Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

Introduction

Re-Collection as Feminist Rhetorical Practice

LETIZIA GUGLIELMO

The act of remembering calls upon the work of feminist historiographers and rhetoricians who have worked to recover women’s histories and their work as part of recorded history and public memory. The feminist rhetoricians Jessica Enoch and Jordynn Jack have reminded us that pedagogically, remembering usually means that teachers bring recovered women’s rhetorics into the classroom, prompting students to come to know women as rhetorical agents by analyzing the rhetorical strategies they used to make their voices heard (518). According to Enoch and Jack, this approach offers a version of remembering with two distinct parts: it includes women rhetors within the revised and expanded rhetorical tradition and expands what counts as rhetorical practice (518). This process of expanding who is remembered and, in turn, creating subsequent opportunities for recovering or remembering other women is one significant way that remembering has served the goals of feminist rhetoricians and historiographers both within and outside classroom spaces.

Engaging the possibilities that envision the rhetorical practice of remembering as a complex and compelling site for feminist historiographic exploration (Enoch and Jack 535), authors in this collection expand the definition and practice of remembering in ways that certainly write women into the histories that have excluded them; yet, beyond these acts of recovery, essay authors also introduce new versions of women’s narratives previously written into historic and public record—a recasting or remembering differently—and they bring to light or refocus the lens on women’s stories that may have existed in the shadows of another’s more convenient, accepted, or publicly sanctioned narrative. Related to the term remembering, recollecting suggests an act of recalling or of calling to mind with clear roots in classical rhetoric. Yet more fitting for the goals of this collection and the content of the essays that follow, I suggest a repurposing of the term as re-collecting, a feminist rhetorical act of gathering or assembling again what has been scattered. This process of recollecting, with connections to public memory and remembrance, highlights the agency of both the re-collector and the subject whose story is recovered or retold. Within the individual essays that follow, authors engage in re-collecting the details of the women’s stories profiled—some for the first time and some collected in new, illuminating ways—and, together, in an act of macro-level re-collection, these narratives offer theories and additional sites for ongoing recovery and analysis.

In this introduction, I offer a definition of re-collection grounded in scholarship on memory studies, feminist rhetoric, and classical rhetorical theory, and I illustrate the ways in which this collection both engages in and moves beyond feminist intervention by exploring broader question[s] of public memory and reputation (Enoch and Jack 534). Providing re-collection as a frame for this feminist rhetorical act, I argue for a plurality of remembering illustrated within the essays of this collection that suggest the nuanced ways in which women’s stories are written out of or written differently within public memory and what it can look like to recover or retell them in very different ways. The process of re-collecting women’s narratives theorized and performed by this collection’s contributors expands how and where we engage remembering as a feminist rhetorical act.

Memory, Recollection, and Re-Collecting

As a canon of classical rhetoric, memory as a rhetorical device finds some of its earliest roots in the work of Plato and Aristotle, characterized by both as fallible and unreliable. The rhetoric and communication scholar Kendall Phillips clarified that for Plato, this distrust lies not with the possibility of forgetting but with the likelihood of misremembering and with a broader concern for our capacity for false beliefs (210). This disruption of the presumed binary relationship between remembering and forgetting suggests that memory requires a much more nuanced and multifaceted exploration. Continuing his analysis of Plato’s work, Phillips distinguished forgetting from other-judging or misremembering: While forgetting is conceived as a kind of occlusion or even erasure, the process of ‘other-judging,’ or here misremembering, constitutes an active process of making claims about the past that are in error (212). And here, while I would argue that erasure is, in fact, also an active process, a topic I return to in a later section of this essay, Plato’s placement of misremembering on a continuum between remembering and forgetting is particularly significant in understanding a plurality of the term remembering and its role in feminist historiography.

