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Feminist rhetorical studies always have engaged and challenged the agendas of at least two disciplines: speech communication and feminist/women's studies. In speech communication, feminist rhetoricians seek to intervene in a rhetorical tradition dominated by the study of elite, white males (Campbell, 1989) and guided by theory produced by elite, white males (Foss & Griffin, 1992). However, they simultaneously draw energy from and contribute to the general goal of many feminists across the academy: to use the intellectual resources of feminism to understand and to valorize the contributions of women to public life, specifically public discourse, and to critique the ways in which these contributions have been and continue to be marginalized.
One visible strain of scholarship linked to feminism has focused on analyzing rhetoric associated with feminist movements. From some perspectives, rhetoric and feminism are natural comrades; rhetoricians long to study the dynamics of social movement discourse, and feminism is one of the longest, most ideologically diverse, and most discursive social movements in history. Because early nineteenth-century woman's rights activists had virtually no legal, political, or economic rights, rhetoric was their only form of influence. The proliferation of studies of nineteenth-century female rhetors in the last fifteen years or so evidences rhetoricians' realization of the riches to be mined in historical feminist texts.
Indeed, rhetorical scholars have sometimes too easily conflated criticism of feminist rhetoric with feminist criticism in rhetorical studies. In a recent anthology of reprinted works in rhetorical criticism (Burgchardt, 1995), one of the selections under the section labelled "Feminist Criticism" is Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's essay on Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Solitude of Self," originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1980).1 Yet Campbell's critique of Stanton's speech does not make much use of feminist principles in its analysis; rather, it is an insightful piece of public address scholarship that happens to focus on the discourse of a feminist. The feminist resonance of this piece of scholarship comes not from its approach but from its topic and from the author's reputation. Some may label this essay a piece of feminist criticism because it is easily linked to Campbell's feminist motive to call attention to the important rhetorical contributions of women. However, she does not assert this motive in the essay and so the...