Praising Girls The Rhetoric of Young Women, 1895-1930 [#220125]

Henrietta Rix Wood, "Praising Girls: The Rhetoric of Young Women, 1895-1930 "
English | ISBN: 0809334429 | 2016 | 224 pages | PDF | 7 MB
In Praising Girls, Henrietta Rix Wood explores how ordinary schoolgirls engaged in extraordinary rhetorical activities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. Focusing on high school girls' public writing, Wood analyzes newspaper editorials and articles, creative writing projects, yearbook entries, and literary magazines, revealing how young women employed epideictic rhetoric-traditionally used to praise and blame in ceremonial situations-to define their individual and collective identities. Many girls, Wood argues, intervened rhetorically in national and international discourses on class, race, education, immigration, racism, and imperialism, confronting the gender politics that denigrated young women and often deprived them of positions of authority.