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Introduction Scraping the Roof I thank God with never-ending gratitude that young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to speak in public at all has been earned. —Lucy Stone, “The Condition of Women” It was around noon on March 13, 2009. I was driving north on I-95 going over in my mind the recent revisions I had made to this book and sent to the press when, on the radio, I heard an NPR announcer say that President Barack Obama would be giving a speech shortly. “Now let’s go to the East Room,” said the voice over the radio. The occasion was his signing of an executive order creating a White House Council on Women and Girls. What I heard surprised and delighted me. What is needed now, he said, is to prepare the way for future women “to sit in the high seats”—those symbolic chairs of leadership and authority. He was quick to point out how far women have come and cited not only his grandmother and mother as examples but also Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and the first woman to serve in the Cabinet. “But,” he added, “when women are more than half of our population, but just 17 percent of our Congress; when women are 49 percent of the workforce, but only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs—when these inequalities stubbornly persist in this country, in this century, then I think we need to ask ourselves some hard questions.”1 The question of women in the “high seats” is not unlike the question that prompted me to write this book. I take the coincidence of central ideas as a sign that the time is ripe for taking a fresh look at American women and the question of authority. While President Obama situated his message in a house—the White House—and used various houses—for example, the House of Representatives— for displaying inequalities in the culture writ large, I, too, situate my message in a “house.” When we wish to assemble and speak up, we do so in houses: the courthouse, the House of Representatives, the schoolhouse, the House of God, the meet- 2 / Introduction ing house, and so on. The English word house suggests there is a house made of rhetoric—a structural site that informs, contains, and shapes public life through speech with the process of decision making. I present rhetoric as a house—a structure where the business of deliberation and decision making is transacted. Although the house of rhetoric is imaginary, it is nevertheless a space of and for public life that functions through oral, written, and visual persuasion for the sake of decision making. What makes this space peculiar is that it is embodied ; in the course of making decisions, bodies speak and enact rhetoric, conveying from one human to another values and arguments when the ways of solving problems are many.2 Built out of its (embodied) process, the house of rhetoric is more mortal and organic than it is a building. So a study of this house structure is not exactly a venture into architecture, although it is related and at times useful . Looking carefully at the house of rhetoric involves an “archi-techne.”3 For the time being, let it suffice to note that this neologism has the sole advantage of considering rhetoric as a whole—not in the canonical sense but in the sense of its unique theory, tropical resources, and real sense of the body fused with production. A holistic perspective is crucial for the kind of systemic change I am seeking. Analogically, I envision the relationship between women and rhetoric as a house, a structure erected upon principles and design concepts employed in ancient Greece and how, historically, that structure has allowed women to enter but has, at the same time, denied them the authority to speak from inside. This is evident by the fact that, despite their rising circumstances in the United States, women for the better part of two centuries are absent from the high seats. That this book coheres around the idea that rhetoric is a house is not original. As far back as the ancient Greeks, rhetoric is described as an oikodomēmatōn, namely a house in the building process.4 Throughout history, others have compared rhetoric to an edifice.5 But what I am going to do with this old-fashioned metaphor...

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