How we communicate with other Church members can be as important as what we’re trying to say. Women are at a disadvantage with less freedom and opportunity to speak truth to those in authority. Even when we do get the floor, sometimes things as innocuous as pitch, accent, and personal style determine whether we’re listened to or dismissed. Our own perceived lack of power can have an impact too. In this conversation, Cynthia and Susan discuss their ideas and experiences around LDS women speaking up in ways that will be heard.
Notes & Quotes:
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, by Soraya Chemaly
Latter-day Saint women’s leader discusses how to deal with dismissive male authorities, by Peggy Fletcher Stack, Salt Lake Tribune, 5/2019
When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978, by Adrienne Rich
Are Gender Differences Just Power Differences in Disguise, by Adam Galinsky, Columbia Business School website, March 2018
Women less likely to get their ideas endorsed at work than men, by Lydia Smith, March 2021
These Black students at BYU are using TikTok to document attitudes in the LDS Church, by Courtney Tanner, Salt Lake Tribune, May 2022
“The famed American novelist Henry James described women’s, ‘thin nasal tones,’ their ‘twangs, whiffles, snuffles, whines, and whinnies,’ sentiments echoed by Rush Limbaugh when he referred to Hillary Clinton as ‘a screeching ex-wife.’ During the entire 2016 presidential campaign, while her male counterparts boomed, swaggered, and diatribed to accolades, the former US senator and secretary of state was criticized for being ‘shrill,’ ‘inauthentic’ (if she was quiet and calm), and for ‘shouting’ (if she used her voice clearly, loudly, and confidently). ‘Angry’ is a common addition to condescending and sexist stereotypes like these, used to further dismiss women.” — Soraya Chemaly
“Jean Bingham (RS President) ‘discovered it was a style-and-personality issue and if she prayed for him, worked to understand him, and found better ways of expressing herself, the exchanges improved. ‘We women tend to be shrill or demanding or stubborn, thinking we have the best idea ever,’ Bingham said to audience laughter, ‘and if they don’t see it our way, clearly there’s a problem here.’ She suggested women look inside themselves for the solution.” — Peggy Fletcher Stack
“The specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the misnaming and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival. In rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men: […] But to a lesser or greater extent, every woman writer has written for men even when, like Virginia Woolf, she was supposed to be addressing women. If we have come to the point when this balance might begin to change, when women can stop being haunted, not only by ‘convention and propriety’ but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves, then it is an extraordinary moment for the woman writer—and reader.” —Adrienne Rich
“When you have lots of power, you have a wide range of acceptable behavior, a lot of leeway in what you can say and do. But when you lack power, your range of acceptable behavior narrows. I’ve documented across hundreds of studies that power has psychological effects. And one of the things it does is change the range of acceptable behavior that we allow ourselves in our own minds. Our power, however, also affects the range that other people allow us. Across all of these studies, one of the most interesting things that we’ve discovered is that a lot of gender differences can be reproduced by manipulating people’s sense of power.” — Adam Galinsky
“The appropriation of women’s ideas and overlooking of their achievements is nothing new. It happened to Frankenstein author Mary Shelley in the 1800s. After her husband wrote the preface, it was widely assumed he was behind the novel. It also happened to mathematician Ada Lovelace, now widely known as the first computer programmer for writing an algorithm for a computing machine in the mid-1800s. And Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man” may not have happened without Katherine Johnson, who performed the NASA calculations that made possible the manned space missions of the early 1960s as well as the 1969 moon landing.” — Lydia Smith
“Like Virginia Woolf, I am aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children. Nearly fifty years after she spoke, that fact remains largely unchanged. And I am thinking also of women whom she left out of the picture altogether—women who are washing other people’s dishes and caring for other people’s children, not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children. We seem to be special women here, we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special, as long as our words and actions didn’t threaten their privilege of tolerating or rejecting us and our work according to their ideas of what a special woman ought to be.” — Adrienne Rich
“We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.” — Soraya Chemaly
Suzanne Gardner Stott
Have recently been following you. Thank you for your insights. Your comments today struck a note with me. I was recently the Grand Marshal of the Utah Pride Festival and you wouldn’t believe the comments I received! Some very funny, some frightening! There is work to do!
Shannon Starks
Great work, friends! It’s a cultural thing that’s going to take a LONG time to change. And people still wonder why women feel underprivileged 😉 This episode reminded me of this post I read recently:
https://lucid.substack.com/p/what-should-a-leader-sound-like
“During the 1979 general election campaign, Gordon Reece, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, head of Britain’s Conservative Party, worried that Thatcher’s voice was too shrill. Reece, a former journalist and television producer, knew that how politicians sound can be as important as how they look.
Thatcher took lessons with the speech coach of the National Theatre designed to lower her voice so she would project a sense of calm authority. After she was elected as Britain’s first female Prime Minister, that deeper voice became an important part of her profile as the ‘Iron Lady.'”
Katrina
As an alto who prefers to use my lower range of my voice, I think the dynamics are a little more complex than what you say. I really appreciate hearing your side though as my genes mean I’ve had very different experiences and it’s helpful to see there’s pushing from both sides.
As a grown woman, for the most part, I am accepted for having a low voice. It seems to be celebrated. So it feels like a balm to me personally now. When I was a teenager it was not. (Usually by peer males, and sometimes peer females). I don’t know if it is time period (graduated high school in ’09) or an age of life thing. (I think a low voice is ridiculed in older women sometimes, or purple with “damaged” sounding voices). I know so many altos who didn’t want to use the lower part of their voice because they perceived it as “manly” until they became adults. So for me the annoyance at “primary voice” was at the perceived unacceptance of my natural voice and that women leaders in the church being the model of how I was supposed to talk, especially because when I was a teenager all the women leaders talked in their (mostly) higher range of their voice. It was refreshing to me when new leaders came in that talked in a wider range like most people normally do. I don’t know if they naturally talked like that or not as when people give talks in general conference it doesn’t sound natural.
The voice actor for piglet was shrill. There used to be a wider variety of male voices in older Hollywood… But not from leading men & leading women, usually character actors of both genders. There’s less room for men to use their higher range of voices now days. There’s a reason most teenage boys try to talk in the lowest part of their voice. (I mean the one exception is singing) 🙂
I recently ranted on Facebook about this topic, a lot of the pressure stems from people assuming all men are basses and all women sopranos, instead of majority of women and men share a considerable amount of voice range. So when someone is out of the “norm” they get picked on about it. My cousin’s husband said he felt similar things, but in the opposite way as me since he’s a tenor. Boys (teens and up) are taught to talk in their middle or lower voice whether they prefer to talk there or not (they can be a bass baritone tenor or alto, just needs to sound like a chest voice), whereas teen girls are pressured to talk in their middle voice. It can be OK to talk lower if they have a higher voice and don’t make men feel like you have practically the same voice range. XD BUT once you’re an adult woman there’s definitely a push to not talk in your higher part of your voice for anyone. People tend to prefer using one part, it’s not fair that we pressure them to do something that’s not comfortable or natural.