Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies

By Parlor Press, LLC

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies gathers significant, oft-cited scholarship about feminism and rhetoric into one convenient volume. Essays examine the formation of the vibrant and growing field of feminist rhetoric; feminist historiographic research methods and methodologies; and women’s distinct sites, genres, and styles of rhetoric. The book’s most innovative and pedagogically useful feature is its presentation of controversies in the form of case studies, each consisting of exchanges between or among scholars about significant questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jan 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9781602353183

Book preview

Foreword: Talking the Talk/Walking the Walk: The Path of Feminist Rhetorics

Kate Ronald

I’ve spent a most pleasant few weeks reading this collection and a decidedly frustrating morning trying to find the origin of a phrase that haunted me as I read. Lindal Buchanan and Katie Ryan have presented the field of feminist rhetorics (as well as composition and rhetoric, women’s rhetoric(s), women’s studies and just plain rhetoric—just to complicate the terrain we travel a bit more) with an important and timely collection of primary scholarly work, the first collection of late twentieth and twenty-first century published scholarship in this field that they claim is here to stay. Feminist rhetorics, they assert, is no longer a promising possibility or a nascent area of study but has, in fact, arrived. I agree with them, and I applaud their bold yet careful stance in framing this walk through feminist rhetorics.

First, putting this collection together was clearly no walk in the park. Although Buchanan and Ryan use meandering metaphors to describe both their choices and the paths they hope their readers will take, the authors and stances they collect here require the reader to spend more time at certain stops than others, and I’m particularly grateful for the editors’ candor in admitting that "the essays gathered here do not delineate a hierarchy of scholars, a chronology of events and ideas, a stable or fixed body of knowledge, or the parameters of feminist rhetorics. They simply reflect our walk through this metaphorical field and record our journey to this point in time. I frankly don’t see how they managed to make the difficult choices I know that they faced. After all, landmarks can be individual, personal as well as communal, public. And yet, in their careful introductions to these essays, particularly the case studies of controversies" in the field, Buchanan and Ryan frame this research in ways that are bold, new, and indeed present a field that has arrived, that wants more to look forward than backward. In other words, they retrace our paths—walking familiar ground—but as we amble, we hear new talk about what the journey might mean and where it might lead.

Reading Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics, though, I just couldn’t get the lines about talking the talk vs. walking the walk out of my head. It’s usually phrased as Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk. Or more pejoratively, Sure, he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk? (I use he deliberately because I’m confident that this maxim is decidedly male. In fact the OED tells me that it’s been in use since 1921, and its contexts include wrestling and prison sentences.) Like the maxim Talk is cheap, to talk the talk means that you are able to talk theoretically—or talk a good game—about how something is/should be done; but if you can walk the walk, you know what you’re talking about. In other words, walking denotes firsthand, practical experience, and moreover, it means connecting that practice to theory. It strikes me that feminist rhetoricians almost always do both, by necessity. Denied the right to speak historically, as the scholars collected here show, feminist rhetors more often than not devised theory from practice, not the other way around. Determined to chart new ground, as the essays here also show, feminist researchers and teachers insist on the consequences of theory. And, as the editors of this collection show in both their opening definitions of feminist rhetoric and in their listing of strands they see in the collection, theorizing practice, holding theorists accountable for practice and practitioners for theory, remains the ground of all we do. Feminist rhetoricians, it occurs to me, might be one group that also turns this expression around to insist that someone who can walk the walk must also talk the talk.

One more expression kept running around in my head as I read Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics. It’s most commonly associated in rhetoric, composition, literacy, and education with another liberatory project, the book that Myles Horton and Paulo Freire talked into being: We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations in Education and Social Change (1990). That book was dedicated, as is this one, to the collaborative enterprise of dismantling oppressive structures of power and creating new methods of inquiry and pedagogy. But the phrase comes originally from a poem by Antonio Machado, a twentieth century Spanish poet (1875–1939). The full lines are: Searcher, there is no road/We make the road by walking (sometimes translated as Wanderer, Traveler or as Wayfarer, there is no road). I would argue that Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen Ryan, along with all their collaborators, both current and past, have walked us onto a new road, our steps a little surer, all the while holding themselves to the promise of continuing the journey and the conversation.

Works Cited

Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990.

Machado, Antonio. Selected Poems. Trans. Alvin S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the assistance of many friends and colleagues on this project. Nancy Myers, Rebecca Jones, Paul Butler, and Carol Mattingly provided us with guidance, encouragement, and feedback at various stages; their contributions inspired us to express ideas more clearly, fully, and convincingly. We also appreciate Kate Ronald’s wit and wisdom in writing a foreword that gives us new ways to explore the metaphors that shape this book. Additionally, we’d like to thank Old Dominion University for its help, particularly for funding research assistant Xiang Li. Xiang gathered and then translated the collection’s many essays into the required format, a time-consuming process with many technical complications; she overcame them all with diligence, enthusiasm, and imagination. Thanks, too, to Ana Timofte, who compiled the works cited list for the volume.

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics would not have been possible without the generosity of publishers and authors who graciously waived or reduced permission fees. Further, many writers worked with us to condense essays when the collection grew too long. Finally, our colleagues at Parlor Press have been a pleasure to work with: we appreciate the support of series editors Thomas Rickert and Jennifer Bay as well as David Blakesley’s eternal readiness to answer questions throughout the review and publication process. Thank you.

Introduction: Walking and Talking through the Field of Feminist Rhetorics

Having passed through the familiar and patriarchal territory of exclusionary rhetoric, we are moving into a frontier—the rhetorics of the future that await our exploration, our settlements, and our mapping.

