Episode 13: Famous Speeches
Newly Paul talks about some of the most famous first lady speeches in American history from Eleanor Roosevelt to Melania Trump.
TRANSCRIPT
Teri Finneman: Eleanor. Dolley. Mamie. Jackie. They were the nation’s original influencers. Some were fearless, some were fragile. All left their mark on the nation’s history. In this podcast, we'll reflect on the fascinating legacies of the women forever tied to the White House. I'm your host, Teri Finneman, a journalism historian who studies media portrayals of first ladies with production editing by Bella Koscal. This is The First Ladies podcast.
We're all familiar with these famous lines in presidential speeches: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” But less attention is paid to the notable moments from first ladies. In today's episode, our guest Newly Paul talks about some of the most famous first lady speeches in American history. She analyzed speeches of 10 first ladies, ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Melania Trump.
Newly, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?
Newly Paul (1:18): Thank you for having me. So, my interest in first ladies as a research subject first started when I was a doctoral student at LSU. I remember reading about Michelle Obama and how she was covered in the media in my political communication class, and that was actually the first time that I read about research on first ladies and how they're covered. So, I was curious. I looked up on the internet for more research, and I found that there was a whole entire field that was focusing only on first ladies. It talked about their speeches and media coverage mostly, but I also found some pieces that were looking at their social media presence, visuals, and so that was pretty much how I became introduced to the field, and I developed an interest in studying this topic.
Teri Finneman (2:13): So, let's start by talking about Eleanor Roosevelt who gave many speeches, but there's one that stands out to me most and that I actually play every semester in my history of journalism class. We talked about this a little bit in another episode, but I want to also get your take on it because it was such a pivotal moment in history. It was Eleanor, not Franklin, who addressed the nation first after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Talk about what she said to women in particular in that speech, and then let's also discuss some of the other messages she had for women in the years after.
Newly Paul (2:47): Sure. So, Eleanor Roosevelt, she had a really big record of prioritizing women through her role as first lady. I mean, her press conferences are really famous, and these were the press conferences which she held exclusively for women reporters and that had the huge impact of newsrooms hiring more women as reporters so they could cover them. So, in the same vein, it wasn't surprising that in this speech that she gave after Pearl Harbor, she chose specifically to address part of her speech to women. So, I also think that in her role as first lady, she was required to act as a link between the president and women voters. So, this was another way of reaching out to women that she did in this speech. So, the first thing she did was she started out by identifying common ground between herself and women.
(3:45): She told them that her own children were on ships, and they were heading out into the Pacific, and they could be in harm's way. So, that was, at the very outset, a very great way to establish common ground between herself and women, and to show that, you know, the president, the White House, had skin in the game, that they were really invested in what was happening as a response to the attack. She also acted as a person who was calm and reassuring, and she told women that, you know, it was okay to feel anxious about their loved ones being out at sea, but at the same time, women should not panic, and they shouldn't give up, that they should be strong and they should fulfill their obligation as caregivers and do whatever that they were required to do in their communities. So, she told them that they should step up to build other people's morale, they should help out in any way they could.
(4:45): You also asked about other messages that she gave to women in her other speeches. So, I think one thing I saw was that she was a staunch promoter of women's rights, and she did say that she supported their right to work outside the house, but at the same time, in her speeches, she did not advocate for women to deprioritize their domestic roles. So, she said that women should step up, they should serve society, they should take on larger roles, but at the same time, they should remember that their primary jobs are within the house, and in her speeches, she continuously encouraged women to participate in civic life beyond home and children, but she said that, you know, all of it was to build a better family, to build a better future for the youth. So, she constantly emphasized women's connection with their families and with the domestic sphere.
Teri Finneman (5:42): Moving on to Lady Bird Johnson, she actually used a speech coach to help her with her speaking and was the first first lady to campaign without her husband on a Southern whistlestop tour alone. She made dozens of speeches. What did you find most interesting about the speeches from her that you analyzed?
Newly Paul: I did find some similarities between her speeches and Eleanor Roosevelt's speeches in the sense that they both told women not to sacrifice their femininity or give up their roles as wives and mothers, but they both told women that they should maintain their warmth, their sensitivity, their femininity, even as they take on bigger roles in society. So, in that sense, they were similar, but Lady Bird Johnson, she also allowed for the idea of a career-oriented woman. She said that women should take up jobs in professions like education, which was, according to her, uniquely suited to women's natural talents. I also saw that she used a lot of feminine rhetoric in her speeches, so she framed the issue of poverty through its impact on children, which is considered, you know, a topic that is feminine, that is closer to first ladies’ areas of concern.
