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Skriven 2005-10-13 23:33:22 av Whitehouse Press (1:3634/12.0)
Ärende: Press Release (0510138) for Thu, 2005 Oct 13
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For Immediate Release
Office of Lynne Cheney
October 13, 2005




It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon. I appreciate that kind
introduction, Pat. People often have trouble figuring out what to call the
wife of the vice president. Tipper Gore reports that she was once
introduced as the first lady of vice. In any event, Pat, you overcame all
obstacles in your introduction, and I'm grateful for that.

As for what title I ought to have, I got a good suggestion along these
lines from my five-year-old granddaughter not long ago. She was in
California visiting her other grandparents. One of the disconcerting things
you discover as a grandmother is that your grandchildren do have other
grandparents they need to pay attention to. So Elizabeth--that's the
five-year-old's name--was in California driving across the Oakland Bay
Bridge with her mother. And her mother decided to tell her about her own
visit to California as a child when a friend of mine and I, accompanied by
children, drove across the Oakland Bay Bridge and ran out of gas. Now this
story, illustrating the incompetence of adults, is exactly the kind of tale
that little kids love, so my granddaughter was very interested, but since
she was in California visiting the other grandmother she couldn't figure
out exactly who the incompetent adult was. "You mean Grandma Julie?" she
asked my daughter. "No," my daughter answered, "it was Grandma Lynne."
Which still left the five-year-old puzzled because that's not what she
calls me, but as my daughter described it, suddenly a light bulb went on.
"Oh," said the five-year-old, "you mean the grandma of the United States."
Now that's a title to be proud of, isn't it.

I'd say we all have a lot to be proud of. And right at the top of the list
I would put the fine men and women of our military. They serve this great
country of ours with such skill and courage. In the first alphabet book I
wrote, America: A Patriotic Primer, there were so many letters that were
truly moving to work on. A is for America the land that we love, F is for
Freedom and the flag that we fly, P is for the patriotism that fills our
hearts with pride. But none was more important to me than V-V is for the
valor shown by those who've kept us free. Around the edge of the
illustration were the names of some of our military heroes: Joshua
Chamberlain, Abraham Cohn, Mary Walker, John Ortega, Joe Nishimoto,
Mitchell Red Cloud, Frank Mitchell, Roy Benevidez. It's an honor roll that
reflects our nation. It's an honor roll that reflects the valor of
America's fighting men and women.

My goal in writing America: A Patriotic Primer was to help children
understand how fortunate we are to live in this great country and how well
worth it is defending. I wanted children to know about our nation's
founders and the noble ideals upon which they built our country. And I
wanted them to know about abolitionists and suffragists and all those who
since the founding have helped us to do a better and better job of living
up to our ideals.

In the last couple of decades we haven't always done a good job of
conveying how positive our national story is, and so when I was thinking
about a second book, I decided I wanted to tell one of the most inspiring
parts of our story, and that has to do with the transformation of women's
lives from our country's beginnings to now. The second book, A is for
Abigail, begins with Abigail Adams. When she lived, women could not go to
college, become professionals, own property once they were married, or
vote. And they weren't supposed to complain about any of these things.
Well, Abigail did, and she blazed a path that other women have followed and
extended, so that today our daughters and granddaughters have a world of
choices before them.

So that's part of the story, and the other part is about the amazing things
women did even before their rights were fully recognized. Abigail made it
possible for John to help create the country. She ran the family farm,
deciding whom to hire, what to plant, and when to harvest. She saw to it
that her children were educated, including her daughter, though it was not
thought very important to educate girls. She gave shelter to soldiers
fighting for America's cause, wove homespun cloth during the Revolutionary
War and made clothes for the whole family. And she wrote John hundreds of
letters that not only informed and sustained him, but left us one of our
most historical records.