As a reaction to their distrust of memory, first Plato and then Aristotle, in much more formalized terms, introduced recollection. For Plato, unlike remembering, recollection is an active process that involves sorting through a collection of information, a search. To illustrate this distinction, Plato offered a somewhat lengthy metaphor of the bird and aviary, which Phillips summarized in his text (212), yet it is this primary distinction of an active search that I find most significant with regard to recollection. For Plato, recollection is more reliable than memory alone precisely because of this active and deliberative process. To be clear, memory does play a role in Plato’s recollection: it serves as the starting point or impetus for the search. Aristotle took up and formalized this distinction between memory and recollection, what Phillips described as a hierarchy, noting, It is this concern for reasserting the potential for human (read: rational) agency to control the appearance of memories that leads Aristotle to distinguish memory from recollection, as recollection becomes a disciplined structure for containing and directing the unbidden and potentially disruptive effects of memories (214). In other words, the deliberative process of recollection affords control over seemingly uncontrolled or undisciplined memories. Furthermore, Phillips explained, The instrumentality of recollection then lies within individuals who through their own agency engage in the process of tracing the sequence of events backward to the memory sought (215). This process then seemingly becomes more reliable and familiar through repetition, increasing the individual’s agency in shaping and directing memories.

Aristotle’s approach to recollection becomes particularly significant to a study of public memories of women with its intersection of individual agency and repetition. Previous work in memory studies affirmed memory’s public nature, that memory exists in the world rather than in a person’s head (Zelizer 232), and Aristotle’s disciplined structure for containing and directing memory (Phillips 214) suggests a potential for instantiating and reifying public memories, a process, I would argue, that certainly is still fallible given its direction by individual human interest. As a canon of ancient rhetoric, memory involved repetition to train the mind, and similarly, public memory also can be trained through repetition to believe a specific version of a history or of a life. Calling on the work on Bradford Vivian, Phillips explained that public memories and rituals are similarly repeated in order to formalize cultural truths and to shape public remembrance: In these repetitions we find not only an insistence that events, people or places be remembered but that they be remembered in the same way; in a repetition that serves to craft the same culture over and over again (218).

Recognizing the human agency that exists in Plato’s and Aristotle’s version of recollection and Phillips’s public remembrance, I invoke recollection as a frame for the essays that follow in order to highlight each author’s agency in deliberately creating a memory of the woman profiled. However, I aim to repurpose the term as re-collecting both to highlight the active process of searching through a collection of information to (re)make those memories, to remember differently, and to acknowledge the ways in which re-collecting is also an active process of disrupting seemingly stable, disciplined memories of women’s lives and of cultural truths. As a feminist rhetorical act, re-collecting creates opportunities to expand the process of recovering women’s work by also looking for opportunities to disrupt or destabilize established memories created by prior acts of recollection and public remembrance. Furthermore, processes of re-collecting within this text also demonstrate how acts of recollection often lead to women being forgotten or misremembered.

Remembering, Memory, and Reputation

Previous work in women’s rhetoric and women’s history indicates that how women are remembered—their public memory or lack thereof—is connected to the social realities and the contexts in which they were living and often influenced by a specific cultural moment or development leading to their recovery. It is clear that remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall (Zelizer 214). Beyond writing women into history, historiographers and rhetoricians also have called upon other scholars to theorize the often limiting ways in which women have been remembered or recovered. Writing in the 1970s, for example, Gerda Lerner argued, The literature concerning the role of women in American history is topically narrow, predominantly descriptive, and generally devoid of interpretation (New Approaches 349). She suggested a fresh approach to this recovery work and offered various directions by which to approach the narratives of women’s lived experiences, including moving past women’s rights movements as predominant sites of inquiry and, instead, investigating women’s varied economic and social roles despite the prevailing belief that women were expected to occupy a single proper place (New Approaches 354). Responding to Lerner’s call for more critical work, scholars have continued to address much of what was missing from women’s history at the time, yet there remains more work to be done. One more recent call to which this collection responds called on scholars to interrogate the strategies of forgetting and modes of ‘remembering differently’ that have erased or downplayed women’s rhetorical presence in public memory and to investigate the constraints groups have faced and the negotiations they have made to commemorate women in the public sphere (Enoch and Jack 535).

In Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective, Lerner framed her overview of early forays into women’s history as a field of study with questions: Who are the women missing from history? Who oppressed women and how were they oppressed (357–58)? Similarly, this collection is framed by questions intended to explore how and to what extent women are remembered as part of public history and to what extent they are forgotten:

1.  Why was this figure left out of existing historical narratives?

2.  What has been the status of her reputation or our knowledge of her?

3.  What are the challenges to understanding her ethos and rhetorical agency?

4.  What did the figure do (or not) to contribute to her existing reputation or absence in existing narratives?

We know that prevailing value systems play an important role in shaping history and public memory and may often determine who is remembered and when. Lerner claimed that society’s attitudes toward women and toward gender role indoctrination can be usefully analyzed as manifestations of a shifting value system and of tensions within patriarchal society (Placing Women 359). Within these patriarchal societies, we also recognize that women’s lives were constrained in a variety of ways that both limited their rhetorical agency and determined their reputations. If, then, memories are created through the act of recollection and may become, in turn, part of public memory, a figure’s reputation may become fixed by the historical record produced within that very same patriarchal society. By virtue of gender, race, or class, marginalized groups may find a collective reputation similarly determined by acts of remembering. Pondering the moral and political merits of collective forgetting [as] a compelling topic of rhetorical inquiry, Bradford Vivian explained, the premise that discursive or symbolic representations of the past are inherently selective, fragmentary, and protean is commonplace to memory scholarship, whether inside or outside rhetorical circles (90). Vivian, here, was generally complicating the binary relationship between memory and forgetting, positing the notion that forgetting need not amount to amnesia, erasure, or loss of memory—that it may, as an available trope of public deliberation, constitute a principled and judicious response to the past (91). Although I am not suggesting that the omission of the women’s narratives included in this collection constituted a principled and judicious response, Vivian’s comments do prompt us to consider the nuances of remembering that are central to this collection.

To be sure, we can call up numerous instances of women and their work deliberately and purposefully destroyed, buried, silenced, erased, Sor Juana de la Cruz offering but one example. In a recent issue of Peitho, Amy Gerald explored the public memory (or lack thereof) of the feminist rhetoricians and abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké in Charleston, South Carolina. Sharing the exigency for her work, Gerald explained that there had been almost no public acknowledgment of the Grimkés in their home town, a city famous for historical tourism (100). She continued, The public opposition they faced during their lifetimes was followed over time by an erasure from Charleston public memory, remarkable in its completeness (100). The constraints of what was considered proper activity for and the limited spheres available to the daughters of a Southern slave-holding plantation owner (and judge on the South Carolina Supreme Court) certainly shaped the Grimkés’ reputation both during their lifetimes and in the many years following their civic work. Yet, Gerald’s piece offered readers an opportunity to read the Grimkés’ omission in two ways: as deliberate erasure, for which she provided a great deal of evidence, and as the result of the city’s choice to remember its own history differently. Participating in the historical tourism that she described, Gerald discovered the constructed narrative of Charleston [as] a colonial city (114), which she described as an attempt to get past and to whitewash the city’s significant role in American slavery (115). Gerarld argued that the suppression of connections between the Grimké sisters and the South was at one time purposeful on an institutional level, not merely an accident of history (101), a claim that can inform the act of remembering and of recovering women’s histories as contributors to this collection do. Yet the act of remembering differently and, in turn, of erasing by omission provides space for a very different kind of recollection. In the sections that follow, I draw from the narratives within this collection to posit how and why women are remembered differently or obscured from public history. It is important to remember here as well, however, that even my reading and categorizing of the women’s narratives involves a kind of remembering that can be fruitfully disrupted and re-collected.

Constraints on Memory and Reputation

Scholarship in feminist rhetoric and recovery, as earlier sections of this essay suggest, reminds us that women’s voices, their work, and their histories have often been obscured or excluded from the historical record. Scholars in rhetoric and women’s studies also demonstrate that feminist interventions, foregrounding issues of gender, race, sexuality, and class, may help to uncover these exclusions and silences and to expand our notions of how and when women contribute to public discourse. In the feminist tradition of consciousness raising, personal narratives have been powerful catalysts in prompting political action and fostering social change, reminding us that the personal is, in fact, political, and as a significant part of that process, personal narratives offer opportunities to gain agency while intervening in essentialist descriptions of women’s experiences (Guglielmo and Wallace Stewart 20). At various points throughout history, women have written from and about the realities of their lived experiences to talk back against misogyny and the cultural norms that constrain their agency.

