Curious Reads: Baby Voice
Why Right-Wing Evangelical Women Talk Like That
Hello friend, Liz here.
#1 Today’s top of the fold story is “fundie woman baby speak”—that is, Republican Senator Katie Britt’s State of the Union response revealed a troubling evangelical trend of women changing their voices to seem less threatening to (politically and theologically) conservative men.
I’m much less interested in the voice modulation of women within conservative spaces on its own; what fascinates me are the ways that women seek to conceal their power from men. And Katie Britt and other evangelical MAGA women provide a case study.
Read “'Fundie Baby Voice' Is The Chilling Vocal Trend You Need To Know About” by Caroline Bologna at the Huffington Post
Above: A mash-up of Senator Katie Britt’s actual rebuttal to the “State of the Union” and Scarlett Johansson’s mock imitation that weekend on Saturday Night Live. (Here’s Britt’s entire rebuttal and the imitation in full.)
The Highlights:
After Pres. Biden’s, “State of the Union,” Republicans responded with a speech by Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, the state’s first-ever female senator. Supposedly, Britt has political acumen—not that you would have know it from her over-dramatized speech, which was riddled with factual errors and fear-mongering.
And much has been made of her delivery. Breathy, full of awkward pauses and discordant smiles, no matter the political leaning, folks had a field day mocking her.
She’s not the only conservative woman to adopt this style of speaking either. The Shiny Happy People documentary featured Michelle Duggar’s “high-pitched baby voice,” and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s wife Kelly repeated the performance during a Fox News interview. Voice expert Rebecca Kleinberger says Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s voice registers the same discordant feature as Britt’s.
Vocologist Kathryn Cunningham described the trend: “While the average woman’s voice is higher-pitched than the average man’s due to a combination of anatomical and social factors, some women who speak this way seem to be intentionally placing their voices higher than their natural pitch range in order to convey submission to male authority and [to convey] childlike innocence.” In other words, this voice can be manipulative on multiple levels.
Personally, I find the mocking about Sen. Britt’s voice sounds like plain old female voice-shaming. Yes, her voice sounded strange. But I could easily imagine my own voice modulating strangely while filming myself at home in my kitchen. (Ugh, the setting.) She was weird, the whole speech was weird, yes, that’s true, but more importantly, the speech was false.
However, women are perpetually being called out for the weirdness of our voices—think “vocal fry.”
As in this article above, some have identified this as “Fundie Baby Voice,” a noticeable falsetto affect that conservative Christian women sometimes use to lean into a Marilyn Monroe sexy, ditzy innocence.
, talking to Huff Post, described this voice as “that childlike, sweet, submissive, honey sound that just pours from the mouths of Sunday school teachers and pastors’ wives.” And she’s not wrong.
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But what interests me most about this affect is why women adopt it.
Women modulate our speech patterns as a way to adapt to diverse settings, and often we’re changing our tone and pitch based on how we perceive men’s reactions to us.
Having grown up within evangelicalism, I have actually worked toward the opposite of the “baby voice.” I wanted to be taken seriously so, being a natural alto, I intentionally sought to lower my speaking range further. In a group of women singing at church, I would often consciously try to sing the lowest harmony, disliking the wispy upper registers of my gender group.
Now, I understand that when women adapt their voices to be higher within conservative evangelicalism to intentionally to hide our power. We orally infantilize ourselves. We defer to the fragile egos of important men in the room.
This does not necessarily mean we give up our power—as in the case of Senator Katie Britt, one of our governing law-makers—but it does mean we seek to make ourselves seem nonthreatening. Hence, Senator Britt listed her main and most important credentials for a conservative audience as “proud wife and mom.” She’s signaling, “See? I’m in the kitchen, not the Capitol building. I’m not a threat. I can still be controlled, if you want to control me. In fact, you can use me to control other women.”
~
This whole debacle reminds me of the most revealing sections of Beth Moore's autobiography, All My Knotted Up Life.
