Balaghat al-Nisa’, or The Eloquences of Women, one of the earliest anthologies of women’s voices in Arabic literature, collects poetry, speeches, anecdotes and akhbar attributed to or conveying the reported opinions of women. The work was originally part of the multi-volume compendium Kitab al-Manthur wa al-Manzum, or The Book of Poetry and Prose, credited to Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 893), a prolific adib and poet in Baghdad, of whose literary output only four volumes are extant. Included in the anthology are a series of speeches attributed to the wives, daughter and granddaughters of the Prophet including the earliest extant version of a text that portrays Fatima delivering a speech to Abu Bakr and the community on the occasion that he denied her the right to inherit Fadak. Shawkat Toorawa and Nadia El Cheikh have brought attention to the conditions of such a work’s production, namely that it entailed a process of selection from a broader oral corpus and the rewriting of female voices by male udaba'. My paper examines the contents of Balaghat al-Nisa’, some of its intertextual relations, as well as organizing principles and presentational devices observed in the text. My analysis centers on Fatima’s khutba and the dramatic scene-setting that frames both hers and other women’s speeches addressing Muslim audiences. Following an approach articulated by El Cheikh, my treatment balances the work of analyzing how Ibn Tayfur's dramatization constructs Fatima in relationship to prevailing gender discourses and speculating about how the survival of the text raises questions about silences in the Sunni archive. I argue that while the khutba is politically inflected and its speaker an exceptional one, it nonetheless propagates and legitimates a scene wherein a female authority challenges core Islamic institutions.