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Regendering Delivery: TheFifth Canon and AntebellumWomen Rhetors, LindalBuchananLynee Gaillet aa Georgia State University ,Published online: 05 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Lynee Gaillet (2007) Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon andAntebellum Women Rhetors, Lindal Buchanan, Rhetoric Review, 26:4, 445-448, DOI:10.1080/07350190701577975

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Rhetoric Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, 445–67Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 445

HRHR0735-01981532-7981Rhetoric Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, jul 2007: pp. 0–0Rhetoric Review REVIEW ESSAYS

Lindal Buchanan. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and AntebellumWomen Rhetors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.xi-xiii+202 pages. $30.00 paperback.

Review EssaysRhetoric Review Lindal Buchanan’s groundbreaking and engaging work displaces traditionalnotions of delivery and provides a theoretical framework for synthesizing priorscholarship addressing “rhetorics and feminisms.” Even a cursory examination ofthis work, however, quickly reveals the broader implications and applications ofBuchanan’s significant reshaping of the canon. Recognizing that rhetoricalspeaking and performance are socially situated acts, Buchanan argues “that whenresearchers’ attention is focused too narrowly on the voice, gesture, and expres-sion of the good woman speaking well, much that is germane to her delivery isoverlooked” (3). In this accessible, illustrated, and scholarly treatise, Buchananbrilliantly proves her claim.

The power to speak, access to education, race, cultural gender expectations,and issues of silencing characterize recent scholarship investigating nineteenth-century women’s struggles to find a public voice. Scholars who attempt to rescuethe voices of nineteenth-century women activists from obscurity remind us of thediverse careers and roles female rhetors adopted in nineteenth-century societydespite cultural boundaries that limited women’s access to public spaces. Bucha-nan’s excellent analysis of women’s rhetorical engagement adds to the recentrich body of scholarship that regenders nineteenth-century rhetorical history; shejoins good company (Adams, Bacon, Brekus, Collins, Connors, Conway,Donaworth, Fitzgerald, Gifford, Hobbs, Johnson, Kates, Knight, Logan,Mattingly, Mountford, Royster, Tonn, Watson, Wells, Wilson, Zaeske—to namebut a few). Other titles published within the impressive SIUP Studies in Rhetoricsand Feminisms series, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan, shareBuchanan’s interests as well. For example, Roxanne Mountford’s insightful TheGendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (2003) and NanJohnson’s first-rate 2002 work Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life(1866–1910) specifically examine nineteenth-century gendered delivery.Echoing these feminist scholars, Buchanan explains how locating delivery withina particular time and place not only expands but also alters traditional (andmasculine) definitions of the fifth canon. For Buchanan delivery is a product oflocal exigencies and must be studied within a cultural and rhetorical context.Specifically, the author focuses this study on gender biases within traditionalstudies of delivery, analyzing the public performances and private lives of ante-bellum female rhetors (former slaves and privileged women, Northerners andSoutherners, religious and secular figures) to illustrate her claims. Investigations

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of the intersections of delivery with gender, race, and class challenge traditionalassumptions about rhetorical engagement, and Buchanan’s work builds on recentscholarship by posing and then answering the following questions concerninglate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women rhetors:

• Where, for instance, and when did American women typically learn aboutelocution?

• How and where did they hone the skills needed for public speaking?• What distinctive styles of delivery did women develop and employ once

they began to address civic matters?• What unique audience considerations arose when women, rather than

men, spoke publicly?• How did the body, especially pregnancy, affect women’s rhetorical

delivery?• What kinds of offstage assistance did antebellum women require in order

to stand and deliver discourse on public platforms? (6–7)

Through a close analysis of the rhetorical delivery of women rhetors—suchas Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Olympia Brown, Emma Willard, CatherineBeecher, Dorothea Dix, Francis Wright, Mary Ann Shadd, and Maria Stewart—Buchanan illustrates the (sometimes subversive) modifications to traditionalrules of delivery that nineteenth-century women were forced to make in order tobe heard. To circumvent cultural restrictions that limited women’s public perfor-mances, these women rhetors often found innovative methods for collaboratingwith men and other women to give voice to their messages. Claiming that tradi-tional connotations of delivery suffer from the following “blind spots”—they (1)assume that rhetors are male and authorized to speak, (2) focus only on speaker’svoice and body, (3) define delivery in terms of one standing before a crowd, and(4) ignore the social contexts of rhetorical engagement—Buchanan clarifies thenarrow manner in which these assumptions preclude the study of disenfranchisedrhetors.

