Hillary Clinton's New York Speech about Women and Girls: Values, Policy, Public Life

Hillary Clinton, DOS photo

Hillary Clinton spoke in New York on March 7, 2017 at the "2017 Girls Inc. New York" luncheon. She gave this speech as she re-emerged into public life after her loss in the 2016 election. This was a ceremonial speech and, like most good ceremonial speakers, Clinton talked about values and implied policies. In Aristotle's book The Art of Rhetoric, ceremonial speeches aim at the question of praise and blame. Who deserves praise? Who deserves blame? What kinds of things are praiseworthy? What kinds of things are blameworthy? Ceremonial rhetoric is often called by the Greek phrase epideictic rhetoric.

As Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca point out in their important book, Traité de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique (The New Rhetoric in English translation), epideictic rhetoric also reaches out to questions of value. When we talk about what is praiseworthy, we express our values. If a speaker praises George Washington for his patriotism, the speaker implies that patriotism is good and that it is a value that people should hold and believe.

We can take this a step farther and use epideictic rhetoric to advocate a policy. If patriotism is

US Flags on Porch, USA.gov

good, then we should adopt patriotic policies. If it is bad to lack patriotism, then a speaker might attack an unpatriotic person, urging the audience to reject the unpatriotic person's policies. If, for example, a speaker castigates the traitor Benedict Arnold, the speaker also opposes the policy of rebellion.

Let's look at what Clinton said on March 7. She commented on perseverance: "[It's] the inner strength, even the stubbornness to keep showing up every day, to refuse to quit or give up in the face of any setback." That is a praiseworthy value. This led her to speak for the "full participation of women and girls." That is a policy. She carried the policy a step farther: "We have to form our own chorus, twice as loud, convincing our friends, our colleagues, ourselves that women are both smart enough and good enough to be considered for anything they choose to pursue."

So, the chain is this: the speaker praises an individual or group. In this case, Clinton praised women. The praise leads the speaker to advocate a value. The value implies that we should work to carry out the values. This is quite different from what Aristotle called deliberative speech, where the speaker would try to prove that a policy is advantageous. In many cases, epideictic speeches can be much more persuasive than deliberative speeches.

A long line of scholars has looked at these matters. I'll mention a few. Gerard Hauser wrote an important article in 1999 about Aristotle and "The Formation of Public Morality." Cindy Koenig Richards wrote about "Public Women and the Transformative Potential of Epideictic Rhetoric." My article about the Amarna Letters shows how ancient writers used praise to urge the King of Egypt to send troops to support them. I've written about epideictic rhetoric during the 1896 presidential campaign, for example here and here.

Here are some of my earlier blog posts about epideictic rhetoric:

• FDR's war message.
• The family Thanksgiving speech.
• New Year's Day speeches.
• Selena Gomez speaking about her struggles with depression.   
• And, of course, Meryl Streep's controversial Golden Globes speech.