Yet both Roxanne and Sharon seem to believe that there can be no causal correlation. Women before the nineteenth century never used rhetoric or engaged in public speaking. Women cannot engage in agonism or contestive behavior. Women do not argue as well as men. Women shrink from oral discourse.
Rhetoric is male and composition is female.
Rhetoric is good and composition is bad. I challenge anyone to find evidence in my work that I support any of these ideas. Men and women do and always have engaged in gender-differentiated behaviors. For cultural and perhaps biological reasons, men have traditionally engaged and have been expected to engage in public agonistic and contestive activities more than women have. Rhetoric is the discipline that formalized and reified one important set of public contestive activities.