Althea Dotzour
This is the story of a book deal, a substantial advance and the kismet of a cultural moment. It’s about a first-time author finding her subject and following her dream. And it begins with women talking to each other — about their voices.
Veronica Rueckert and Anne Strainchamps shared an office at Wisconsin Public Radio back when Rueckert was still a producer on To the Best of Our Knowledge, the show co-hosted by Strainchamps and her husband, Steve Paulson.
“We were two women on an otherwise mostly male staff, and we were both working mothers,” says Strainchamps. “There was just a lot that we bonded around.”
One conversation they kept returning to was a seeming hostility towards women’s voices. Almost every woman they knew who worked in an on-air role in radio had received hate mail from listeners.
Why, wondered Rueckert, were women so often criticized for the way they sound? Why was it so hard to persuade female experts to appear on Central Time, the statewide news magazine she began co-hosting in 2014? And when they did agree to be guests, why was it so hard for them to speak with confidence in their expertise?
Rueckert began to research the problem, and started a workshop series to help women learn to love their voices. This was in 2015, before #metoo happened, before the great un-silencing of many of the women harassed, assaulted and abused by film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Still, there was already something in the zeitgeist. You could see it in the full-to-capacity workshops Rueckert was running for women at schools and at area companies like American Family Insurance (she went in expecting to offer women some useful tips for projecting, and instead was “gobsmacked” by the number of stories from women afraid to use their voices, and mourning the loss of them). You could listen on YouTube to a Fox News segment where a female reporter criticizes Hillary Clinton’s voice, over and over. You could follow the burgeoning outcry on the internet over “vocal fry,” a gravelly sound often heard in the voices of college-age women.
“There are all of these studies that show in stark relief how women’s voices are criticized and marginalized every day,” says Rueckert. “And we just live with it. We don’t even realize it.”
Strainchamps decided to do a show on the subject. She focused on the brouhaha over “vocal fry,” because she thought that her own voice sounded “sizzly.” For her, though, it wasn’t an affectation, it was her voice. Strainchamps decided she was tired of feeling bad about it. “So it cracks and creaks a little. That’s what I sound like. That’s who I am.”
What the show (and the results of a vocal exam, shared on-air) revealed was what Rueckert had been telling Strainchamps all along: her voice was perfectly normal. The problem wasn’t her, it was society.
“Anne’s story is, in a microcosm, every woman’s story that I’ve worked with,” says Rueckert. “You think, Anne Strainchamps! Here’s a woman at the top of her game. A Peabody-winning journalist, host of a national public radio show and she did not like her own voice. But every woman in my workshops tells me that. It really staggers me. Because I have learned to love my own voice.”
Rueckert decided, in 2016, to write a book — her first. Outspoken, in bookstores July 2, is a call for women everywhere to reclaim their voices, and in so doing, reclaim themselves. She is not just talking about tone and timbre (though, as a classically-trained vocalist and a former radio host, she has plenty to say on this). Rueckert’s book also addresses the barriers that keep women from speaking up and speaking out, even when they know they’re right.
I recently sat down with Rueckert over iced tea at Peet’s in the Memorial Union (her current gig is national media relations specialist for UW-Madison). We talked about Aristotle’s “silent woman,” cubicle voice, and how cool it is when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office requests a copy of your book.
Althea Dotzour
Mary Ellen Gabriel: Talk about riding the crest of a cultural wave! How did the #metoo movement carry you and your very first book to publication?
Veronica Rueckert: The whole idea to coach women on their voices — to love their voices, to learn to use their voices both as vocal instruments and as expressions of self — was born from conversations I was having with staff on the Central Time show, and morning editorial meetings at WPR. In alignment with National Public Radio, which was trying to be very diligent about equity, we’d go around the table and add it up: how many white men, versus women and people of color, have we interviewed? And at first, every meeting it was something like 80/20.
I started intentionally trying to source female guests. And it was difficult, because I found this reluctance in women to talk. For example, I found this female academic — we had a “stable” of white males we’d gone to in the past — and she was fantastic on paper. I reached out to her and she demurred. She said, “I don’t know enough.” I was so surprised — she’d taught a class on the subject! I talked her into it — I admit it, I pushed her. But when she went on the air, she was still reluctant, and it didn’t work. And that’s just one example. I thought, what is holding women back? Why don’t they have the same feeling of expertise and right to speak as men have? And can I help? And so the book idea grew from that kernel. At a certain point I realized I was starting to amass this database of research. And I remember the fateful day when the Harvey Weinstein story broke — I write about it in my book. I was going to dinner with a friend — it was raining — and NPR was doing their story on it. I sat in her driveway and listened. I was really just rocked to my core. I couldn’t believe it. What I couldn’t know at the time was how it would change things.
MEG: On that rainy night, where were you with the book proposal?
VR: It hadn’t quite flatlined, but I was getting frustrated. And then someone’s name popped into my head: Signe Pike, a guest I’d interviewed maybe six years earlier on my show, a former book editor who’d started a business helping people develop nonfiction book proposals. I reached out to her the very next morning. She loved the proposal. She just loved it. I felt like I was coming out of the wilderness.
MEG: So there was no agent?
VR: There was, but Signe came first. I hired her to help me refine my proposal. I could not afford much — I picked her “economy package” — but it was worth every penny.
Do you know Ann Imig, who wrote Listen to Your Mother? I reached out to her to find out who her agent was. It was Elizabeth Kaplan. And when I contacted her, she was interested and wanted to sign me right away. This was late fall 2017. By winter, she had sold it to Harper Collins. By May 2018, I had the initial conversation with the editor. And then I had to start writing.
