Apparently, many people hate the sound of Hillary Clinton’s voice. She has been accused of sounding like a “nagging housewife”; she yells too much; it’s a “turn-off”.
Everyone from Bloomberg and the New York Times to Fox News and the National Journal have analysed the Democratic presidential hopeful’s speech patterns over the years.
There are compilation videos of her “cackle”, and controversial broadcaster Glenn Beck once famously said she could never be elected president because of her voice.
“Hillary Clinton cannot be elected president, because there’s something about her vocal range. She’s that stereotypical, nagging,” he said in 2007. “After four years, don’t you think every man in America will go insane?
“It can’t be just me. I know it’s not. I mean, if there’s somebody in your life whose voice just sticks in your ear like an ice pick, somebody who makes every part of you just clench every time they speak. Yes, the senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has a voice like that. It makes me envy the deaf. It does.
“She could be saying, ‘All right, Glenn, I want to give Glenn Beck $1 million,’ and all I’d hear is, ‘Take out the garbage.’”
But in a piece in New Republic analysing the voices of presidential nominees, one linguist has argued there’s a simple reason: her voice is “powerful ... loud and clear”, and if someone doesn’t want a woman to be powerful, they won’t like her voice.
“A ‘nice’ woman tends to have a breathy voice [like Marilyn Monroe],” Stanford University linguistics professor Penelope Eckert said. “There’s nothing breathy about Hillary Clinton’s voice.”
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist with National Public Radio, agreed. “People have become so conscious of the semi-coded ways in which people communicate these sexist notions of aggression,” he told New Republic. “Voice will be the place where that comes home to roost. [‘Turn-off’] is just another way of saying ‘shrill’.”
According Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor with Pitzer College who studies how we use language to project identity, Clinton has modified her voice since the ‘90s to strip out emotion.
“I think the advice she’s gotten is to get anything marked out of her speech,” she said. “Anything that people can pick up on and make fun of.”
She describes it as a “Bubble” versus “Bubba” dialect, with the big difference being a smaller pitch range — how high and low their voice goes. “We associate pitch range with being emotional,” she said. Hillary’s voice has “no emotion, no ups and downs”.
“All she does to emphasise her speech, instead of using those emotional pitch range changes, she uses an emphasis on stress patterns.
“Because emphasising words is not as associated with emotion as pitch changes. So she’s using that instead. But she doesn’t do a lot of ups and downs. Because she’d be labelled as an emotional woman. She’s projecting, ‘I’m an unemotional expert who’ll solve your problem.’”
In Australia, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard was frequently pilloried for her voice, which critics sometimes described as “nasal” or “insincere”. Writing in The Conversation in 2011, Macquarie University linguist Jennifer Peck summed up the issue faced by all powerful women.
“Julia Gillard faces the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ dilemma: if she is forceful and direct she is too aggressive, if she’s indirect, she’s weak and indecisive,” she wrote.
“Since males have traditionally occupied positions of institutionalised leadership and power, successful communication in these positions has become associated with directness and confrontation.
“The paradox for women in leadership positions is the implied need to communicate both care and competition ... Perhaps, in the same way as an assertive woman may be referred to as aggressive, calm professionalism in a woman can be interpreted as a lack of engagement or involvement.”
Who has heard her speak? Is this true?
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