Hearing Women’s Voices
Yvette Cooper’s new book lets women’s voices be heard loud and clear
There have been times, I am deeply ashamed to admit, when I have run training courses on speech-writing and only used speeches by men as examples. I’m not proud, nor is it an excuse, but if it’s only a half day or even a day, you’ve only time for a Martin Luther King, a Barack Obama, an Earl Spencer, and Ronald Reagan. A diversity of voices, from belted Earl to Baptist preacher, but all men.
So where are the women? I used to tell myself that, despite my own strong feminist instincts, the patriarchy had conspired to keep women out of the frame, keep their voices silenced, and that the men compiling books of famous speeches, or even CDs of famous speeches, were unconsciously biased towards men. It’s not my fault if there aren’t any famous speeches by women. Blame sexism.
This, of course, is a load of bollocks (like the compendiums of male-only speeches), because women have been making speeches as long as men, which is to say about 10,000 years, and with the same skill, force and historical significance. To prove it, Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP and sometime Labour leadership contender, has written a brilliant book She Speaks The Power of Women’s Voices, out this week.
It starts with Boudica, and takes us through a journey of voices, from Sojournor Truth, to Emmeline Pankhurst, to Ellen Degeneres, to Jacinda Arden, to Greta Thunberg. For the speech-writing trainer, or speech-writer seeking inspiration, the full range of rhetorical devices is on display: imagery, metaphor, triclons, alliteration, allusion, litotes, asyndeton, the works.
But where the collection differs from all the male-dominated equivalents is that so many of the speeches are the voices of women in protest, not power. Very few are prime ministers or presidents — such as Thatcher, Theresa May, Julia Gillard, Benazir Bhutto, Merkel, or Jacinda Arden. Most are women campaigners, protestors, champions of civil and political freedoms — such as Josephine Butler, Maya Angelou, Malala, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
And what is joyful about Cooper’s selection is that it introduces even the most diligent student of rhetoric to unfamiliar voices. I knew the words of Harriet Harman, Diane Abbott, Barbara Castle, and Michelle Obama. The words of Jo Cox brought a tear to my eye. I’ve heard Yvette Cooper speak loads (including in my own back garden). But I’d never even heard of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kavita Krishnan, Lupita Nyong’o or Donna Strickland. By capturing these women’s voices in her slim volume, Cooper has ensured they will be heard, in the mind of a reader at least, forever.
She Speaks appears in a lovely hardback edition, with perspicacious commentary by Cooper throughout, and her own tips on speech-writing, inspired by her trade union leader father. I have witnessed the make-shift podium constructed on an ironing board in a seaside hotel ahead of a big conference speech that she describes. I can only imagine the conversations between her and husband Ed Balls that she describes as they test and hone each other’s words. It adds up to a wealth of experience at the sharp end of speech-making, which is shared throughout the book.
I never teach speeches nowadays without a gender balance. I share Gillard or Obama or JK Rowling with my trainees, and enjoy the debates that ensue. The service Cooper has performed for all of us is that there is no excuse not to. Women’s voices are there in every century, demanding to be heard.
Paul Richards is a speech-writer and trainer.
She Speaks The Power of Women’s Voices by Yvette Cooper is published by Atlantic Books, priced at £10.00.
