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Hasian, Jr., Celeste Michelle Condit, and John Louis Lucaites’s 1996 incisiverhetorical examination of legal practice, which argues that judges and hence thelaw are constrained by public vocabulary. Congressional hearings, debates, andlegislation on welfare from 1992–1996 are examined in Lisa M. Gring-Pemble’s2001 essay. The chapter ranges the historical gamut from Kirt H. Willson’s 1998essay on the 1874–75 civil rights debates to Theodore F. Sheckel’s 2000 piece onhow Senator Carol Mosely-Braun challenged institutional norms in 1993.

The book concludes with chapter seven, “Voices from the Margins,” whichexamines political communication from marginalized groups. The selected essaysreflect upon the challenges that marginalized groups face as they express them-selves publicly and the strategies the groups use to gain recognition. The chapterincludes the work of Randall Lake (1989) on Native Americans; Karlyn KohrsCampbell (1995) on early speeches by women; Lisa A. Flores (1996) on Chicanafeminists; Lester C. Olson (1997) on Audre Lorde, a “Black lesbian feministsocialist mother”; and Gary S. Selby (2002) on Frederick Douglass on slavery.

While a single book cannot address every important research question posedin political communication, Readings on Political Communication gives studentsan excellent base for learning. Although the selected pieces are thoughtfullyarranged, the book can be used in many ways when teaching political communi-cation. Teachers of political communication will find that they can easily incor-porate additional readings and use this text as either a primary book for a courseor a supplement to other works. The authors have done a commendable job inputting together a collection that is especially useful for those scholars who wantto expose their students to a diverse collection of studies that cover insightfulworks from the major areas of political communication and include a range ofmethodological inquiry and theoretical development.

KATE KENSKI

University of Arizona

HRHR0735-01981532-7981Rhetoric Review, Vol. 27, No. 3, April 2008: pp. 1–4Suzanne Bordelon. A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy ofGertrude Buck. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. xi-xv+ 241 pages. $55.00 cloth.

Review EssaysRhetoric Review In recent years Gertrude Buck (1871–1922) has been rightly recognized asan innovative early twentieth-century rhetorician and educator. Scholars such as

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JoAnn Campell, Gerald P. Mulderig, and Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald haveretrieved her writing and sketched her life. Now Suzanne Bordelon provides thefirst book-length study of the Vassar College professor’s progressive educationalphilosophy and revisionary rhetoric in A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric andPedagogy of Gertrude Buck. To support her claim that Buck modeled modernfeminist approaches to ethics and pedagogy, Bordelon considers Buck’s activi-ties, texts, and contexts in six chapters. These chapters define Buck’s view of eth-ics and rhetoric, address her progressive education and feminism, explore herprofessional association with Laura Johnson Wylie at Vassar, link Buck’sengagement in the suffrage movement to her approach to argument and debate,chart her participation in the Little Theater movement, and trace the impact ofBuck’s instruction on several students who became renowned college professors.

Like other scholars who have helped to recover Buck, Bordelon believes thatBuck’s social philosophy and pedagogy anticipated contemporary feministapproaches to ethics and teaching. At several points she draws parallels betweenBuck’s practices and those of well-known feminist scholars including CarolGilligan and Nel Noddings. While Buck never identified herself as a feminist-aterm not widely used until the 1920s-she espoused women’s causes throughouther life. Bordelon writes, “Buck forged a distinctive theory of rhetoric and peda-gogy that was inseparable from her feminism, middle-class women’s activism,and linked to Progressive Era reform. Her approach provided an alternative set ofassumptions from those offered by mainstream educators and rhetoricians” (12).One of Bordelon’s objectives is to challenge Robert Connors’s assertion that theentry of US women into higher education in the nineteenth century feminized theteaching of rhetoric and shifted rhetoric from a public civic activity to a privatepursuit. In contrast, Bordelon views Buck as a pioneer of a more ethical approachto rhetoric and argumentation also promoted by men, such as her mentor, FredNewton Scott.

