Over the next nine months Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly be spending a great deal of time in the state of Iowa, the site of the first caucuses for the 2016 presidential election. She will cross-cross the state addressing crowds of all sizes. Her speeches will attract the attention of historians at Iowa State University.
The Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University in Ames is the home of the Women’s Political Communication Archives. The archives are a vast database of speeches and campaign ads for over 300 women politicians and activists from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony all the way to Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. The archive is searchable by the name of the woman or by the office that she sought. Political ads and speeches can also be searched by keywords included in the text.
Kelly Winfrey, a lecturer at the Catt Center, stated that “we’ve worked to build these databases so we can look back and see how have women candidates communicated in their campaigns and their advertisements. Now that Hillary Clinton has announced her candidacy, we can look back at her speeches and campaign ads to see what she did during the 2008 campaign and what went wrong in terms of messaging. We can compare that to what she’s doing now to see if there are aspects that are more successful for female candidates.”
Dr. Winfrey is a graduate of Emporia State University in Kansas. She holds a master’s degree in communication from Missouri State University and a Ph.D. in communication studies from the University of Kansas.