Top
Free Shipping On Orders Over $35!
Get Rewarded for Ordering Your Textbooks! Enroll Now
Customer Reviews Read Reviews
Write a Review
What is included with this book?
| Preface | ix | ||||
| Acknowledgments | xi | ||||
| Prologue | xiii | ||||
|
1 | (12) | |||
|
13 | (14) | |||
|
27 | (12) | |||
|
39 | (12) | |||
|
51 | (16) | |||
|
67 | (14) | |||
|
81 | (14) | |||
|
95 | (16) | |||
|
111 | (12) | |||
|
123 | (12) | |||
|
135 | (14) | |||
|
149 | (16) | |||
|
165 | (14) | |||
|
179 | (12) | |||
|
191 | (12) | |||
|
203 | (12) | |||
|
215 | (16) | |||
| 2000 Election Postscript | 231 | (2) | |||
| Web Resources | 233 | (1) | |||
| Timeline for Some Selected Parallel Milestones | 234 | (3) | |||
| Notes | 237 | (10) | |||
| Bibliography | 247 | (4) | |||
| Index | 251 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Chapter One
The Celebration
If you want to have power over your life, then
you must make sure that more women
have power to make public policy.
--The National Women's Political Caucus
It was an icy night in Washington, D.C., in February 1994, and streets and sidewalks were so slick it was almost impossible to walk. Despite the near-crippling weather conditions, the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel was full. Looking around, I realized that this probably was the greatest assemblage of female power the country had ever seen. All the years fighting to break through gender barriers had finally produced truly meaningful results.
Strolling through the room, chatting and embracing in high-spirited greetings, were commissioners of major federal agencies, assistants to the president, deputy attorneys general, regional directors of health, judicial nominees, state department officials--and four women of cabinet rank: Attorney General Janet Reno, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, EPA Administrator Carol Browner, and President's Council of Economic Advisers Chairperson Laura D'Andrea Tyson.
Secret service agents had conducted the usual sweep, and a rope barrier had been installed around the speaker's podium in anticipation of the arrival of First Lady Hillary Clinton. The elegant ballroom with its gilded decorations, busy heart of a historic hotel, seemed a fitting site to make modern history. We were celebrating the first year in office for the record number of women who had been named to top-level posts by the Clinton administration. It was a very special night.
The event was being hosted by the bipartisan National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), and as its president, I exchanged hugs and handshakes with exhilarated officeholders and their friends. I also was chair of the Coalition for Women's Appointments, made up of about sixty women's professional and issue groups, so this event was specially meaningful. I knew about the hard work that had gone into assembling the names, along with the personal contacts, the arm-twisting, the struggles, and the carrot-and-stick maneuvering, so that this number of women could be placed within the new administration.
The effort had demonstrated what was best about the women's movement. In a crisis, or in a great common cause, women do work together. There still were tensions and occasional sharp elbows as individuals jockeyed for position with the new administration, but most women selflessly labored for other women's success. The coalition was able to provide the new administration vital assistance, with seven hundred résumés of highly qualified, individually vetted women, including many who filled breakthrough positions in the military, economic, and scientific areas, such as chief scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
That was the carrot. The stick came out in December 1992. The coalition had been working with the Clinton transition team since early fall, even before the election. By late December, we worried that time was running out on key appointments, and women were losing out for consideration in remaining unfilled top posts. Communication with the administration had broken down; it was difficult to get to see anyone. We needed to get their attention. I began sending out to the media a fax news sheet called The Mirror . It was headed by a quote of Clinton's statement: "I think I owe the American people a White House staff, a Cabinet and appointments that look like America." Underneath, we simply listed without comment all key appointments to date, by race and sex, and then added them up and noted the percentages. Women were 51 percent of the U.S. population, but they weren't even close to that percentage in the figures on the fax sheet.
The new White House was furious. An annoyed president, determined to show he wouldn't be pushed around by special interests, lashed out at women at a press conference, calling us "bean counters." I was shocked. It wasn't fun being publicly criticized by a president, although Washington Post writer E. J. Dionne, Jr., wrote: "What's wrong with bean-counting? ... Presidential Cabinets always have been the product of a similar kind of bean-counting. What's changed is the nature of the beans we count."
Some women leaders also weren't too happy with me, saying that, by putting out The Mirror , the Caucus had just made the president angry. But three decades of making my way within the system had taught me something: Politics is a power game. For women, pressure from an informed public was a big part of our power, and we needed to use it.
In the end, more than 40 percent of the president's appointments were women, including six women at cabinet level, and, most significantly, a record 32 percent of all Senate-confirmed positions. That compared to 22 percent for George Bush. Months later, the president joked about the bean-counting episode as I passed through a White House reception line. I had long since praised him for his appointments, and he had long since sent a very kind note saying that my help with those appointments "was invaluable." We can't really know what made the difference: a sincere Clinton commitment to diversity, key friendships with Hillary, powerful résumés, expert lobbying, political gamesmanship, or public bean counting. What was important was the qualified women who were appointed.
It was obvious many of the president's advisers were unhappy with what had happened, and they blamed his public pledge to diversity for the resulting negative publicity about special-interest pressures. No doubt the pledge did increase expectations among all sorts of groups. That prompted critics to label subsequent appointments of blacks, Hispanics, and women as "quota mongering," but the traditional all-white-male leadership reflected a different kind of quota that had to be challenged. The goal of our women's coalition was the very opposite of quotas; it was to win appointments for women on their merits in the midst of a world that reflected traditional gamesmanship; there always would be a long line of well-connected white men waiting for every opening. Without a specific priority, one of them would get every opening. We wouldn't have had much to brag about in 1994 if it hadn't been for the president's pledge, and our pressure. That was a lesson women will need to remember in the year 2001.
With this struggle in the background, it is no wonder that I felt so emotional that February night, so moved to see the stunning array of abilities assembled in the ballroom. This indeed would help assure a government that not only looked a lot more like America but acted like it. Women would be in positions of power to influence policy, in which they could address needed changes in the social structures that were barriers to so many people. Their numbers in this room were evidence that the transformation wrought by the women's movement was beginning to pay off in real power.
Spaced around the room, television monitors continuously scrolled a long list of female appointees' names. There were whole areas of government that had female leadership for the first time: the commissioner of Immigration, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, the secretary of the Air Force, the director of the Census Bureau, and the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
It would be easy to minimize this celebration, to point out how far we still had to go (even with these recent appointments, still only fourteen women in American history had been appointed heads of executive departments), but this was the time to enjoy our success. Most of these women had taken risks in their lives to reach these positions of power. They had made personal sacrifices. Now they just wanted to celebrate together, to be impressed by their own numbers in a male-dominated political world. The applause and cheers rose as Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore led the new women cabinet members to a raised platform to be acknowledged. (Only Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary had been unable to attend.) They also were cheering themselves for having made it this far, just as they also were applauding all the women who had broken barriers and pushed limits in years past so that women could gain a greater voice.
Who knew better than Donna Shalala, former university president, former assistant secretary of housing in the Carter administration, long-time children's advocate and friend of Hillary Clinton? It was a long climb, but she stayed focused, and she stayed connected with other women. It was Donna Shalala who gave me a place to stay in Manhattan during the tough fundraising grind in my last race for U.S. Senate in 1986.
Now she was secretary of Health and Human Services, heading one of fourteen executive departments, a member of the president's cabinet--and she still was thinking in terms of women's mutual support. She told the enthusiastic crowd: " In this administration there are so many women at high levels that you literally can move a major policy issue all the way to the president's desk without it ever touching a man's hands ."
When it came Tipper Gore's turn to speak, she continued the theme, expressing thanks for the people in power who had helped to bring this female progress about, "from the president [pause] on down." The Washington Post reported, "The First Lady looked on innocently from the platform and the crowd roared knowingly." Hillary Clinton's influence within the White House on behalf of women was common knowledge.
In response, Hillary Clinton gave credit to another woman, Bill Clinton's late mother, who she said had raised a son with "respect and appreciation for women, women who work, women who raise children, women who are not given the break we think they deserve but keep going every day." She also credited one other person, Jan Piercy, deputy presidential assistant for personnel, who had helped alert women to key positions. Mrs. Clinton joked: "I will admit right now she was one of my roommates at Wellesley." This verified something we all understood; women needed their own power networks. Without them, we wouldn't be here.
We could sense the spirits of all the preceding risk takers who had made this night possible. Some had famous names, like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, first woman named to the Cabinet in 1933 (it would be twenty years before there was another woman named) or Senator Margaret Chase Smith and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, one a white Republican, the other an African-American Democrat, who bucked the male system to run for president before polls said it was doable. They had ventured out where none had gone before, with little more than their own determination.
There was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who brought women together for the nation's first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 17, 1848, but had to ask a man to chair the meeting because it was deemed improper for a woman to play such a public role. A "public woman" was a prostitute. Seventy-two years later, in 1920, women finally gained the vote after incredible struggle, but when they failed to cast their ballots in expected numbers or deferred to their husbands, male politicians began to ignore them. Women advocates continued their activism on issues, like child labor, but it was rare for a woman to try for elective office. As late as 1971, there were just 15 women out of 563 members of Congress and women were only 5 percent of state legislators.
Now, in 1992, after all these years, it seemed that women were fully engaged in the political process. Women were voting, women were running, women were taking power. Not only were there record numbers of senior appointees but there was also a record number of women in Congress: nine women in the U.S. Senate, and forty-seven women in the U.S. House. Women were now more than 20 percent of state legislators. It may have taken the whole twentieth century, but we were seeing results, and that was worth celebrating.
There was another significance to this event. The women surrounding me on the platform, and circulating in the ballroom, were important role models to inspire a new generation of women to believe in themselves and their ability to compete successfully for important positions. There hadn't been many role models for my generation. For me personally, it was my mother and Eleanor Roosevelt. My mother had been a nationally ranked tennis player. Every day I stared at the shining silver trophies that filled our dining room cabinet, and I knew she had achieved something in her own right, and therefore I could too. Roosevelt was a model of compassion, an activist First Lady who reached out to care for all the people in America. She also showed me strength when she ignored criticism to speak out in her own voice.
There also was Amelia Earhart, the pioneering pilot, a slim woman with tousled short hair and warm smile who dressed just like the male flyers but with a bright scarf at her neck. She became a legend when she disappeared on an attempted round-the-world trip in 1937. Asked why she risked her life, she said: "I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."
Earhart was ahead of her time. Adventurous or powerful women were oddities. I was lucky to have my personal role models. Men held all positions of authority. In public schools, maiden women might be teachers, but men were principals. It took World War II to change women's self-perception of their second-class status. When millions of men were sucked into the military in the early 1940s, the economy needed alternative labor, specifically women and minorities.
There was a wartime poster that became a symbol of the new woman. It showed a muscle-flexing female dressed for factory work--doing a job for which females previously had been judged unqualified. It was powerful visual reinforcement that women could be strong. Women enlisted in every branch of the service to free up men for combat, including the then-new Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs) to fly noncombat assignments. Even young women felt needed. I saved tin foil in huge balls, knitted crooked khaki scarves for the men overseas, and, as soon as I was old enough, took flying lessons. As Earhart had said, women could be risk takers, too.
When the war ended, attitudes changed; women were expected to resume their posture of dependency. There was an underlying understanding that when the boys came marching home, the jobs were to be theirs, and so were the women. Those who continued to work returned to inferior pay and working conditions, in lunch counters and ten-cent stores. Many African-American women went back to domestic service. But the seeds of discontent had been planted among working women, as well as those who had become full-time homemakers.
In many ways, the seemingly placid 1950s set the stage for social revolution, as women realized how little control they had over their own lives. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote: "I began law school with a class of over four hundred. It included nine women. Employers were, to put it euphemistically, cool toward the idea of employing women." She also was a young mother, and Jewish. When she began looking for a job in 1959, law firm doors were closed to her.
