0:00:08 > 0:00:12APPLAUSE
0:00:16 > 0:00:21I want to start tonight very near the beginning
0:00:21 > 0:00:25of the whole tradition of Western literature,
0:00:25 > 0:00:32and with its first recorded example, and there must be many unrecorded,
0:00:32 > 0:00:37the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to shut up.
0:00:37 > 0:00:38LAUGHTER
0:00:38 > 0:00:42That her voice is not to be heard in public.
0:00:43 > 0:00:46I'm thinking of a particular moment,
0:00:46 > 0:00:51immortalised at the start of Homer's Odyssey, one of the founding epics
0:00:51 > 0:00:57of the Western literary tradition, almost 3,000 years old.
0:00:57 > 0:00:59Now we tend to think of the Odyssey
0:00:59 > 0:01:02as the story of the Greek hero Odysseus
0:01:02 > 0:01:04and the adventures and scrapes
0:01:04 > 0:01:08he had returning home after the Trojan War,
0:01:08 > 0:01:12while for decades his wife, Penelope,
0:01:12 > 0:01:14here sitting by her loom,
0:01:14 > 0:01:20loyally waited for him, fending off the suitors pressing to marry her.
0:01:22 > 0:01:27But the Odyssey is just as much a story of Telemachus,
0:01:27 > 0:01:31the son of Odysseus, seen here facing her.
0:01:32 > 0:01:35It's the story of his growing up,
0:01:35 > 0:01:42how, over the course of this long poem, he matures from boy to man.
0:01:42 > 0:01:47It's a process that starts in the very first book like this.
0:01:48 > 0:01:51One day, in the family palace,
0:01:51 > 0:01:57Penelope comes down from her private quarters into the great hall,
0:01:57 > 0:02:01to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors
0:02:01 > 0:02:05and he is singing about the awful difficulties the Greek heroes
0:02:05 > 0:02:11are having in their attempts to get back home after the war.
0:02:12 > 0:02:17Penelope is not amused and, in front of everybody,
0:02:17 > 0:02:21she asks him to choose another happier number.
0:02:21 > 0:02:26At which point, young Telemachus intervenes.
0:02:26 > 0:02:28"Mother," he says,
0:02:28 > 0:02:33"Go back up to your quarters and take up your own work,
0:02:33 > 0:02:36"the loom and the distaff.
0:02:36 > 0:02:44"Speech will be the business of men, all men and me most of all,
0:02:44 > 0:02:49"for mine is the power in this household."
0:02:49 > 0:02:52And off she goes, back upstairs.
0:02:52 > 0:02:55Now, there is, I have to say,
0:02:55 > 0:02:57something faintly ridiculous
0:02:57 > 0:03:01about this sort of wet-behind-the-ears teenager
0:03:01 > 0:03:06actually managing to shut up the savvy, middle-aged Penelope.
0:03:06 > 0:03:09But he does that,
0:03:09 > 0:03:14and it's a nice demonstration that, right at the very beginning,
0:03:14 > 0:03:18where the Western literary tradition starts,
0:03:18 > 0:03:23women's voices are not being heard in the public sphere
0:03:23 > 0:03:26and, more than that, as Homer has it,
0:03:26 > 0:03:33an integral part of growing up to be a man is learning to take
0:03:33 > 0:03:39control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species.
0:03:40 > 0:03:47Actually, the very words Telemachus uses are significant, too.
0:03:47 > 0:03:51When he says, "Speech is men's business,"
0:03:51 > 0:03:55the word he uses for speech is "muthos".
0:03:55 > 0:03:57Now, that's not actually
0:03:57 > 0:04:01in the sense that it has come down to us as "myth".
0:04:01 > 0:04:07In Homeric Greek, it signals authoritative public speech,
0:04:07 > 0:04:11not the kind of chatting and prattling and gossip
0:04:11 > 0:04:17that anyone, women included or especially women, could do.
0:04:17 > 0:04:22The line is, Mum can chat, but woe betide her
0:04:22 > 0:04:26if she tries to command muthos, the voice of authority.
0:04:28 > 0:04:31But what I want to do this evening is to reflect
0:04:31 > 0:04:36on the relationship between that classic Homeric moment
0:04:36 > 0:04:40of silencing a woman
0:04:40 > 0:04:45and some of the ways in which women's voices are not
0:04:45 > 0:04:49publicly heard in our own contemporary culture
0:04:49 > 0:04:54and in our own politics, from the front bench to the shop floor.
0:04:56 > 0:05:00It is a well-known deafness which is nicely captured
0:05:00 > 0:05:03in this Punch cartoon,
0:05:03 > 0:05:06drawn, needless to say, by a woman.
0:05:06 > 0:05:09You've seen this many times in many areas.
0:05:09 > 0:05:12There are five blokes around the table,
0:05:12 > 0:05:16one nice lady called Miss Triggs, and the Chair is saying,
0:05:16 > 0:05:18in case you can't quite read it,
0:05:18 > 0:05:22"That's an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs.
0:05:22 > 0:05:25"Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it."
0:05:28 > 0:05:31We will be coming back to this cartoon later.
0:05:31 > 0:05:38But I also want to look briefly at how, again, this Homeric moment
0:05:38 > 0:05:40might also relate to
0:05:40 > 0:05:46the abuse that many women who do speak out
0:05:46 > 0:05:50get subjected to even now.
0:05:50 > 0:05:52Now, I want to underline
0:05:52 > 0:05:57that I am trying to concentrate much more on voice tonight
0:05:57 > 0:06:02than on writing or on physical appearance.
0:06:02 > 0:06:05One of the questions at the back of my mind,
0:06:05 > 0:06:08to put it very simply,
0:06:08 > 0:06:12is what's the connection between, say, publicly speaking out
0:06:12 > 0:06:17in support of a female logo on a banknote,
0:06:17 > 0:06:20Twitter threats of rape and decapitation,
0:06:20 > 0:06:24and Telemachus's put-down of Penelope?
0:06:26 > 0:06:30Now, I have to be the first to acknowledge that it might
0:06:30 > 0:06:35seem a bit paradoxical, maybe even slightly self-defeating,
0:06:35 > 0:06:39for me here to be speaking publicly in front of this great audience
0:06:39 > 0:06:42about the obstacles confronting women
0:06:42 > 0:06:46in finding a public voice or a public ear.
0:06:46 > 0:06:49There will be some people who are saying,
0:06:49 > 0:06:52"She's got a bit of a nerve to try that."
0:06:52 > 0:06:54I'm going to come back again to that question, too,
0:06:54 > 0:06:56but let me say now,
0:06:56 > 0:07:00this is not intended to be an hour-long complaint.
0:07:00 > 0:07:03Nor am I wanting to suggest
0:07:03 > 0:07:06any blanket rules about women's silence,
0:07:06 > 0:07:09if that is how we should see it.
0:07:09 > 0:07:12I want to say it is much more complicated than that.
0:07:12 > 0:07:16My aim, rather, is to try to take a long view,
0:07:16 > 0:07:24a very long view on what I see as the culturally awkward relationship
0:07:24 > 0:07:28between the voice of women and the public sphere
0:07:28 > 0:07:32of speech-making, debate and comment,
0:07:32 > 0:07:35politics in its widest sense,
0:07:35 > 0:07:39whether it is in the office or the floor of the House of Commons.
0:07:39 > 0:07:44I am hoping that a long view will help us get beyond
0:07:44 > 0:07:48the simple diagnosis of misogyny that I think
0:07:48 > 0:07:53we tend to fall back on a bit lazily, to be honest.
0:07:53 > 0:07:59I mean, to be sure, misogyny is one of the things that is going on here.
