When the 91st session of the United States Congress convened, I arrived a little late and broke one of the venerable traditions of the House before I was even sworn in as a member. They had just finished calling the roll when I got there, so I rushed onto the floor with my coat and hat on. At least three members told me that I was breaking a House rule. I went back to a cloakroom to leave my hat and coat and returned to take the oath.
There was nothing like the decorum I had experienced the first day in the New York State Assembly. Members were walking around shaking hands and slapping each other on the back, talking without paying any attention to the proceedings. Up behind a raised platform high in the front of the room sat a gaunt, frail-looking old man, Speaker John McCormack. I was shocked by the way the members milled around and set up a din that drowned out both the Speaker and the men who were taking turns giving brief speeches. The speechmakers were talking on an incredible variety of subjects that seemed of no importance to me. Each talked for one minute, then broke off and handed a copy of his speech to a clerk. The next day it would be printed in full in the Congressional Record as if it had really been given and the other members had listened to it.
Only a few of the faces were known to me, but everyone knew who I was. They were cordial, but in many greetings I sensed aloofness. Men kept asking me, "What does your husband think about all this?" They acted as if they were joking, but they meant to imply that, after all, "a woman's place..." I told them all that this was nothing new for Conrad and me; we had met while I was running from one meeting to another; during the early years of our marriage when he worked as a private detective, he was often away from home; then when he became an investigator for the city and was home every night I was away in the state Assembly four days a week, so my being in Washington four days a week would be nothing new.
After several weeks I realized that everyone had been expecting someone else, a noisy, hostile, antiwhite type. Some of my new colleagues admitted it frankly. "You're not the way we thought you'd be," one said. "You're actually charming."
When the campaign ended, I had taken three weeks' vacation in Jamaica, sleeping and eating, trying to gain back a few pounds. The months of campaigning, broken up by a major operation, had drained my vitality. I knew I should be in Washington rounding up a staff, but first I had to have some rest. When I came to Washington in December, I had to do everything at once. I interviewed a string of applicants for my office staff. Many new Congressmen reward their supporters by putting them in staff jobs. I knew from my experience in Albany that this would be a mistake. What I needed was experience, to make up for my own inexperience in Washington, and after that, of course, I needed competence and loyalty. Before long, I decided my staff would be composed of young women, for the most part, from the receptionist to my top assistants. Capitol Hill offices swarm with intelligent, Washington-wise, college-trained — and attractive — young women who do most of the work that makes a Congressman look good, but often get substandard pay for it and have little hope of advancing to a top staff job. The procedure in my office, I decided, would be different. I have never regretted it. Since then, I have also hired some outstanding young men, on my district and Washington staffs, but the majority is still female. More than half are black, but there has been pressure on me from some of my constituents to hire all all-black staff. "If you don't, who will?" I have been asked. What I have done is hire the best applicants I can get. If they are black, so much the better. But the young white women on my staff are every bit as dedicated and hard working. Even the most suspicious folks from Bedford-Stuyvesant, once they come in contact with them and see how they are working for me and my district, are won over. One constituent paid one of the girls what he thought was the ultimate compliment. "She's black inside," he said.
"We Americans," I said in my maiden speech late in March, "have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are the good guys, everywhere, in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it's true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.
"I am deeply disappointed at the clear evidence that the number one priority of the new administration is to buy more and more and more weapons of war, to return to the era of the Cold War and to ignore the war we must fight here, the war that is not optional. There is only one way, I believe, to turn these policies around. The Congress must respond to the mandate that the American people have clearly expressed. They have said, 'End this war. Stop the waste. Stop the killing. Do something for our own people first.'..."
I concluded, "We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote 'no' on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war."
In a movie, of course, the House would have given me a standing ovation and members would have crowded around to congratulate me and confess that they had understood for the first time what was happening and were behind me from then on. But the reality of Congress is that no one is usually swayed one way or another by any speech made on the floor. Debate in the House is not discussion, give-and-take to clarify the issues, an attempt to make up other members' minds. It is a succession of monologues in which everyone gets his predetermined stand on the record. Sometimes it is like a poker game, in which each side reveals some of the strength it has, trying to make it just enough to convince a waverer that there is a lot more being held back and he'd better join the winning side. It is seldom that anyone listens to what is being said on the floor of the House.
All that happened was that as I walked out I overheard (probably was meant to overhear) one member say to another, "You know, she's crazy!" Later other colleagues told me that even if I really believed what I had said, it was not a wise political move to say so publicly. After all, the country was at war and responsible Congressional leaders shouldn't say they are not going to support defense bills. Think of the soldiers over there: how do they feel when they read that the country isn't behind them and that some people are talking about not even supporting them even with the material they need to stay alive?
Only a handful of members of Congress dared to defy such logic — at most twenty of us. You can't argue with someone whose premises are completely different from yours, where there is not even an inch of common ground. What I wanted was perfectly plain. It was not to deny support to servicemen in Vietnam, for heaven's sake, but to bring them home at once, to stop forcing them to risk death or disfigurement in the defense of a corrupt puppet dictatorship. What I saw was this country at war with itself, and no one in a position of power paying any attention, our lives deteriorating around us and scarcely anyone trying to find out why and stop it.
In the 91st Congress, I am a sponsor of the perennial Equal Rights Amendment, which has been before every Congress for the last forty years but has never passed the House. It would outlaw any discrimination on the basis of sex. Men and women would be completely equal before the law. But laws will not solve deep-seated problems overnight. Their use is to provide shelter for those who are most abused, and to begin an evolutionary process by compelling the insensitive majority to reexamine its unconscious attitudes.
The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. They must become revolutionaries. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" to the American adage, "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority; too many of them believe the male fiction that they are emotional, illogical, unstable, inept with mechanical things, and lack leadership ability.
The best defense against this slander is the same one blacks have found. While they were ashamed of their color, it was an albatross hanging around their necks. They freed themselves from that dead weight by picking up their blackness and holding it out proudly for all the world to see. They found their own beauty and turned their former shame into their badge of honor. Women should perceive that the negative attitudes they hold toward their own femaleness are the creation of an antifeminist society, just as the black shame at being black was the product of racism. Women should start to replace their negative ideas of the femininity with positive ones affirming their nature more and more strongly.
It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact. The warmth, gentleness, and compassion that are part of the female stereotype are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the values of our world begin to shatter and fall from our grasp. The strength of Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King was a strength of gentleness, understanding, and compassion, with no element of violence in it. It was, in short, a female strength, and that is the kind that often marks the highest type of man.
If we reject our restricted roles, we do not have to reject these values of femaleness. They are enduring values, and we must develop the capacity to hold them and to dispense them to those around us. We must become revolutionaries in the style of Gandhi and King. Then, working toward our own freedom, we can help the others work free from the traps of their stereotypes. In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — antihumanism. The values of life must be maintained against the enemies in every guise. We can do it by confronting people with their own humanity and their own inhumanity whenever we meet them, in the streets, in school, in church, in bars, in the halls of legislatures. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those we have of ourselves and others.
In particular, I am certain that more and more American women must become involved in politics. It could be the salvation of our nation. If there were more women in politics, it would be possible to start cleaning it up. Women I have known in government have seemed to me to be much more apt to act for the sake of a principle or moral purpose. They are not as likely as men to engage in deals, manipulations, and sharp tactics. A larger proportion of women in Congress and every other legislative body would serve as a reminder that the real purpose of politicians is to work for the people.
EQUAL RIGHTS
AMENDMENT (ERA): The ERA was written by suffragist Alice
Paul in 1923 and had been submitted to congress for consideration every year
until it was finally passed in 1972. It failed to pass 2/3 of the states to become
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. [Learn more about the struggle for women's
rights in this helpful
timeline from NOW with Bill Moyers.]
The woman who gets into politics will find that the men who are already there will treat her as the high school counselor treats girls. They see her as someone who is obviously just playing at politics part-time, because, after all, her real place is at home being a wife and mother. I suggested a bright young woman as a candidate in New York City a while ago; she had unlimited potential and with good management and some breaks could become an important person to the city. A political leader rejected her. "Why invest all the time and effort to build up the gal into a household name," he asked me, "when she's pretty sure to drop out of the game to have a couple of kids at just about the time we're ready to run her for mayor?"
Many women have given their lives to political organizations, laboring anonymously in the background while men of far less ability managed and mismanaged the public trust. These women hung back because they knew the men would not give them a chance. They knew their place and stayed in it. The amount of talent that has been lost to our country that way is appalling. I think one of my major uses is as an example to the women of our country, to show them that if a woman has ability, stamina, organizational skill, and a knowledge of the issues she can win public office. And if I can do it, how much more hope should that give to white women, who have only one handicap?
Young people volunteered for Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign in large numbers
One question bothers me a lot: Who's listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It's as if I'm facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say. It seems so clear to me what's wrong with the whole system. Why isn't it clear to most others? The majority of Americans do not want to hear the truth about how their country is ruled and for whom. They do not want to know why their children are rejecting them. They do not dare to have to rethink their whole lives. There is a vacuum of leadership, created partly by the bullets of deranged assassins. But whatever made it, all we see now is the same tired old men who keep trucking down front to give us the same old songs and dances.
There are no new leaders coming along. Where are they? What has happened suddenly? On the national level, on the state level, who commands respect, who is believed by a wide enough cross section of the population to qualify as a leader? I don't see myself as becoming that kind of a leader. My role, I think, is more that of a catalyst. By verbalizing what is wrong, by trying to strip off the masks that make people comfortable in the midst of chaos, perhaps I can help get things moving.
It may be that no one can have any effect on most adults on this society. It may be that the only hope is with the younger generation. If I can relate to them, give them some kind of focus, make them believe that this country can still become the America that it should have been, I could be content. The young may be slandered as "kooks" and "societal misfits" by frightened, demagogic old men, but that will not scare them. They are going to force change. For a while they may be beaten down, but time is on their side, and the spirit of this generation will not be killed. That's why I prefer to go around to campuses and talk with the kids rather than attend political meetings. Politicians tell me I'm wasting my time and energy. "They don't vote," I'm told. Well, I'm not looking for votes. If I were, I would get the same kind of reception that a lot of political figures get when they encounter young people, and I would deserve it.
There are many things I don't agree with some young zealots about. The main one, I suppose, is that I have not given up — and will not give up until I am compelled to — my belief that the basic design of this country is right. What is essential is to make it work, not to sweep it away and substitute — what? Something far worse, perhaps.
Most young people are not yet revolutionary, but politicians and police and other persons in power almost seem to be conspiring to turn them into revolutionaries. Like me, I think, most of them are no more revolutionary than the founders of this country. Their goals are the same— to insure liberty and equality of opportunity, and forever to thwart the tyrannous tendencies of government, which inevitably arise from the arrogance and isolation of men who are securely in power. All they want, if it were not too fashionable for them to say so, is for the American dream to come true, at least in its less materialistic aspects. They want to heal the gaping breach between this country's promises and its performance, a breach that goes back to its founding on a Constitution that denied that black persons and women were full citizens. "Liberty and justice for all" were beautiful words, but the ugly act was that liberty and justice were only for white males. How incredible that it is nearly 200 years since then, and we have still to fight the same old enemies! How is it possible for a man to repeat the pledge of allegiance that contains these words, and then call his fellow citizens "social misfits" when they are simply asking for liberty and justice?
Such schizophrenia goes far back. "All forms of commerce between master and slave are tyranny," intoned Thomas Jefferson, who is rumored to have had several children by black women on his estate. If the story is true, the great democrat was a great hypocrite. Even if it is not true, it has verisimilitude. It could be a perfect metaphor for the way our country was founded and grew, with lofty and pure words on its lips and the basest bigotry hidden in its heart.
The main thing I have in common with the kids is that we are tired of being lied to. What we want is for people to mean what they say. I think they recognize at least that I'm for real. They know most adult are selling something they can't deliver.
Nowhere nearly enough young persons are involved in politics. Too many have been discouraged from participating, for various reasons. Some retired into inactivity after 1968, the year when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed, Eugene McCarthy was ignored by the men who controlled the Democratic convention, the Chicago police attacked them in the streets, and finally, Richard Nixon was elected President. It was a discouraging year for youth, a year when their hopes were trampled into the mud one after another. Not much since then has given young people any hint that the forces of reaction are not firmly in control.
Whenever I speak to student groups, the first question they ask me is "Can't you do something about the war?" The next one usually is "How can you stand to be part of this system?" They mean, "How can you stay in Congress and keep talking about progress, about reconciliation, after all that this society has done to you and your people?" It is the hardest question I could be asked, and the answer is the most important one I can offer. I try to explain to them:
"You can be part of the system without being wedded to it," I say. "You can take part in it without believing that everything it does is right. I don't measure America by its achievement, but by its potential. There are still many things that we haven't tried — that I haven't tried — to change the way our present system operates. I haven't exhausted the opportunities for action in the course I'm pursuing. If I ever do, I cannot at this point imagine what to do next. You want me to talk to you about revolution, but I can't do that. I know what it would bring. My people are twelve percent of the population, at most fifteen percent. I am pragmatic about it: revolution would be suicide."
Campaigning on the "Chisholm Trail" bus
What is the alternative? What can we offer these beautiful, angry, serious, and committed young people? How are we all to be saved? The alternative, of course, is reform — renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation. This is our only hope. If my story has any importance, apart from its curiosity value — the fascination of being a "first" at anything is a durable one — it is, I hope, that I have persisted in seeking this path toward a better world. My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone. When I wrote my campaign slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought," it was an expression of what I believe I was and what I want to be — what I want all candidates for public office to be. We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence — who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation's ideals.
Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans — black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor — who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short.
Excerpted with permission from Unbought and Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm, 1970.
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When the 91st session of the United States Congress convened, I arrived a little late and broke one of the venerable traditions of the House before I was even sworn in as a member. They had just finished calling the roll when I got there, so I rushed onto the floor with my coat and hat on. At least three members told me that I was breaking a House rule. I went back to a cloakroom to leave my hat and coat and returned to take the oath.
There was nothing like the decorum I had experienced the first day in the New York State Assembly. Members were walking around shaking hands and slapping each other on the back, talking without paying any attention to the proceedings. Up behind a raised platform high in the front of the room sat a gaunt, frail-looking old man, Speaker John McCormack. I was shocked by the way the members milled around and set up a din that drowned out both the Speaker and the men who were taking turns giving brief speeches. The speechmakers were talking on an incredible variety of subjects that seemed of no importance to me. Each talked for one minute, then broke off and handed a copy of his speech to a clerk. The next day it would be printed in full in the Congressional Record as if it had really been given and the other members had listened to it.
Only a few of the faces were known to me, but everyone knew who I was. They were cordial, but in many greetings I sensed aloofness. Men kept asking me, "What does your husband think about all this?" They acted as if they were joking, but they meant to imply that, after all, "a woman's place..." I told them all that this was nothing new for Conrad and me; we had met while I was running from one meeting to another; during the early years of our marriage when he worked as a private detective, he was often away from home; then when he became an investigator for the city and was home every night I was away in the state Assembly four days a week, so my being in Washington four days a week would be nothing new.
After several weeks I realized that everyone had been expecting someone else, a noisy, hostile, antiwhite type. Some of my new colleagues admitted it frankly. "You're not the way we thought you'd be," one said. "You're actually charming."
When the campaign ended, I had taken three weeks' vacation in Jamaica, sleeping and eating, trying to gain back a few pounds. The months of campaigning, broken up by a major operation, had drained my vitality. I knew I should be in Washington rounding up a staff, but first I had to have some rest. When I came to Washington in December, I had to do everything at once. I interviewed a string of applicants for my office staff. Many new Congressmen reward their supporters by putting them in staff jobs. I knew from my experience in Albany that this would be a mistake. What I needed was experience, to make up for my own inexperience in Washington, and after that, of course, I needed competence and loyalty. Before long, I decided my staff would be composed of young women, for the most part, from the receptionist to my top assistants. Capitol Hill offices swarm with intelligent, Washington-wise, college-trained — and attractive — young women who do most of the work that makes a Congressman look good, but often get substandard pay for it and have little hope of advancing to a top staff job. The procedure in my office, I decided, would be different. I have never regretted it. Since then, I have also hired some outstanding young men, on my district and Washington staffs, but the majority is still female. More than half are black, but there has been pressure on me from some of my constituents to hire all all-black staff. "If you don't, who will?" I have been asked. What I have done is hire the best applicants I can get. If they are black, so much the better. But the young white women on my staff are every bit as dedicated and hard working. Even the most suspicious folks from Bedford-Stuyvesant, once they come in contact with them and see how they are working for me and my district, are won over. One constituent paid one of the girls what he thought was the ultimate compliment. "She's black inside," he said.
"We Americans," I said in my maiden speech late in March, "have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are the good guys, everywhere, in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it's true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.
"I am deeply disappointed at the clear evidence that the number one priority of the new administration is to buy more and more and more weapons of war, to return to the era of the Cold War and to ignore the war we must fight here, the war that is not optional. There is only one way, I believe, to turn these policies around. The Congress must respond to the mandate that the American people have clearly expressed. They have said, 'End this war. Stop the waste. Stop the killing. Do something for our own people first.'..."
I concluded, "We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote 'no' on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war."
In a movie, of course, the House would have given me a standing ovation and members would have crowded around to congratulate me and confess that they had understood for the first time what was happening and were behind me from then on. But the reality of Congress is that no one is usually swayed one way or another by any speech made on the floor. Debate in the House is not discussion, give-and-take to clarify the issues, an attempt to make up other members' minds. It is a succession of monologues in which everyone gets his predetermined stand on the record. Sometimes it is like a poker game, in which each side reveals some of the strength it has, trying to make it just enough to convince a waverer that there is a lot more being held back and he'd better join the winning side. It is seldom that anyone listens to what is being said on the floor of the House.
All that happened was that as I walked out I overheard (probably was meant to overhear) one member say to another, "You know, she's crazy!" Later other colleagues told me that even if I really believed what I had said, it was not a wise political move to say so publicly. After all, the country was at war and responsible Congressional leaders shouldn't say they are not going to support defense bills. Think of the soldiers over there: how do they feel when they read that the country isn't behind them and that some people are talking about not even supporting them even with the material they need to stay alive?
Only a handful of members of Congress dared to defy such logic — at most twenty of us. You can't argue with someone whose premises are completely different from yours, where there is not even an inch of common ground. What I wanted was perfectly plain. It was not to deny support to servicemen in Vietnam, for heaven's sake, but to bring them home at once, to stop forcing them to risk death or disfigurement in the defense of a corrupt puppet dictatorship. What I saw was this country at war with itself, and no one in a position of power paying any attention, our lives deteriorating around us and scarcely anyone trying to find out why and stop it.
In the 91st Congress, I am a sponsor of the perennial Equal Rights Amendment, which has been before every Congress for the last forty years but has never passed the House. It would outlaw any discrimination on the basis of sex. Men and women would be completely equal before the law. But laws will not solve deep-seated problems overnight. Their use is to provide shelter for those who are most abused, and to begin an evolutionary process by compelling the insensitive majority to reexamine its unconscious attitudes.
The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. They must become revolutionaries. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" to the American adage, "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority; too many of them believe the male fiction that they are emotional, illogical, unstable, inept with mechanical things, and lack leadership ability.
The best defense against this slander is the same one blacks have found. While they were ashamed of their color, it was an albatross hanging around their necks. They freed themselves from that dead weight by picking up their blackness and holding it out proudly for all the world to see. They found their own beauty and turned their former shame into their badge of honor. Women should perceive that the negative attitudes they hold toward their own femaleness are the creation of an antifeminist society, just as the black shame at being black was the product of racism. Women should start to replace their negative ideas of the femininity with positive ones affirming their nature more and more strongly.
It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact. The warmth, gentleness, and compassion that are part of the female stereotype are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the values of our world begin to shatter and fall from our grasp. The strength of Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King was a strength of gentleness, understanding, and compassion, with no element of violence in it. It was, in short, a female strength, and that is the kind that often marks the highest type of man.
If we reject our restricted roles, we do not have to reject these values of femaleness. They are enduring values, and we must develop the capacity to hold them and to dispense them to those around us. We must become revolutionaries in the style of Gandhi and King. Then, working toward our own freedom, we can help the others work free from the traps of their stereotypes. In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — antihumanism. The values of life must be maintained against the enemies in every guise. We can do it by confronting people with their own humanity and their own inhumanity whenever we meet them, in the streets, in school, in church, in bars, in the halls of legislatures. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those we have of ourselves and others.
In particular, I am certain that more and more American women must become involved in politics. It could be the salvation of our nation. If there were more women in politics, it would be possible to start cleaning it up. Women I have known in government have seemed to me to be much more apt to act for the sake of a principle or moral purpose. They are not as likely as men to engage in deals, manipulations, and sharp tactics. A larger proportion of women in Congress and every other legislative body would serve as a reminder that the real purpose of politicians is to work for the people.
EQUAL RIGHTS
AMENDMENT (ERA): The ERA was written by suffragist Alice
Paul in 1923 and had been submitted to congress for consideration every year
until it was finally passed in 1972. It failed to pass 2/3 of the states to become
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. [Learn more about the struggle for women's
rights in this helpful
timeline from NOW with Bill Moyers.]
The woman who gets into politics will find that the men who are already there will treat her as the high school counselor treats girls. They see her as someone who is obviously just playing at politics part-time, because, after all, her real place is at home being a wife and mother. I suggested a bright young woman as a candidate in New York City a while ago; she had unlimited potential and with good management and some breaks could become an important person to the city. A political leader rejected her. "Why invest all the time and effort to build up the gal into a household name," he asked me, "when she's pretty sure to drop out of the game to have a couple of kids at just about the time we're ready to run her for mayor?"
Many women have given their lives to political organizations, laboring anonymously in the background while men of far less ability managed and mismanaged the public trust. These women hung back because they knew the men would not give them a chance. They knew their place and stayed in it. The amount of talent that has been lost to our country that way is appalling. I think one of my major uses is as an example to the women of our country, to show them that if a woman has ability, stamina, organizational skill, and a knowledge of the issues she can win public office. And if I can do it, how much more hope should that give to white women, who have only one handicap?
Young people volunteered for Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign in large numbers
One question bothers me a lot: Who's listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It's as if I'm facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say. It seems so clear to me what's wrong with the whole system. Why isn't it clear to most others? The majority of Americans do not want to hear the truth about how their country is ruled and for whom. They do not want to know why their children are rejecting them. They do not dare to have to rethink their whole lives. There is a vacuum of leadership, created partly by the bullets of deranged assassins. But whatever made it, all we see now is the same tired old men who keep trucking down front to give us the same old songs and dances.
There are no new leaders coming along. Where are they? What has happened suddenly? On the national level, on the state level, who commands respect, who is believed by a wide enough cross section of the population to qualify as a leader? I don't see myself as becoming that kind of a leader. My role, I think, is more that of a catalyst. By verbalizing what is wrong, by trying to strip off the masks that make people comfortable in the midst of chaos, perhaps I can help get things moving.
It may be that no one can have any effect on most adults on this society. It may be that the only hope is with the younger generation. If I can relate to them, give them some kind of focus, make them believe that this country can still become the America that it should have been, I could be content. The young may be slandered as "kooks" and "societal misfits" by frightened, demagogic old men, but that will not scare them. They are going to force change. For a while they may be beaten down, but time is on their side, and the spirit of this generation will not be killed. That's why I prefer to go around to campuses and talk with the kids rather than attend political meetings. Politicians tell me I'm wasting my time and energy. "They don't vote," I'm told. Well, I'm not looking for votes. If I were, I would get the same kind of reception that a lot of political figures get when they encounter young people, and I would deserve it.
There are many things I don't agree with some young zealots about. The main one, I suppose, is that I have not given up — and will not give up until I am compelled to — my belief that the basic design of this country is right. What is essential is to make it work, not to sweep it away and substitute — what? Something far worse, perhaps.
Most young people are not yet revolutionary, but politicians and police and other persons in power almost seem to be conspiring to turn them into revolutionaries. Like me, I think, most of them are no more revolutionary than the founders of this country. Their goals are the same— to insure liberty and equality of opportunity, and forever to thwart the tyrannous tendencies of government, which inevitably arise from the arrogance and isolation of men who are securely in power. All they want, if it were not too fashionable for them to say so, is for the American dream to come true, at least in its less materialistic aspects. They want to heal the gaping breach between this country's promises and its performance, a breach that goes back to its founding on a Constitution that denied that black persons and women were full citizens. "Liberty and justice for all" were beautiful words, but the ugly act was that liberty and justice were only for white males. How incredible that it is nearly 200 years since then, and we have still to fight the same old enemies! How is it possible for a man to repeat the pledge of allegiance that contains these words, and then call his fellow citizens "social misfits" when they are simply asking for liberty and justice?
Such schizophrenia goes far back. "All forms of commerce between master and slave are tyranny," intoned Thomas Jefferson, who is rumored to have had several children by black women on his estate. If the story is true, the great democrat was a great hypocrite. Even if it is not true, it has verisimilitude. It could be a perfect metaphor for the way our country was founded and grew, with lofty and pure words on its lips and the basest bigotry hidden in its heart.
The main thing I have in common with the kids is that we are tired of being lied to. What we want is for people to mean what they say. I think they recognize at least that I'm for real. They know most adult are selling something they can't deliver.
Nowhere nearly enough young persons are involved in politics. Too many have been discouraged from participating, for various reasons. Some retired into inactivity after 1968, the year when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed, Eugene McCarthy was ignored by the men who controlled the Democratic convention, the Chicago police attacked them in the streets, and finally, Richard Nixon was elected President. It was a discouraging year for youth, a year when their hopes were trampled into the mud one after another. Not much since then has given young people any hint that the forces of reaction are not firmly in control.
Whenever I speak to student groups, the first question they ask me is "Can't you do something about the war?" The next one usually is "How can you stand to be part of this system?" They mean, "How can you stay in Congress and keep talking about progress, about reconciliation, after all that this society has done to you and your people?" It is the hardest question I could be asked, and the answer is the most important one I can offer. I try to explain to them:
"You can be part of the system without being wedded to it," I say. "You can take part in it without believing that everything it does is right. I don't measure America by its achievement, but by its potential. There are still many things that we haven't tried — that I haven't tried — to change the way our present system operates. I haven't exhausted the opportunities for action in the course I'm pursuing. If I ever do, I cannot at this point imagine what to do next. You want me to talk to you about revolution, but I can't do that. I know what it would bring. My people are twelve percent of the population, at most fifteen percent. I am pragmatic about it: revolution would be suicide."
Campaigning on the "Chisholm Trail" bus
What is the alternative? What can we offer these beautiful, angry, serious, and committed young people? How are we all to be saved? The alternative, of course, is reform — renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation. This is our only hope. If my story has any importance, apart from its curiosity value — the fascination of being a "first" at anything is a durable one — it is, I hope, that I have persisted in seeking this path toward a better world. My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone. When I wrote my campaign slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought," it was an expression of what I believe I was and what I want to be — what I want all candidates for public office to be. We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence — who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation's ideals.
Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans — black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor — who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short.
Excerpted with permission from Unbought and Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm, 1970.
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When the 91st session of the United States Congress convened, I arrived a little late and broke one of the venerable traditions of the House before I was even sworn in as a member. They had just finished calling the roll when I got there, so I rushed onto the floor with my coat and hat on. At least three members told me that I was breaking a House rule. I went back to a cloakroom to leave my hat and coat and returned to take the oath.
There was nothing like the decorum I had experienced the first day in the New York State Assembly. Members were walking around shaking hands and slapping each other on the back, talking without paying any attention to the proceedings. Up behind a raised platform high in the front of the room sat a gaunt, frail-looking old man, Speaker John McCormack. I was shocked by the way the members milled around and set up a din that drowned out both the Speaker and the men who were taking turns giving brief speeches. The speechmakers were talking on an incredible variety of subjects that seemed of no importance to me. Each talked for one minute, then broke off and handed a copy of his speech to a clerk. The next day it would be printed in full in the Congressional Record as if it had really been given and the other members had listened to it.
