Persuasive Acts

Happy Women's History Month! This week we hear from women on a myriad of issues particular to them, which, in turn, impact us all

Persuasive acts: women’s rhetorics in the twenty-first century

[ed.] by Shari J. Stenberg and Charlotte Hogg Pittsburgh, 2020
478p bibl index, 9780822966135 $35.00, 9780822987512

The power of this collection of 21st-century rhetoric lies in its comprehensiveness. The content and styles represented expand the import of women’s voices around the globe. Each voice adds to the cornucopia of issues impinging on women and affecting the entire human community. The volume comprises 70 pieces divided into sections devoted to the rhetorics of civic engagement, feminism, protest and resistance, education, work and labor, and identities and the body, and it demonstrates a wide variety of rhetorical means—using cartoons to point out absurdities, weaving false words into fabric, making a statement by removing a political symbol, and public speaking using neologisms, numbers, facts, minute explanations, and arguments. All of these are part of the broad concept of rhetoric. Providing insight into current forces, civil, sexual, educational, and so on, these many pieces recount both the most intimate of women’s experiences and the most publicly celebrated. Continuing Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s)ed. by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald (CH, Feb’02, 39-3211), the present volume offers instruction and topics for discussion for all, but especially women.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
Reviewer: 
T. B. Dykeman, formerly, Fairfield University
Subject: Humanities – Communication
Choice Issue: Oct 2020