Martha Root’s Interwar Lectures: Cosmic Education and the Rhetoric of Unity

Martha Root’s Interwar Lectures: Cosmic Education and the Rhetoric of Unity

Peitho Volume 21 Issue 1 Fall/Winter 2018

Author(s): Layli Maria Miron

Abstract: This article introduces Martha L. Root’s cosmopolitan rhetoric, which exemplifies how women speaking from (religious) margins interpret traditions to create calls for social change. In lectures delivered between the world wars, Root argued for “cosmic education,” a global peacemaking program promoting openness and civic service in learners, which she distilled from precepts of the Bahá’í Faith. Root implored every listener, from her US co-nationals to audiences worldwide, to evangelize peace. Her rhetoric of unity harnessed principle with practice to animate the cycle of cosmic education, a cycle she modeled by inventing transnational sisterhood with the 19th-century Persian poet Táhirih Qurratu’l-Ayn.

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Tags: 20th century, Bahá’í Faith, cosmopolitanism, Iran, religion, transnational rhetoric