Quote: "How plausible is it that a women could have possessed this skill?" (page 58)
Question: so far, every person we have read about in rhetoric was male. Aspasia happens to be the first women mentioned when it comes to having her own meaning/use of rhetoric. why do you believe that she is the first to be taken seriously in this field that was so dominated by men? do you think she opened up doors for other females?
She was able to be taken seriously because she was exempt from the categories that kept Athenian women from participating in the public domain. Because she was educated, foreign, and unacculturated into Athenian society, (she had to be all three at once for this to work, if she'd been just one or two of the three I don't think she'd have been able to do what she did) she was able to "trespass into the masculine territory of classical rhetoric" (298).
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