Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

Throughout the nineteenth century, American authors such as Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Noah Webster displayed a fascination with women’s speech–describing how women’s voices sound, what happens when women speak, and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Voices of the Nation argues that closer inspection of these recurring descriptions also performed political work that has had a profound–though unspecified to date–impact on American culture.