The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric

Lisa Vargo is an associate professor of English at the University of
Saskatchewan. She is the editor of the Broadview Literary Texts, Lodore
and Shelley.

The editors of The Changing Tradition want to dispel the notion that
women had no place in the history of rhetoric. The essays in this
collection were delivered at the Conference of the International Society
for the History of Rhetoric at the University of Saskatchewan in 1997.
The authors are exploring both why and to what extent “women have been
excluded from rhetoric, and what contributions they have nevertheless
made to it in the past, as well as what they are doing in it today.”
Scholars ranging from graduate students to distinguished professors from
seven countries are represented.

The 17 essays are helpfully organized by group. The collection begins
with a plenary paper, “Women in the History of Rhetoric: The Past and
the Future,” which serves as an introduction. Section 1 concerns the
exclusion of women from the rhetorical tradition. The essays in Section
2 treat aspects of religion to show women’s involvement in discourse
that ran parallel to traditional definitions of rhetoric. Three essays
about how women use the rhetorical tradition in the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, and the early modern period make up Section 3. Section 4
concerns women in the 19th and early 20th centuries entering the
rhetorical tradition on their own terms and includes an essay about
Flora MacDonald Denison and the rhetoric of the women’s suffrage
movement in Canada. The final group of four essays concerns feminist
issues in contemporary rhetoric. The volume concludes with a brief
afterword.

This diverse and excellent collection serves as an introduction to the
subject and will engage those already working in the field of women’s
rhetoric. The essays push against the traditional boundaries of rhetoric
to focus on philosophy, aesthetics, journalism, women as cultural
symbols, and the rhetoric of behavior or life as text. The Changing
Tradition makes an important contribution to its subject.