SOURCE: Griffin, Cindy L. “Women as Communicators: Mary Daly's Hagography as Rhetoric.” Communications Monographs 60, no. 2 (June 1993): 158-77.

In the following essay, Griffin analyzes Daly's feminist philosophy of language and its application as an alternative mode of communication theory and rhetorical practice among women. According to Griffin, Daly elucidates the dichotomy between women's public and private discourse, embodied in a “foreground” of patriarchal oppression and a “background” of feminist authenticity and subversion.

In 1987, Spitzack and Carter suggested that, although women's visibility has increased in the communication discipline, the simple fact of their presence has not necessarily corresponded to increased knowledge about women's unique or distinctive forms of communication. While the study of women's communication may have become a part of the communication discipline in the 1990s, scholars who work in this area, for the most part, continue to attempt to understand and evaluate women's communication from traditional frameworks. The...