Renee Ellmers

We haven't even heard from women yet. Women's voices are largely silent, minimal.
Ms. Ellmers should read Luce Irigary, if she can.
I always want and wait to hear a woman speak honestly with power and authority.
I sometimes heard it from my mother.
I heard it once from my friend in a Michigan Mall. She told a male display arranger in no uncertain
terms to go into the men's room and get her ( 10 year old ) son. The man was a total stranger to her.
I almost never hear women speak in that way. That happened forty years ago, but I won't forget it.
I had stereotyped her because she was slight, very blond, very western European ancestry, very
married.
She spoke without harshness, without rancor, without hysteria, but was tremendously stern and
unquestioningly fierce and demanding.
The young man she addressed was reluctant when she first made her wishes known, so she told
him again, in a tone and with a mannerism no could have mistaken, barely raising her voice a fraction
of a decibel.
What remains a shock to me even now is that this happened before 1970!
I knew her before this incident as a homemaker/occasional student who taught me to make
pumpkin bread the way her German grandma did.
After this incident I was careful to speak to her with more deference. She was no suburban gad-fly.
I think I was terrified of her after that.
I met one other such woman who was also a surprise.
She taught English at a city university, something I had done part time. Sorry if I've lost the skills.
I'd somehow gotten myself into a women's rights mode with other women educators.
A few of us were going on about how firmly committed we had to be to equal rights for women in
order to keep teeth in the movement.
Finally, one of the women in the group who hadn't said much piped up...'I used to be very committed,
and so were all my friends. But I can tell you for certain I dropped it whenever I had to for however
long I felt I needed to once my babies were born. When I had my son I decided that boy came before
anything else, all the time!'
I hadn't heard a woman's minority voice sound so strong and so certain and so forthright.
I'm from the Midwest though. Sometimes we're hicks. (The people who vandalized a building in
Michigan this week with graffiti spelled illegal- illeagle.)
Ms. Ellmers could hear women speak if she were listening. In order to hear a woman speak one has
make the woman feel it unnecessary to use soft tones or socially acceptable attitudes.
Alexis Goldstein is a woman who does speak, sometimes overspeaks- probably as a reflex from working in an aggressive male dominated environment.
I doubt Ms. Ellmers could ever understand a word  Ms. Goldstein said; but she could practice trying.
I think it would be difficult for her even to try. She has obviously, like most people, not been
accustomed to hearing women speak.