Good morning, it's Friday, March 3, 2023, the day of the week when I reprise quotations meant to be uplifting or educational. For the first week of Women's History Month, I'll reprise several female voices.
I'd initially planned to start with singer Helen Reddy and segue to Nancy Pelosi. I'll still do that, but this morning I remembered a complaint lodged two years ago by Kay Coles James, who headed the Heritage Foundation: "Why aren't conservative women recognized during Women's History Month?"
It's a fair question. As Kay James pointed out, in a Time magazine year-by-year list of "accomplished" American women, nearly all those named in the previous two decades were on the political left. This is not a surprise, given the partisan makeup of big-city newsrooms; besides, the feminist movement is a progressive moment, so there's a logic to it. At RCP, however, we like to amplify political viewpoints, so in a moment, I'll have some quotations from politically diverse sources.
First, and in that same spirit, I'd direct you to RCP's front page, which contains the latest poll averages, political news and video, along with aggregated opinion pieces ranging across the ideological spectrum.
If you came of age in the 1970s, as feminism began to change U.S. politics, you couldn't escape the defiant words of an Australian pop singer named Helen Reddy. They were on the radio constantly. Reddy seemed an unlikely rebel. She had come to America from Down Under and made a name for herself by covering a solo from the musical "Jesus Christ Superstar."
But she was searching for material that expressed her own new sense of empowerment. "I was looking for songs that reflected the positive sense of self that I felt I'd gained from the women's movement," she told Billboard magazine. Having trouble finding them, Reddy sat down and wrote one herself.
It was called "I Am Woman," and in December 1972 it rose to No. 1 on the pop charts. Nancy Pelosi was then a 32-year-old protégé of powerful San Francisco congressman Phillip Burton and raising children while working in the vineyards of California's Democratic politics. The spirit of Helen Reddy's song has remained with Pelosi for five decades. In 2018, after one of her trusted lieutenants -- a member of the Democratic leadership -- was upset in a New York primary by a then unknown 28-year-old barista named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi was asked if her party's leadership would be better served if it more accurately mirrored a younger, more progressive generation. "I am female. I am progressive," she shot back. "What's your problem?"
Two years ago, when Kay James challenged the media to highlight high-achieving conservative women, it raised an obvious question: Whose voice would James choose to elevate during Women's History Month? Although the conservative foundation president mentioned a handful of female Republican trailblazers (Condoleezza Rice, Joni Ernst, Carly Fiorina, Amy Coney Barrett), the woman James herself wanted to honor was Harriet Tubman.
Born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1820 or 1821, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia in 1849. Not content to enjoy her own freedom, she became a famous "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, met with John Brown before his famous raid on Harper's Ferry, and acquired the nickname "Moses" -- for leading her people out of bondage. When the Civil War broke out, she joined the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse and then as an armed scout. In 1863, she guided a unit of Union soldiers to a Confederate supply depot on the banks of the Combahee River where they razed Southern plantations and torched the cotton and foodstuffs stocks -- and brought back some 750 enslaved people.
In so doing she fulfilled a promise she made to herself even before she escaped slavery herself.
"I had seen their tears and sighs, and I had heard their groans," she said, "and would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them."
We have learned in our own time that many human beings are still not free -- here at home and around the world -- and also that shackles come in many forms. Few women have been more eloquent and clear-eyed on this point than Condoleezza Rice.
A daughter of the segregated South, Rice perhaps more than any living American has shown how far a quality education, when combined with a desire to excel and a disciplined mind, can take a person in this country.
She's the first black woman to serve as White House national security adviser, the first to head the U.S. State Department, and the first to be named provost at Stanford University. A competitive figure skater as a girl, Rice speaks Russian well enough to negotiate with leaders of the Kremlin, and played a Brahms piece on the piano for Queen Elizabeth. She played a fierce game of tennis in her 20s and 30s, and at the age of 50 she took up golf, which she uses to showcase the possibilities of women in sports.
Always, for her, it comes back to education. After leaving Washington, she returned to Stanford, where she now heads the Hoover Institution. When asked "what keeps her up at night," Rice has given expansive answers over the years: North Korea's nuclear ambitions, Mexico's drug cartels, her fear that America is losing its will to lead globally. But the most evocative, and unexpected, answer to that question came in a 2011 Q&A with Donna Shalala, then the president of the University of Miami.
"I worry," she said, "about the fact that in the case of K-12 education, I can look up your zip code and tell you whether or not you're going to get a good education."
And those are our quotes of the week.
