Untimely Women recovers the work of three earlytwentiethcentury working women none of whom history has understood as feminists or rhetors cinema icon and memoirist Mae West silent film screenwriter and novelist Anita Loos and journalist and megapublisher Marcet HaldemanJulius. While contemporary scholarship tends to highlight and recover women who most resemble academic feminists in their uses of propositional rhetoric Jason BarrettFox uses what he terms a mediomaterialist historiography to emphasize the different kinds of political and ontological genderpower that emerged from the inscriptional strategies these women employed to navigate and critique male gatekeepersfrom movie stars to directors to editors to abusive husbands.ampampnbsp In recasting the work of West Loos and HaldemanJulius in this way BarrettFox reveals the material and ontological ramifications of their forms of invention particularly their ability to tell trauma in ways that reach beyond their time to raise the consciousness of audiences unavailable to them in their lifetimes. Untimely Women thus accomplishes important historical and rhetorical work that not only brings together feminist historiography rhetorical materialism and posthumanism but also redefines what counts as feminist rhetoric.