Nova: Imagine walking into a library, pulling down a definitive anthology of the greatest speeches in history, and discovering something startling. Out of 233 speeches, only 13 are by women. That's less than six percent. And those 13? They're the same handful, recycled over and over: Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony. As if across four centuries of American history, barely more than a dozen women ever opened their mouths in public. That was the moment that changed everything for speechwriter Dana Rubin, and it's the origin of her book Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women. I'm Nova.

Nova: That's the truly staggering part. Rubin didn't stop at that first anthology, William Safire's Lend Me Your Ears. She went on to collect and examine 115 different anthologies of great speeches. And the pattern was consistent. Many contained no women at all. Those that did featured the same tiny cluster of names. It was systematic erasure — not because women weren't speaking, but because their words weren't being valued, collected, or preserved.

Nova: That's exactly the question Rubin set out to answer. And what she found is nothing short of a secret history of American speech. Women at every critical juncture, from pre-colonial times to the present, were speaking publicly, shaping ideas, influencing policy, changing minds. They just weren't making it into the anthologies. Today, we're diving into her book and the extraordinary legacy she has unearthed.

Nova: Dana Rubin is a Yale-trained historian, a former journalist for Texas Monthly and Reader's Digest, and a longtime speechwriter whose clients have included Martha Stewart and executives at Deloitte, PepsiCo, and CBS. She spent years teaching public speaking and coaching women to find their voice. And she kept noticing the same thing: when she asked students to name women speakers from history they admired, she got silence. Maybe someone would mention Sojourner Truth. Maybe Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama. But mostly, blank stares.

Nova: She says she was angry at first, then she got busy. She started digging through old newspapers, out-of-print books, historical society records, and manuscripts. She described herself as an excavator. Some of these speeches were in hidden recesses, but they weren't impossible to find. And once she started, she couldn't stop. What emerged was a continuous, unbroken tradition of women speaking in public across American history.

Nova: Take Sarah Parker Remond. She was a Black woman born free in Massachusetts in 1826. She became an abolitionist speaker for the American Anti-Slavery Society and was sent to England, where in 1859 she delivered a blistering speech in Manchester. She looked at the cotton trade and said: when I walk through the streets and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those eighty thousand cotton plantations and remember that not one cent of that money has ever reached the hands of the laborers. It's an electric speech. And most people have never heard of her.

Nova: Exactly. As Rubin herself put it, the history of speech is the history of ideas. When women's speeches get overlooked, ignored, even erased, we lose the insights and ideas those women labored to create. We struggle generation after generation to develop new arguments, not knowing that women before us have explored the same problems and thought the same thoughts.

Nova: So in December 2018, Rubin launched the Speaking While Female Speech Bank, a free online archive. It now contains more than 2,500 speeches by women from around the world, across 33 categories — from the anti-slavery movement to health and medicine, protests and rallies, issues of race, U. S. politics, and the women's suffrage movement. It's the largest and most diverse collection of women's speeches in existence, and Rubin has pledged it will remain free and accessible forever.

Nova: Through her consultancy, Speech Studio, where she coaches women in speaking, storytelling, thought leadership, and self-advocacy. The corporate training work funds the pro bono speech bank. She calls it a tricky balance but says both parts are essential to her mission.

Nova: Right. The book opens with Anne Hutchinson's heresy trial in 1637 — she was tried and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for holding religious meetings in her home and daring to interpret scripture. It closes with Bina Venkataraman's 2021 commencement speech. Between those bookends, Rubin contextualizes every speech with background on the speaker and her historical moment. The diversity is intentional and remarkable: Black, White, Indigenous, Latina, Asian-American women, and immigrant women from every corner of the earth.

Nova: It is. The phrase captures the double bind women have always faced: when they speak, they're scrutinized, criticized, and often punished for the act of speaking itself — not just for what they say. The book's cover features a marble bust of Helen Gahagan Douglas, sculpted by Isamu Noguchi in 1935. Douglas was a Congresswoman from California who delivered what's now known as My Democratic Credo, an extraordinary speech on the floor of the House denouncing Joseph McCarthy's smear campaign. She was among the first to publicly challenge McCarthyism, and she paid for it with her political career.

