It's Friday June 9, the day of the week I pass along a quotation intended to be enlightening or uplifting. Today's words come from a writer and scholar named Dana Rubin, whom I have written about before in this space.
A friend from our shared California newspapering days many years ago, Dana is the proprietor of a vast online collection of women's speeches, as well as a new book that RCP had a hand in publishing. It's titled, "Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women," and as I said last night while introducing Dana at a Washington event, it's a book no American nonfiction library should be without.
If C-SPAN's cameras were working properly, you'll have a chance soon to watch Dana Rubin's own remarks describing her work. The project took root when Dana was teaching classes or making public speeches herself. At some point, she began asking her audiences to name famous American orators. They would rattle off familiar names: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Billy Graham, Ronald Reagan. She would then ask, What about female speakers? This was usually met by an uncomfortable silence. Someone might finally mention Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.
This led Dana on a search. Were there no great speeches by women? Were they rare? Or were they lost, through the carelessness of (mostly male) gatekeepers? I'll have the answers to those questions in a moment.
Dana Rubin's natural curiosity and training as a journalist -- combined with an intense sense of fair play -- made her the perfect person to undertake the search for lost or suppressed examples of women's speeches.
What she found encouraged her. And galvanized her. Women on this continent had been speaking publicly all along, addressing the most important issues facing society. Moreover, women's words had helped shape that discussion, and that society.
"Speech creates change in ways often impossible to measure," she notes. "Sarah Parker Remond's words didn't weaken Northern England's ties to cotton, but they opened eyes to the links between slavery and British commercial profit.
"Not many people in America became anarchists because of the thundering rhetoric of Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, or Emma Goldman," she continued, "yet their words left an imprint, making it possible for less radical speakers and thinkers to be accepted and influential. Clare Boothe Luce's clear-eyed warning about Russia helped sharpen our sense of that country's territorial ambitions and authoritarian nature."
The moral of the story?
"Without women's speech," says Dana Rubin, "the world we inhabit would not exist."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
