Genre, Location, and Mary Austin'sEthos

Inventing a Space to Speak: Ethos, Agency and United States' Woman Suffrage Cookbooks (1886–1916)

“…Risa Applegarth's 'Genre, Location, and Mary Austin's Ethos', Patricia Bizzell's 'Frances Willard, Phoebe Palmer, and the Ethos of the Methodist Woman Preacher', Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's 'Agency: Promiscuous and Protean', Julie Nelson Christoph's 'Reconceiving Ethos in Relation to the Personal: Strategies of Placement in Pioneer Writing', Sonja Foss's 'Rhetorical Criticism as Synecdoche for Agency', Casey Ryan Kelly's 'Women's Rhetorical Agency in the American West: The New Penelope', and Nedra Reynolds' 'Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Activity', all examine ethos in women's writing. 8 Applegarth, Bizzell, Christoph, Kelly, and Reynolds explore women's texts of the nineteenth century. The women who produced the suffrage cookbooks and those included in these studies are similar in both time and place, if not in purpose.…”

“…Applegarth provides another way to think about community expectations and locational ethos: 'Ethos traces a boundary between individual, strategic performance and the constraints of social norms'. 12 The 'boundary' creates metaphorical spaces that rhetors and their audiences inhabit through their values. To conceptualise ethos, Applegarth and Reynolds look specifically to how communities develop 'boundaries' or rhetorical spaces that delimit rhetors' persuasive actions.…”

“…To be most persuasive rhetors should locate themselves in the space that allows the most interplay between their own and the communal values, interpreting 'ethos as location, grounded in material spaces and drawing persuasive power from the shared symbolic resonance of such spaces'. 15 The space itself has its own ethos, and the audience's attention to the 'symbolic resonance' includes their awareness of the space's communal values. For example, a religious leader or congregant speaking within a place of worship is expected to uphold that community's shared values.…”

“…Rather, ethos 'requires negotiation between individual rhetorical choices [agency] and meaningful social categories'. 17 Rhetors use their agency to manipulate and build the spaces from which they speak. Campbell admits that 'authors/rhetors are materially limited, linguistically constrained, historically situated subjects'.…”

“…Applegarth describes this strategic location as a process in which 'rhetors learn to enact culturally specific notions of "good will, good sense, and good moral character" through their participation in particular communities and their habituation, within places, to shared norms that make ethos effective'. 51 In their opening paragraphs, Burr and Jennings wrote to the 'particular communities' they needed to persuade by situating themselves in the audience's preferred rhetorical space.…”