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Women Making Change « Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11:41a

Daily newsbrief journal for April 2007, also see http://www.usdemocrats.com/brief for a global 100-page perpetual brief and follow twitter @usdemocrats


Women Making Change « Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11:41a

Postby admin » Sat Jan 28, 2012 11:40 am

Women Making Change « Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11:41am » --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Women Making Change Prepared Remarks of Sheila WellstoneAs part of Women's Week at Iowa State UniversityCampanile Room, Memorial UnionOctober 7, 1998 It is a pleasure to see all of you here I want to thank Allissa for inviting me and to all the other sponsors of the lecture series for giving me the opportunity to come tonight to be a part of Women's Week at Iowa State. And I want to thank you for coming and to, I hope, joining the conversation that we have afterward. This is not just about me and what I have to say. I think it is about hearing from you and what you have to say on the topic of women making change. Since I'm going to be suggesting some priorities for your futures and make some assumptions about those priorities I feel that I should tell you a little bit about my journey as a woman and how I got where I am today. It is very difficult, I want to tell you first of all, to talk about myself but I have a very important friend and mentor in Betty Bumpers who is married to Senator Dale Bumpers from Arkansas. And Betty, in the 1970's formed an organization called Peacelinks. That was around the arms buildup. She and other women were very concerned about what this was going to mean in the future of our children so they started an organization called Peacelinks working with women first of all in the country of Russia. It has now spread locally around the world. They have worked with women in other countries, not only about the arms race which now is, hopefully with the end of the cold war and with everything coming around with the falling of the Berlin wall, that we were able to move beyond that to dealing with issues of violence in the community and violence in the family. I heard Betty speak one night and she said, "I do what I do because of who I am and I do it unashamedly." And what she meant by that was, because she happened to be married to a United States Senator, that doors were opened to her that normally would not have been. And as I heard her say that, I thought, you know I believe in what she's done, if I can do it in the way that she's done, if I can use my position but not abuse it, but use it to talk about something that is important to me that that's what I would do. I have done this around the issue of domestic violence. And she was the one who gave me freedom to know that I can speak about the issue but in also doing that I knew that there would be times that I'd have to speak about myself. So, I will tell you my story, my journey that I have taken as a woman. First of all, I want to tell you that I'm a grandmother of 3 grandchildren Kari who is 7, Keith who is 4, and Joshua who is 3. I grew up in Kentucky. My family is all from Appalachia. I come from families of coal miners so I've been very part of Union organizing and people struggling for a long time. Paul and I met in high school in Arlington Virginia when we were 16. We were married when we were 19 after our freshman year in college. I went to the University of Kentucky for a year. He was at the University of North Carolina. We were married. I dropped out of school and worked there while he went on to get his Ph.D. We then moved to Minnesota where he was a professor of Carleton College. We had 3 children. I stayed home until our youngest was in first grade and decided that I wanted to go back into the workforce. I worked as a paraprofessional in the high school media center for 11 years until Paul was elected to the senate in 1990. In the fall of 1991, after our youngest had graduated from high school, I moved to Washington. In Washington, I work as an unpaid volunteer in Paul's office, coordinating the legislative policy that we do on domestic violence. I love doing that but what I love most is coming back to Minnesota which we do almost every weekend and all recesses, to do the grassroots work. And as I mention that, I'd like to introduce Molly Wilson who is here from the Minnesota office. She is an Iowan and it is very nice to have her working with me, but I find that it is important to be out in the community continually listening to people. As I do this work people often say, why would you do such an issue. It is unpleasant, its ugly sounding. When you say that the first thing that comes to people's mind is the picture that is not pleasant, so why would you want to do it. I do it for a very simple reason. I find it absolutely intolerable to think that a woman's home can be the most violent, most dangerous and oftentimes the most deadly place she can be. And that means if she is a mother, that means that that is the same home that her children are growing up in. So I spent a year traveling through Minnesota, meeting with advocates, sitting in battered women's shelters, listening to the stories and learning about what was happening. I have met with law enforcement, judges, social service agencies, health care providers, anyone in the community that would talk to me about what it is that their community is doing. And then started having town meetings about domestic violence. Again, I was confronted with, "you know Sheila, nobody is going to come. The only people that you are going to have there are the people who do the advocacy work. Why would you do it?" But I have to tell you, I had them in small rural town areas, I had them in the suburbs, I had them in the cities and the crowds were so encouraging. We would have 75 at one, we had over 500 at another. The reason people came, a lot of this was going on during the OJ Simpson trial. My fear was that people would only want to talk about that drama that was going on in this country. That's not what I found. I found that people really did want