This anthology is the first to feature women's rhetorical theory from the fifth through the nineteenth centuries. Assembling selections on rhetoric, composition, and communication by 24 women around the world, this valuable collection demonstrates an often-overlooked history of rhetoric as well as women's interest in conversation as a model for all discourse. Among the theorists included are Aspasia, Pan Chao, Sei Shonagon, Madeleine de Scudéry, Hannah More, Hallie Quinn Brown, and Mary Augusta Jordan. The book also contains an extensive introduction, explanatory headnotes, and detailed annotations.

"Through close attention to the centrality of involuntarity in pivotal nineteenth-century American court cases that created new property relations with photographs, this book offers a historically situated theory of photography in terms of expression and an archivally-supported theory of whiteness as an aesthetics of racial capitalism"--

Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre--dominated by women--achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.

In Conversational Rhetoric, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres-humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women's preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks.