Tag: HIllary Clinton

Fundy baby voice-shaming

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Back in 2016, you may recall, there was an explosion of disparaging commentary about Hillary Clinton’s voice. It was shrill, people said, and too loud; it was harsh and flat and “decidedly grating”; it was the voice of a bossy schoolmarm whose “lecturing” or “hectoring” tone was widely agreed to be a total turn-off.  No one, they said, would vote for a president with a voice like that. 

As feminists immediately recognized, this criticism wasn’t really about Clinton’s voice. Her voice was just a symbol of everything her critics didn’t like about her, beginning with the simple fact that she was a woman who wanted to be president. The words her detractors used, words like “shrill” and “harsh” and “bossy”, are commonly used to express dislike and disapproval of “uppity” women, women who occupy, or aspire to occupy, positions of authority and power.  That these words have little if anything to do with what an individual woman actually sounds like is demonstrated by the fact that they’re contradictory—Clinton’s voice was said to be both “shrill” (high and piercing) and “flat” (low and monotonous)—and are applied to women who sound totally different (Greta Thunberg and the late Margaret Thatcher have both been described as “strident”). What “grates” is not the voice itself, but the temerity of the woman who raises it in public and expects others to listen to what she says. Calling her “strident” or “shrill” is a way of shaming her for that. Male politicians are not subjected to this voice-shaming: they may be criticized for any number of other things (as Trump was in 2016), but their voices rarely become an issue, because men’s right to a public voice is not in question.

I found myself thinking about this last week while watching another female politician being voice-shamed: Alabama Senator Katie Britt, who responded on behalf of the Republican party to President Biden’s State of the Union address. As you’d expect, she was critical of Biden; as you’d also expect, her performance attracted a lot of criticism from non-Republicans. But much of that criticism focused not on what she had said, but on how she had said it, and especially on her use of something called “fundy baby voice”.  

Here’s one example, written by Cheryl Rofer for the leftist blog Lawyers, guns and money:

I wasn’t going to watch the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech. But then social media posts started popping up: “What am I seeing?” “This porn sucks.” “Who is this?”

…a United States Senator who presents herself with a dipping blouse neckline showing a gleaming stone-encrusted cross, speaking in a breathy childlike voice from a darkened and apparently unused kitchen… 

…That bizarre voice is called “fundy baby voice.” It is cultivated by women in what let’s call the fundy bubble…they use it deliberately to signal that they belong to that bubble and all it implies about women – submissive to men, stays in the home, and certainly no attempt to control the relationship of sex to pregnancy.

…Her emotional presentation was also bizarre, with much too much smiling as she spoke about rape and household finances. But women are supposed to smile – men thought Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren should smile more. …Here was a woman who is willing to smile more, before our very eyes. And also to choke up her voice as if she was about to cry, to show us how very sensitive she is to others’ plights.

The way of speaking referred to here as “fundy baby voice” (“fundy” = [Christian] fundamentalist) is evidently in the process of being what sociolinguists call enregistered. Enregisterment happens when a linguistic phenomenon (usually one that’s been in existence for some time) becomes sufficiently noticeable to be identified, given a name (e.g., “Estuary English”, “uptalk”) and commented on. “Fundy baby voice” doesn’t yet have the same level of popular recognition as, say, uptalk: as last week’s commentary demonstrated, you still have to explain what it is if you’re writing for a general audience. But people who are aware of it can tell you not only what it’s called, but also who uses it (prototypically, white southern evangelical women), what it signifies (feminine submissiveness) and what its most salient characteristics are (it’s high in pitch, has a breathy or whispery quality and is produced with a smile).

The discourse through which a way of speaking is enregistered doesn’t just explain what it is: typically it does two other things as well. One is to construct a stereotype—a generic representation which captures what makes the way of speaking distinctive, but which is simpler and more extreme than any real-life example of its use. When I listened to Katie Britt’s speech, for instance, I realized that the descriptions I’d read had exaggerated some elements of her performance while leaving out others entirely. Her voice was definitely breathy, but not as high-pitched (or as southern) as I’d expected; I was also surprised by how much she used creaky voice (which is not part of the stereotype: it’s similar to vocal fry, associated with speaking at a low pitch, and it doesn’t sound sweet or babyish). The only thing I thought the commentary hadn’t exaggerated was her frequent and incongruous smiling.

