SOURCE: Lassner, Phyllis. “Feminist Responses to Rogerian Argument.” Rhetoric Review 8, no. 2 (spring 1990): 220-32.

[In the following essay, Lassner examines the responses of female writing students to Rogerian persuasive techniques.]

When Rogerian argument was introduced in the 1970s, it was hailed as a heuristic which would “break the stalemate” that occurs when writers close themselves off from feeling the validity of an opposing argument (Hairston, “Carl Rogers' Alternative to Traditional Rhetoric” 373). Young, Becker, and Pike presented Rogerian argument as an alternative to traditional argument on the grounds that instead of using logic to destroy the opponent's case and legitimize your own, “Rogerian argument … serves an exploratory function, helping you to analyze the conditions under which the position of either side is valid” (Rhetoric: Discovery and Change 282). In more recent years, the bloom has been fading from those enthusiastic claims, and yet Rogerian argument is still very appealing to those who want to teach writing as “real communication with people, especially about sensitive or controversial issues” (Hairston, “Using Carl Rogers” 50). Particularly because there are contradictions in teaching academic literacy while showing sensitivity to students' various cultural backgrounds, Carl Rogers' “humane rhetoric” is attractive (Hairston, “Alternative” 373). Rogers encourages empathy instead of opposition, dialogue instead of argument. These are views that reflect the experiences of teachers who have found that traditional argumentation only inhibits self-reflection and the willingness to engage with the critical argument of another.¹ Likewise, the criticisms of Rogerian Rhetoric have come from teachers.

Any attempt to translate Carl Rogers' theories into practice must base its claims on his assumptions. To use his “person-centered approach,” based on “empathic understanding” of another's feelings and experience, teachers would have to consider how the assignment affected, not only themselves, but the students who write Rogerian argument.² While we teachers can wax poetic over Rogers' humanistic escape from more authoritarian models of discourse, we return to our position on high so long as we prescribe what is good for our students without challenging our own assumptions and his.

My purpose here is to attempt such a challenge by exploring the responses of students in my “Women and Writing” course to writing Rogerian argument. I don't claim that their responses can be universalized. But in the very specific nature of what they have to say, these students present an authentic individual response to the affective claims made on behalf of Rogers' empathetic theories of communication.³ In no way is this an objective, scientific study, but rather an effort to understand the conditions and contexts which shaped an almost entirely negative response.

When I asked this group of sixteen women students how they liked writing a Rogerian argument, I was greeted with jeers, boos, and this statement:

I hated it. The Rogerian model is male, masculinist, and denialist. It leaves no space to be persuasive with anger. It denies that women have a right to be angry at being left out of most methods of persuasion and that anger is worthwhile listening to, even if it's threatening, because for women to be recognized, everyone needs to know how they feel.

I reeled with disappointment. I had viewed this assignment as a perfect opportunity to bring together the student-centered values of Composition and Women's Studies in a course which fulfills a University-of-Michigan graduation requirement for upper-level writing. Readings and discussions of composition and feminist theory would become more “real,” I felt, in the experience of arguing about issues that were central in these students' lives. In turn, I assumed that arguing on behalf of both sides of an issue would test their own assumptions and claims and “humanize” their opponents'. Turning my dismay into a call for inquiry and action, I responded with a challenge: “OK, your next writing assignment is to tell my why.”

As I try to understand both the substance and the passion of my students' denouncement, I look at the assumptions of those who promoted the application of Rogers' theories to composition, some critiques of his theories and their application, and then weave together my students' statements with my analysis of their implication for teaching writing.

Maxine Hairston and Young, Becker, and Pike introduced Carl Rogers' theories to composition studies.⁴ Hairston extrapolated guidelines from Rogers' thought to develop a self-reflective method of argumentation which encourages writers to be as self-critical as they would become empathetic with the positions of the other. Rogerian argument would thus provide a heuristic by which students come to understand the assumptions and biases on which their positions are based, as well as the positions, attitudes, and values of those who differ from them. Paul Bator summarizes Young, Becker, and Pike's goal as learning to sense “when it is appropriate to confront ‘opponents’ and when it is more advantageous to strive for change through mutual acceptance and understanding by each party of the other's view” (“Aristotelian and Rogerian Rhetoric” 427).