The doors that closed for me led to newsrooms. I had worked my way up to managing editor of The Michigan Daily in college in 1949, and I expected to become a newspaper reporter after graduation with the same prospects as the young men who worked for me. Unfortunately, most editors refused to hire women as general news reporters. The assumption was that we weren't tough enough. During a summer stint at a Chicago newspaper, the city editor tried to scare me off by making my first assignment a twenty-three-story suicide jump into a courtyard. He apparently expected me to weep instead of write. As I looked for a permanent job, the editors all pointed to the society section, where stories focused on weddings, club meetings, and social events. That was not acceptable.
I packed a small bag and, without any appointments or prospects, boarded a train heading east from home-town Chicago to wherever there were good newspapers: Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York. In each town, I'd call the editor from the station, asking for an interview. Amazingly, most of them saw me, but then without fail either said that women didn't belong in the newsroom or that they already had "one."
I finally found a job. So did the young Ginsburg. She turned to teaching and special projects, focusing on laws that treated men and women differently. She went on to win five of six sex discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and in the late 1970s became a federal appellate court judge. We both had learned valuable lessons. If doors are closed to you, find a way around. Don't give in to gender-biased judgments. Be willing to take chances, and try something new because if you maintain your principles, you can earn respect, and that translates into power of accomplishment.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a small, reserved woman; it would be hard to guess how much impact she has had within the judicial system. We met for the first time at an inaugural reception that the NWPC held in January 1993 at a Washington, D.C., art gallery. She later recalled that I predicted she would be appointed to the Supreme Court. In truth, I just was reflecting our determination to see a second woman on the court and the knowledge that she was high on everyone's list. It was good luck that we were able to help when the White House did take up her name, by countering false information that was being circulated to damage her chances. It was fascinating to me that our separate struggles for careers had brought us together at this moment, with the power to help one another. It was glorious being in the Rose Garden the day President Clinton introduced her to be the second woman on the Supreme Court.
Justice Ginsburg deserved appointment to the Supreme Court on the basis of her qualifications, but there's no doubt she won consideration because gender was made an issue. A president no longer could use the excuse that he couldn't find a qualified woman for the job. The 1980s had seen a remarkable increase in the number of women in all kinds of professional positions, from economists and scientists to prosecuting attorneys. Gender was our wedge but good résumés gave us leverage, and aroused public opinion was an effective weapon.
We also had learned that we were no one's priority but our own. There was a lot of lip service about equality, but the statistics demonstrated a lack of follow-up commitment. Our predecessors always seemed to be petitioning for consideration; in 1993, we had to be bolder. All the women advocates agreed that it was time for a gender breakthrough to one of the Big Four cabinet positions: defense, state department, justice, or treasury. These represented the major power bases of government: the military and its contracts; foreign affairs; law and order; and the flow of money. The consensus target was attorney general, head of Justice, because women now were well established in legal fields and there were some excellent candidates.
After the election, while the president-elect remained in Little Rock, Vernon Jordan, one-time civil rights activist, lobbyist, and FOB (friend of Bill), was designated as the Washington contact on appointments. It wasn't easy getting a meeting, so we were pleased finally to arrange what we understood was a private appointment for the coalition with Jordan. When we arrived, the room was full; they clearly had invited every other woman who had contacted them. Probably deliberately, Jordan's office had created an atmosphere that was not conducive to serious negotiation.
Our spokesperson, Judith Lichtman, of the Women's Legal Defense Fund, urged the appointment of a woman attorney general. Others added varied views. Jordan was conciliatory. He is a very handsome black man with the confidence of a power broker and a reputation for charming his way through difficulties, partly relying for credibility on his civil rights credentials. He assured us that women were being actively considered for additional positions, but I left feeling frustrated that we were still lobbing messages over the transom. Fortunately, some members of the team had better results working White House contacts with the new First Lady. A woman was indeed named attorney general: New York attorney Zoe Baird.
Alas for best-laid plans. First, Zoe Baird, and then substitute appointee, Kimba Wood, ran into problems over nonpayment of taxes for domestic workers. By the time Janet Reno was nominated, critics were saying that the president hadn't been looking for the best person, just the best woman . True, we answered, but every woman proposed was well qualified. There were plenty of ambitious, well-connected men and without deliberate effort, there never would be a woman selected. Women had to create their connections.
