Introduction

Gifts of Speech is a digital collection of speeches by women from around the world and across history. The collection was begun in 1996 by Liz Kent León, then a librarian at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, USA. Originally meant to make the full texts of speeches by influential, contemporary women available for free to high school and college students, the project eventually reached back 150 years to include important speeches by women in history. All speeches were originally delivered, and are presented here, in English. Eventually, the website contained the texts of nearly six hundred speeches, browsable by name of author and year of delivery, the largest collection of speeches by women on the Internet.

León stopped collecting speeches in 2010, and the website closed in 2017. In 2024, David Fleming, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, began working with León to convert the original html files to an Open Educational Resource (OER) on the Pressbooks platform. You can read more about the history of Gifts of Speech, both the original website and Pressbooks version, below.

This resource includes the full text of nearly six hundred speeches by women, delivered between 1848 and 2010. The collection is oriented towards modern speeches by women in the United States, with a particular focus on speeches from the 1990s and early 2000s, including speeches from lesser-known women in government, science, business, and the arts. But the collection also includes important historical speeches by women from the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. More than a fifth of the collection is speeches from women outside the United States.

Plans are underway for Volume 2 of Gifts of Speech, which will collect speeches in English by women from around the world delivered after 2010. Readers with ideas for speeches to include in Volume 2 should contact one of the editors.

All speeches are given in full based on the best text available. Many of the speeches are in the public domain. Permission has been granted to publish all other speeches. Key identifying information for each speech – title, author, occupation of author, and date and place where speech was delivered – is provided. Each speech includes a link to the author’s Wikipedia entry if available. At the bottom of each speech is information about copyright. Readers who find any errors or have questions or suggestions regarding this resource should contact one of the editors.

More about the history of Gifts of Speech:

The Gifts of Speech website (1996-2023) was a non-profit online archive that preserved full-text speeches by women in a free online database. Librarian Liz Kent León, and volunteers, collected nearly 600 English-language speeches by notable women from around the world to archive at the site to amplify women’s voices. For most of its twenty-seven years online, Gifts of Speech was the only resource in the world devoted entirely to archiving and providing access to full text women’s speeches.

The project began at Sweet Briar College in central Virginia. It is a small educational institution for women. The spark for the project ignited when a student asked León for help finding a speech by Gloria Steinem. To her surprise, León could not find complete speeches by any well-known women in the resources available at the college’s library. The journal of record, Vital Voices of the Day, was almost completely devoted to oratory by men. The few women who were included there were not well-known. Articles in other publications occasionally provided scanty quotes from women’s speeches, but there was no full text. León suddenly saw an unmet need for students to be able to easily access the unabridged words of women in leadership.

Dr. John Jaffe, the Director of Sweet Briar College Libraries, provided a small fund from the library to start Gifts of Speech as a web-based library resource. León compiled addresses for 85 prominent women and mailed letters to each, asking permission to host copies of their speeches on a free college-based website.

Letters went to women in the United States, Ireland, Kenya, Canada, England, Sri Lanka and other countries. They earned, in return, seventy-four charter donations. The President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, and Queen Noor of Jordan, exemplify two charter donors who were happy to participate since they did not have websites of their own.

As the project grew, retired attorney Beth Wortman volunteered to document the appropriate permissions for the speeches. She included the details of each of the permissions and made them publicly visible on the web, as required by United States copyright law. Her work helped make the project more consistent, transparent and legally compliant.

Other volunteers expanded the site by scouring newspapers, biographies, magazines, reference works, documentary films, educational media, and press releases of government and private agencies to look for names of notable women in all fields of accomplishment. They wrote letters or emails to prospective donors, inviting speech donations. Women who responded to the invitation sent copies of speeches and written permission for the project to host the speeches on the website, while the speaker retained all rights. In this way, the site gathered material that was not available elsewhere.