0:07:59 > 0:08:03Speaking personally, if you go on a television discussion programme
0:08:03 > 0:08:06and then you receive a load of tweets
0:08:06 > 0:08:10comparing your genitalia to a variety of rotting vegetables,
0:08:10 > 0:08:16it's hard not to think misogyny is an apt term for what's going on.
0:08:18 > 0:08:20But if we want to, I think, understand better
0:08:20 > 0:08:25and even more do something about the fact that women,
0:08:25 > 0:08:30even when they are not actually silenced, yet still tend to pay
0:08:30 > 0:08:36a very high price in our culture to have their voices heard,
0:08:36 > 0:08:40we have, I think, to recognise that it's all a bit more complicated
0:08:40 > 0:08:44than that and that there is a long back story.
0:08:44 > 0:08:47And I'm starting with the back story.
0:08:47 > 0:08:52Because you won't be surprised to learn that Telemachus's outburst
0:08:52 > 0:08:58is just the first in a long line of largely successful attempts
0:08:58 > 0:09:02stretching throughout Greco-Roman antiquity,
0:09:02 > 0:09:07not just to exclude women from public speech,
0:09:07 > 0:09:11but also to boast that they have been excluded.
0:09:12 > 0:09:15To give you just a very quick flavour,
0:09:15 > 0:09:18in the early fourth century BC,
0:09:18 > 0:09:23the Greek playwright Aristophanes devoted a whole comedy
0:09:23 > 0:09:27to the "hilarious" fantasy
0:09:27 > 0:09:32that women might actually take over running the state.
0:09:32 > 0:09:38Part of the joke was that women just couldn't speak properly in public,
0:09:38 > 0:09:43or rather they couldn't adapt their private speech,
0:09:43 > 0:09:48which in this case turns out to be all about sex,
0:09:48 > 0:09:52they couldn't adapt their private speech to the lofty idiom
0:09:52 > 0:09:54of male Athenian politics.
0:09:56 > 0:10:02In the Roman world, Ovid's wonderful Metamorphoses,
0:10:02 > 0:10:08that extraordinary mythological epic poem about people changing shape,
0:10:08 > 0:10:13probably the most influential work of literature on Western art
0:10:13 > 0:10:15after the Bible ever,
0:10:15 > 0:10:22the Metamorphoses repeatedly returns to the idea of the silencing
0:10:22 > 0:10:26of women in the process of their transformation.
0:10:28 > 0:10:31Here is a 17th-century version of poor Io,
0:10:31 > 0:10:35who's been turned into a cow by Jupiter,
0:10:35 > 0:10:38so she cannot talk but only moo.
0:10:39 > 0:10:45While the chatty nymph, Echo, is punished by being condemned
0:10:45 > 0:10:49only to be able to repeat the words of others.
0:10:49 > 0:10:53Waterhouse here, in this famous picture,
0:10:53 > 0:10:55has her gazing at Narcissus,
0:10:55 > 0:11:00but unable to initiate conversation with him, while he,
0:11:00 > 0:11:02the original narcissist,
0:11:02 > 0:11:05has fallen in love with his own image in the pond.
0:11:07 > 0:11:10In the realm of history rather than myth,
0:11:10 > 0:11:15one earnest Roman anthologist of the first century AD
0:11:15 > 0:11:20managed to rake up just three examples of
0:11:20 > 0:11:24"women whose natural condition
0:11:24 > 0:11:29"did not manage to keep them silent in the forum."
0:11:29 > 0:11:33His descriptions are quite revealing.
0:11:33 > 0:11:36The first, a woman called Maesia,
0:11:36 > 0:11:39successfully defended herself in the courts
0:11:39 > 0:11:43and "because she really had a man's nature,
0:11:43 > 0:11:46"under the appearance of a woman,
0:11:46 > 0:11:50"was called the Androgyne, the man-woman."
0:11:50 > 0:11:56The second, Afrania, used to initiate legal cases herself
0:11:56 > 0:12:01and was "impudent enough" to plead in person,
0:12:01 > 0:12:06so that people became tired out with her barking or yapping.
0:12:06 > 0:12:10See how, in this account, she still doesn't have a human voice.
0:12:10 > 0:12:12She's turned into a dog already.
0:12:12 > 0:12:17We're told that she died in 48 BC because,
0:12:17 > 0:12:22and I'm quoting again, "with unnatural freaks like this,
0:12:22 > 0:12:25"it's more important to record when they died,
0:12:25 > 0:12:28"not when they were born."
0:12:29 > 0:12:33Now, there are just two main exceptions in the classical world
0:12:33 > 0:12:38to this abomination of women's public speaking.
0:12:39 > 0:12:43First, women are allowed to speak out
0:12:43 > 0:12:47as victims and as martyrs,
0:12:47 > 0:12:51usually to announce their own forthcoming death.
0:12:52 > 0:12:57Early Christian women, for example, are regularly represented,
0:12:57 > 0:13:02loudly upholding their faith as they go to be eaten by the lions.
0:13:03 > 0:13:09And in a famous story from the early history of Rome,
0:13:09 > 0:13:11the virtuous Lucretia,
0:13:11 > 0:13:15raped by a brutal prince of the ruling house,
0:13:15 > 0:13:17was given a speaking part
0:13:17 > 0:13:23solely to denounce the rapist and announce her own suicide.
0:13:23 > 0:13:25Or so Roman writers presented it.
0:13:25 > 0:13:28We haven't a clue what really happened.
0:13:28 > 0:13:32Here you have a 16th-century image of the rape at the top
0:13:32 > 0:13:37and there, Lucretia underneath, announcing what she's going to do.
0:13:37 > 0:13:41But even this rather bitter opportunity to speak
0:13:41 > 0:13:44could also itself be removed from women.
0:13:44 > 0:13:48One memorable story, in Ovid's Metamorphoses again,
0:13:48 > 0:13:52tells, I'm afraid, of yet another rape,
0:13:52 > 0:13:54this time of the young Princess Philomela.
0:13:56 > 0:14:01In order to prevent any Lucretia-style denunciation here,
0:14:01 > 0:14:06the rapist, as you see, quite simply cuts her tongue out.
0:14:06 > 0:14:10It's a theme that you probably know gets picked up again
0:14:10 > 0:14:14in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,
0:14:14 > 0:14:16where the raped Lavinia there
0:14:16 > 0:14:18has her tongue removed.
0:14:20 > 0:14:23The second exception to women's silences,
0:14:23 > 0:14:24perhaps a more familiar one,
0:14:24 > 0:14:29occasionally a woman could legitimately rise up to speak
0:14:29 > 0:14:34to defend her home, her kids,
0:14:34 > 0:14:38her husband or the interests of other women.
0:14:40 > 0:14:44So, in the third of the three examples of female oratory
0:14:44 > 0:14:46discussed by the Roman anthologist,
0:14:46 > 0:14:51the woman, Hortensia by name, gets away with it
0:14:51 > 0:14:55because she is acting explicitly as the spokesperson
0:14:55 > 0:14:59of the other women of Rome, the women only,
0:14:59 > 0:15:03after they had been subject to a special wealth tax
0:15:03 > 0:15:06to fund a rather dubious war effort.
0:15:06 > 0:15:11Women, in other words, may, in extreme circumstances,
0:15:11 > 0:15:15publicly defend their own sectional interests,
0:15:15 > 0:15:17but they can't speak for men
0:15:17 > 0:15:21and they can't speak for the community as a whole.
0:15:21 > 0:15:28And here's a 15th-century attempt to recapture Hortensia in full flow.
0:15:28 > 0:15:34In general, as one ancient Roman guru rather aptly put it,
0:15:34 > 0:15:38"a woman should as modestly guard against
0:15:38 > 0:15:42"exposing her voice to outsiders
0:15:42 > 0:15:46"as she would guard against stripping off her clothes."
