List of female rhetoricians

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Within the field of rhetoric, the contributions of female rhetoricians have often been overlooked. Anthologies comprising the history of rhetoric or rhetoricians often leave the impression there were none. Throughout history, however, there have been a significant number of women rhetoricians.

Re∙Vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. -Adrienne Rich

The following is a timeline of contributions made to the field of rhetoric by women.

Before Common Era

Aspasia (c. 410 BC)

Aspasia was a Milesian woman who was known and highly regarded for her teaching of political theory and rhetoric. She is mentioned in Plato's Memexenus, and is often credited with teaching the Socratic method to Socrates.

Diotima (4th century BC)

Diotima of Mantinea is an important character in Plato's Symposium. It is uncertain if she was a real person or perhaps a character modelled after Aspasia, for whom Plato had much respect.

14th century

Julian of Norwich (1343-1415)

Julian of Norwich was an English mystic who challenged the teachings of medieval Christianity in regard to women's inferior role in religion.

Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

Catherine of Siena was an Italian who was influential through her writings to men and women in authority, where she begged for peace in Italy and for the return of the papacy to Rome. She was canonized in 1461 by Pope Pius II.

  • "Letter 83: To Mona Lapa, her mother, in Siena" (1376)

Christine de Pizan (1365-1430)

Christine de Pizan was a Venetian who moved to France at an early age. She was influential as a writer, rhetorician and critic during the medieval period, and was Europe's first female professional author.

Margery Kempe (1373-1439)

Margery Kempe was a British woman who could neither read nor write, but dictated her life story The Book of Margery Kempeafter receiving a vision of Christ during the birth of the first of her fourteen children. From the 15th century Kempe was viewed as a holy woman after her book was published in pamphlet form with any thought or behavior that could be viewed as nonconforming or unorthodox removed. When the original was rediscovered in 1934, a more complex self-portrait emerged.

15th century

Laura Cereta (1469-1499)

Laura Cereta was an Italian humanist and feminist who was influential in the letters she wrote to other intellectuals. Through her letters she fought for women's right to education and against the oppression of married women.

  • Letter to Bibulus, Sempronius, Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women" (1488)

17th century

Margaret Fell (1614-1702)

Margaret Fell was a British founding member of the Religious Society of Friends, and was popularly known as the "mother of Quakerism". She was persecuted and imprisoned for speaking her mind. She is credited with many essential changes within the Quaker church which brought more freedom for women in religious, social, and political areas.

  • Women's Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures (1666)

Margaret Cavendish (c. 1623-1673)

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a British novelist, playwright, philosopher, poet, and rhetorician. Recent critics—most notably Christine Sutherland and Jane Donawerth—have explored her rhetorical theory and practice. Key works in this vein include:

  • sections of The Worlds Olio (1655)
  • Orations of Divers Sorts (1662)
  • The Female Academy in Playes (1662)

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651-1695)

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a Mexican who entered a convent to dedicate her life to scholarship. She took part in the elite intellectual circles of her time, and many see her as the first feminist of the New World. She wrote poetry, essays, and religious treatises, and argued for a more holistic role for women in society.

  • La Respuesta (1691)

Mary Astell (1668-1731)

Many regard Mary Astell as the first English feminist writer. In her anonymous publications, Astell vigorously supported equal education opportunities for women.

  • A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694)
  • A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II (1697)
  • Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700)

18th century

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer who wrote abundantly across the disciplines. In her brief writing career she advocated women's equality and argued against the male birthright as a necessity for political rights. Today, she is celebrated as an essential force in the history of feminism.

Nineteenth century

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

  • The United States of America v. Susan B. Anthony (1873)

Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)

  • The Higher Education of Women (1892)

Kate Chopin (1850-1904)

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Margaret Fuller was an American journalist, critic and women's rights activist, a contributor to the "first wave" of feminism in the US. Her idea of gender equality rested upon the transcendental notion of the universal one, the fact that female and male form a whole and require one another.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was prominent an American author, artist, lecturer, and feminist social reformer. She is best known for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper, which she based on her own experience with mental illness and misguided medical treatment.

Sarah Grimke (1792-1873)

Sarah Grimke was an American, who was influential in her work in the abolitionist movement during the Civil War and also for writings and lectures she made in support of President Abraham Lincoln.

Since Grimke was prohibited from receiving formal education, she educated herself to become the oritor she had always wanted to be. She also taught her personal slave to read even though it was against the law for her to do so. Grimke noted that fighting for abolition was as important as fighting for women's rights.

  • "Letter to Theodore Weld" (1837)

Frances Harper (1825-1911)

  • We Are All Bound Up Together (1866)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was involved in the 19th century temperance and the abolitionist movements. Stanton and Lucretia Mott were the primary organizers of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton drafted a "Declaration of Sentiments" for the convention, in which she declares that men and women are created equal. She also proposed a resolution demanding the right to vote be extended to include women. That resolution was voted upon at the convention and carried. Stanton went on to write many important documents and speeches of the women's rights movement.

Maria W. Stewart(1803-1879)

Maria W. Stewart was an African American public speaker, abolitionist, and feminist. Her speeches addressed the plight of Northern black people and drew arguments from the Scriptures. She became the first woman to speak in front of a mixed audience, both male and female, black and white.

  • "Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall" (1832)

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)

Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist. A former slave, she became an important rhetorical figure for the women's rights movement. Truth could neither read nor write, but had powerful oratory skills, which she used to challenge white Americans to live up to their own ideals.

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)

Born into slavery, Ida B. Wells researched and rallied campaigns against systematic lynching in the South at the end of the 1800s. After much personal tragedy, she expanded her activism to Europe. Wells was known for her strong belief in logos and her idea that the truth speaks for itself.

