Right in time for Christmas shopping, this month sees the publication of She Speaks: The Power of Women’s Voices by Yvette Cooper. A collection of humdinger speeches by women who have changed the course of history – from Boudica to Benazir Bhutto – it’s a wonderful book that I would happily unwrap and spend half of Christmas avoiding the family with. It’s also part of a slow-burning trend for anthologies that champion women’s long marginalised stories, including Wonder Women, A History of Britain in 21 Women and a whole slew of jauntily feminist children’s titles aimed at raising girls who will put down the Play-Doh and lean in.As a phenomenon, it gives me mixed feelings. To start with the obvious: these books are a much-needed rebuttal to a culture that gives off the ineffable impression that the only woman who did anything of note in the past two millennia was Marie Curie. Leaders included in She Speaks like Sojourner Truth, a former slave turned powerful activist, should be part of the collective consciousness, but they’re not. As recently as the mid Nineties, as Cooper points out, The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches blithely noted that “women’s voices are not made by nature for oratory. They are not deep enough.”
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