Women’s Voices Matter
In the spring of 1946, California Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas squared off against Senator Joseph McCarthy, demagogic leader of an anti-Communist witch hunt, in a historic speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives. Douglas was among the first to publicly denounce McCarthy’s malicious campaign, and her words have gone down in history. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they should have gone down in history.
“We, the members of this Congress — chosen by a free people to protect their rights and to bring reality to their hopes and faiths — are not bigots,” Douglas said. “We do not believe in name calling. We do not agree that everyone who disagrees with us should be hunted down like a criminal, denied his civil rights, and deprived of his ability to earn a living.”
Unfortunately, today, hardly anybody remembers what Ms. Douglas said. Students seldom learn about her courageous public stand. Douglas’s speech, known as “My Democratic Credo,” seldom, if ever, appears in textbooks or curricula about the fight for civil rights, freedom of speech, or free association. But that’s far from unusual. Very few women in history, if any, have been recognized in the narrative of the nation for using their public voices.
I used to wonder whether it was true that the “great men” in American history gave all the greatest speeches. Like so many others, I learned in school about Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert, Billy Graham, and Ronald Reagan. All are widely considered to be among the greatest American orators. True, the words of Kamala Harris, America’s first woman Vice President, probably will be recorded in history books, perhaps for what she said in Selma, Alabama, or the Munich Security Conference. But unfortunately, that is not the case with so many other American women whose voices have shaped our history.
Here’s my question: Did any women play a role in shaping the nation’s history through their public speaking? That’s what I set to find out. In 2017, I began an intensive research and excavation project. Down the rabbit hole I went into a subject that at first seemed extremely niche and arcane, but eventually opened up into a vast expansive world.
I searched speech anthologies, surely the most obvious source for historic speeches. I collected and combed through any and every speech anthology, published in the English language, that I could get my hands on, whether in the US or abroad, going back to the 18th century.
Among the earliest known anthologies was The Columbian Orator, a collection of speeches (with some essays and poems mixed in) published in Boston 1797. It contained oratory by Cicero, Napoleon Buonaparte, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and other luminaries. During the 19th century, The Columbian Orator was widely used in American classrooms to teach reading and speaking. In fact, when he was twelve years old, Frederick Douglass purchased a copy of The Columbian Orator in a Baltimore bookshop, and it became one of his most treasured possessions. He used it to practice his own public speaking.
But the Columbian Orator included no speeches by women.
In fact, among the 230 speech anthologies I eventually collected, there were precious few speeches by women. Many volumes contained none, or just a few.
And yet, as I broadened my search, I began uncovering more addresses by women, in no small numbers. In the archives of historical societies and universities, in old newspapers and journals, in out-of-print books and diaries, speeches began turning up everywhere. I began adding them to a free, online archive that I created called, the Speaking While Female Speech Bank, a free resource with speeches by women from around the globe and across time. , a free resource with speeches by women from around the globe and across time.
A picture began to emerge of a large and important aspect of women’s lives that had been almost completely overlooked and forgotten. The abundance and diversity of women’s speeches, along with their considerable and largely ignored talents, was staggering.
Numerous academic scholars, I learned, had been researching and writing about women’s oratory, but their insights have largely been confined to academic publications and conversations. Beyond the confines of academe, the message simply hasn’t gotten through — that throughout history, women have not been silent. They’ve been speaking out in public and private venues, giving testimony in courts of law and before legislatures, delivering solace and inspiration in houses of worship, and speaking about political, social and religious issues. Women have been leading with their voices.
But the absence of women’s speech from the anthologies and the history books is not just a case of missing content. It’s not just words that are absent — what’s also lost are examples of women as authority figures, as self-determined leaders, as informed and confident commentators on public life and affairs.
Speaking While Female aims to correct this oversight by making these orations available to the public. Across the country and around the world, academics, teachers, and speakers are already using the archive as part of their content, lesson plans and curricula, filling in the gaps where traditional sources lack women’s words.
Last year, I published an anthology of women’s speech, Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women. It includes talks by US women of every background, race, ethnicity, and belief from 1637 to the present. Many of the speeches are hard to find; one had never before been published.
On the cover is a portrait bust of Helen Gahagan Douglas sculpted by American artist Isamu Noguchi. Douglas is pictured with her head tilted upward, a figure of hope and strength. Her historic words are presented alongside those of other American women leaders such as:
Black American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond, who in 1859-1860 traveled and lectured across the north of England, Scotland, and Ireland, speaking to audiences of educated British about the evils of slavery. She also emphasized the consequences of the British textile trade, which was enriching their economic fortunes but perpetuating chattel slavery in the American South.