—Cheryl Glenn, sex, lies, and manuscript

In response to Cheryl Glenn’s call to explore new rhetorical frontiers, feminist scholars have left familiar terrain and begun to produce the inclusionary rhetorics of the future envisioned above. Historiographers, rhetoricians, and theorists have challenged established tradition(s) and canon(s) and, in the process, created a unique interdisciplinary field of study—feminist rhetorics. What do we mean by feminist rhetorics? We use the term as an umbrella of sorts to encompass the many projects and purposes of ongoing work in the field. First, feminist rhetorics describes an intellectual project dedicated to recognizing and revising systems and structures broadly linked to the oppression of women. Second, it includes a theoretical mandate, namely, exploring the shaping powers of language, gender ideology, and society; the location of subject(s) within these formations; and the ways these constructs inform the production, circulation, and interpretation of rhetorical texts. Third, it constitutes a practice, a scholarly endeavor capable of transforming the discipline of rhetoric through gender analysis, critique, and reformulation. This feminist practice entails identifying and examining women rhetors and women’s rhetorics, making claims for their importance and contributions to the discipline, and, in so doing, regendering rhetorical histories and traditions. Fourth, it consists of a body of scholarship recording the field’s intellectual, theoretical, and practical pursuits. Fifth, the term encompasses a community of teacher/scholars with shared interests in the intersections of gender and rhetoric. Sixth, it describes a political agenda directed toward promoting gender equity within the academy and society. In other words, the rhetorical work of this community of feminist teacher/scholars—in the classroom, at conferences, in publications, through outreach—encourages others to think, believe, and act in ways that promote equal treatment and opportunities for women.

The field of feminist rhetorics, then, is both broad and deep. One of our goals in creating Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies is to demonstrate that the field is no longer just a promising possibility or a nascent area of study but has, in fact, arrived. As we undertook the tasks of selecting and arranging significant work in feminist rhetorics, we were mindful of Nedra Reynolds’ admonition to choose guiding metaphors with care, especially when describing the efforts and accomplishments of pathfinders and explorers (an apt description of the scholars and women rhetors included in this volume). Spatial metaphors, such as Glenn’s figuration of feminist historiography as a mapping of new territories, are inspiring for their depiction of trailblazers making new discoveries, so it’s not surprising that Glenn’s (re)mapping metaphor has been taken up in many other works, including Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric. Other spatial tropes have also proven fruitful, for instance, Gloria Anzaldùa’s border-crossing metaphor, which emphasizes movement and resistance to territoriality or containerization (Reynolds 36). It, too, has been widely adopted by feminist rhetorical scholars, as is evident, for instance, in an essay in this volume, Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford’s Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism.

However, the tropes that, ultimately, proved most helpful to us in framing our project were walking and talking. The walking metaphor derives from Reynolds’s Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Differences and connotes continual improvisation, a type of performance that continually privileges, transforms or abandons the spatial elements in the constructed order; it also signifies agency, for walkers can pause, cross, turn, linger, double-back and otherwise have control of their actions (69). We especially liked how the walking metaphor valorized intellectual flexibility and openness as well as the reflexivity and curiosity necessary in interdisciplinary studies. Further, it helped us to envision our project as a journey into the metaphorical field (or meadow) of feminist rhetorics. There were no established paths to follow, so we made our own way, directing our steps toward regions that enticed us. We frequently paused, zigzagged, or circled back to examine things more closely—sometimes together, sometimes apart—and when we resumed our travels, carried part of what we’ve seen within us. Although this edited collection necessarily reflects our particular journeys, we are confident it acknowledges many of the terrain’s most important landmarks.

If walking allowed us to explore the field of feminist rhetorics, then talking enabled us to understand what we’d seen. Discussion was essential to our effort because the landscape we traversed was forever in transition and often seemed to change before our eyes. The talking metaphor, therefore, emerged naturally from our exchanges, which helped us process our observations and develop a richer and fuller sense of the field together than we could have apart. We also appreciated the insights and contributions of Samuel R. Evans and Barbara Hebert, doctoral students in rhetoric at Old Dominion University, who wrote introductions to Case Study 2 and 4 respectively. Our collective efforts ensured that an assortment of voices, perspectives, and representations were incorporated into the project, a feminist objective that was important to us (Hawisher and Selfe 112).

The walking and talking metaphors further suggest that our particular path through the field of feminist rhetorics necessarily differs from the ones that others might take or make. Our account of the journey (as represented by the selection and arrangement of material in Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics) is, therefore, partial, encompassing aspects of rather than the entire field. We acknowledge this limitation at the outset. Due to space constraints, we could not attend equally to every area of feminist rhetorical scholarship, so this collection necessarily reflects our own concerns and locations. We have selected work that focuses on historical and contemporary women rhetors and women’s rhetorics, chiefly in the West; on gender bias within the discipline as well as the changes that occur when bias is acknowledged and contested; on research methods and methodologies capable of recuperating forgotten or devalued rhetors; and on the distinct rhetorical sites, means, and manners employed by women. What is less well represented than we would like is feminist scholarship on gender and rhetorical education; on the impact of culture, nation, and ethnicity on women’s rhetorics; on transnational feminisms and global communications; and on gendered rhetorics in digital environments. Our selected bibliography acknowledges work in these areas to suggest starting points for those interested in learning more about them. Moreover, the essays gathered here do not delineate a hierarchy of scholars, a chronology of events and ideas, a stable or fixed body of knowledge, or the parameters of feminist rhetorics. They simply reflect our walk through this metaphorical field and record our journey to this point in time. Our journey is ongoing, so we invite readers to amble and ruminate alongside us, whether this constitutes their first or fortieth foray into feminist rhetorics.

Before detailing the contents of Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics, a brief overview of the rhetorical situation that produced the field is in order. As has been well documented by Gerda Lerner and Marilyn French among others, patriarchal structures and institutions developed some ten to twelve thousand years ago, producing a gender hierarchy that effectively controlled women’s reproductive bodies and proscribed their participation in public spaces. This hierarchy had an enormous impact on the emergent discipline of rhetoric (in the West), which flourished 2,500 years ago when Athens became a democracy and granted male citizens a voice in determining the direction of the city/state. It soon became apparent that those who spoke well might convince others of the existence of problems or the best means of resolving them, thereby not only shaping the course of political events but also acquiring power in the process. The resultant demand for instruction in the arts of public speaking produced teachers and, ultimately, the discipline of rhetoric. At the time of its inception and for most of its history, the presumed student, teacher, practitioner, and theorist of rhetoric has been male, so the discipline’s pedagogies and precepts evolved to meet his needs. Consequently, the discipline was founded and developed with elite male speakers as the prototype. As Robert Connors observes, rhetoric was the domain of men, particularly of men of property. The continuing discipline of rhetoric was shaped by male rituals, male contests, male ideals, and masculine agendas. Women were definitively excluded from all that rhetoric implied (Gender Influences 24). As a result, the traditional rhetorical tradition—spanning Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine to Campbell, Blair, and Burke—was saturated with gendered biases and assumptions (Bizzell, Editing 110).

