Parlare da donna nella sfera pubblica: identità multiple

Woman speaking in the public sphere: multiple identities The paper analyzes, from a rhetorical perspective, the so-called ‘role identity’ of women as speakers active in the public sphere. Based on an Italian linguistic column stemming from the year 1976, the text confronts different role identities of women in the context of public speech: (a) the traditional one, according to which women are not expected to speak in public; (b) the current one (i.e., valid in the Seventies), according to which women active in the public sphere, being more concise, reveal to be better orators than men; (c) two role identities desired for the future: one, according to which women should limit themselves only to short forms of oratory, and an alternative one, according to which women should have access to a full range of rhetorical choices.