorical strategies of “silent” academic feminists.

Notes

¹This research was funded through the support of an Oakland University Faculty Research Fellowship. I am indebted to Illinois State University Archivist Jo Ann Rayfield for her research support; to ISU archive librarians April Anderson, Ross Griffiths, and Jenna Self; and to Jim Nugent for patiently responding to countless drafts. I am also grateful for the feedback I received from RR reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Catherine Hobbs, and from Becky Nugent, Dana Driscoll, and Cornelia Pokrzywa.

²For an explanation of the waning interest in college society work after 1900, see Bradway-Hesse.

³The University of Michigan will not release Colby's transcripts, but the few graduate school notebooks contained in Colby's files indicate that she studied Elizabethan literature and took George Sylvester Morris's classes in ethics and in the history of philosophy.

⁴Felmley was an advocate of simplified spelling. I have left his spelling unchanged in this article.