Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric

Abstract

Location has been as important to rhetoric as discovering the available means of persuasion, to paraphrase Aristotle. Classifying orations as forensic, deliberative, and ceremonial has had as much to do with where they are uttered (courtroom, legislature, and celebratory platform or pulpit) as with their content. That these are all public locations provides the main reason why women have been excluded from such rhetorical occasions since classical times, though as litteraturazione (the application of oral rhetoric principles to written language) and rhetorical arts of conversation developed, private venues in which women could be persuasive were legitimated. The problem has always been that a woman in public seems to be a public woman, in the same sense that a lodging serving all comers is a “public” house: in other words, she seems to be a whore; or else, no woman at all. Accusations of sexual impropriety were leveled against American women activists from early in the nineteenth century. For example, in 1837 the Congregationalist clergy of Massachusetts, provoked by the public speeches of abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke, issued a Pastoral Letter against female activists, which suggests that such women take a prurient interest in the sexual exploitation of female slaves (Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition , 1046–7).