Women's Irony Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories

Three case studies of women's political discourse between 1600 and 1900-examining the work of Anne Askew, Anne Hutchinson, and Helen M. Gougar-demonstrate how reading historical texts ironically complicates the theoretical relationships between women and agency, language and history, and archival location and memory. Interwoven throughout are shorter case studies from twentieth-century performances, revealing irony's consciousness-raising potential for the present and the future.
Ultimately, Women's Irony suggests alternative ways to question women's histories and consider how contemporary feminist discourse might be better historicized. Graban challenges critical methods in rhetoric, asking scholars in rhetoric and its related disciplines-composition, communication, and English studies-to rethink how they produce historical knowledge and use archives to recover women's performances in political situations.