The rhetorical history of women tells the story of the nine-
teenth-century struggle to obtain the right to speak and to function as
moral agents. The struggle demonstrates that public speaking and fem-
ininity were perceived as mutually exclusive. Because gender roles
persist, contemporary women who seek leadership positions face bar-
riers that make it particularly difficult for them to succeed

-- Campbell and Jerry 123

American women have come a long way in the last one hundred years. We
occupy positions as doctors, lawyers, astronauts, college professors, CEOs,
and politicians. However, on the brink of the twenty-first century, women
still encounter many of the obstacles faced by their predecessors. "Women
remain almost entirely excluded from power in political, economic, and
cultural institutions of importance in the United States, despite the small
gains of 'the year of the woman' [ 1992]" ( Tronto2). Nowhere are these bar-
riers to public life greater than in the contemporary political arena. And no
political context in the United States is more fraught with challenges than
that faced by female governors.

While women are being elected to state and national legislatures at a
slightly increasing rate in recent decades, the number of women who con-
sider entering a gubernatorial race, and ultimately those who succeed, is
much smaller. As Gertrude Mongella notes in the foreword to Brill A Ris-
ing Public Voice, "in spite of the general increase in political participation
by women over the past twenty years, the overall numbers of women at the

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