The second thing this kind of discourse constructs is an attitude to the way of speaking that’s being enregistered. In the case of fundy baby voice that attitude is strongly negative, as you can tell not only from what is said about it (e.g., Cheryl Rofer’s description of it as “bizarre”), but also from the name it’s been given, which is obviously not neutral—it’s not a label you’d expect evangelical women to use themselves. Discourse about fundy baby voice is largely a matter of people outside what Rofer calls the “fundy bubble” criticizing the speech of women inside it. Which is not, of course unusual: commentary on uptalk, vocal fry and other alleged “female verbal tics” is also produced by people who don’t (or think they don’t) talk that way to criticize, mock or shame those who do. 

There are, to be fair, some exceptions: there’s a more nuanced take, for instance, in a post by the former Southern Baptist and now self-described “rural progressive” Jess Piper. Piper wrote about fundy baby voice well before Katie Britt made it a talking-point, and when she revisited the topic in the wake of Britt’s speech she reminded her readers that it isn’t bizarre to women like her who grew up with it:

I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was ingrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.

Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.

Whereas Rofer suggests that evangelical women use fundy baby voice “deliberately”, Piper points out that speaking is a form of habitual behaviour shaped by lessons learned early in life. Though she no longer identifies with the values the voice symbolizes or the community it signals membership of, she hasn’t been able to eliminate the habits she acquired during her formative years—habits which were modelled, as another ex-fundamentalist, Tia Levings, explains, by “older generations speaking in a soft baby whisper to the younger”, and reinforced through “an invisible reward system of acceptance and attention”. Girls learned, in other words, how to speak so that others would listen to them.

That is not, lest we forget, something that only happens in the “fundy bubble”. We are all products of gendered language socialization, which is practised in some form in all communities.  Of course, the details vary: when I was a girl what was modelled and rewarded wasn’t the “soft baby whisper” Tia Levings and Jess Piper learned. But it was just as much a linguistic enactment of my community’s ideas about “proper” femininity. Sounding “ladylike”, for instance, was constantly harped on: girls got far more grief than boys for things like yelling, laughing loudly, using “coarse” language, speaking with a broad local accent and addressing adults without due politeness. And the process continues into adulthood: it’s what’s happening, for instance, in all the modern, “diverse” and “inclusive” workplaces where women are told they sound too “abrasive” and need to “soften their tone”. At least in the “fundy bubble” the speech norms prescribed to women are consistent with the overtly professed belief that women should be sweet and submissive; they’re not enforced by bosses who claim they haven’t got a sexist bone in their body.  

Jess Piper thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to judge women like the ones she grew up with, who “used the voice because they were trained to use it”. They aren’t all terrible people: in many cases, she says,     

They are kind women who show up for others in sickness and in need. They take care of their families and their neighbors and their church sisters and brothers. They are living the life they feel called to lead—I give them grace and understanding. They are not out to harm others.

Piper does not, however, want to give “grace and understanding” to women like Katie Britt, who have real power and who do want to use it to harm others. “I am jolted awake”, she writes, “when I hear the voice dripping sugar from a mouth that claims to love all while stripping rights from many”.

If her point is that these women are hypocrites, then she’ll get no argument from me. But is it right, factually or morally, to make that argument only about fundamentalist women? Isn’t anyone a hypocrite who claims to follow Jesus’s commandment to “love thy neighbour as thyself” while preaching intolerance towards anyone who isn’t white or straight or Christian? Even the hypocrisy of a woman who forges a successful career in national politics while maintaining that women’s place is in the home is not hers alone: presumably women like Britt made their choices with the support of the husbands, fathers and pastors who, as Piper says herself, have more power within the community than they do. If those men are happy for some women to pursue high-powered careers because they think it will advance the community’s political goals, then they are hypocrites too. But by making a specifically female way of speaking into a symbol of the hypocrisy of the religious Right, we are, in effect, scapegoating the women.  

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t criticize Katie Britt. But it would surely be possible to hold her to account—for what she said in her speech, for her record of espousing repellent political views, and indeed for her general hypocrisy—without bringing her voice into it. Is the voice-shaming of right-wing Christian women by leftists and feminists not itself hypocritical? How is it different from what feminists objected to so strenuously in 2016, the voice-shaming of Hillary Clinton by conservatives and woman-haters?

