| dc.description.abstract | Abstract This dissertation presents the teaching practices of temperance reformer Frances E. Willard. While Willard's work in temperance reform has been well documented, the pedagogical aspect of her life has not. I argue that Willard's form of rhetorical pedagogy enacted at two institutions--the Evanston College for Ladies and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union--retained the focus on creating a Christian citizen-orator often presented in histories as diminishing in importance in American educational institutions. Willard was positioned to continue this work despite its wane at the academy. She found that her form of pedagogy, which maintained an equilibrium between intellectual stimulation and ethical behavior, came into conflict with the late-nineteenth century academy's emphasis on purely intellectual endeavor and professionalization. At the Evanston College for Ladies, which later became the Woman's College at Northwestern University, Willard began a teaching practice that she later continued at the WCTU, an alternative educational institution. This practice emphasized spiritual guidance, engagement in social issues of the day, and a public voicing of this engagement in school and city newspapers and debates. In both institutions, Willard emphasized the means of delivering this social engagement, encouraging her students to be self-consciously "womanly," or in accordance with the expectations of middle-class Christianity. I present Willard's practice using the approach of historical ethnography. This inductive method does not provide a predetermined critical frame for the archival material. Instead, the documents are presented first, followed by conclusions driven by historically contemporaneous observations. Archival material is provided from Willard and her students in each institution--at the College and the Temperance Union--in an effort to create a dialogue of call and response, a voicing from both teacher and taught. I present an in-depth perspective of Willard's work in two different locations and provide context to these practices through Willard's speeches, books, journals, private letters, and autobiography. Those taught are presented in the Northwestern school paper, the Tripod, Chicago newspapers, meeting minutes of the school's literary societies and the Temperance Union, Union worker manuals, autobiographies, tributes to Willard, and private letters. I conclude that Willard's approach, which emphasizes many of the educational practices of an earlier period, was maintained at the WCTU with great success because it created an intellectual culture ensuring that female rhetoricians would be heard on platform, pulpit and paper. Jane Robson Graham Department of English The University of Kansas December 2008 | |
