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I re-acquainted myself with Eleanor Roosevelt last weekend when I received the Eleanor Roosevelt medal for public service at Val-Kill, her Hyde Park retreat.

Call it payback time for former Harvard President Larry Summers (remember he opined that the reason women were rarely found amongst top scientists was because they didn’t want to work that hard and that their brains might be different) but female scientists made history with this year’s Nobel Prize awards.

I recently got a lesson in how diverse this country is by speaking about my book, Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead on Nantucket, El Paso, Texas, Chicago, Illinois and Greenville, South Carolina.
When I walked into the Nantucket Athenaeum, I inhaled the air of history. The walls were lined with portraits. [...]

When I heard the yell “You Lie!” during President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress last night, I thought it might have been some rabid outsider who was let into the chamber by mistake.

At the 1980 Democratic Convention I was not pleased with Senator Ted Kennedy. Why was he challenging the incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Presidency, and thereby hurting his chances for re-election?
The convention was deeply divided between Carter and Kennedy supporters. But we sat shoulder to shoulder on the convention floor to hear Kennedy speak.
All [...]

A female Secretary of State who identifies with the plight of women is making a difference. We’ve had two female Secretaries of State with Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. But Hillary is the first one to spend seven days in Africa and use her time there to put a bright spotlight on an issue that [...]

“This is socialized medicine!” was the charge leveled by opponents of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, when these two landmark pieces of legislation were being debated.
The debate was a bit more civil then, but the scare tactics were exactly the same as they are today as we debate health care legislation. In the 60’s, I [...]

There are few purely joyous moments in the course of daily global events. The homecoming of the two female journalists from North Korea—Laura Ling and Euna Lee was one of these. Hurray!
The sight of these two freed women, stepping off the plane which brought them back, broke through the summer doldrums of the increasingly nasty [...]

The death of a famous person is different from the death of a loved one—whether it is Michael Jackson, Frank McCourt, or Walter Cronkite. We didn’t know any of them personally, and yet, we experience a sense of loss.
Fame lends itself to a different kind of intimacy—on one level, a famous person becomes part of [...]

Judge Sonia Sotomayor has displayed admirable self-control and patience throughout this Senate hearing process. I, on the other hand, found myself yelling at the television screen more than once during the question periods from some of the Senators.
The first time was when they characterized her statement about a “strong Latina woman” as a clear indication [...]