| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. By Nan Johnson. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. xvi, 220 pp. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-8093-2426-1.)

Published as part of the Southern Illinois University Press series Studies in Rhetorics and Feminism, this book may seem curiously anachronistic to scholars in American women's history. Nan Johnson argues that, in the later nineteenth century, prescriptive literature on American rhetoric and canonical compilations of American oratory maintained gendered constraints that generally relegated women to peripheral performances within conservatively defined contexts. Delving into etiquette manuals, letter-writing encyclopedias, conduct guides, biographical sketches of female orators, and anthologies of addresses, the author too often conflates normative instructional writings with lived relations, thus missing the opportunity to engage with more recent debates about the plasticity, permeability, multivalence, and, ultimately, utility of concepts of "woman's sphere" in the explication of gender in American culture.

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