0:15:46 > 0:15:48Right?
0:15:48 > 0:15:51That's the limit of female silence.
0:15:53 > 0:15:57There is, I think, more to this than meets the eye.
0:15:57 > 0:16:04The muteness that I've been trying to evoke is not simply a reflection
0:16:04 > 0:16:09of a general disempowerment of women in the classical world -
0:16:09 > 0:16:14no voting rights, limited legal and economic powers and so on.
0:16:14 > 0:16:16Of course, it's partly that.
0:16:16 > 0:16:20Ancient women were obviously not likely to raise their voices
0:16:20 > 0:16:25in a political sphere in which they had no formal stake.
0:16:25 > 0:16:26But the point seems to me
0:16:26 > 0:16:30is that we're dealing with a much more active
0:16:30 > 0:16:36and loaded exclusion of women from public speech in the ancient world.
0:16:38 > 0:16:42And, importantly, it's one with a much greater impact than
0:16:42 > 0:16:47we usually acknowledge on our own traditions, conventions
0:16:47 > 0:16:51and assumptions about the voice of women.
0:16:51 > 0:16:53What I mean is that public speaking
0:16:53 > 0:16:57and oratory wasn't something that ancient women just simply didn't do.
0:16:59 > 0:17:03It was an exclusive practice, an exclusive skill,
0:17:03 > 0:17:08that positively defined masculinity as a gender.
0:17:09 > 0:17:14As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man,
0:17:14 > 0:17:17and, of course, we're talking an elite man,
0:17:17 > 0:17:23to become a man was to claim the right to speak.
0:17:23 > 0:17:27Public speech was a, if not THE,
0:17:27 > 0:17:32defining attribute of maleness.
0:17:32 > 0:17:36So, a woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances,
0:17:36 > 0:17:40by definition, not a woman.
0:17:40 > 0:17:45So, beyond the kind of examples that I've quoted to you,
0:17:45 > 0:17:49we find repeated stress throughout ancient literature
0:17:49 > 0:17:55on the authority of the deep male voice.
0:17:55 > 0:17:59As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it,
0:17:59 > 0:18:06"A low-pitched voice indicated manly courage,
0:18:06 > 0:18:12"a high-pitched voice indicated female cowardice."
0:18:12 > 0:18:15Or, as other classical writers insisted,
0:18:15 > 0:18:21"The turn and the timbre of women's speech always threatened to
0:18:21 > 0:18:27"subvert, not just the voice of the male orator, but the social
0:18:27 > 0:18:32"and political stability and the health of the state as a whole."
0:18:34 > 0:18:40Another 2nd-century lecturer and guru, Dio Chrysostum...
0:18:40 > 0:18:43His name is a bit of a mouthful, but it actually means,
0:18:43 > 0:18:47significantly enough, Dio The Golden Mouth.
0:18:47 > 0:18:51Dio had this to say - I think it captures it nicely.
0:18:51 > 0:18:54"Imagine this," he asked.
0:18:54 > 0:18:58"Suppose an entire community was struck
0:18:58 > 0:19:02"by the following strange affliction -
0:19:02 > 0:19:08"all the men suddenly got female voices and no male,
0:19:08 > 0:19:14"child or adult, could say anything in a manly way.
0:19:14 > 0:19:21"Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague?
0:19:21 > 0:19:26"I'm sure they would send off to a sanctuary to consult the gods
0:19:26 > 0:19:32"and try to propitiate the divine power with many gifts."
0:19:32 > 0:19:36It would be nice to think that Dio was joking, but he wasn't,
0:19:36 > 0:19:38I don't think.
0:19:39 > 0:19:43What I want to underline here, and it's really my second point,
0:19:43 > 0:19:45is that this is not just
0:19:45 > 0:19:49the peculiar ideology of some distant culture.
0:19:49 > 0:19:53Distant in time, it may be.
0:19:53 > 0:19:58But actually, this is the tradition of gendered speaking
0:19:58 > 0:20:03and the theorizing of gendered speaking to which we are still,
0:20:03 > 0:20:07directly, or more often indirectly, the heirs.
0:20:08 > 0:20:10I don't want to overstate the case.
0:20:10 > 0:20:15Western culture does not owe everything to the Greeks and Romans,
0:20:15 > 0:20:17in speech or in anything else.
0:20:17 > 0:20:21And, to be honest, thank heavens it doesn't. You know?
0:20:21 > 0:20:24Even a classicist, or perhaps especially a classicist,
0:20:24 > 0:20:29would not fancy living in a Greco-Roman world.
0:20:29 > 0:20:34There are all kinds of variants and competing influences on us
0:20:34 > 0:20:38and our political system has happily overthrown
0:20:38 > 0:20:42many of the gendered certainties of antiquity,
0:20:42 > 0:20:45most obviously in giving women, formally at least,
0:20:45 > 0:20:50and relatively recently, equal political rights.
0:20:50 > 0:20:55And yet it remains the fact that our own traditions of debate
0:20:55 > 0:21:00and public speaking, their conventions and their rules,
0:21:00 > 0:21:05still lie very much in the shadow of the classical world.
0:21:06 > 0:21:08The modern techniques
0:21:08 > 0:21:12of rhetoric and persuasion, formulated in the Renaissance,
0:21:12 > 0:21:17were drawn explicitly from ancient speeches and handbooks.
0:21:18 > 0:21:21Our own terms of rhetorical analysis
0:21:21 > 0:21:25go back directly to Aristotle and Cicero.
0:21:25 > 0:21:28In fact, it's common to point out that Barack Obama
0:21:28 > 0:21:34or his speech writers have learnt all their best tricks from Cicero.
0:21:34 > 0:21:37And so far as the House of Commons is concerned,
0:21:37 > 0:21:42those 19th-century gents who devised or enshrined
0:21:42 > 0:21:46most of our parliamentary rules and procedures,
0:21:46 > 0:21:51they were brought up on exactly those classical theories
0:21:51 > 0:21:55and slogans and prejudices that I have been quoting to you.
0:21:55 > 0:21:57Again, I'm not meaning we're simply
0:21:57 > 0:22:01the victim of the classical inheritance here,
0:22:01 > 0:22:06but those classical traditions have provided us with
0:22:06 > 0:22:09and continue to provide us with
0:22:09 > 0:22:13a template for thinking about public speech,
0:22:13 > 0:22:19for defining and deciding what counts as good oratory, or bad,
0:22:19 > 0:22:22what counts as good persuasion or not
0:22:22 > 0:22:26and whose speech has a right to be heard,
0:22:26 > 0:22:31and gender is obviously an important part of that mix.
0:22:31 > 0:22:33And it only takes a really casual glance
0:22:33 > 0:22:37at the modern Western traditions of speech-making and debate,
0:22:37 > 0:22:42at least up to the 20th century, to see many of those classical themes
0:22:42 > 0:22:47being replayed and re-emerging all over the place.
0:22:47 > 0:22:54Women who claim a public voice get treated as freakish androgynies,
0:22:54 > 0:22:57like Maesia defending herself in the Forum.
0:22:57 > 0:23:02Now, the obvious case here is Elizabeth I's belligerent address
0:23:02 > 0:23:08to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 in the face of the Spanish Armada,
0:23:08 > 0:23:13where, in those famous words that I certainly learnt at school,
0:23:13 > 0:23:15and I'm sure many of you did too,
0:23:15 > 0:23:20she seems positively to avow her own androgyny.
0:23:20 > 0:23:24You'll remember it. "I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman,
0:23:24 > 0:23:31"but I have the heart and stomach of a king and a king of England, too."