Some feminists might reply that the question is obtuse: the two cases are obviously completely different. Whereas Clinton was criticized for flouting patriarchal speech-norms (e.g., that women should be nice, be humble, speak softly and wear a smile), Katie Britt and other fundy baby voiced women are putting on a bravura display of conformity to those norms: criticizing their way of speaking is therefore a feminist act. But while I do understand that logic, there are two reasons why I don’t accept it.

First, it is my belief that when anyone sets out to shame a woman for something they wouldn’t shame a comparable man for, be that her marital status, her sex-life, her weight, the clothes she wears or the sound of her voice, that is, by definition, sexist. It relies on the existence of a double standard which feminists should be criticizing, not exploiting—especially if we’re going to criticize it when it’s used against us.

Which brings me to the second point. Making high-profile women the subject of endless public commentary about how nasty or stupid or babyish they sound is a form of sexist language-policing that has a negative effect on all women. Not just the ones who really are nasty or stupid; not even just the ones who are individually subjected to criticism. What gets said about those women is intended to teach the rest of us a lesson—to make us more hesitant about speaking publicly, more self-conscious about our speech and more cautious about how we express ourselves. If we think that’s a problem, we can’t pick and choose which forms of it to be against. We can’t argue that it’s OK when the targets are reactionary anti-feminist women, but totally out of order when they’re on our side of the political fence.

Any woman who chuckled at the tweet quoted by Cheryl Rofer—“this porn sucks”, a reference to the fact that fundy baby voice has things in common with the more overtly eroticized “sexy baby voice”—should remember that ideas about how women should or shouldn’t speak are many and varied, and available to be used by anyone who feels the urge to put a woman—any woman—in her place. You may not talk like Katie Britt, but you almost certainly talk in some way that someone somewhere could decide to mock or shame you for—because the basic problem, whether you like it or not, is one that you, like every other woman, share with Katie.   

None of this is meant to imply that feminists shouldn’t be critical of the norms which define “feminine” speech: what I’m saying is that there’s a difference between critically analysing those norms and criticizing, mocking or shaming women whose speech exemplifies them. I (still) don’t understand why language-shaming is so often seen as acceptable when other kinds of shaming are not. If feminists wouldn’t criticize a female politician by making disparaging comments on her appearance–for instance, saying that Marine Le Pen looks like an old hag and Giorgia Meloni dresses like a bimbo–it’s odd that they don’t seem to have similar scruples about mocking the way women’s voices sound.  

But even if you don’t share my reservations about voice-shaming women whose politics you don’t like, in this case it could be seen as a trap. When we ridicule Katie Britt’s performance (as Scarlett Johansson did in her “scary mom” parody on Saturday Night Live) we may actually be doing her a favour, politically speaking, by treating her as a joke rather than a threat. On that point we could learn something from the great Dolly Parton, who has often said that she built her career on being underestimated by people who couldn’t see past the surface trappings of her femininity—the elaborate wigs, the breasts, and indeed the voice (high, sweet and southern accented)—to the inner core of steel. Katie Britt and her ilk may not share Dolly Parton’s values (or her talents), but they are no less ambitious and determined; the threat they represent is real, and we underestimate them at our peril.

To gender or not to gender? (Thoughts prompted by the death of Zaha Hadid)

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Last week, after Zaha Hadid’s death was announced, someone I know posted on Facebook: ‘It’s annoying that the coverage keeps referring to her as “the world’s most prominent female architect”. Why not “one of the world’s most prominent architects?”’

Most people who responded agreed that it was sexist to put Hadid into a subcategory of ‘female architects’ rather than acknowledging her status as one of the leading figures in contemporary architecture, period. But one person dissented, arguing that since it’s still harder for women to succeed in most professions, drawing attention to Hadid’s sex underlined rather than detracting from her achievements. This commenter also felt that highlighting women’s successes explicitly was important, because it helped to inspire other women and girls.

‘To gender or not to gender’ is a question that has also divided feminist linguists. Robin Lakoff, author of the influential early text Language and Woman’s Place, is among those who have argued that using gender-marked language has a profoundly negative effect. In 2007 she explained to William Safire (who wrote the New York Times’s language column until his death in 2009),

The use of either woman or female with terms such as ‘president, speaker, doctor, professor’ suggests that a woman holding that position is marked — in some way unnatural, and that it is natural for men to hold it (so we never say ‘male doctor,’ still less ‘man doctor’).

