1st Edition

American Women Activists and Autobiography Rhetorical Lives

By Heather Ostman Copyright 2022
192 Pages
by Routledge

192 Pages
by Routledge

192 Pages
by Routledge

American Women Activists and Autobiography examines the feminist rhetorics that emerge in six very different activists’ autobiographies, as they simultaneously tell the stories of unconventional women’s lives and manifest the authors’ arguments for social and political change, as well as provide blueprints for creating tectonic shifts in American society. Exploring self-narratives by six... Read more

Introduction: American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives

Chapter 1: The Progressive Cassandra: Rhetoric in Jane Addam’s Twenty Years at Hull-House

Chapter 2: Anarchism and the Rhetoric of Womanhood: Emma Goldman’s Living My Life

Chapter 3: Dorothy Day and the Rhetoric of Paradox

Chapter 4: Angela Davis: An Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Race Consciousness

Chapter 5: Rhetorical Sovereignty and the Gendered Body in Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman

Chapter 6: Betty Friedan’s Life So Far and New Activist Paradigms

Biography

Heather Ostman is the author or editor of multiple books, including Kate Chopin and Catholicism (2020). She teaches English at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, NY, where she also serves as Director of the Humanities Institute.

'Heather Ostman approaches the autobiographical projects of Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan by looking at what they shared and what they did not, especially regarding the authors’ feminist rhetorics and the various ways their lives and social justice causes were entangled. This premise is particularly exciting for scholars interested in the relationship between life writing and social justice. Ostman’s volume can be read as an evolution of themes (womanhood, sisterhood,
motherhood, marriage, class, race, gendered body, conversion) threaded along each chapter.'

Ana Belén Martínez García, Associate Professor of English at the University of Navarra