0:23:31 > 0:23:35It's a slogan that I discovered this week that you can still buy
0:23:35 > 0:23:38emblazoned on gifts,
0:23:38 > 0:23:43from babygrows to skateboards.
0:23:43 > 0:23:48I have to say, why you'd want that on a babygrow rather beats me,
0:23:48 > 0:23:51but I tell you, you can get it.
0:23:51 > 0:23:54The truth is, actually, I have to tell you,
0:23:54 > 0:23:59that Good Queen Bess may never have said anything of the sort.
0:23:59 > 0:24:03There is absolutely no script from Elizabeth or from her speech writer,
0:24:03 > 0:24:06there's no eyewitness account
0:24:06 > 0:24:09and the canonical version that I was made to learn...
0:24:09 > 0:24:12Again, as I was reflecting this week,
0:24:12 > 0:24:17a funny thing to make a girl at a girls' school learn,
0:24:17 > 0:24:19that speech, but I did.
0:24:19 > 0:24:24That comes from a letter from a pretty unreliable commentator
0:24:24 > 0:24:25with a terrible axe to grind,
0:24:25 > 0:24:31about 40 years after the speech was said to be delivered.
0:24:31 > 0:24:32But, for my purpose,
0:24:32 > 0:24:37the likely fictionality of the words makes them even better
0:24:37 > 0:24:41cos the nice twist there is that the male letter-writer
0:24:41 > 0:24:46puts the confession or the boast of androgyny
0:24:46 > 0:24:49into Elizabeth's own mouth.
0:24:49 > 0:24:53But looking at modern traditions of oratory more generally,
0:24:53 > 0:25:00we also find that main area of licence for women to talk publicly,
0:25:00 > 0:25:06that is to support their own and women's interests,
0:25:06 > 0:25:08again, being very prominent.
0:25:08 > 0:25:12And I hope you don't spend as long as I've been spending
0:25:12 > 0:25:16flipping through those rather quaint compendia
0:25:16 > 0:25:20called A Hundred Great Speeches From History,
0:25:20 > 0:25:22cos they're very odd.
0:25:22 > 0:25:26But, if you do, what you will find,
0:25:26 > 0:25:29when they come to get the women's speeches from history,
0:25:29 > 0:25:31which is always a bit of a challenge,
0:25:31 > 0:25:36most of the female highlights, from Emmeline Pankhurst
0:25:36 > 0:25:38to Hillary Clinton talking at
0:25:38 > 0:25:42the UN Conference On Women in Beijing, very famously,
0:25:42 > 0:25:43are just of that type.
0:25:43 > 0:25:46They're talking, always, or almost always,
0:25:46 > 0:25:51about the lot of women, not about the community as a whole.
0:25:51 > 0:25:55And so, too, is probably what's the most popularly
0:25:55 > 0:26:01and frequently anthologised example of female oratory of all,
0:26:01 > 0:26:06which is the 1851 Ain't I A Woman? speech
0:26:06 > 0:26:08of Sojourner Truth,
0:26:08 > 0:26:12an ex-slave, abolitionist and American campaigner
0:26:12 > 0:26:14for women's rights.
0:26:14 > 0:26:17"And ain't I a woman?" she's supposed to have said.
0:26:17 > 0:26:19"I have borne 13 chilern
0:26:19 > 0:26:23"and seen 'em most all sold off to slavery
0:26:23 > 0:26:26"and when I cried out with my mother's grief,
0:26:26 > 0:26:29"none but Jesus heard me!
0:26:29 > 0:26:31"And ain't I a woman?"
0:26:31 > 0:26:34That's been very influential.
0:26:34 > 0:26:37I should say, just in case you're wondering,
0:26:37 > 0:26:40those words are only slightly less mythical
0:26:40 > 0:26:43than Elizabeth's at Tilbury.
0:26:43 > 0:26:47That authorised version was written up about ten years
0:26:47 > 0:26:52after Sojourner Truth's speech, saying whatever she said
0:26:52 > 0:26:56and it's in that second version, not by her at all,
0:26:56 > 0:27:00that what is now the famous refrain - "Ain't I a woman?"
0:27:00 > 0:27:05which Sojourner Truth certainly never said - was inserted
0:27:05 > 0:27:12and, in fact, the whole speech was kind of re-translated at that point
0:27:12 > 0:27:16into the Southern drawl that I notably failed to replicate...
0:27:16 > 0:27:17AUDIENCE CHUCKLES
0:27:17 > 0:27:20..to match the abolitionist message,
0:27:20 > 0:27:23even though Sojourner Truth came from the North
0:27:23 > 0:27:26and had been brought up speaking Dutch.
0:27:27 > 0:27:30So we have to be careful with these things.
0:27:30 > 0:27:34Now, I'm not, of course, saying that women's voices
0:27:34 > 0:27:38raised in support of women's causes aren't important, you know.
0:27:38 > 0:27:41Someone, for heaven's sake, has to speak up for women
0:27:41 > 0:27:45and if men won't, well, women should.
0:27:45 > 0:27:51But it remains the case that women's public speech has, for centuries,
0:27:51 > 0:27:54been niched into that area
0:27:54 > 0:27:58and here, of course, I've got to flag up, before somebody else does,
0:27:58 > 0:28:01my own topic this evening.
0:28:01 > 0:28:04No-one forced me to talk about this,
0:28:04 > 0:28:07but I think it can hardly be a coincidence
0:28:07 > 0:28:11that I chose to talk about the public voice of women
0:28:11 > 0:28:16rather than about, say, migration or the war in Syria.
0:28:16 > 0:28:21Now, I don't want to put myself in the same league as Sojourner Truth,
0:28:21 > 0:28:26but I probably have to confess to being in that niche, too.
0:28:26 > 0:28:31But even that area of licence has not always, or even at all,
0:28:31 > 0:28:34consistently been available to women.
0:28:34 > 0:28:38There are countless examples of attempts to write women out
0:28:38 > 0:28:42of public discourse entirely, Telemachus-style.
0:28:42 > 0:28:47But just to take one, anyone who's read Henry James's Bostonians,
0:28:47 > 0:28:49published in the 1880s,
0:28:49 > 0:28:53will remember that a central theme in that book
0:28:53 > 0:28:55is the silencing of Verena Tarrant,
0:28:55 > 0:28:59a young feminist campaigner and speaker.
0:28:59 > 0:29:04As she draws closer and closer to her suitor, Basil Ransom,
0:29:04 > 0:29:10a man endowed, as James stresses, "with a rich, deep voice"...
0:29:11 > 0:29:15..she finds herself increasingly unable to speak,
0:29:15 > 0:29:17as she once did, in public.
0:29:17 > 0:29:22Ransom effectively re-privatises her voice,
0:29:22 > 0:29:26insisting that she speak only to him.
0:29:26 > 0:29:31"Keep your soothing words for me," he says.
0:29:31 > 0:29:36Now, in the novel, it's quite hard to pin James's own standpoint down,
0:29:36 > 0:29:39and certainly most readers don't warm to Basil,
0:29:39 > 0:29:44but in the essays, James makes it pretty clear where he stood,
0:29:44 > 0:29:48for he wrote about the polluting, contagious
0:29:48 > 0:29:53and socially destructive effects of women's voices
0:29:53 > 0:29:56in words that could well have been written
0:29:56 > 0:29:58by some second-century-AD Roman,
0:29:58 > 0:30:04and were probably in part derived from second-century-AD sources.
0:30:04 > 0:30:09Under American women's influence, he insisted,
0:30:09 > 0:30:15language risks becoming "a generalised mumble or jumble,
0:30:15 > 0:30:19"a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine.
0:30:19 > 0:30:25"It will sound like the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass,
0:30:25 > 0:30:27"and the bark of the dog."
