‘Expression is power’: Gender, residual culture and political aspiration at the Cumnock School of Oratory, 1870–1900

Abstract

This article investigates the ways in which late-nineteenth-century students at Northwestern University's Cumnock School of Oratory mobilised elocution training and parlour performance to foster mixed-gender public discourse. I use student publications to reconstruct parlour meetings in which women and men adapted traditions of conversational speech to allocate artistic and political participation equally across genders. Women expanded their expressive range and political aspirations, while men gained new understandings of manliness and women's rights. With the onset of muscular masculinity in the 1890s, oratory students reworked their performance culture into an act of campus resistance and a blueprint for social reform.