Through collective practices of interruption, women also have created spaces for women’s stories and for other women’s voices. Looking at the work of proto-feminists during the early modern period in Europe, for example, we find women who blended their stories with the stories of other women’s lives to expose the realities of patriarchy; who created space for other women’s voices by serving as patrons for their writing; and who argued for the education of all women regardless of class, often repurposing or retelling cultural narratives to make their arguments (see Cereta; Fonte; Tarabotti). For many of these women, their goals were not simply rhetorical but activist as they worked to improve the lives of women and to make a connection between misogynistic cultural assumptions and concrete social abuses (Cox 14). Despite the critical mass of women who were writing and publishing their work in Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that work virtually disappeared until it was recovered by feminist scholars and activists who continued and reinvigorated this work previously silenced through a cycle of backlash. Within the essays of this collection, we witness a similar move toward inclusion and connection by each of the authors; yet, beyond simply adding these narratives to women’s histories, the authors provide a multidisciplinary exploration of recollection that theorizes why and how women are forgotten or remembered differently. However, even in suggesting the reasons for erasure or remembering differently, it is important to note that the essays within this collection themselves construct a version or a specific re-collecting of the individual women’s lives—a theorizing and performing of re-collecting simultaneously.

Alice Myatt’s essay on Rosalind Franklin serves as a useful case study of this dual purpose. Within the essay, Myatt explains how Franklin’s work on DNA was dismissed by male colleagues who took credit for her work and how her reputation was then restored within scientific history by rhetoricians who recollected the details of her life and professional work. In her own act of recollecting, however, Myatt further demonstrates the role of remembering differently by highlighting other areas of Franklin’s work for which she is not remembered: "Her work with coal and the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses are [sic] seldom mentioned in histories of her, though some of her work still provides foundational scholarship for scientists entering those fields" (this volume). In addition to this act of re-collecting, Myatt theorizes for readers the process of restoration through Franklin’s narrative, one that can shape future acts of feminist recovery.

Through her essay on Anna Komnene, Ellen Quandahl demonstrates how multiple versions of recollecting Komnene’s public memory become part of writing a history of Byzantium inevitably shaped by the individual authors’ present concerns (this volume). These acts of remembering differently, of three women’s ways of writing [Komnene] into memory, she explains, aler[t] us to the impossibility of fully re-collecting and representing women’s reputations (this volume). This volume then, offers both possibilities for re-collecting women’s reputations and invitations to add complexity to those public memories through ongoing recollection.

Negotiating Ethos and Agency

As a facet of classical rhetoric, discussions of ethos traditionally [have] not included a space for women whose sex is visibly marked on their bodies (Ratcliffe 93) and whose sex alone often determined their reputations. In the face of thousands of years of misogyny, grounded in intellectual, medical, legal, religious, and social systems, silencing of women’s voices has been rooted in dominant perceptions that women were inferior to men. Aristotle’s dualities exemplified the Greek tradition that men embody judgment, courage, stamina and women irrationality, cowardice, and weakness; women were subordinate to men—fathers, brothers, and husbands—and, later, Roman law ensured that women played no public role (King and Rabil vii–xi). Ratcliffe reminds us, As scholars too numerous to name have claimed, Aristotle’s brilliantly conceived systematic art of rhetoric has greatly influenced Western culture. Yet … Aristotle’s rhetoric also poses potential pitfalls for women and feminists and, hence, suggests many possible starting points for revisionist theories (92). Women in the nineteenth century, as many of this collection’s contributors illustrate, like women rhetors before them, were forced to make creative arguments in order to advocate for themselves and for their right to speak, particularly when they were confronted by unwelcoming or outwardly hostile audiences.

Recent work on ethos by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones suggests that many women rhetors find that there is not comfortable ethos to employ if they want to shift the dominant discourse on a particular topic (2). Furthermore, they explain, everyday definitions of ethos tend to assume the composing subject is a solitary individual crafting his or her character to firm up reputation and persuasive power (5), yet we know that women often have not been solitarily in control of their perceived or constructed reputations given social and gender norms and recollections of their lives and work. This collection’s contributors reveal that as they worked to establish a professional ethos, many of the women profiled found that men still played a significant role in reinforcing or damaging that ethos no matter the creative, deliberate appeals women made. Moreover, Nedra Reynolds acknowledges the importance of location, of one’s place or perceived location in the world and argues that female knowers adapt to their marginalized positions in a male-dominated culture by seeing differently—and learning different things (325, 330). She acknowledges, as other feminist have, the value of moving away from the center to find different perspectives (326, 331).