0:30:27 > 0:30:32I hope you spotted in that kind of mad, extreme stuff,
0:30:32 > 0:30:37a faint glimpse of the tongueless Philomela, the moo of Io,
0:30:37 > 0:30:42and the barking of the Roman female orator in the Forum.
0:30:43 > 0:30:48Henry James was just one among many in what amounted, at the time,
0:30:48 > 0:30:53to something of a crusade for proper standards in American speech.
0:30:53 > 0:30:56Other contemporaries praised
0:30:56 > 0:31:01the sweet, domestic, private singing of the female,
0:31:01 > 0:31:05while opposing any use of a female voice
0:31:05 > 0:31:07in the wider world.
0:31:07 > 0:31:09And there's plenty of thundering
0:31:09 > 0:31:13about "thin nasal tones" of women's public speech,
0:31:13 > 0:31:15about their twangs, their whiffles,
0:31:15 > 0:31:19their snuffles, their whines and their whinnies.
0:31:21 > 0:31:25"In the name of our homes, our children, our national honour,"
0:31:25 > 0:31:31said James again, in 1906, "Don't let us have women like that!"
0:31:31 > 0:31:36Now, we don't talk quite in those bold terms now.
0:31:36 > 0:31:40Not quite, but it does seem to me
0:31:40 > 0:31:45that many aspects of that traditional package of views
0:31:45 > 0:31:51about the unsuitability of women for public speaking in general,
0:31:51 > 0:31:54a package which goes back more than two millennia,
0:31:54 > 0:31:58still underlies some of our own assumptions about,
0:31:58 > 0:32:00and our awkwardness with,
0:32:00 > 0:32:03the female voice in public.
0:32:03 > 0:32:07Take, for example, the language we still use
0:32:07 > 0:32:10to describe the sounds of women's speech,
0:32:10 > 0:32:13which is not all that far from Henry James
0:32:13 > 0:32:16or some pontificating Roman.
0:32:16 > 0:32:22In making a public case, in speaking out, what are women said to be?
0:32:22 > 0:32:24They're said to be "strident",
0:32:24 > 0:32:28they "whinge" and they "whine".
0:32:28 > 0:32:32When, after one particularly vile bout
0:32:32 > 0:32:35of internet comments on my own genitalia,
0:32:35 > 0:32:39I tweeted, rather pluckily, I thought,
0:32:39 > 0:32:42that it was all a bit "gobsmacking".
0:32:42 > 0:32:45This got reported by one commentator
0:32:45 > 0:32:50in a mainstream British magazine in these terms -
0:32:50 > 0:32:55"The misogyny is truly 'gobsmacking', she whined."
0:32:55 > 0:32:57LAUGHTER
0:32:57 > 0:32:58Since when has it been whining
0:32:58 > 0:33:01to say that something was gobsmacking?
0:33:01 > 0:33:07This did induce in me a quick Google trawl to see, you know,
0:33:07 > 0:33:10who is said to whine in the world these days?
0:33:10 > 0:33:13And I can tell you - it's women, closely followed
0:33:13 > 0:33:16by Premiership football managers on a losing streak.
0:33:16 > 0:33:18LAUGHTER
0:33:18 > 0:33:20Not only women.
0:33:22 > 0:33:23I felt so angry about that,
0:33:23 > 0:33:27I felt more angry about being said to be a whiner
0:33:27 > 0:33:30than I did about the misogyny in the first place, I think.
0:33:31 > 0:33:34You might say, "Well, do those words really matter?"
0:33:34 > 0:33:37And the answer to that is of course they matter
0:33:37 > 0:33:41because they underpin a contemporary idiom
0:33:41 > 0:33:46that acts to remove the authority, the force,
0:33:46 > 0:33:52even the wit or the humour or the irony from what women have to say.
0:33:52 > 0:33:57It's an idiom that effectively repositions women
0:33:57 > 0:34:00back into the domestic sphere.
0:34:00 > 0:34:04Think when people normally use the words "whinge" and "whine",
0:34:04 > 0:34:07it's over things like the washing-up and who hasn't put their socks
0:34:07 > 0:34:09in the laundry basket, and things like that.
0:34:09 > 0:34:12It trivialises the words of women
0:34:12 > 0:34:15by making it into, turning it into, a whine
0:34:15 > 0:34:18or in the terms I was using about Henry James,
0:34:18 > 0:34:22it "re-privatises" women that way.
0:34:22 > 0:34:27Contrast, very easy, contrast "the deep-voiced man"
0:34:27 > 0:34:31with all the connotations of profundity
0:34:31 > 0:34:36that that simple word "deep" actually brings.
0:34:36 > 0:34:38Deep, he's deep and deep.
0:34:40 > 0:34:45And it is still the case, I'd argue, that when, as listeners,
0:34:45 > 0:34:49we, and I think I'm including women in this,
0:34:49 > 0:34:53we hear a female voice,
0:34:53 > 0:34:58we much more rarely hear a voice that connotes authority
0:34:58 > 0:35:02or rather, and this is to put it, I think, more correctly,
0:35:02 > 0:35:08we haven't yet learned how to hear authority in a woman's voice.
0:35:08 > 0:35:14We don't hear, in Homeric terms, muthos when we listen to a woman.
0:35:14 > 0:35:16Now, I'm talking just voice here,
0:35:16 > 0:35:19but it's very obvious that you could do appearance too.
0:35:19 > 0:35:23You could say, in a man,
0:35:23 > 0:35:29craggy and wrinkled faces signal mature wisdom.
0:35:29 > 0:35:32In a woman, they signal a kind of
0:35:32 > 0:35:34past-my-use-by-date label, I think.
0:35:37 > 0:35:38We don't hear a voice of authority,
0:35:38 > 0:35:43we don't hear a voice of expertise either,
0:35:43 > 0:35:48at least, not outside women's traditional spheres.
0:35:48 > 0:35:50To put it in another obvious way,
0:35:50 > 0:35:55for a female MP to be a Minister of Women, or of Education or of Health,
0:35:55 > 0:35:59is a very different thing from being Chancellor of the Exchequer -
0:35:59 > 0:36:02a post that no woman has yet filled.
0:36:03 > 0:36:08And, across the board, we still tend to see a tremendous resistance
0:36:08 > 0:36:11to female encroachment
0:36:11 > 0:36:14onto traditional male discursive territory,
0:36:14 > 0:36:18whether that's the abuse that gets hurled at Jacqui Oatley
0:36:18 > 0:36:21for having the nerve to leave the netball court
0:36:21 > 0:36:25to become the first woman commentator on Match Of The Day,
0:36:25 > 0:36:29or what can get meted out, and regularly is meted out,
0:36:29 > 0:36:32to women who appear on Question Time,
0:36:32 > 0:36:36where the range of topics discussed
0:36:36 > 0:36:40is usually fairly mainstream "male political".
0:36:42 > 0:36:45It may not be a surprise that the same commentator
0:36:45 > 0:36:49who accused me of whining claims to run, I quote,
0:36:49 > 0:36:54a "small light-hearted competition," for guess what -
0:36:54 > 0:36:59"the most stupid woman to appear on Question Time in a year."
0:36:59 > 0:37:05Now, I am extremely reluctant to stoop to the obvious point
0:37:05 > 0:37:09about the stupid men that appear on the panel.
0:37:09 > 0:37:14Much more interesting is another cultural connection
0:37:14 > 0:37:16that that reveals -
0:37:16 > 0:37:22that unpopular, controversial or just plain different views,
0:37:22 > 0:37:24when voiced by a woman,
0:37:24 > 0:37:29tend to get taken as indications of her stupidity.
