Perhaps it's because of the personal plea at the end of the review, or perhaps because Roxanne Mountford's own scholarship has been around religious rhetoric. But I must admit at this point to feeling the vague spiritual guilt of the recalcitrant heretic rejecting the kindly counsels of orthodox doctors of the church. As Roxanne points out, I have been given many opportunities to recant with only minimal discipline--opportunities I have spurned, through blameworthy antinomian pride, no doubt. My interrogators have offered their corrections of my fallacious opinions time and again, yet I will not learn from them. I have not yet been shown the instruments, but I fear that will be the next step. Heresy is an ugly business, but with revealed truth available, it must be exposed.

If we assume a secular intellectual world, though, we have here a curious situation. Two reviewers of my book, Sharon Crowley and Roxanne Mountford, have chosen to devote four-fifths of each of their lengthy reviews to melancholy critiques of a gender thesis that informs one of the book's eight chapters. For each of these reviewers, the other seven-eighths of the book are decidedly minor. We might think that the gender issue is the pivot on which everything turns; we might think that the book was not about the history of composition in American colleges. That is why it seems to me that what we have in these reviews is not so much the need to review a book as to expose an error, confute a heresy. What's at issue seems more than merely intellectual; as the tone of Roxanne's last page indicates clearly, we have gone here into questions of ideology, attitude, and community that have some deep emotional roots. It's not just this one chapter of the book for Roxanne, but my CE article and responses to it, my arguing back against powerful criticism--my whole refusal to accept all of the tacit ideological positions of some monolithic version of feminist rhetorical history that she seems to feel she and Sharon represent.

I don't believe that such a unified condemning circle of feminist historians exists; the feminist rhetorical-history community is more thoughtful and individual than that. On my side, I feel like I've been straw-manned by both Sharon and Roxanne, who seem determined to draw invidious conclusions from my work that I do not see there. What is this infamous "feminization theory" which I so notoriously refuse to abandon? It is the idea that during the nineteenth century, women in America began to stake a claim to rhetorical education that was one of the reasons for powerful changes in American rhetoric. Not the only reason, not even, perhaps, the most important reason. But a reason.

I have been working on this idea since 1986, and I evolved it to try to deal with two groups of facts that will, I think, not be argued:

1. Between 1820 and 1910, women entered American post-secondary education in both all-women's colleges and in coeducational settings.

2. Between 1820 and 1910, rhetorical education in American colleges shifted powerfully from its 2500-year-old traditional concern with oral, argumentative, non-personal discourse to a new concern with written, multi-modal, and more personalized discourse. "Rhetoric" became "composition," and the remnants of the oral rhetorical tradition were marginalized as elocution and dramatic recitation.

There are three possible relations between these two generally accepted sets of facts:

a. There is an absolute causal correlation.
b. There is some causal correlation.
c. There is no causal correlation.

The "feminization theory" is a working out of some of the implications of position (b.) I do not--as Roxanne admits in one of the very few quotes the book is allowed in her review--claim any absolute causality. I am aware of post hoc ergo propter hoc. On p. 54, I go out of my way to list other reasons for the displacement of oral rhetoric by composition. But I do argue that women's entry into American colleges after 1820 is one factor in that change. I do supply evidence from a variety of sources to the effect that coeducation wrought powerful changes to the atmospheres and workings of American colleges, and that it had rhetorical consequences. Both position (a.) and position (c.) are extreme, and anyone proposing one of them would have as difficult a time arguing for no causal correlation as would the person arguing for an absolute causal correlation. Yet both Roxanne and Sharon seem to believe that there can be no causal correlation.

Just to try to halt the manufacture of straw-man versions of my argument, let me state here explicitly what I am not claiming, in the book or anywhere else. I do not argue that:

I challenge anyone to find evidence in my work that I support any of these ideas. I do and will argue that:

These claims are general and institutional, and they are not about the rhetoric of writing, but of public oral discourse. With a very few exceptions--which we must see in context, as exceptions--oral rhetoric was a male-dominated activity until after 1820. If I had been able to find more than a persecuted handful of women who attempted to engage in oral civic rhetoric before the nineteenth century, I would not have made such claims. If rhetorical education had been widely available to women before 1820, they would be rendered trivial or false.

As I have said, my claims are not absolute. They are about general trends and tendencies. I have no arguments with Roxanne's statement that hundreds of Methodist women preached during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I detail myself (pp. 37-40) the rise of the female Quaker preaching tradition after George Fox and Margaret Fell in the mid-seventeenth century. We have, as Roxanne says, knowledge of a few women preaching and prophesying from Paul on down. The point I make about these female preachers was not that they did not exist, but that they were very few--because they were marginalized, persecuted, tortured, and even killed by a patriarchal western culture determined to keep women out of the public sphere. Our laudable desire to find rhetorical foremothers cannot blind us to the power of the forces arrayed against them, forces that were hegemonic and overwhelmingly successful. It is no accident that Cheryl Glenn, in revising her dissertation into a book, moved from the title Muted Voices to Rhetoric Retold. The old field of rhetoric did mute women's voices all too successfully, and we are forced to retell the story of rhetoric, to move it out from the traditional oral, civic, argumentative and pedagogical tradition if we are to find more than a very few women in rhetoric before 1820.

