Kin-dom Sermon
Edwards Church, Framingham 02/21/16 Dawn Sorensen There’s this story about a professor who held up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved on it. “This is often considered to be man’s first calendar,” the professor explained. Then she said, “My question to you is this--what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.” Danish actor Sandi Toksviq said that sitting in that class in that moment changed her life. In that second, she stopped to question almost everything she had been taught about the past. Why does the world see “man” when it should see “woman”? What does this mean about the way we see God--or the way we’ve been taught to see God? When we talk about theology, mostly we are referring to the way we talk about God, for the word theology, when broken down, actually means God-talk. One of the things seminary did for me was to help me understand how to talk about God in my own way. Just like the Danish actor, I was challenged to question all of those things that I had been taught about God. Questions like what does sin mean to you? Or how would we know safety and happiness if there was no suffering in the world? While I can’t answer all the questions today, I can tell you that these questions led me to find an understanding of God that works well for me, even though it might be quite different from the understanding of God that others might have. In a class called Systematic Theology, we learned that the work of theology is to interpret what it means to talk about God in today’s world, with all of today’s cultures and language and meaning. So, as you might imagine, that work comes with a whole lot of questions. Believe it or not, questioning our faith is a good thing. Questions lead us to search for meaning and understanding. Questions help us realize that a 28 day calendar might have been made by a woman, and that somewhere in the re-telling of the story of the bone, the narrative got off-track. Luckily, there are thousands of years of writings that we can draw upon to answer these questions. You’ve probably heard of some of the guys they call “The Church Fathers.” People like Saint Augustine, who shaped western Christianity with his ideas on things such as original sin and just war--or Saint Thomas Aquinas who wrote prolifically on the existence of God, and the meaning of life itself. Then, of course, there’s Martin Luther, and his ninety-five theses, as well as his belief in translating the bible into the language of the people. Some people might even call these early church leaders “Giants among Men--” meaning that they transcend the average people of their time to become leaders. In this case, they became leaders within the church. But I want to tell you a little bit about my giants. In 1895, Susan B. Anthony published The Woman’s Bible because she wanted to promote a radical theology that stressed self-development for women. In 1967, Mary Daly got a job at Boston College, during her tenure, she published eight books, and is now known as a foundational modern feminist theologian. Her radical views on men, both in the church and in her classes, caused much conflict throughout her 30 year career. It was a radical notion to the once all-male Catholic school for Daly to proclaim that God and our language for God should not be exclusively male, especially in the Bible. The Reverend Katie G. Cannon is the first African American woman to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church. She is a founder of womanist theology, which focuses theology on the perspectives and experiences of women of color. These women provided me a foundation, a place to start when I began to really understand God. They had already asked the questions I wanted to ask--Questions like “if God is seen as the great creator, even through the use of birth language, then why is it that God has historically been referred to only as God the Father?” Isn’t creation of new life generally seen as something that women do? Even though I may have felt the external world putting up a good fight telling me that I wasn’t worthy of a relationship with God because of my gender or because of my physical presentation, or because of whatever percieved sin of the day, these women spoke to my soul. These women proved it could be done. These women asked the hard questions. My giants overcame their oppressors because they trusted there was something worth fighting for. Let’s explore one theologian in particular: Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz created the sector of theology known as Mujerista Theology. Her thinking takes a little bit different approach to the idea of the kingdom of God. Let’s think about that word kingdom. Isasi-Diaz reminds us that the word Kingdom implies that somewhere there’s a king, a ruler, a despot on high. Kings are only male-- not even the past 63 years of the English monarchy can pass that test! Kings lead patriarchies. Kings lead armies and armies have wars and wars result in death. When we speak of God’s kingdom coming, is this what we are asking for? Isasi-Diaz gives us another option. She introduces the idea of kin-dom. K-I-N-no G-D-O-M Kindom, implies that we are all kin as Christians. We are family, equally, in communion with God and all those Christian ancestors who went before us. Like Fran said in her Monday devotional--does God really want to be a king or a ruler or do we think God rejoices in our freedom--our freedom to hope, freedom to make our own choices, freedom to ask questions! In today’s Gospel lesson, Martha refused to settle for the truth that seemed to be right in front of her. Her brother was dead. He had been dead for four days, but she didn’t accept it. Can you imagine the questions that might have run through Martha’s head over the course of those four days? Four days worth of questions is a lot of questions! Some people might say that Mary, Martha and Lazarus are Jesus’ chosen family, his kin--he spends so much time and attention on them. In this scary time, Martha sends for Jesus but Jesus doesn’t come. Can you imagine her pacing, pacing …. where is he? Where? Why is he not here yet? How many times had she asked that question over the past four days? Her only brother had come down with a mysterious illness and nobody could help him. Nobody except their buddy, their close friend, their brother Jesus. Can you think of the thoughts that ran through her head? How many times had Jesus just held out his hand and the blind had seen or the lame had walked? If there was any hope at all for Lazarus, it would only come through Jesus. Even though, Martha had not specifically asked Jesus to come, she had sent word that Lazarus was ill. But if Jesus really was the friend he said he was, he would come. Right? Martha had waited and Lazarus became more ill. She waited and Lazarus died. She waited and Lazarus was buried in the tomb. Jesus healed the paralytic and he didn’t even know his name. Jesus healed the blind man who was just a face in the crowd. Surely he would come for Lazarus, his friend, whose table he had eaten at, whose roof he had slept under. That had to mean something to him, right? Maybe Martha had faith all along, but we humans tend to feel anxious, and questions fill our minds. Where was he? Did he really love them like he said he did? Would he use his power freely to help his friend, or was that just for strangers? Then a murmur through the crowd came and she was already on her feet, the thought in her heart on her lips: “Jesus, if you had come, my brother would not have died.” Can you imagine the tone of betrayal in her voice, can you hear her broken heart? How many times have we felt alone, left on our own, helpless and scared? How many times have we heard people say, “If God existed, this would not have happened?” This is when the understanding of Christian Kin-dom might be most important. How does our understanding of being being part of God’s web of connection--help