Demonstrating this move toward the margins in their essay, Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Fancher explore the concepts of social circulation and of collective ethos through case studies of a group of turn-of-the-twentieth-century American women physicians and a group of mid-twentieth-century British women who worked at Bletchley Park as mathematicians, computer operators, and code breakers, both groups working in male-dominated spaces for which women were often deemed unsuitable (this volume). Examining evidence of collective activism within the margins of archival material, Kirsch and Fancher uncover the important role of professional networks as a powerful force for change, allowing women to educate, mentor, and support one another, to exchange knowledge and resources, and to establish their professional identity, authority, and ethos (this volume). With a theoretical lens for future acts of memory and recovery, [the authors] argue that the notion of social circulation can enrich the way we understand the accomplishments of professional women not only as historical figures in their own right but as actors in larger social circles whose ideas and actions shaped developments in the medical profession and in computer science that circulated across time, locations, and generations (this volume).

In claiming the right to speak, women have throughout history faced severe consequences for speaking publicly and for occupying spaces traditionally reserved for men. Gerald’s work on Angelina and Sarah Grimké illustrates how these perceived violations of gender and social norms led to the women’s reputations being fixed and their public memory limited or erased. According to Vicki Tollar Collins(Burton), when women’s lives are formed and women’s voices are managed and silenced by the ways a production authority uses their discourse and the forms and forums in which it is published, who is speaking and who controls the materiality of the message matters very much—culturally, rhetorically, and ethically (146). The violence of silencing women’s experiences is also evident in how and whether those experiences have been named. Women’s contributions in male-dominated fields often have been minimized or unrecorded, particularly with regard to how they have been portrayed within traditional texts and widely circulated media. In the case of women in the military, as demonstrated in Hart and Grohowski’s essay, the force of the dominant narrative has led to a view of women’s military service as ancillary or helping and frequently to women not naming themselves and their experiences as veterans. The act of re-collecting women’s stories that Hart and Grohowski engage in, then, is not only one of recovering and of acknowledging women’s contributions within military history but also one of securing their compensation, benefits, honors, and status as veterans.

Scholarship exploring digital and social media literacies within the past two decades highlights participatory possibilities of these environments, particularly the opportunities for collaboration and community-building and the potential to offer marginalized groups a forum in which to discover their own voice, to reinterpret and reconstruct their experience, and to make meaning that reflects their own cultural and intellectual contributions (Selfe 127), while also cautioning users against utopian ideals for universally egalitarian spaces. Daniell and Guglielmo explain, Within digital and social media, women now have greater opportunities not only to control the context of their messages but also to distribute and access them. With increased opportunities to reach audiences of women, women’s appeals to ethos have shifted. In digital spaces, they do not ask permission to include themselves in the conversation or justify their right to speak (100). As evidence of this shift, Hart and Grohowski demonstrate how online social networks have begun to remedy historical limitations and omissions by affording a platform for female military personnel to share their stories with one another and with the public more broadly in an effort to alter the power patterns in the U.S. Armed Forces. Through the use of digital and social media, women as production authorities now have greater control over whether and how they are remembered, and, as Hart and Grohowski illustrate, digital archives and Web 2.0 spaces have benefited military women’s ethos by providing them with platforms and audiences with whom to share their stories and thereby re-writing themselves into public memory (this volume). As a significant rhetorical strategy, naming by others with the authority to name or naming by the women themselves determines how and whether they are remembered, and Hart and Grohowski’s essay offers readers an opportunity to seek out other digital spaces where this naming and re-collecting are taking place.

The women’s narratives presented in this collection also make clear, however, that the construction of ethos is never uncomplicated and that women’s marginalization often has occurred at the hands of other women and marginalized groups. While communities of women might offer more welcoming, supportive audiences, the women profiled in this volume often were marginalized even by those women who were perceived to work on their behalf, as illustrated in the next section of this introduction.

