It's Tuesday, March 1, 2022, State of the Union night – and the first day of Women's History Month. Two years ago, on each weekday that March, RealClearPolitics highlighted a speech by a woman in history. The project, "A Woman Spoke Today," was conceived and executed by Dana Rubin, a former San Jose Mercury News colleague of mine from our old California newspapering days.
Today, I'm honored to inform you that Dana Rubin is putting 50 women's speeches into a long-overdue anthology. I'm also pleased to report that my organization is playing a role in bringing it about: If everything goes according to plan, the book will be printed by RealClearPublishing. If you'd like to help make that happen, here's the link to Dana's Kickstarter campaign, which launches this morning. I don't normally do commercial announcements, but as Inigo Montoya told Miracle Max, this is a truly noble cause.
Dana is the founder of Speaking While Female, the first online collection of contemporary and historical speeches by women from across time and around the world. Two years ago, she collated a woman's speech for every weekday in the month, beginning on Monday morning, March 2, with a 2017 speech at Vassar College by labor economist Betsey Stevenson titled, "Our Changing Lives: Work, Family, and Policy in a time of Gender Equality."
And though it was delivered on March 31, 1937, the last speech in the "A Woman Spoke Today" sequence was eerily prescient -- and a cautionary lecture for 21st century Americans. Titled "It Can Happen Here," influential journalist Dorothy Thompson warned Congress that a "modern coup d'état" could take place in the United States if we weren't careful with the tools of democracy. Thompson was talking specifically about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's plans to pack the Supreme Court, a warning from history's vault to today's Democrats who have reprised one of FDR's worst ideas. But Republicans should also take heed. RCP published that piece only nine months and one week before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol intending to prop up a demagoguing incumbent Republican president refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election.
In other words, as Dana Rubin can tell you, women have been speaking throughout history. One problem is that we haven't always been listening.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
