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2 The Rhetorical Tradition Through a Feminist Lens: Locating Women

Rhetoric has a complex reputation. To some, it is a venerated, classical tradition—a two-thousand-year-old centerpiece of western education, and the cornerstone of effective public discourse and persuasion. To others, the term rhetoric signifies empty political discourse, or worse, a tool of nasty, partisan politics. A quick Google news search on “rhetoric,” for instance, yields phrases like this: “GOP full of empty rhetoric”; “his campaign is full of rhetoric that doesn’t amount to much”; “US officials deploy increasingly aggressive rhetoric”; “Obama’s rhetorical onslaught”; and “politicians stepped up ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric.” This tells us that, at least within mainstream media, rhetoric denotes speech that is public and political, uttered by powerful figures, sometimes devoid of meaning, and often agonistic or argumentative. Still others approach rhetoric as vehicle for argument and agency—a way to make one’s voice heard, to sponsor change. This, in fact, is how contemporary scholars in Composition and Rhetoric tend to view rhetorical engagement. Here, rhetoric is writing and speaking that creates and communicates knowledge; rhetorical strategies (i.e., how a text is organized, what evidence is used, what kind of voice is employed) are necessarily shaped by cultural assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality. By examining what kinds of rhetorical practices are most predominant at a given time, we learn much about the values, assumptions, and social and political contexts of its users. As James Berlin notes, however, rhetoric is not a unitary field. “While one particular rhetorical theory may predominate at any historical moment, none remains dominant over time; thus, we ought not to talk about rhetoric but [. . .] of rhetorics” (3).

Indeed, women writers and feminist scholars have played an important role in revising the idea of a unitary masculine rhetoric, since, as Cheryl Glenn notes, the tradition of classical rhetoric is often problematically conceived of “great men speaking out” (52). Historically, rhetorical acts were categorized as “exclusively upper-class, male, agonistic, and public—yet seemingly universal” (2). While “universal” implies that any speaker could enter the rhetorical sphere, the definition of rhetoric as public, competitive acts of persuasion long excluded women from rhetorical participation. Women have historically been denied public speech, education, and literacy—and in fact, in some cultures, are still denied—making it difficult, and sometimes nearly impossible, to speak and to be heard.

Despite these conditions, feminist scholars have successfully demonstrated that we can hear women’s voices in the tradition(s) if we listen hard enough, or, in some cases, if we listen for different kinds of rhetoric. Thanks to the work of these scholars, an extensive revision of the rhetorical tradition is underway, as they recover women’s voices, and in so doing, alter the very definition of rhetoric.

In this chapter, I provide a sampling of the voices feminist rhetors have recovered, beginning with the texts that have now become what Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald call “the primary works” of feminist rhetoric. These voices include overlooked female figures from ancient rhetoric, like Aspasia and Diotima, and early female theologians, like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. These voices also stem from the suffragist and abolitionist movements. While we may have learned about figures like Susan B. Anthony or Sojourner Truth in our history books, feminist rhetoricians help us consider how these women were rhetoricians in their own right, borrowing and appropriating rhetorical strategies to participate in the public sphere.

As I showed in the last chapter, one of the ways Composition Studies has sought to establish itself as a discipline is by claiming its historical roots in rhetoric. The work of recovering women’s voices to the rhetorical tradition, then, has much to do with writing instruction, which is central to composition. Whether or not classical rhetoric is composition’s ancestor, the values of masculine classical rhetoric have forcefully shaped what we in contemporary western culture consider good argument and writing: linear, persuasive, objective-sounding, and clear. The classical tradition also shapes the assumed purpose of rhetoric: to win. As Robert J. Connors observes, “Classical rhetoric is, plain and simple, about fighting [. . .] Rhetoric was about contest and struggle; indeed, agonistikos as used by Aristotle in the Rhetoric means ‘fit for athletic contests’ (1.5.14) as well as ‘fit for debating’ (3.12.1)” (27).

A look back on the culture of the ancient rhetoricians helps illuminate the purposes and practices that gave rise to such values. For Plato and Aristotle, rhetoric was ideally a means to “win the souls” of their listeners—to ensure that Truth prevailed. Consider how Richard Weaver, a twentieth-century rhetorical scholar, summarizes Plato’s view of the rhetorician: “The rhetorician will have such a high moral purpose in all his work that he will ever be chiefly concerned about saying that which is ‘acceptable to God.’ [. . .] The perfect rhetorician, as a philosopher, knows the will of God” (qtd. in Golden, Berquist, and Coleman 20). Subsequently, this perfect rhetorician could employ language to directly translate God’s will to his audience.