(6:56): Another thing I saw was that she used a lot of narratives in her speeches and that she did to humanize various policies that she was talking about and to give specific examples so audiences could better understand the impact of these policies that were coming out from the White House. So, one example I would give is on her speech in poverty that she gave in Kentucky. She used a narrative of a specific family where there was a father with seven children, and one of his children had some kind of disability, and they were really poor. They were struggling to make money off the little bit of land that they owned. And she described how the father had been helped by government aid, the poverty alleviation programs that, you know, Lady Bird Johnson's husband was promoting, and she explained in that story that this family's fortunes had turned after they had received some government aid. So, I think this narrative was a great way of getting audiences to see specific examples of people from their own neighborhoods who were being helped by government programs. So, this was a pretty good way in which she used narratives in her speeches.
Teri Finneman (8:12): Betty Ford was a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. How did she incorporate women's rights into her speeches?
Newly Paul: Betty Ford was first lady from 1974 to 1977, and this was pretty much in the middle of the women's rights movement. She had very strong opinions on women's rights. She was pro-choice, and she also held progressive ideals which were considered ahead of her time. She presented herself as a traditional woman who worked within the home, but she was also very clear that she had admiration and support for women who held professional careers outside the home. So, in her speeches, I found that she did not ask women to prioritize, you know, their traditional domestic caregiving roles, but she allowed for the idea that women's work should be valued regardless of where that work was occurring.
(9:13): I also found that her speech was interesting because she did not treat women as homogeneous groups, but she acknowledged that there are some socioeconomic differences between women which make it easier for some women to progress and other women to not progress as quickly. So, in that sense, there were a lot of nuances that her speeches captured.
She also talked about the need for policy reforms and a change in how women's work was perceived socially. So, in that sense, her speeches incorporated elements from the women's rights movement. I thought another element that was interesting in her speeches was the reference to men and the role that they play in advancing women's rights. So, she said that, you know, people, regardless of their gender, are often perceived through stereotypical lenses, but it's women who have faced longtime systemic discrimination through the ages, and their needs should really be listened to. So, in this sense, it was interesting because she was acknowledging that men also play a role in advancing women's rights. So, in that sense, it was interesting.
Teri Finneman (10:29): Of course, one of the most famous first lady speeches ever was Barbara Bush's commencement speech at Wellesley College in June 1990. It later ranked as one of the top 50 speeches of the century in one poll. Talk about the controversy leading up to it and what the first lady ended up saying that was such a hit.
Newly Paul: This was actually one of my favorite speeches to analyze for this chapter. What happened is when Barbara Bush was invited for this commencement speech, the students circulated a petition where they said that the college should rescind her invitation because they did not consider her to be progressive enough, and they thought that all of the fame that she had gathered was entirely because of her husband being the president, and none of it was acquired on her own merits. The students wanted to have the novelist Alice Walker as a speaker, and she had won the Pulitzer Prize for best fiction for her novel The Color Purple in 1983, and she was also the first black woman who had won the Pulitzer Prize. So, the student body felt that she was way more qualified and just way better of a choice for a commencement speaker.
(11:45): But what happened is Barbara Bush ended up going to the commencement anyway and she delivered her speech, and that speech has really become one of the most iconic speeches that she gave. So, the speech was special because she did have advice for students like all other commencement speeches do, but she was also very open about her progressive ideals. So, in the speech, she acknowledged that times had changed, that women no longer needed to live by any predetermined social rules. They could make independent choices, and they could live full lives. It was interesting that she pointed out that childrearing is gender-neutral. She sort of talked about it in very gender-neutral terms, and she said that men are also expected to take up more responsibilities. When she said that, you know, people should spend more time with their children, they should prioritize their children's needs, she wasn't talking about it in ways that, you know, sort of painted it as just the woman's duty.
(12:49): She talked about it saying that it's both men and women's duties that they look after their children and prioritize their needs because healthy children means healthy society and so on. So, in that sense, it was very interesting, and then she, again, did not advocate for women to choose a career over domesticity or vice versa, but she said that women could choose their dreams, their own personal dreams, regardless of what society had in mind for them. She used this metaphor of a mermaid to show that, you know, you don’t need to fit into boxes that are predetermined for you. You can choose whatever you want.
And then, her last part, toward the end of the speech, she concluded her speech by saying that, you know, at some point, a woman might be elected president of the country, but the way she said it was very smooth, very understated, and so, her speech got a lot of applause, especially this particular part where she talked about, you know, maybe someday in the future there would be a woman president, and so she really defied all of the expectations, and it was pretty much one of the most memorable speeches that she gave.