The assumptions of Rogerian argument have been challenged by a growing awareness of the political implications of all rhetorics. In “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” James Berlin observes that the structure of a rhetoric will “favor one version of economic, social, and political arrangements over other versions” and is therefore never “a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others because it is always already serving certain ideological claims” (477). As Michael Awkward reminds us, no writing can be empathetic unless it considers the reader's ideological assumptions as “a politics of interpretation that is determined by race … and gender” (“Race, Gender, and the Politics of Reading” 5). For what constitutes understanding and communication is shaped by the ways we experience our cultural identities as we relate to each other and formulate “sensitive or controversial issues.”

Rogers' person-centered communication is designed to enable us to learn to live with new knowledge about others, but as James P. Zappen points out, this can lead to manipulation (“Carl Rogers and Political Rhetoric” 107). For even though Rogers' psychology validates both the “independence and integration of the individual” and questions “any presupposition of social cohesion,” it also presumes a definition of “the unity and integrity of the individual” (Zappen 102, 106, 105).⁵ This definition in turn is socially constructed on a foundation of cultural hegemony and one towards which the client or reader is being guided to accept. In order to avoid manipulation, the “politics of interpretation” deeply embedded in the ideology of humanist therapy must be considered. Only then can we begin to understand, much less accept, the goal “of facilitating change by striving for mutual understanding and cooperation with the audience” (Bator 429).

If the threat of manipulation is present in nondirective therapy, where clients are encouraged to shape the terms and structure of their treatment, it becomes highlighted in writing. Lisa Ede points out that Rogers' wish to have the therapist's empathy replace judgment and guidance requires active dialogue; this is impossible in writing.⁶ In Rogerian argument the writer's stance looks nondirective and active because it states the opposition's position, but in fact guides the reader to accept the writer's arguments as fair and empathetic. As Ede and Nathaniel Teich observe, to translate Rogers' humanistic therapy into a “formula” or “rhetoric” may be a contradiction in terms, since written argumentation still assumes that one side will win (Teich, “Rogerian Problem-Solving and the Rhetoric of Argumentation” 53). Ede notes that “Young, Becker, and Pike consistently call the reader ‘the opponent’” and constantly refer to “winning as a strategy to gain the reader's attention” (“Is Rogerian Argument Really Rogerian?” 45). If writers of Rogerian argument are out to win, they are clearly very different from the therapist who submerges her own needs and adapts to the client's ego by changing her style of discourse in response to the client's needs.

For those who do not recognize themselves as worthy opponents with a fair chance of winning, Rogerian rhetoric can be as inhibiting and as constraining as any other form of argumentation. As Jim Corder shows, before we can build bridges between opponents, we must “face the flushed, feverish, quakey, shakey, angry, scared, hurt, shocked, disappointed, alarmed, outraged … condition that a person comes to when his or her narrative is opposed by a genuinely contending narrative” (“Argument as Emergence” 21). Feminist scholars have shown how far women have to go before they can even face that contending narrative. This is because women feel they must capitulate to the the values of the majority culture in which they live. Engaging in a person-centered dialogue fails to acknowledge women's ambivalent relations to culture, the fact that although the language of the majority culture does not always fit their experiences, they often behave as though it does. Because women and other marginalized people don't always see themselves represented either at all or accurately in their culture, they often find language to be inhibiting rather than expressive. Hairston's claim that neutral language improves communication is therefore problematic because in the experience of many no language is neutral, nondirective, or nonjudgmental.