Scriptural, social, and ideological constraints limited women’s discursive opportunties, constraints that ranged from Saint Paul’s injunctions against female preaching to the cult of true womanhood. Although excluded from public forums of influence and power and ignored by the discipline itself, women, nevertheless, thought about, studied, and practiced rhetoric, indirectly for much of western history and, incrementally over the past 350 years, more directly. Scholarly efforts to excavate this history began with Doris Yoakum’s Women’s Introduction to the American Platform (1943) and Lillian O’Connor’s Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement (1954), both of which made early cases for the existence and significance of pre-Civil War women’s speeches on woman’s rights, abolition, temperance, and moral reform. However, it is Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (1989)—a two-volume work that detailed the distinctive rhetorical style and accomplishments of nineteenth-century women rhetors and recovered their work—that conventionally marks the beginning of contemporary feminist scholarship on women rhetors and women’s rhetorics.

Since the publication of this milestone, a near avalanche of feminist research has appeared and profoundly altered the discipline of rhetoric. Why? Once its prototypical elite male speaker was replaced by a woman, the discipline required deep revision in order to accommodate the constraints and particular strategies of a new constituency. In fact, incorporating women into the traditional rhetorical tradition require[d] not merely the readjustment of existing scholarly priorities, but a whole new set of priorities (Bizzell, Editing 113). Feminist historiographers developed research methods and methodologies capable of recovering women rhetors of whom little record remains. Further, feminist scholars discovered women’s rhetorics in formerly disregarded sites and genres and, in the process, broadened what counted as rhetoric and as evidence, necessary moves as the standards traditionally used to value rhetors simply did not always apply well to women (Mattingly, Telling 105). In short, feminist researchers not only questioned established rhetorical categories, definitions, criteria, principles, and practices but also identified gender biases that slighted the full range and inventiveness of marginalized rhetors.

The field of feminist rhetorics has emerged from these investigations. Although initially centered on women in the United States, scholars have begun to branch out and examine women’s rhetorics in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and other global regions and ethnic locations. This expansion signals feminist rhetoric’s vitality, as does the number of field-specific organizations, conferences, publications, publishers, and teaching materials now in existence. Feminist rhetorics incorporates scholarship in women’s studies, history, philosophy, law, anthropology, communication, and English, but the latter two disciplines, in particular, have produced important organizations for those investigating the nexus of gender and rhetoric. In English, the most significant is the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (the Coalition), a group that meets yearly at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Dues-paying members stay in touch year round via a list-serve and newsletter, Peitho. Meanwhile, the Organization for Research on Women and Communication (ORWAC) provides a similar gathering place for feminist scholars in communications. ORWAC meets yearly at the Western States Communication Association Conference and maintains contact through the biannual ORWAC Newsletter. Both disciplines sponsor national and regional conferences that provide feminist scholars with presentation and networking opportunities. The Coalition, for instance, sponsors the biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, and many major conferences in English studies regularly include panels, presentations, and workshops on feminist rhetorics, including the CCCC, Rhetoric Society of America Conference, International Society for the History of Rhetoric Conference, and National Communication Association Conference. Important regional venues include the Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference and the Western, Southern, and Central States Communication Association Conferences. Publishing opportunities in the field have also multiplied, with a number of journals welcoming work in feminist rhetorics. The longest running focused journal is Women’s Studies in Communication, which has been in operation since 1977 and is sponsored by ORWAC. The Coalition hopes to follow suit and develop Peitho into a journal dedicated to feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition. General journals in communications and English studies also welcome work in feminist rhetorics, including College English, College Composition and Communication, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, Rhetorica, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Finally, a number of academic presses publish scholarly monographs and collections in feminist rhetorics. The most active is arguably Southern Illinois University Press (SIUP). SIUP regularly produces rhetoric and composition texts written from a feminist perspective and also sponsors the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan. Since its inception in 2002, this series has published many noteworthy books in the field of feminist rhetorics (see the selected bibliography).

A growing body of resources for courses in feminist rhetorics and rhetorical history has also appeared although some critical needs remain, chief among them being a collection of landmark scholarship in the field. Granted, useful compilations of research in feminism and composition are available (e.g., Jarratt and Worsham’s Feminism and Composition: In Other Words, Kirsch and her collaborators’ Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, Phelps and Emig’s Feminist Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric), but they include little on women’s rhetorics. Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies responds to this gap, gathering significant work on gender, feminism, and rhetoric responsible for creating a new area of study and reshaping the discipline as a whole.

As editors of this collection, we have read and reread a great many books and articles about women and rhetoric over the past two years and—through the processes of analyzing and synthesizing, selecting and arranging, introducing and explicating this material—have developed a kairotic sense of the field’s major lines of inquiry and areas of controversy. In the course of our efforts, we have identified five major strands in the work of feminist rhetorical scholars:

Reclaiming forgotten or disparaged women rhetors and rhetoricians and making convincing cases for their contributions and accomplishments. An example of this type of research is Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women, an interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century black women’s literate practices and rhetorical efforts to protest racial injustice and promote racial uplift.

Examining the interrelationships among context, location, and rhetoric and tracing how these shape women’s discursive options, strategies, and choices. For instance, in A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck, Suzanne Bordelon first situates the educator within the Progressive Era; then details her interconnected theories of rhetoric, citizenship, and equality; and, finally, traces their application in Buck’s classroom, theatrical, and suffrage activities. Bordelon places Buck’s rhetoric within surrounding systems of power, gender, politics, economics, and education and shows how they mutually inform and illuminate one another.

Searching for gender bias and, when it is found, retheorizing (or regendering) rhetorical traditions. Lindal Buchanan’s Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors illustrates this approach, replacing the male orator at the center of the fifth rhetorical canon with a woman and speculating on the changes that gender makes to the theory and practice of delivery.

Interrogating foundational disciplinary concepts—such as rhetorical space, argument, genre, and style—in order to expand and, when necessary, redefine the realm of rhetoric. The 1996 special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy illustrates this approach. Because many feminists contend[ed] that argument as a process [was] steeped in adversarial assumptions and gendered expectations, this journal issue examined alternative approaches and conceptions in order to open up studies of argumentation (Palczewski 164, 168). Feminists undertake this sort of critical scrutiny and conceptual reframing in order to generate novel approaches to established disciplinary precepts and practices.

