Women's Compilations of Recitations, Dialogues, and Tableaux: Building Feminist Rhetorics for the Twentieth Century

Abstract

As America entered the twentieth century, a number of women contributed to the popular elocution movement through their publication of compilations of recitation, dialogues, tableaux, and other elocutionary genres. An examination of woman-authored elocutionary compilations reveals a nascent feminism: Through their selection of pieces that examine women's changing roles and celebrate women's accomplishments—both within and beyond the domestic sphere—women compilers encouraged novice women speakers to rethink their gendered societal roles.

Notes

¹Many thanks to RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Susan Kates for their insightful suggestions for revision, and to Nan Johnson, Beverly Moss, and Louie Ulman for their ongoing guidance with this project.

²Randall-Diehl wrote and compiled over forty books, most of which were on elocution. Her first publication, Elocution: Theoretical and Practical, went through twenty-four editions between 1869 and 1974. Elocutionary Studies and New Recitations went through eight editions between 1887 and 1898.

³Scholars have only begun to uncover the significant contributions turn-of-the-century women made to the American elocution movement. Feminist scholarship on women's elocution includes Susan Kates's chapter on Hallie Quinn Brown in Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885–1937; Jane Donawerth's recovery of elocutionary women in Rhetorical Theory Before 1900: An Anthology and in Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Rhetorical Tradition; Lisa Suter's article on Delsartean women, “Living Pictures, Living Memory: Women's Rhetorical Silence within the American Delsarte Movement”; and Whitburn et al.'s examination of the elocutionary career of Carolyn Winkler. These recoveries of women's elocution are encouraging and do much to demonstrate the importance of elocutionary study for women in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. Other scholarship on the American elocution movement can be found in articles in Karl Wallace's History of Speech Education in America; Edith Renshaw's chapter mentions many women who founded and ran private elocution schools.

⁴Grace B. Faxon studied drama in Boston and New York, but after her family objected to a career in theater she quit acting and devoted herself to writing and teaching. In addition to Popular Recitations, Faxon compiled or co-compiled over forty recitation compilations and teacher's resource books. An active clubwoman and women's rights advocate, Faxon was a member of the New York Woman's Press Club, The Professional Woman's League, and the Daughters of the American Revolution (Howe and Graves 294–5).

⁵Irish was an incredibly prolific compiler, serving as editor or coeditor of over one hundred elocutionary compilations, including Good Things for Washington's and Lincoln's Birthdays and The Days We Celebrate. Many of her works are for juvenile audiences.

⁶As Perelmann and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain, “[E]pideictic discourse sets out to increase the intensity of adherence to certain values which might not be contested … The speaker tries to establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience, and to this end he [sic] uses the whole range of means available to the rhetorician for purposes of amplification and enhancement” (51).

⁷Announcements in local papers reveal Randall-Diehl's busy lecture schedule. As Helen M. Cooke reported in the Daily Inter-Ocean in 1878, “Mrs. Anna Randall-Diehl [is] the busiest of many women.” See also “Public Reading” and “Mrs. Diehl To-Night.”

⁸In comparison, early and midcentury elocutionary compilations emphasize that a woman's good work is rewarded in heaven. As described in a selection from Anna and William Russell's Introduction to the Young Ladies Elocutionary Reader, “Man performs the public toils of life, and participates in the honours of the world and the recompense of fame; but woman, who has formed man for his high density, and whose virtues and amiable qualities constitute the refinement of society, has no share in such rewards… . [H]istory could not do justice to her merits; she must be satisfied with the living admiration of her excellence on earth, and the everlasting remuneration of her virtues in heaven” (250–51).

⁹Rachel Shoemaker and her husband, J.W. Shoemaker, opened the National School of Elocution and Oratory in 1875 in Philadelphia. When Mr. Shoemaker died in 1880, Rachel became the president of the school. The short biography of her in Woman of the Century says that, “[Shoemaker] has taught thousands of students and has read in many cities including Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati and Minneapolis in the United States and Toronto, Hamilton and Montreal in Canada” (Willard and Livermore 655).

¹⁰Not coincidentally, these last lines echo Frances Willard's advice to women speakers: “Womanliness first—afterward what you will” (qtd. in Mattingly 65). Carol Mattingly has demonstrated that the celebration of womanhood figured predominantly in the rhetoric of temperance women, as they argued for both prohibition and women's franchise. As Bonnie J. Dow notes, arguments based on the celebration of womanhood were a dominant rhetorical trope by the final stages of the suffrage movement, and they “figured significantly in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment” (298).

¹¹Barbara Welter identifies piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity as the “cardinal virtues” of True Womanhood, as defined by the expectations of women in the early nineteenth century. As Welter notes, these virtues define women according to their roles as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives (152).

¹²In addition to School and Parlour Tableaux, Stocking published two other elocutionary compilations, Shadow Pictures, Pantomimes, Charades, and Tableaux (1884) and Columbian Entertainments (1893).