Many of us have spent a good deal of time lately reflecting on the confines and transformative possibilities of space. During this global pandemic, our homes have become our workplaces, childcare centers, and virtual doctor’s offices; we have conducted tele-therapy sessions in our bathrooms and turned closets into private offices. Space helps shape what happens within it – it primes us to work or to sleep or to study our reflection in the mirror – and our homes have resisted the sudden imposition of new expectations for work, care, play, and privacy. As Nedra Reynolds asserts, “Homes hold, in fact, many answers to questions about what can happen where” (2007, 154). But neither have our homes been impervious to adaptation. I spent three months engaging in the activities of life while quarantined within an open-plan loft with my partner, cantankerous cat, and 50-pound puppy. The space pressed on us and we pressed back. Some days it felt like the space won.While awareness of the pressures and possibilities of space may feel newly visceral, the notion is not new to feminist rhetorical studies, which has long moved between metaphorical and material senses of spatial constraint. Geographic tropes pervaded early feminist recovery work, guided by Cheryl Glenn’s influential call for “remapping” rhetorical history so that what were often assumed to be “barren territories” would reveal themselves as “scenic routes, historic events, and influential people” (Glenn 1995, 287). Continuing to shape our methodological discussions today, it is difficult to talk about revisionist history at all without resorting to the figurative language of fields, border-crossing, the center and the margins, and making space. Likewise, feminist rhetorical scholars have examined physical spaces that were previously off the proverbial map – actual sites of speaking, writing, rhetorical education, and archival research such as parlors (Johnson 2002), neighborhoods and dwellings (Shaver 2019), classrooms (Reynolds 2007), and attics (Sharer 2004) – as well the rhetorics those spaces constrained or enabled. For decades, space has functioned prominently in feminist rhetorical studies in literal and figurative ways.Three recent book-length studies find good company in this spatial tradition, both continuing its tenets and rethinking how space functions rhetorically in feminist histories of the nineteenth-century United States. Jessica Enoch’s Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work takes the most direct approach to rethinking the rhetoricity of material space, while Carly Woods’ Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835–1945 and Kristy Maddux’s Practicing Citizenship: Women’s Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair move fluidly between space’s literal and figurative senses. Putting these texts into conversation reveals how various approaches to space inform a number of methodological and rhetorical insights, with particular consequences for diversity and inclusivity.In Domestic Occupations, Enoch’s focus is on the historicity of women’s relationship to the home and workplace between 1820 and 1950. Her aim is to track the shifts in this relationship over time by focusing on “spatial rhetorics”: the “pictorial, embodied, displayed, emotive, and discursive” ways spaces gain gendered meanings and functions (2019, 6). This innovative focus allows Enoch to explain how the nineteenth-century American school transitioned from a “prisonlike space of discipline and corporal punishment,” then appropriate for a male pedagogue, to a “feminine homelike space” appropriate for an imagined white, middle-class female teacher (6). The material changes to the space of the schoolhouse facilitated the movement of women from the family home to the classroom; in turn, the feminization of the space helped feminize (and devalue) the occupation. In a second case study, Enoch examines an inverse movement between workplace and home as she tracks the emergence of the domestic scientist. Instead of making a schoolhouse more like a home, women made the home more like a laboratory, where the “drudgery” of domestic chores became the challenging, varied work of the science of cooking and cleaning. In the process, domestic scientists developed a professional ethos that they were able to bring outside the home and showcase in publications and public demonstrations. Enoch’s third study of spatial rhetorics takes her to a “moment of spatial anxiety” (120) during World War II, when millions of middle-class women took jobs outside the home in men’s absence – for what was to become of the children? The government’s answer was three thousand “war nurseries,” which Enoch shows were carefully designed to “transfer … emotional investment from the home to the childcare center” – and then back to the home when the war was over and men returned to reclaim their jobs (123).Enoch’s unique approach to spatial rhetorics shapes her methodology: while individual women may pop up as occasional examples, her primary subjects are the spaces themselves and the arguments contemporaneously proffered for their design. To access the spaces as they were imagined and created, Enoch examines them any way she can: through architectural plans, art and photographs, educational tracts, school board and government minutes, and other materials. Homing in on how the school, the kitchen, and the location of childcare were strategically redesigned to shape who belonged and what kind of work could happen there, Enoch’s focus is on distributed cultural shifts in the meaning of home and work spaces. Consequently, she is most interested in the dominant meanings of home and work spaces, which, she admits, leads to an implicit focus on the white, middle-class women who are envisioned by the designers and advocates of these spaces. Yet, Enoch is also attentive to how assumptions about the dominance of white middle-class status “were complicated by the differently raced, cultured, and classed women who encountered them” (7). A focus on space often leads to such an approach: who is allowed in and what happens to a space when it is confronted by individuals who do not fit its expectations? Enoch closes each main chapter by examining how actual, diverse women engaged in spaces designed for an imagined white, middle-class teacher, homemaker, or mother. After all, domestic science education often held far less promise of excitement for African American women, for whom it was tinged with a long history of servitude within white homes. Furthermore, wartime childcare centers were most often segregated or unwelcoming to Black families. These physical spaces were not only gendered in their rhetorical design; they were profoundly raced and classed in practice.Compared to Enoch’s materialist approach to spatial rhetorics, Carly Woods’ Debating Women moves more fluidly between figural and literal senses of space. In