Teri Finneman (14:01): One of Hillary Clinton's most remembered speeches happened in 1995 at the UN Women's Conference in Beijing, where she said the famous line that women's rights are human rights. What else did she say in that speech, and what were the type of strategies she used in giving speeches?
Newly Paul: In my analysis, I found that Hillary Clinton's speeches were quite different from the standard speeches that most other first ladies gave, in the sense that she did not always use feminine rhetoric in her speeches. She used a mix of masculine and feminine rhetoric, which means that she did not always defer to, you know, quoting experts. She often painted herself as a source of knowledge. So, that's pretty much what I saw in the speech in Beijing that you referred to. This speech is also one of the most famous speeches that she gave, and the line about women's rights being human rights is one of the most quoted lines from this speech. So, this is very interesting because in this speech, she talked about the condition of women globally rather than just in America or just in China where she was delivering this speech.
(15:13): She talked about how women face oppression and violence simply while they exist and they go about their lives, and this is not just in one part of the world, but she gave specific examples from different parts of the world. She also talked about how it was important for women to be educated and free from violence so that, you know, the world itself could progress.
Some of the people in the presidency were worried that if she gave this speech, she would end up offending the Chinese delegates who were there, and it would not be taken very well, that it would be too divisive. They wanted her to tone the speech down, but she didn't do any of that. In fact, she specifically mentioned, you know, and she criticized the Chinese “one-child policy,” where female children are often killed after birth because, you know, people want males as heirs. She did not pull any punches. She was very honest in her speech and then it tracked really well.
(16:17): People received it very well. There was a lot of positive feedback for this particular speech and, like I was mentioning earlier, her speeches were quite different from that of other first ladies because she used feminine and masculine rhetoric. She didn't cite expert statistics. She also stayed away from mentioning her husband or his presidency in her speeches. She often mentioned her own expertise, her own knowledge as the source of her information in the speeches, and another way in which she was different from other first ladies was she rarely used narratives in her speeches. If she used narratives, they were used very sparingly, and they were mostly used to illustrate policies that she wanted to talk about, but none of them were personal anecdotes from her own family life. She would rather repeat anecdotes or stories that she heard from other people. So, in that sense, she was very different in her speeches from the other first ladies.
Teri Finneman (17:17): Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Laura Bush found herself in a position of having to reassure the nation after it was attacked, in her case, it was September 11. How did she go about doing so?
Newly Paul: Laura Bush's speech after September 11 was at the National Press Club, where she spoke in November of 2001. In this speech, again, she came across as the “consoler-in-chief.” She sort of talked about the positive and hopeful things that she had noticed in the days following 9/11. She mentioned that a reporter had asked her, you know, how should people explain the attacks to children? And she said that, you know, children need reassurance that they are safe in their homes and their schools, and they should also be told that it was acceptable to feel sad about the events. So, she sort of cautioned parents from hiding things from them or trying to sugarcoat it, but she said that, yes, they do need reassurance and it's okay to discuss their feelings of anxiety because children pick up on these things very easily.
(18:26): In her speech, she mentioned the various ways in which children around the country were stepping up and showing resilience. She mentioned a lot of fundraisers that children had organized to help raise money to pay for food and medicine for children in Afghanistan. So, she basically used this as a positive message to show people that, you know, children are stepping up. They're playing their part. So, this was a positive message that she gave.
The rest of her speech also highlighted the different ways in which people were coming together in the country and stepping up at a very difficult time. It was a message filled with hope, positivity. She talked about how people were openly displaying symbols of patriotism, how people were starting to appreciate small things like, you know, spending time with their family. She mentioned people were signing up to enlist in the Army and then she also talked about just small everyday acts of kindness that people were showing to one another, and she said that, you know, the impact of these small acts was great in a time which was so uncertain and scary right after the attacks.
Teri Finneman (19:40): You note that Michelle Obama used speech strategies that served to legitimize her presence in the White House and show evidence of her connection with mainstream America. Give us some examples of that.
Newly Paul: So, Michelle Obama, as the first Black lady, she was up against many negative stereotypes of Black women. We know from looking at research on race and gender that Black women are often portrayed as angry and entitled, and those were some of the stereotypes that she was dealing with. So, one way in which she legitimized her presence was to portray herself as a "mom-in-chief” and as a Black woman who was focused solely on her family. So, in her speeches, she would often talk about her career trajectory, how she studied really hard in school, how she was a good student, the impact of her neighborhood, her family, her teachers, and how she had defied expectations to attend Princeton University, how she had become a very successful lawyer, and later, how she'd become a successful director of a hospital.