Challenging traditional knowledge-making paradigms and research practices (including criteria, methods, and methodologies) when they prove inadequate for investigating women rhetors and women’s rhetorics and developing inventive and robust alternatives. In A Lover’s Discourse: Diotima, Logos, and Desire, C. Jan Swearingen interrogates questionable applications of evidentiary criteria, which are often used to support textual (re)constructions of figures like Socrates, Jesus and Moses and to impede the recovery of women rhetors (28). Through skillful interpretation and application, Swearingen transforms Diotima from a shadowy figure in Plato’s Symposium to a feminist priestess and healer who teaches Socrates about love, discourse, and birth (26, 28). Swearingen’s critical (re)readings of historiographic methodology and recovery of Diotima thus illustrate an important goal of feminist research.

This list of research concerns is not comprehensive, but it does provide a starting point for distinguishing among the various approaches to feminist rhetorics represented in this sourcebook. What is more, these lines of inquiry guided the organization and arrangement of our project. Part 1. Charting the Emergence of Feminist Rhetorics presents five early essays that created a foundation for the field by challenging women’s exclusion from rhetorical history and theory. Additionally, they introduced some key concerns and knowledge-making paradigms that emerged as scholars began to challenge gendered assumptions within the rhetorical tradition. In Part 2. Articulating and Enacting Feminist Methods and Methodologies, six essays examine distinctive issues in feminist rhetorical scholarship. Of particular concern are the ethical, interpretive, and methodological questions that researchers confront when recovering women rhetors of whom there is little trace or when examining unconventional rhetorics. The six essays in Part 3. Exploring Gendered Sites, Genres, and Styles of Rhetoric address areas little studied within the traditional discipline of rhetoric. Private conversation as well as bricks and mortar become the available means of persuasion employed by women to shape public life and assert the value of their collective efforts. Finally, Part 4. Examining Controversies: Four Case Studies presents exchanges between or among scholars on matters that not only shaped the field’s past but also inform its present and future directions. Case Study 1 considers whether feminist scholarship best proceeds by integrating women rhetors into the established canon of public speakers or by retheorizing the discipline through the lens of gender. Case Study 2 concerns the nature of persuasive discourse and debates whether it constitutes a gendered form of violence or means to power. Case Study 3 examines how nineteenth-century women’s entry into American colleges influenced rhetorical education while Case Study 4 explores credibility and ethics in feminist historiography. The book concludes with a selected bibliography of feminist rhetorical studies, identifying anthologies, edited collections, special journal issues, and significant monographs for those interested in further study.

The discipline of rhetoric—which consists of the study, practice, and theorizing of public discourse—developed in response to the Athenian context and has survived due to its ability to adapt to social, ideological, political, economic, and technological changes. Thanks to the efforts of feminist rhetorical scholars, rhetoric is being reshaped once more, this time in order to accommodate gender and incorporate women rhetors who have existed but have been largely ignored throughout history. As you read the essays in this volume and learn about researchers’ efforts to recover the forgotten and retheorize the discipline, we hope that your walk through the field of feminist rhetorics will be rich and rewarding. We encourage you to create your own path and to pause, cross, turn, linger, [or] double-back to contemplate what you find along the way (Reynolds 69). And when you are ready, we invite you to add your voice to the field’s continuing conversations about women, language, and power.

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics

Part 1. Charting the Emergence of Feminist Rhetorics

It is true that considering women as active participants in the history of rhetoric will alter our accounting of our history and may even compel us to adjust our understanding of what rhetoric itself means. Yet, we should embrace, not resist, rival and innovative considerations.

—Richard Enos

Richard Enos makes an insightful point regarding the potential impact of feminist perspectives on the traditional rhetorical tradition, namely that they may change—in fact, have changed—the discipline as a whole. Feminist scholars’ attention to women on the margins has transformed rhetoric’s single-minded focus on discourses of power. Further, their distinct vantage point has heightened awareness of, first, the ways that women’s standpoints disrupt long standing assumptions conflating privileged, elite, male experience with universal experience and, second, the potential contributions of postmodern theory to rhetoric. As a result, feminist scholarship has altered not only the subjects, genres, styles, and sites of rhetorical inquiry but also the research methods used to study them.

The five readings in this section present the sometimes divergent, sometimes overlapping paths that feminist historiographers, theorists, and rhetoricians first took to interrogate women’s exclusion from rhetorical histories and traditions. Presented chronologically in their order of publication, they introduce the distinct research questions and knowledge-making paradigms that arose as scholars examined the intersections of feminism(s) and rhetoric(s), questioned the gendered assumptions embedded within the discipline, and recuperated women’s historical and contemporary rhetorical contributions. In other words, these essays represent the torrent of feminist scholarship that appeared between the late 1980s to the mid 1990s and trace the emergence of the field of feminist rhetorics.

The first reading is excerpted from Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak For Her (1989), a landmark two-volume study of the early woman’s rights movement. Volume 1 presents Campbell’s analysis of nineteenth-century women’s rhetorical contributions while volume 2 anthologizes a selection of their neglected speeches. The first book-length feminist reclamation of women rhetors and rhetorics, Campbell is committed to rescu[ing] the works of great women speakers from the oblivion to which most have been consigned (15). She, therefore, promotes an informed understanding of gendered rhetorics and advocates incorporating women into the male-dominant rhetorical canon. More specifically, Campbell identifies the formidable gender constraints that confronted nineteenth-century women rhetors—for instance, the expectation that they exhibit such feminine qualities as domesticity and subservience, both of which were antithetical to the demands of public speaking. To compensate for defying dominant gender norms, women developed a strategic feminine style of rhetoric that enabled them to negotiate public work and private expectations. Campbell’s work articulates perspectives, motives, and methods that continue to inform discussion in the field.

Susan Jarratt’s essay Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric (1990) likewise seeks to create histories aimed at a more just future (191). Jarratt reflects on her earlier call for feminist scholars to prioritize regendering rhetorical theory over recovering women’s rhetorical history. Revising her stance, she explains how feminist standpoint theory and Gayatri Spivak’s postmodern theory of representation suggest the necessity of pursuing both objectives at once. The essay presents a well-theorized discussion of the issues confronting feminist scholars and concludes by anticipating how their work will impact the design and content of courses in rhetorical history, a topic that continues to garner attention as Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie’s recent edited collection Teaching Rhetorica (2006) indicates.