Some of the most amazing American women have had lives like Abigail's-lives
of service to others. One I write about was a farm girl from Massachusetts
who was quite small, very smart, and deeply shy. As a teenager, she
discovered that working with children helped her to overcome her painful
self-consciousness, and for many years she was a teacher. She left that
profession in frustration, however, when she realized that no matter how
hard she worked and how good a teacher she was, she would never rise as
high in teaching as men she worked with. She subsequently moved to
Washington, D.C., and she was there when the Civil War broke out. She
realized after the battle of Bull Run, which occurred close to Washington,
that Union forces did not have the supplies they needed to care for wounded
soldiers, and so she began to advertise for bandages and anesthetics and to
organize ways to get them to the battlefield. The army was not entirely
thrilled with her efforts. They didn't particularly want unmarried women
out in the field, but she finally got permission, and she arrived at battle
after battle with wagonloads of much needed medical supplies. She herself
began to help the wounded, bandaging them, comforting them. Clara Barton,
for that was her name, soon became known as the Angel of the Battlefield.
She had found her life's work, and after the war she sought other ways to
help those in distress. In 1881, she founded the American Red Cross, and
for many years she was its leader. Another who had a life of service came
from a very wealthy family, but she spent her life among the poor. Her
mother died when she was only two, but her father, who counted Abraham
Lincoln among his friends, encouraged her to a life of responsibility and
high purpose. In 1889, after she had graduated from college, she and a
friend moved into the slums of Chicago and invited their new neighbors into
their home. Soon Jane Addams and her friend and other idealistic women who
joined them were offering visitors to Hull House, for that was the name of
Jane Addams's home, everything from hot lunches to a place to bathe. There
were classes in subjects ranging from English to physics to singing. There
was medical care, child care, legal aid, and inspiration aplenty for others
who wanted to help the poor. By the turn of the century, there were about a
hundred centers like Hull House in cities all across the country. Jane
Addams became a political activist, focusing on labor law and juvenile
justice. She was a leader in the international peace movement and in 1931,
won the Nobel Prize. Convinced that women should have the right to vote,
she also took up the suffrage cause, reassuring her audiences -- with, I
have to think, a twinkle in her eye -- that she did not think women were
better than men. "We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted
legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done," she said.
And she added, "But then we must remember that we have not had the chance."
Another woman to whom those of us in this room -- indeed, those of us in
this nation -- are deeply indebted had a life animated by the quest for
justice for women. Born in Johnstown, New York, she had five sisters and
five brothers. But children often died young in the nineteenth century and
only one of her brothers survived to adulthood. When he died at the age of
twenty, the father of the family was devastated, and the girl, Elizabeth,
remembered her whole life how she had crawled onto her father's lap and
tried to comfort him. "At length," she wrote years later, "he heaved a deep
sigh and said, 'Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!'" And to her
grieving father she replied, "I will try to be all my brother was."

And she did exactly that. "She succeeded in what were then considered
masculine fields," her biographer Elisabeth Griffith observes. "She won
second place in the Johnstown Academy Greek competition, she learned to
jump four-foot fences [on her horse], and she became a skilled debater."
But rather than being pleased, her father began to worry. In his eyes--and
in the eyes of the world at the time--she was becoming entirely too good at
undertakings that were suitable only for males.

And so Elizabeth Cady Stanton decided to change the world, and she had the
intellect and analytical skills to do it. For fifty years, most of them
spent in Seneca Falls, she, together with her dear friend, Susan B.
Anthony, was the driving force behind the movement to improve the lot of
American women. Stanton argued, among other things, for property rights,
the right to attend college, the right to participate in athletics, and the
right to vote. She spoke and wrote and agitated, and, I should note, raised
seven children.

I doubt that either Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony knew at the
outset that their struggle would be so long or, indeed, that both of them
would die before women finally, in 1920, achieved the right to vote. But
Stanton and Anthony had supreme conviction that their cause was just and
would prevail. As Anthony put it, "Failure is impossible!"

Many women volunteered in the cause of suffrage and there is one other I
want to make note of today. Her name was Sojourner Truth, she was born in
slavery, and after she gained her freedom she became an eloquent champion
of the rights of African Americans and women. She had a voice that boomed
with authority. She stood nearly six feet tall, and she became righteously
indignant when she heard people claim that women were too weak to be full
citizens. "I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns," she
said, "and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man
-- when I could get it -- and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman?"
She talked about seeing her children sold off to slavery, "and when I cried
out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!" she said, "And ain't
I a woman?" History offers many lessons, and surely one is about the ties
that bind us. It is about "an inescapable network of mutuality," as Martin
Luther King, Jr. called it, that connects us, all of us in the present to
those in the past and all of us in the present to one another. I know how
much those of you in this room do to help others. You serve family and
country, and you don't stop there. I've seen the way that military wives
reach out to babies and children who need help and to the less fortunate
adults among us. In your daily lives, you recognize the network of
mutuality that Dr. King talked about. In so doing, you are carrying on the
work of women who came before you, and you will inspire others who come
after. Like Clara Barton, Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, and Sojourner Truth, you are making our country and our world a
better place. Your commitment is a gift to us all, and I thank you for it.
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