This book is a history of the rhetorical instruction generated by educators who taught at three institutions founded to serve middle-class White women, African Americans, and workers in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A detailed overview is provided of the curricula produced by Mary Augusta Jordan (Smith College), Hallie Quinn Brown (Wilberforce University), and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz (Brookwood Labor College). The chapters are: (1) "Educational Politics: Rhetorical Instruction and the Disenfranchised Student"; (2) "Gender and Rhetorical Study: The Pedagogical Legacy of Mary Augusta Jordan"; (3) "Elocution and African American Culture: The Pedagogy of Hallie Quinn Brown"; (4) "Ideology and Rhetorical Instruction: Brookwood Labor College"; and (5) "Borderlands, Intersections, and Ongoing History: Rhetoric and Activism in Higher Education." (Contains 174 references.) (SLD)