Cheryl Glenn’s sex, lies and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric (1994) earned the Richard Braddock Award for best article in College Composition and Communication, recognition that, for many, signaled the arrival of feminist rhetorics. Glenn speaks, broadly, of the need for feminists to revise rhetorical history and remap the discipline and, specifically, of Aspasia of Miletus, a resident of fifth-century BCE Athens known only through second-hand accounts. Marked as an outsider because of her non-citizen status and as sexually suspect because of her intimate relationship with Pericles, Aspasia is recovered as a rhetorician. In the process, Glenn models how feminist historiographers can recuperate a woman’s rhetorical legacy when, as is so often the case, only traces of it remain; she also refutes arguments that interpret a paucity of evidence as proof of women’s rhetorical inactivity. This essay has generated considerable controversy and conversation regarding ethics and methods of feminist historiography, as Case Study 4 details.

In this section’s fourth essay, Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford employ Gloria Anzaldúa’s metaphor of border crossing in order to consider the impact of feminism on the discipline. Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism (1995) examines the five canons of rhetoric—consisting of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—and their conventional heuristic value in speech making. After tracing the canons’ formation in Greece and Rome, Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford explore how traditional conceptions of the canons change when (re)considered in light of women’s rhetorical practices and experiences. Their essay, like many others in this collection, talks back to patriarchal privileging of agonistic, linear discourse; to the denigration of composing strategies and language traits gendered as feminine; and to the discipline’s grounding in genres, media, and methods developed exclusively for male elites. Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford not only make a persuasive case for gendered revisions of foundational rhetorical precepts in order to meet contemporary needs and interests but also demonstrate that feminism and rhetoric have much to offer each other.

The final reading is excerpted from Krista Ratcliffe’s Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich (1995). Ratcliffe opens with the dilemma confronting Bathsheba Everdene, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, who bemoans having only the language of men to express the feelings of a woman (1). Bathsheba’s dilemma encapsulates Ratcliffe’s objective—redressing disciplinary genderblindness through studying women’s rhetorical theorizing. After reviewing four interrelated methodologies for challenging a genderblind rhetorical tradition (recovering, rereading, extrapolating, and conceptualizing), she establishes the exigency, terms, and nature of her own study (the subject of the essay included in this section). Within the book’s larger framework, Ratcliffe ultimately extrapolates Virginia Woolf’s, Mary Daly’s, and Adrienne Rich’s rhetorical perspectives from their essays, diaries, letters, and poems (28), and, in the process, discovering, defining, and defending Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric that present possibilities for resolving Bathsheba’s dilemma.

Collectively, the feminist scholars in this section have called attention to the barriers that women historically confronted when crafting rhetorical performances in resistant social contexts. They have also (re)read male-centered texts and traditions and explained why it is important to recognize, challenge, and rethink genderblind perspectives. After all, as Jarratt observes, If the Western intellectual tradition is not only a product of men, but constituted by masculinity, then transformation comes not only from women finding women authors but also from a gendered rereading of [. . .] masculine rhetoric (Feminist Rereadings 2). Finally, these scholars have inspired others to rewrite rhetorical histories, tenets, and traditions, a legacy that has produced a distinct field of study, feminist rhetorics, and the (re)construction of a more equitable, inclusive discipline.

Introduction to Man Cannot Speak for Her*

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

Men have an ancient and honorable rhetorical history. Their speeches and writings, from antiquity to the present, are studied and analyzed by historians and rhetoricians. Public persuasion has been a conscious part of the Western male’s heritage from ancient Greece to the present. This is not an insignificant matter. For centuries, the ability to persuade others has been part of Western man’s standard of excellence in many areas, even of citizenship itself. Moreover, speaking and writing eloquently has long been the goal of the humanistic tradition in education.

Women have no parallel rhetorical history. Indeed, for much of their history women have been prohibited from speaking, a prohibition reinforced by such powerful cultural authorities as Homer, Aristotle, and Scripture. In the Odyssey, for example, Telemachus scolds his mother Penelope and tells her, "Public speech [mythos] shall be men’s concern" (Homer 1980, 9).¹ In the Politics, Aristotle approvingly quotes the words, Silence is a woman’s glory (1923, 1.13.12602a.30), and the epistles of Paul enjoin women to keep silent. As a result, when women began to speak outside the home on moral issues and on matters of public policy, they faced obstacles unknown to men. Further, once they began to speak, their words often were not preserved, with the result that many rhetorical acts by women are gone forever; many others can be found only in manuscript collections or rare, out-of-print publications. Even when reprinted, they frequently are treated as historical artifacts from which excerpts can be drawn rather than as artistic works that must be seen whole in order to be understood and appreciated. As a rhetorical critic I want to restore one segment of the history of women, namely the rhetoric of the early woman’s rights movement that emerged in the United States in the 1830s, that became a movement focused primarily on woman suffrage after the Civil War, and whose force dissipated in the mid-1920s. I refer to this as the early movement in contrast to contemporary feminism.

This project is a rhetorical study, which means that all of the documents analyzed [. . .] are works through which woman’s rights advocates sought to persuade others of the rightness of their cause. In the broadest sense, rhetoric is the study of the means by which symbols can be used to appeal to others, to persuade. The potential for persuasion exists in the shared symbolic and socioeconomic experience of persuaders (rhetors) and audiences; specific rhetorical acts attempt to exploit that shared experience and channel it in certain directions.

Rhetoric is one of the oldest disciplines in the Western tradition. From its beginnings in ancient Greece, it has been a practical art, one that assesses a persuader’s efforts in light of the resources available on a specific occasion in relation to a particular audience and in order to achieve a certain kind of end. As a result, rhetorical analysis has focused on invention, the rhetor’s skill in selecting and adapting those resources available in language, in cultural values, and in shared experience in order to influence others.