Only a few of the faces were known to me, but everyone knew who I was. They were cordial, but in many greetings I sensed aloofness. Men kept asking me, "What does your husband think about all this?" They acted as if they were joking, but they meant to imply that, after all, "a woman's place..." I told them all that this was nothing new for Conrad and me; we had met while I was running from one meeting to another; during the early years of our marriage when he worked as a private detective, he was often away from home; then when he became an investigator for the city and was home every night I was away in the state Assembly four days a week, so my being in Washington four days a week would be nothing new.
After several weeks I realized that everyone had been expecting someone else, a noisy, hostile, antiwhite type. Some of my new colleagues admitted it frankly. "You're not the way we thought you'd be," one said. "You're actually charming."
When the campaign ended, I had taken three weeks' vacation in Jamaica, sleeping and eating, trying to gain back a few pounds. The months of campaigning, broken up by a major operation, had drained my vitality. I knew I should be in Washington rounding up a staff, but first I had to have some rest. When I came to Washington in December, I had to do everything at once. I interviewed a string of applicants for my office staff. Many new Congressmen reward their supporters by putting them in staff jobs. I knew from my experience in Albany that this would be a mistake. What I needed was experience, to make up for my own inexperience in Washington, and after that, of course, I needed competence and loyalty. Before long, I decided my staff would be composed of young women, for the most part, from the receptionist to my top assistants. Capitol Hill offices swarm with intelligent, Washington-wise, college-trained — and attractive — young women who do most of the work that makes a Congressman look good, but often get substandard pay for it and have little hope of advancing to a top staff job. The procedure in my office, I decided, would be different. I have never regretted it. Since then, I have also hired some outstanding young men, on my district and Washington staffs, but the majority is still female. More than half are black, but there has been pressure on me from some of my constituents to hire all all-black staff. "If you don't, who will?" I have been asked. What I have done is hire the best applicants I can get. If they are black, so much the better. But the young white women on my staff are every bit as dedicated and hard working. Even the most suspicious folks from Bedford-Stuyvesant, once they come in contact with them and see how they are working for me and my district, are won over. One constituent paid one of the girls what he thought was the ultimate compliment. "She's black inside," he said.
"We Americans," I said in my maiden speech late in March, "have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are the good guys, everywhere, in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it's true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.
"I am deeply disappointed at the clear evidence that the number one priority of the new administration is to buy more and more and more weapons of war, to return to the era of the Cold War and to ignore the war we must fight here, the war that is not optional. There is only one way, I believe, to turn these policies around. The Congress must respond to the mandate that the American people have clearly expressed. They have said, 'End this war. Stop the waste. Stop the killing. Do something for our own people first.'..."
I concluded, "We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote 'no' on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war."
In a movie, of course, the House would have given me a standing ovation and members would have crowded around to congratulate me and confess that they had understood for the first time what was happening and were behind me from then on. But the reality of Congress is that no one is usually swayed one way or another by any speech made on the floor. Debate in the House is not discussion, give-and-take to clarify the issues, an attempt to make up other members' minds. It is a succession of monologues in which everyone gets his predetermined stand on the record. Sometimes it is like a poker game, in which each side reveals some of the strength it has, trying to make it just enough to convince a waverer that there is a lot more being held back and he'd better join the winning side. It is seldom that anyone listens to what is being said on the floor of the House.
All that happened was that as I walked out I overheard (probably was meant to overhear) one member say to another, "You know, she's crazy!" Later other colleagues told me that even if I really believed what I had said, it was not a wise political move to say so publicly. After all, the country was at war and responsible Congressional leaders shouldn't say they are not going to support defense bills. Think of the soldiers over there: how do they feel when they read that the country isn't behind them and that some people are talking about not even supporting them even with the material they need to stay alive?
Only a handful of members of Congress dared to defy such logic — at most twenty of us. You can't argue with someone whose premises are completely different from yours, where there is not even an inch of common ground. What I wanted was perfectly plain. It was not to deny support to servicemen in Vietnam, for heaven's sake, but to bring them home at once, to stop forcing them to risk death or disfigurement in the defense of a corrupt puppet dictatorship. What I saw was this country at war with itself, and no one in a position of power paying any attention, our lives deteriorating around us and scarcely anyone trying to find out why and stop it.
In the 91st Congress, I am a sponsor of the perennial Equal Rights Amendment, which has been before every Congress for the last forty years but has never passed the House. It would outlaw any discrimination on the basis of sex. Men and women would be completely equal before the law. But laws will not solve deep-seated problems overnight. Their use is to provide shelter for those who are most abused, and to begin an evolutionary process by compelling the insensitive majority to reexamine its unconscious attitudes.
The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. They must become revolutionaries. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" to the American adage, "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority; too many of them believe the male fiction that they are emotional, illogical, unstable, inept with mechanical things, and lack leadership ability.
The best defense against this slander is the same one blacks have found. While they were ashamed of their color, it was an albatross hanging around their necks. They freed themselves from that dead weight by picking up their blackness and holding it out proudly for all the world to see. They found their own beauty and turned their former shame into their badge of honor. Women should perceive that the negative attitudes they hold toward their own femaleness are the creation of an antifeminist society, just as the black shame at being black was the product of racism. Women should start to replace their negative ideas of the femininity with positive ones affirming their nature more and more strongly.
It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact. The warmth, gentleness, and compassion that are part of the female stereotype are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the values of our world begin to shatter and fall from our grasp. The strength of Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King was a strength of gentleness, understanding, and compassion, with no element of violence in it. It was, in short, a female strength, and that is the kind that often marks the highest type of man.
If we reject our restricted roles, we do not have to reject these values of femaleness. They are enduring values, and we must develop the capacity to hold them and to dispense them to those around us. We must become revolutionaries in the style of Gandhi and King. Then, working toward our own freedom, we can help the others work free from the traps of their stereotypes. In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — antihumanism. The values of life must be maintained against the enemies in every guise. We can do it by confronting people with their own humanity and their own inhumanity whenever we meet them, in the streets, in school, in church, in bars, in the halls of legislatures. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those we have of ourselves and others.
In particular, I am certain that more and more American women must become involved in politics. It could be the salvation of our nation. If there were more women in politics, it would be possible to start cleaning it up. Women I have known in government have seemed to me to be much more apt to act for the sake of a principle or moral purpose. They are not as likely as men to engage in deals, manipulations, and sharp tactics. A larger proportion of women in Congress and every other legislative body would serve as a reminder that the real purpose of politicians is to work for the people.
EQUAL RIGHTS
AMENDMENT (ERA): The ERA was written by suffragist Alice
Paul in 1923 and had been submitted to congress for consideration every year
until it was finally passed in 1972. It failed to pass 2/3 of the states to become
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. [Learn more about the struggle for women's
rights in this helpful
timeline from NOW with Bill Moyers.]
