Appropriate[Ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms

by Carol Mattingly

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.

Genres: History

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2002

Reviews

[Mark Bieraugel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although a scholarly book, Mattingly writes in an engaging and colorful way. She tackles the subject of gender presentation for women speakers in the 1850s and beyond in a unique fashion. I particularly enjoyed how she used primary source materials, such as letters, to get into the heads of the women speakers and how they chose their clothing, how they aimed to present themselves to the public. Also of interest is how cross dressing was seen and responded to during that era. This book is not on fashion, but rather how women who aimed to speak in public in the 1850s worked to mitigate the fear, anger, against them using their gender presentation through clothes, and somewhat by how they moved.