[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to a special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]
On two
telling political efforts beyond Chisholm’s groundbreaking presidential
campaign.
Here in
this election year, it’s only appropriate to end a series on groundbreaking women
with the first America woman to run for
the Democratic presidential nomination (and the second woman to seek a major
party nomination, after Republican
Senator Margaret Chase Smith in 1964), and the first African American presidential
candidate to boot: New York Congresswoman
Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm’s 1972 campaign was groundbreaking
for both of those reasons, and was also quite successful, with the candidate
achieving significant results (sometimes classified as wins, although each case
is complicated) in the New
Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi primaries, and eventually garnering
152 delegates (some symbolically released by the nominee George McGovern, but
all real nonetheless) at the Democratic
National Convention in Miami. Everything I said in Monday’s post about the
symbolic significance of Victoria Woodhull’s 1872 campaign holds true for
Chisholm’s campaign a century later, and I’d say Chisholm’s represented a
significantly more serious contention for the nomination as well.
If that
were Chisholm’s only contribution to national politics it would be more than
enough to deserve collective memory—but it’s not, and her participation in a
couple specific efforts helps us better remember the full scope of her half-century
career in politics. Chisholm’s first political work took place in 1953, the
same year that the 29-year-old Chisholm began directing a couple New York City child
care centers (putting her MA in
Elementary Education from Columbia’s Teachers College to work
in the process). In that year she joined prominent local Democratic
politician and power broker Wesley “Mac” Holder’s
successful campaign to elect Lewis
Flagg Jr. as the first African American judge in Brooklyn. That campaign
became the basis for a more overarching organization, the Bedford-Stuyvesant
Political League (BPSL), which fought for civil rights,
economic equality, and fairness in housing throughout the 1950s. While both
those efforts were partly local in emphasis, they were also part of the
burgeoning national civil rights movement—and that combination of local and
national, targeted and broader political goals, is at the heart of all
Congressional work, particularly in the House in which Chisholm would serve for
seven groundbreaking terms between 1969 and 1983.
One of
Chisholm’s many important efforts during those 14 years in Congress took place
just a year before her presidential run. In 1971, she once again utilized her
education and experience in early childhood education and care, teaming with
fellow New York
Congresswoman Bella Abzug to co-sponsor
a historic bill that would allocate $10 billion toward child care services. Senator
Walter Mondale came on board for the Senate version of the bill, which passed
both houses in December 1971 as the Comprehensive
Child Development Act. Unfortunately President
Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing not only that it was too costly but
also that it would implement a “communal approach to child-rearing” and thus
that it was “the most radical piece of legislation” to have crossed his
presidential desk. The fight for federal support for child care has continued
into this year, one of many arenas in which we still have a great deal to learn
from the lessons and model of Shirley Chisholm.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?
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