Book Description

On June 25, 2013, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis filibustered the Texas State Senate to prevent the passage of a law intended to severely restrict access to abortion in Texas. Reading aloud from a lengthy prepared text, Davis was able to thwart an overwhelmingly Republican, white male majority that many believe is intent on limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to the point of its de facto annihilation. With Let Her Speak, Counterpath presents, for the first time in print, the complete transcript of the filibuster, from Senator Davis’s first words on the Senate floor, to the point where it was decided by the Senate President that she could no longer continue. It is a document alive with American history, the struggle of women to carve out basic human rights, and a heroic 10-hour effort—Davis literally standing in one place, speaking and reading, arguing with other Senators—that infiltrates the timed machinations of the law with the defiant text of one of the most important political movements of our time. To celebrate and extend Davis’s act of protest, readings of the entire transcript were held on Saturday, November 2, and Sunday, November 3, 2013. Counterpath hosted a reading at its venue in Denver, Colorado—videos of this event are interspersed through the text of the transcript below on this web page—with parallel readings at Innisfree Books in Boulder, Colorado, in Durham, NC, at the Spider House Cafe in Austin, Texas, and at Bluestockings Bookstore in New York City. Participation in these readings was open to the public, with each reader being given about 6 pages of the printed transcript to read. Additional readings are currently being planned in New York City and Raleigh, NC. Please feel free to contact Counterpath program coordinator Oren Silverman at [email protected] if you would like to organize a reading or have any questions. Press coverage of these events: An article in Guernica about the Austin reading can be found here. An article in the conservative Townhall is here. Early coverage of the Denver event is here. The Austin reading set up its own website, with a signup sheet and ways to participate from afar. Preliminary coverage of this event is here. Facebook page is here. A snapshot of the Durham reading (video courtesy of Erin Espelie), which took place Saturday, November 2, 2013, is here. With local press coverage here and here. The transcript itself made it onto Christopher Higgs’s 2013 National Book Award longlist at HTML Giant. “An important work of conceptual/performance art and an important work of radical political action against the war on women.”