[Music]
[Applause]
so great to be here any TEDx women is
seriously fantastic right but long
before TEDx women there are amazing
women speakers in fact history is full
of women who've stepped up and spoken
out and used their voices but the thing
is you wouldn't know it from the history
books I've been a speech writer and I'm
a speech coach and also I coach students
for high school debate and judge high
school debate and about a year ago a
coach came to me and said Donna can you
give me five great speeches by American
women so I can share them with my
students I said of course so then I went
to look and I looked and I looked and I
looked and I'll tell you what I found
just not but I didn't find not many
speeches by women so I first of all I
looked online and then I started
collecting speech anthologies right
speech collections I looked on my own
bookshelf and I bought a few and I
bought a few and I bought a few more and
I have 85 of them actually 87 these are
books with names like best speeches in
history and speeches that changes the
world and great speeches through the
ages and the thing they were published
between 1797 and the current year 2019
and the thing is there are not many
speeches by women either no or not many
speeches by women so I wanted to know
where are all the speeches by women I
started to do some research right
because women speakers have been active
in history they've been speaking but the
history doesn't reflect it you know how
when you're in grade school and you're
choosing sport people for team sports
and somehow it's always the same five
players that get chosen again and again
and again right and you think there are
other really great players but for some
reason we never get to see them in the
game that's great talent
they're not on the field I feel the same
way about women's speeches they've been
speaking out you know for for really for
centuries and there are thousands of
women's speeches that we should know
about but what the history books do is
they only include the same handful of
speeches it's really infuriating like
for example they'll have Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B Anthony obviously
maybe Margaret Thatcher obviously
Elizabeth the first to her troops it
tells Marie
Eleanor Roosevelt in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights but they're
all great speeches all great women but
they're more women in the game so when I
was buying all of these books I also
happened to buy this little gem it's
called the white house hand a book of
oratory and it has speeches all by men
no surprise but it also has rhetorical
poses to show you how you should stand
so that you can project the right image
and authority
now you know historians speak of a
master narrative it's a story right
but it's so uncommon like deeply
embedded in our consciousness that we're
not even maybe aware of it and it may be
wrong it may be totally wrong but it's
still the story that we live with and I
believe that story is that a great
speaker is a man and a powerful voice is
masculine or manly and the thing is that
these are stereotypes right or they're
even more than stereotypes they're like
archetypes they go so deep but we women
all of we women here tonight we need
those archetypes - where are our
archetypes because we need women's
shoulders to stand on we need examples
that we can follow
we need role models so I want to show
you some of the women the examples that
I've discovered of powerful women
speakers who are our role models Sarah
Parker Raymond
she was a black American who was very
well educated and she gave her first
public speech at age 16 on anti-slavery
she was in Massachusetts which obviously
says she was a free person and she was
such an eloquent speaker and so so made
such an impression that they sent her on
a mission to England to give lectures
abolition lectures and in 1859 she went
to the city of Manchester in the north
of England now Manchester was a very
wealthy City it was a center of Finance
and capital and there was a great wealth
on display but a lot of the wealth came
and actually one of the main industries
was cotton so when Sarah Parker Riemann
went there she spoke to the man that
Chester Athenaeum mostly white audience
and she indicted not just the south in
the united states where slavery was
legal
not just the north which was benefiting
economically off of slavery but also
England in Britain
because where were they getting all that
raw cotton from the southern some from
the southern states so she says she
walks through the some of the southern
states where human beings were raised
like cattle for the market so she says
she walks through the streets and she of
Manchester and she sees load after load
of cotton and all she hears is cotton
cotton cotton she says I cannot speak of
Scott of cotton when people are being
brutalized it was extraordinary Sarah
Parker Rieman Sarah Winnemucca she was a
Native American from the west coast and
in 1884 she went to Washington DC to
testify to a Subcommittee on Indian
Affairs of Congress and she testified to
these congressmen about her people the
northern Paiute and how they had been
treated they had been forced off their
ancestral land and forced to march north
350 miles in the dead of winter in the
snow across the mountains it was so cold
that their infants died in their parents
arms and the ground was frozen solid and
they couldn't even dig the graves they
had to leave the bit the babies by the
roadside covered in snow her testimony
is not just heart it's heartbreaking
that it also is so indicative of our
treatment of Native Americans it's a
testament really to the way we treated
them and it should be in every history
and social studies book in our country
Helen Hamilton Gardiner so in the 1870s
and 1880s it was widely believed that
women were not as intelligent as men
because their brains were skulls were
smaller this was based on the
pseudoscience of craniometry where they
would measure your skulls like
phrenology right and therefore women
were prone to being more emotional less
rational probably it was assumed there
couldn't be any women geniuses right
so therefore Helen Hamilton garter
didn't believe this for a minute
she teamed up with the best neurologists
the best medical scientists and she did
all the research
she looked through the microscope she
looked at mouse brains and in the end in
1884 she gives a speech in which she
thoroughly refutes the notion that women
are biologically or physiologically
destined to be less intelligent than men
and therefore by the way not suitable or
qualified to cast a vote right because
suffrage was very much a live issue she
called her speech sex in brain right and
when she died what it Helen Hamilton
Gardner do she donated her brain to
science it's in Providence it was
weighed and measured Jeannette Rankin
another great woman from the West she
was from the state of Montana and she
was an advocate for the women's vote at
the state level and the first woman to
speak to the Montana Legislature in 1911
and then the people of Montana rewarded
her by sending her back to to Congress
to Washington DC to be the first female
congresswoman and to net Rankin
introduced the legislation that was an
amendment to the United States
Constitution that really launched the
first congressional discussion about
women's vote right and her legislation
eventually became the 19th amendment
which gave them one women the vote one
hundred years ago so thank you Jeannette
Rankin
so what do all these women have in
common
well a number of things first all each
of them understood the power of using
her voice in public right but they faced
tremendous opposition just the very
notion that women should have a public
voice was controversial and a lot of
people didn't like it in fact women lost
their jobs they were booed they were
hissed at when they would speak in
public the very famous orator Sojourner
Truth it was giving a speech one time
and someone yelled out the audience are
you a man
so she ripped open her blouse I won't
demonstrate but she did that so she
showed him right the other thing they
have in common or another thing they
have in common is that they're all of
them were forgotten really they're their
voices were erased from history or
overlooked from history and it's really
kind of crazy because these women spoke
out on I mean everything from education
to Prison Reform to labor I mean for
suffrage again Stef Ridge for temperance
and against temperance for civil rights
throughout history women have been
speaking up but history hasn't recorded
yet we haven't given them credit for
their ideas not because their speeches
weren't any good not because their ideas
weren't strong and not because they
didn't make an impact because clearly
they did right so the third thing I have
in common and this is the good news now
you can find all their speeches on a
site that I've created called speaking
while female speaking well female cow
it is a celebration of women's speech
it's a corrective to the historical
record and it's also an inspiration for
women really all around the world I
think from Boston to Bangladesh so that
any women or any girl can go online and
see what a powerful woman looks like and
read her words and hear her I've got
speeches that the transcripts I have
audio I have video and in some cases I
even have the handwriting the manuscript
so you can see what a woman's
handwriting look like so I want everyone
to be inspired and I want everyone in
this audience to know that you to have a
voice and that you should get appear and
speak as well the other thing that they
have in common is they all understood
that a woman has a woman's voice has
agency in the world and can change the
world the other thing that they have in
common is they all understand the power
of a speech to change the world you know
as the history of speech is really the
history of change it's like a chronicle
of change speeches are given that the
ideas move through time in dialogue with
one another or exchange with one another
and when women's voices aren't in the
mix when they're not in the game we
don't understand women as agents of
change we don't understand that women
have been involved in the change that
has given us the progress and made the
world that we know it today so it was
the famous Ida B Wells she was a
journalist and an activist and she spoke
up she used her voice mostly against
lynching in that in the 1890s and 1900s
she spoke against the horrors of
lynching but she said the way to right
wrongs in the world is to turn the light
of truth upon them so I encourage all of
us let's use our voices to turn the
light of truth on the forgotten history
of women's speech and celebrate women's
voices
you