  • Lynch Law in All its Phases (1893)

Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944)

  • The Intellectual Progress of Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation (1893)

Sarah Winnemucca (1841-1891)

Twentieth century

Gertrude Buck (1871-1922)

  • The Present Status of Rhetorical Theory (1900)

Mary Augusta Jordan (1855-1941)

Born to Augusta Woodbury Ricker and Edward Jordan, Mary Augusta Jordan and her sisters were provided with the best educational opportunities; namely, Jordan's father sent her to college in 1872 instead of her brother when finances allowed him to send only one child. She graduate in 1876, becoming a Vassar Librarian before earning her Master's of the Arts in English in 1878. In 1884, the Smith College President L. Clark Seelye lured her away from Vassar to his college: she became an assistant professor in rhetoric and Anglo-Saxon; she was able to maintain her teaching positions until she retired in 1921 because she never married, as was custom at that time.

In 1906, she became a full professor at Smith College, as well as the head of the English Department while also serving as an informal adviser to three Smith presidents. As a professor, she was known to encourage honesty and freedom of expression and motivated student self-criticism without loss of self-confidence.

In 1910, she was presented with a Smith College honorary doctorate of Humane Letters, and in 1921, she was then presented with a Syracuse University doctorate of Pedagogy. In that same year, she retired from her teaching position and went to New Haven. She eventually died in 1941.[1]

As for her writings, Jordan encouraged an understanding of "proper" usage of English grammar, but she acknowledged that writing and speaking embodied different aspects of the English language. "Proper" English was, according to her, whatever one interpreted it to be and how one proceeded to use it.[2]

  • Correct Writing and Speaking (1904)
  • Shakespeare and the Presumptions
  • Assets and Liabilities of Present-Day English
  • Nobless Oblige
  • Spacious Days at Vassar

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)

Margaret Sanger was the founder of the American Birth Control League (currently called Planned Parenthood), a birth control activist, and an advocate of certain aspects of eugenics. Sanger eventually gained support of the public and courts for ideas giving women the right to decide when and how she will bear children even though the public and courts were fiercely opposed to them at first. Margaret Sanger was instrumental in opening the way to universal access to birth control.

  • Letter to the Readers of The Woman Rebel (1914)

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

  • Marriage and Love (1914)

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

  • Facing Life Squarely (1927)

Dorothy Day (1897-1980)

  • Memorial Day in Chicago (1937)

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf was a British author who is considered, by many, to be one of the foremost modernist/feminist literary figures of the twentieth century. Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group between World War I and World War II.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

  • Crazy for This Democracy (1945)

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

  • A Fable for Tomorrow (1962)

Adrienne Rich (1929- )

Helene Cixous (1937- )

Cixous is considered one of the three most famous feminists in France, being a professor of literature at the Universite de Paris VIII which she helped to found in 1968. She has written more than thirty books of fiction as well as numerous essays and plays. She urges women to reclaim their natural relationships with their bodies and become rhetorically expressive. Cixous's work sparked the French feminist theory of écriture feminine.

  • Sorties (1975)
  • The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

Julia Kristeva (1941- )

  • Women’s Time (1979)

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

  • The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977)

Merle Woo (1941- )

An Asian American activist who brought two lawsuits against the University of California in the 1980s for race, gender, sexual orientation, and political bias. In her "Letter to Ma," she re-lives the silent relationship with her mother and addresses social issues such as racism, sexism, oppression and exploitation as underlying themes. Her letter resonates with the Asian American experience and reclaims power and pride for Asian American heritage.

  • Letter to Ma (1980)

Alice Walker (1944- )

Evelyn Fox Keller (1936- )

  • A Feeling for the Organism (1983)

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005)

  • I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape (1983)

Paula Gunn Allen (1939- )

  • Grandmother of the Sun: Ritual Gynocracy in Native America (1986)

Gloria Anzaldua (1942-2004)

June Jordan (1936-2002)

  • Don’t You Talk About My Momma! (1987)

bell hooks (1952- )

bell hooks, who was born Gloria Jean Watkins, is an internationally recognized intellectual, speaker, writer, and social activist. She focuses on how race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination are interconnected. She is a recognized author and has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles. She has also appeared in several documentary films, and participated in various public lectures. hooks addresses race, gender, and class in education, sexuality, feminism, history, art and the mass media through a black female perspective.

  • Homeplace (a site of resistance) (1990)

Nancy Mairs (1964- )

  • Carnal Acts (1990)
  • On Being a Cripple

Terry Tempest-Williams (1955- )

  • The Clan of One-Breasted Women (1991)

Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946- )

  • Gender Quiz (1995)

Dorothy Allison (1949- )

  • Two of Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)

Nomy Lamm (1976- )

Nomy Lamm is a self-described “fat-ass bad-ass Jew dyke amputee.” She is also an award winning musician (queer punk). She forces her audience, whether through her music or through her lectures, to consider the oppression of fat people. Because of this activism, she earned the title "Woman of the Year" from Ms. Magazine.

  • It’s a Big Fat Revolution (1995)

Leslie Marmon Silko (1948 - )

  • Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996)

Ruth Behar (1962- )

Behar was born in Cuba in 1962. Her parents moved Behar's family to the US where she became an accomplished poet, writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist. She is currently employed at the University of Michigan.

  • Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (1996)

Gloria Steinem (1934- )

  • Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions(1983)
  • Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986)
  • Revolution from Within (1992)
  • Moving beyond Words (1993)
  • Supremacy Crimes (1999)

Sources

  • Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric. Ed. Richie, Joy & Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh: University Press, 2001.

References

  1. ↑ "Mary Augusta Jordan". Biography. Vassar College. Retrieved 2 May 2011.
  2. ↑ Ritchie, Joy S. (2001). Available Means: an Anthology of Women's Rhetoric. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh. p. 218.
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