She went on:

Every time we say ‘woman president’, we reinforce the view that only a man can be commander in chief, symbolize the U.S. (which is metonymically Uncle Sam and not Aunt Samantha, after all), and make it harder to conceive of, and hence vote for, a woman in that role.

What Safire had actually asked her about was an old grammatical shibboleth. Pedants insist that referring to someone as a ‘woman architect/ doctor/professor’ is ungrammatical, because a noun can only be premodified by an adjective, not another noun. In their view, therefore, it should be ‘female architect/doctor/professor’. This, incidentally, is bullshit. Countless everyday English expressions are constructed on the ‘noun + noun’ model: for instance, ‘apple tree’, ‘dog collar’, ‘garden shed’ and ‘wedding ring’. Adjectives can fill the same slot, but there’s no law reserving it for their exclusive use. In any case, Lakoff derailed the ‘woman v female’ debate by declaring that the right answer was ‘neither’. Women should just be called by the same word we use for men.

But the pedants obviously didn’t get that memo: last year, when Hillary Clinton announced the start of her campaign, there was a new outbreak of handwringing about whether she should be referred to (in the event she’s elected) as a ‘woman president’ or a ‘female president’. On one side we had the usual objection that ‘woman’ is ungrammatical, while on the other we had people saying that ‘female’ was disrespectful—more appropriate for describing livestock than the leader of the free world.

What no one seemed to be asking was Lakoff’s question, why the president’s sex needs to be specified at all. True, if Clinton wins in November there will be a ton of ‘America elects its first ____ president’ stories, and someone will have to decide what to fill the blank with. But after that, we can surely just refer to her as ‘the President’. It’s not as if people are going to confuse her with all the other serving presidents of the US. Or even with her husband, a former US president. We’re talking about a nation that elected two presidents named George Bush: they ought to be able to manage without constant reminders that Hillary is the female President Clinton.

But what about the idea that there is value in drawing attention to the achievements of women as women? Some feminist linguists do favour using gender-marked language to make women’s presence in the world more visible. Even if you accept Lakoff’s argument that  referring to ‘a woman X’ rather than just ‘an X’ reinforces the perception that ‘Xs’ are prototypically men, there are reasons to doubt whether using unmarked terms does much to shift that perception. Research suggests that gender- neutral occupational labels are still typically interpreted as referring to men where the role they denote is culturally stereotyped as male (e.g. ‘lorry driver’ or ‘firefighter’). Replacing gender-specific terms with generic/inclusive ones seems not to override people’s real-world understanding of the relationship between gender and occupational status.

My own view (as usual) is that there isn’t a single, simple linguistic solution to this problem. It’s a decision I think you have to make case by case, because so much depends on the specifics of the context. And the effect will also depend on how any gender-marking is done, using what specific label.For instance, there are contexts in which I would refer to someone as ‘a woman writer’ (as well as contexts where I would simply call them ‘a writer’). But there are no contexts in which I would use the term ‘authoress’, because that word does not just convey that the writer is a woman, it also implies that her work is trivial and inferior.

The baggage that has become attached to certain words in the course of their history of being used is relevant to the great ‘woman v. female’ debate. In his column on the subject, William Safire expressed surprise and disappointment that feminists now seemed to prefer ‘woman’ to ‘female’ and ‘gender’ to ‘sex’. He put this down to a growing cultural squeamishness, describing those who have ‘turned against’ biological terms as ‘faint-hearted sociological euphemists’. Readers who know more about feminist theory than Safire did will be aware that the ‘sex/gender’ question is complicated. But in the case of ‘woman/female’ there are more straightforward reasons for preferring ‘woman’ to ‘female’–and they have little to do with squeamishness about biology.

‘Female’ is not just interchangeable with ‘woman’, as you immediately realize when you look at a corpus (a large collection of authentic examples). My own quick-and-dirty search of the 100 million-word British National Corpus turned up a crop of ‘female’ examples like these:

1. My poor Clemence was as helpless a female as you’d find in a long day’s march
2. ‘Stupid, crazy female’, was all he said as he set about bandaging it.
3. A call yesterday involved giving the chatty female at the other end one’s address.