Bordelon surveys Buck’s life and achievements in Chapter One. Buck wasborn in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan, whereshe earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 1898 Buck became the firstperson in the US to receive a doctorate in composition-rhetoric, studying withScott and John Dewey at Michigan. Buck acknowledged both men in her disser-tation, which re-viewed the rhetorical functions of metaphors through a psycho-logical lens. Bordelon notes that Dewey introduced Buck to the idea thateducation served the political function of promoting democracy, a principle thatBuck enacted in her scholarship and pedagogy. After teaching at IndianapolisHigh School and Detroit Normal Training School, Buck became an Englishinstructor at Vassar. Hired by Wylie, who was chairperson of the English Depart-ment, Buck taught courses in argument, composition, rhetorical theory, literary

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criticism, poetics, English lyric poetry, and drama. She and Wylie formed bothpersonal and professional relationships, living together off campus in Pough-keepsie and sharing responsibility for the administration of the English Depart-ment at Vassar. Buck was a prolific writer who produced six textbooks, a book ofliterary criticism, and more than twelve articles on grammar, language, rhetoric,and teaching. She also wrote fiction, poetry, plays, and edited John Ruskin’s Ses-ame and Lilies.

In Chapter One Bordelon also discusses Buck’s “social view” of ethics andrhetoric. Bordelon writes that Buck “developed women-centered alternatives thatdiverged from traditional Kantian ethics and agonistic approaches to rhetoric.”Buck’s ethics depended on some of the same assumptions of late twentieth-centuryfeminist scholars who emphasize “concrete relationships, interdependence, andparticipation” (40). As proof of this assertion, Bordelon cites sources such asBuck’s article, “The Present Status of Rhetorical Theory” (Modern LanguageNotes, 1900). Viewing people as social beings, Buck maintains that rhetoricenables people to develop equality in their relationships and build community.This contention led her to emphasize audience and invention, as opposed to tradi-tional rhetoric that privileges the individual speaker using agonistic strategies topersuade listeners. Bordelon’s discussion of different schools of psychology isparticularly enlightening; she connects Buck’s training in functionalist psychol-ogy, which requires studying the human mind and consciousness as a part ofnature, to her organic view of individuals and of effective writing as communica-tion rather than adherence to rules and forms. Putting theory to classroom prac-tice, Buck promoted discussion and activities that required students to constructknowledge rather than merely receive it.

Bordelon examines Buck’s theory of rhetoric more fully in Chapter Two,citing Buck’s first professional position as a teacher at the Detroit NormalTraining School as a site where she cultivated her ideas about progressive edu-cation. Working under the tutelage of the school’s principal, Harriet M. Scott(the older sister of Fred Newton Scott) Buck encountered European pedagogi-cal practices that encouraged a developmental approach to education, recog-nized children’s interests as key to engaging their intellects, and formulatedinstruction that guided students from the familiar and concrete to the unfamiliarand abstract. Bordelon’s discussion of the educational context of the 1890sunderscores one of the many paradoxes of the Progressive Period: the fact thatBuck and other intellectuals promoted democracy while embracing quasi-scientific theories that privileged native-born Anglo-Saxon Americans. DespiteBuck’s acceptance of widely held biases about race and class, she believed herorganic conception of education could remove barriers separating differentAmericans during this era.

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Like Harriet Scott, Laura Wylie’s influence on Buck’s rhetoric and peda-gogy was significant, as Bordelon makes clear in Chapter Three. For twenty-fouryears Buck and Wylie codirected the English Department at Vassar, where theyencouraged all faculty members to assume administrative duties. Bordelon callstheir example a “feminist model of administration” similar to paradigms pro-posed by contemporary scholars such as Jeanne Gunner (72). One of the firstwomen to earn a doctorate at Yale University, Wylie was English chair at Vassarfrom 1897 to 1922. A gifted teacher and astute administrator, Wylie defied thetrend of her day to separate rhetoric from literature. She challenged the malepresident and board members of Vassar on regular occasions, collaborating withBuck and other faculty to create persuasive arguments relying on concrete evi-dence to demonstrate the need for more money and resources for their depart-ment. Buck and Wylie also supported the suffrage movement, the subject ofChapter Four. Cautioned by Vassar administrators to keep politics out of theclassroom, Buck deftly circumvented this edict by incorporating the topic ofwomen’s rights into her textbooks and assignments and by teaching her studentshow to speak and argue in public.