The woman who gets into politics will find that the men who are already there will treat her as the high school counselor treats girls. They see her as someone who is obviously just playing at politics part-time, because, after all, her real place is at home being a wife and mother. I suggested a bright young woman as a candidate in New York City a while ago; she had unlimited potential and with good management and some breaks could become an important person to the city. A political leader rejected her. "Why invest all the time and effort to build up the gal into a household name," he asked me, "when she's pretty sure to drop out of the game to have a couple of kids at just about the time we're ready to run her for mayor?"
Many women have given their lives to political organizations, laboring anonymously in the background while men of far less ability managed and mismanaged the public trust. These women hung back because they knew the men would not give them a chance. They knew their place and stayed in it. The amount of talent that has been lost to our country that way is appalling. I think one of my major uses is as an example to the women of our country, to show them that if a woman has ability, stamina, organizational skill, and a knowledge of the issues she can win public office. And if I can do it, how much more hope should that give to white women, who have only one handicap?
Young people volunteered for Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign in large numbers
One question bothers me a lot: Who's listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It's as if I'm facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say. It seems so clear to me what's wrong with the whole system. Why isn't it clear to most others? The majority of Americans do not want to hear the truth about how their country is ruled and for whom. They do not want to know why their children are rejecting them. They do not dare to have to rethink their whole lives. There is a vacuum of leadership, created partly by the bullets of deranged assassins. But whatever made it, all we see now is the same tired old men who keep trucking down front to give us the same old songs and dances.
There are no new leaders coming along. Where are they? What has happened suddenly? On the national level, on the state level, who commands respect, who is believed by a wide enough cross section of the population to qualify as a leader? I don't see myself as becoming that kind of a leader. My role, I think, is more that of a catalyst. By verbalizing what is wrong, by trying to strip off the masks that make people comfortable in the midst of chaos, perhaps I can help get things moving.
It may be that no one can have any effect on most adults on this society. It may be that the only hope is with the younger generation. If I can relate to them, give them some kind of focus, make them believe that this country can still become the America that it should have been, I could be content. The young may be slandered as "kooks" and "societal misfits" by frightened, demagogic old men, but that will not scare them. They are going to force change. For a while they may be beaten down, but time is on their side, and the spirit of this generation will not be killed. That's why I prefer to go around to campuses and talk with the kids rather than attend political meetings. Politicians tell me I'm wasting my time and energy. "They don't vote," I'm told. Well, I'm not looking for votes. If I were, I would get the same kind of reception that a lot of political figures get when they encounter young people, and I would deserve it.
There are many things I don't agree with some young zealots about. The main one, I suppose, is that I have not given up — and will not give up until I am compelled to — my belief that the basic design of this country is right. What is essential is to make it work, not to sweep it away and substitute — what? Something far worse, perhaps.
Most young people are not yet revolutionary, but politicians and police and other persons in power almost seem to be conspiring to turn them into revolutionaries. Like me, I think, most of them are no more revolutionary than the founders of this country. Their goals are the same— to insure liberty and equality of opportunity, and forever to thwart the tyrannous tendencies of government, which inevitably arise from the arrogance and isolation of men who are securely in power. All they want, if it were not too fashionable for them to say so, is for the American dream to come true, at least in its less materialistic aspects. They want to heal the gaping breach between this country's promises and its performance, a breach that goes back to its founding on a Constitution that denied that black persons and women were full citizens. "Liberty and justice for all" were beautiful words, but the ugly act was that liberty and justice were only for white males. How incredible that it is nearly 200 years since then, and we have still to fight the same old enemies! How is it possible for a man to repeat the pledge of allegiance that contains these words, and then call his fellow citizens "social misfits" when they are simply asking for liberty and justice?
Such schizophrenia goes far back. "All forms of commerce between master and slave are tyranny," intoned Thomas Jefferson, who is rumored to have had several children by black women on his estate. If the story is true, the great democrat was a great hypocrite. Even if it is not true, it has verisimilitude. It could be a perfect metaphor for the way our country was founded and grew, with lofty and pure words on its lips and the basest bigotry hidden in its heart.
The main thing I have in common with the kids is that we are tired of being lied to. What we want is for people to mean what they say. I think they recognize at least that I'm for real. They know most adult are selling something they can't deliver.
Nowhere nearly enough young persons are involved in politics. Too many have been discouraged from participating, for various reasons. Some retired into inactivity after 1968, the year when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed, Eugene McCarthy was ignored by the men who controlled the Democratic convention, the Chicago police attacked them in the streets, and finally, Richard Nixon was elected President. It was a discouraging year for youth, a year when their hopes were trampled into the mud one after another. Not much since then has given young people any hint that the forces of reaction are not firmly in control.
Whenever I speak to student groups, the first question they ask me is "Can't you do something about the war?" The next one usually is "How can you stand to be part of this system?" They mean, "How can you stay in Congress and keep talking about progress, about reconciliation, after all that this society has done to you and your people?" It is the hardest question I could be asked, and the answer is the most important one I can offer. I try to explain to them:
"You can be part of the system without being wedded to it," I say. "You can take part in it without believing that everything it does is right. I don't measure America by its achievement, but by its potential. There are still many things that we haven't tried — that I haven't tried — to change the way our present system operates. I haven't exhausted the opportunities for action in the course I'm pursuing. If I ever do, I cannot at this point imagine what to do next. You want me to talk to you about revolution, but I can't do that. I know what it would bring. My people are twelve percent of the population, at most fifteen percent. I am pragmatic about it: revolution would be suicide."
Campaigning on the "Chisholm Trail" bus
What is the alternative? What can we offer these beautiful, angry, serious, and committed young people? How are we all to be saved? The alternative, of course, is reform — renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation. This is our only hope. If my story has any importance, apart from its curiosity value — the fascination of being a "first" at anything is a durable one — it is, I hope, that I have persisted in seeking this path toward a better world. My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone. When I wrote my campaign slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought," it was an expression of what I believe I was and what I want to be — what I want all candidates for public office to be. We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence — who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation's ideals.
Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans — black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor — who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short.
Excerpted with permission from Unbought and Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm, 1970.
When the 91st session of the United States Congress convened, I arrived a little late and broke one of the venerable traditions of the House before I was even sworn in as a member. They had just finished calling the roll when I got there, so I rushed onto the floor with my coat and hat on. At least three members told me that I was breaking a House rule. I went back to a cloakroom to leave my hat and coat and returned to take the oath.
There was nothing like the decorum I had experienced the first day in the New York State Assembly. Members were walking around shaking hands and slapping each other on the back, talking without paying any attention to the proceedings. Up behind a raised platform high in the front of the room sat a gaunt, frail-looking old man, Speaker John McCormack. I was shocked by the way the members milled around and set up a din that drowned out both the Speaker and the men who were taking turns giving brief speeches. The speechmakers were talking on an incredible variety of subjects that seemed of no importance to me. Each talked for one minute, then broke off and handed a copy of his speech to a clerk. The next day it would be printed in full in the Congressional Record as if it had really been given and the other members had listened to it.
