Rhetorical Lives: American Women Activists and Autobiography

FAIN: FT-278187-21

Heather E. Ostman
Westchester Community College (Valhalla, NY 10595-1550)

Research and writing of a book on the rhetorical strategies used in the autobiographies of American women activists. 

This book-length project explores the rhetorical strategies within the autobiographies of six diverse women at the forefront of social and political change in the United States over the last 100 years: Jane Addams (1910), Emma Goldman (1934), Dorothy Day (1952), Angela Davis (1974), Mary Crow Dog (1990), and Betty Friedan (2000). The study looks at the ways each woman activist used gender as well as the conversion narrative and other conventions as rhetorical strategies for the advancement of their individual visions for a new, transformed world.