Political Speech

For our Voice class with Charmian, we all have to work with political speeches. Here's the one I have been assigned:


Suffragist leader Anna Howard Shaw, Albany NY, June 21 1915


250,000 Men Killed Since the War Began
I said you ask me what woman knows about war?
No woman can read that line and comprehend the awful horror; no woman knows the significance of 250,000 dead men, but you tell me that one man lay dead, and I might be able to tell you something of its awful meaning to one woman.
I would know that years before, a woman whose heart beat in unison with her love and her desire for motherhood walked day by day with her face to an open grave, with courage which no man has ever surpassed, and if she did not fill that grave, if she lived, and if there was laid in her arms a tiny little bit of helpless humanity, I would know that there went out from her soul such a cry of thankfulness as none save a mother could know.
And then I would know, what men have not yet learned, that women are human; that they have human hopes and human passions, aspirations, and desires as men have, and I would know that that mother who had laid aside all those hopes and aspirations of herself, but never for one moment did she lay them aside for her boy, and if, after years had passed by, she forgot her nights of sleeplessness and her days of fatiguing toil in her care of her growing boy, and when at last, he became a man, and she stood looking up into his eyes and beheld him bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, and there he stands, the most wonderful thing in all the world, for in all the universe of God, there is nothing more sublimely wonderful than a strong limbed, clean hearted, keen brained, aggressive young man standing as he does on the border line of life, ready to reach out and grapple with its problems.
Oh how wonderful he is, and he is hers.
She gave her life for him, and, in an hour, this country calls him out, and, in an hour, he lies dead; that wonderful, wonderful thing lies dead, and sitting by his side, that mother looking into the dark years to come knows that when her son died her life's hope died with him, and in the face of that wretched motherhood, what man dare ask what a woman knows of war?