The aim of the rhetorical critic is enlightenment—an understanding of the ways symbols can be used by analyzing the ways they were used in a particular time and place and the ways such usage appealed or might have appealed to other human beings—then or now. Rhetorical critics attempt to function as surrogates for audiences, both of the past and of the present. Based on their general knowledge of rhetorical literature and criticism, and based on familiarity with the rhetoric of a movement and its historical milieu, critics attempt to show how a rhetorical act has the potential to teach, to delight, to move, to flatter, to alienate, or to hearten.

The potential to engage another is the aesthetic or symbolic power of a piece of persuasive discourse. Such assessments are related to a work’s actual effects. However, many rhetorical works fail to achieve their ends for reasons that have little to do with their style or content. In a social movement advocating controversial changes, failure to achieve specific goals will be common, no matter how able and creative the advocates, whether male or female. For example, a woman might urge legal changes to give a wife a right to her own earnings, but in a single speech to men opposed to the very idea of a woman speaking, she cannot succeed in practical terms, even though her speech is powerful and noteworthy. If she were extremely skillful, she might increase awareness of the plight of married women and arouse sympathy for them among some members of the audience. As a result, critics must judge whether the choices made by rhetors were skillful responses to the problems they confronted, not whether the changes they urged were enacted. Nevertheless, where evidence of impact exists, it will be noted, although such evidence is not a reliable measure of rhetorical skill, because it, too, can be the product of extrinsic factors.

Selecting appropriate terminology to refer to women in the early movement has proved something of a problem, because the meanings of some key terms have changed. I call the activists of the earlier movement feminists only in the sense that they worked to advance the cause of women. To themselves, they were woman’s rights advocates (working for the rights of woman) or suffragists (working for woman suffrage), and for the most part, I shall retain these labels. In the United States, only their opponents called them suffragettes, whereas in Great Britain, the radical wing of the movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, adopted this epithet as their own. The term feminism existed in the mid-nineteenth century, but it meant only having the qualities of a female. In the 1890s the term came into use, primarily by anti-suffragists, to refer negatively to woman’s rights activists, that is, those committed to the legal, economic, and social equality of women. After the turn of the century, the term became more acceptable, and mainstream suffragists used the term but redefined it (Shaw 1918, in Linkugel 1960, 2:667-83; Cott 1987, 3-50); early in this century more radical feminists in the National Woman’s Party claimed it as their own. As this study will demonstrate, women in the early movement differed over goals; my use of feminism here is inclusive and catholic, referring to all those who worked for the legal, economic, and political advancement of women, beginning in the 1830s. [. . .]

Movement History

Woman’s rights agitation was in large measure a byproduct of women’s efforts in other reform movements. Women seeking to end slavery, to attack the evils of alcohol abuse, and to improve the plight of prostitutes found themselves excluded from male reform organizations and attacked for involving themselves in concerns outside the home. A distinctive woman’s rights movement began when women reformers recognized that they had to work for their own rights before they could be effective in other reform efforts.

Many early woman’s rights advocates began as abolitionists, but because they were excluded from participation in male anti-slavery societies, they formed female anti-slavery societies and ultimately [. . .] began to press for their own rights in order to be more effective in the abolitionist struggle (Hersh 1978). Both Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton dated the beginnings of the woman’s rights movement from 1840, the year when five female delegates from U.S. anti-slavery societies, one of whom was Coffin Mott, were refused seating at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The outrage they felt at the debate that culminated in the denial of women’s participation in the convention fueled their decision to call a woman’s rights convention, a decision that eventuated in the Seneca Falls, New York, convention of 1848. [. . . The] struggle to abolish slavery was [. . .] closely related to the earliest efforts for woman’s rights, and [. . .] female abolitionists’ speeches show them struggling to find ways to cope with proscriptions against speaking [. . .].

Woman’s rights activism took an organized form at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton made her first speech, and the movement’s manifesto, the Declaration of Sentiments, was introduced and ratified. Local, regional, and national woman’s rights conventions were held until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. During the war, women activists bent all their efforts toward supporting the Union cause, primarily through work on the Sanitary Commission, and toward abolishing slavery, primarily through the Woman’s National Loyal League. Because of their important contributions, women expected to be rewarded with suffrage. Instead, they were told that their dreams were to be deferred. Woman suffrage was so controversial that it was feared it would take suffrage for Afro-American males down to defeat. As a result, in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time introduced the word male into the U.S. Constitution. Bitterness and frustration caused the movement to split into rival organizations in 1869. However, a final effort was made to obtain suffrage through the courts. Based on the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment had defined citizenship, and that citizenship implied suffrage, in 1872 Susan B. Anthony and other women registered and voted, or attempted to do so. In 1875, however, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, making a separate federal amendment necessary.

During this period a major impetus toward woman suffrage came from an unexpected source—the temperance movement. This reform effort, like abolitionism, was a major source of woman’s rights advocates. The struggle against the evils of alcohol abuse caught fire in 1874, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded. Per capita consumption of alcohol by Americans in the 1820s is estimated to have been three times that of 1980, and by 1909, Americans spent almost as much on alcohol as they did on all food products and nonalcoholic beverages combined. In the 1820s, hard liquor was inexpensive, cheaper than beer, wine, milk, coffee, or tea; only water was cheaper, and it was often polluted. Consumption of alcoholic beverages had been an integral part of U.S. life since colonial times, and alcoholic beverages were thought to be nutritious and healthful. Such traditions and beliefs, combined with low cost, increased consumption (Rorabaugh 1980; Lender and Martin 1983). In 1870, there were some 100,000 saloons in the country, approximately one for every fifty inhabitants (Giele 1961, 41).

Women were vulnerable to the effects of alcohol abuse. Although some women became drunkards, primarily due to the high alcohol content of patent medicines, alcoholism among males was the major problem. Women married to drunkards were at the mercy of their husbands. As late as 1900, in thirty-seven states a woman had no rights to her children, and all her possessions and earnings belonged to her husband (Bordin 1981, 7).

