The Lady's Rhetorick (1707): The Tip of the Iceberg of Women's Rhetorical Education in Enlightenment France and Britain

Abstract

The Lady's Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women's rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women's and men's rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook's uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women's informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”

J. Matlock's Young ladies guide to the knowledge of the English tongue (1715): contextualising the first grammar of English for ladies

“…Despite the cultural cachet of having been ‘Done from the French, with some improvements’, the contemporary and anonymously authored Lady's Rhetorick (1707: t.p.) seems to have missed its target, with no subsequent editions (Smith ). But the Ladies Library (1714) was a popular compilation, published by the canny Jacob Tonson and into its seventh edition by 1772 (ESTC), no doubt aided by the title page's claim that it had been ‘published by Mr. Steele’.…”