To Whom is Feminism Really Benefiting?

In Ann George’s chapter “Burke, Meet Helen Keller”, she begins by comparing the two – Kenneth Burke and Helen Keller – as rhetoricians. She claims that Keller was just as successful as Burke rhetorically and they even used some of the same exact techniques to get different points across. Both did so effectively. Okay. Fine. The two are rhetorical counterparts. I get it. But then George further explains that Helen Keller took a more ambiguous, roundabout approach in presenting rhetorical theory, apparently much like other female rhetorical theorists, as opposed to Burke’s more straightforward approach. Keller reveals rhetorical ideas through a series of discourses otherwise meant to have a different purpose – almost as if she was hiding her ideas, disguising them as something else in order to present them to the public.

 

Again, that’s fine and valid but what does this have to do with feminist rhetoric? Well, this made me think of the ancients and opportunity and access. In Aristotle’s time, rhetoricians spoke in a public forum, often outside for the townspeople to hear. Women often were not out in the streets of the town or near these events and therefore were left out. Women were especially not rhetoricians themselves. They typically stayed in the home; that was the life they knew.

Helen Keller was also constrained by lack of experiences, much like the women back then. She was blind and deaf and could only know the world around her through what she read and experienced. Also, the fact that she was a woman, even in the early 20^th century, posed an array of constraints. She had limited access to the world around her, not only because of her gender but also because of he sensory handicaps.

In this way, feminism was not only about gender but about unequal opportunity in general, which can be applied to race, class, handicaps, etc., as well as gender. Helen Keller possessed very distinct kinds of “otherness” which set her apart and made living more difficult, because of unequal opportunity and access. Feminism represents all of these inequalities. Not only those against women. The modern rebirth of rhetoric attempts to include these others and women play a huge role in it.

One of the biggest criticisms against Helen Keller had to do with her ability to know. People had problems with the fact that she was deprived of sight and sound yet she wrote as if she wasn’t. Her approach to knowledge was through reading more-so than experience. She was criticized for her “naïve verbal realism” because there was no way that she could have a first-hand knowledge of the world. George quotes Keller’s response to these criticisms on page 346:

“ Of course I am not always on the spot when things happen, nor are you. I did not witness the dreadful accident at Stanford the other day, nor did you, nor did most people in the United States. But that did not prevent me, any more than it prevented you, from knowing about it.”

            Alright. That is also a valid argument but then I read Butler’s text about gender and rhetoric. In it, she mentions an argument made by Beauvoir on page 15:

“…men could not settle the question of women because then they would be acting as both judge and party to the case.”

I could be wrong, but I understood this as saying that men are not women and therefore cannot know what it is like to experience the world as a women, and therefore cannot write about it. However, by Helen Keller’s logic, she does not need to be someone with the ability to see and hear because she has other ways of obtaining knowledge about the world. Does that mean a man does not need to be a woman in order to know what it is like?

In this case, the man is the “other” because he is lacks access of being a woman. I feel like these two texts contradict each other when it comes to feminist rhetoric. Maybe I’m reading too much into this but if everything I have said so far is true, and feminism is about equal opportunity and access for all, then men should be able to “settle the question of women” because he has the ability to gain knowledge of the feminine.