Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-century AmericaCarol 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. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America features twenty-five illustrations. |
Contents
Acknowledgments | xv |
Fabricated Gender | xix |
Friendly Dress A Disciplined Use | 15 |
Blooming Celebrity The Flowering of a National Ethos | 35 |
Restraining Womens Rhetoric Backlash Against the Reform Dress | 60 |
The Language of Passing and Desire The Rhetoric of CrossDressing | 83 |
Common terms and phrases
acceptable African American Amelia Bloomer Amelia Opie American Angelina Angelina Grimké Anthony apparel appropriate arrested attention attire audiences black women speakers Bloomer costume Bloomer dress celebrity century claimed color conventions coverage critics cross-dressing cultural demonstrated dress and appearance dress reform editor efforts Elizabeth Cady Stanton Emma Snodgrass ethos example Fanny Fanny Wright fashion magazines fashion plates female feminine focused Frances Wright garments gender Godey's Godey's Lady's Book Grimké Harper Herald insisted ladies Lily male Mary Walker masculine men's clothing modesty moral newspapers nineteenth nineteenth-century noted numerous organization pantaloons pants Peterson's petticoats platform popular position presented publicly Quaker dress radical readers reform dress reported rhetorical roles Sarah Grimké Sartain's Sibyl skirts slave Sojourner Truth speaking Stanton style suggested Swisshelm tion traditional dress trousers WCTU wearers white women Willard woman's rights women speakers women's bodies women's dress wore York Daily Tribune young