Amplify: What podcasting taught me about women’s voices

This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail.

This week’s newsletter was written by Jana G. Pruden, a feature writer at The Globe and Mail and host of its new podcast In Her Defence.

Earlier this year, I moved from my regular role as a feature writer at The Globe to hosting In Her Defence, an eight-part podcast series about Helen Naslund, an Alberta woman who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for killing her abusive husband in 2011.

I’d never worked in audio before, and there was one big problem with hosting a podcast: I hated hearing my voice on tape. Just like, as it turns out, nearly everyone else on the planet.

According to this piece, aptly entitled “Why You Hate the Sound of Your Own Voice,” it has to do with the way our voice reverberates with the bones in our head, and the disconnect between how we sound to ourselves and how we sound to the world. This disconcerting feeling of hearing ourselves from the outside is actually called “voice confrontation.”

But then again, there are many reasons to be insecure about your voice, especially as a woman.

There is an oft-quoted (but questionable) study that says men literally cannot hear us. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, many things considered annoying in speech are particularly associated with women’s voices.

There’s ‘vocal fry,’ which author Naomi Wolf described in the Guardian as the way “a valley girl might sound if she had been shouting herself hoarse at a rave all night.” There’s “shrill,” which, as this New Yorker story notes, has been particularly employed against “women who speak publicly and challenge authority.”

And then there’s the much-maligned “uptalk” or “upspeak,” which is basically valley girl-style without the rave shouting, and is variously described in uncountable articles as unprofessional, obnoxious, and generally unappealing.

Globe and Mail special project producer Kasia Mychajlowycz, my partner in making In Her Defence, warned me that as a female podcaster you will almost invariably get feedback – usually from men – saying your voice is annoying or grating, or has some other quality they find objectionable.

I vowed not to take those criticisms to heart. But I also knew that my voice would matter in this new medium. Before we began recording, I started to think differently about my voice, and how I would use it to tell Helen’s story.

Paying attention to voices on the radio and in other podcasts, I started to recognize and try out different styles of diction and delivery. There was the This American Life voice. The newscaster voice. The kind of artsy voice people use at book and poetry readings. But none of them really seemed like me.

And while it was tempting to think of how I could make my voice “better,” I also knew that my scripting would be accompanied by audio of my interviews. Side by side, any difference between how I really talk and the voice I was using to narrate would be obvious.

To friends, I joked I was going to narrate the podcast using a deep, throaty timbre like Elizabeth Holmes, the tech-darling-turned-convicted-fraudster, whose voice – and the question of whether or not it was real or put-on – has been a point of much speculation.

But as we started our first recording sessions, I decided I would just try to use the best possible version of my own voice. I’d be intentional about how I delivered certain words and phrases, but otherwise, I’d just be me.

At first, I dreaded listening to hours of tape of myself talking. But in fact, I stopped thinking about my own voice almost immediately. Instead, I started focusing on the many other women who’d given their voices to this podcast. And it wasn’t what they sounded like, it was what they were saying.

There was Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote the book Defending Battered Women on Trial, and contacted Helen personally to see what she could do to help in her case. There was Senator Kim Pate, who has done a lot of work advocating for incarcerated women and got personally involved in Helen’s case. And there was Mona Duckett, a senior defence lawyer who represented Helen at her appeal. There was Helen’s sister, and some of Helen’s friends.

And then there was Helen herself.

I was struck again and again by the collective power of these women’s voices – and by the voices of the thousands of other women who supported Helen, whether by writing letters to her in prison, signing the petition for her release or raising awareness about her case on social media.

The voices of all these women – and some men, like activist Matthew Behrens – have helped in very real ways. The groundswell of support for Helen formed the foundation of her appeal, which last year saw her sentence cut in half, to nine years.

Helen’s story, in turn, has helped many other women speak out about their own experiences with domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, or support others who have. I can’t even count the number of e-mails and calls I’ve received from women who’ve been changed in some way by hearing Helen’s story.

Helen used her voice in the hope it would help other women and be a call to action. It has. I can’t imagine a stronger and more powerful voice than that.

What else we’re thinking about:

I listened to a lot of podcasts while I was working on In Her Defence, and I gained an even greater appreciation for what the medium can do to amplify the voices and experiences of women. In particular, I’d like to recommend Death of an Artist, The Retrievals, the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s informative Signal For Help, and Anna Maria Tremonti’s very personal Welcome to Paradise.

Marianne

Open this photo in gallery:

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