"Silent Work for Suffrage": The Discreet Rhetoric of Professor June Rose Colby and the Sapphonian Society 1892-1908

During the early twentieth century, Illinois State Normal University Professor June Rose Colby employed a number of discreet rhetorical strategies to counteract the moral panic over the feminization of education on her own university campus. In particular, this article analyzes how Colby used a women's literary society-the Sapphonian Society-to prepare her women students to confront the rhetoric of a perceived "woman peril in education" (Chadwick 109). Colby's "discreet rhetoric" suggests the continuing need for historical scholarship that may reveal the often tacit, yet wholly subversive, rhetorical strategies of "silent" academic feminists.