Chapter one, “Readers and Rhetors: Schoolgirls’ Formal ElocutionaryInstruction,” claims that contrary to popular opinion, girls of the time did actuallystudy both elocution and civic discourse models in the course of reading instruc-tion. Until the end of the nineteenth century, reading was taught to both girls andboys as an oral activity. Buchanan closely examines twenty-three textbooksaddressing elocution and delivery, marking the texts as intended either for femaleaudiences, mixed audiences, or male audience. In an easily accessible table,Buchanan then compares the level of instruction in elocution, pronuntiatio, and

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Review Essays 447

actio for each examined text. She surmises that when eighteenth-century girlsbegan appropriating classroom elocution instruction for public discourse, educa-tors shifted pedagogy for female and mixed audiences away from oratory andtoward silent reading skills in order to maintain cultural connotations of the“idolized true woman.” Chapter two, “Practicing Delivery: Young Ladies on theAcademic Platform,” discusses school-sanctioned public performances. Girlswere allowed to participate in these events until they began honing these skills toparticipate in prohibited public performances. Buchanan explains that schoolofficials “debated whether schoolgirls’ public displays damaged feminine char-acter” (8). As a result of these discussions, colleges curtailed young women’saccess to academic platforms, leading female students to create “extracurricularvenues” where they could gain elocutionary training. In this chapter Buchananchallenges Robert Connors’ now infamous “feminization of rhetoric” claims,makes a distinction between Southern and Northern educational practices forwomen, and closely examines coeducational colleges’ curricula and pedagogicalpractices

Chapter three, “Performing Gender and Rhetoric: ‘Feminine’ and ‘Mascu-line’ Delivery Styles,” defines the two gendered styles of delivery charac-terizing women’s rhetoric of the period and argues that while both styleswere effective, only those women who adopted masculine oratory stylesfigure in traditional, anthologized histories of nineteenth-century rhetoric. Inchapter four, “Delivering Discourse and Children: The Maternal Difficulty,”Buchanan investigates the creative solutions female rhetors devised formerging motherhood and civic participation. The author insightfully analyzestraditional delivery’s emphasis on voice and body when that body is, in fact,pregnant. Contemporary readers may find this chapter’s discussions regardingnineteenth-century women’s negotiations of career and family to be eerilyfamiliar.

Chapter five, “Forging and Firing Thunderbolts: Collaboration andWomen’s Delivery,” brings to light our forbearers’ innovative collaborativenetworks, devised primarily to help women negotiate home and the public arena.Buchanan applies collaboration to delivery, a novel line of inquiry in research oncollaboration. Defining collaboration as “a cooperative endeavor involving twoor more people that results in a rhetorical product, performance, or event,”Buchanan offers a convincing model of collaboration that includes “productive,”“productive/supportive,” and “supportive” rhetorical collaborations (134). Theend product of these diverse collaborations? The means for giving marginalizedpeople a public voice.

In conclusion, Buchanan identifies six topoi (addressing onstage deliveryand offstage factors) for investigating female rhetors’ delivery: education,

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access, space, genre, body, and rhetorical career (160). While these criteria areessential for reconsidering the rhetorical activities of nineteenth-centurywomen, they also provide an important rubric for investigating contributions torhetorical theory and performance by other marginalized rhetors or disenfran-chised groups. I applaud Buchanan’s excellent, thorough, scholarly investiga-tion of Antebellum female figures, but this study has far broader significance.Buchanan provides the field a new framework for (re)conceiving delivery; inher hands delivery becomes a rich canon broadened to include rhetoricalelements of venue, society, local exigencies, and the inherent collaborativenature of public utterances. Students and scholars of gender studies, history ofpedagogy, the rhetorical canon, collaboration, public performance, institutionalhistories, textbook archives, and nineteenth-century figure studies will find thatBuchanan’s Regendering Delivery not only is a rich bibliographical resourcefor investigating the period but also offers a novel research paradigm for(re)viewing public discourse.

LYNEE GAILLET

Georgia State University

HRHR0735-01981532-7981Rhetoric Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, Jul 2007: pp. 0–0

Duane Roen, ed. Views from the Center: The CCCC Chairs’ Addresses, 1977–2005. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. xii+500 pages. $33.95 paperback.

Review EssaysRhetoric Review A confession: I’m not a very good sitter. Indeed, I think one of the reasons Ibecame a teacher is that I find it difficult to sit through an hour-long class, andthe teacher always has the prerogative of getting up and moving around. (AsI approach my 55th birthday, I wonder whether I have ADHD.) So, as much asI love the Conference on College Composition and Communication—I’vemissed the convention only once since I started attending in 1982—I sometimesfind the sessions torturous, through no fault of the presenters. I can attend to atwenty-minute talk, but three in a row can tax me. Therefore, when I was asked toreview the new collection, Views from the Center: The CCCC Chairs’ Addresses,1977–2005, edited by Duane Roen and published by Bedford/St. Martin’s incooperation with the National Council of Teachers of English and CCCC, I wasdoubly delighted. Not only do we now have collected in one place an archeologyof our profession—something I continually discover that new graduate students

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