This essay faces configurations of 'women' in the space of rhetoric and democracy. It deals in ancient Athens recognizing that an ancient conceptual space called rhetoric, an art or techne of civic discourse, is put in the contemporary lived space of American civic discourse always constructing the rhetorical figure of woman and continously under construction. This conceptual space rhetorically is examined, that is not articulate the feelings or meanings the space would have had for the ancient Athenians, but rather to articulate how this conceptual space still figures 'woman'.