Customer Reviews

The Speeches of Famous Women: From Suffragette to Senator [VHS]

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The tape begins badly with old silent footage of various suffragette demonstrations and a not very good voiceover of a suffrage address read by a modern actor; then Eleanor Roosevelt is butchered by a bunch of the typical Speeches-Of tricks (chopping up her speech and using it as voiceover for stock footage). But stay with this one. There are three nice, too-brief clips of speakers from the Women's Centenary Meeting (1940) (unfortunately, no speakers identified), and then three excellent speeches lengths, no cutaways, no hoked-up special effects. IT's unfortunate that they only give half of Mosely-Braun's address, and they could have used more of Freidan. There's a dud of a speech by Barbara Boxer, but at least it can serve as a horrible example. For people with an interest in rhetoric or public speaking, this tape gives you about 40 minutes of good, usable footage (it's just that it's 70 minutes long ...).

And how about three or four more tapes of speeches by women? Why not let a couple of fine woman speakers -- Eleanor Roosevelt, Jeanette Rankin, Barbara Jordan, to mention three -- have a tape all to themselves, and just show some of their speeches UNCUT?

-- J. Barnes, Asst Professor of Communication, Western State College, Gunnison CO