SOURCE: Donawerth, Jane. “Nineteenth-Century United States Conduct Book Rhetoric by Women.” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 1 (2002): 5-21.

In the following essay, Donawerth studies women's conduct books that focus on writing and speaking, finding that while works by Lydia Sigourney and Eliza Farrar emphasize the importance of learning conversation skills and letter writing for the purpose of appropriately influencing one's children, Jennie Willing's The Potential Woman includes discussion of preaching and social reform.

In 1904 Mary August Jordan, a professor of rhetoric at Smith College, published Correct Writing and Speaking with a national company, A. S. Barnes of New York. Looking very much like a rhetoric textbook, this book yet came out in a series called “The Woman's Home Library.”¹ The contents of this book seem to fall under the category of late nineteenth-century rhetorical theory—advice on composition and speech. But in the mixture of belletristic rhetoric, contemporary scientific linguistics, and...