Intersectionality and Marginalization

Referring to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and its central argument, Adrienne Rich described [her] own luck … being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged [her] to read and write (Rich 272). Rich’s acknowledgment of privilege and, throughout the rest of the text, of exclusion even within movements for liberation offers a significant and common criticism of U.S. women’s rights movements and still another opportunity to consider how women’s stories are remembered and remembered differently. Further developing this critique in its 1977 statement, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) addressed the racism of white feminists in the women’s movement—the racism that forced many black women to reject feminism altogether (Ritchie and Ronald 291) and an articulationof intersectionality that major systems of oppression are interlocking (CRC 292).

Within this volume, contributors point to a variety of marginalizations even within liberation movements presumed to be inclusive. In her essay on Rukshmani Bhatia, a participant in India’s freedom movement, Gail M. Presbey shares Bhatia’s narrative as a disruption of the male-centric public memory of the movement. Presbey’s recollecting of Bhatia’s story not only expands the history of who walked with Gandhi but also complicates the idea that all of Gandhi’s followers blindly obeyed his doctrine of nonviolence. Bhatia did not. As a young woman, she not only took up arms, a practice which in and of itself violated social convention, but also engaged in violence as part of the movement. Presbey argues, In contrast to this posture of blind obedience, Bhatia showed she was a thinking person, accepting or rejecting guidance according to whether or not she saw merit in it (this volume), and readers are led to consider how these individual choices contributed to the silencing of Bhatia’s narrative and how they now add to a re-visioning of India’s freedom movement. Moreover, within her essay, Maria Martin notes, Histories of African nationalism tend to focus on men’s roles and therefore typically lack the new perspectives and theoretical developments that an analysis of women’s activisms would yield (this volume). Identifying multiple levels of oppression and exclusion, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the subject of the essay, carefully worked against racism and classism as part of her activism, ever aware of her own privilege and of the ways in which common conceptions of Western (that is, U.S.) feminism failed to acknowledge the realities of women’s lives within her community.

In her essay on Lois Waisbrooker, Wendy Hayden asks us to consider the complicated issues of agency and reputation for communities of women outside mainstream women’s rights movements and for those without the education and class-status of many suffragists (this volume). Waisbrooker’s narrative illustrates the challenges nonelite women faced in becoming accepted participants—and therefore members of historic records—in mainstream women’s movements. Reminding readers that systems of oppression are multiple and overlapping, Waisbrooker’s profile feels particularly contemporary as she connects social issues (birth control, in this case) to economic class. Hayden argues, Waisbrooker challenges our conceptions of ethos and agency for nineteenth-century women in several ways because [her] reputation was partially imposed by others and partially constructed by her, and she used her status as a fallen woman…. to engage with topics other, more ‘respectable’ women avoided (this volume). Particularly noteworthy in Waisbrooker’s narrative is the collaborative, communal construction of ethos and agency that Hayden articulates, providing readers with a theoretical lens for future recollecting of women’s histories. Waisbrooker’s story, similar to that of other women throughout the text, affirms that women are still responsible for managing their own reputations despite the varying realities of women’s individual lives.

For women presumed to have access and agency because of class status and participation in social movements, performance of simultaneously appropriate femininity and activism also shapes the ways in which they are remembered as part of those movements. There is danger, as Amy Aronson and other contributors to this volume suggest, in making the decision to live a woman’s life on her own terms. Crystal Eastman’s narrative speaks to the inherent hierarchies within women’s movements and Eastman’s perceived inability to reconcile private life with public activism in a way that leaders of the movement believed essential. Aronson’s essay investigates why Eastman is not remembered despite her wide-ranging, long-term international activist work and demonstrates how women are still limited by proscriptive gender roles: Her story emphasizes anew the critical interplay between private life and public stature and between gender ideology and female reputation, dynamics that still, more than a century after Eastman mounted the chariot, more readily disrupt women’s advancement in the directions they have wanted and endeavored to go (this volume).

Furthermore, the individual narratives also remind readers that there are no single narratives of privilege and poverty, access and restriction to public life. For Alice James, economic and cultural privilege limited her access to the world (Ronald and Roskelly, this volume). And still, she acknowledges her class and privilege, recogni[zing] that she must listen to others—especially those others who often go unheard—to know any truth (Ronald and Roskelly, this volume). As a memorable example of the feminist intervention and re-collection present throughout this collection, James herself appears to enact an ethic of hope and care in her own work just as Ronald and Roskelly do the same in their re-collecting of her story.