(20:47): But after saying all of this, she would say that, you know, motherhood was by far the most important job that she had held in her life. So, she came back to that whole idea of the Black woman as a caring figure, as a mom-in-chief, and tried to situate herself differently from all of the negative stereotypes which were prevalent. Other first ladies generally avoided discussing their professional roles before they came to the White House, but Obama would often talk about her background as an inspirational story for others. However, what she did was she never painted her successes as, you know, individual success stories. She would talk about it more as a caregiver so she could remain congruent with the role of first ladies.
(21:40): She often talked about her working-class roots, the blue-collar neighborhood where she grew up. She talked about how people worked long hours, they had low pay, all of those things, and when she was talking about these things, she painted herself as an average American with an average American background, average American dreams, average American problems, you know, all of these. But again, she was trying to move away from the image of a Black woman with all of the stereotypes attached to it. Another thing I saw she did was to use a lot of humor and spontaneity in her speeches, which gave the sense of warmth, credibility, and immediacy to her speeches, and again, this was done, I think, to show that she is a person who is warm, caring, and again, remove herself from the negative stereotypes which are prevalent.
Teri Finneman (22:39): With Melania Trump, her most famous speech happened at the Republican National Convention, where it was later discovered that portions were plagiarized from a Michelle Obama speech, yet Trump also gave speeches related to her “Be Best” anti-bullying initiative. What strategies did Trump use in her speeches?
Newly Paul: Trump's speeches, she talked a lot about, you know, her childhood in Slovenia. She talked about growing up in a beautiful country. She talked about the family, her family, how they helped her, how they prepared her for her career, how they made sure that she had the skills and that she was talented, she was skilled, she had knowledge, and then she talked about how she was a worthy immigrant. She said that while she was in Slovenia, her parents had talked about America as being a land where, you know, you have prosperity, progress, a good place to live in, basically. But she always, in her narratives, she made sure to stress that from her very childhood, she had prepared herself, she had made herself worthy of immigrating sort of to America, and she also talked about how she had followed the rules.
(23:54): She had waited until she became eligible. She had taken the citizenship test, so she was showing that she was a worthy immigrant who had followed the rules and trying to sort of, in a very overt way, she was trying to say that she is a person who has immigrated here legally. She belongs here. The American Dream is what she celebrates. So, in that sense, she always talked about this whole narrative of being a legal, a desirable immigrant in her speeches. She talked about the American Dream quite a bit. She said that even though she had immigrated from a different country, she had wholeheartedly embraced the American Dream, and she was proud of it. A lot of her speeches talked about her role as a mother and how proud she was of her son. She talked about, you know, raising him up and the kind of typical problems that children in America face, especially with reference to bullying, and that's why she, in her Be Best speech, she talked about the importance of protecting children from being bullied and making sure that they have happy lives where they are protected.
(25:04): So, in that sense, she used some of the familiar narratives of, you know, womanhood, femininity, motherhood, all of these things. In her speeches, she would also talk about her husband's record about his love for the country and the fact that he was trying to do his best to make the country better. In that sense, she kind of stayed with the typical format that first ladies use in their speeches.
Teri Finneman: And then, our final question of the show is why does studying first ladies matter?
Newly Paul (25:39): I think it's just a very cool and very interesting topic. These first ladies, I found all of them to be very interesting women just beyond politics. They just have very cool lives, very interesting personalities. Not all of them come from privileged backgrounds. When I started out looking into this chapter, I don't know, I just had this impression that maybe they were just born into politics, and they just came that way, you know, immaculate, meant for delivering public speeches, but it's not that. A lot of them worked really hard to become efficient speakers, and they practiced, they worked really hard. So, in that sense, I found it very fascinating to look into first ladies, but otherwise, I think that their image is nonpolitical, but because they are so close to the highest political office of the country, they are just, by association, I think, they are just in politics, and it's just a very interesting topic to study them and to see how, you know, gender expectations in politics applies to them. You know, looking at their role and how they have evolved over the decades, that's also a very interesting way of seeing how public perception of first ladies has evolved over the years, how the role of women in politics has evolved over the years. So, for all of these reasons, I think it's just a very important subject to study.
Teri Finneman: All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.
Newly Paul: Thank you for having me.
Teri Finneman: We hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next time to uncover more untold histories of the nation's first ladies. I'm Teri Finneman, and this is The First Ladies podcast.
Show music credit: "Winning Elevation" by Hot_Dope.