Episode 172: Speaking While Female
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…it’s Women’s History Month and we are taking a historical view of women as public speakers. Traditionally, stating one’s views in public was a man’s game…and women who spoke up got a lot of pushback…
“They would say, ‘are you a man?’ The insinuation being if you were standing there speaking you were pretending to be male, you were overstepping your role, stepping out of your gendered role and into the territory of male behavior.”
How the past relates to the present. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
Listen to this snippet from a speech by the actress Dorothy Dandridge in 1963. She was standing in front of a crowd of 35,000 at a civil rights rally in Los Angeles, and she was introducing the main act: Dr. Martin Luther King.
“There have been so many wonderful speakers here this afternoon that I feel just a little bit inadequate in making my little speech. But I must say I have never spoken for such a worthy cause before such a large audience…I am not a speaker, but I have to say what I have worked on that I must say…”
The self-deprecation, the insistence that she’s not really a speaker…it all feels familiar to those of us who dread speaking in public. Who am I to put my thoughts out there? And what if I stumble, forget what I’m gonna say, embarrass myself?
Dana Rubin is a speechwriter and a speech coach who’s pretty obsessed with the history of women’s speech. For years she wrote speeches, taught men and women how to become better public speakers. She still does. And she noticed how many of the women hesitated to speak in public. To claim any expertise. To put their voices out there.
“And I began to wonder, why is it so challenging for so many women?”
So a few years ago she went to her bookshelf, to her speech anthologies, and began flipping through the pages. And that’s when she realized to her horror that the vast majority of speeches in there were by men.
“And when I say to my horror it was horrifying to see so few women represented, but it was also horrifying for me to realize that had been staring me in the face, the books had been on my shelves for years, and I had never fully appreciated that the way we have constructed public speaking and speech is as a male endeavor.”
That realization galvanized her. Yes, those books had some speeches by women like Elizabeth I, Margaret Thatcher, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But it was the same handful of speeches that cropped up over and over again. She started scouring anthologies, searching on the internet…and came across example after example of women’s speeches she’d never read or heard about, going back hundreds of years.
A couple of years ago she started building a speech bank of women’s speeches – you can find it at SpeakingWhileFemale.co.
“And I have thousands of speeches now by women in history…not every one is historically significant but a lot are, and a lot of them are totally unknown, they’re not part of our school curriculum, they’re not recognized, they’re not in our pantheon of role models. And that really bothers me.”
Because she says women were speaking in public. But history didn’t make note of their speeches the way it did men’s. She says if only more of us knew about all the women of the past who were orators…who took up the challenge of speaking in public.
And it was a challenge. Dana says women were regularly attacked for speaking up. They had fruit thrown at them and they were heckled all the time. The story goes that African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth was speaking once in the 1800s…
“And someone called out from the audience, are you a man? So in defiance she ripped open her blouse to show them she wasn’t a man. But that was common, they would say, ‘are you a man?’ The insinuation being if you were standing there speaking you were overstepping your role, stepping out of your gendered role and into the territory of male behavior.”
AM-T: “I mean that’s not that different from today in many ways, especially if you think about women speaking out online, and the abuse they get for speaking up about things on social media.”
“Well, we all know social media is a hornet’s nest and anyone who does anything that is unpopular to anybody can and does get victimized, but women are certainly at the top of that list. Women who put their opinions out there, left, right, any kind of opinion, women get challenged just because they’re using their voices, because they’re presenting themselves as experts, as authorities. When women put their voices into the world they are exposed and vulnerable and it shouldn’t have to be that way.”
AM-T: “And I want to come back to the history in a minute but I want to go to a bit of your history…when you first got into the workforce for instance, were you then a confidence speaker, did you enjoy speaking in front of groups of people and standing up and stating your opinion?”
“No, I’m so glad you asked that because I historically have been a terrified speaker. In fact the reason I got into public speaking originally is cos when I was in my 20s I was asked to speak at an alumni org and I was at the podium and I was speaking and I just blacked out. It’s common occurrence in public speaking, all of a sudden I couldn’t remember what I had said previously, in the middle of a sentence, what I was supposed to say, I just had a blackout…and it was horrifying. I fumbled my way through it, I was a very timid speaker…not confident at all and I joined Toastmasters.”
Toastmasters is an international organization that teaches public speaking and leadership skills. Dana built up her own skills there, and ultimately that led to public speaking becoming her life’s work.
“To this day I would not say I’m a confident speaker, but I have discovered one of the keys to speaking more confidently is knowing your topic. The more you speak about a topic the more comfortable you are with it. And I always tell my terrified speakers, my speakers who are nervous about the platform: know your topic.”
