List of female rhetoricians

Before Common Era

• Aspasia was a Milesian woman who was known and highly regarded for her teaching of political theory and rhetoric. She is mentioned in Plato's Memexenus, and is often credited with teaching the Socratic method to Socrates.
• Diotima of Mantinea is an important character in Plato's Symposium. It is uncertain if she was a real person or perhaps a character modelled after Aspasia, for whom Plato had much respect.

  14th century

• Julian of Norwich was an English mystic who challenged the teachings of medieval Christianity in regard to women's inferior role in religion.
• Catherine of Siena was an Italian who was influential through her writings to men and women in authority, where she begged for peace in Italy and for the return of the papacy to Rome. She was canonized in 1461 by Pope Pius II.
• Christine de Pizan was a Venetian who moved to France at an early age. She was influential as a writer, rhetorician and critic during the medieval period, and was Europe's first female professional author.
• Margery Kempe was a British woman who could neither read nor write, but dictated her life story The Book of Margery Kempeafter receiving a vision of Christ during the birth of the first of her fourteen children. From the 15th century Kempe was viewed as a holy woman after her book was published in pamphlet form with any thought or behavior that could be viewed as nonconforming or unorthodox removed. When the original was rediscovered in 1934, a more complex self-portrait emerged.

  15th century

• Laura Cereta was an Italian humanist and feminist who was influential in the letters she wrote to other intellectuals. Through her letters she fought for women's right to education and against the oppression of married women.

  17th century

• Margaret Fell was a British founding member of the Religious Society of Friends, and was popularly known as the "mother of Quakerism". She was persecuted and imprisoned for speaking her mind. She is credited with many essential changes within the Quaker church which brought more freedom for women in religious, social, and political areas.
• Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle was a British novelist, playwright, philosopher, poet, and rhetorician. Recent critics—most notably Christine Sutherland and Jane Donawerth—have explored her rhetorical theory and practice. Key works in this vein include:
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a Mexican who entered a convent to dedicate her life to scholarship. She took part in the elite intellectual circles of her time, and many see her as the first feminist of the New World. She wrote poetry, essays, and religious treatises, and argued for a more holistic role for women in society.
• Mary Astell is regarded by many as the first English feminist writer. In her anonymous publications, Astell vigorously supported equal education opportunities for women.

  18th century

• Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer who wrote abundantly across the disciplines. In her brief writing career she advocated women's equality and argued against the male birthright as a necessity for political rights. Today, she is celebrated as an essential force in the history of feminism.

  Nineteenth century

• Susan B. Anthony
• Anna Julia Cooper
• Kate Chopin
• Margaret Fuller was an American journalist, critic and women's rights activist, a contributor to the "first wave" of feminism in the US. Her idea of gender equality rested upon the transcendental notion of the universal one, the fact that female and male form a whole and require one another.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American author, artist, lecturer, and feminist social reformer. She is best known for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper, which she based on her own experience with mental illness and misguided medical treatment.
• Sarah Grimke was an American, who was influential in her work in the abolitionist movement during the Civil War and also for writings and lectures she made in support of President Abraham Lincoln. Since Grimke was prohibited from receiving formal education, she educated herself to become the oritor she had always wanted to be. She also taught her personal slave to read even though it was against the law for her to do so. Grimke noted that fighting for abolition was as important as fighting for women's rights.
• Frances Harper
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton was involved in the 19th century temperance and the abolitionist movements. Stanton and Lucretia Mott were the primary organizers of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton drafted a "Declaration of Sentiments" for the convention, in which she declares that men and women are created equal. She also proposed a resolution demanding the right to vote be extended to include women. That resolution was voted upon at the convention and carried. Stanton went on to write many important documents and speeches of the women's rights movement.
• Maria W. Stewart was an African American public speaker, abolitionist, and feminist. Her speeches addressed the plight of Northern black people and drew arguments from the Scriptures. She became the first woman to speak in front of a mixed audience, both male and female, black and white.
• Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist. A former slave, she became an important rhetorical figure for the women's rights movement. Truth could neither read nor write, but had powerful oratory skills, which she used to challenge white Americans to live up to their own ideals.
• Ida B. Wells was born into slavery, researched and rallied campaigns against systematic lynching in the South at the end of the 1800s. After much personal tragedy, she expanded her activism to Europe. Wells was known for her strong belief in logos and her idea that the truth speaks for itself.
• Fannie Barrier Williams
• Sarah Winnemucca

  Twentieth century

• Gertrude Buck
• Margaret Sanger was the founder of the American Birth Control League, a birth control activist, and an advocate of certain aspects of eugenics. Sanger eventually gained support of the public and courts for ideas giving women the right to decide when and how she will bear children even though the public and courts were fiercely opposed to them at first. Margaret Sanger was instrumental in opening the way to universal access to birth control.
• Emma Goldman
• Alice Dunbar-Nelson
• Dorothy Day
• Virginia Woolf was a British author who is considered, by many, to be one of the foremost modernist/feminist literary figures of the twentieth century. Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group between World War I and World War II.
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Rachel Carson
• Adrienne Rich
• Helene Cixous is considered one of the three most famous feminists in France, being a professor of literature at the Universite de Paris VIII which she helped to found in 1968. She has written more than thirty books of fiction as well as numerous essays and plays. She urges women to reclaim their natural relationships with their bodies and become rhetorically expressive. Cixous's work sparked the French feminist theory of écriture feminine.
• Julia Kristeva
• Audre Lorde
• Merle Woo is an Asian American activist who brought two lawsuits against the University of California in the 1980s for race, gender, sexual orientation, and political bias. In her "Letter to Ma," she re-lives the silent relationship with her mother and addresses social issues such as racism, sexism, oppression and exploitation as underlying themes. Her letter resonates with the Asian American experience and reclaims power and pride for Asian American heritage.
• Alice Walker
• Evelyn Fox Keller
• Andrea Dworkin
• Paula Gunn Allen
• Gloria Anzaldua
• June Jordan
• bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, is an internationally recognized intellectual, speaker, writer, and social activist. She focuses on how race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination are interconnected. She is a recognized author and has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles. She has also appeared in several documentary films, and participated in various public lectures. hooks addresses race, gender, and class in education, sexuality, feminism, history, art and the mass media through a black female perspective.
• Nancy Mairs
• Terry Tempest-Williams
• Minnie Bruce Pratt
• Dorothy Allison
• Nomy Lamm is a self-described “fat-ass bad-ass Jew dyke amputee.” She is also an award-winning musician. She forces her audience, whether through her music or through her lectures, to consider the oppression of fat people. Because of this activism, she earned the title "Woman of the Year" from Ms. Magazine.
• Leslie Marmon Silko
• Ruth Behar was born in Cuba in 1962. Her parents moved Behar's family to the US where she became an accomplished poet, writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist. She is currently employed at the University of Michigan.
• Gloria Steinem