Temperance was an acceptable outlet for the reformist energies of women during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike earlier woman’s rights and woman suffrage advocacy, which implied at least a redefinition of woman’s sphere, temperance work could be done by a true woman. Because brothels were often attached to saloons, alcohol was perceived as an inducement to immorality as well as a social and economic threat to the home. Women who struggled against its use were affirming their piety, purity, and domesticity. Because the sale and consumption of alcohol was associated with immorality, and because temperance work implied no change in woman’s traditional role, churches that opposed other reforms supported temperance activities. WCTU branches often grew out of existing churchwomen’s organizations. As a result, temperance efforts exacted fewer social costs from women than did work for other woman’s rights. Although the WCTU accepted traditional concepts of womanhood, it came to argue that woman’s distinctive influence should be extended outside the home via the vote. Consequently, woman suffrage became acceptable to more conservative women (and men), who had rejected it before, when presented as a means for woman to protect her domestic sphere from abuses related to alcohol.

In 1890, the rival suffrage organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Although 1890 was the year Wyoming became the first state to give women the right to vote, in the period around the turn of the century women activists made little progress. Anti-suffrage activity was at its height, and movement leadership was in transition as the initiators died and a younger generation took over. With the rise of the Progressive movement, particularly in the West, the climate for woman’s rights improved. Women such as the Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw traveled throughout the nation speaking in support of woman suffrage. In 1915, the skilled administrator Carrie Chapman Catt assumed leadership of NAWSA, developing a Winning Plan to maximize pressure on Congress to pass a suffrage amendment. Finally, Alice Paul and her cohorts in the National Woman’s Party (NWP) paraded, picketed, and demonstrated in order to draw attention to the issue and to keep it at the top of the congressional agenda. These efforts, energized by the pressures of World War I, led to passage of an amendment and its ratification on August 26, 1920. For the first time, all U.S. women were eligible to vote in the 1920 elections.

Sadly, that achievement meant less than women activists had hoped. Few women voted, and in a short time it became clear that women did not form a distinct voting bloc or constituency. The limited meaning of woman suffrage was manifest in 1925 when an amendment prohibiting child labor failed to gain ratification, and that event symbolizes the end of the early movement.

Many causes contributed to the demise of the movement. In the Red scare of the 1920s, women activists were attacked for their support of progressive causes, including the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Activists also hastened their own end by bitterly dividing over the equal rights amendment, introduced in 1923 at the behest of the National Woman’s Party. On the one hand, the NWP took an inflexible and absolute natural rights position, rejecting any special legal consideration for women. In opposition, the League of Women Voters, descendant of NAWSA, and women trade unionists, among others, fought to retain protective legislation, which would have been imperiled by such an amendment. Conflict over similar issues and over the ERA persists among U.S. women, underlining the links between the earlier movement and contemporary feminist concerns.

This Study

[. . .] I have analyzed and anthologized discourse that appeared at critical moments in this movement and that represents particular issues or groups within the movement. But, although some of these works have great historical significance, all of them were selected for their rhetorical significance, in order to reveal the variety and creativity of woman’s rights advocacy. In this sense, the works anthologized and analyzed are persuasive masterworks of the early movement. As such, they contributed to the development and survival of that movement, and they represent skillful human artistry in the face of nearly insuperable rhetorical obstacles. [. . .]

I offer this two-volume study to call into question what has become the canon of public address in the United States, a canon that excludes virtually all works by women (Campbell 1985). It is my hope that the analyses of this volume and the texts in volume II will prompt re-examination of U.S. rhetorical literature and the inclusion of some of these works in courses that survey the history of rhetoric and that explore artistic excellence in speaking.

In addition to making texts available and correcting rhetorical history, still another goal of this project is to make it clear that the rhetoric of women must be studied if we are to understand human symbolization in all its variety and to identify touchstones that illustrate the peaks of human symbolic creativity. Rhetorical invention is rarely originality of argument, but rather the selection and adaptation of materials to the occasion, the purpose, and the audience. Early feminist rhetors rose to inventive heights as they sought to overcome the special obstacles they confronted because they were women, and because they were attempting to alter traditional conceptions of gender roles. The relationship between rhetoric and feminism is pertinent to all facets of this study, and the remainder of this chapter explores that special relationship.

Struggling for the Right to Speak

Early woman’s rights activists were constrained to be particularly creative because they faced barriers unknown to men. They were a group virtually unique in rhetorical history because a central element in woman’s oppression was the denial of her right to speak (Lipking 1983). Quite simply, in nineteenth-century America, femininity and rhetorical action were seen as mutually exclusive. No true woman could be a public persuader.

The concept of true womanhood (Welter 1976), or the woman belle ideal (Scott 1970), defined females as other, as suited only for a limited repertoire of gender-based roles, and as the repository of cherished but commercially useless spiritual and human values. These attitudes arose in response to the urbanization and industrialization of the nineteenth century, which separated home and work. As the cult of domesticity was codified in the United States in the early part of the century, two distinct subcultures emerged. Man’s place was the world outside the home, the public realm of politics and finance; man’s nature was thought to be lustful, amoral, competitive, and ambitious. Woman’s place was home, a haven from amoral capitalism and dirty politics, where the heart was, where the spiritual and emotional needs of husband and children were met by a ministering angel. Woman’s nature was pure, pious, domestic, and submissive (Welter 1976, 21). She was to remain entirely in the private sphere of the home, eschewing any appearance of individuality, leadership, or aggressiveness. Her purity depended on her domesticity; the woman who was compelled by economic need or slavery to work away from her own hearth was tainted. However, woman’s alleged moral superiority (Cott 1977, 120, 146–48, 170) generated a conflict out of which the woman’s rights movement emerged.

As defined, woman’s role contained a contradiction that became apparent as women responded to what they saw as great moral wrongs. Despite their allegedly greater moral sensitivity, women were censured for their efforts against the evils of prostitution and slavery (Berg 1978; Hersh 1978). Women who formed moral reform and abolitionist societies, and who made speeches, held conventions, and published newspapers, entered the public sphere and thereby lost their claims to purity and piety. What became the woman’s rights/woman suffrage movement arose out of this contradiction.

Women encountered profound resistance to their efforts for moral reform because rhetorical action of any sort was, as defined by gender roles, a masculine activity. Speakers had to be expert and authoritative; women were submissive. Speakers ventured into the public sphere (the courtroom, the legislature, the pulpit, or the lecture platform); woman’s domain was domestic. Speakers called attention to themselves, took stands aggressively, initiated action, and affirmed their expertise; true women were retiring and modest, their influence was indirect, and they had no expertise or authority. Because they were thought naturally incapable of reasoning, women were considered unsuited to engage in or to guide public deliberation. The public realm was competitive, driven by ambition; it was a sphere in which the desire to succeed could only be inhibited by humane concerns and spiritual values. Similarly, speaking was competitive, energized by the desire to win a case or persuade others to one’s point of view. These were viewed as exclusively masculine traits related to man’s allegedly lustful, ruthless, competitive, amoral, and ambitious nature. Activities requiring such qualities were thought to unsex women.

The extent of the problem is illustrated by the story of educational pioneer Emma Hart Willard (Scott 1978; Willard 1819). Encouraged by Governor De Witt Clinton in 1819 to present A Plan for Improving Female Education to the New York Legislature, Hart Willard presented her proposal to legislators, but carefully remained seated to avoid any hint that she was delivering a speech. In her biography of this influential educator, Alma Lutz writes: Although this [oral presentation] was very unconventional for a woman, she did not hesitate, so great was her enthusiasm for her Plan. . . . She impressed them not as the much-scorned female politician, but as a noble woman inspired by a great ideal (Lutz 1931, 28).

In other words, a woman who spoke displayed her masculinity; that is, she demonstrated that she possessed qualities traditionally ascribed only to males. When a woman spoke, she enacted her equality, that is, she herself was proof that she was as able as her male counterparts to function in the public sphere. That a woman speaking is such proof explains the outraged reactions to women addressing promiscuous audiences of men and women, sharing a platform with male speakers, debating, and preaching, even on such clearly moral issues as slavery, prostitution, and alcohol abuse. The hostility women experienced in reform efforts led them to found female reform organizations and to initiate a movement for woman’s rights, at base a movement claiming woman’s right to engage in public moral action.

Biology, or rather ignorance of biology, was used to buttress arguments limiting woman’s role and excluding her from higher education and political activity. On average, women were smaller than men. As a result, it was assumed that they had smaller brains, and that therefore their brains presumably were too small to sustain the rational deliberation required in politics and business. Moreover, their smaller, and hence more delicate and excitable, nerves could not withstand the pressures of public debate or the marketplace. Menarche, the onset of menstruation, was viewed as a physical cataclysm that rendered women unfit for normal activity. For example, Harvard medical professor Dr. Edward Clarke (1873) argued against higher education for women on the grounds that the blood needed to sustain development of the ovaries and womb would be diverted to the brain, which he believed was a major cause of serious illness.

Because of the conceptions of their nature and the taboos that were part of the cult of domesticity, women who spoke publicly confronted extraordinary obstacles. For example, abolitionist Abby Kelley [Foster]

faced such continuous and merciless persecution that she earned the title our Joan of Arc among her co-workers. Lucy Stone later described Kelley’s career as long, unrelieved, moral torture. . . . Because she often traveled alone, or (worse) with male agents, she was vilified as a bad woman. . . . She was further reviled when she continued to appear in public while pregnant. (Hersh 1978, 42–43)

On the one hand, a woman had to meet all the usual requirements of speakers, demonstrating expertise, authority, and rationality in order to show her competence and make herself credible to audiences. However, if that was all she did, she was likely to be judged masculine, unwomanly, aggressive, and cold. As a result, women speakers sometimes searched for ways to legitimate such unwomanly behavior and for ways to incorporate evidence of femininity into ordinary rhetorical action. In other instances, their own defiance and outrage overwhelmed their efforts at adaptation. In still other cases, rhetors found womanly ways of persuasion that were self-contradictory, and hence ultimately damaging to their cause. Yet on occasion, extraordinarily skilled women persuaders found symbolic means of responding to these contradictory expectations, and produced masterpieces. The problems women faced as speakers are a recurring theme of this book, a theme that remains relevant for contemporary women who still must struggle to cope with these contradictory expectations, albeit in somewhat modified forms.

Feminine Style

Analysis of persuasion by women indicates that many strategically adopted what might be called a feminine style to cope with the conflicting demands of the podium. That style emerged out of their experiences as women and was adapted to the attitudes and experiences of female audiences. However, it was not, and is not today, a style exclusive to women, either as speakers or as audiences.

Deprived of formal education and confined to the home, a woman learned the crafts of housewifery and motherhood—cooking, cleaning, canning, sewing, childbearing, child-rearing, and the like—from other women through a supervised internship combining expert advice with trial and error. These processes are common to all craft-learning, including carpentry, horse training and plumbing, but craft-related skills cannot be expressed in universal laws; one must learn to apply them contingently, depending upon conditions and materials (McMillan 1982). Learning to adapt to variation is essential to mastery of a craft and the highly skilled craftsperson is alert to variation, aware of a host of alternatives, and able to read cues related to specific conditions.

If the process of craft-learning is applied to the rhetorical situation (and rhetoric itself is a craft), it produces discourse with certain characteristics. Such discourse will be personal in tone (crafts are learned face-to-face from a mentor), relying heavily on personal experience, anecdotes, and other examples. It will tend to be structured inductively (crafts are learned bit by bit, instance by instance, from which generalizations emerge). It will invite audience participation, including the process of testing generalizations or principles against the experiences of the audience. Audience members will be addressed as peers, with recognition of authority based on experience (more skilled craftspeople are more experienced), and efforts will be made to create identification with the experiences of the audience and those described by the speaker. The goal of such rhetoric is empowerment, a term contemporary feminists have used to refer to the process of persuading listeners that they can act effectively in the world, that they can be agents of change (Bitzer 1968). Given the traditional concept of womanhood, which emphasized passivity, submissiveness, and patience, persuading women that they could act was a precondition for other kinds of persuasive efforts.³

Many of the qualities of the style just described are also part of the small-group phenomenon known as consciousness-raising, associated with contemporary feminism as well as other social movements, which is a communicative style that can be incorporated into speaking or prose writing (Farrell 1979). Because oppressed groups tend to develop passive personality traits, consciousness-raising is an attractive communication style to people working for social change. Whether in a small group, from the podium, or on the page, consciousness-raising invites audience members to participate in the persuasive process—it empowers them. It is a highly appealing form of discourse, particularly if identification between advocate and audience is facilitated by common values and shared experience.

Based on this description, it should be obvious that while there is nothing inevitably or necessarily female about this rhetorical style, it has been congenial to women because of the acculturation of female speakers and audiences.⁴ It can be called feminine in this context because it reflects the learning experiences of women who were speakers