us to feel less alone? When we really need each other, who shows up? Edwards Church is such an amazing example of this kin-dom. We fully live out what it means to be brothers and sisters in Christ. We have lots of love to give. Edwards Church has experienced some big events over the past few years. But you never stopped showing up for each other. Whether it was food or friendship, whether it was just a hand to hold or a shoulder to cry on, you counted on each other. We are a chosen family. This church follows in the steps of Martha. Martha is our kin, too. Martha believes, even though she may never understand why it took Jesus four days to get to them. What she says next tells it all. “But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” “Jesus, I may not understand what you’ve done, I may not be able to explain it, I may not like it but even now I still believe that you are capable of anything.” And he was. And so are we. Debbie’s friday reflection lets us know that this question--is kingdom the right word to use? is a question that is relevant in our time. People who think and talk about God and The Bible are asking the question, “Is kingdom language appropriate in this time and this place?” The question was asked in a popular forum to a popular speaker, and he replied like any good speaker might. Historically, during Jesus’ time, using the word Kingdom was a way of challenging the status quo. A way of making those in power just a little bit less comfortable. Do we expect any less from Jesus? Now, here we are, asking similar questions--challenging the way things have always been done. I think that’s what we are called to do as Christians. We’re called to ask questions. We are called to challenge each other to be better. We are called to not settle for status quo. Using the language of relationship, asking for God’s Kin-dom to come is--at the very least-- two things, one--a radical new way of thinking about being in right relationship with one another as Christians--a way of speaking and living that treads with a much lighter footprint--that reminds us every time we pray that we are related to each other through the common bond of belief in Jesus. This is also a way of praying that lifts us up as community instead of hierarchial, warring, unequal factions. It’s also, secondly, a really small change. I mean, we could drop the G and call it a typo. O.K…. maybe not. Whatever happens with the way we say The Lord’s Prayer, the most important thing is that we asked the question. We didn’t just believe what someone else told us. We thought about it. We looked at it from all perspectives. We decided what was right for us. We made a decision, a choice, and we didn’t settle. Amen.
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Abigail Adams was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts on November 11, 1744, in the parsonage of the North Parish Congregational Church of Weymouth. Her parents were the Reverend William Smith and Elizabeth Quincy. Her mother's cousin was Dorothy Quincy, the wife of John Hancock. Abigail Smith's ChildhoodDuring her childhood, Abigail was greatly influenced by her Congregationalist upbringing. She received no formal schooling, but she was able to use the library and environment of her father's parsonage to learn to study the Bible, history and literature, including the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton and Alexander Pope. Although her relatives on her mother's side were well-known in Massachusetts, she was given a simple upbringing that stressed the importance of reason and morality. Although she is well-known for the letters she wrote during the Revolutionary period, she was embarrassed about her overall lack of education, and her difficulties with spelling and punctuation. Marriage to John AdamsIn 1759, Abigail met John Adams, a country lawyer, and three years later, in 1762, their courtship began. The two were married on October 25, 1764 in the Smith's home, five days shy of John's 29th birthday. The ceremony was performed by Abigail's father. After living in Braintree for some time, they moved to Boston, where John was able to expand his law practice. Between 1765 and 1777, they would have six children:
Abigail Adams in EuropeFrom 1784 to 1788, she joined John in Europe, on diplomatic missions to France and England. Her account of the voyage to England from Boston, the return trip and journals she kept while in England can be found in The Adams Papers' Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, volume 3. Abigail Adams, First Lady to Live in the White HouseJohn was elected President in 1797, but unlike her predecessor, Martha Washington, Abigail took an active role in politics, earning the nickname "Her Majesty," for supporting John's views on the influence of the French revolution and passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. In 1800, John and Abigail moved into the new President's House, which is now known as the White House, making her the first First Lady to reside there. The building was unfinished, cold and damp, which required fires to be constantly lit to make the place livable. She even used one of the rooms to hang the laundry on clotheslines, a far cry from the White House as we know it today. John and Abigail Retire to BraintreeIn 1800, Thomas Jefferson was elected President and John and Abigail retired to their home in Braintree. During these years, they were able to enjoy the rise of John Quincy Adams to prominence. However there were difficult times as they dealt with the errant ways of Thomas and Charles, and questionable investments taken on by the husband of their daughter Nabby. In October of 1818, Abigail fell ill with typhus and died on the 28th. Her last words to John were, "Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long." She was buried in the cemetary of First Church in Quincy. She was 73 years old, two weeks shy of her 74th birthday. Legacy of Abigail AdamsAbigail's legacy lives on through the many letters she wrote in correspondence with her husband and other notable men and women of the time, including Thomas Jefferson, James Lovell, Benjamin Rush and Mercy Otis Warren. Her letters stand as an important record of the Revolutionary era and beyond, and cover topics that include:
Suggested Reading "Ye Will Say I Am No Christian": The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values. Braden, Bruce. Prometheus Books. 2005. Holton, Woody. Abigail Adams. Free Press. 2009. John Adams.McCullough, David. Simon & Schuster.2001. John Adams: In His Own Words. Baron, Robert C. Fulcrum Publishing. 2009. My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. Hogan, Margaret A. Belknap Press of Harvard University. 2007. Presidency of John Adams. Brown, Ralph A., University Press of Kansas. 1975. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Cappon, Lester J. The University of North Carolina Press. 1988. Madeleine Korbelová Albright (born May 15, 1937) was the first woman to become the United States Secretary of State. She was appointed by US President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99–0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997. Albright currently serves as a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. She holds a PhD from Columbia University. She holds honorary degrees from Brandeis University (1996); the University of Washington (2002); Smith College (2003); University of Winnipeg (2005); the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007), and Knox College (2008). In May 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama.Secretary Albright also serves as a Director on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations. Albright is fluent in English, French, Russian, and Czech; she speaks and reads Polish and Serbo-Croatian as well. Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová (Czech pronunciation: [ˈmarɪjɛ ˈjana ˈkorbɛlovaː]) in the Smíchov district of Prague, Czechoslovakia. At the time of her birth, Czechoslovakia had been independent for less than twenty years, having gained independence from Austria after World War I. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech Jewish diplomat and supporter of the early Czech democrats, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš. She was his first child with his Jewish wife, Anna (née Spieglová), who later also had another daughter Katherine (a schoolteacher) and son John (an economist). At the time of Albright’s birth, her father was serving as press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. However, the signing of the Munich Agreement in March 1938 and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia at the hands of Adolf Hitler forced the family into exile because of their links with Beneš. Prior to their flight, Albright's parents had converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Albright spent the war years in England, while her father worked for Beneš’s Czechoslovak government-in-exile. They first lived on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill, London, where they endured the worst of The Blitz, but later moved to Beaconsfield, then Walton-on-Thames, on the outskirts of London. While in England, a young Albright appeared as a refugee child in a film designed to promote sympathy for all war refugees in London. Albright was raised Catholic, but converted to Episcopalianism at the time of her marriage in 1959. Albright did not learn until late in life that her parents were Jewish and that many of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia had perished in The Holocaust, including three of her grandparents. After the defeat of the Nazis in the European Theatre of World War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Albright and family moved back to Prague, where they were given a luxurious apartment in the Hradcany district (which later caused controversy, as it had belonged to an ethnic German Bohemian industrialist family forced out by the Beneš decrees – see "Controversies"). Korbel was named Czechoslovak Ambassador to communist Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. Communists governed Yugoslavia, and Korbel was concerned his daughter would be indoctrinated with Marxist ideology in a Yugoslav school, so she was taught by a governess and later sent to the Prealpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles in Chexbres, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Here, she learned French and went by Madeleine, the French version of Madlenka, her Czech nickname. However, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took over the government in 1948, with support from the Soviet Union, and as an opponent of Communism, Korbel was forced to resign from his position. He later obtained a position on a United Nations delegation to Kashmir, and sent his family to the United States, by way of London, to wait for him when he arrived to deliver his report to the U.N. Headquarters, then in Lake Success, New York. The family arrived in New York City, New York, in November 1948, and initially settled in Great Neck, on Long Island, New York. Korbel applied for political asylum, arguing that as an opponent of Communism, he was now under threat in Prague. With the help of Philip Mosely, a professor of Russian at Columbia University in New York City, Korbel obtained a position on the staff of the political science department at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. He became dean of the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, and later taught future U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. When Albright took office as the 64th U.S. Secretary of State on January 23, 1997, she became the first female U.S. Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. Not being a natural-born citizen of the U.S., she was not eligible as a U.S. Presidential successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. In her position as Secretary of State, Albright reinforced the U.S.'s alliances; advocated democracy and human rights; and promoted American trade and business, labor and environmental standards abroad.During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Middle East. She incurred the wrath of a number of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia for her role in participating in the formulation of US policy during the Kosovo War and Bosnian war as well as the rest of the Balkans. But, together with President Bill Clinton, she remains a largely popular figure in the rest of the region, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Croatia. According to Albright's memoirs, she once argued with Colin Powell for the use of military force by asking, "What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?" In one of her last acts as Secretary of State, Albright on January 8, 2001, paid a farewell call on Kofi Annan and said that the U.S. would continue to press Iraq to destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition of lifting economic sanctions, even after the end of the Clinton administration on January 20, 2001. In September 2009, Albright opened an exhibition of her personal jewelry collection at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, which ran until January 2010. The collection highlighted the many pins she wore while serving at the United Nations and State Department, including the famous pin showing a snake and apple she wore after the Iraqi press called her "an unparalleled serpent", and several jeweled insect bugs she wore to meet the Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov after it was discovered the Russian secret service had attempted to bug the State Department. Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O'Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. O'Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–1906) and at the Art Students League, New York (1907–1908), where she was quick to master the principles of the approach to art-making that then formed the basis of the curriculum—imitative realism. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Shortly thereafter, however, O'Keeffe quit making art, saying later that she had known then that she could never achieve distinction working within this tradition. Her interest in art was rekindled four years later (1912) when she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College, Columbia University. Bement introduced O'Keeffe to the then revolutionary ideas of his colleague at Teachers College, artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks). Dow's ideas offered O'Keeffe an alternative to imitative realism, and she experimented with them for two years, while she was either teaching art in the Amarillo, Texas public schools (1912-14) or working summers in Virginia as Bement's assistant. O'Keeffe was in New York again from fall 1914 to June 1915, taking courses at Teachers College. By the fall of 1915, when she was teaching art at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina, she decided to put Dow's theories to the test. In an attempt to discover a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. She mailed some of these drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, on January 1, 1916. Stieglitz began corresponding with O'Keeffe, who returned to New York that spring to attend classes at Teachers College, and he exhibited 10 of her charcoal abstractions in May at his famous avant-garde gallery, 291, which O’Keeffe knew he would do, but was uncertain of when. A year later, he closed the doors of this important exhibition space with a one-person exhibition of O'Keeffe's work. In the spring of 1918 he offered O'Keeffe financial support to paint for a year in New York, which she accepted, moving there from Texas, where she had been affiliated with West Texas State Normal College, Canyon, since the fall