Publisher's Synopsis
Studies of women's rhetorics to date have focused largely on the civic arena and the home. These two spheres are clearly important, but they ignore another vital arena: the workplace. Women at Work presents fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore, for example, women's "labor evangelism" in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women's trade unions, the rhetorical "branding" of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work. Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.