0:37:29 > 0:37:34It's not that you disagree, it's that she's stupid.
0:37:34 > 0:37:38"Sorry, love, you just don't understand."
0:37:38 > 0:37:43And I can't tell you the number of times that I have been called,
0:37:43 > 0:37:46you know, online or by e-mail,
0:37:46 > 0:37:47"an ignorant moron".
0:37:48 > 0:37:52Now, hang on, I think, and sometimes say, you know,
0:37:52 > 0:37:56I might be wrong, you know, I might not have got it right.
0:37:56 > 0:38:00We might disagree, but I'm self-confident enough to know
0:38:00 > 0:38:03that I'm not an ignorant moron. Right?
0:38:03 > 0:38:04CHUCKLING
0:38:04 > 0:38:07Being wrong is different from being stupid.
0:38:09 > 0:38:12Now, these assumptions and these prejudices are,
0:38:12 > 0:38:15I think, very hard-wired into us.
0:38:15 > 0:38:18I don't mean that they're hard-wired into our brains,
0:38:18 > 0:38:22there is no neurological reason whatsoever
0:38:22 > 0:38:25for us to perceive low-pitched voices
0:38:25 > 0:38:29as more authoritative than high-pitched voices.
0:38:29 > 0:38:34But they hard-wired into our culture, our language,
0:38:34 > 0:38:36our way of talking about men and women
0:38:36 > 0:38:39and into the millennia of our history.
0:38:39 > 0:38:43And when we are thinking about the under-representation of women
0:38:43 > 0:38:45in national politics, say,
0:38:45 > 0:38:49their relative muteness in the public sphere,
0:38:49 > 0:38:53I'm sure we have to think beyond what the Prime Minister
0:38:53 > 0:38:56and his chums got up to in the Bullingdon Club,
0:38:56 > 0:39:01beyond the bad behaviour and the blokeish culture of Westminster,
0:39:01 > 0:39:04beyond even issues of family-friendly hours,
0:39:04 > 0:39:07childcare and women-only short lists,
0:39:07 > 0:39:09important as those are.
0:39:09 > 0:39:15I think we need to be focusing on those even more fundamental issues
0:39:15 > 0:39:22of how we have learned to hear the contributions of women,
0:39:22 > 0:39:23or, just to go back
0:39:23 > 0:39:25to the cartoon for a moment,
0:39:25 > 0:39:27I think we have to focus on what
0:39:27 > 0:39:29I'm going, from now on, to call
0:39:29 > 0:39:32the Miss Triggs question.
0:39:32 > 0:39:36Not just, how does poor old Miss Triggs get a word in edgeways?
0:39:36 > 0:39:39Though that's important enough.
0:39:39 > 0:39:45But how can we make ourselves more aware about the processes
0:39:45 > 0:39:50and prejudices that mean we don't hear her.
0:39:52 > 0:39:54Now, at this point,
0:39:54 > 0:39:56I am going to turn briefly to trolls,
0:39:56 > 0:39:58the internet death-threat and abuse,
0:39:58 > 0:40:02because some of these same issues of voice and gender
0:40:02 > 0:40:04are at play there, too.
0:40:04 > 0:40:08Now, I think we have to be very, very careful about generalising
0:40:08 > 0:40:13too confidently about the nastier sides of the internet.
0:40:13 > 0:40:17These appear in many, many different forms,
0:40:17 > 0:40:20it's not quite the same on Twitter
0:40:20 > 0:40:25as it is under the line in comments in newspapers,
0:40:25 > 0:40:29and criminal death-threats are a quite different kettle of fish
0:40:29 > 0:40:33from merely "unpleasant" abuse.
0:40:33 > 0:40:37And many different people are targets,
0:40:37 > 0:40:40from grieving parents of dead teenagers
0:40:40 > 0:40:43through, you know, professors of classics,
0:40:43 > 0:40:47to celebrities of all sorts.
0:40:47 > 0:40:51What is clear about internet abuse
0:40:51 > 0:40:57is that many more men than women are the perpetrators of it,
0:40:57 > 0:41:01and they attack women far more than they attack men.
0:41:01 > 0:41:05Now, men are not immune from attack,
0:41:05 > 0:41:09but one academic study a few years ago put the ratio
0:41:09 > 0:41:15at something like 30 to 1, female to male targets.
0:41:15 > 0:41:18For what it's worth, and I have to say I've not suffered
0:41:18 > 0:41:21anything like as bad as some other women,
0:41:21 > 0:41:26I receive what I would euphemistically call
0:41:26 > 0:41:30something inappropriately hostile,
0:41:30 > 0:41:33that's to say, you know, beyond fair comment,
0:41:33 > 0:41:36beyond even fair anger, just being cross,
0:41:36 > 0:41:40every time I speak on the radio or television
0:41:40 > 0:41:44and I almost certainly will after this lecture is broadcast.
0:41:46 > 0:41:48It's driven, I'm sure, by many different things.
0:41:48 > 0:41:52Some of it's from kids acting up, some of it's from people who've had
0:41:52 > 0:41:55too much to drink, some of it's from people who've just for a moment
0:41:55 > 0:42:00lost that inner inhibitor and can often be very apologetic later.
0:42:00 > 0:42:05I think most of them are more sad than they are wicked.
0:42:05 > 0:42:07And when I'm feeling charitable,
0:42:07 > 0:42:09sometimes, when I'm feeling charitable,
0:42:09 > 0:42:14I think quite a lot of it comes from people who feel rather let down
0:42:14 > 0:42:18by the false promises of democratisation
0:42:18 > 0:42:22blazoned by media such as Twitter.
0:42:22 > 0:42:26It was supposed to put us directly in touch with those in power,
0:42:26 > 0:42:29it was supposed to open up
0:42:29 > 0:42:33a new kind of democratic kind of conversation.
0:42:33 > 0:42:36Of course, it does absolutely nothing of the sort.
0:42:36 > 0:42:41You know, if we choose to tweet the Prime Minister or the Pope,
0:42:41 > 0:42:45they will no more read our tweet than they would read a letter
0:42:45 > 0:42:47if we sent it to them.
0:42:47 > 0:42:50And for the most part, the Prime Minister doesn't even write
0:42:50 > 0:42:53the tweets that appear under his name anyway.
0:42:53 > 0:42:54How could he?
0:42:54 > 0:42:57I have to say, I'm rather more optimistic
0:42:57 > 0:42:59that maybe the Pope does write some of his.
0:42:59 > 0:43:02I think he might not be so busy.
0:43:02 > 0:43:04LAUGHTER
0:43:07 > 0:43:12Some of the abuse, I suspect, is actually a squeal of frustration
0:43:12 > 0:43:18at those false promises, taking aim at one of the traditional targets
0:43:18 > 0:43:20of our culture - "the gobby woman".
0:43:20 > 0:43:22And we have to remember,
0:43:22 > 0:43:25and I think it's important to stress at this point,
0:43:25 > 0:43:28women are not the only group in our culture
0:43:28 > 0:43:32who either are or feel themselves to be voiceless.
0:43:33 > 0:43:36But the more I've looked at the details
0:43:36 > 0:43:38of the threats and the insults
0:43:38 > 0:43:41that women are on the receiving end of,
0:43:41 > 0:43:47the more, some of them at least, seem to fit into the old patterns
0:43:47 > 0:43:51of prejudice and assumption that I've been talking about.
0:43:52 > 0:43:56For a start, it doesn't much matter
0:43:56 > 0:44:00what line you take in an argument as a woman.
0:44:00 > 0:44:07If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway.
0:44:07 > 0:44:10It's not WHAT you say that prompts it,
0:44:10 > 0:44:14it's the fact that you are saying it.