Pioneering American lawyer Clara Shortridge Foltz, who in 1893 delivered a speech at a conference in Chicago in which she carefully laid out the legal and moral case for a public defender system. Hugely influential, that speech led to the creation of a publicly funded system of legal representation for criminal defendants who deserve representation but can’t afford to hire lawyers.
Psychologist and industrial engineer Lillian Gilbreth, who at a conference in Chicago in 1933 delivered a groundbreaking speech about the role of mechanized labor during the Great Depression, its potential gains and losses, and the critical importance of taking a human-centered approach to the tools and technologies of daily life.
Labor organizer Dolores Huerta, who in 1966 delivered a rousing speech on the steps of the California state capitol building that drew attention to striking grape growers, rallying support for their cause. It took nine years, but California Gov. Edmund Brown, Jr. signed the landmark California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, giving farmworkers the right to collective bargaining — the first law of its kind in the nation.
More than a corrective to the history books, Speaking While Female aims to serve as a catalyst for a more inclusive curriculum for students. We already know there’s a disparity between women’s historical accomplishments and the recognition and awareness of them in our educational curricula, our media, and our common storehouse of knowledge.
A 2017 study by the National Women’s History Museum — Where Are the Women? — found that less than one quarter of the historical figures studied from kindergarten through 12th grade in US classrooms were women. Alexander Cuenca, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at Indiana University and a board member of the National Council for the Social Studies, has argued that this absence of women in the classroom shows that curriculum standards have remained “doggedly masculine.”
One thing is clear: this problem will not be fixed by itself. I call on educators and policymakers to consider three steps on the road to solving this problem: Elevate the importance of gender studies; write more women into classroom history lessons; and commit to inspiring young people by closing the gender gap in all aspects of society.
Elevate Gender Studies
It’s been more than half a century since the birth of Women’s studies as an academic field of inquiry. Ince considered a “useless degree,” women’s and gender studies degrees are now offered at hundreds of colleges across the country. Thousands of books, monographs, and articles have been written on different aspects of women’s history, with more published all the time. The art world and the media are enthusiastically filling in the gaps. There’s no shortage of documentaries about overlooked and “erased” women — including women who used their public voices.
Yet at the level of our educational curriculum — what students are actually learning in K-12 classrooms across the country — too many old stereotypes persist. Only a multi-faceted, cross-institutional effort will make a meaningful difference in shifting what young people learn about the power of voice in history.
Write Women into Classroom History Lessons
Some organizations are stepping to fill the gaps. The non-profit National Women’s History Alliance has been working since 1980 to “write women back into history” by sharing resources and promoting the inclusion of women’s history in more state K-12 curricula.
The National Women’s History Museum works with educators to create classroom resources that include more women’s history, with detailed lesson plans on women leaders such as workers’ right advocate Frances Perkins, educator Fannie Lou Hamer, and artist Faith Ringgold.
The AP United States Women’s History Proposal is a coalition of history students and educators who are promoting a stand-alone AP US Women’s History course. Founding members and history teachers Kristen Kelly and Serene.
Williams points out that in the current AP US Government & Politics course, 14 Supreme Court cases are required to be taught across school, but none address women’s equality. At the very least, students should learn about the landmark 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case, which affirmed that married couples had a right to use birth control, based on the Fourth and Fifth amendments that protect an individual’s private life from government interference. In that same AP course, none of the nine required foundational documents were written by women. Why did they not include the historic Declaration of Rights and Sentiments that was written and signed in 1848 at the first women’s rights convention organized by women?
Inspire Young People by Eliminating Gender Disparities Throughout Society
Who loses out when women's words and wisdom are absent? We all do. But the biggest losers are the young women and men who are now being educated, and who will one day replace the adults in the room. They are our future — we depend on them to rise to the challenge and speak up about the subjects they hold dear. We need them to know they have role models and an accessible and inspirational past to draw on, so they’ll be prepared to speak up and put their knowledge into a world that badly needs their creativity, ideas and insights.
About the Author:
Dana Rubin was working as speechwriter and public speaking coach when she realized the extent to which women’s public words had been overlooked in the history book. The publicly accepted narrative has given credit to male speakers, their words, and the impact of their spoken words while discounting the significant role women have also played by public speaking. Rubin spent years searching through archives, old newspapers, out-of-print books, and public records for the words of women in speeches, lectures, testimony, and worship services, and publishing them in a free public archive. She also has published an anthology of American women’s speeches. Since then, her mission has expanded to champion the words of other underrepresented voices, inspired by the belief that diverse voices in the public sphere strengthen public debate, good governance, and democratic values.