Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part I. Cultural and vocal challenges



When I wrote 'Our Masters' Voices' (1984), Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and looked well set to win at least one more term of office (and actually won two more). The following is a somewhat revised version of what I wrote then, and will be followed in due course by some further blog entries about how she and her advisors sought to solve the problems she was up against as the UK's first woman head of government.

It was important for Martin Luther King's success as a communicator that there already existed a distinctive black religious tradition that could be readily adapted for speaking on behalf of the civil rights movement, because American political oratory before the 1960s had been dominated by white males. But, when Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 after winning the first of three UK general elections, there were no such obvious models for women. For thousands of years before that, politics and speech-making had been almost exclusively male preserves.

There are no records of any famous female orators in classical Greece or Rome, where the early texts on rhetoric assumed that the practitioners would all be male. This was very evident in the opening pages of Quintillian’s classic work on The Education of an Orator, where he had this to say about the aim of the book:

‘We are to form, then, the perfect orator, who cannot exist unless as a good man; and we require in him, therefore, not only consummate ability in speaking, but every excellence of mind ... since the man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and who can govern communities by his counsels, settle them by means of law, and improve them by judicial enactments, can certainly be nothing else but an orator.' (Quintillian, Institutes of Oratory, or The Education of an Orator, p. 4, emphases added)

In the years before Mrs Thatcher became prime minister of the UK, a number of women had become heads of government in other countries - Mrs Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Mrs Peron in Argentina, Mrs Gandhi in India and Mrs Meir in Israel - success stories that might seem to suggest that the male-dominated political mould had already been broken and that women in the future would in be able to enjoy equal opportunities in the pursuit of political careers.

Even then, however, there were two reasons for caution in drawing any such conclusion. The first was that three of the women who’d achieved high political office also had close family ties with male national heroes who had recently died, with Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher being the only ones who had reached the top entirely by their own individual efforts.

A second reason for caution is that women faced and still face cultural and physical obstacles with which men never have to contend. In the absence of any established tradition like that in which black American leaders Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson were able to operate, female politicians still have to develop new ways of surviving and thriving in such a male-dominated profession. This raises the question of whether the solutions found by Mrs Thatcher established any ground-rules that might benefit aspiring women politicians of the present and future.

Some of the problems faced by women in politics are obviously much the same as those faced by women in any other male-dominated profession – aptly summed up by the adage that ‘they’re damned if they behave like men, and damned if they don't.' If a woman acts in a tough, decisive or ruthless manner, she risks having her femininity being called into question. But if she appears gentle, indecisive or conciliatory, her male colleagues may conclude that she’s simply not up to the job.

This is a dilemma familiar to most professional women, but female politicians face another disadvantage because public speaking is such an important part of the job – not just because the techniques of oratory and debate have been monopolized by men for so long, but also because of the difference in length of male and female vocal cords that affect the pitch of the human voice.

Pitch can be a problem for all public speakers, whatever their sex, because it tends to rise when someone is nervous or is speaking louder than usual – both of which are likely to happen in speeches. For women the problem is more acute because the natural pitch of their voices has a higher starting point than is the case for men, with the result that it cannot rise as far before reaching a level at which it sounds 'shrill'.

This might not matter but for the fact that high pitch tends to be strongly associated with emotional or irrational outbursts - a deeply rooted cultural assumption that probably derives from (and is sustained by) the screams of each new generation of infants. The fact that the sound of a woman raising her voice is more likely to be negatively evaluated as ‘shrill' or 'screeching' is probably at the heart of a source of irritation that’s familiar to many professional women, namely the tendency of male colleagues to accuse them of 'overreacting' whenever they become involved in arguments.

Nor is it just a matter of there being negative associations with high pitched voices, as there are positive associations between lower-pitched female voices and attractiveness, 'huskiness' and 'sexiness'. Shakespeare's positive evaluation of low pitch has long been enshrined in the dictionaries of quotations:

'Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman' (King Lear, V, iii).

So the fact that Mrs Thatcher took positive steps to lower the pitch of her voice was a perfectly rational response to a real problem. Under the guidance of the National Theatre, she underwent training that included humming exercises aimed at lowering her previously natural pitch. Comparing recordings of speeches she made before and after tuition reveals a clearly audible difference. When played through a pitch and intensity analyser, the reduction in pitch came out at 46 Hz – a figure that’s almost half the average difference in pitch between male and female voices.

This significant decrease was all the more remarkable because it was achieved after Mrs Thatcher had already passed the age at which the pitch of women's voices tends naturally to rise: generally speaking, it falls up to the age of about forty-five, after which the it gradually starts to rise.

The lowering of her voice had other consequences that probably contributed both to the greater clarity of her talk and to its 'statesmanlike' character. For example, the human voice-production system works in such a way that a reduction in pitch tends to slow down the speed at which we speak, and the tutored Mrs Thatcher spoke noticeably more slowly than she did before having any voice coaching.

You can inspect the change in her style of speaking in the following clip showing her in one interview just after she became leader of the opposition in 1975 and another about ten years later after she'd spent two terms as prime minister.



