Sappho's prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the 21st century. But not without peril. Sappho's writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women's voices. Sappho's hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion - across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations - in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them.
'Gripping' Vogue 'Empowering' Cosmopolitan 'Joyful' Financial Times 'Eye-popping' Daily Mail When her 22-year-marriage suddenly ended, 47-year-old mother of three Laura expected life as she knew it to be over. What she hadn't expected: - An incredible one-night stand - A new-found sexual appetite - Ten men in eight months - That there is plenty of fun to be had after 40 From G-spots to bald spots, dirty talk to dating fiascos, Available is the unflinchingly honest, empowering, and humorous true story of one woman's love life after divorce. 'A real page-turner [...] Unexpected, original, funny and sometimes deeply infuriating, Laura Friedman Williams has so much to say about what we expect of women's sexuality. I loved it' Viv Groskop author of How to Own the Room
"Culled from previously unpublished material, this collection of writing and photography by John Howard Griffin was taken from the period during which he was writing and revising what would be his most famous book, the bestselling Black Like Me. Living in exile in Mexico at the time, along with his young family and aging parents, Griffin had been forced from his home town of Mansfield, Texas, by death threats from local white racists. Knowing that he would become a controversial public figure once he returned to the states, he kept an intimate journal of his ethical queries on racism and injustice--and to escape from his worries he also immersed himself in the culture of the Tarascan Indians of Michoacan. Accordingly, Robert Bonazzi's introduction contains substantial unpublished portions of the journals, and the main body of the book is made up of three essays by Griffin--one on photography and two about trips he made to photograph rural Mexico"--Publisher's description.
“I say that even later someone will remember us.”—Sappho, Fragment 147, sixth century, BC Sappho’s prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the twenty-first century. But not without peril. Sappho’s writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women’s voices. Sappho’s hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion—across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations—in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them. Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do so in the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women’s rhetoric. Women whose voices are central to such scholarship are included here, such as Aspasia (a contemporary of Plato’s), Margery Kempe, Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells. Added are influential works on what it means to write as a woman—by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Alice Walker, and Hélène Cixous. Public “manifestos” on the rights of women by Hortensia, Mary Astell, Maria Stewart, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, and Audre Lorde also join the discourse. But Available Means searches for rhetorical tradition in less obvious places, too. Letters, journals, speeches, newspaper columns, diaries, meditations, and a fable (Rachel Carson’s introduction to Silent Spring) also find places in this room. Such unconventional documents challenge traditional notions of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery, and blur the boundaries between public and private discourse. Included, too, are writers whose voices have not been heard in any tradition. Ritchie and Ronald seek to “unsettle” as they expand the women’s rhetorical canon. Arranged chronologically, Available Means is designed as a classroom text that will allow students to hear women speaking to each other across centuries, and to see how women have added new places from which arguments can be made. Each selection is accompanied by an extensive headnote, which sets the reading in context. The breadth of material will allow students to ask such questions as “How might we define women’s rhetoric? How have women used and subverted traditional rhetoric?” A topical index at the end of the book provides teachers a guide through the rhetorical riches. Available Means will be an invaluable text for rhetoric courses of all levels, as well as for women’s studies courses.
