Issues of empowerment have led rhetoricians as professionals to reexamine the notion of rhetorical history and to recast what is thought to be known of the past as a collection of histories--each necessarily selective, ideologically biased, and incomplete, many potentially conflicting and all, to some degree, creative fictions. Susan Jarratt, focusing on revisionary historiography, argued for "historiography in the subjunctive mode," suggesting that the Sophists have something to teach about the value of redefinition, discontinuity, and indeterminacy in rewriting rhetorical history. James Berlin argued for plurality--a search for and recognition of ideologies in opposition to whatever dominant rhetoric emerged as "the winner" at a given historical moment. Both have shown today how the failure to recognize the contributions of marginalized groups diminished rhetoricians as a community of scholars. When the language in which rhetoricians choose to write is a source of disempowerment or exclusion they are further diminished. Once again it is hard to ignore Richard Weaver's emphasis on the "whole man" and his advocacy of "mastery." There is irony in the clear elevation of the masculine to a status of preferability in a passage about the fully human as the object of rhetoric. Such recognition helps to illuminate why it ultimately matters whether rhetoric is cast in the language of masculinity or femininity, because rhetoric is evaluative and as a consequence cannot help broadcasting its ethical basis while it has its impact on receivers. (RAE)