A story about the Reno nomination makes the point. The male political network did not surface her name, even though she had won acclaim in Dade County, Florida, as a prosecutor who created innovative and effective programs to cut crime. Women found her. A prominent political player in Washington who knew her, named Ann Lewis, called me; I checked Reno's credentials with a Caucus leader in Florida and then called the media and the White House. That seemed to set things in motion.
Janet Reno told the rest of the story at the NWPC's annual convention in the summer of 1993. She said: "Harriett Woods was the first person to be quoted in the paper presenting the possibility of Janet Reno.... In the Oval Office, the president said: `So you've got the support of the women's groups!'" Then she looked out at the dedicated volunteers who had labored over the years to put women into power and said: "Thank you."
An article in Newsweek right after the Reno appointment noted its impact: "The Old Boys Club that has traditionally ruled Washington is grudgingly making adjustments. With a woman tapped to be the chief law-enforcement officer, a First Lady charged with making policy and four new women senators, there is a new power grid. Rules are being rewritten to take into account the sensibilities of a generation of women coming into power."
In putting later events in perspective, it's important to note that women's political advocacy groups like NOW and the NWPC didn't even exist until the late 1960s; there was little concern in those days about women's views on appointments, or anything else. Women not only couldn't get good jobs or fair wages; we couldn't even get credit cards in our own name. It could be a crime to use contraceptives. Few women were admitted to professional schools like medicine or law. Domestic violence hadn't even been given a name. When I graduated from college, help-wanted ads were divided into male and female; you couldn't apply for a desirable job listed in the male columns, even if you felt you were qualified.
This meant that women who became achievers in the 1970s and 1980s, including many at the ballroom celebration, had triumphed over those situations. They helped to pass laws to end discrimination, win court cases, and get supportive lawmakers elected. There are very thoughtful reflections elsewhere on the women's movement that point out the diverse threads that went into its evolution. For me, as a young mother in the Midwest, the women's movement seemed very distant. What wakened me was injustice at the community level and a passion for reform. Like others of that time, I certainly never intended to become a "woman leader." Now here I was in Washington, leading a woman's group dedicated to getting more women into public office. Life had gradually taught me what many women have had to learn: Women pay a bigger price to get power, and we're more likely to succeed when we support one another.
It had been a long journey, combining individual risk taking and group struggle, a history many younger women do not know or understand. In the months and years after the 1994 reception, there would be more significant appointments of women by the Clinton administration, including Madeleine Albright as the first woman secretary of state, but in many ways, that February night was our zenith for the twentieth century. We thought the future was assured.
Later events would show the struggle was far from over. The 1994 election saw the defeat of many of the women reformers of "The Year of the Woman," as well as a worrisome downturn in the number of women running for state legislative seats. For years we had blamed outside barriers for keeping women from leadership; now we needed to look at the question more carefully, including inside women themselves. Why was it that so many failed to see the connection, that we finally recognized, between the quality of our lives and who makes public policy decisions?
It will take a fresh generation of risk takers to regenerate the momentum, women who have absorbed our history and our commitment to public service but who are clear-eyed in their understanding of the way power is exercised. It would have been good to have them in the ballroom that night. They could have caught the energy that flowed from those who have been part of a great adventure.
My life has been one small part of that adventure, paralleling the evolution of many public women in America. We began at the local level, drawn into the political arena by local problems and a passion for social justice; we took some risks and gradually learned how to create and use power. I did not set out to run for office or devote myself to getting women appointed. One thing just led to another.
That history may be useful to today's young women who are filled with determination for the future without fully understanding that there still are plenty of bumps in the road. They need to hear our stories and learn how we became risk takers and coped with adversity, so they will have more appreciation of the cost of change and more confidence to meet whatever challenges arise in their own lives.
When we know where we've been, we're more likely to get where we want to go. We need a lot more women competing for positions of power. The celebrants in 1994 would agree: a ballroom full of power is wonderful; so is a woman in the Oval Office; but in the next century there must be so many women leaders that no single room can contain our celebration.
We have been trudging uphill far too long.
Copyright © 2000 Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.
Need Help? Copyright © 1999-2024