(Ebook) Imagining Rhetoric by Janet Carey Eldred, Peter Mortensen ISBN 9780822941828, 0822941821

(Ebook) Imagining Rhetoric by Janet Carey Eldred, Peter Mortensen ISBN 9780822941828, 0822941821

Imagining Rhetoric examines how women's writing developed in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and how women imagined using their educations to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation. In the late eighteenth century, proponents of female education in the United States appropriated the language of the Revolution -- civic rhetoric rich with opposing images of tyranny and liberation, lawlessness and justice -- to advance the cause of women's literacy. Reflecting the possibilities for educational opportunities in an exciting, new republic, postrevolutionary writing stressed civic argument and inspired women's education by emphasizing the sentimental and social values of literacy. As a market of female readers began to emerge, new textbooks and fictions about schooling revealed ideal curricula for women covering subjects from botany and chemistry to rhetoric and composition. Schooling for women -- along with abolition, suffrage, and temperance -- became one of the four primary arenas of early-nineteenth-century women's activism. A few short decades later, however, such curricula and hopes for female civic rhetoric changed under the pressure of threatened disunion. While postrevolutionary writing was anchored in a neoclassical tradition, antebellum writing instruction was grounded in Romantic culture. Good writing was tasteful and aesthetically pleasing; bad writing was argumentative and agonistic -- or so young women in antebellum female academies were taught.