Theorizing Reception: Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s Response to Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

Because nineteenth-century women were generally excluded from evolutionary research, they had limited options for resisting its claims that women were inferior to men. Antoinette Brown Blackwell presented one means of intervening in the influential discourse of evolutionary science in The Sexes Throughout Nature (1875), where she theorized reception as a rhetorical approach particularly suited to women. Although reliance on reception risks reinforcing stereotypes of feminine passivity, Blackwell’s theorization of reception suggests relationships between audience and rhetor that are not well accounted for by the masculine rhetorical tradition and foregrounds reception as an often overlooked but important counterpart to rhetorical production.