0:44:15 > 0:44:19And that matches the details of the threats themselves.
0:44:19 > 0:44:24And OK, you know, they include the predictable menu
0:44:24 > 0:44:28of rape, bombing, murder and so forth.
0:44:28 > 0:44:33And if I sound now relatively insouciant about that,
0:44:33 > 0:44:34I can tell you, late at night,
0:44:34 > 0:44:37when you get one of those, you feel scared.
0:44:37 > 0:44:41They have all that, but there's a significant subsection
0:44:41 > 0:44:46which homes in on the silencing of women.
0:44:46 > 0:44:50If you look at what these tweets are saying, "Shut up, you bitch,"
0:44:50 > 0:44:52is a fairly common refrain.
0:44:52 > 0:44:57Or they will promise to remove your capacity to speak.
0:44:57 > 0:45:03"I'm going to cut off your head and rape it," was one tweet I got.
0:45:03 > 0:45:07"eadlessfemalepig"was the Twitter name chosen
0:45:07 > 0:45:11by someone threatening an American journalist.
0:45:11 > 0:45:14Or perhaps most diagnostic of all,
0:45:14 > 0:45:18"You should have your tongue ripped out,"
0:45:18 > 0:45:22as was tweeted to another journalist, which, of course,
0:45:22 > 0:45:27takes us back straightaway, 2,000 years,to poor Philomela.
0:45:28 > 0:45:31In its crude, aggressive way,
0:45:31 > 0:45:36a lot of these tweets and other forms of online abuse
0:45:36 > 0:45:41are about keeping women, or getting women, out of man's talk.
0:45:42 > 0:45:46In a way, I think, the 140 characters of a tweet
0:45:46 > 0:45:51act as a sort of magnifying glass on attitudes that you find elsewhere.
0:45:51 > 0:45:53And, in some ways, I'm tempted to see
0:45:53 > 0:45:56that there is a kind of faint connection
0:45:56 > 0:46:01between these mad Twitter outbursts, and mad mostly is what they are,
0:46:01 > 0:46:05and the blokes in the House of Commons heckling women MPs so loud
0:46:05 > 0:46:09that you simply can't hear what they say.
0:46:09 > 0:46:11I'm told that in the Afghan parliament,
0:46:11 > 0:46:13they have a rather cleverer strategy.
0:46:13 > 0:46:17They just unplug the women's mics when they don't want to hear them.
0:46:18 > 0:46:23Ironically, too, the well-meaning solution that's often recommended
0:46:23 > 0:46:26when women are on the receiving end of this turns out to bring about
0:46:26 > 0:46:29the very result that the abusers want -
0:46:29 > 0:46:32namely, women's silence.
0:46:32 > 0:46:35What do you get told? "Don't call the abusers out.
0:46:35 > 0:46:39"Don't give them any attention, that's what they're looking...
0:46:39 > 0:46:42"Just say nothing and it will all go away."
0:46:42 > 0:46:44That's the advice you get.
0:46:44 > 0:46:46I can tell you, if you think
0:46:46 > 0:46:50that women have put up and shut up far too long,
0:46:50 > 0:46:54it's very hard to follow that advice.
0:46:54 > 0:46:58It amounts, I think, to leaving the Twitter bullies
0:46:58 > 0:47:02in unchallenged occupation of the Twitter playground.
0:47:02 > 0:47:04We have to speak out.
0:47:06 > 0:47:11Now, in a way, that's sort of the bare bones of my...
0:47:11 > 0:47:15It's not a diagnosis, it's my kind of historical long view.
0:47:15 > 0:47:20But to finish with, we ought to think a bit about
0:47:20 > 0:47:22what the remedy might be.
0:47:22 > 0:47:24It's all very well doing a bit of analysis,
0:47:24 > 0:47:27but what are we going to do about it?
0:47:27 > 0:47:30What is the remedy?
0:47:30 > 0:47:33Well, put in those terms, like most women,
0:47:33 > 0:47:38I can say, I only wish I knew what to do about this.
0:47:38 > 0:47:43There can't be, I think, a group of female friends or colleagues
0:47:43 > 0:47:45anywhere in this country,
0:47:45 > 0:47:48and probably not many places in the world,
0:47:48 > 0:47:51who haven't regularly discussed
0:47:51 > 0:47:54at least the day-to-day practical aspects
0:47:54 > 0:47:56of the Miss Triggs question,
0:47:56 > 0:47:59whether in the office or the committee room,
0:47:59 > 0:48:03the council chamber, the seminar or the House of Commons.
0:48:03 > 0:48:05How do I get my point heard?
0:48:05 > 0:48:08How do I get it noticed?
0:48:08 > 0:48:13How do I feel, as a woman, I belong to that discussion that is going on?
0:48:13 > 0:48:17Now, I'm sure it's something that some men feel too.
0:48:17 > 0:48:21As I've already said, women aren't the only voiceless people on the planet.
0:48:21 > 0:48:26All the same, if there's one thing we know bonds women
0:48:26 > 0:48:30across all backgrounds, all political colours,
0:48:30 > 0:48:34in all kinds of businesses and professions in this country,
0:48:34 > 0:48:37it's the classic experience that almost all of us have shared
0:48:37 > 0:48:41of the failed intervention. I'm sure that many women in the audience
0:48:41 > 0:48:44are instantly going to recognise what I'm talking about.
0:48:44 > 0:48:49You're at a meeting, you decide you're going to make a point,
0:48:49 > 0:48:53you find a place to put it in,
0:48:53 > 0:48:57then there's a silence - isn't it? - a short silence follows,
0:48:57 > 0:48:59a few awkward seconds...
0:48:59 > 0:49:02and then some man picks up just where he'd last left off and says,
0:49:02 > 0:49:04"But what I was saying was..."
0:49:04 > 0:49:06LAUGHTER
0:49:06 > 0:49:08And if feels as if you might never have opened your mouth,
0:49:08 > 0:49:11and you end up both blaming yourself
0:49:11 > 0:49:16and the blokes whose exclusive club this discussion appears to be.
0:49:17 > 0:49:21Those who do manage successfully to get their voice across
0:49:21 > 0:49:26very often adopt some version of the androgyne route,
0:49:26 > 0:49:30like Maesia in the Forum or the mythical Elizabeth at Tilbury -
0:49:30 > 0:49:35consciously aping aspects of male rhetoric.
0:49:35 > 0:49:36CHUCKLING
0:49:36 > 0:49:40That was basically Margaret Thatcher's line
0:49:40 > 0:49:44when she took training specifically to lower her voice,
0:49:44 > 0:49:46to add the tone of authority
0:49:46 > 0:49:50that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked.
0:49:51 > 0:49:56And that's fine, in a way, if it works,
0:49:56 > 0:50:00but it seems to me that all tactics of that type
0:50:00 > 0:50:04tend to leave women still feeling that they're on the outside,
0:50:04 > 0:50:09that they're impersonators of rhetorical roles
0:50:09 > 0:50:11that they don't quite own.
0:50:11 > 0:50:14They're actors rather than orators.
0:50:15 > 0:50:17And putting it bluntly,
0:50:17 > 0:50:22it seems to me that having women just pretend to be men
0:50:22 > 0:50:24may be a quick fix for some,
0:50:24 > 0:50:28but it doesn't honestly get to the heart of the problem.
0:50:29 > 0:50:34Now, what I've been suggesting at various points in this lecture,
0:50:34 > 0:50:36is that what we really need to do
0:50:36 > 0:50:39is to think much more fundamentally
0:50:39 > 0:50:43about the rules of our own rhetorical operations.
0:50:43 > 0:50:47Now, I don't mean by that that sort of old stand-by of,
0:50:47 > 0:50:51"Oh, men and women talk different languages, don't they?"