Nova: When she ran for Senate in 1950, her opponent was a young Richard Nixon. His campaign manager ordered 500,000 flyers printed on pink paper attacking her. They called her the pink lady and said she was pink right down to her underwear, implying she was a Communist sympathizer. She lost by a wide margin, and her political career was over. Rubin chose her image for the cover precisely because Douglas represents courage in the face of silencing.

Nova: Let's talk about some of the women in the book, because their stories are what make this anthology so powerful. One that Rubin often highlights is Frances E. W. Harper, born free in Baltimore in 1825. In 1866, she spoke at the 11th National Women's Rights Convention in New York City and delivered a speech called We Are All Bound Up Together. She called for women's suffrage, but she reserved her harshest criticism for the white women in the audience. She told them: if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.

Nova: Absolutely. Then there's Margaret Brent, who some call America's first female lawyer. In 1648, she became the first woman in the English North American colonies to appear and argue her own case before a court of common law. Or Clara Shortridge Foltz, who in 1892 introduced the very concept of a public defender system based on what she witnessed as a lawyer in criminal courtrooms.

Nova: Exactly. The book also includes Nannie Helen Burroughs, who founded a school for Black girls in Washington D. C. in 1909 with a curriculum preparing them for jobs traditionally held by men — gardening, shoe repair, printing, barbering, tailoring. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, a groundbreaking industrial engineer, argued in 1933 that technological design should incorporate what she called the human factor. Josephine Baker, the Parisian nightclub sensation, returned to her hometown of St. Louis in 1952 and gave a searing speech about the trauma of the 1917 race riots.

Nova: And she's careful about historical accuracy. For instance, the famous Ain't I a Woman speech attributed to Sojourner Truth — Rubin acknowledges that historian Nell Irvin Painter demonstrated in 1994 that the version most people know was actually embellished and rewritten years later by a white abolitionist named Frances Dana Gage, who gave Truth a Southern slave dialect she never actually had. The speech bank includes Painter's restored version. That kind of scholarly integrity matters enormously.

Nova: That's a crucial point. And the book covers contemporary figures too: Barbara Jordan's majestic opening statement during the Nixon impeachment hearings in 1974, Hillary Clinton's 1995 Beijing speech declaring that women's rights are human rights, Temple Grandin's 2007 speech on neurodiversity, and Grayce Uyehara, who was sent to a Japanese internment camp as a child and later argued before Congress for reparations.

Nova: So what's at stake here? Why does it matter whether women's speeches make it into anthologies?

Nova: Rubin's argument is that it's profoundly deeper. When anthologies exclude women's voices, they shape our understanding of whose ideas mattered. They tell students — especially young women — that their intellectual inheritance is thin, that they don't have a rich tradition of female thought leadership to draw on. And that's simply false. Rubin calls this knowledge a secret weapon, one that should no longer be secret.

Nova: And she gives a powerful example. In 1792, a young woman named Molly Wallace stood up at a New England academy and argued for the importance of a woman's voice in public discourse. More than two centuries later, in 2018, Meghan Markle echoed nearly identical arguments. That's not coincidence — it's a broken chain of transmission. If women knew Wallace's speech, they wouldn't have to start from scratch each time.

Nova: And perhaps most importantly, the book has been embraced as a teaching tool. Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative highlighted it as a catalyst for a more inclusive curriculum. Educators and students now have a resource that didn't exist before — a single volume that demonstrates, through primary sources, that American women have always been intellectual and rhetorical leaders.

Nova: Let's pull this together. Dana Rubin's Speaking While Female does three things at once. First, it's a correction: it sets the historical record straight by proving that women have always spoken publicly at every critical juncture in American history. Second, it's a resource: the free online speech bank with thousands of speeches, and the book itself, give students, educators, speechwriters, and anyone curious about history access to voices long buried. And third, it's a call to action: knowing this history should inspire more women to take the microphone today.

Nova: The book spans from 1637 to 2021 but it really asks us to think about what happens next. Whose voices are we elevating right now? Who gets invited to the podium, published in the anthology, remembered in the history books? Those decisions are being made today, and they'll shape what future generations know as their inheritance.

Nova: Dana Rubin closed one of her essays with a line that has stayed with me: We're all better off when we know our history and can look for inspiration to the outspoken women who've led the way. Those women led the way. Now it's our turn to ensure they're not forgotten.