Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2002
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 183-98.
Abstract
The library in the western Nebraska town of Paxton (population approximately 500) is small, and my grandmother was president of the library board for many years. When I was younger, I learned about the history of the library from her research and writing published in the local county newspaper. In write-ups for both the library's twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries, she described how women "were found to be very handy with hammer and saw" when starting the library.1 I saw my grandma frequently and had been hearing her stories for years, but here were her words in a newspaper, which to me was identified as a place for public consumption. This was one of the first examples I recall of the boundaries of public and private writing converging. My own grandma was only one example. In the community in which I lived, older women contributed memoirs to the town library, wrote for the newspaper, and wrote histories of the town, churches, and school. These women not only shaped my writing life but were responsible for the rhetorical education of others in the community through these literacy practices. In my explication of the kinds of literacy practices of women in Paxton, I show that in this particular setting, their rhetorical practices do not fit our definitions of the private sphere so often used to situate women's reading and writing lives, though that sphere does offer an important space where rhetorical education is undertaken.2
Scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric have long investigated the role of public vs. private lives; the study of rhetorical figures from antiquity involved the Greek polis, and the legacy of the "separate spheres" is traced from that historical period. However, as Kate Ronald points out, it is scholars' reading of history that created these binaries: "[C]lassical rhetoric did indeed value personal discourse, but finally .... the distinction between personal and public discourse is one that would not have made sense to classical rhetoricians, nor is it useful to us today."3 She explains that persuasion of the self was often an integral part of persuading an audience; thus the personal and public were intertwined.
For women in Paxton, their merging of public and private both creates and reflects Great Plains culture-much of the reading and writing they did focused on the western Nebraska region and can, I believe, tell us much about life for women on the Plains. Cary W. de Wit notes in a study on women's sense of place that few studies of contemporary Plains women of any ethnic background currently exist.4 Over the past quarter century, while scholarship on Great Plains women has greatly increased, much of the work has focused on the experiences of 19th century white women and their settlement and travel across the overland trails.5 Images from this time are reinforced in the enduring prairie women from literature: O. E. Rolvaag's Beret, Willa Cather's Antonia, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Of course, adding to our understanding of what has become the defining period in Plains history and culture is critical; similarly, exploring the ways contemporary Plains women respond to and exist within the context of that history is necessary. Studying the ways in which women's writing practices have been at work in the Plains at any time in its history is one way to understand how the culture is shaped for and by them.
Comments
Copyright 2002 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln