Feminist Rhetorical Theory

History of Feminists Rhetorics and writing practices: Professors Glen, Lunsford, and Welch


• Women's roles have been surpressed -- no equal opportunity.
• Women's roles are valued.
• Research should improve women's lives and lot-in-life.

Stages & Strategies

• Inclusion: Include womens' speech as data.
  • Studies in Sexist language issues.
  • Studies of linguistic gender differences.
  • Develop corpus of great women speakers.

Stages & Strategies

• Revision
  • Revise and reformulate traditional notions about rhetoric.
    • Develop new judgment criteria: the old ones are male and will always be unfair to women.
    • Develop new models not based on male great speakers.
    • Revise the public-private dichotomy.

Aspasia of Miletus
(ca. 470-410 BC

• Classical base in the Golden Age.
• Perhaps one of Plato's teachers.
• Her teaching was often co-opted/presented in other classics.
• Stressed Socratic method.
• Stressed commom-places, esp. for extemporaneous speaking.
• Used declamation as pedagogy.

Christine de Pisan
ca. 1364-1430

• Feminist ideals:
  • cultivate wisdom and eloquence.
  • cultivate the good person speaking well.
  • build a "safe place" for women
  • Reason, rectitude, justice as values
  • train women to read, write, and speak effectively in matters both public and private.

Mary Astell
1666-1731

• Stressed private not public speaking (the salons of the time were a perfect outlet)
• Serious Proposal concerning the proper education/treatment of women.
• Safe haven concept.
• Stressed "the natural" a kind of artful and relaxed second rhetorical nature.
• Mind over body.
• Subject analysis and careful invention.

Mary Wollstonecraft
1759-1797

• Mentioned here for her feminist advocacy rather than her rhetorical theory.
• That women are not inferior in intellect to men.

Susanne K. Langer
1896-1985

• Philosophy in a New Key.
• Mind: An essay on Human Feeling (in 3 vols).
• Symbol: an instrument of thought; a vehicle for meaningful conceptions.
• Discursive form: linguistic
• Non-discursive/presentational form: the wider concept, communicated via other than linguistic means.
• Much writing about ethics via shared human emotions/feelings/symbols.

Foss and Foss

• Feminist agenda: Gender front stage.
  • wholeness
  • process
  • interconnectedness of knowledge
  • approximation

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

• Primarily work on political communication.
• Virtually founded "genre" approach, with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell.
• Examines roles of advertising, tv, mass media in the political process.
• Effeminate speech: the key to rhetoric in our time?
• Words as deeds: Rhetoric as ontologic.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

• Historic and biographical study, recovering womens' speeches.

Explores the rhetoric of the two edged female rhetorical sword: Speak effectively (often as would a man) yet strategically (acceptably as a woman).

• The craft of the feminine style:
  • personal
  • collaborative
  • experiential
  • empowering
• Genre with Jamieson.

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