“May we bring hope” – 30 years since Margaret Thatcher took office as prime minister

Barack Obama isn’t the first successful politician to talk about ‘hope’.

On 4th May 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of the UK, and concluded some lines from St Francis of Assisi with a contrast between ‘despair’ and ‘hope’ as she entered 10 Downing Street (see clip below).

The quotation was supplied to her by speechwriter Ronald Millar, who reflects on it (and how she delivered it) in the same video clip.

The New Year is a more personal 30th anniversary for me, as it was during the UK general election of 1979 that I first started recording political speeches on audio tape (video recorders had still to become widely available).

So I'll be using this as an excuse to revisit some of that early work in future blog entries, which will start with some comments on ‘Margaret Thatcher and the genesis of female charisma’ – that has some resonances for the likes of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.


Name your price: the curious language of television advertising


More and more British television advertisements are referring to prices in a way that bears little or no relationship to the way we talk about prices in everyday life.

Commercials are telling us that an armchair priced at two hundred and ninety nine pounds costs “two-nine-nine” and that a three-piece suite priced at four hundred and ninety nine pounds can be ours for “four-nine-nine”.

There are presumably two reasons why the ad agencies have sold their clients on the idea of listing digits as an 'effective' way of mentioning the price of a product. One is that it avoids having to mention high-sounding numbers like “ninety” or “a hundred”. The other is that these shorthand digital options save on costly air time: there are only three syllables in “four-nine-nine” compared with eight syllables in “four hundred and ninety nine pounds”, which takes more than twice as long to say.

But the trouble is that, to any competent speaker of English (e.g. the mass television audience), these linguistic inventions stand out as noticeable and distinctly odd in comparison with the more usual conversational way of referring to the price of things in tens, hundreds or thousands of pounds. What’s more, if you actually follow the advertisers’ preferred usage, it can lead to confusion and embarrassment, as happened on the only occasion on which I can ever remember describing a price in this rather unusual way.

After I’d spent £1,250.00 (one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds) on an antique dining table, my late mother-in-law said she’d like to pay for it as a house-warming present and asked me how much it had cost. Taken aback by such unexpected generosity, I replied (perhaps unwittingly following the advertisers’ example of trying to make a high price sound lower) by saying “twelve-fifty” – at which point, she reached into her purse and handed me £12.50 (twelve pounds and fifty pence).

I won’t dwell on how the conversation developed after that, because what really interests me about all this is the question of how ad agencies manage to get away with persuading their clients to buy into such bizarre linguistic usages without regard for what (little) we know how language actually works.

Another example of heavy investment on the basis of questionable advice from the agencies is the huge number of TV commercials in which there is no spoken reference at all to the name of the product being advertised. Even when this key information appears in a written caption on the screen, it won’t be noticed by the millions of viewers who are reading a newspaper, doing a crossword puzzle or are using the break to make a cup of tea.

The expensive pointlessness of such commercials was summed up many years ago by Professor W.M. O’Barr of Duke University, when he pointed out that the advertisers and/or their agencies don’t seem to realise that eyes have eyelids but ears don’t have ear lids – the obvious consequence of which is that, however inattentive viewers are, they will at least hear the name of the product being advertised.

The net result of all this is that we often become very familiar with expensively created artistic film footage of cars doing extraordinary things without being left with any idea about what make or model of car it is that we’re supposed to go out and buy.

Meanwhile, the ad agencies seem content to carry on ignoring research, like that by O’Barr, that could point them and their clients in much more profitable directions.

Ready-made words for Mr Obama from a previous president’s inaugural speech

Given that Barack Obama is such a brilliant orator, it might seem a bit presumptuous to offer any suggestions for his inaugural address next month. But these lines from another presidential inaugural seem uncannily relevant for someone taking office at a time of economic crisis:

“These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions… It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

“Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity … For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

“You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

“The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away…


The speaker was Ronald Reagan at his inauguration on 20th January 1981. More than two and a half decades later, the depressing thing is that nothing much seems to have changed – including the optimism/hope of the newly elected president.

Neutrality in the Queen's Christmas speech


In an earlier blog entry (12 November 2008), I looked at the way the Queen’s speech at the state opening of parliament each year is a model of how to read out someone else’s words (i.e. the government’s legislative plans for the coming year) with complete neutrality.

Although her annual broadcast to the Commonwealth on Christmas day is supposed to be her words to people in the UK and the British Commonwealth, she has to solve a rather different problem of displaying neutrality – not between different political parties, but between different religions.

As head of the Church of England, she's obviously free, and perhaps even obliged, to be open about her own Christian faith in her Christmas message, but sections aimed at believers in other religions have become a regular feature in recent years, as is illustrated by the following three extracts:

2005
"There may be an instinct in all of us to help those in distress, but in many cases I believe this has been inspired by religious faith. Christianity is not the only religion to teach its followers to help others and to treat your neighbour as you would want to be treated yourself. 

