Lives, Letters, and Quilts
232 pages, 6 x 9
7 B&W figures
Hardcover
Release Date:10 Dec 2019
ISBN:9780817320386
Lives, Letters, and Quilts
Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance
University of Alabama Press
How writers, activists, and artists without power resist dominant social, cultural, and political structures through the deployment of unconventional means and materials
In Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan applies a translingual and transmodal framework informed by feminist rhetorical practice to three distinct case studies that demonstrate women using unique and effective rhetorical strategies in political, religious, and artistic contexts. These case studies highlight a diverse set of actors uniquely situated by their race, gender, class, or religion, but who are nevertheless connected by their capacity to envision and recontextualize the seemingly ordinary means and materials available to them in order to effectively persuade others.
The Great Depression provides the backdrop for the first case study, a movement whereby thousands of elderly citizens proselytized and fundraised for a monthly pension plan dreamt up by a California doctor in the hopes of lifting themselves out of poverty. Sohan investigates how the Townsend Plan’s elderly supporters—the Townsendites—worked within and across language, genre, mode, and media to enable them for the first time to be recognized by others, and themselves, as a viable political constituency.
Next, Sohan recounts the story of Quaker minister Eliza P. Kirkbride Gurney who met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Their subsequent epistolary exchanges concerning conscientious objectors made such an impression on him that one of her letters was rumored to be in his pocket the night of his assassination. Their exchanges and Gurney’s own accounts of her transnational ministry in her memoir provide useful examples of how, throughout history, women rhetors have adopted and transformed typically underappreciated forms of rhetoric—such as the epideictic—for their particular purposes.
The final example focuses on the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers—a group of African American women living in rural Alabama who repurpose discarded work clothes and other cast-off fabrics into the extraordinary quilts for which they are known. By drawing on the means and materials at hand to create celebrated works of art in conditions of extreme poverty, these women show how marginalized artisans can operate both within and outside the bounds of established aesthetic traditions and communicate the particulars of their experience across cultural and economic divides.
In Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan applies a translingual and transmodal framework informed by feminist rhetorical practice to three distinct case studies that demonstrate women using unique and effective rhetorical strategies in political, religious, and artistic contexts. These case studies highlight a diverse set of actors uniquely situated by their race, gender, class, or religion, but who are nevertheless connected by their capacity to envision and recontextualize the seemingly ordinary means and materials available to them in order to effectively persuade others.
The Great Depression provides the backdrop for the first case study, a movement whereby thousands of elderly citizens proselytized and fundraised for a monthly pension plan dreamt up by a California doctor in the hopes of lifting themselves out of poverty. Sohan investigates how the Townsend Plan’s elderly supporters—the Townsendites—worked within and across language, genre, mode, and media to enable them for the first time to be recognized by others, and themselves, as a viable political constituency.
Next, Sohan recounts the story of Quaker minister Eliza P. Kirkbride Gurney who met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Their subsequent epistolary exchanges concerning conscientious objectors made such an impression on him that one of her letters was rumored to be in his pocket the night of his assassination. Their exchanges and Gurney’s own accounts of her transnational ministry in her memoir provide useful examples of how, throughout history, women rhetors have adopted and transformed typically underappreciated forms of rhetoric—such as the epideictic—for their particular purposes.
The final example focuses on the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers—a group of African American women living in rural Alabama who repurpose discarded work clothes and other cast-off fabrics into the extraordinary quilts for which they are known. By drawing on the means and materials at hand to create celebrated works of art in conditions of extreme poverty, these women show how marginalized artisans can operate both within and outside the bounds of established aesthetic traditions and communicate the particulars of their experience across cultural and economic divides.
In Lives, Letters, and Quilts, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan reveals how both the pen and the needle are mightier than the sword for women crafting persuasive arguments. For those interested in the history of women’s everyday rhetorics of resistance and rebellion, this is the monograph to read.’
—Maureen Daly Goggin, coauthor of Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950
Lives, Letters, and Quilts is an engaging read. The case study chapters provide interesting background and analysis, and as a study of quotidian forms of rhetorical resistance, this book makes a valuable contribution.’
—Robert E. Terrill, author of Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment and Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship
Lives, Letters, and Quilts makes a considerable intervention in the history of rhetoric, focusing on over 150 years of letter-writing campaigns, practices of contemplation, and quiltmaking. Sohan’s rousing cast of characters brings translingual aptitudes to civic deliberation, persuading as forcefully through cloth, design, and stillness as through words.’
—Christopher Carter, author of Metafilm: Materialist Rhetoric and Reflexive Cinema
Vanessa Kraemer Sohan is associate professor of English at Florida International University. Her work has appeared in College English, Pedagogy, and JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction. (Un)Conventional Means: Recontextualizing Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance
Chapter 1. The Pen as Sword: The Townsend Letter-Writing Campaigns and the Case of Pearl Burkhalter
Chapter 2. With Pen and Prayer: The Life and Ministry of Eliza P. Gurney
Chapter 3. “The Needle as the Pen”: Recontextualizing the Discourses of Quilts and Quiltmaking
Conclusion. “What Is This Thing You Call a Pen?”: The Courage of Ordinary Americans
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Related Titles