Historically, some women writers have resisted being coerced into accepting the claims of traditional rhetorical forms by concealing their feelings. In order to even find an audience, they expressed their experiences in a rhetoric of disguise.⁷ Women's writing has been suppressed, according to Joanna Russ, because their concerns are judged as too limited because too personal, and their emotions as interfering with rational discourse.⁸ This is as true today as it was in the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Brontë. Pamela Annas observes that when her women students internalize “a sense of audience—the academic establishment,” there is a struggle in “sensing that their truth, because it is new, because it challenges old beliefs, can't be contained inside the bounds of traditionally defined objectivity” (“Style as Politics” 364).

We now understand that argumentative forms are governed by different historical and psychological experiences. In academic writing women students have said that they feel assumptions about objectivity, evidence, even subject matter, do not address their experiences and in fact present them with a double bind. They must write about subjects in which women are invisible. They must use linguistic and rhetorical conventions which invalidate the logic of their experiences. And all this turns out to be for the purpose of educating women to identify with those who ignore or dismiss their concerns.

In their studies of women's responses to classroom activity and women's “ways of knowing,” feminist teachers show that women do not respond to language as though it generically represents their experience.⁹ Radical feminists have argued that as long as language represents white, middle-class, patriarchal culture as the norm, women will have to create a language of their own in order to express their experiences as they feel them. If the feelings and experiences of women neither translate readily into conventional academic language nor can be expected to be received with “unconditional acceptance” (Ede 44), then what is the experience of women students writing Rogerian argument? In “Women and Writing,” students read and write about feminist and composition theories while questioning old and new assumptions about the ways women think. In this course as in many Women's Studies courses, gender and race become categories of analysis as students explore the social construction of gender and the differing sense of self which grows out of the experiences of women of different cultures. Students are encouraged to question ideological assumptions in their readings and assignments in order to understand how learning itself is politically charged. Having read Carol Gilligan's study of women's moral choices, In a Different Voice, the class of winter 1987 wrote a Rogerian argument on a moral dilemma to which they felt particularly committed.

These students also kept journals in which they recorded how they felt about presenting both sides of the dilemma fairly, empathetically, and yet as objectively as they could, and finally about how they experienced their composing processes as liberated or constrained by this exercise. The results showed that the whole notion of communication is highly charged, that what we see ordinarily as negative, that is “communication breakdown” (Hairston, “Alternative” 374), may imply a positive move for some writers and that “acceptance and understanding” may sometimes be constraining. Of fourteen students in the class, ten felt in varying degree that Hairston's form was “easy to follow” and easy to revise once they had figured out how to “quell emotions” in order to produce the “detached writing” Hairston interprets Rogerian argument as demanding.

The steps these women writers felt it necessary to take in order to be “fair and present both sides impartially” were experienced by everyone as “unnatural.” Although the writers admitted it was a worthwhile effort to try to understand the values of their opposition, they also felt that “fair” was a judgment already biased in its suppositions. It impelled them to present the other side as equally valid in its need for recognition and protection as their own, and in a sincere voice. They said they felt out of sync with their adopted voice. Several students reported that as a result of disguising their feelings they felt powerless and isolated from those who stood on different sides of the issues they chose for argument. Hairston identifies this problem as “rhetorical stance,” and suggests projecting “a personal voice that inspires trust and acceptance” (“Alternative” 376). For these students, the rhetorical problem expressed, but also concealed and disguised an underlying one. They needed to figure out how to be comfortable in the role of “an equal” in relation to those on the other side of the issues who had failed to regard them as such. They wondered how they could be “impartial,” a frame of mind which assumes one is partial to, that is, comfortable in the style and form of the debate.

The students' papers showed attempts in every step to recognize and understand the positions of those who oppose abortion on demand, who vote against the right to private consent of homosexuals, who will not include language expressing women's experience in prayer, who will not consider pornography a civil offense, and several other positions of concern to women today. The statements made by these students in discussion and in their journals show a conjunction between their experiences and the problems studied by Ede and Zappen.

