American politician (1920-1998)
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Ever since my youth I've been a Zionist, and I worked hard for the cause of a Jewish homeland too. I've visited Israel and I raised my kids with a very strong background in Jewish culture. Besides that, I spent a couple of years of my life as a Hebrew teacher! To try to make me out as anti-Israel was nothing but rotten and vicious. (p 70)
Perhaps the best way to change Congress to make it more representative, to make it more responsive-is to show people exactly what it is. This is the reason I've decided to keep this diary. I want people to share my personal experiences in struggling with the system. Having spent many years as the legislative director of Women Strike for Peace, I'm no innocent to Washington. I've already had a pretty good whiff of what to expect. The inside operation of Congress-the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building-is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about
Imperfect though it may be, the Beijing Platform for Action is the strongest statement of consensus on women's equality, empowerment and justice ever produced by governments...It is an agenda for change, fueled by the momentum of civil society, based on a transformational vision of a better world for all.
Without getting scientific or psychological or historical about it, it's long been my judgment that women have been at the forefront of social change. When we first got the vote, we used it to clean up the sweat shops, to clean up the horrors of child labor, and so on. Then we got sidetracked. Instead of carrying forth Carrie Chapman Catt's notion that women should organize as a political movement, the movement became nonpartisan and followed the League of Women Voters route. So between their nonpositions and Madison Avenue's assigned stereotype of women as flowers in the home who can be sold all kinds of products to beautify themselves, and Hollywood with its awful stereotypes, women were sunk. Up until now, we've been laboring under the concept of women as appendages to men and children and subjected to constant brainwashing by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, TV-and the descendants of John Adams who know when they have a good thing going. We now see the concept changing because the women's movement, which renewed itself several years ago as an intellectual revolt of the bored middle class housewife, has grown into a broad movement seeking complete economic, social and political change in all arenas. It's like the black movement, which started out over the right to a seat in the front of the bus and then extended itself to pursue for the black people their rightful piece of the whole system. The women's movement, like the black movement and the movement of the young people, comes at a time when the system is not responding to the largest numbers of its people. This puts all these movements in a very critical perspective, because out of all this ferment the last thing we can realistically expect is for things to remain the same. (p 202)
I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prizefighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing. Whether I'm any of these things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am-and this ought to be made very clear at the outset-I am a very serious woman. I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business. It's no joke to me that women in this country are terribly oppressed and are made to suffer economic, legal and social discrimination. I am not evoking a wild fantasy when I claim that I'm going to help organize a new political coalition of the women, the minorities and the young people, along with the poor, the elderly, the workers and the unemployed, which is going to turn this country upside down and inside out. We're going to reclaim our cities, create more jobs, better housing, better health care, more child care centers, more help for drug addicts; we're going to start doing something for the millions of people in this country whose needs, because of the callousness of the men who've been running our government, have taken a low priority to the cost of killing people in Indochina. To some people all this may sound a bit grandiose, but let me tell you something: This is the only thing we can do and still survive.
Then up gets Carl Albert to tell us he supports Bolling's resolution because he wants to see us work together with the Republicans to end the war. I was appalled! Here was the Speaker of the House-a man in that kind of position-giving us more old-fashioned, desperate, moldy garbage from the past. Since World War II the Democrats and the Republicans have been "joining hands" to fight international communism, and where has it gotten us? We've created a nuclear monster and a vast, uncontrollable military machine. We've inspired guys like Joe McCarthy and Spiro Agnew to level all the opposition. The military and the industrialists and the munitions-makers have moved in to take over our power structure, influencing it, manipulating it and dominating it. All for the sake of good old bipartisanism; all for the sake of good old anticommunism. (p 93)
It's also important for me to run again so that other women will be encouraged to do the same. One thing that crystallized for me like nothing else this year is that Congress is a very unrepresentative institution. Not only from an economic class point of view, but from every point of view-sex, race, age, vocation. Some people say this is because the political system tends to homogenize everything, that a Congressman by virtue of the fact that he or she represents a half million people has to appeal to all sorts of disparate groups. I don't buy that at all. These men in Congress don't represent a homogeneous point of view. They represent their own point of view-by reason of their sex, background and class.
Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Congress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?