Rhetoric, reform, and political activism in United States women's organizations, 1920--1930

Although several scholars have examined collaborative rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century American women's organizations, the writing and speaking practices of post-suffrage women's groups have yet to receive adequate attention. Despite their enfranchisement, women did not possess power within critical deliberative and administrative bodies of domestic and international politics. As a result, post-suffrage women's organizations, such as the League of Women Voters (LWV) and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), relied on collective rhetorical practices to pressure for reform even after women were formally admitted to electoral politics.;In this study, I present a detailed analysis of the rhetorical practices the LWV and the WILPF used to train American women as political rhetors and to challenge the rhetorical conventions of male-dominated political discourse in the decade after suffrage. To accomplish this analysis, my project combines extensive archival study with the critical perspectives of feminist historiography in composition and rhetoric. Additionally, I use the work of Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin to understand how the LWV and the WILPF established a political ethos for women as they entered the hostile environments of domestic and international politics. Because the study of historical discourses requires an exploration of the contexts that produced them, my project also discusses the influence of the early twentieth-century progressive education movement on these organizations, specifically through their links to prominent educational theorists John Dewey and Jane Addams.;Finally, I consider how the rhetorical practices of these two organizations might inform present-day instruction in composition and rhetoric by suggesting more extensive study of the persistent, cumulative persuasive practices that subordinate groups use to cultivate broader receptivity to innovative arguments for social and political change.