I’ve always found the more passionate I am about a subject the likelier I am to give a good talk. And of course I get nervous before I speak. So do most of Dana’s clients.
“Right now I’m actually coaching a woman who’s in the NYPD, the New York Police Department, and she has to speak to her colleagues as part of her professional responsibilities and she is terrified, or has been terrified. And I just, I tell her, get up there and do it, I give her a whole range of strategies that she can use to calm herself down…and there are a lot of different strategies and any good speaking coach knows these. You have to explore, to find the ones that work for you, there’s a multitude of strategies you can draw on: you can talk about breath control, mindset, feeling your feet on the ground, having notes in front of you, there’s a whole bunch of different things you can do that’ll make it easier for you, everybody’s different.”
She says while many women struggle with public speaking it’s certainly not everyone. The younger the woman, she says, the likelier it is she has confidence in her own voice. But she says whoever is speaking, they have a fine line to tread while doing it - particularly in male-dominated environments…
“We don’t want to hide our identity, we don’t want to mask ourselves, we don’t want to be something other than who we are, but we have to play on their terms in that we have to project utmost confidence, we have to be sure of ourselves…we have to project knowledge and authority to be taken seriously. And to do all those things it is, has been and is still a man’s game and we have to learn how to play it on our own terms.
By the way I was a speechwriter for a year for the former head of the NYPD when it was Ray Kelly, and I learned an enormous amount about the New York Police Department. it is very much a man’s world and it’s a place where not a lot of emotion is expressed. They’re not comfortable with expressing of a lot of emotion so when they talk about incidents, crime incidents, they talk about them extremely factually, emotion is not normally part of the equation…and it’s important for women in that environment to abide by those rules and present themselves that way but still be true to themselves, to be authentic. It’s a challenge.”
Another famously male environment of course…is politics…
[Fade up applause/Thatcher speech here]
Margaret Thatcher: “To those waiting with baited breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: you turn if you want to…” [much applause]
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher speaking to the Conservative Party Conference in 1980…
Thatcher: “The lady’s not for turning.”
Now Mrs. Thatcher reportedly sought voice lessons and by the time she became prime minister her vocal pitch was quite a bit lower than it was earlier in her career – when she’d been accused of being ‘shrill’.
So how do you abide by the unwritten rules but still stay true to yourself? Many women today would say – don’t tell me to lower my voice and sound more like a man. In fact I did a show on around topic a few years ago…it was a pretty heated debate.
Dana says look, of course women have higher voices than men – we have shorter vocal folds, different hormones…
“So women have higher voices and higher voices have been interpreted as less powerful. I don’t think women should change their voices, I think women should speak like women. We want our voices to be aspects of our bodies, as they are. However if we want to sound powerful we need to speak as powerfully as we can, we need to speak in a powerful way, and that means minimizing our filler words, not apologizing, not backing into what we’re saying…and it also means lowering our pitch at the end of a sentence or the end of a phrase. When we want to hammer home a point we need to go down.”
We all use upspeak and it’s fine to use it sometimes, but she says to sound authoritative, to get people to receive your message, you need to end your sentences on a decisive note.
I just want to say a couple of things in the break here: first, thank you so much to all those of you who pitched in recently on the Facebook page with advice for a listener who had a particular work problem. I’m not going to lie, it can get lonely doing this show by myself and I love it when I’m reminded that there is a community out there and that you’re willing to help eachother. This isn’t the first time I’ve anonymized a listener query and posted it on Facebook so thank you again for always jumping in and offering up your own perspectives and advice.
Also…you know what hell this year has been for parents – in particular a lot of mothers. The new season of the Double Shift podcast just started – I’ve mentioned the show to you before, I’m betting some of you already listen. It’s a storytelling show that challenges the status quo of motherhood in America and this season the hosts Katherine Goldstein and Angela Garbes are focusing on what this pandemic has truly costs mums…I just listened to the first episode, it features a waitress in Mississippi who has had an incredibly challenging year…she is so raw and honest – I think it’s an interview Broad Experience listeners will really enjoy and they have a bunch more episodes coming. And just like this show is not just for women, the Double Shift isn’t just for mums either. They have plenty of dads and non parents like me who are fans as well.
They’re doing really important work. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
AM-T: “You and I were talking offline about the recent remarks by the now former head of the Tokyo Olympics Committee Yoshiro Mori…he mentioned that women talk too much in meetings, and they were all going to compete with eachother to talk. And this caused a massive storm, and he did end up resigning. What does that say about our voices in the workplace and how we are perceived? Japan is a very particular culture and society of course.”
