The Newberry Seminar in Early American History and Culture

Co-Sponsored by the University of Chicago, DePaul University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Northern Illinois University, and Northwestern University

Thursday, March 18, from 3:30pm to 5:30pm

"The Female Cicero: Young Women's Oratory and Gendered Public Participation in the American 1790s"
Carolyn Eastman, University of Texas at Austin

It has long been a tenet of American women's history that women were, for the most part, excluded from public speaking during the early republic, a silence that was broken controversially by women reformers of the 1820s and 30s. This essay examines young women's oratory within the common school and academy environments, milieux that reveal that girls learned elocutionary and oratorical skills alongside boys and regularly practiced those skills before explicitly public audiences of community members. Even more significant, their educations in speaking skills reveals the extent to which contemporaries had far different conceptions of what constituted "public" speaking - conceptions that have important ramifications for how we understand gender and the public sphere of the era.

Scholl Center seminars present scholars' works-in-progress. All papers are pre-circulated. If you plan to attend, you may receive a paper by contacting Ginger Shulick via email or phone.

We encourage faculty members to call the seminar to the attention of graduate students.

The full schedule for this and other Scholl Center seminars is available online at our website.