“Let your women’s sons be ours, and let our sons be yours. Let your women hear our words.”
The words come from Cherokee tribe leader, Nanye’hi, who spoke about a land dispute to U.S. government representatives in July 1781.
It’s just one of many speeches found in Dana Rubin’s book Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women that works to fill in gaps of history by showing female speeches missing from pages of countless anthologies.
Rubin is a professional speechwriter, speaking coach and consultant focused on bringing women’s voices to the forefront of conversations. She is a New York resident and alumn of Hillcrest High School, the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University.
While working with clients and teaching students as an adjunct professor at New York University, she would first ask people to list famous speakers.
Of course, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and others were among the mainstream answers Rubin would get, but when asked about female speakers, the room would hit a lag.
“Everybody could quote a man and nobody could quote a woman,” Rubin says.
A question led to a discovery.
One book Rubin read, Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History by William Safire, documents over 202 male speakers and only a mere 15 women. Open another book, she would find the same result. Rubin combed through 250 anthologies, biographies, newspapers or anything with a hint of words from women.
“I started making a speech bank and it was like the scales fell from my eyes,” she says. “I realized this is a treasure trove of information.”
In 2019, she founded and curated the global online archive Speaking While Female to share over 2,500 of women’s speeches and counting to emphasize how often they are overlooked.
It’s become the world’s largest collection of women’s speeches to date, according to The Coordinating Council for Women in History in 2021.
“It breaks my heart that so many women’s voices aren’t recorded and that we don’t have an understanding of their power and leadership,” Rubin says.
This passion led her to compile women’s words into a companion book form. Speaking While Female, released in June 2023, is the first anthology of its kind to include American women speakers from 1637 to the present with short information blurbs about each one.
“One of my hopes is that this book will encourage more students and scholars to join the quest for missing women’s speeches,” Rubin writes in her book’s forward. “So many more remain to be uncovered, and without them, the historical record is not only incomplete – it’s inaccurate. To know American history, we must hear these women speak.”
The pages come alive with speeches from familiar names like Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller and Michelle Obama. It also features names that may be new to readers, such as Madeline Davis, an American LGBQT activist and historian who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 1972, or Nanye’hi, the fearless tribe leader.
“[The book] is not just a handy anthology of powerful speeches. It is also a rediscovery of forgotten American history going all the way back to the 1600s, an unearthing of the voices of indigenous women, and women of color,” one reviewer notes.
The book and online archive highlights females of different backgrounds and touch upon topics ranging from politics to social issues.
“Women’s words have been discounted, ignored, put down, rejected and overlooked by gatekeepers in history,” Rubin says. “They didn’t care what women had to say.”
“I want to speak to women everywhere,” Rubin says. “I want to speak to young women and I want to speak to women of every age and make sure they know the true history of women’s speech and make sure that they feel emboldened and inspired and encouraged to also use their voices. The book is just the beginning. I want to change the situation for women today and future generations.”