to understand the issue of domestic violence. They really did want to ask the question what is it that we can do. They really did want to understand the impact of domestic violence on our community. I think it is very important that people understand that it knows no boundaries. Women are battered regardless of their economic status, regardless of their education, regardless of the color of their skin, the language that they speak, regardless of whether they are urban or rural or suburban, regardless of their sexual orientation, it does not discriminate. I think it is important for people to understand that, "why doesn't she just leave?" is not a simple question. It is important for people to understand that children who witness their mother being abused are as traumatized and show the same effects to trauma of children who are abused. It is important that people understand that violence in the home is a crime and that it should be treated as a crime. It is important that people in the communities understand that it is happening to women that they know. It is happening to the women who live next door to them, it is happening to the women they go church or to worship with, it is happening to people in their workplace and it is happening to women who sit next to you in the classroom when you are at school. To stop this, I am convinced that the community must be involved. A community must send a message to a woman that she is not to blame, that they do believe her and that domestic violence and other forms of violence against women will not be ignored where they live and that it will not be tolerated. I think it is so important because the safety and the lives of so many women and children depend on what the community response is. Like I said earlier, I am very honored to be here with you. I look forward afterwards to hearing your plans and to know how it is that you hope to be a part of change that women are making. If you would allow me, I would like to quote someone who is very dear and special to me, my husband Paul. I have often heard him say as he speaks that history is the dance of life: past, present and future. History is abundantly blessed with stories of women, many of whom fought wars, ruled empires, and dominated their times. Think of Cleopatra in the first century B.D. Egypt, Joan of Arc in 15th Century France, Queen Elizabeth in 16th century England, Catherine the Great in 18th century Russia, and Queen Victoria in 19th century Britain. Each transcended her own era. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said that women, like slaves, had the right to be free. "Suffrage," he said, "is . . . the right by which all others are secured." It took women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth who traveled the country lecturing and organizing for decades to finally win the right to vote for women. Jeannette Rankin was born on a ranch in Montana 1880. While at the University of Washington, she joined the woman's suffrage movement in time to celebrate its victory a year later. After Montana approved a woman's right to vote in 1914, she was elected to the House of Representatives, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Hattie Caraway was born 120 years ago in Bakersville, Tennessee. They called her "Silent Hattie," because she avoided public speaking. When her husband, Taddeus Caraway, a U.S. Senator from Arkansas, died during his second term, Arkansas's governor appointed Hattie to finish her husband's term. Many political activists expected Hattie go back home and raise her three children and teaching after she finished her husband's term, but Hattie wanted to go on serving her country. In 1932, she ran for the Senate in her own right, facing opposition from a former Governor and former Senator. But with the endorsement of the charismatic Louisiana Senator Huey Long, she defeated her opponents soundly and became the first woman elected to serve in the Senate. She was re-elected in 1938, even though her opponent ran under the slogan, "Arkansas needs another man in the Senate." She was the co-sponsor of a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution during her term. Then there is the story of a young New York City researcher and social reformer named Frances, who while visiting a friend on March 25, 1911 in New York City, suddenly heard the clanging of fire engines close by. Rushing out to the street, she saw the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in flames. To her horror she watched as young women workers leaped to their deaths. The fire escapes were either inaccessible or stopped several stories above the ground. The tragedy claimed 146 lives. The researcher, Frances Perkins, went on to become President Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor and the first woman in a president's cabinet. It was three weeks before Christmas in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, and 42-year-old Rosa Parks had just put in a hard day's work at her job as a seamstress. She bought some pills for the pain in her neck and shoulders, and then she waited at the bus stop at Court Square, across from the banner that read "Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men." She let the first bus go by, because it looked so overcrowded. Rosa boarded the second bus, and sat in the one open seat left, in the fifth row. Signs on all the buses reserved the first four rows for whites only, but the unwritten law in Montgomery held that African Americans could sit in the middle section of the bus only if no whites were standing. Two stops later white people crowded on the bus and one white man could not find a seat. The bus driver yelled back at Rosa and the three other African Americans in the fifth row to get out of their seats. The others, two women and a man, got up. Even though she knew that a bus driver had beaten a disabled Black passenger not long before, Rosa refused to budge. The bus driver called the police, and they arrested Rosa. Rosa's courage sparked a 381-day boycott of Montgomery's buses, led by a young African-American minister named Martin Luther King, and a movement was born. America's First Ladies have a long tradition