the gold in Fort Knox. I know on that first night I must have looked like a delicate Southern flower to the onlookers in Judge Beard’s courtroom. Beard later warned me that I would see a lot of the underside of urban life in his court. To prove it, he then sent me to the cell block below, where a young man was writhing in the anguish of drugs or drug withdrawal. My blood went cold.”

“Before long, I was defending alleged drug addicts and armed-robbery suspects. I look back now and marvel at the chances that I took prowling around some of Washington meanest streets looking for witnesses. I often met characters like Racehorse Mitchell, a courthouse legend straight out of Damon Runyone. I also ran into other attorneys-Fifth Street Lawyers, we called them - whose specialty seemed to be cynicism. They laughed at my naiveté and couldn’t understand  why I continued to counsel my clients to believe that people could change if only they were given a chance.”

forwarded approximately four thousand complaints to agencies like the Federal Trade Commission or the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or directly to the companies involved. The mail contained a depressing litany of deceptive packaging, shoddy workmanship, and warranties not worth the paper they were printed on.”

“What began as just a job soon turned into something of a personal crusade.”

“When the war ended and the planes returned to earth, most of their construction crews traded in their overalls for more conventional feminine garb. The new working woman of the early 1970s was no Rosie the Riveter. Instead of patriotism, she had internal drives that propelled her into the workforce to excel and wield power. Women who waited longer than their mothers to marry sought the same professional fulfillment as men. And millions more worked out of simple economic necessity.

By 1970, more than 23 million American women were employed full time. Eight million more held down part-time jobs. Forty percent of the female workforce was  married. A third had children under eighteen at home. Meanwhile, a rising divorce rate was expanding the number of single-headed households, and the vast majority of them were supported by women.

What all this added up to was nothing less than a quiet revolution. Notwithstanding all the economic and demographic trends, however, American’s organizational culture remained predominantly male.” ...”when a group of female journalists asked her (Margaret Chase Smith) how she would respond if she ever woke up on morning and found herself in the White House?  ‘The first thing I’d do is go straight-away to the President’s wife and apologize,’ she said, ‘Then I’d go home.’

We have come a long way in the years since, but even as a fairly high-ranking woman in the Nixon Administration, I still encountered lingering resentment among those who saw women only as envelope stuffers. Oh, sure, we could type position papers, but having those papers ever reflect our own positions as candidates and office holders was the sort of utopian vision best left to party platform.”