These are typical examples of the use of ‘female’ as a noun, and they all involve a male speaker making a disparaging judgment on the individual he’s referring to. The judgments would remain disparaging if you substituted ‘woman’ for ‘female’, but to my mind they would be less unequivocally contemptuous. Whereas ‘woman’ can feature in positive as well as negative judgments, it’s hard to think of any context in which the noun ‘female’ is used to praise its referent: no one would say, for instance, ‘my late grandmother was an absolutely marvellous female’.

Does the contempt conveyed by the noun ‘female’ have anything to do with its being, as Safire suggests, more biological than sociological? In the examples I’ve just quoted there isn’t any explicit reference to biology, but in some cases the term does seem to have been chosen to foreground the issue of biological sex difference, and the motive for this may be overtly anti-feminist.

Here, for instance, is what a Texas businesswoman named Cheryl Rios posted on Facebook after Hillary Clinton announced that she was running for president:

A female shouldn’t be president. …with the hormones we have there is no way we should be able to start a war. Yes I run my own business and I love it and I am great at it BUT that is not the same as being the president, that should be left to a man, a good, strong, honorable man.

When challenged she stood by her comment, saying: ‘The president of the United States, to me, should be a man, and not a female’.

What’s striking here is the way Rios uses the non-parallel terms ‘a female’ and ‘a man’ (rather than contrasting ‘a female’ with ‘a male’ or ‘a woman’ with ‘a man’). The consistency with which she does it suggests it isn’t just a random accident. It may not be a fully conscious choice, but she has evidently chosen her words to mirror her general proposition that women, unlike men, are in thrall to their biology, and are consequently unfit to hold the highest office.

There’s nothing ‘faint-hearted’ about objecting to the label ‘female’ when it’s used in this way and for this purpose. But that doesn’t mean we have to object to all uses of it for all purposes: as always with language, it’s horses for courses. For instance, it doesn’t bother me when I read in a scientific paper that the researchers ‘recruited a balanced sample of male and female subjects’. In a discussion of sex I’d be more likely to refer to ‘the female orgasm’ than ‘the woman’s orgasm’. Conversely I’d be more likely to say ‘women’s underwear’ than ‘female underwear’ (and don’t even get me started on ‘Female Toilet’: when it comes to that phrase I am, unashamedly, a pedant. Sex is a characteristic of toilet users, not toilets themselves.)

But this discussion of the merits of competing terms does not resolve the larger question of whether it’s desirable to use any kind of gender-marking in references to women like Hillary Clinton and Zaha Hadid. Hadid herself had a view on this (one which, interestingly, seems to have changed over time). She’s been quoted as saying:

I used to not like being called a ‘woman architect’: I’m an architect, not just a woman architect. Guys used to tap me on the head and say, ‘You are okay for a girl.’ But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don’t mind that at all.

It’s not hard to understand why successful women in heavily male-dominated fields so often say, ‘I don’t want to be judged as a woman, I want to be judged on my merits as an astronaut/conductor/ mathematician’. But the reality is that women can’t avoid being judged as women; whatever we say or do, we can’t make the world treat our sex as an irrelevance or a minor detail. And maybe we shouldn’t want it to be treated in that way. Another thing Zaha Hadid said on this subject was:

People ask, ‘what’s it like to be a woman architect?’ I say ‘I don’t know, I’ve not been a man’.

As this answer implies, sex and gender shape every individual’s life-experience: the difference between men and women isn’t that men aren’t affected by their maleness, it’s only that they are rarely asked to ponder its effects. Women, by contrast, are endlessly required to explain how their femaleness influences everything they do.

If Hadid herself declined to play this game, others were happy to play it for her, both during her life and after her death. Here, for instance, is what Bust (an online magazine that bills itself as ‘a cheeky celebration of all things female’) had to say last week:

The world became a little less whimsical today with the loss of Zaha Hadid. The Queen of Curve, who was widely regarded as the most famous living female architect in the world, passed away today at the age of 65.

It’s hard to imagine that future obituaries of male ‘starchitects’ like Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano will use words like ‘whimsical’. I chose to mention these two because they designed (among other things) the somewhat whimsical Pompidou Centre in Paris–while Hadid designed (among other things) the not-so-whimsical Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Kircaldy. As you’ll see from the illustration, this example of her work demonstrates her skill with straight lines and sharp angles. Nevertheless, she’s ‘The Queen of Curve’. Oddly enough, when men design curved structures, like Norman Foster’s dome over the Reichstag in Berlin, that isn’t seized on as their unique signature, nor do people routinely compare the buildings to female body parts.