of using their position to contribute to the national good. Martha Washington once said: "I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else, there [are] certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from . . . ." I suspect that First Ladies right on through to Hillary Clinton must have had an idea what she meant. But many have certainly made change. They called Edith Wilson the "Secret President" and "the first woman to run the government," as she took over many of her husband's duties after Woodrow Wilson had a stroke. Edith did not start any new initiatives, but she selected matters for her husband's attention and routed other things to the heads of departments. She called her service, her "stewardship." Eleanor Roosevelt's work for the underprivileged of all races and nations made her one of the most loved -- and for some years and some circles, one of the most hated -- women of her generation. History is the dance of life - the present. Women also make change through volunteering. Take Georgia Travis, a senior citizen in Des Moines. Georgia has spent much of her life volunteering to make the lives of children better. She teaches theater arts to inner city kids whose primary access to arts is on MTV. She makes all of the costumes her kids use, picks them up from school or home, and drives them to rehearsal, makes all of the props, and more. She coaches the kids to write, produce, and perform their own plays, helping them build confidence and self-respect. Sometimes influencing lives near home is the greatest gift that you can give. I tell the story of Sharon Rice-Vaughn of St. Paul, MN. She did a simple thing that created a movement. At a time when there were no shelters, she opened her own home to women and children needing to escape domestic violence. From this came Women's Advocates, the first domestic violence shelter in the country and a forerunner of a national movement. And then there is the story of Bonnie Campbell. In 1990, Bonnie, a lawyer from Des Moines, became the first woman Attorney General of Iowa. She used that office as a platform to prevent and fight domestic violence. Bonnie increased awareness about this serious problem through a statewide domestic violence prevention campaign. In 1992, Bonnie authored one of the nation's first anti-stalking laws. She now directs the Department of Justice's Violence Against Women Office. In October 1991, young Jacob Wetterling was abducted just blocks from his home in rural Minnesota. His mother, Patty Wetterling has since devoted her life to children's safety. She tells the story of lying in bed one day with the covers pulled tightly over her head, not wanting to emerge. She could have kept the covers pulled tightly over her head, never leaving her bedroom. She could have accepted the status of "victim." She could have lived and possibly died under the oppression of the man who kidnaped her son Jacob. But a tiny voice in her mind told her to fight back. She became a victim with a plan. Today, the Jacob Wetterling Foundation advocates for children's personal safety. The Foundation works to educate both state and federal lawmakers of the need for effective legislation concerning child predators. They have worked hard on creative effective community notification laws and established a national hot line to bring leads on missing children. When she was a freshman at the College of William and Mary, Katie Kesner was raped by a fellow student. What was different about Katie is that she was among the first to come forward and talk publicly about a phenomenon that we now call date rape. She helped bring the issue into the national spotlight, appearing on "Oprah," "Geraldo," "Larry King Live," and the cover of Time Magazine, and was the subject of an HBO docudrama, "No Visible Bruises: The Katie Kesner Story." Katie has presented her program about college rape to over 450 colleges, high schools, youth groups, and military institutions in 46 states. She worked on the Student Right to Know and Campus Security Act of 1990 and continues to lobby in Washington for legislation to aid women on college campuses. In 1994, she founded Campus Outreach Services, to fight sexual assault in all ways possible. The sad truth is that a woman is most likely to be raped her first six weeks at college. One in three college women report being the victim of rape or attempted rape. One in four women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. I hope that at the end of this we can talk about what is happening here on your campus, what you think should happen if its not and to enter into a dialogue about how to make sure that women on the campus of Iowa State are safe and feel that they can come and go as they need to be active, full participating students. Women need to make changes in the law. Women continue to be treated differently in the eyes of the court. For example: Too often, a woman who kills her abusive husband will be charged with a homicide and given the maximum sentence possible, while the shooting of a wife by her husband can be termed a "passion shooting" and he will receive a very reduced sentence. Only in 1968, for example, did the Pennsylvania courts void a state law that required that any woman convicted of a felony be sentenced to the maximum punishment prescribed by law. Often women prostitutes were prosecuted although their male customers were allowed to go free. And even though we have made progress, there is still more to do. Women need to make change in schools. Advocates need to talking about dating violence in classes. We need to teach our young boys and girls at an early age about healthy and unhealthy relationships, about parenting, about the value of families, about the responsibilities to oneself and to one's communities. We need to teach our young boys and girls about accepting and understanding those whose color, language, culture, economic status or sexual orientations are not theirs. We need to change the value society places on women and girls. In a landmark study, the American Association of University Women found that treating girls differently from boys affects self-esteem, career aspirations, and learning. As girls reach adolescence, their self-esteem drops significantly more than boys'. Teachers and others systematically -- if unintentionally -- discourage girls from a wide range of pursuits. Journalist Peggy Orenstein wrote of adolescent middle school girls like Becca, who boasts that she's a feminist but won't raise her hand in class for fear she will give the wrong answer. What does this self-esteem gap and lack of academic confidence mean for the future of women and the future of this nation? History is the dance of life - the future We need to move toward a time where every woman can rise to her true potential. As Jane Goodall said, "Above all we must realize that each of us makes a difference with our life. Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place--or not to bother. We must continue to learn from our sister's lessons of the past. What we have is that for which they lived. Now let us focus on what we will do today. What will be our history. I believe that we cannot separate the lives we lead from the words we speak. History is the dance of life--at this moment in that dance if we believe it is wrong that a woman is battered every 13 seconds in her home, then we must work for change. If we believe it is wrong that 1 out of 4 children under the age of 3 is growing up poor in America, that 1 out of every 2 children of color under the age of 3 is growing up in poverty, if we believe this is wrong, then we must fight for change. If we believe that there is a direct correlation between race, gender and poverty, then we must work for change. If we believe that it is wrong that a women only earns 74 cents for every dollar that men earns, then we must work for change. And as we believe that as women are living longer, healthier lives that still too many studies on women's health are being conducted on men, then we must work for change. As an anecdote, I want to mention something. I don't know if everyone in this room may be aware, but I found it shocking not too long ago to find out that as late as the year 1980, only male rats were being used to study the effects of drugs and disease upon women's lives. Finally, now female rats have been added to this equation. And, if we believe that every person in this country is entitled to a job at a decent wage, a good productive education, to health care that is affordable, that everyone has the right to safety in their community, their home, and in their workplace, that every small family farmer deserves the right to be able to stay on their farm, then we must work for change. There are many ways women make change and you will know your way. You can continue or start that work right here on campus. I urge you to consider some sort of community service. Too often there is the attitude that young people just care, that they don't want to serve their community. I don't believe this and I continually meet students who are working as tutors or mentors, who are volunteering at women's shelters or rape crisis centers. More young women need to go into politics and to support groups that help women candidates, like Emily's List or the Women's Campaign Fund. Iowa is one of seven states that has never elected a woman to Congress. My hope is that there are young women in this audience tonight who will want to run for public office. You could be a part of bringing the women's agenda to the forefront of policy making. You could speak out on all the issues of importance to women's lives. You could be a part of directing the future of our country as we enter the 21st century. Just allow me a moment, I would like to read a quote that I found in a book as I was traveling out today from "And Then She Said" this is a journalist. And she says, "I truly believe that women of your generation can bring a new and cleansing element to American public life." To date, only 23 women have served in the United States Senate, but they are making their presence felt. You could see it six years ago, in the "year of the woman," as they called it, with Dianne Feinstein, Carol Moseley Braun, Barbara Boxer, and Patty Murray all joining the Senate in the same year, and they have made a difference. You could see it in the first day. They came to the floor of the senate in reds and yellows and whites and purples. It was such a stark contrast from the funeral gray and navy blue that the men almost always wear as their uniform. I swear to you, if you watch C-Span that since the women came and this may seem superfluous to talk about this but to me it really does say a lot about this. The men have really started to wear very bright ties that sort of set them apart from each other now. But it was not only the appearances that make the difference. As the director of Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics, Ruth Mandel, says, it "sends a powerful message to young boys and girls about our decision-makers and who they are" and it says that they are also women. We need to increase women's representation in Congress. Women make up less than 12 percent of the United States House of Representatives and 9 percent of the Senate. We need committed women at the policy level and at the grass roots level. Find a way to work for what you believe in. You will be more true to yourselves if you do. As young women you are on the threshold of embarking on an incredible journey. Please don't forget or judge those women who choose a different journey or have no choice in the journey they take. Our goal as women should be to support and encourage all our sisters. Not every woman will be fully educated, or be a professional, or be a community leader. She won't be in a traditional relationship or be a mother. We must accept her for who she is. History is the dance of life: Past, present and future. And now, think about the women of the future. May we so conduct ourselves, and may we do all that we can, so that a hundred years from now, our daughters' daughters' daughters may come to think of us here at the beginning of the 21st century. And may they have reason to know, that they will be, in that moment, the whole reason for which we now exist at all. Thank you very much.
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