Gertrude Buck

Gertrude Buck (July 14, 1871 – January 8, 1922) was one of a group of powerful female rhetoricians of her time. She strived to inspire young women to take on leadership roles within the democracy using the written word. She wrote many books, plays, articles, and poems relating to her cause. Buck dedicated her life to "challenging the patriarchal paradigm with her reformist views of pedagogy and rhetoric".

Early life Buck was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her parents were Judge M. Buck and Annie Buck.

As part of a new generation of women that had the opportunity to attend college, Buck graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor of science in 1884, a Master of Science in 1895, and a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition in 1898. Buck was the first student of Michigan's Fred Newton Scott to receive a PhD in this field.

Gertrude Buck's thesis, completed for her master's degree, was on the metaphor. Her approach is mostly psychological, describing metaphors as a result of primitive human behavior that confuses different things as the same. However, she states that the civilized human is able to immediately distinguish between the two items. The poetic metaphor, then, is a representation of the primitive perception of two different items as the same which are known to be inherently different. Buck taught at Vassar for twenty four years leading up to her death in 1922. Interpreting the insights by pre-Socratic sophists, Buck denoted sophistic rhetoric as violent and manipulative with less regard to listeners as she called it as “purely predatory-primitive aggression to the weak." The art of rhetoric is the art of war.” Buck echoed rhetoric as “a real communication between speaker and hearer, to the equal advantage of both, and thus a real function of the social organism."

Personal life and death Buck lived out most of her life after college in Poughkeepsie, New York with close friend and colleague, Laura Johnson Wylie. The two were rumored to be lovers. She never married or had any children.