From Aspasia--a contemporary of Plato--to Gloria Steinem, Available Means gathers the voices of women rhetoricians throughout history. The first anthology of primary texts in this tradition, this book expands the canon and demonstrates how women's writing and speaking has redefined and subverted traditional means of persuasion. "I say that even later someone will remember us," wrote Sappho in the sixthe century, B.C.E. Her prediction came true, not only for her own writing, but for that of hundreds of women over the past two and a half millennia. Seventy of them are represented in Available Means, including: Queen Elizabeth I, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, and many more.