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For Aristotle, a speaker's ethos was a rhetorical strategy employed by an orator whose purpose was to "inspire trust in his audience" (''Rhetorica'' 1380). ''Ethos'' was therefore achieved through the orator's "good sense, good moral character, and goodwill", and central to Aristotelian virtue ethics was the notion that this "good moral character" was increased in virtuous degree by habit (''Rhetorica'' 1380). Aristotle links virtue, habituation, and ''ethos'' most succinctly in Book II of ''Nichomachean Ethics'': "Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching [...] while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ''ethike'' is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ''ethos'' (habit)" (952). Discussing women and rhetoric, scholar Karlyn Kohrs Campbell notes that entering the public sphere was considered an act of moral transgression for females of the nineteenth century: "Women who formed moral reform and abolitionist societies, and who made speeches, held conventions, and published newspapers, entered the public sphere and thereby lost their claims to purity and piety" (13).<ref>{{Cite book|title = Man Cannot Speak for Her: Volume I; A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric|last = Campbell|first = Karlyn Kohrs|publisher = Praeger|year = 1989|pages = 13}}</ref> Crafting an ethos within such restrictive moral codes, therefore, meant adhering to membership of what Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have theorized as counterpublics. While Warner contends that members of counterpublics are afforded little opportunity to join the dominant public and therefore exert true agency, Nancy Fraser has problematized Habermas's conception of the public sphere as a dominant "social totality"<ref>{{Cite journal|title = Publics and Counterpublics|last = Warner|first = Michael|date = 2002|journal = Public Culture|volume = 14|pages = 49–90|doi = 10.1215/08992363-14-1-49}}</ref> by theorizing "subaltern counterpublics", which function as alternative publics that represent "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (67).<ref>{{Cite journal|title = Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of the Actually Existing Democracy|last = Fraser|first = Nancy|date = 1990|journal = Social Text|issue = 25/26|pages = 56–80|doi = 10.2307/466240|jstor = 466240}}</ref>
Though feminist rhetorical theorists have begun to offer more nuanced ways to conceive of ethos, they remain cognizant of how these classical associations have shaped and still do shape women's use of the rhetorical tool. Johanna Schmertz draws on Aristotelian ethos to reinterpret the term alongside feminist theories of subjectivity, writing that, "Instead of following a tradition that, it seems to me, reads ethos somewhat in the manner of an Aristotelian quality proper to the speaker's identity, a quality capable of being deployed as needed to fit a rhetorical situation, I will ask how ethos may be dislodged from identity and read in such a way as to multiply the positions from which women may speak" (83).<ref>{{Cite journal|title = Constructing Essences: Ethos and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism|last = Schmertz|first = Johanna|date = 1999|journal = Rhetoric Review|volume = 18|pages = 82–91|doi = 10.1080/07350199909359257}}</ref> Rhetorical scholar and professor Kate Ronald's claim that "ethos is the appeal residing in the tension between the speaker's private and public self", (39)<ref>{{Cite journal|title = A Reexamination of Personal and Public Discourse in Classical Rhetoric|last = Ronald|first = Kate|date = 1990|journal = Rhetoric Review|volume = 9|pages = 36–48|doi = 10.1080/07350199009388911}}</ref> also presents a more postmodern view of ethos that links [[credibility]] and identity. Similarly, Nedra Reynolds and Susan Jarratt echo this view of ethos as a fluid and dynamic set of identifications, arguing that "these split selves are guises, but they are not distortions or lies in the philosopher's sense. Rather they are 'deceptions' in the sophistic sense: recognition of the ways one is positioned multiply differently" (56).<ref>{{Cite book|title = Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory|last1 = Susan|first1 = Jarratt|publisher = Southern Methodist University Press|year = 1994|location = Dallas|pages = 37–69|last2 = Reynolds|first2 = Nedra}}</ref>
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