Overview

Employing the trope of architecture, Jane Sutton envisions the relationship between women and rhetoric as a house: a structure erected in ancient Greece by men that, historically, has made room for women but has also denied them the authority and agency to speak from within. Sutton’s central argument is that all attempts to include women in rhetoric exclude them from meaningful authority in due course, and this exclusion has been built into the foundations of rhetoric. Drawing on personal experience, the spatial tropes of ancient Greek architecture, and the study of women who attained significant places in the house of rhetoric, Sutton highlights a number of decisive turns where women were able to increase their rhetorical access but were not able to achieve full authority, among them the work of Frances Wright, Lucy Stone, and suffragists Mott, Anthony, and Stanton; a visit to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the busts that became the Portrait Monument were displayed in the Woman’s Building (a sideshow, in essence); and a study of working-class women employed as telephone operators in New York in 1919. With all the undeniable successes—socially, politically, and financially— of modern women, it appears that women are now populating the house of rhetoric as never before. But getting in the house and having public authority once inside are not the same thing. Sutton argues that women “can only act as far as the house permits.” Sojourn calls for a fundamental change in the very foundations of rhetoric.

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9780817317157

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Reviews

Sutton employs tropes of architecture and the house of rhetoric to demonstrate that over time room was made for women in public and rhetorical spaces, but authority and agency were denied them. ... Useful for philosophy and women's studies as well as rhetoric, this volume supplements and moves beyond earlier work. Highly recommended. -- CHOICE

This is an intriguing, inspiring, imaginative, and deeply courageous excavation and rebuilding of the house of rhetoric. My advice to readers: prepare to read on the metaphoric edge of your seats; you're in for a great ride. --Andrea A. Lunsford, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English at Stanford University and author of Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Public and Private Lives

Author Information

Jane S. Sutton is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University, York.

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