Women as communicators: Mary Daly's hagiography as rhetoric

In 1987, Spitzack and Carter made a call for a greater understanding of the notion of women as communicators. While feminist scholars have explored the various aspects of this notion both before and after Spitzack and Carter's call, the work of Mary Daly, a radical philosopher and theologian, can be used to develop this conceptualization in a more comprehensive way. A theory of women as communicators developed from Daly's writings reveals the existence of a rhetorical foreground that silences and oppresses women, and alternative realm of rhetoric, the Background, in which women act as communicators. A theory of rhetoric based on the notion of women as communicators also reveals an alternative framework with which to assess rhetorics that do not fit easily into our more traditional frameworks. In this essay, the author develops and explores Daly's theory of women as communicators suggesting that Daly's theory assists rhetorical scholars in expanding the perimeters of the communication discipline and in exploring the notion of women as communicators more fully.