(By the way, you can see all my highlights at Goodreads)
She writes, “Ours was a patriarchal world. To be anything different wouldn’t have been Southern Baptist. Here were the verses. If we didn’t like it, we could take it up with God. ‘He wrote it.’ That was that. Women like me played by the rules or we were off the court.”
Beth taught patriarchal gender norms. She taught women to submit to men at church and at home. And she herself obsessed over her “male covering,” by which she meant, her protection that allowed her to teach the Bible while being “covered” by the authority of male authority figures in her life—her head pastor, her elders, and her husband. (Especially her husband.) She understood—and heard explicitly—that the “legitimacy of her ministry” was conflated with the health of her marriage.
In her memoir, she describes the lengths to which she went to honor and submit to the men of higher rank in her denomination, twisting herself to fit gender norms found nowhere within the pages of the Scriptures. Her aim was to do her SBC work “without making trouble or posing any threat” to the men who might not like God’s calling on her life.
She wore flats (shoes with no heel) if she knew she’d be standing on stage with a man shorter than her, and she would also bow her head and hunch so as not to appear taller than him. In casual conversations with men, she would use their full titles, offering deference even to those men younger than her. She was constantly apologizing for being in the room, for teaching men, even to men who’d arrived to hear her speak.
She notes that “the biggest offense I brought into these environments was my gender, but my personality and lack of academic training were also factors.” And remember, these were the 90s and 2000s, not ancient history. And her gender was still a problem.
She writes a list of deferential phrases she’d most commonly say as compulsive apology for her presence to higher ranking men of her denomination:
"I could learn so much from you, and goodness knows I need to.”
“You’re so much better at message delivery. I mostly blurt stuff out.”
“You know better than I that… [insert anything at all about theology, the Bible, the church, or Christian spirituality in general.]”
“I’m anxious to study under you.”
“I’m just a lay person.”
Can you imagine a man with the influence of Beth Moore uttering these phrases ever, let alone in a room of very important church people?
Me neither.
~
If you’re reading this newsletter, you know the end of Beth’s story. Though Beth genuinely sought to follow the rules, Beth Moore still found herself unwelcome anyway. At mixed-company SBC conferences in which she was often “the only woman on the program,” the men of her denomination would make it clear that they owned the court.
These SBC male leaders would ignore her backstage (or in the car on the way to the venue, or while standing next to her in the elevator) and then they would stand up on stage and caricature her. Their ridicule of Beth Moore was often the introduction to their messages, before they stood up to teach the Bible to a room of men and women. They would say something like, “We’re just glad we get to be on the same platform as Beth Moore. Sure hope we get some of that anointing,” and then they’d prance around the stage waving their arms and hollering in a thick drawl, “GLO-REE TO GAWD!”
In fact, Beth frequently saw or heard that men—her colleagues—would wonder aloud about her, asking each other, “Can you imagine what it would be like to be her husband?” The disdain and disapproval was tangible and overwhelming.
And then Beth refused to play by the rules any longer. She publicly announced her disgust with Donald Trump’s sexual abuse scandals (such as the Access Hollywood tapes) in 2016. And in seconds flat, the denominational leaders discarded her. She was thrown out of the institution that she had served and loved for decades.
She writes, “For a stunning number of people, that one set of comments rendered years of ministry null and void.”
~
The senior Alabama Senator said of Katie Britt that one of the reasons she was chosen to speak for the GOP because she was “a housewife.” That’s the role that qualified her to rebut Pres. Biden’s State of the Union.
This qualification is also an indication that Britt can be replaced if she refuses to comply with the demands of the male Republican patriarchal agenda. She’s nonessential to the mission, though she’s allowed a role if only she plays by their rules.
For now, she’s playing along. But she might not always. And on that day, I wonder if her voice will change again.
And Senator Katie Britt’s vocal fry would be welcome.
Thanks for reading. Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant
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Just for Fun…
Read the whole letter at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.