Enacting an Ethic of Hope and Care

In a 2015 article in Rhetoric Review, Charlotte Hogg raised questions about research subjects who are valued and who are overlooked within feminist research (392). Presentism, she argued, contributes to the broader tendency in our scholarship to focus on feminist women (even when we are the one labeling them as such) and disregard certain women who don’t fit into our feminist frameworks (395). Like Hogg, contributors to this volume help to disrupt assumptions about whose voices do and do not deserve attention and to prompt feminist rhetoricians and researchers to rethink the ways in which women’s experiences have been given voice and have been silenced by men and also by other women. In the first essay of Feminist Rhetorical Practices, Gesa Kirsh explained: I have had a long-standing interest in and concern for including women’s voice, vision, and experiences in our work, for allowing them to be heard—in their manifold expressions, well beyond the ‘museum pieces’ they so easily become when we impose our values, views, and judgments upon them, speaking only for or about them, not with them (Royster and Kirsch 4). The essays in this collection also acknowledge women’s responsibilities to other women contemporaries, to future women, and to broader women’s movements, and in doing so they create space for other women’s voices and promote social circulation (Royster and Kirsch 23–24), specifically what Kirsch and Fancher take up as a lens for analysis in their essay. Throughout this collection there exists a multilevel social circulation both within the work of the individual women profiled and also in the act of re-collecting these stories within each essay. Essay authors remind us that simply telling the story or remembering the women is not enough; often the way that story is told matters, too.

Writing about the life of Alice James, Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly prompt readers not only to rethink the texts examined as the site of feminist rhetorical practices (a published diary as well as family letters and autobiographies of other family members) but also to consider how James’s story has been shaped—or recollected—by other writers, even though the story is a diary written by Alice herself. Publishing the diary, Ronald and Roskelly explain, Anna Robeson Burr … did more than edit and introduce: she removed all the newspaper clippings, omitted whole days, changed words, sentences and punctuation (this volume). Writing to those researching feminist rhetorical practices, Royster and Kirsch ask their readers to look and listen carefully and caringly, contemplate [their] perceptions, and speculate about the promise, potential, and realities of these rhetors’ lives and work (147), and what we see in this volume is contributors applying this ethic of hope and care as a framework for analyzing women’s stories already told.

In the case of Dorothy Day, as Laurie Britt-Smith illustrates, her history is in danger of being rewritten and voice silenced by the prospect of sainthood, and she is also shunned by an academic community that has often glossed over her work as being too religious in nature to warrant serious study (this volume). This double bind that Britt-Smith identifies is an illustration of remembering differently, of recollecting the details of Day’s life in different ways with different purposes for different audiences and in response to particular exigencies. Day’s own writing suggests an awareness of this power in remembering and its role in securing a reputation: The lives of saints … are too often written as though they were not in this world. We have seldom been given the saints as they really were, as they affected the lives of their times. We get them generally only in their own writings. But instead of that strong meat, we are too generally given the pap of hagiographical writing (qtd. in Britt-Smith, this volume). Yet, like the recollections of saints’ lives she describes, for Day, Britt-Smith argues, All incidents of conflict and confrontation are forgotten, and her intellectual contributions are made small as she is presented as yet another example of the ‘fallen woman’ trope—the whore who through divine intervention became a Madonna (this volume). Instead, Britt-Smith works to re-collect the details of Day’s life with an expanded version of her social justice activism and feminist rhetorical practice.

Re-collecting Rhetorical Practices and Texts

Beyond who is left out historically and what version of her life is preserved, the essay authors ask us to consider what is left out: which rhetorical acts are valued, investigated, and remembered and which are not and, as a result, which women continue to be silenced. Arguing for the ways in which Victorian women … performed rhetorical roles in their everyday lives, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, in her essay on Florence Smalley Babbitt, explains: Through their responsibility for the family photograph album, Florence and other women of her generation operated as visual power brokers. Moreover, Fleckenstein identifies Babbitt as a ‘remembering woman’: an adroit practitioner of vernacular visual rhetoric aimed at creating and memorializing a particular familial ethos while practicing her everyday art of persuasion in the parlor, a site positioned on the cusp between the