ABSTRACT
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell opens Man Cannot Speak for Her with a description of the rhetorical tradition: Public persuasion has been a conscious part of the Western male’s heritage from ancient Greece to the present. The classic text in feminist rhetorical theory goes on to explain that while women “have no parallel rhetorical history” due to prohibitions against women speaking, Campbell starts the reclamation by examining “women’s rights agitation”. Academic writing is meant to create a body of knowledge that may or may not influence public discourse, policy, or conversations about a topic. Even if merely description, the work can offer valuable insight through the collection of ideas into cohesive units. Stephen Yarbrough in After Rhetoric: The Study of Discourse Beyond Language and Culture distinguishes between rhetorical force and discursive power as a way to talk about the limits of persuasion.