With stakes as high as “winning souls,” it was imperative that the rhetor avoid using “false” rhetoric—rhetoric that relied on emotional appeal or colorful language, say—and instead employ “true” rhetoric, which was deemed pure and transparent, delivering but not interpreting a message. (Here you see some origins of a cultural privileging of “objective” language, for media that is “fair and balanced” and for research papers with no “I.”) To accomplish this, Plato offers a highly controlled approach to true rhetoric, which requires the speaker to 1) know the truth of his argument; 2) know what will be persuasive to a particular audience; 3) define his terms, knowing what is and is not debatable; 4) order and arrange his language, with a clear beginning and end; 5) employ proper decorum, emphasizing clarity, brevity, and simplicity (Golden, Berquist, and Coleman 20). We see this structure reflected in Edward P. J. Corbett’s 1965 Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, which separates and orders the work of arguments into four parts: introduction, discovery of argument, arrangement of material, and style.

While the ancients considered the work of establishing a chain of logical propositions (philosophy) more important than the language of delivery, decorum—clarity, succinctness, appropriateness—was crucial to the ancients in much the same way “correct” writing remains a priority in many classrooms today. Because the classical rhetorician was a privileged citizen, often enlightening the non-educated, his rhetoric served as a display of privilege, status, and honor. To move outside of “correct” logic and language, then, demonstrated questionable moral status.

We can see this demonstrated in Plato’s and Aristotle’s low regard for the Sophists, a group of fifth-century teachers who offered (for pay) instruction in persuasion and oratory and who viewed truth not as predetermined but as constructed in each distinct context. Rather than relying on strict notions of “true” rhetoric, the Sophists utilized a wide range of discursive practices, many of which would fall into Plato’s category of “false” rhetoric. In fact, As Susan C. Jarratt contends, Plato and Aristotle critiqued many characteristics of Sophistic rhetoric that are also present in feminist rhetoric: “generic diversity, loose organization, a reliance on narrative, physical pleasure in language production and reception, a holistic psychology of communication, and an emphasis on the aural relationship between speaker and listener” (72). The valorization of Plato and Aristotle—and their emphasis on a highly linear, “objective,” logic-based rhetoric—remains today, and it shapes whose voices are heard, recorded, and taught.

This makes the addition of female voices to the rhetorical tradition all the more significant, because they ask us to think in new ways about what counts as legitimate knowledge, argument, and speech acts. They help us to see that what is often assumed to be “good writing” and “good speech” is indeed a result of what Patricia Bizzell calls “the cultural preferences of the most powerful people in the community” (1). In this way, then, the inclusion of women’s voices is not simply additive; women’s voices raise new questions, alter history, offer social critique, and they also make space for new kinds of knowledge and new kinds of writing.

Locating Women among Ancient Voices: Aspasia and Diotima

For feminist scholars, the connection of composition’s historical origins to classical rhetoric raises concerns. They challenge the idea that classical rhetoric is a universal guide to good speech and writing, showing how it stemmed from exclusivity—a training ground for the male ruling class. The near absence of women in classical rhetoric transpires from the fact that women in fifth-century Athens were utterly silenced—in fact, because women were denied citizenship, the language did not even have a word for a women from Athens (Loraux 10). Women were deprived of education, literacy, citizenship, and even entry to the public sphere, except during religious festivals. In the words of Aristotle, “between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject” (1.2.12 Politics, qtd. in Glenn 50). Considering these conditions for women, it’s remarkable that feminist scholars have recovered Aspasia and Diotima, two women who contributed to rhetoric and philosophy in Ancient Greece.

Born in Miletus (now Turkey) in fifth century BCE, Aspasia somehow achieved literacy before immigrating to Athens, where she was considered an exotic “foreigner.” In Athens Aspasia served as a rhetorician, philosopher, political influence, and teacher of male rhetoricians. There are no direct records of Aspasia’s voice; instead, her influence and speech is rendered through the words of men. For instance, in a dialogue between Menexenus and Socrates, Socrates claims that he has in Aspasia “an excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric—she who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the Hellenes—Pericles, the son of Xanthippus” (Menexenus par. 235, qtd. in Jarratt and Ong 15).

Pericles, whom Socrates deems “the best among all the Hellenes,” was Aspasia’s lover, a detail that has served to delegitimize her influence. After all, the ideal Greek woman was silent, with a closed mouth and closed body. Aspasia defied both of these traits, and so history has often written her as “self-indulgent, licentious, immoral” (Glenn 39). In fact, there was much about Aspasia that transgressed social norms of the time, including her unique relationship to Pericles. According to Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong, Athenian women who were not slaves were defined by their relationship to men: as wives (who brought dowries to increase family wealth); concubines (who served as sexual companions for men); or hetaerae (who accompanied men to public festivities) (12). Aspasia fit none of these roles. Instead, she served as the divorced Pericles’s “beloved and constant companion” as well as his intellectual equal and teacher (12).