‘To gender or not to gender’ remains a tricky question. In language as in life, what we need is a middle way. Women should not be defined entirely by their sex; but nor should we have to disclaim it entirely to be given whatever credit our contributions to the world deserve.

The taming of the shrill

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During last year’s UK General Election campaign, Richard Madeley told readers of the Daily Express:

I can’t get enough of Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood. That gorgeous accent! I could listen to it all day. It’s warmer than sunlight shining through a jar of honey.

Madeley wasn’t the only commentator who found the ‘warm’ or ‘lilting’ quality of Wood’s voice a bit of a turn on. Over in the USA, by contrast, it’s become a truth almost universally acknowledged that Hillary Clinton’s voice is a turn off. It’s been described by commentators as ‘loud, flat and punishing to the ear’, ‘decidedly grating’ and, inevitably, ‘shrill’.

The extent to which her critics have made an issue of Clinton’s voice has become a mainstream news story in its own right. Yet the topic of the male voice has barely featured in discussions of Clinton’s rival Bernie Sanders, nor in reporting on the Republican race, which is now an all-male affair. In the UK, similarly, election pundits expressed no opinions on the ingratiating smoothness of David Cameron’s vocal performance, or the blokeish braying of Nigel Farage. As Elspeth Reeve observed last year in the New Republic, men’s voices just don’t seem to make much impression:

[T]hink about Jeb Bush’s voice. It’s so—wait, what does it sound like again? He sounds just … like a guy, maybe?

It’s not that male politicians’ language gets no attention: there’s been plenty of commentary on their rhetoric, especially in the case of Donald Trump. And–as the New Republic piece goes on to demonstrate, quoting linguists like Penny Eckert, Carmen Fought and Mark Liberman–it’s not as if there’s nothing to say about the voices of Trump, Cruz, Rubio and Sanders. So, why is it only women whose voices are subjected to relentless critical scrutiny?  The short answer is, of course, ‘sexism’. But why does it take this particular form?

The most familiar feminist explanation for prejudice against the female voice connects it to the larger question of gender and authority. For historical and social reasons, the ‘unmarked’ or default voice of authority is a male voice;  criticism of female politicians’ voices is essentially a way of tapping into the still-widely held belief that women do not have the authority to lead.

Low voice pitch, a highly salient marker of maleness, is also strongly associated with authority. In 2012 an experimental study using digitally manipulated recordings of men and women saying ‘I urge you to vote for me this November’ found that judges of both sexes preferred the lower pitched version of each recording. Both men and women were advantaged by having a lower voice than their same-sex ‘rival’.

This association is what makes the word ‘shrill’, which combines the concept of high pitch with the idea of an unpleasantly piercing sound, such a common criticism of female public speakers. The linguist Nic Subtirelu has investigated the use of ‘shrill’, along with two other terms that do a similar job, ‘shriek’ and ‘screech’, in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. He calculates that the media are

2.17 times more likely to describe a woman or a girl as “screeching” (or a related form of the word) than a man. A woman or girl is also 3.14 times more likely to be described as “shrieking” (or a related form of the word), and she’s 2.3 times more likely to be described as “shrill”.

High pitch is associated not only with femaleness, but also with other characteristics which imply a lack of authority, such as immaturity (children have high-pitched voices) and emotional arousal (we ‘squeal’ with joy or fear, ‘shriek’ with excitement, ‘screech’ angrily). Saying that a woman’s voice is ‘shrill’ is also a code for ‘she’s not in control’.

It was this perception that led Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first and so far only woman Prime Minister, to undergo voice-training which lowered her pitch significantly. But the result was—to put it mildly—not to everyone’s taste. As Mrs Thatcher soon discovered, the only prejudice more widepread than scepticism about female authority is deep resentment of female authority.

That resentment is expressed in some of the other disparaging terms that are commonly used about women’s voices, like ‘abrasive’, ‘bossy’, ‘grating’, ‘harsh’, ‘hectoring’ and ‘strident’. Rather than focusing on pitch, this set of negative descriptors focuses on the tone and volume of a woman’s voice to suggest that she is aggressive and overbearing.

Today this is an even bigger problem for female politicians than it was for Mrs Thatcher. In an age of interactive, 24/7 media, we no longer treat our leaders as remote authority figures: we want them to be likeable or ‘relatable’ on a human level. But research suggests that it is harder for women to combine authority with likeability. If they score well on one, they’ll do badly on the other.

