When I was a young lawyer, working women wore hats. It was the only way they would take you seriously. - Bella Abzug

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.

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?