Authors: Carol Mattingly
ISBN-13: 9780809324286, ISBN-10: 0809324288
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Date Published: March 2002
Edition: 3rd Edition
Carol Mattingly, director of the writing center at the University of Louisville, is the author of Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric and editor of Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader.
Carol Mattingly examines the importance of dress and appearance for nineteenth-century women speakers and explores how women appropriated gendered conceptions of dress and appearance to define the struggle for representation and power that is rhetoric. Although crucial to women’s effectiveness as speakers, Mattingly notes, appearance has been ignored because it was taken for granted by men.
Because women rarely spoke in public before the nineteenth century, no guidelines existed regarding appropriate dress when they began to speak to audiences. Dress evoked immediate images of gender, an essential consideration for women speakers because of its strong association with place, locating women in the domestic sphere and creating a primary image that women speakers would work with—and against—throughout the century. Opposition to conspicuous change for women often necessitated the subtle transfer of comforting images when women sought to inhabit traditionally masculine spaces. The most successful women speakers carefully negotiated expectations by highlighting some conventions even as they broke others.
Mattingly (U. of Louisville) has written extensively about women's history. Women in 19th-century America, she says, were identified as feminine primarily by their dress and location. She explores how women speakers used appearance to negotiate expectations restricting them to limited locations and excluding them from public rhetoric. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
List of Figures | ||
Preface | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction: Fabricated Gender | 1 | |
1 | Friendly Dress: A Disciplined Use | 17 |
2 | Blooming Celebrity: The Flowering of a National Ethos | 37 |
3 | Restraining Women's Rhetoric: Backlash Against the Reform Dress | 62 |
4 | The Language of Passing and Desire: The Rhetoric of Cross-Dressing | 85 |
5 | [Re]Fashioning a Proper Image by Dressing the Part | 107 |
Conclusion: Dress and Body as Spectacle | 135 | |
Notes | 147 | |
Works Cited | 157 | |
Index | 169 |