The female authority figure with the ‘shrill’, ‘grating’ voice is not just unlikeable, she’s also stereotyped as sexually repulsive. When Sylvia Shaw and I analysed media commentary on the UK General Election for our book Gender, Power and Political Speech*, we were struck by how frequently women in authority—and not only politicians, but even the woman newsreader who moderated one of the TV debates—were compared to archetypal female ‘battleaxes’ like the headmistress of a girls’ boarding school, the sadistic nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and ‘Matron’ from the ‘Doctor’ and ‘Carry On’ films. What these fictional characters have in common is that they’re grotesque: ageing, usually ugly, and either totally sexless or sexually voracious, terrifying the male objects of their insatiable desire.

The theme of the sexually predatory female was especially noticeable in commentary on the relationship between Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, and the then-leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband. In the Times, for instance, we got a strange little fable about pigeons, under the headline ‘Nicola Sturgeon and the politics of sadism’:

Spring is the season when pigeons distract us with their mating dance. The male paces about in an exotic strut, coo-cooing and puffing out his chest. The female makes a show of mincing away from him. He follows; she sidesteps; he pursues; she retreats. … On Thursday night on the BBC a similar courtship ritual could be observed taking place between two politicians, but with this striking difference. It was the lady in the dove-grey jacket coo-cooing with a puffed-out chest, and the gentleman in the dove-grey tie who was being coy.

The Sun compared Sturgeon to a Black Widow spider who ‘eats her partners alive’. And in this extract from a political sketch in the Telegraph, the words used to evoke the quality of her voice (in this case through the choice of quotative verbs) play into the depiction of powerful women as bossy bullies:

“Ed Miliband is scared to be bold,” scowled Ms Sturgeon. “We don’t want a pretend alternative to austerity.”
…Desperately Mr Miliband tried to steer the debate back to his absent foe. “Let’s not pretend there’s no difference between me and David Cameron,” he said, rather pleadingly.
“There’s not a big enough difference!” barked Ms Sturgeon.

Whereas Miliband ‘says’ things, ‘pleadingly’, Sturgeon ‘scowls’ and ‘barks’. Hillary Clinton has been described as ‘lecturing’ her audience (the behaviour of a schoolmarm or a strict mother) and her laugh has been called a ‘cackle’ (suggesting another version of the powerful but repulsive female, namely the witch).

Our cultural stereotype of the ‘attractive’ or sexually alluring female voice is very different. A ‘sexy’ voice may be high or low in pitch (think Marilyn Monroe or Lauren Bacall), but it is never ‘shrill’ or ‘grating’: it is breathy rather than clear, soft rather than loud, and ‘warmer than sunlight streaming through a jar of honey’.

Of course, a politician who used this voice would be criticized for ‘lacking authority’. Leanne Wood, whose warm and honeyed tones Richard Madeley said he could ‘listen to all day’, was endlessly patronized by the media: another writer described her as looking like ‘a 16-year-old whose date had failed to show up for the prom’. But unlike Margaret Thatcher, Nicola Sturgeon or Hillary Clinton, Wood did not commit the cardinal female sin of being a ‘turn off’.

Which brings me back to the question of why it’s women whose voices get all the attention. I think it’s at least partly for the same reason there’s more attention to female politicians’ faces, figures and clothes. Women are judged, to a far greater extent than men, by their perceived physical/sexual attractiveness. Judgments on a woman’s voice—the most directly embodied, physical aspect of linguistic performance—are part of the same phenomenon. And just like the judgments made on their bodies, the judgments made on women’s voices often express something more visceral, and more sexual, than the commentators are willing to admit.

Consider, for instance, Ben Shapiro’s defence of ‘shrill’ in a piece whose self-explanatory title was ‘Yes, Hillary Clinton is shrill. No, it’s not sexist to say so’.  His trump card is the observation that not all women politicians get called ‘shrill’:

Nobody calls Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) shrill, because she’s not shrill. She may have lifeless eyes, a doll’s eyes, but she doesn’t shriek like a wounded seagull.

‘Lifeless eyes, a doll’s eyes’??? On reflection, I think I agree with Shapiro that comments like these aren’t most aptly described as ‘sexist’. I’d describe them as outright misogyny.

*Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election, by Deborah Cameron and Sylvia Shaw