Human history will show almost no absolutely successful prohibitions, but some powerful constraints are relatively complete, and this is one of them. The hundreds of Methodist and Quaker women preaching after 1660 cannot blind us to the millions of women of all other Christian faiths forbidden to speak in the churches or to the obloquy those women preachers received from the mainstream cultures they inhabited. Samuel Johnson's gibe against women preaching in the 1770s ("Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.") is a truer reflection of his time than our admiration today for Ann Lee. And women who proposed to preach and prophesy had an easier time of it than women who proposed to engage in secular public speaking; if they existed historically, their stories have been transmitted, like those of Aspasia, in controversial or equivocal forms, or they stand out strongly, like the story of Hortensia, as exceptional. We simply have no good historical evidence that women were permitted to engage in oral civic rhetoric before the nineteenth century, and the desperate and horrified struggle waged after 1800 against the very women who pioneered oral public rhetoric should tell us how powerful the disciplining forces had been for over two millennia preceding.

I must confess to being a little surprised at the animus directed here against my chapter. Yes, the exclusion of women from a field we think of as our own is discouraging. Yes, it is tempting to focus on the few women who broke the taboo and to paint them as representative. Yes, it may be necessary to broaden the definition of rhetoric to include convent homiletics and written discourse, in which women always engaged much more freely. But we cannot turn our backs on the cumulation of so much inductive evidence about the nature of the field that has called itself rhetoric. It was a male field for most of its history. This very fact, though, makes the changes of the nineteenth century all the more notable. As I did the research, I found myself thrilled by the courage and resourcefulness of the college women who demanded and won access to rhetorical training at that time. My title for a book chapter about that movement is "Women's Reclamation of Rhetoric in the Nineteenth Century," and I thought of it as in most ways a story of triumph. That it has been read as insulting to women--that some readers seem to need to find positions in the chapter that I do not take--mystifies me a bit.

As I look back on the last thirteen years, I can also see that this research has, for me, been less about women than it has been about men, and that fact may finally be more important than anything else. When I heard Walter Ong present his theories about male agonistic behavior in 1982, what he said explained much that I had experienced in my training as a male in this culture, and from his theories of agonism it was a natural step to the history of rhetoric. Finally, my "feminization theory" (and I should say here that I have never used that term in any of my own titles) is really about how traditional patriarchal culture was challenged and was changed forever during the nineteenth century, and how American manhood would not be the same after that. Finally, the theory is not really about women and was not meant to be.

Now I'm no less in love with my own ideas than anyone else and am loathe to give them up, but I'm not, I hope, a solipsist or a monomaniac. Show me evidence, and I'll recant. But I'd need more and better arguments than I've seen so far to do so in this case. What would such evidence look like? It would have to have certain facts on display. It would have to show that:

1. Traditional rhetoric and rhetorical education were not agonistic.

OR

2. Women have always been part of the tradition that called itself rhetoric. Women before the nineteenth century were widely invited to engage in oral rhetorical training and given access to oral rhetorical forums.

OR

3. Rhetorical training in the nineteenth century did not change substantially.

OR

4. All the changes in American rhetorical education during the nineteenth century are explicable with no reference to gender issues or to the single most striking change in colleges, the entrance of women.

I do not see such evidence forthcoming. And although I cannot quite follow Roxanne in calling the sort of history I have tried to write "empirical" (I think we'd need Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine for historical empiricism), my own examination of the textual evidence available makes me suspect it will not be forthcoming.

And despite Roxanne's suggestion that book reviewing is agonistic, our little written give-and-take here is really fairly mild compared to rhetorical agonism of the old sort. Roxanne, let's imagine that you and I were upon a stage in front of hundreds of our CCCC colleagues. Our intentions would be simple: you would seek to attack me and my ideas with every tactic and piece of evidence and skill you possess, and I would seek to defend my ideas and to show that your motives were ideological. No reading of prepared papers, no hiding behind citations or French theory or literature surveys. You attack; I parry. The audience responds immediately and loudly to every point made, every hit scored. Back and forth it goes, mounting to the heights of eloquence, dipping into the muck of personal invective, thrust and counter-thrust, until we are both exhausted. And then the audience votes on a winner and one of us is chaired out of the hall to huzzahs while the other bitterly collects notes and goes out silently, escorted by a few sullen seconds.

Now that's agonism. And we don't see it much in college anymore. The irenic discourse that replaced it--this stuff we're doing--does not have to be about sweetness and light. We may indeed disagree. All that I would ask, of both you and of Sharon, is that when you are asked to do a book review, you do the author the simple courtesy of reviewing--that is, describing and evaluating--his or her book, not taking the five pages of journal space you are given as a unilateral forum for attacking one idea in the book while more or less ignoring everything else the book is proposing to be about. We don't actually disagree about that much, after all, and there are issues about which people of good will may disagree.

Unless my opening idea about heresy holds water. Because for true believers, religious or ideological, the difference between homoousion and homoiousion is, literally, the difference between heaven and hell.