The XX Factor: What women really think.

Did Hillary find her voice?

Some analysts have been arguing that many of the actual differences between Clinton and Obama are a matter of style rather than substance. But, wow, is that stylistic difference.... substantive. Watching the two candidates speak last night you couldn't escape it. Obama is all cute optimism checked by quasi-gravitas. His way of ducking his head and looking down at the end of sentences makes you feel secure and cozy inside; it suggests an untapped inner power. Never mind that his speech doesn't say very much at all, built as it is on repetition and rousing rhetorical flourishes about hope and affirmation. Hillary says more, but she continues to seem so ill at-ease; watching her try to play cool gal, making shout-outs to supporters as the applause died down, simply made me uncomfortable. 

I wonder if the biggest difference comes down to their voices. (Not their speaking styles.) Obama's is round and full and open. But Hillary always sounds as though she's not quite inhabiting hers- as if she is stuck using what some scholars call the "false voice," where the throat constricts. At other times, she seems as though she's trying to speak in a lower voice than is comfortable for her. I don't think this is a small point. As Anne Karpf points out in her fascinating book, The Human Voice, a lot of how we judge people's derives from what their voices subconsciously convey to us. She points out that over the past 50 years women's voices have deepened to a pitch closer to men's--a pitch we associate (if I recall correctly) with trustworthiness  and power. (Margaret Thatcher's voice, Karpf notes, "lowered by 60Hz, or about half the normal difference between a female and a male voice" while she was Prime Minister.) Watching that clip of Hillary's "emotional moment," I was most struck by how natural her voice sounded. She said she finally had found her true voice. Was it the way her voice sounded, as much as anything she actually said, that might have spoken to voters?