Reviewed by: Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors Suzanne Bordelon Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. By Lindal Buchanan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005; pp xiv + 202, 23 illus. $60.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. In her detailed study of the elocutionary education and oratorical practices of antebellum women, Lindal Buchanan demonstrates how research on public speaking has traditionally assumed a male speaker and focused narrowly on voice, gesture, and expression, overlooking women's contributions. However, by underscoring the socially and ideologically situated nature of delivery, Buchanan dramatically broadens the analytical scope, providing scholars with a helpful lens "for investigating how a variable like gender (or sexuality, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, age, class, disability, and so on) affects rhetoric" (4). With her emphasis on the juncture of gender and delivery, [End Page 360] Buchanan contributes to the scholarly project of writing women into the history of rhetoric by reconsidering "what counts as evidence" and, ultimately, creating a more inclusive tradition. The first two chapters question the scholarly assumption that because women were excluded from the public realm, they received no formal rhetorical training. In the first chapter, Buchanan demonstrates that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, girls learned elocutionary concepts from their reading classes and textbooks, critical but often overlooked sources of rhetorical training for women. To emphasize important differences in elocutionary content, she contrasts three popular eighteenth-century readers with three nineteenth-century textbooks. Buchanan argues that as women used their rhetorical training to address public issues, an "educational backlash" resulted, and the elocutionary content became more limited in readers targeting female audiences (7). Chapter 2 shows how middle- and upper-class girls gained elocutionary education through their access to what Buchanan calls the "academic platform," which included "all of the curricular and extracurricular sites and activities that permitted pupils to practice the arts of oral expression, including formal classroom exercises, school exhibitions, college commencements, and literary club events" (41–42). Extending her backlash argument, Buchanan posits that although primary- and secondary-level girls had secured access to various educational stages by the mid-nineteenth century, the academic platform became a highly contested site when women entered higher education. Chapters 1 and 2 both challenge and complicate Robert Connors's feminization of rhetoric argument, presented in Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (1997). With the entrance of women into American colleges in the nineteenth century, Connors argues that the teaching of rhetoric became feminized, shifting from a more public, agonistic emphasis to "a more privatized, interiorized, and even artistic orientation" (23). Buchanan questions the gendered discourse categories this argument creates, demonstrating in chapter 1 that reading wasn't a private activity but was instead "an oral and communal skill" and that readers introduced girls to elocutionary principles (43). In chapter 2, she complicates the feminization theory by noting that if the curriculum did change to adapt to women, the transformation had two outcomes: it accommodated women but also restricted "their knowledge and practice of privileged genres like oratory, debate, and argument" (74). Buchanan's academic backlash argument provides another way of considering these curricular changes. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine how women applied their elocutionary skills, investigating the different constraints they faced and the strategies they used in response. Chapter 3 discusses the feminine and masculine delivery approaches that emerged during this period and explores how the different methods were [End Page 361] used by five antebellum speakers. Buchanan urges scholars to recognize feminine delivery style and to include its various practitioners in disciplinary histories. In chapter 4, Buchanan investigates the complexities confronting women who were both speakers and mothers, demonstrating that maternal rhetors were evaluated by their domestic as well as public performances. Noting limitations in the discipline's current models of rhetorical collaboration, chapter 5 introduces a new schema for investigating collaboration and draws upon it to analyze several antebellum women speakers. As Buchanan demonstrates, an important aspect of collaborative practices is what they disclose in terms of how marginalized groups gain a public voice. Buchanan makes an important contribution to the work of feminist scholars who are developing new analytical frameworks for understanding and appreciating women...