This study reveals the feminist rhetoric of three working women of the early 20th century: actress Mae West, screenwriter and novelist Anita Loos, and journalist and publisher Marcet Haldeman-Julius. The study integrates ideas from feminist historiography, rhetorical materialism, and posthumanism in order to expand the definition of feminist rhetoric. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Recovers feminist rhetors not known for being feminist in their time to offer a more capacious approach to feminist historiography and our definition of feminist rhetoric.
Untimely Women recovers the work of three early-twentieth-century working women, none of whom history has understood as feminists or rhetors: cinema icon and memoirist, Mae West; silent film screenwriter and novelist, Anita Loos; and journalist and mega-publisher, Marcet Haldeman-Julius. While contemporary scholarship tends to highlight and recover women who most resemble academic feminists in their uses of propositional rhetoric, Jason Barrett-Fox uses what he terms a medio-materialist historiography to emphasize the different kinds of political and ontological gender-power that emerged from the inscriptional strategies these women employed to navigate and critique male gatekeepersfrom movie stars to directors to editors to abusive husbands.
In recasting the work of West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius in this way, Barrett-Fox reveals the material and ontological ramifications of their forms of invention, particularly their ability to tell trauma in ways that reach beyond their time to raise the consciousness of audiences unavailable to them in their lifetimes.
Untimely Women thus accomplishes important historical and rhetorical work that not only brings together feminist historiography, rhetorical materialism, and posthumanism but also redefines what counts as feminist rhetoric.
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