The Idea That Was a Forum

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When the current Coalition president wrote these words in a September 27 blog post, she did not anticipate that they would speak much beyond that day’s topic:

“[T]here is a great and well defined need for what the members of this organization do—not only to assuage crises in settings as public as the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, but also to make the less conspicuous publics that we occupy every day of our lives into more critically visible and audible spaces. More often than not, the discourses we find ourselves having to engage in involve the promotion of fear, the preservation of self, the shoring up of a single position, or the mitigation of an immediate crisis. … More often than not, the intersecting spaces that we occupy do politically and emotionally conflict.”

However, they did and they do speak to the occasion of a blog forum we had hoped to conduct, which was in turn motivated by several concurrent threads on the WPA-L listserv between October 21 and October 30, including the consequent hashtag (#wpalistservfeministrevolution), and which resonated across parallel threads into the month of November 2018.

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Constellating White Women’s Cultural Rhetorics: The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching and Its Contemporary Scholars

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Feminist Dispaches from #4C18

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Volunteers from among CFSHRC members and supporters who attended 4C18 composed brief summaries of feminist-related sessions at the convention. This year, we find it especially important to publish these summaries because many feminist scholars did not journey to CCCC in light of the cancellation of the Wednesday night CFSHRC SIG and amidst concerns about the NAACP travel advisory for Kansas City. These session summaries are intended as synopses of sessions rather than as reviews with critical commentary.

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Opportunity to Assist in Missouri

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Dear Coalition members,

As part of the Coalition’s response to the NAACP’s travel advisory the Coalition has worked to imagine ways that we could support our colleagues currently doing work on the ground in Missouri.  As a result, we have identified two organizations in Kansas City whose missions are in keeping with our own, and we have voted to support those organizations financially.

The task force has identified the Greater Kansas City Writing Project (an off-shoot of the National Writing Project) and the Women’s Foundation of Kansas City, which “promotes equity and opportunity for women of all ages, using research, philanthropy and policy solutions to make meaningful change.”

The Coalition has given a donation to each organization.  In addition, we encourage our membership to make individual donations. Donations to the Women’s Foundation can be made here:  http://www.womens-foundation.org/ (click on the “Donate” tab all the way to the right).

Donations to the Greater Kansas City Writing Project can be made here:   https://40153.thankyou4caring.org/

Please note that the front page looks like it is for the National Writing Project. In the Comment box, you can indicate that this is for the Greater Kansas City group. As well, on the second page you can click on the red link that says “Make a Gift to an NWP site here” and it will lead you to a search box.  If you type “Greater Kansas City” in the box, the Greater Kansas City group will appear and you can choose them for your donation.

Many many thanks to those of you who have helped us choose the sites.  We hope you will contribute to our support of them!

The Coalition Advisory Board

Follow #FemRhet2017 Online

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Whether you are at home or with us in Dayton for the Feminisms and Rhetorics 2017 Conference, we hope that you follow along and engage with the conference conversations on our social media feeds. We are delighted to have a full team of social media curators who are going to be working hard to live-tweet sessions, create connections among panels, and offers ways to engage with the conference for those who aren’t able to attend in person.

Follow along on Twitter @femrhet2017 and on Facebook @Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference 2017. And you can participate by using our hashtag #FemRhet2017 Or one of our other favorite hashtags: #TeamFemRhet #TheFeministsAreComing #FemRhetSyllabus

Meet our #FemRhet2017 Social Media Team!

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Women, Work, and Success: Fin de Siècle Rhetoric at Sophie Newcomb College

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“Women, Work, and Success: Fin de Siècle Rhetoric at Sophie Newcomb College,” identifies a kairotic moment in the current conversation about gender in all-women’s colleges. We look to a now-closed (a year after Hurricane Katrina in 2006) women’s college in New Orleans to understand how faculty, students, and alumnae used rhetoric at the fin de siècle and early part of the twentieth century to construct a successful vision for women’s education. In calling their public rhetorics “epideictic,” we note that they were strategic rhetoricians who praised the institution of women’s education in documents like the student and alumnae-run magazine, The Newcomb Arcade, and in promises made by faculty in their speeches about education, and even in alumnae’s oral histories that were supposedly more candid. Together, we’ve written this article because it affords the field of Feminist Rhetoric with historical data and documents from female students and alumnae who were making a case for women’s education when it was in its incipience. The research we have done will help modern-day rhetoricians see and reflect upon the rhetorical foundations of women’s education in the South and in general, to then go forth to interpret the broader future of women’s education and an expanded sense of women’s gender.