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.
language: a feminist guide 