What Makes a Great Speech?

That's the question the Guardian asks looking back through time at all the great speeches, and wondering why so few were done by women.

From the piece...

The modern world has largely inherited the ancient view that oratory is a matter of technique. True, we do have a romantic notion that some people are "naturals" at public speaking – whether it is something in the air of the Welsh valleys that produces the gift of the gab, or the "natural" sense of timing that great orators share with great comedians. But modern speech-writers always stress the importance of technique, and they advocate many of the same old tricks that the ancients used ("group your examples into threes", they advise – that's the classical "tricolon", which was taken to extremes in Blair's famous "education, education, education" soundbite). And the pundits who have turned their attention to Obama's great speeches have emphasised his technical rhetorical sophistication, some of it handed down, directly or indirectly, from the Roman star orator, Cicero: the judicious repetitions ("yes we can"); the subtly placed "tricola"; the artful references to earlier oratory, in Obama's case especially to the speeches of Martin Luther King.

Yet there is something problematic about the very notion of "great oratory". For a start, it is an almost entirely male category. I doubt that there have been many, if any, "great" female orators, at least as "great oratory" has traditionally been defined. Margaret Thatcher may have delivered some memorable soundbites to the party faithful ("The lady's not for turning"), but she did not give great persuasive speeches. In fact, when a few years ago the Guardian published its own collection of great oratory of the 20th century, it obviously had a problem with the female examples.