'The Too Vigorous Use of a New Broom’: Towards a Methodology for Analysing the Gendered Meanings of Sound in History

Abstract

The role of sound as an historical source has recently begun to gain greater attention within history, with Greg Goodale arguing for the importance of sonic sources in understanding the complex experiences of the past. As is perhaps concordant with an emerging area of research, coherent methodologies to deconstruct sound historically have not yet been adequately developed. This article begins to address this problem through the development of a methodological approach to analysing the gendering of sound. Using the recording of Dame Enid Lyons’s maiden speech to Australian federal parliament as a case study, I analyse how recordings of speech can be ‘read’ to reveal how gender was constructed in specific ways. I argue that Lyons vocally constructed a version of political femininity using particular speech markers, vocabularies and pitch ranges. This article therefore breaches the boundaries of historical analysis by developing a new approach for analysing a neglected type of source material – sound recordings.