A Feminist Rhetorical Tradition of Women Fighting For Their Right to Sp

The country is crying out for liberty and equality. Every man and woman has the right to express his/her opinions,† echoes Mariah S. Stewart, the first African-American female to speak amongst a mixed race and gender crowd. Since the very moment men dictated women to act as children, seen and not heard, fervent female voices refused the patriarchal oppression aimed at quelling the efforts of their female gender’s. With a social order firmly placed in position and accepted in large by those in political and social power, women activists continued to work towards impeding the subjection, which denounced them as the weaker, unintellectual, unspiritual, less virtuous and inarticulate sex. While some of these women used the power of Christianity as a vehicle to assert their concerns of women’s lack of freedom, they simultaneously chastised men for condemning their gender as less righteous, which was essentially against God’s order. The prevalence of womenâ€℠¢s activist roots contextualizes women in a cultural manifestation of societal change. By tracing a synopsis of some of the key figures in the anti-slavery agenda, woman’s war on race and sexism, woman’s fight for equality in religiosity and ministerial vocation, and more exclusively, the women’s rights movement, we can identify in a historical tradition of rhetoric the preeminence of the female voice and her passionate declaration for individual rights to freedom and happiness Recognized as a contemporary, as well as contributor, to the leading philosophers, Plato, Socrates, Xenophon and Aristophanes of the Common Era, historians regard Aspasia of Miletus as a key figure in political and rhetorical theory. In Cheryl Glenn’s essay, â€Å"Sex, Lies and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the... ...ignificant to the women’s movement, but also to contemporary scholarship where women’s voices are often marginalized and silenced over their male counterparts. Challenging the â€Å"contemporary academic and cultural scene† forces women to regain their place in western rhetorical history while also urging women to be aware of the importance in writing themselves into history (Glenn 181). Willard speaks of the action women must take in order to persevere over female hardship; she states, â€Å"The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.† With these words, it is important to consider that change is not met by stagnation of a voice, but instead it is initiated by passionate women who within their voices can reach a majority of opposing listeners fearlessly and demand with great articulation that change must persist.