Spreading the Word(s):  19^th Century Women Rhetors/Rhetoricians

Re-sounding Spiritual Spaces

Revisitionist historians are re-mixing traditional ideas about 19^th century homiletics, “the art of preaching,” by regendering it to include the varied spiritual discourse of women in that era.  These women often occupy spaces far beyond the pulpit:  On our panel we find them as Christian missionaries on Native American reservations, as New Thought pamphlet writers read by women in parlors, as professors whose theologies inform their theorizing and teaching, and as mediums who articulate oracular knowledge with clients visiting them in their own homes.  How can we theorize these gendered spiritual discourses, all of which worked, wittingly or unwittingly, to transform existing rhetorical structures?  This presentation explores the complications, contradictions, and, finally, the possibilities of adding such women to the traditional homiletic mix.

Speaker # 1:  A Question of “Conversion”:  Rhetoricity in Isabel Crawford’s Kiowa and Double-Logic in Historical Narrative

Isabel Crawford spent thirteen years between 1893 and 1906 in southwestern Oklahoma in what was then the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache (KCA) Reservation.  The missionary, who weighed ninety pounds and was nearly deaf, characterized the time she spent among Kiowas as “the best part of my life” (xxix).  She published an account of the years from 1896 to 1906 in Kiowa: Story of a Blanket Indian Mission (Kiowa).  Published in 1915 by Fleming H. Revell Company, Kiowa is a version of her diary.  Crawford’s narrative must be considered “a purposive communicative act” (Phelan 203).  According to James Phelan in “Rhetoric/ethics,” a narrative is “not just a representation of events but is also itself an event” (203).  Examining a narrative through a rhetorical perspective forces an engagement with “an ethics of the told and an ethics of the telling” (203).  Thus, both the story and discourse of Kiowa implicate Crawford’s work, in the first instance as a missionary engaged in rhetorical acts, and in the second as a writer engaged in rhetorical acts.  Crawford’s ideological commitment to “civilizing” the Kiowas is expressed as the narrative story unfolds; simultaneously, a critique of empire emerges as Crawford self-consciously gives expression to the heteroglossia that challenges the hegemonic discourse.  Kiowa is the product of two vying narratives, one that embraces empire and its philosophical preconditions, the other that pushes back against them.  The text bears the scars of this collision as Crawford cannot reconcile its double-logic:  the force of argument for Kiowas’ humanity meets the force of argument for their objectification.

Speaker # 2:  Emma Curtis Hopkins, New Thought, and the Contradictions of Female Spiritual Authority

Justifications of women’s preaching have held an important place in collections of women’s rhetorics, because they both represent much of women’s earliest public speech and provide complex arguments for a potentially female, ideal orator.  In many cases, women preachers proclaimed exceptionality – a personal, unique connection to God that warranted their speech.  Alternatively, women frequently argued for the higher spirituality of the feminine and its importance in guiding the race.  Both arguments, while potentially opening a space for women’s words, placed substantial limitations on their discourse.

The religious writings of Emma Curtis Hopkins, an important New Thought leader during the Progressive Era, offer an opportunity to further explore these contradictions in women’s religious discourse in the late nineteenth century.  Hopkins, who taught a loose but large collection of believers, encouraged women to embrace masculine desire, their “God-Self” or “Man-Child,” in order to become a whole, healthy individual.  The teacher and writer affirmed women’s closeness to the divine, yet she also suggested that they might passively await their desires with the assurance of fulfillment.  So while she empowered many individual women to self expression, Hopkins never encouraged women to participate in civic discourse.  Despite the opportunity for a female voice in Hopkin’s New Thought, this voice was largely contained to private, traditionally female spaces, such as periodicals that could be consumed at home by solitary individuals.

Speaker # 3:  Discourse as Organism:  A Renewal of the Teachings of Gertrude Buck

Early Ph.D. of Rhetoric, Gertrude Buck, whose article, “The Religious Experience of a Skeptic” connects the theological with the rhetorical, concludes, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” And so we can know Buck by her own fruits, her writings about rhetoric. Buck saw “the universe as a single organism . . . one great, throbbing, living creature, of diverse organs and parts . . . .” And such is the rhetorical theory she leaves to us: discourse as “organic” and “biologic,” with metaphor growing as an integrated organism from the desire to commun-icate. While discourse as organic sounds wonderful and timely in theory, to revisit the idea stands, in practice, to revolutionize the way we teach writing. Writing from the seed of thought enables students to grow writing that needs less weeding and keeps mechanics out of the garden of discourse. I'll demonstrate how.

Speaker # 4:  Healing and Heretics:  The Oracular Discourse of 19^th Century Women Mediums

Since, often as not, homiletics does not fit the varied kinds of 19^th century women’s spiritual discourse, it seems clear that other rhetorics are likely at work.  In particular, the gendered version of the elocutionary movement and parlor rhetorics may be involved.  But what of the spiritual origins of these discourses? I explore one illustrative case.

On the outer margins of the marginal are the late 19^th century women mediums who emerged as part of the Spiritualism movement.  These women often set up shop in their homes, sometimes within communities of like-minded people, rather than sermonizing to a large congregation.  And their ethos and delivery style included speaking with voices (and therefore authority) not their own, in sometimes shocking and scandalous fashion, far outside the bounds of the cultivated tones of middle class women studying elocution.  With the homiletic rhetorical tradition of little use in understanding their discursive practices, I trace their lineage instead to Gorgias and early rhetorics of healing and even further back to the female oracles and sibyls who spoke a revelatory rhetoric.