Only a few of the faces were known to me, but everyone knew who I was. They were cordial, but in many greetings I sensed aloofness. Men kept asking me, "What does your husband think about all this?" They acted as if they were joking, but they meant to imply that, after all, "a woman's place..." I told them all that this was nothing new for Conrad and me; we had met while I was running from one meeting to another; during the early years of our marriage when he worked as a private detective, he was often away from home; then when he became an investigator for the city and was home every night I was away in the state Assembly four days a week, so my being in Washington four days a week would be nothing new.
After several weeks I realized that everyone had been expecting someone else, a noisy, hostile, antiwhite type. Some of my new colleagues admitted it frankly. "You're not the way we thought you'd be," one said. "You're actually charming."
When the campaign ended, I had taken three weeks' vacation in Jamaica, sleeping and eating, trying to gain back a few pounds. The months of campaigning, broken up by a major operation, had drained my vitality. I knew I should be in Washington rounding up a staff, but first I had to have some rest. When I came to Washington in December, I had to do everything at once. I interviewed a string of applicants for my office staff. Many new Congressmen reward their supporters by putting them in staff jobs. I knew from my experience in Albany that this would be a mistake. What I needed was experience, to make up for my own inexperience in Washington, and after that, of course, I needed competence and loyalty. Before long, I decided my staff would be composed of young women, for the most part, from the receptionist to my top assistants. Capitol Hill offices swarm with intelligent, Washington-wise, college-trained — and attractive — young women who do most of the work that makes a Congressman look good, but often get substandard pay for it and have little hope of advancing to a top staff job. The procedure in my office, I decided, would be different. I have never regretted it. Since then, I have also hired some outstanding young men, on my district and Washington staffs, but the majority is still female. More than half are black, but there has been pressure on me from some of my constituents to hire all all-black staff. "If you don't, who will?" I have been asked. What I have done is hire the best applicants I can get. If they are black, so much the better. But the young white women on my staff are every bit as dedicated and hard working. Even the most suspicious folks from Bedford-Stuyvesant, once they come in contact with them and see how they are working for me and my district, are won over. One constituent paid one of the girls what he thought was the ultimate compliment. "She's black inside," he said.
"We Americans," I said in my maiden speech late in March, "have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are the good guys, everywhere, in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it's true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.
"I am deeply disappointed at the clear evidence that the number one priority of the new administration is to buy more and more and more weapons of war, to return to the era of the Cold War and to ignore the war we must fight here, the war that is not optional. There is only one way, I believe, to turn these policies around. The Congress must respond to the mandate that the American people have clearly expressed. They have said, 'End this war. Stop the waste. Stop the killing. Do something for our own people first.'..."
I concluded, "We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote 'no' on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war."
In a movie, of course, the House would have given me a standing ovation and members would have crowded around to congratulate me and confess that they had understood for the first time what was happening and were behind me from then on. But the reality of Congress is that no one is usually swayed one way or another by any speech made on the floor. Debate in the House is not discussion, give-and-take to clarify the issues, an attempt to make up other members' minds. It is a succession of monologues in which everyone gets his predetermined stand on the record. Sometimes it is like a poker game, in which each side reveals some of the strength it has, trying to make it just enough to convince a waverer that there is a lot more being held back and he'd better join the winning side. It is seldom that anyone listens to what is being said on the floor of the House.
All that happened was that as I walked out I overheard (probably was meant to overhear) one member say to another, "You know, she's crazy!" Later other colleagues told me that even if I really believed what I had said, it was not a wise political move to say so publicly. After all, the country was at war and responsible Congressional leaders shouldn't say they are not going to support defense bills. Think of the soldiers over there: how do they feel when they read that the country isn't behind them and that some people are talking about not even supporting them even with the material they need to stay alive?
Only a handful of members of Congress dared to defy such logic — at most twenty of us. You can't argue with someone whose premises are completely different from yours, where there is not even an inch of common ground. What I wanted was perfectly plain. It was not to deny support to servicemen in Vietnam, for heaven's sake, but to bring them home at once, to stop forcing them to risk death or disfigurement in the defense of a corrupt puppet dictatorship. What I saw was this country at war with itself, and no one in a position of power paying any attention, our lives deteriorating around us and scarcely anyone trying to find out why and stop it.
In the 91st Congress, I am a sponsor of the perennial Equal Rights Amendment, which has been before every Congress for the last forty years but has never passed the House. It would outlaw any discrimination on the basis of sex. Men and women would be completely equal before the law. But laws will not solve deep-seated problems overnight. Their use is to provide shelter for those who are most abused, and to begin an evolutionary process by compelling the insensitive majority to reexamine its unconscious attitudes.
The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. They must become revolutionaries. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" to the American adage, "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority; too many of them believe the male fiction that they are emotional, illogical, unstable, inept with mechanical things, and lack leadership ability.
The best defense against this slander is the same one blacks have found. While they were ashamed of their color, it was an albatross hanging around their necks. They freed themselves from that dead weight by picking up their blackness and holding it out proudly for all the world to see. They found their own beauty and turned their former shame into their badge of honor. Women should perceive that the negative attitudes they hold toward their own femaleness are the creation of an antifeminist society, just as the black shame at being black was the product of racism. Women should start to replace their negative ideas of the femininity with positive ones affirming their nature more and more strongly.
It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact. The warmth, gentleness, and compassion that are part of the female stereotype are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the values of our world begin to shatter and fall from our grasp. The strength of Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King was a strength of gentleness, understanding, and compassion, with no element of violence in it. It was, in short, a female strength, and that is the kind that often marks the highest type of man.
If we reject our restricted roles, we do not have to reject these values of femaleness. They are enduring values, and we must develop the capacity to hold them and to dispense them to those around us. We must become revolutionaries in the style of Gandhi and King. Then, working toward our own freedom, we can help the others work free from the traps of their stereotypes. In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — antihumanism. The values of life must be maintained against the enemies in every guise. We can do it by confronting people with their own humanity and their own inhumanity whenever we meet them, in the streets, in school, in church, in bars, in the halls of legislatures. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those we have of ourselves and others.
In particular, I am certain that more and more American women must become involved in politics. It could be the salvation of our nation. If there were more women in politics, it would be possible to start cleaning it up. Women I have known in government have seemed to me to be much more apt to act for the sake of a principle or moral purpose. They are not as likely as men to engage in deals, manipulations, and sharp tactics. A larger proportion of women in Congress and every other legislative body would serve as a reminder that the real purpose of politicians is to work for the people.
EQUAL RIGHTS
AMENDMENT (ERA): The ERA was written by suffragist Alice
Paul in 1923 and had been submitted to congress for consideration every year
until it was finally passed in 1972. It failed to pass 2/3 of the states to become
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. [Learn more about the struggle for women's
rights in this helpful
timeline from NOW with Bill Moyers.]
The woman who gets into politics will find that the men who are already there will treat her as the high school counselor treats girls. They see her as someone who is obviously just playing at politics part-time, because, after all, her real place is at home being a wife and mother. I suggested a bright young woman as a candidate in New York City a while ago; she had unlimited potential and with good management and some breaks could become an important person to the city. A political leader rejected her. "Why invest all the time and effort to build up the gal into a household name," he asked me, "when she's pretty sure to drop out of the game to have a couple of kids at just about the time we're ready to run her for mayor?"