One writer turns an assumption of Rogerian argument into a question that can be applied to all the moral dilemmas the students chose to explore: “How can you really know what others feel?” Those whose experiences are marginal or run counter to the assumptions of cultural norms understand how difficult it is to recognize another when her own needs have been misunderstood, ignored, and sometimes even condemned. For a gay couple who wishes to adopt a child or for women who feel alienated from the language and ritual of religious service, the values in question on both sides of the issue legitimate the sense of self at such a basic level that each side is experienced as a threat to the other's sense of wholeness and integrity. Hairston's interlocking claims about the ability of Rogerian communication to diminish threat disregards the depth of this sense.¹⁰

How can those who feel marginalized by the social, legal, and educational institutions that structure their lives be expected to “establish an atmosphere of trust and suspend judgment” (Hairston, “Using” 51-52)? Not only do they not trust, but they feel they are not trusted. Moreover, they feel oppressed by their own experience—where they have had to trust and suspend judgment in an adversarial situation and have found their trust betrayed. As one student argued on the issue of gay couple adoption, “Even to express the ‘natural’ joy of parenthood is threatened when you know the social worker is, with the best intentions, holding back feelings of revulsion in order to be fair.” Even if one consciously chooses nonemotional language for the discussion, emotions crop up in the tone of the empathetic voice the writer tries to assume. For anyone who has prior experience of total rejection, who feels, in the words of one student, “as if my very identity is going to push me over the edge … to be empathetic means I'm also going to be pretty defensive.” Defensiveness will not be masked; it will show through an unconsciously deployed irony or unexpected humor, the choice of metaphor, or in ambiguous language.

As the writer feels the feelings of the other, her own position is threatened by knowing she is using language that both disguises and exposes her vulnerability. For neutral language is really the provenance of those social institutions, such as education and social welfare, in which she feels marginalized. What these students experienced as “detached writing” implies once again detaching women's needs from the concerns of a dominant culture. As one student wrote:

Because I feel it's so necessary to eliminate violence against women from our society, it is very easy to overstate my point through sheer emotion. Although the con side may be covered clearly and factually, it is overpowered by the overwhelming emotion coming through from me. I guess the trick is to try to find and represent the emotion of those on the con side. The choices are: divorce all emotion or charge both sides with equal emotion.

The ironic result of either choice is that the woman writer loses her voice.

To detach her emotion means, in effect, to deny her sense of herself. While this detachment, in one writer's words, “is more civilized,” it relies on a notion of rationality which dismisses emotion as nonrational and disruptive and insists on distinctions between feeling and thinking. As Ann Berthoff has shown repeatedly, this dichotomy derives from reliance on positivist assumptions. Despite the claim of positivists that their assumptions are scientific because they observe categories of difference, philosophers such as Suzanne K. Langer have shown how these assumptions are unscientific because they create categories which discriminate against kinds of knowing which include emotion. To continue to insist that rationality can be exercised without emotion is to protect a system of thought which is exclusionary, despite the imperative from Rogerian argument that under all circumstances the other side has to be recognized on the part of both sides. For as Susan McLeod observes, we have “ignored the affective domain in our research on and speculation about the writing process. This is partly due to our deep Western suspicion of the irrational, the related scientific suspicion [of] anything which cannot be observed and quantified … and the simple fact that we lack a complete theoretical perspective and common vocabulary with which to carry on a cogent academic discussion of affect” (“Feelings” 426). The impact on women writers of dismissing the affective domain is revealed by another student:

Rogerian argument feels like a model of mock democracy—too sweet, pretending to accept the minority view but writing in a way that makes women ignore how they feel. If they ignore how they feel no one else has to pay attention to them.