It has been clear that in the course of this year relief workers and financial support have come from members of every faith and from every corner of the world.
"

2006
"It is worth bearing in mind that all of our faith communities encourage the bridging of that divide. The wisdom and experience of the great religions point to the need to nurture and guide the young, and to encourage respect for the elderly…. The scriptures and traditions of the other faiths enshrine the same fundamental guidance. It is very easy to concentrate on the differences between the religious faiths and to forget what they have in common."

2007
"All the great religious teachings of the world press home the message that everyone has a responsibility to care for the vulnerable."

You can inspect the whole scripts of these and ones going back to 1996 by clicking on the title above. Or you can click here to see her in action last year, or here (after 3.00 p.m. UK time on 25 December) to check whether she has any more religious neutrality in store for us this year.

What did Santa say before "Ho, ho ho"?


I’ve just received an email with Christmas greetings from the White House Writers Group in Washington D.C., which contains a nice little ditty:

Santa called the other day.
"I need a speech and right away!
It should sound new, but somehow old;
A message sweet, yet still quite bold.
My words must be both short and clear
And memorable throughout the year!"
Our writers worked all through the night
To get each phrase exactly right.
Then one scribe cried, "Ah ha! I know!
Tell Santa to say just, 'Ho, ho, ho!'"


Rhetorically speaking, their use of repetition, alliteration and a three-part list can hardly be faulted.

But, having just seen Santa using these very words 3,000 miles away from Washington, I realise that this memorable line raises another intriguing question, namely, what had he been talking about just before saying “ho, ho, ho”?

The reason for asking the question comes from many years ago when I heard the late Gail Jefferson talking about her fascinating and innovative work on transcribing particles of laughter, of which “ho, ho, ho” is one of several possible vowel sounds – such as “ha, ha , ha”, “he, he, he”, “huh, huh, huh”, etc.

The gist of Jefferson’s point was that which one of these gets selected often seems to be triggered by vowel sounds that had come immediately before it. Someone might say “he was stung by a bee – he-he-he!”, “he was locked in the bar – ha-ha-ha” or “she dropped a bottle of gin on her toe – ho-ho-ho”.

I didn’t catch what Santa had been saying just before he used the line that had been supplied to him by the White House Writers Group, so there’s scope here for a pre-Christmas creative competition.

Suggestions as to what it was he'd said just before "ho-ho-ho" before midnight on 25th December, please.

You don’t have to be Barack Obama to use rhetoric and imagery to discuss the financial crisis

When I show clips of top politicians in action to illustrate the power of rhetoric and imagery, people sometimes react by saying that such techniques may be all very well in political speeches but wouldn’t be much use in the kind of technical presentations they have to do.

It's alright for Barack Obama to say things like "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep", as he did in his victory speech in Chicago, but conjuring up images of journeys and hills isn't the kind of thing that professionals like economists and bankers can do.

My usual reply to such reactions is that nothing could be further from the truth - because I've yet to come across any subject where rhetoric and imagery can't be used to make a point more clearly and/or effectively.

The following transcript and video clips provide a nice illustration of how rhetorical techniques (including contrasts, a puzzle-solution format and a three-part list) and imagery can be used to discuss the ongoing financial crisis. Complicated it may be, but here we have a Nobel prize-winning economist (Joseph Stiglitz) talking about an economy going into "a tailspin", using a contrast (between two points in time and two contrasting facts) followed by a medical metaphor (“the cure is worse than the disease”).

The video then cuts to a segment from a prime-time (UK) television news broadcast (from ITN) in which the newsreader starts by using a puzzling headline that gets us wondering what the governor of the Bank of England's "most downbeat prediction yet about the economy” actually is and a solution that seems to be using an image (“the ‘nice’ decade is over”) – though actually Mr King's use of "nice" is a reference to an acronym for 'Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion', that's been used by economists to describe the sort of growth the UK has experienced since Labour came to power in 1997.

He then uses a three-part list and a metaphor (“travelling along a bumpy road”) that’s immediately picked up by a reporter, who continues the journey imagery (“en route”) and sums the problem up with a simple contrast (“high inflation and low growth”).

It’s worth comparing this with another news programme featured in a previous blog entry on 9th October 2008 ('PowerPoint Peston' - click here to view) and reflecting on which way of getting messages across is easier to follow.

TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO CLIPS:

Stiglitz:
[METAPHOR] When the largest economy in the world goes into a tailspin it's going to have global repercussions.
[A] Before the Iraq war the price of oil was twenty-five dollars a barrel.
[B] Now it’s over a hundred and ten dollars a barrel.
[METAPHOR] The cure is worse than the disease.

Newsreader:
[P] The governor of the Bank of England made his most downbeat prediction yet about the economy.
[S] What Mervyn King called 'the nice decade' is over.

King:
[1] The nice decade is behind us.
[2] The credit cycle has turned.
[3] Commodity prices are rising.

[METAPHOR] We are travelling along a bumpy road as the economy rebalances.

Reporter:
So we’re all now traveling along the governor’s bumpy road.
[A] En route, high inflation
[B] and low growth.