of 1916. By the time she arrived in New York in June, she and Stieglitz, who were married in 1924, had fallen in love and subsequently lived and worked together in New York (winter and spring) and at the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George, New York (summer and fall) until 1929, when O'Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico. From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O'Keeffe and her work, organizing annual exhibitions of her art at The Anderson Galleries (1923–1925), The Intimate Gallery (1925–1929), and An American Place (1929–1946). As early as the mid-1920s, when O'Keeffe first began painting New York skyscrapers as well as large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close up, which are among her best-known pictures, she had become recognized as one of America's most important and successful artists. Three years after Stieglitz's death, O'Keeffe moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose stunning vistas and stark landscape configurations had inspired her work since 1929. Indeed, many of the pictures she painted in New Mexico, especially her landscape paintings of the area, have become as well known as the work she had completed earlier in New York. Indeed, her ability to capture the essence of the natural beauty of northern New Mexico desert, its vast skies, richly colored landscape configurations and unusual architectural forms, has identified the area as “O’Keeffe Country,” Indeed, the area nourished O’Keeffe’s creative efforts from 1929 until 1984, when failing eyesight forced her into retirement. She lived either at her Ghost Ranch house, which she purchased in 1940, or at the house she purchased in Abiquiu in 1945. She made New Mexico her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death, and continued working in oil until the mid–1970s. She worked in pencil and watercolor until 1982 and produced objects in clay from the mid-1970s until two years before her death in 1986, at the age of 98. Below is a small sample of her work. I'm sure you can see why Back when I was in the Women's Studies Program at Central Michigan University, Adrienne Rich was a woman we read in more than one (and maybe in almost all) of the classes. She was considered gold standard. Back then, I thought she was brilliant, the stuff she said was right on. The idea of Compulsory Heterosexuality was how I understood the world to be ordered. Things have changed since then. Now I see Rich as someone who came from privilege, both in race and class, (but not necessarily ethnicity--as she was Jewish) and she was not someone who clawed her way toward being published like Audre Lorde. Even so, she joins the cacophony of voices who contribute to women's understanding of themselves, and even more she contributes to the voices that shape lesbian consciousness. For me, her writings are still very valuable, and are best when read in tandem with other feminist voices. Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse." Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; she went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the older of two sisters. Her father, the renowned pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the Chairman of Pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich, was a concert pianist (before she married) and a composer. Her father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians. Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence stemmed from her father who encouraged her to read but also to write her own poetry. Her interest in literature was sparked within her father's library where she read the work of writers such as Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Rossetti, and Tennyson. Her father was ambitious for Adrienne and "planned to create a prodigy." Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were home schooled by their mother until Adrienne began public education in the fourth grade. The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents' ambitions for her—moving into a world in which she was expected to excel.In later years, Rich went to Roland Park Country School, which she described as a "good old fashioned girls' school [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned." After graduating from high school, Rich gained her college diploma at Radcliffe College, Harvard, where she focused primarily on poetry and learning writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all. In 1951, her last year at college, Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; she went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Following her graduation, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship, to study in Oxford for a year. Following a visit to Florence, she chose not to return to Oxford and spent her remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy.In 1953, Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard University, whom she had met as an undergraduate. She had said of the match: "I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family ... I wanted what I saw as a full woman's life, whatever was possible." They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts and had three sons. The birth of David in 1955 coincided with the publication of her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, a collection she said she wished had not been published. That same year, she also received the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award for the Poetry Society of America. Her second son, Paul, was born in 1957, followed by Jacob in 1959. The 1960s began a period of change in Rich's life: she received the National Institute of Arts and Letters award (1960), her second Guggenheim Fellowship to work at the Netherlands Economic Institute (1961), and the Bollingen Foundation grant for the translation of Dutch poetry (1962). In 1963, Rich published her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which was a much more personal work examining her female identity, reflecting the increasing tensions she experienced as a wife and mother in the 1950s, marking a substantial change in Rich's style and subject matter. In her 1982 essay "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity", Rich states "The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me." The book met with harsh reviews. She comments, "I was seen as 'bitter' and 'personal'; and to be personal was to be disqualified, and that was very shaking because I'd really gone out on a limb ... I realised I'd gotten slapped over the wrist, and I didn't attempt that kind of thing again for a long time." Moving her family to New York in 1966, Rich became involved with the New Left and became heavily involved in anti-war, civil right, and feminist activism. Her husband took a teaching position at City College of New York. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam-America War. Her collections from this period include Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971), which reflect increasingly radical political content and interest in poetic form. From 1967 to 1969, Rich lectured at Swarthmore College and taught at Columbia University School of the Arts as an adjunct professor in the Writing Division. Additionally, in 1968, she began teaching in the SEEK program in City College of New York, a position she continued until 1975. During this time, Rich also received the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine. Increasingly militant, Rich hosted anti-war and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment; tensions began to split the marriage, Conrad fearing that his wife had lost her mind. The couple separated in mid-1970 and shortly afterward, in October, Conrad drove into the woods and shot himself. In 1971, she was the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and spent the next year and a half teaching at Brandeis University as the Hurst Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. Diving into the Wreck, a collection of exploratory and often angry poems, split the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America. Declining to accept it individually, Rich was joined by the two other feminist poets nominated, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, to accept it on behalf of all women. The following year, Rich took up the position of the Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College.In 1976, Rich began her lifelong partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published the same year, Rich acknowledged that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well as a personal issue, writing, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs." The pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marked the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her writing, themes which run throughout her work afterwards, especially in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001). In her analytical work Adrienne Rich: the moment of change, Langdell suggests these works represent a central rite of passage for the poet, as she (Rich) crossed a threshold into a newly constellated life and a "new relationship with the universe". During this period, Rich also wrote a number of key socio-political essays, including "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence", one of the first to address the theme of lesbian existence. In this essay, she asks "how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding". Some of the essays were republished in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (1979). In integrating such pieces into her work, Rich claimed her sexuality and took a role in leadership for sexual equality. From 1976 to 1979, Rich taught at City College as well as Rutgers University as an English Professor. In 1979, she received an honorary doctorate from Smith College and moved with Cliff to Montague, MA. Ultimately, they moved to Santa Cruz, where Rich continued her career as a professor, lecturer, poet, and essayist. Rich and Cliff took over editorship of the lesbian arts journal Sinister Wisdom (1981–1983). Rich taught and lectured at Scripps College, San Jose State University, and Stanford University during the 1980s and 1990s. From 1981 to 1987, Rich served as an A.D. White Professor-At-Large for Cornell University. Rich published several volumes in the next few years: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), and Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988 (1989). She also was awarded the Ruth Paul Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from NYU, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry (1989). Janice Raymond cited Rich in the acknowledgments section of her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, writing "Adrienne Rich has been a very special friend and critic. She has read the manuscript through all its stages and provided resources, creative criticism, and constant encouragement." In the chapter "Sappho by Surgery" of The Transsexual Empire, Raymond cites a conversation with Rich in which Rich described trans women as "men who have given up the supposed ultimate possession of manhood in a patriarchal society by self-castration". Rich's work with the New Jewish Agenda led to the founding of Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends in 1990, a journal of which Rich served as the editor. This work coincided explored the relationship between private and public histories, especially in the case of Jewish women's rights. Her next published piece, An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), won both the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award as well as the Poet's Prize in 1993 and Commonwealth Award in Literature in 1991. During the 1990s Rich became an active member of numerous advisory boards such as the Boston Woman’s Fund, National Writers Union and Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. On the role of the poet, she wrote, "We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation." In July 1994, Rich won the MacArthur Fellowship and Award, specifically the "Genius Grant" for her work as a poet and writer. Also in 1992, Rich became a grandmother to Julia Arden Conrad and Charles Reddington Conrad. If you don't know who she is, you've been living under a rock. Daytime talk show host, blue eyed New Orleans native, first woman to come out as a lesbian on a TV sitcom, Ellen Degeneres made silly dancing and being vegan cool. DeGeneres has hosted both the Academy Awards and the Primetime Emmys. As a film actress, she starred in Mr. Wrong, appeared in EDtv and The Love Letter, and provided the voice of Dory in the Disney-Pixar animated film Finding Nemo, for which she was awarded a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first and only time a voice performance won a Saturn Award. She was a judge on American Idol for one year, having joined the show in its ninth season. She also starred in two television sitcoms, Ellen from 1994 to 1998 and The Ellen Show from 2001 to 2002. During the fourth season of Ellen in 1997, DeGeneres came out publicly as a lesbian in an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Shortly afterwards, her character Ellen Morgan also came out to a therapist played by Winfrey, and the series went on to explore various LGBT issues including the coming out process. She has won thirteen Emmys and numerous other awards for her work and charitable efforts.In November 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named her a Special Envoy for Global AIDS Awareness.DeGeneres was raised in Metairie, Louisiana, the daughter of Elizabeth Jane DeGeneres, a speech therapist, and Elliott Everett DeGeneres, an insurance agent. She has one brother, Vance DeGeneres, who is a producer and musician. She is of French, English, German and Irish descent. DeGeneres was raised as a Christian Scientist until the age of thirteen. In 1973, DeGeneres's parents filed for separation and were divorced the following year. Shortly after, Betty Jane remarried Roy Gruessendorf, who worked as a salesman. Betty Jane and Ellen moved with Gruessendorf from the New Orleans area to Atlanta, Texas. Vance stayed with their birth father.DeGeneres graduated from Atlanta High School in May 1976, after completing her first years of high school at Grace King High School in Metairie, Louisiana. She moved back to New Orleans to attend the University of New Orleans, where she majored in communication studies. After one semester, she left school to do clerical work in a law firm with her cousin Laura Gillen. She also held a job selling clothes at the chain store the Merry-Go-Round at the Lakeside Shopping Center. Other working experiences included J.C. Penney, being a waitress, a house painter, a hostess, and a bartender. She relates much of her childhood and career experiences in her comedic work.Since 2004, DeGeneres has had a relationship with Portia de Rossi. After the overturn of the same-sex marriage ban in California, DeGeneres announced on a May 2008 show that she and de Rossi were engaged, and gave de Rossi a three-carat pink diamond ring. They were married on August 16, 2008, at their home, with nineteen guests including their mothers. The passage of Proposition 8 cast doubt on the legal status of their marriage, but a subsequent California Supreme Court judgment validated it because it occurred before November 4, 2008. DeGeneres and de Rossi live in Beverly Hills, with three dogs and four cats, and both are vegan. DeGeneres served as campaign ambassador to Farm Sanctuary's Adopt-A-Turkey Project in 2010, asking people to start "a new tradition by adopting a turkey instead of eating one" at Thanksgiving. On August 6, 2010, de Rossi filed a petition to legally change her name to Portia Lee James DeGeneres. The petition was granted on September 23, 