Women Agents: To be or not to be, that is the question

When first reading Karlyn Kohrs Campbell I had a lot of trouble unpacking everything she was trying to articulate in her text titled “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean”. I understood her definition of agency and the many propositions she was making but was she also proposing that women could not be agents, or that they had no agency? I also found myself asking the same question when reading Caroline G. Heilbrun’s Introduction to her book Writing a Woman’s Life. After reading Heilbrun I could not really determine what a female agent was, but rather I was left with descriptions of what a female agent is not. Naturally when I was done with both readings I was left puzzled and with the mission to determine whether I felt women could be agents or have agency.

According to Campbell the propositions she was making about agency were that “agency is communal and participatory, hence both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic; is invented by authors who are points of articulation; emerges in artistry or craft; is effected through form; and is perverse, that ism inherently protean, ambiguous, open to reversal”(Campbell 1). After reviewing these propositions or defining terms of agency it really made me question whether a woman could be defined as an agent. The time period to which Campbell links her text to, especially when she refers to Sojourner Truth’s speech, was not a time that women were thought very highly of. Women were considered to be inferior to men and ultimately really just an extension of them. So can one associate these terms with women? Although Campbell was trying to make the point of separating ourselves from essentialism, or not placing value on someone based on their gender, I think that this time period really exemplified that women were bounded to their externalities. Women were not attributed to any of these defining terms of agency because at the time they could not have been. So if Campbell is making these propositions, how can a woman be an agent?

I now want to jump to Heilbrun and unpack her depiction of women and autobiography. In Heilbrun’s text she describes four different styles of writing on a woman’s life and then goes on to describe the constraints that come along with being a woman as well as writings about women. Heilbrun notes that typical autobiographies about women are not honest because they do not include the anger and pain that women actually feel. Women were not supposed to be associated with these terms that are generally considered masculine. Heilbrun states “If one is not permitted to express anger or even to recognize it within oneself, one is, by simple extension, refused both power and control” (Heilbrun 15). Women were restrained because of this and therefore denied their public voice. Therefore I would say its possible that Heilbrun felt females could not have agency because they were not allowed to have a public voice. They were also denied the right to power and control, so how can a woman be an agent?

Now looking back at Campbell, She lays out that Sojourner Truth’s speech became a “fictive” performance because it was depicted and circulated by Frances Dana Gage after she wrote a version of the speech. In her account, it is obvious that Gage edited Truth’s speech making Gage the point of articulation for Truth. If Gage edited the speech, was she doing so because she felt Truth didn’t have agency? I think Campbell does believe that Truth had agency because she was using the lives and experience of slave women to challenge biological binaries and elitist conceptions of “true womanhood” (Campbell 14). I would say that Gage’s account has the same agency but it is also tinged with damaging agency of racist stereotypes that demean Truth and the women she was speaking for.

In a way I think that Gage was taking away Truths agency because she was taking away her voice, therefore constraining her. At the same time though I think Gage gave Truth agency because she created another version, one that could better the binaries between race and created a more dramatic space and more dramatic identity.

In my opinion I think Truth and Gage provide the conclusion that women can be agents. Truth is an agent because her agency emerged in her artistry or craft of her speech. She also had rhetorical agency because she had “the capacity to act, that is to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community” (Campbell 1). Gage is an agent because she was the point of articulation for Truth; she gave Truth’s speech constitution. After looking at Heilbrun though I think that yes women can be agents, but they will never have the same power or control as men because they are and will always constrained by externalities until we find a new base for feminist discourse.

- Cailyn Callaway

Works Cited

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2.1 (2005): 1-19.


Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Introduction.” In Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Norton, 1988. 11-24.