For this writer, Rogerian rhetoric manipulates women into feeling that they must change their way of thinking in order to be part of the majority culture. Zappen observes that it is not Rogers' “intention to change people but to assist them in changing themselves, with a full understanding of the process” (107). For the student quoted above, that would simply mean that women will repress their authentic feeling and comply with values and expectations of what others wish them to be, not with what they feel themselves to be. Such manipulation reflects the way our cultural institutions also pressure women into complying with their own exclusion. To understand the process simply legitimizes the process of suppression in the woman writer's mind. One student wrote how her insecurity about arguing for female inclusive language in the Bible and in Christian liturgy was exacerbated by her “fear of those in the powerful positions of deciding what was the language of God and gospel”:

Presenting the position of church leaders and traditional congregations meant a confrontation for me that made me feel fearful because I was ambivalent. I still wanted to be part of the church while I realized I had been excluded and I was afraid if I challenged their language and rituals they would find reasons for excluding me. The reason I felt ambivalent and fearful of my opposition was that not long before I wrote my paper, I had actually sided with my opposition.

To present the position of those in authority created a situation for this writer which did not allow her to feel safe in self-reflection, a primary goal of Rogerian argument. To be convinced by the opposition would mean giving up her insights about experiences which put her in opposition to authority in the first place. Her newly discovered, still fragile views were threatened by the certainty of beliefs legitimized by deeply entrenched tradition. The very act of presenting the views of those she opposed reinstated their validity in her experience. Her ability to fulfill the Rogerian contract was affected by her anxieties and lack of confidence. She overstated the cause of the Church. She knew its terms so well, in their logical system, in their rhetoric, and perhaps most significantly, in the history of the church's need to consolidate an otherwise pluralistic and secular community. Having won its struggle, the church could rely on a united, unchallenged voice. Indeed, its language joined a community together with words whose familiarity and certitude overwhelmed their individual differences. To question the language of prayer, sermon, and liturgy was to underline uncertainties in the student's own argument. If there was no historical evidence or even question that God was man or woman, if many women who served the church out of their belief in its importance to their lives accepted and even enjoyed identification with patriarchal power, on what basis could the religious needs of this woman challenge her own community to integrate her experience into theirs?

What is the rhetorical solution to the experience of feeling anxious and threatened by a neutralized presentation of a message which denies otherness? As these students discovered, neutralizing an inherently threatening position exacerbates the danger because they felt it as disguised and concealed and therefore manipulative and disingenuous. Empathy requires acceptance of the other. For many, there are no social, religious, or legal structures that even recognize their needs, much less affirm them as legitimate. The presentation of women's needs, even in nonevaluative language, cannot conceal the threat to self and community experienced by those opposing abortion on demand or the decriminalization of prostitution. In one small group discussion of a paper, a student reader made the point that “even if I sympathize with the economic plight of prostitutes, and feel empathy for their situation, I understand, from the point of view of being a woman, that others would not want their daughters to know that prostitution was in any way legitimate, even if the women on the street were protected. I would be afraid of prostitution becoming an attractive profession.” Here, precisely because empathy was real, not an assumed voice, the writer felt the strength of her own position eroding. Hairston argues that people “stop listening [to a threatening message] in order to reduce anxiety and protect the ego” (“Using” 52). The writing experiences of my students testify that they might stop listening to their own messages because they are a threat to themselves and to their opponents. For them, writing to achieve mutual understanding would have to begin with a plea for recognition, knowing that mutual empathy was many writing tasks away.

In the third step Hairston directs the write as follows:

The writer must present his own side of the issue with such restraint and tact that the person reading the argument will not feel threatened by either the information or the language. Doing this requires using descriptive rather than evaluative language and stating one's points as hypotheses or opinions rather than as assertions. Young, Becker, and Pike suggest ‘provisonal writing,’ using a tentative, unassertive tone.

(“Alternative” 376)

If we substitute her for “his,” we must consider that for women using a “tentative, unassertive tone,” is, in effect, self-effacing; to validate the position of the other replicates a history of suppression.¹¹ According to Carol Gilligan, as caretaker of patriarchal worlds, women have acted out a morality of concern for others to the point of neglecting their own needs. The insecurities and anger of the students in “Women and Writing” expressed the fear that they were reinscribing, indeed underwriting, their own neglect.