2010. Olympia Brown (January 5, 1835-October 23, 1926) dedicated her life to opening doors for women. Among only a handful of women to graduate from college, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Antioch in 1860 and three years later became the first woman graduate of a regularly established theological school: St. Lawrence University. She was ordained a Universalist minister, the first woman to achieve full ministerial standing recognized by a denomination. As a young minister, she took an active role in the women's suffrage movement and was one of the few original suffragists who lived to vote in the 1920 presidential election.The first of four children, Olympia Brown was born to Vermont Universalists Asa B. and Lephia Olympia Brown, pioneers in Prairie Ronde, Michigan. Determined to give his children a good education, her father built a schoolhouse on his farm. He and Olympia rode from house to house to enlist their neighbors' donations toward hiring a teacher. The Brown children later attended school in the nearby town of Schoolcraft. Olympia was determined to go to college and persuaded her father to allow her and a younger sister to enter Mary Lyons's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts. After an unhappy year in the rigidly Calvinistic atmosphere there, Olympia went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Horace Mann was president. Her experience there was so positive that her family moved to Yellow Springs for all four children to get a good education. While at Antioch, Olympia Brown invited Antoinette Brown (no relation) to lecture and preach. "It was the first time I had heard a woman preach," she remembered, "and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand." Her next step was theological school, even though theological schools at that time did not welcome women. "The ministry was the first objective of her life," wrote Gwendolen Brown Willis, "since in her youthful enthusiasm she believed that freedom of religious thought and a liberal church would supply the groundwork for all other freedoms. Her difficulties and disillusionments in this field were numerous. That she could rise superior to such difficulties and disillusionments was the consequence of the hopefulness and courage with which she was richly endowed." The Unitarian School of Meadville, Pennsylvania, replied to her request for admission saying that "the trustees thought it would be too great an experiment" to admit a woman. Oberlin replied that she could be admitted but could not participate in public exercises. Finally, Ebenezer Fisher, President of the Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University, offered her admission but added that he "did not think women were called to the ministry. But I leave that between you and the Great Head of the Church." This, Olympia thought, "was exactly where it should be left. But when I arrived, I was told I had not been expected and that Mr. Fisher had said I would not come as he had written so discouragingly to me. I had supposed his discouragement was my encouragement." Entering divinity school in 1861, she completed her course of study in 1863. She had to convince those opposed to women in the ministry that they could complete the required course of study as commendably as she had. Then she had to convince the reluctant ministers to ordain her and allow her to be called to the parish ministry. Despite considerable opposition, Brown prevailed in both goals. This determination characterized her throughout her long and fruitful life. In 1864 she was called to her first full-time parish ministry in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. At this time Olympia Brown became active in the women's rights movement, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and other leaders. In the summer of 1867, at the urging of Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, she agreed to take on a rigorous campaign in Kansas to urge passage of a woman suffrage amendment. The Weymouth Landing parish generously gave their minister a four-month leave of absence to fulfill this commitment. Although Henry Blackwell assured Brown that he had made all the arrangements for her campaign, she arrived in Kansas to find that little if anything had been done in her behalf. She would have to make her own travel arrangements, find lodgings in each town, advertise her speaking engagements, secure halls in which to speak and deal with those determined to disrupt her speeches. Often she had to face down hostile townspeople who wanted to discredit her and the cause of woman suffrage. Brown took such obstacles as challenges to be surmounted and kept her eyes firmly on her goal. In spite of unbearable heat and brutal winds, she persevered and mounted a spirited campaign, delivering more than 300 speeches. She was not discouraged when only one-third of the voting population (all male, of course) approved the amendment. In spite of the final vote Susan B. Anthony considered Olympia Brown's work a glorious triumph. By 1870 Brown was ready for another challenge and accepted a call to the Universalist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut, "thinking it a larger field of usefulness." Even though the church had many members, "some had lost interest and there had even been an inclination to close the church." She also found that "unlike my Weymouth people, they had no such breadth of vision." Although her mother and her friends advised her against marriage because they thought it would interfere with her career as a minister, she married John Henry Willis in 1873. She "thought that with a husband so entirely in sympathy with my work, marriage could not interfere, but rather assist. And so it proved, for I could have married no better man. He shared in all my undertakings." As did Lucy Stone, Olympia Brown kept her maiden name, with Willis's agreement. It was a most felicitous marriage. When her husband died, unexpectedly in 1893, she wrote: "Endless sorrow has fallen upon my heart. He was one of the truest and best men that ever lived, firm in his religious convictions, loyal to every right principle, strictly honest and upright in his life,....with an absolute sincerity of character such as I have never seen in any other person." A son, Henry Parker Willis, was born in 1874 and a daughter, Gwendolen Brown Willis, in 1876. During her maternity leave for her first child, a faction at the Bridgeport church started agitating to terminate her ministry. As she writes in her autobiography: "although (or because) my parish gave me a vote of endorsement passed by a large majority, these enemies continued....calling in ministers from neighboring churches...promulgating the doctrine, 'what you need here is a good man.'" At the end of 1874, Brown decided to resign her ministry. She and her husband stayed in Bridgeport for two more years, during which time her daughter was born. With characteristic spirit, Olympia recounts "after this tempestuous time at Bridgeport, I considered where I should go to continue the work of preaching, to which I had, as I thought, a distinct calling." Discovering that a Universalist church in Racine, Wisconsin, was in need of a minister, she wrote to Mr. A. C. Fish, the clerk of the society, to offer her services. He wrote back that the parish was in an unfortunate condition, thanks to "a series of pastors easy-going, unpractical and some even spiritually unworthy, who had left the church adrift, in debt, hopeless and doubtful whether any pastor could again rouse them." This was precisely the kind of challenge that Olympia welcomed. It is also true that her options were limited. Of her career as a parish minister she writes: "Those who may read this will think it strange that I could only find a field in run-down or comatose churches, but they must remember that the pulpits of all the prosperous churches were already occupied by men, and were looked forward