0:50:51 > 0:50:54To which I would always reply, "Well, if they do, it's because
0:50:54 > 0:50:57"somebody taught them different languages."
0:50:57 > 0:51:00And I certainly don't mean to urge us down some kind of
0:51:00 > 0:51:02pop psychology route, you know,
0:51:02 > 0:51:04"Men are from Mars, women are from Venus,
0:51:04 > 0:51:07"so never mind about public speaking, my dear."
0:51:07 > 0:51:09CHUCKLING
0:51:09 > 0:51:14My hunch is that if we're going to make any progress
0:51:14 > 0:51:16with the Miss Triggs question,
0:51:16 > 0:51:18we need to go back to some first principles
0:51:18 > 0:51:22about the nature of spoken authority,
0:51:22 > 0:51:24about what constitutes it,
0:51:24 > 0:51:29how we have learned to hear authoritative utterance
0:51:29 > 0:51:30where we have,
0:51:30 > 0:51:33and how we recognise that.
0:51:33 > 0:51:39And rather than push generations of women into voice-training classes,
0:51:39 > 0:51:43I think perhaps we should be thinking more about
0:51:43 > 0:51:48the fault lines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse.
0:51:48 > 0:51:51It isn't necessarily women's fault here.
0:51:52 > 0:51:56And again, I think, we can usefully look back
0:51:56 > 0:51:58to the Greeks and the Romans.
0:51:58 > 0:52:03For, while it is true, as I've been insisting, that classical culture,
0:52:03 > 0:52:07I think, has to bear, some, some part of the responsibility
0:52:07 > 0:52:12for our starkly gendered assumptions about public speech,
0:52:12 > 0:52:16about male muthos and female silence,
0:52:16 > 0:52:22it's also the case that some ancient writers were much more reflective
0:52:22 > 0:52:28than we ourselves are about those gendered assumptions.
0:52:28 > 0:52:32They were subversively aware of what was at stake in them,
0:52:32 > 0:52:36they were troubled about their simplicity,
0:52:36 > 0:52:39and they hinted at resistance.
0:52:39 > 0:52:42Ovid, for example, may have silenced his women
0:52:42 > 0:52:46in their transformation and mutilation,
0:52:46 > 0:52:52but he also suggested that communication could transcend the human voice,
0:52:52 > 0:52:57and that women were not that easily shut up.
0:52:57 > 0:53:00Philomela lost her tongue,
0:53:00 > 0:53:04but she still managed to denounce her rapist
0:53:04 > 0:53:10by weaving the story of what had happened to her into a tapestry,
0:53:10 > 0:53:15which is why Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus,
0:53:15 > 0:53:21has to remove not only the tongue of Lavinia, but also her hands,
0:53:21 > 0:53:25just in case she got anywhere near a loom.
0:53:25 > 0:53:27CHUCKLING
0:53:27 > 0:53:31And the smartest male, ancient... They're all male.
0:53:31 > 0:53:35The smartest ancient rhetorical theorists acknowledged
0:53:35 > 0:53:41that the best masculine techniques of oratorical persuasion
0:53:41 > 0:53:45were uncomfortably close, as they saw it,
0:53:45 > 0:53:48to the techniques of female seduction.
0:53:48 > 0:53:53"So, was oratory really so safely masculine?" they wondered.
0:53:53 > 0:53:56Maybe it was a female genre all along.
0:53:58 > 0:54:04And one particularly bloody anecdote vividly exposes the gender wars
0:54:04 > 0:54:10just below the surface of ancient public life and speaking.
0:54:10 > 0:54:14It's a story that comes from the conflicts at Rome that followed
0:54:14 > 0:54:18the assassination of Julius Caesar, in 44 BC.
0:54:18 > 0:54:22The cause of these, Marcus Tullius Cicero,
0:54:22 > 0:54:29Roman's most powerful public speaker and debater ever, was lynched.
0:54:29 > 0:54:31And the hit-squad that took him out
0:54:31 > 0:54:36triumphantly brought his head and his hands to Rome,
0:54:36 > 0:54:39and they pinned them up, for all to see,
0:54:39 > 0:54:42on the speaker's platform in the Forum.
0:54:42 > 0:54:48So just where Cicero had claimed his greatest oratorical triumphs,
0:54:48 > 0:54:53there his head and his hands got stuck up, dead.
0:54:53 > 0:54:57It was then, the story goes, that Fulvia,
0:54:57 > 0:55:01the wife of Mark Antony, who had been the victim of some of Cicero's
0:55:01 > 0:55:07most devastating polemics, went along to have a look.
0:55:07 > 0:55:09And when she saw the bits of him,
0:55:09 > 0:55:16she removed the pins from her hair and repeatedly stabbed them
0:55:16 > 0:55:18into the dead man's tongue.
0:55:19 > 0:55:21It's a disconcerting image
0:55:21 > 0:55:27of a defining article of female adornment, the hairpin,
0:55:27 > 0:55:33used as a violent weapon against the very site of the production
0:55:33 > 0:55:37of male speech in the male mouth.
0:55:37 > 0:55:40It's a kind of reverse Philomela.
0:55:40 > 0:55:45This 19th-century painting, even more disconcertingly,
0:55:45 > 0:55:47eroticises the whole scene.
0:55:47 > 0:55:50In fact, gloating Fulvia actually
0:55:50 > 0:55:53seems to have taken Cicero's head home
0:55:53 > 0:55:56to do her way with, rather than...
0:55:56 > 0:55:58It's supposed to be in the Forum, you know,
0:55:58 > 0:56:01not in your bedroom, darling.
0:56:01 > 0:56:02LAUGHTER
0:56:02 > 0:56:04But you get the point.
0:56:07 > 0:56:12What I'm pointing to here is a critically aware,
0:56:12 > 0:56:15self-aware ancient tradition,
0:56:15 > 0:56:19and it's not one that directly challenges the basic template
0:56:19 > 0:56:22I've been outlining, but it is one
0:56:22 > 0:56:27that seems to determine to reveal the conflicts and the paradoxes
0:56:27 > 0:56:31in the gendering of public speech,
0:56:31 > 0:56:35to raise bigger issues about the nature
0:56:35 > 0:56:39and purpose of communication, male and female.
0:56:40 > 0:56:42And I think, really, to close,
0:56:42 > 0:56:45we should perhaps take our cue from this,
0:56:45 > 0:56:50and really make an effort to bring to the surface
0:56:50 > 0:56:55all those big questions that we tend to shelve
0:56:55 > 0:56:59in our pursuit of quick fixes and practical answers
0:56:59 > 0:57:02about how we speak in public,
0:57:02 > 0:57:06why we speak in public, what actually is debating for,
0:57:06 > 0:57:12and whose voice, have we learned, fits.
0:57:12 > 0:57:14What we need, in other words, I think,
0:57:14 > 0:57:18is not just, you know, practical measures, you know,
0:57:18 > 0:57:24not just saying, "Let's have a woman chair every committee and everything will get better."
0:57:24 > 0:57:29What we need is some good, old-fashioned feminist consciousness-raising
0:57:29 > 0:57:33about what we mean by the voice of authority
0:57:33 > 0:57:37and how we have come to construct it.
0:57:39 > 0:57:42And I think we need to work on that
0:57:42 > 0:57:49before we can even start to figure out how we modern Penelopes
0:57:49 > 0:57:53might answer back to our own Telemachuses,
0:57:53 > 0:57:59or, for that matter, I think we should start to work on that
0:57:59 > 0:58:07before we decide just to, well, lend Miss Triggs some hairpins
0:58:07 > 0:58:10and see what happens. Thank you.
0:58:10 > 0:58:13APPLAUSE