“Yoshiro Mori is gone. He was the prime minister. He had the most visible position of leadership in his country. And his position with the Olympics was a very prominent one and with that remark he stripped back the veneer and showed us what he thinks of women in the workplace. And it’s really unfortunate. But that viewpoint must be widespread, there must be many, many people who object categorically to women’s voices. Women talk too much. That is a very, very old trope.”
“And I was looking in my archive the other day at a speech by a young woman, a schoolgirl named Anna Harrington in Massachusetts. She gave a speech at her school academy in 1793, and I’ll read you just the first line of what she said: “It is not unknown to you how much wit has been scattered on the subject of the loquacity of women.” So there she was referring to the idea that women are loquacious, that women speak too much, in 1793. This goes back a long time, the roots are very deeply embedded in all of our cultures, Japan might be a particular case of a very conservative and patriarchal society, but that’s the world that we live in.”
And that reminded me of a famous speech from about 8 years ago, made by then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She was addressing her political rival, then leader of the opposition Tony Abbott. I’m not gonna play you some of the most famous bits, they’re very easily found online…we’re jumping in near the end…
“Good sense, common sense…not the kind of double standards and political game playing imposed by the leader of the opposition…now looking at his watch because apparently a woman’s spoken too long, I’ve had him yell at me to shut up in the past. I will take the remaining seconds of my speaking time…”
Gillard faced a ton of sexism in her role as Australia’s first female prime minister, particularly as a woman without children – a lot of it really visceral and crude.
In fact Gillard probably wouldn’t be surprised by the existence of some early 20th century postcards Dana pointed me to.
“I came across some postcards that stem from the suffrage era. I’ve been a postcard collector for many years, so I have thousands of postcards, and during the latter years of the suffrage campaign postcards were really popular. They’d publish these anti-suffrage postcards – they were against the women’s rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement, and they’d show images of women being tortured because they were speaking. They’re images of women with their tongues or their lips being mutilated…their tongues being cut off, sliced, hacked, there are clamps on them and chains on them, some of them have plugs in their mouth, a lot of them have women’s tongues being nailed to wood…I mean these are torture scenes.”
And you can go on eBay and search using terms like women and misogyny and comic…and you’ll find these images for sale…being peddled as amusement…
“In what world would it be OK that we call these images comic? We both know if there were any images of others being tortured, of any black people being tortured, no one would call those comic. I mean it’s really outrageous that people consider those comic.
One of those images shows a woman with her tongue being sliced off by a giant pair of scissors. And here’s the thing that really infuriates me. Someone has taken that image and made it commercially available in a series of products – you can have that image framed for your wall, you can have it made into a pillow, you can have it put on a mug…you can have it made into a jigsaw. In case that image really delights and tickles you, you can have that image of a woman’s tongue being sliced off for your domestic enjoyment.”
In the same era as those postcards were being produced, this woman was speaking in the soon-to-be Soviet Union, advocating for women’s equality…this recording is about a hundred years old.
[Alexadra Kollontai speech here]
Here, Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai address a group of women. She begins…
“For many centuries woman was oppressed and had no rights. For many centuries she was just an appendage to the man, his shadow. The husband provided for his wife, so long as she obeyed her husband’s will, meekly endured her own powerlessness, her own domestic and family slavery.”
She goes on to urge the women of Russia to work, to build nurseries, maternity homes, public canteens. She says, “Your place, working women and peasant women, is under the red revolutionary banner of worldly victorious communism!”
Dana was happy to unearth that historic speech and link to it in her speech bank.
“And I’m always looking for more, so if any of your listeners have example of speeches they think belong in my speech bank I really welcome those, I invite them to email me share them with me so I can get them up on the site as quickly as possible. My goal with this project is for every young girl, and I do mean young girl, from Kenya to Kentucky, anywhere in the world she has access to the internet, I want her to go the site, read the words of a powerful woman, hear her speak, hear her voice, and be inspired to use their own voices.”
Just as Dorothy Dandridge was in 1963.
Dandridge: “We as actors and actresses should take part in the most important drama this country has seen. And again the name of the drama is freedom.”
Thanks to Dana Rubin for being my guest on this show.
You can find the speech bank at SpeakingWhileFemale.co and there’s an email address you can use to contact her right at the top of the page. I’ll link you to more information about Dana and other resources for women speakers under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks so much for listening.