Many women have given their lives to political organizations, laboring anonymously in the background while men of far less ability managed and mismanaged the public trust. These women hung back because they knew the men would not give them a chance. They knew their place and stayed in it. The amount of talent that has been lost to our country that way is appalling. I think one of my major uses is as an example to the women of our country, to show them that if a woman has ability, stamina, organizational skill, and a knowledge of the issues she can win public office. And if I can do it, how much more hope should that give to white women, who have only one handicap?
Young people volunteered for Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign in large numbers
One question bothers me a lot: Who's listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It's as if I'm facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say. It seems so clear to me what's wrong with the whole system. Why isn't it clear to most others? The majority of Americans do not want to hear the truth about how their country is ruled and for whom. They do not want to know why their children are rejecting them. They do not dare to have to rethink their whole lives. There is a vacuum of leadership, created partly by the bullets of deranged assassins. But whatever made it, all we see now is the same tired old men who keep trucking down front to give us the same old songs and dances.
There are no new leaders coming along. Where are they? What has happened suddenly? On the national level, on the state level, who commands respect, who is believed by a wide enough cross section of the population to qualify as a leader? I don't see myself as becoming that kind of a leader. My role, I think, is more that of a catalyst. By verbalizing what is wrong, by trying to strip off the masks that make people comfortable in the midst of chaos, perhaps I can help get things moving.
It may be that no one can have any effect on most adults on this society. It may be that the only hope is with the younger generation. If I can relate to them, give them some kind of focus, make them believe that this country can still become the America that it should have been, I could be content. The young may be slandered as "kooks" and "societal misfits" by frightened, demagogic old men, but that will not scare them. They are going to force change. For a while they may be beaten down, but time is on their side, and the spirit of this generation will not be killed. That's why I prefer to go around to campuses and talk with the kids rather than attend political meetings. Politicians tell me I'm wasting my time and energy. "They don't vote," I'm told. Well, I'm not looking for votes. If I were, I would get the same kind of reception that a lot of political figures get when they encounter young people, and I would deserve it.
There are many things I don't agree with some young zealots about. The main one, I suppose, is that I have not given up — and will not give up until I am compelled to — my belief that the basic design of this country is right. What is essential is to make it work, not to sweep it away and substitute — what? Something far worse, perhaps.
Most young people are not yet revolutionary, but politicians and police and other persons in power almost seem to be conspiring to turn them into revolutionaries. Like me, I think, most of them are no more revolutionary than the founders of this country. Their goals are the same— to insure liberty and equality of opportunity, and forever to thwart the tyrannous tendencies of government, which inevitably arise from the arrogance and isolation of men who are securely in power. All they want, if it were not too fashionable for them to say so, is for the American dream to come true, at least in its less materialistic aspects. They want to heal the gaping breach between this country's promises and its performance, a breach that goes back to its founding on a Constitution that denied that black persons and women were full citizens. "Liberty and justice for all" were beautiful words, but the ugly act was that liberty and justice were only for white males. How incredible that it is nearly 200 years since then, and we have still to fight the same old enemies! How is it possible for a man to repeat the pledge of allegiance that contains these words, and then call his fellow citizens "social misfits" when they are simply asking for liberty and justice?
Such schizophrenia goes far back. "All forms of commerce between master and slave are tyranny," intoned Thomas Jefferson, who is rumored to have had several children by black women on his estate. If the story is true, the great democrat was a great hypocrite. Even if it is not true, it has verisimilitude. It could be a perfect metaphor for the way our country was founded and grew, with lofty and pure words on its lips and the basest bigotry hidden in its heart.
The main thing I have in common with the kids is that we are tired of being lied to. What we want is for people to mean what they say. I think they recognize at least that I'm for real. They know most adult are selling something they can't deliver.
Nowhere nearly enough young persons are involved in politics. Too many have been discouraged from participating, for various reasons. Some retired into inactivity after 1968, the year when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed, Eugene McCarthy was ignored by the men who controlled the Democratic convention, the Chicago police attacked them in the streets, and finally, Richard Nixon was elected President. It was a discouraging year for youth, a year when their hopes were trampled into the mud one after another. Not much since then has given young people any hint that the forces of reaction are not firmly in control.
Whenever I speak to student groups, the first question they ask me is "Can't you do something about the war?" The next one usually is "How can you stand to be part of this system?" They mean, "How can you stay in Congress and keep talking about progress, about reconciliation, after all that this society has done to you and your people?" It is the hardest question I could be asked, and the answer is the most important one I can offer. I try to explain to them:
"You can be part of the system without being wedded to it," I say. "You can take part in it without believing that everything it does is right. I don't measure America by its achievement, but by its potential. There are still many things that we haven't tried — that I haven't tried — to change the way our present system operates. I haven't exhausted the opportunities for action in the course I'm pursuing. If I ever do, I cannot at this point imagine what to do next. You want me to talk to you about revolution, but I can't do that. I know what it would bring. My people are twelve percent of the population, at most fifteen percent. I am pragmatic about it: revolution would be suicide."
Campaigning on the "Chisholm Trail" bus
What is the alternative? What can we offer these beautiful, angry, serious, and committed young people? How are we all to be saved? The alternative, of course, is reform — renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation. This is our only hope. If my story has any importance, apart from its curiosity value — the fascination of being a "first" at anything is a durable one — it is, I hope, that I have persisted in seeking this path toward a better world. My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone. When I wrote my campaign slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought," it was an expression of what I believe I was and what I want to be — what I want all candidates for public office to be. We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence — who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation's ideals.
Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans — black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor — who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short.
Excerpted with permission from Unbought and Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm, 1970.
In the 91st Congress, I am a sponsor of the perennial Equal Rights Amendment, which has been before every Congress for the last forty years but has never passed the House. It would outlaw any discrimination on the basis of sex. Men and women would be completely equal before the law. But laws will not solve deep-seated problems overnight. Their use is to provide shelter for those who are most abused, and to begin an evolutionary process by compelling the insensitive majority to reexamine its unconscious attitudes.
The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. They must become revolutionaries. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" to the American adage, "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority; too many of them believe the male fiction that they are emotional, illogical, unstable, inept with mechanical things, and lack leadership ability.
It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact. The warmth, gentleness, and compassion that are part of the female stereotype are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the values of our world begin to shatter and fall from our grasp. The strength of Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King was a strength of gentleness, understanding, and compassion, with no element of violence in it. It was, in short, a female strength, and that is the kind that often marks the highest type of man.
In particular, I am certain that more and more American women must become involved in politics. It could be the salvation of our nation. If there were more women in politics, it would be possible to start cleaning it up. Women I have known in government have seemed to me to be much more apt to act for the sake of a principle or moral purpose. They are not as likely as men to engage in deals, manipulations, and sharp tactics. A larger proportion of women in Congress and every other legislative body would serve as a reminder that the real purpose of politicians is to work for the people.
