This text by Deborah Sweeney covered the spectrum of law,
the styles used, and how women played a role. This is an admirable goal to try
and bring women out of the private salons and into the public realm of
rhetoric. However, it is my opinion that Sweeney was not able to achieve this
goal in this text. Before the specific section that is subtitled “Women in
Court”, the count for pronouns and specific-gendered nouns for women was only
forty-two. These words include: women, wife, daughter, she, and etc. On the other
hand in the brief section that is devoted to women the number of male-gendered
nouns and pronouns hold a count of twenty-four. Six and half pages are devoted
to the general themes of the author and women are rarely mentioned. The page
and half segment dedicated to women is heavily littered with male-gendered
words. Therefore subconsciously the author is not pushing women into the public
realm but keeping them in this private space of rhetoric. Why is it then if she
is writing a piece on rhetoric of Egyptian law and women does she suppress the
female sex into a tiny section?
There is an
interesting quote on page 100: “These written records tend to summarize the
dialogue, weeding out the repetitions, and redundancies of spoken language.
They do not necessarily represent the exact words uttered.” This quote I find
connects to another quote: “Maybe women made an effort to adopt male speech
patterns in order to succeed in a male-dominated environment, but it is also
possible that the recording scribes standardized spoken utterances, as they
summarized them for the written record” (106). It seems that stylistic choices
are important to Egyptian law when speaking but the recording of stylistic
choices is not necessary. This standardization of written accounts lessens the
opportunities that women have to be in the public spotlight. Their language is
not longer distinguishable from that of their counterparts. Although, it would
be of interest to see texts from women of the scribal class who recorded
proceedings with women. Would their recordings be standardized or would they
record the unique utterances of women? I
would also like to point out here it is in a male dominated area of the scribal
class that suppresses the voice and language of women. Although it is also suppressing
individuality of the citizens of Egypt, but that is a separate issue at the
moment.
Overall, it is in my opinion that women were ignored and put
into their own private spaces both in Egypt and in this text. Even though it is
stated that women had the same civic rights as men they were still considered
to be less than men and even though this text is has its own section about
women it is still considerable less than men.
I found your comments very though provoking, and I think it is very important to look at an author’s argument and assess how well he or she was able to make the argument. I agree that the text did not quite meet its goal.
ReplyDeleteIn thinking about this, I’m reminded of what I read on the sites given to us by Emily. On the one site, Sweeny lists letters written by women as an available text for study. However, her work focuses on legal texts and how women can move into the public realm of rhetoric through analysis of these types of documents. I wonder if it wouldn’t be more productive to look at Ancient Egyptian letters, which we know were written by men and women, as opposed to legal texts which were written about women by mostly male scribes. By looking at letters, a rhetor would be able to compare language use between genders, which, I think, would more clearly demonstrate characteristics of female Egyptian rhetoric. I wonder if this has been addressed by other scholars, as it seems a logical as well as beneficial decision!
I too found this aspect of the article frustrating. Based on the title not just of the article, but the section "Women in Court" I was expecting a more extensive look at female rhetoric. However, this article like many of the other ones we have read, just sort of mentioned that women haven't much of a place in rhetoric as oppose to really getting into really getting into the effect that female rhetors have had on rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteI found your observation of the number of female v. male pronouns interesting and I agree with your statement that "subconsciously the author is not pushing women into the public realm but keeping them in this private space of rhetoric."
I think your approach of counting the pronouns used in the text was very effective in demonstrating what I found to be frustrating about this text. When I saw the title, I was expecting women to be incorporated throughout the entire text, rather than just having one small section, while the court's regular structure and funcitons dominated most of it. Having most of the text be how the court normally works, while one separate section was about women made it seem as if male domination is the norm, and women are a special circumstance. Seeing women as "other" rather than just a part of life is an issue that has come up in various rhetorics and is clearly demonstrated in this text.
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