Chapter Five evaluates Buck’s role in the Little Theater movement, whichbegan in the 1910s in response to commercial theater that featured light entertain-ment produced for maximum profit. Little Theater proponents, in contrast,addressed social and political issues and invited amateurs to participate in commu-nity-based nonprofit productions. Joining other reformers who regarded theater as atransformative medium that furthered their democratizing goals, Buck initiated adrama workshop at Vassar. This course allowed students to write and performplays, and audiences were required to submit evaluations so that scripts and pro-ductions could be revised. The Vassar program was the genesis of PoughkeepsieCommunity Theatre. Seeking to bridge the distance between “town and gown,”Buck and Wylie helped to organize the Poughkeepsie theater in 1920. Bordelonalso assesses two of Buck’s own plays in Chapter Five. Both dramas featuredstrong female characters and challenged gender or class assumptions: Mother-Lovedepicts a woman who must act as the mother figure to her own mother and disabledsister while Buck’s adaptation of The Girl from Marsh Croft revises notions aboutthe lower class. Given Buck’s status as a childless, elite woman who nurtured manyyoung women during her Vassar career, these works are intriguing.

Chapter Six follows the careers of two of Buck’s students who becamerespected faculty members at Vassar and Stanford University. Bordelon’s agendain this section is to complicate claims that the entrance of women into highereducation adversely affected the teaching of rhetoric. As is evident in Bordelon’sassessments of Yost and Lockwood, both scholars stressed social and democraticperspectives that reflected Buck’s philosophy. Bordelon justifies her discussion

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of Buck’s protégés by contending that they are further evidence of Buck’simpact. Their inclusion also buttresses Bordelon’s contention that academic suc-cess should be measured by more than a scholar’s publication record.

Bordelon makes a strong case about Buck’s legacy, and her book is animportant addition to Buck scholarship. It also suggests new lines of inquiry. Forexample, a critical biography of Buck that investigates the influence of her fam-ily and her Michigan girlhood would be useful. Buck’s relationship with Wyliealso merits closer examination: How did their personal relationship empowertheir professional activities? Considering that other prominent Progressive Periodwomen chose female partnerships over heterosexual marriage, I wonder if Buckand Wylie’s association could inform our understanding of a larger group of pro-fessional women of this era. Fortunately, Bordelon’s carefully annotated notes toher sources will enable further study of this inspiring rhetorician and teacher.

HENRIETTA RIX WOOD

University of Missouri–Kansas City

HRHR0735-01981532-7981Rhetoric Review, Vol. 27, No. 3, April 2008: pp. 1–5Byron Hawk. A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies ofComplexity. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Pitts-burgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. 400 pages. $24.95 paperback.

Rhetoric ReviewReview Essays Byron Hawk’s title grabs our ready-made attention-what model will thisbook undo? Connors’s? Brereton’s? Crowley’s? Lunsford’s? Harvard Overseers’or Midwestern, Post-Morrell Act Public Composition’s? Composition in the Acad-emy, or in the Academies where nineteenth-century women outnumbered menenrolled in postsecondary schooling? Does rhetoric have anything to do with it?

Hawk disabuses us immediately of these well-worn targets, declaring that hewants to practice dissoi logoi, making an argument that uses such ingrained histori-cal habits to uncover a deeply consequential but sidelined story that “no one wouldeven consider investigating” (10). This he does with surprising force. His carefullyconstructed attention to philosophical Vitalism’s visits to composition theory andto nineteenth-century subtexts of these encounters in Coleridge and others are infact rarely thought as a history. But this often-Hegelian chronology of philosophi-cal moves, countermoves, and current expansions into what Hawk deems a Vitalistcomplexity around invention does that work. He shifts historical attention to possi-bilities apart from the student-centered account of academic/national purposes in