Because we are so concerned with students' ability to learn the conventions of writing academic prose, it may seem counterproductive to question and perhaps undermine heuristics that facilitate the teaching and learning of argumentation. No matter how much we urge freewriting and create assignments which sequence the process of self-discovery in the social contexts in which students live and work, no matter how much we work against the production of “theme-writing,” we are all aware, as David Bartholomae and others have observed, that students must adjust their self-expression to the requirements of academic coursework. How do the critical assumptions of a Woman's Studies curriculum accord with these purposes?

Hairston claims that Rogerian argument makes students more aware of what and how they are achieving by challenging students to replace “conventional pieties” with careful reflection about the values embedded in their writing (“Alternative” 377). A principal method in Women's Studies is the examination of ideological assumptions behind the language of men and women, and of the institutions which govern their lives. In their own writing, therefore, Women's Studies students are encouraged to explore their own biases in order to see themselves in relation to others. What is felt to be natural or unnatural comes to be seen as a cultural construct and not a matter of one's essential nature. By the same token, we discuss what it means to be a member of a community and how we must recognize the social and psychological forces that marginalize people and how we become complicit in our own oppression by internalizing social and cultural pressures.

Through this process of recognition, we try to figure out what values we share with our home communities and about which so much anger has been generated. Instead of presenting a persona that is trustworthy because it expresses empathy, a student might present a self that is ambivalent about the position of the other and is uncomfortable presenting her own position. There are no conventional pieties here, but rather an honest attempt to see what keeps self and other apart, but mutually respectful. As Geoffrey Chase reminds us, “writing needs to be seen as an ideological process whose aims should include teaching students to write as a part of a larger project in which they can affirm their own voices, learn how to exercise the skills of critical interrogation, and, finally, exercise the courage to act in the interests of improving the quality of human life” (“Accommodation” 22).

From the writing experiences of these women students, it is possible to imagine a form of argumentation that also works as inquiry into the ideological constructs of self in relation to other. Exploring the anxieties that writer and reader might bring to an issue would be a first step towards demystifying a subject whose object remains unknowable until looked at as real human beings living in a culture of its own and with its own values, and yet very much a part of the more dominant culture with which it is at logerheads. No matter how alien, how repugnant those values might be to the writer or reader, recognition that they share the same world might very well be the bridge on which argumentation can begin.

Notes

1. See, for example, Patricia Bizzell. Andrea Lunsford points out that Aristotelian rhetoric does presuppose difficulties in communication and begins at the point where communication becomes possible.

2. Nathaniel Teich discusses the evolution and purpose of Rogers' term (“Rogerian Problem-Solving and the Rhetoric of Argumentation” 52-3).

3. For example, see Zappen (104-05), Young, Becker, and Pike (275), and Jim W. Corder for discussion of the affective components of Rogers' theory of empathy.

4. See Maxine Hairston and Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike.

5. Paul Bator observes that Rogers' psychological model “questions the classical ideology of man as a rational animal living in a relatively homogeneous society” (428).

6. Teich notes that Rogers never saw his communication theory applicable to writing (52).

7. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

8. Cora Kaplan shows how women's written arguments which express their “need, demand and desire … exceed social possibility and challenge social prejudice: (Pandora's Box 169).

9. See Women's Ways of Knowing, ed. Mary Field Belenky et al.

10. For this group of women writers, Teich's recommendation to draw topics from students' “own experiences,” but to avoid “potentially loaded topics as abortion” is contradictory (57).

11. For James S. Baumlin, “understanding requires … a temporary negation or effacement of self” (37). For these students, this would be a double bind. In the same vein, Helen Rothschild Ewald warns against Rogers' mission to change as “adversarial” (174). To change is to yield one's sense of self to another's.

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