ABSTRACT
Women have taught and written rhetorical theory from its beginnings, as far back as Aspasia, a fifth-century Athenian sophist, and Pan Chao, a firstcentury contemporary of Quintilian, who taught eloquence to the Empress of China (see Bizzell; Bizzell and Herzberg; Donawerth, “Transforming”; Glenn; Levine and Sullivan; Lunsford; and Wertheimer). Not until the nineteenth century, however, did a tradition of women’s rhetoric exist. It was a transatlantic EuroAmerican tradition. This chapter examines the ways that women constructed a women’s tradition of rhetoric: Hannah More, who erects a proper sphere for women’s rhetoric by demonizing the work and style of précieuses like Madeleine de Scudéry; Lydia Sigourney, who eulogizes the work of Hannah More as foremother and Eliza Farrar as sister; and Eliza Farrar, who copies materials freely from Hannah More and Lydia Sigourney because she takes for granted the field of women’s rhetoric. These women are not the radical end of the spectrum of women’s rhetorical theory, but instead, co-opt, as a means to make room for rhetorical theory by women, the movement to delineate a women’s sphere.
