I mean, Ted X women is seriously fantastic, right?

But long before Ted X women, They're amazing women speakers.

In fact, history is full of women who have stepped up and spoken out and use their voices.

But the thing is, you wouldn't know it from the history books.

I've been a speech writer, and, um, 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 was not, but I didn't find not many speeches by women.

So I first 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 actually, 87.

These are books with names like Best speeches in history and speeches that change the world and great speeches through the ages and the thing that they were published between 17 97 and the current year 2019.

And the thing is, they're 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 to get chosen again and again and again, right?

And you think they're other really great players.

But for some reason, we never get to see them in the game.

It's great talent, but 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 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, Susan B.

Anthony, Obviously, maybe Margaret Thatcher, obviously.

Elizabeth.

The first to her troops at Pillsbury.

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 happen to buy this little gem.

It's called the White House Handbook 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.

Historians speak of, Ah, master narrative.

It's a story, right?

But it's so all encompassing and deeply embedded in our consciousness that we're not even may be 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 voices, masculine or manly.

And the thing is that these air stereotypes, right other, even more than stereotypes.

They're like archetypes.

They go so deep, but we women all of way women here tonight.

We need those archetypes to 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 Remond.

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 should.

She was a free person, and she was such an eloquent speaker.

And so, um so made such an impression that they sent her on a mission to England to give lectures, abolition, lectures.

And in 18 59 she went to the city of Manchester in the north of England.

Now Manchester was 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.

Actually, one of the main industries was cotton, So when Sarah Parker Riemann went there, she spoke to the Manchester Anthony, um, mostly white audience, and she indicted not just the Southend United States, where slavery was legal, not just the North, which was benefiting economically office slavery, but also England in Britain because where were they getting all that raw cotton from the Southern seven from the southern states?

So, she says, she walks through the southern states where human beings were raised like cattle for the market.

So, she says, she walks through the streets of Manchester and she sees load after load of cotton and all.

She hears his cotton, cotton, cotton, she says.

I cannot speak of Scott of cotton when people are being brutalized.

It was extraordinary.

Tiara Parker Riemann, Sarah Winnemucca.

She was a Native American from the West Coast, and in 18 84 she went to Washington, D.

C.

To testify to a subcommittee on Indian affairs of Congress.

And she testified to these congressmen about her people, the northern pilots 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 they're infants, died in their parents arms and the ground was frozen solid and they couldn't even dig the graves.

They had to leave Tibet, the babies by the roadside covered in snow.

Her testimony is not just heart, it's heartbreaking, but it also She is so indicative of our treatment of Native Americans.

It's a testament, really, too, the way we treated them.

And it should be in every history and social studies book in our country.

Helen Hamilton GARDENER So in the 18 seventies in the 18 eighties, it was widely believed that women were not as intelligent as men because their brains were skulls were smaller.

This was based on the pseudo science of creamy on the tree, 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 Gardere didn't believe this for a minute, and 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 18 84 she gives a speech in which she thoroughly refutes the notion that women are biologically your 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 alive issue.

She called her speech sex in brain, right?

And when she died, we did.

Helen Hamilton, gardener do.

She donated her brain to science.

It's in Providence.

It was weighed and measured.

Jeanette, ranking another great woman from the West.

She was from the state of Montana, and she was a kn advocate for the woman'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, D.

C.

To be the first female congresswoman.

And Jeanette Rankin introduced the legislation.

That was amendment to the United States Constitution that really launched the first congressional discussion about women's vote.

Right?

And, um, her legislation eventually became the 19th Amendment, which gave the one women the vote 100 years ago.

So thank you, Jeanette 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 face 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 hiss stat 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 all of them were for gotten, Really.

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 toe labor.

I mean four suffrage against suffrage, for temperance and against temperance for civil rights.

Throughout history, women have been speaking up, but history hasn't recorded it.

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 dot Co 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 sing 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 two have a voice and that you should get a pier and speak as well.

The other thing that they have in common is they all understood that, um, 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, Theo, 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 18 nineties and 1900 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.