the metaphoric sense, she argues that her book “makes space” for women in the history of debate, finding women engaging in intramural and intercollegiate debate long before they were formally allowed in most universities or college debate societies. It is not surprising that the women she finds there were primarily white and middle- or upper-class: those with the relative privilege to enter colleges such as Oberlin (which admitted black men and women but not many) or the leisure time to debate in a Scottish society woman’s parlor. But by “remapping” the territory of collegiate debate history, Woods is able to find the meaningful participation of white, middle-class women where it was presumed absent.In a different spatial register, Debating Women makes clear that nineteenth-century women’s participation in debate required the claiming of material space to foment “argument cultures” (that is, collaborative education in listening, critical thinking, eloquence, and evidentiary support). Argument cultures require spaces for argument to flourish, and the collegiate debate stage, as well as the activity of argument, were seen as “out of place” and “out of taste” for women (Woods 2018, x). Consequently, women gathered secretly in forests, parlors, and dining rooms, and eventually more publicly in classrooms and auditoriums, as their activities became more authorized. To examine how women located and traveled through space to engage in debate between 1835 and 1945, Woods moves through four case studies: the American “origin” story of women’s debate at Oberlin and its ebbs and peaks over a hundred years, the seventy-year tenure of the Ladies Edinburgh Debating Society in Scotland, a debate tour of the US by three British women in 1928, and finally, the tensions and growth of gender-segregated collegiate debate in the 1920s-40s, focusing on two Pennsylvania universities.For Woods, space is less an organizing feature than an explanation for how women skirted the prohibition of their participation in debate. Perhaps this is why Woods characterizes argument “as travel,” a “movement across and between spaces for argument” (17). For instance, because women could be audience members for male debaters in an Oberlin auditorium but not stand at the podium themselves, they moved outside to the forest; when it got too cold to stay there, they moved their meetings to an African American woman’s parlor on the edge of town. Yet, she is also careful to examine why the “escape into the woods” is both alluring to contemporary feminist scholars (it seems risky and brave) and difficult to examine now with any certainty. As Woods explains, the very slipperiness of its ephemeral history has made it malleable into legend for future generations of women’s debaters and debate scholars. Woods has “remapped” the history of debate, reconfiguring its boundaries so that women’s secret societies and dining-room debates could come into view, even as she acknowledges some of those vistas may be mythical in nature and missing diverse participants.While Enoch and Woods’ books each track changes across approximately a century, Kristy Maddux’s Practicing Citizenship drills down into a single event – the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 – facilitating a sustained focus on one massive, complex rhetorical situation. Maddux’s overt concern is less about space than citizenship, which she describes as a “set of repeated behaviors” (2019, 4). Yet, space nonetheless becomes a crucial variable in her analysis, as the location of the fair provided the unprecedented opportunity for hundreds of thousands of diverse women to “practice citizenship” together long before they were granted the right to vote. The book is organized around four practices of citizenship – deliberative democracy, racial uplift, organized womanhood, and economic participation – performed in the women’s congresses at the exposition. The lavish and monumental space of the fair facilitated this physical gathering, which then “projected the anxieties and aspirations” of the Gilded Age for the world (182).Any gathering of women in a space is, of course, an opportunity to come together, but it is also an opportunity for tension and the exposure of difference. Maddux emphasizes how the limited space for women participants created the conditions for dissension within the crowds of women who “jockeyed” to control the process, speak on the stage, and showcase in the exhibition hall (30). These tensions were primarily political (some associations and women were in favor of suffrage and some were not) and racial. African American women were largely excluded from the organizational process and exhibits, except to serve as exhibits themselves or as one of only seven among hundreds of white women speakers. Maddux’s keen awareness of tensions between women within space informs her methodology. Aware of the colossal, surreal nature of a six-month-long event that drew twenty-eight million ticketed visitors, Maddux curates a multivocal, scattershot collection of materials. From programs of the speeches delivered at the women’s congresses and upwards of sixteen speeches per chapter, she finds both shared practices among women (those practices of citizenship that organize the book) and intense debate and political maneuvering between them. Indeed, it is the deliberation and dissension negotiated in the congresses that help demonstrate the practice of citizenship. Maddux’s approach to examining a single, though monumental, event bounded by space highlights for feminist rhetorics how spatial constraints foment tensions between those who grapple for prominence within them.Taken together, these recent books illustrate that attention to both literal and figurative space in the study of rhetoric emphasizes questions of inclusivity and exclusivity, tension and consensus, and movement and constraint. And, implicitly, they raise pressing questions for feminist rhetoricians to consider: How do we study the construction and consequences of dominant discourses without focusing primarily on white, middle-class women, a population over-represented in feminist rhetorical history and the profession alike? How do we balance concern for collective rhetoric and feminist organizing with attention to difference, dissension, and exclusion among women? Finally, how do we bridge our many feminist histories of the nineteenth century with twentieth and twenty-first century intersectional rhetorics? These questions have become more exigent as we navigate the constraints and possibility of our spaces (and the value of our work) in a simultaneous global pandemic and national reckoning with racism in the United States. Social distancing, differential health outcomes, housing insecurity, and the policing of people of color in public space bring new urgency to the meaning and rhetoric of space.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.