Reclaiming Women’s Public Voice

On March 3, 1869, two years after the end of the Civil War, a young woman stepped up to the podium at the South Carolina statehouse. Her tone was defiant, her message unequivocal: Women, including Black women like herself, should be allowed to vote.

It was the Reconstruction Era, and Black men had already gained their voting rights. Now South Carolina legislators were drafting a constitutional amendment to extend the franchise to women. The South Carolina House of Representatives had issued an invitation “to any lady to appear before the Committee of the Judiciary and argue the claims of female suffrage.”

Charlotte “Lottie” Rollin took up the challenge. One of five sisters in a prosperous family of free people of color in Charleston, Rollin was socially prominent and active in political affairs.

“We ask suffrage not as a favor, not as a privilege, but as a right based on the grounds that we are human beings and as such entitled to all human rights,” she told the lawmakers in the state capital, Columbia. The U.S. Constitution did not define voters as male, she argued — therefore it was clear that women should also vote.

Rollin’s electrifying words were later published as a four-page pamphlet. Then that pamphlet all but disappeared from public view. One copy wound up in the archives of the University of Toronto, which recently sent me a scan.

The missing public words of outspoken women like Lottie Rollin are part of a larger story about the absence of women’s voice from the historical record, from the teaching curricula, from our storehouse of common knowledge, and from our public memory.

Like thousands of speeches, testimony, lectures, and sermons delivered by women through the centuries, Rollin’s carefully laid out argument has been almost completely overlooked by the history books. What has also been lost is the example of a woman as an authority figure, an informed, confident commentator on public affairs, sharing her knowledge before a legislative body — one that, ironically, at that time, was comprised of a majority of Black men.

Thousands of American women like Rollin have courageously spoken in public throughout American history. Even when denied access to education, excluded from political roles and professions, and forbidden to speak from the pulpit, women still found ways to use their public voices.

Although the history books scarcely acknowledge it, women have always been speaking out: Black, White, Indigenous, Latina, and Asian American women. Their words helped shape our institutions, ideals, and culture. They shared their knowledge and ideas and made an impact with their voices. But we scarcely know their names, much less their actual words.

The same cannot be said about the many lionized male orators who appear in our history books, media, and public discourse. I know because when I give talks and teach workshops in public speaking, I often ask my audience: “Which famous speakers in American history can you name?” Many people can rattle off at least half a dozen American male speakers like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Many people can even quote lines from their iconic speeches.

Yet when I ask which women speakers they remember, there’s a long pause. Someone might mention Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama. Maybe Sojourner Truth. Mostly the faces are blank.

I used to wonder whether it was true that the “great men” in history gave all the greatest speeches. So I began an excavation project, searching for significant speeches by women. I searched through speech anthologies, transcripts, academic archives, out-of-print books, and old newspapers. What I discovered was a vast but little-known trove of public speeches by women. I’ve published those speeches, by the thousands, in a free online repository of women’s speeches called the Speaking While Female Speech Bank.

“It’s amazing how thoroughly women’s speeches have been kept invisible in the historical record,” says Hannah Rubenstein, co-author of A Speaker’s Guidebook and A Pocket Guide to Public Speaking. “Women speakers have never gotten credit for their contributions.”

Consider another example, the remarkable Clara Shortridge Foltz. She was a professional public speaker and the first female lawyer on the West Coast. In the 1870s, Foltz drafted a bill that replaced “white male” with “woman,” which was eventually passed by the state of California, allowing women to take the state bar exam. She then sued the Hastings School of Law for barring women in a case that went all the way to the California Supreme Court, ultimately opening the door to women law students.

Then, in 1893, Foltz stood up at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and made a historic speech. From her own courtroom experience, she had seen firsthand that the poor scarcely had a chance to defend themselves against criminal charges because they were steamrolled by the legal might and resources of the prosecutor. In her speech, she argued that it was no crime to be poor, and that by failing to protect those whom the law considered “innocent until proven guilty,” the nation was failing to live up to its ideals.

“Let the criminal courts be reorganized upon a basis of exact, equal, and free justice,” she told the audience. “Let our country be broad and generous enough to make the law a shield as well as a sword.” Her speech became the basis of the publicly financed legal defense programs in every state in the country. Her humane vision has prevailed, compelled by the force of her spoken words.

Rollin and Foltz are just two among dozens of women who have changed our country through their public speech. What I’ve come to realize is that the absence of women’s speech from the historical record comes at a high cost to our lives today.

When we discount the role of women speakers in American history, when we continue to see women as bit players who stood on the sidelines, their mouths sealed shut, we fundamentally misunderstand the diverse, vibrant mix of voices and views that got us to this point. The absence of women’s voices colors the way that teachers, speakers, and media gatekeepers understand whose voices convey authority and expertise.

Those aren’t the only losses. Women, too, miss out on the knowledge of an accessible, inspirational past — and the awareness that because those women made a difference with their voices, we can too.

As we know all too well, despite many efforts to achieve gender balance in the authority figures who appear in the media, we still haven’t achieved anything like equity. Women’s public words are still “sharply underrepresented in public life and in electronic media,” argued Marie Tessier in her 2021 book, Digital Suffragists: Women, the Web, and the Future of Democracy.

Tessier edits letters to the editor for The New York Times, where, she says, men’s contributions significantly outweigh those of their female counterparts. Women “are missing and underrepresented in debates about public issues in every forum where public affairs are discussed. Even when women have seats at the table, their voices are outnumbered and underrepresented,” she said.

Lottie Rollin’s argument for women’s suffrage before the South Carolina legislature was ultimately not successful.

As Mary Sarah Bilder noted in her 2022 book, Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution, the speech did receive some press coverage. Several papers reported on it, including The New-York Tribune, which observed that after Rollin’s speech, “Nothing was done further, and the woman-rights agitation ceased there.” The women’s suffrage amendment in South Carolina was defeated as the Reconstruction project came to an end.

Despite their wealth and social prestige, the Rollin family became more vulnerable as the fabric of life in the South changed, racial segregation laws were passed, and white supremacists such as the Ku Klux Klan grew in power and influence. All five sisters eventually fled the South. Lottie Rollin ended up in Brooklyn, where she ran a boarding house with one of her sisters.

We have no record of her ever speaking again in public. But given our spotty record of preserving women’s words, how can we ever know for sure?