Sophia Mertson, Staff Writer
Sewanee Professor Melody Lehn is getting national attention in academic circles for her focus on an area of rhetoric that’s gotten too little attention: the contributions of women to public speaking, argumentation and the art of oratory.
An anthology Dr. Lehn co-authored with Furman University professor Camille Lewis, One Hundred Years of Women Debating the Equal Rights Amendment: An Anthology 1923-2023, was recently released. She’s been a recent guest on a podcast at Quinnipiac University and also contributed a chapter in a new anthology on American first ladies released this month by the Cambridge University Press. Last spring, Lehn was also asked to give the Legacy Lecture for the National First Ladies Library and Museum in Canton, Ohio, delivering the lecture on Zoom from Sewanee.
“For women, we have to just get a little bit more insistent and creative when we want to make sure that they are part of a central part of the story, an integral part of the story rather than tacked on,” said Lehn, associate professor for the Rhetoric and Women’s and Gender Studies Department at The University of the South. “Women have always been rhetorical. We just haven’t always been as good about acknowledging it as such.”
In the Sewanee classroom, Lehn’s passion for elevating the importance of women in rhetoric is both surprising and infectious.
“When I ask students who are the ‘great speakers,’ they might think of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s very rare that women’s names are cited in any sort of popular culture, among the great lists of speakers. You don’t usually find women there. And when you do, it tends to be the same two or three. It’s Susan B. Anthony or Eleanor Roosevelt and maybe Sojourner Truth. What I’m interested in, though, are the women who have rhetorically labored behind the scenes, perhaps, and have not been granted that much visibility or public access.
“That’s one of the reasons that I’ve been really interested in the debates about the Equal Rights Amendment because there are women who were serving in Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, and they were working side by side and just trying to get access to the floor of Congress to give a speech,” she said. “I think this reflects one of my interests in studying women’s rhetoric. How do women bridge differences to come together and work toward common goals?”
Lehn earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of Memphis. She told The Purple that her interest in rhetoric began in the fourth grade, when she was shy in class and was encouraged by a teacher to try interpretive speech. “For me, it was very much about finding my voice. And I talk about this a lot when I teach public speaking. It’s not just about finding your voice as an instrument to communicate [but rather] thinking about finding your voice in terms of what do you have to say?”
Just as that teacher shaped her then, Lehn says her views now are often influenced by what she hears from students in the classroom. “I hear students make really clear and compelling arguments and I have to sit back and say, ‘Wow, I just learned something.’”
Her classroom experiences at Sewanee have also significantly inspired and shaped her research. She says her new anthology was inspired by conversations in her RHET 331 class “Voices of American Women.” “This new limited series came out on Hulu and it was called ‘Mrs. America’, and it was all about the Equal Rights Amendment debate at its most contentious and its most public,” She said. “[My students] were interested in looking more deeply into the controversy.”
Likewise, a new class she is teaching this spring, Rhetoric of the Equal Rights Amendment, was inspired by students’ curiosity.
“The idea for the class came from Sewanee students themselves. We’re looking at a public controversy that has been the subject of debate for more than a century, and it’s the kind of unique seminar that’s possible at an institution like ours,” she said. “There’s a real intersection with my teaching and students. This is Sewanee students shaping the curriculum about a topic that’s literally unfolding around us.”