The purposes of black feminist Pauli Murray in her feminist discourse are to help individuals gain self-awareness about their personal and social histories and about their potential for action, and to direct the energies of all oppressed people toward working together against oppression. Murray's discourse is addressed to successful professional women as well as to nonprofessional women; it provides a common arena in which black power and feminism can meet and focuses on past and potential accomplishments of oppressed groups working together. Among Murray's symbolic strategies are the use of supporting materials, including personal references that convey the improvement in women's condition, illustrative statistics, and citations of the testimony of experts. Murray's style supports her basic purposes in its compatibility with her message content; its optimistic tone; its establishment of personal experience as a valid means of support for her arguments, as well as its transcendance of the personal; and its interaction with the message to activate the audience. The structure of Murray's discourse is based on a variation of the problem-solution pattern. It appears that Murray's discourse increases her audience's capability to act, establishes her as a potential leader in both the black power and feminist movements, and contributes the vital theme of the affirmation of all human beings as a step toward universal liberation. (GT)