"Imagining Rhetoric examines how women's writing developed in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and how women imagined using their educations to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation.".

"Using a variety of sources, including novels, textbooks, letters, diaries, and memories, Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen examine the provenance, authority, and evolution of what they term "liberatory" civic rhetoric - from the early days of the republic through the antebellum years - especially as it shaped women's rhetoric and education.

Imagining Rhetoric recovers what women in the early U.S. imagined instruction and practice in composition should be, and shows how this imagination shaped the possibilities and limitations of female civic rhetoric."--BOOK JACKET.