Addressing issues of context in historical women's public address

Condit's (1993) positionalist perspective allows scholars to recognize the larger contexts of rhetoric by and about women so that we may better identify the ways that rhetors and audiences negotiate the relationships between public rhetoric, public vocabulary, and cultural contexts. They also point to the many representations of woman that rhetorical acts can encourage, suggest reasons why specific representations emerged when they did, and point to the implications of contradictory representations of woman put forth in rhetorical acts.