5 Questions: Dana Rubin

Dana Rubin, who lives in Beacon, is a speech consultant and the author of Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women. 

What sparked the book?
I’ve been a speechwriter for a long time. I’m a judge for a major annual speechwriting contest, and I started noticing all the men who are quoted constantly, such as Winston Churchill, not just in speeches but in the media and our society. I started wondering: Where are the speeches by women? I started looking through anthologies and identified at least 250 in the English language, from the U.S. to Ireland to India. I put the women’s speeches together at speakingwhilefemale.co, organized by category.

Glance at that and you can see how few speeches have appeared in collections, which is a signal that we have not valued what women have to say. I also found hundreds, if not thousands, of references to women who gave speeches, who were orators in their day, but no record of what they said. It’s frustrating and infuriating. I still stay up into the early hours in the morning looking for speeches by women and adding them to the speech bank.

Why is this important to you?
Women changed history with their words, but we haven’t acknowledged that. For example, in 1878 Claire Shortridge Foltz became the first female lawyer in California after challenging a state law that banned women from taking the bar exam. Then she challenged the law that said women couldn’t go to law school. In 1893 she gave a speech in Chicago based on her personal experience in courtrooms, arguing that it’s no crime to be poor, that everybody deserves representation. She argued for a public-defender system. She made it happen. History can be from the bottom up, not just from the top down. And women, of course, historically have been working from the bottom. 

How did you get into public speaking?
I was a journalist for Texas Monthly, Reader’s Digest and other publications and felt comfortable on the sidelines, asking questions. But gradually I began to understand the power of the spoken word. I wasn’t comfortable being a speaker myself but, like so many things, you get better with time. You have to do the reps. Find your area and make it your topic of expertise, so when you speak, you’ll be speaking from a position of relative comfort and security.

Do you have a favorite speech by a woman?
I always say my favorite speech is the one that I added to the archive that morning. I get so excited about each one, because every speech is not just a speech. It’s an aperture to a whole world. Why did this person speak? Why did they take this position? The questions are endless. I should note, the book includes a number of women who were from or who spoke in the Hudson Valley: Eleanor Roosevelt, astronomer Maria Mitchell, educator Emma Willard, abolitionist Sojourner Truth. 

Why is public speaking important?
I would like all public schools to teach public speaking. Young women, in particular, need to learn to use their voices. Many people hesitate to put their voices in the world because they feel they will be judged. I want everyone’s voices in the mix. The older you get, the more you appreciate that we didn’t just get here by accident. People earlier made decisions about everything around us. In the same way, the world we live in can be improved by our actions.