Because it began in 1996, Gifts of Speech pre-dated Google. In those early days, volunteers collected speeches by doing paper-based research and mailing letters to potential donors, no matter where they lived. But by 2006 it was easier to use a web search to locate donors and speeches. Often speeches online wouldn’t stay on their original URLs for more than a few months. Link rot – broken links – was an on-going problem, demonstrating how important it was for Gifts of Speech to archive copies of speeches for perennial access.

But scouring paper sources and searching the web was only the first of four methods of collecting speeches. Another strategy involved mining U.S. Government documents. Congress calls only on experts and their topics of inquest are widely varied, making Congressional testimony an easy way to find important speeches by women. Another benefit – no permissions are needed. Congressional Testimony is automatically in the public domain.

The third method used to collect speeches was through volunteers. A few women contacted Gifts of Speech over the years to offer speeches.

Lastly, speeches in the public domain by the deceased orators of the 1800’s were included at Gifts of Speech due to schoolteachers and college professors requesting this material. Those speeches were copied from paper sources.

Gifts of Speech stopped collecting speeches in 2010 due to León’s shifting job responsibilities. In 2017 she moved to another employer, but Gifts of Speech stayed online at gos.sbc.edu until Sweet Briar College stopped hosting web sites from their own campus-based servers. When Sweet Briar’s servers were disconnected in August of 2023 the site went off-line.

The motto of the Gifts of Speech web resource was “Women’s Voices Change the World.” These are some ways that motto proved true:

• Gifts of Speech was the first website in the world to feature full-text speeches by women. Many of the speeches archived by the project had never been published and were available to researchers exclusively at Gifts of Speech.
• On October 29, 1998, the Nobel Foundation gave Gifts of Speech permission to host copies of all the Nobel lectures by women laureates. At the time, the Nobel Foundation did not have a website. The Nobel lectures at Gifts of Speech were the first digital versions available on the web.
• Textbooks in the United States, Australia and Canada added speeches that were previously only available on the Gifts of Speech website.

Liz Kent León, the founder of Gifts of Speech, is a librarian and emeritus professor living in Virginia. She has a B.A. degree in Creative Writing from East Carolina University and a Master of Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

History of the Pressbooks version of Gifts of Speech

For years, Professor David Fleming of the University of Massachusetts Amherst used the Gifts of Speech website as a resource for students in his English 388 Rhetoric, Writing, and Society course, designed to introduce prospective high school English teachers to rhetorical theory and analysis. Students used the site to find speeches for their Unit II analysis project. It was their favorite collection of speeches, in book or digital form.

But around 2023, Fleming noticed that the link to the site didn’t work; he searched for the collection but was unsuccessful. When he tried again the following semester and still failed to find the site, he reached out to Sweet Briar College and learned that the site was no longer hosted by the College. They pointed him to Liz Kent León, founder of Gifts of Speech, who had left that school and was now working as librarian at another. With her permission, he began looking for a way to resurrect the site.

At first, his idea was for UMass Amherst Libraries to host the site as Sweet Briar College had done, but that turned out not to be feasible. After talking to many people, including Theresa Dooley, OER librarian at UMass Amherst, he decided to work with León to convert the html files to the Pressbooks platform and revive the website as a free digital textbook, hosted at UMass Amherst, and available to anyone with Internet access.

In winter 2025, Fleming used a $1,000 grant from the Massachusetts Society of Professors to hire UMass Amherst graduate student Michael Lyons to work out a process and style guide for the new book; then, in spring 2025, he applied for and received a $5,000 OER grant from UMass Amherst Libraries to convert the files to the new platform. Thank you to Mia Klotz and Victoria Williams, UMass Amherst undergraduate students, for their work on the project. Plans are already underway for publishing a Volume 2 of Gifts of Speech that would collect speeches by women after 2010. Stay tuned for it!

David Fleming, co-editor with Liz Kent León of the Pressbooks version of Gifts of Speech, is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds the PhD in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, the MA in English from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the AB in English from Davidson College (NC). He thanks Liz Kent León for letting him be a part of the Gifts of Speech story!

To contact the editors, email Liz Kent Leon and/or David Fleming.