MEG: That’s so fast, but it makes sense with what was going on in the media at that time.
VR: Weinstein had already happened. And we were seeing this crest — what would happen next, and how would we advance the conversation about it? But it wasn’t just the news cycle. Every time I talked to someone for the book, they would say, “Oh my god, this is my story.” The chapter on “cubicle voice.” Talking in hushed, papery voices — and women internalize these voices and take them home! Every woman said, “I hate my cubicle! I feel like I whisper all the time!”
MEG: So regardless of the #metoo movement, this book would have resonated? This is some sort of deeper chord?
VR: I think so. Remember when Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” came out and put a name to something women had been frustrated with for a long time? The #metoo movement ripped the lid off something that had been simmering. It’s about listening to women’s voices, believing them, listening to their stories and giving them a place of privilege. All of these women [who accused Weinstein] had these stories that they had either been keeping quiet, or trying and failing to be heard. PR people had shooed them away, not wanted to touch this. Why? Because one man’s voice was worth more than one woman’s voice. And that’s always been the equation.
MEG: In your book’s introduction you recount how, when you re-watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid with your children, you were troubled that the bargain Ariel struck was to give up her beautiful voice. Because you have always loved yours, right?
VR: I had to get used to how it sounded on tape, but I never distrusted it, or hated it. And the women I am talking to, they don’t love their voices, they don’t even like them. They are forced into these dysfunctional relationships with their own voices by, I believe, a society that for thousands of years has preferenced the silent woman. Aristotle says, “Silence is a woman’s glory.” Susan B. Anthony recalled a more fierce pushback against a woman’s right to speak in public, than for a woman’s right to vote. It shows up in hundreds of sneaky ways that we internalize as something wrong with us. But really we are just getting bombarded with these messages of: “We don’t like it when women talk. It’s wrong. It makes us uncomfortable.”
MEG: And who is “we?” It’s not just men, is it? Many women, too, don’t like to hear one another talk.
VR: I think it’s very analogous to the way we feel about our bodies. There’s so much cultural pressure to have a thigh gap or look hot in your Instagram photos — we’re told how to look. Our bodies are policed. The voice is the only musical instrument that is housed in the body. That makes it incredibly personal. It gets packaged as part of the body, and the way that we as a society have deemed it OK to comment on the voice is exactly the way we feel it is OK to comment on women’s bodies. And so we police it with adjectives: shrill, harsh, grating, klaxon, annoying, pinched, nagging. I could go on all day. It’s appalling. We are in a dysfunctional relationship with our voices — just as we are with our bodies.
MEG: When you talk about voice, you’re not just talking about the sounds that come out of our mouths.
VR: Right…I’m using voice to mean a conduit of self-expression. Who you are as a person in the world, as manifested in your voice.
MEG: And of course, this is a struggle for a wide range of women.
VR: That’s right. There are different degrees to which voices are stifled. In the book I include many stories from women I have worked with, talked to. I spoke with an African American professor who told me, “That’s great you are telling me to be authentic, but that’s not an option for me as a black woman.” That was painful for me to hear, but I was so glad she shared it with me. I talked to a transgender woman, Sheri Swokowski [who served 34 years in the Wisconsin National Guard]. She said, “the voice is the only thing you can’t pay to have changed.” Her journey to find a voice was fascinating to me.
MEG: I wanted to ask about the counterpoint. There are some voices out there that are ascendant, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Do you think this is because of #metoo?
VR: If AOC were who she is five years ago, I’m not sure she would have gotten the traction she’s gotten. I write about her in my book. In the past it’s been the domain of male orators to thunder with passion on the public stage. Whereas if a women did that she would be scary and emotional, out of control. I found this clip where AOC was debating Joseph Crowley, the Democratic incumbent she was going up against. She pounds one hand on the table! You think, uh-oh — she’d better dial it down, this is getting intense, I’m sure she’s going to realize she’s trespassed a little. But instead of pulling back, she doubles down! And in the next shot she pounds both hands on the table and she leans forward and it blew my mind to see a woman doing this. She was so authentic in that moment.
MEG: In your book you talk about the pros and cons of keeping your own voice, or modulating it. What would you advocate on that?
VR: I think it’s deeply personal. If you feel that your voice is an accurate expression of who you are as a person, then leave it as it is. But if you think, I hear my voice and what I feel inside doesn’t match it, then I think it’s fine to work on your voice. Anne [Strainchamps] did. She went to a voice therapist. I think we have been too absolutist about this, for women: You can’t change your voice or you’re a phony. But we never tell an athlete not to lift weights, because it would be phony to get bigger arms than you were born with! I think it’s about alignment. You want the “you” on the inside to sound like the “you” that you hear on the outside. My voice doesn’t sound like it did 20 years ago, before I had training. We can work with it. It’s an instrument. There’s no reason not to, as long as it’s our choice and as long as it’s authentic.
MEG: Let’s wrap this with the bombshell announcement that Nancy Pelosi’s office asked for your book. What’s next with that?
VR: Yes! Her chief of staff requested a copy. I don’t know if anything else will come of it, but that’s pretty cool.
Veronica Rueckert reads from Outspoken
July 9 at Mystery to Me on Monroe Street in Madison at 7 p.m.
July 26 at Boswell Books in Milwaukee at 7 p.m.
[Editor's note: This article was updated with the correct spelling of Sheri Swokowski's last name.]
