Available Means

An Anthology Of Women's Rhetoric(s)

Joy Ritchie, Katharine Ronald, Joy Ritchie, Kate Ronald, Joy S. Ritchie, Katharine J. Ronald

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2001
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822979753
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"I say that even later someone will remember us."—Sappho, Fragment 147, sixth century, BC



Sappho's prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the twenty-first century. But not without peril. Sappho's writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women's voices. Sappho's hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion—across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations—in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them.



Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do so in the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women's rhetoric. Women whose voices are central to such scholarship are included here, such as Aspasia (a contemporary of Plato's), Margery Kempe, Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells. Added are influential works on what it means to write as a woman—by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Alice Walker, and Hélène Cixous. Public "manifestos" on the rights of women by Hortensia, Mary Astell, Maria Stewart, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, and Audre Lorde also join the discourse.



But Available Means searches for rhetorical tradition in less obvious places, too. Letters, journals, speeches, newspaper columns, diaries, meditations, and a fable (Rachel Carson's introduction to Silent Spring) also find places in this room. Such unconventional documents challenge traditional notions of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery, and blur the boundaries between public and private discourse. Included, too, are writers whose voices have not been heard in any tradition. Ritchie and Ronald seek to "unsettle" as they expand the women's rhetorical canon.



Arranged chronologically, Available Means is designed as a classroom text that will allow students to hear women speaking to each other across centuries, and to see how women have added new places from which arguments can be made. Each selection is accompanied by an extensive headnote, which sets the reading in context. The breadth of material will allow students to ask such questions as "How might we define women's rhetoric? How have women used and subverted traditional rhetoric?"



A topical index at the end of the book provides teachers a guide through the rhetorical riches. Available Means will be an invaluable text for rhetoric courses of all levels, as well as for women's studies courses.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Chronological Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Aspasia
• Diotima
• Hortensia
• Heloise
• Julian of Norwich
• Catherine of Siena
• Christine de Pizan
• Margery Kempe
• Queen Elizabeth I
• Jane Anger
• Rachel Speght
• Margaret Fell
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
• Mary Astell
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• Belinda
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Cherokee Women
• Maria W. Stewart
• Sarah Grimké
• Angelina Grimké Weld
• Margaret Fuller
• Seneca Falls Convention
• Sojourner Truth
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
• Susan B. Anthony
• Sarah Winnemucca
• Anna Julia Cooper
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Fannie Barrier Williams
• Ida B. Wells
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Gertrude Buck
• Mary Augusta Jordan
• Margaret Sanger
• Emma Goldman
• Alice Dunbar Nelson
• Dorothy Day
• Virginia Woolf
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Rachel Carson
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Adrienne Rich
• Hélène Cixous
• Combahee River Collective
• Audre Lorde
• Merle Woo
• Alice Walker
• Evelyn Fox Keller
• Andrea Dworkin
• Paula Gunn Allen
• Gloria Anzaldúa
• June Jordan
• Trinh T. Minh-ha
• Bell Hooks
• Nancy Mairs
• Terry Tempest Williams
• Patricia Williams
• Toni Morrison
• Minnie Bruce Pratt
• Dorothy Allison
• Nomy Lamm
• Leslie Marmon Silko
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Ruth Behar
• Gloria Steinem
• Appendix A: Alternative/Rhetorical Table of Contents
• A Select Bibliography of Works on Women's Rhetorics
• Index