to as the goal of all the young men coming into the ministry with whom I, at first the only woman preacher in the denomination, had to compete. All I could do was to take some place that had been abandoned by others and make something of it, and this I was only too glad to do." With two small children to support, John Willis closed his business in Bridgeport and went ahead to Racine to find a house and employment. This type of support for his wife's endeavors was typical of him throughout their married life. He became one of the owners of The Racine Times-Call newspaper and worked actively to support his wife's ministry. Rejuvenating the Universalist society in Racine was not a task for the faint of heart, but Brown set about it with her usual competence, dedication and practical skill. Not only did she breathe new life into the society, but she also established it as a center of learning and cultural activities. Bringing famous speakers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, and Susan B. Anthony, she added immeasurably to the life of the surrounding community. After nine years of rebuilding, she felt that her parish was able to sustain itself, and she made a momentous decision. At the age of 53 she decided to make a career change. Though she would continue to work as a part-time minister in smaller Wisconsin congregations, Brown left full-time ministry to become an activist for women's rights. Because her new role necessitated a great deal of travel, she was fortunate to have both a supportive husband and a capable mother at home to help care for the family. Olympia Brown was a tireless and effective organizer for suffrage initiatives at the state and national level, leading the Wisconsin Suffrage Association for many years and serving as Vice-president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she promoted a broad range of reforms aimed at women, Believing that education was the key to women's advancement, she worked tirelessly to have women admitted to colleges and professional schools. By the 1890s Brown was convinced that the suffrage movement was languishing under what she considered the lackluster leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. Little progress was being made toward a suffrage amendment, the older suffragists had either died or were being ignored, and in her opinion the fire seemed to have gone out of the movement. Not until Alice Paul and Lucy Barnes started the Woman's Party in 1913 did Brown feel optimistic about the suffrage cause. She welcomed the more confrontational and street-wise tactics of the Woman's Party and was elated with their strategy of mounting large vigils and demonstrations to mobilize support. When she was asked to be a charter member of this more militant and energetic group, she stated "I belonged to this party before I was born." Brown joined in many of the demonstrations organized by the Woman's Party. In freezing rain, in bitter cold, in spite of dangerous confrontations and little police protection from hecklers, the octogenarian minister from Wisconsin was there. During one memorable demonstration, protesting Woodrow Wilson's turning his back on the suffrage amendment, she publicly burned his speeches in front of the White House. When the suffrage amendment was finally passed in 1919, Brown was one of the few original suffragists who was still alive to savor the triumph. She voted in her first presidential election at the age of 85. Speaking in the Racine church in the fall of 1920 on the changes that had taken place since her resignation as minister, she said, "the grandest thing has been the lifting up of the gates and the opening of the doors to the women of America, giving liberty to twenty-seven million women, thus opening to them a new and larger life and a higher ideal." In this sermon, she also testified to the importance in her life of Universalism, "the faith in which we have lived, for which we have worked, and which has bound us together as a church. . . . Dear Friends, stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideal, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for the noble duty and made the world beautiful for you." After the suffrage victory, Brown dedicated herself to promoting world peace and became one of the original members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In her later years she spent summers at her lakeside home in Racine and winters in Baltimore with her daughter Gwendolen, who taught Greek and Latin at the Bryn Mawr School there. She died in Baltimore at 91 and was buried beside her husband in Racine's Mound Cemetery. At the time of her death, The Baltimore Sun captured the independence, fearlessness and passionate commitment to justice of the Reverend Olympia Brown by stating; "Perhaps no phase of her life better exemplified her vitality and intellectual independence than the mental discomfort she succeeded in arousing, between her eightieth and ninetieth birthdays, among the conservatively minded Baltimorans." The church Brown helped to vitalize in Racine has been re-named the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church. In 1975 a group of parishioners mounted a successful campaign to have an elementary school in Racine named in her honor. Nothing would have made this proponent of education, especially for women, prouder. To honor the centennial of her ordination in 1963, the Theological School at St. Lawrence University unveiled a plaque which reads in part: Preacher of Universalism Pioneer and Champion of Women's Citizenship Rights Forerunner of the New Era The flame of her spirit still burns today. Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio. Her parents immigrated to the United States from China in 1949 and settled in Ohio in 1958, one year before Maya Lin was born. Her father, Henry Huan Lin, was a ceramist and former dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts. She is the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China.[3] Lin Juemin, one of the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising was a cousin of her grandfather. Lin studied at Yale University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 and a Master of Architecture degree in 1986. She has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College.[5] She was among the youngest in Yale University when she received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1987. She is married to Daniel Wolf, a New York photography dealer. They have two daughters, India and Rachel. Lin is the youngest and has an older brother who is an English professor and poet. Growing up, she did not have many friends and stayed home a lot. She loved school and loved to study. When she was not studying, she took independent courses from Ohio University and spent her free time casting bronzes in the school foundry. Lin, having grown up as an Asian minority, has said that she "didn't even realize" she was Chinese until later in life, and that it was not until her 30s that she had a desire to understand her cultural background. Commenting on her design of a new home for the Museum of Chinese in America near New York City's bella Chinatown, Lin attached a personal significance to the project being a Chinese-related project because she wanted her two daughters to "know that part of their heritage." In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, Lin won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, beating out 1,441 other competition submissions. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of 58,261 fallen soldiers carved into its face, was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated on November 13, 1982. The wall is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. Lin's conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers. The design was initially controversial for what was an unconventional and non-traditional design for a war memorial. Opponents of the design also voiced objection because of Lin's Asian heritage. However, the memorial has since become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of the American military casualties in Vietnam, and personal tokens and mementos are left at the wall daily in their memory. Lin believes that if the competition had not been "blind", with designs submitted by number instead of name, she "never would have won". She received harassment after her ethnicity was revealed. Prominent businessman and later 3rd party presidential candidate Ross Perot was known to have called her an "egg roll" after it was revealed that she was Asian. Lin defended her design in front of the United States Congress, and eventually a compromise was reached. A bronze statue of a group of soldiers and an American flag was placed off to one side of the monument as a result. Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, went on to design other structures, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field at the University of Michigan (1995). In 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. The title comes from an address she gave at Yale in which she spoke of the monument design process. Talking about the origin of her work, Lin says "My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings and this can include not just the physical but the psychological world that we live in". According to Maya Lin, art should be an act of every individual willing to say something new and that which is not quite familiar. When a project comes her way, she tries to "understand the definition (of the site) in a verbal before finding the form. To understand what a piece is conceptually and what its nature should be even before visiting the site". In 1999, Lin exhibited Il Cortile Mare (1998), furniture design, maquettes and photos of works at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 2000, Lin re-emerged in the public life with a book entitled Boundaries. Also in 2000, she agreed to act as the artist and architect for the Confluence Project, a series of outdoor installations at historical points along the Columbia River and Snake River in the states of Washington and Oregon. This is the largest and longest project that she has undertaken so far. In 2002, Lin was elected Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University (upon whose campus sits another of Lin's designs: the Women's Table – designed to commemorate the role of women at Yale University), in an unusually public contest. Her opponent was W. David Lee, a local New Haven minister and graduate of the Yale Divinity School who was running on a platform to build ties to the community with the support of Yale's unionized employees. Lin was supported by Yale's President Richard Levin, other members of the Yale Corporation, and was the officially endorsed candidate of the Association of Yale Alumni. In 2003, Lin served on the selection jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. A trend toward minimalism and abstraction was noted among the entrants, finalists, and current World Trade Center Memorial. In 2005, Lin was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Lin was commissioned by Ohio University to design what is known as punch card park in that institution's Bicentennial Park, a landscape literally designed to resemble a punched card, supposedly based on Lin's memories of their early use in universities. The park is a large open space with rectangular mounds and voids on the ground.photo At first the park was criticized for being relatively uninviting (with punched card pits promoting mosquito infestation and preventing safe active recreation) and lacked trees or structures to shade students from the sun. In addition, from the ground level, it is difficult to tell what the park is supposed to look like, though from an aerial view it does resemble a punched card. Although the university since planted trees around the park's perimeter in an attempt to make it a more popular place for students to gather, this has been unsuccessful. In 2007, Lin installed "Above and Below", an outdoor sculpture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana. "Above and Below" is made of aluminum tubing that has been electrolytically colored during the anodization process. In 2008, Lin completed a 30-ton sculpture called "2 x 4 Landscape," which is on exhibit at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California. Her current projects include an installation at the Storm King Art Center. In 2009, Lin completed "Silver River," her first work of art in Las Vegas, which is part of a public fine art collection at MGM Mirage's CityCenter, which opened December 2009. Lin created an 84-foot (26 m) cast of the Colorado River made entirely of reclaimed silver. With the sculpture, Lin wanted to make a statement about water conservation and the importance of the Colorado River to Nevada in terms of energy and water. The sculpture is displayed behind the front desk of the Aria Resort & Casino. In 2009, Maya Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Maya Lin is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York. Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi was the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives and served as the 60th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011. She was the first woman to hold the office and to date, has been the highest-ranking female politician in American history. A member of the Democratic Party, Pelosi has represented California's 8th congressional district, which consists of four-fifths of the city and county of San Francisco, since 1987. The district was numbered as the 5th during Pelosi's first three terms in the House. She served as the House Minority Whip from 2002 to 2003, and was House Minority Leader from 2003 to 2007, holding the post during the 108th and 109th Congresses. Pelosi is the first woman, the first Californian and first Italian-American to lead a major party in Congress. After the Democrats took control of the House in 2007 and increased their majority in 2009, Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House for the 110th and 111th Congresses. On November 17, 2010, Pelosi was elected as the Democratic Leader by House Democrats and therefore the Minority Leader in the Republican-controlled House for the 112th Congress. Pelosi is Italian-American and was born Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest of six children of Annunciata M. "Nancy" (née Lombardi) and Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., who was a Democratic party U.S. Congressman from Maryland and a Mayor of Baltimore. Pelosi's brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, also a Democrat, was mayor of Baltimore from 1967 to 1971, when he declined to run for a second term. Pelosi was involved with politics from an early age. In her outgoing remarks as the 60th Speaker of the House, Pelosi noted that she had been present at John F. Kennedy's inaugural address as President in January 1961. She graduated from the Institute of Notre Dame, a Catholic all-girls high school in Baltimore, and from Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) in Washington, D.C., in 1962 with a B.A. in political science. Pelosi interned for Senator Daniel Brewster (D-Maryland) alongside future House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. She met Paul Frank Pelosi (b. April 15, 1940, in San Francisco) while she was attending Trinity College. They married in Baltimore at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen on September 7, 1963. After the couple married, they moved to New York, and then to San Francisco in 1969, where Mr. Pelosi's brother, Ronald Pelosi, was a member of the City and County of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. After moving to San Francisco, Pelosi worked her way up in Democratic politics. She became a friend of one of the leaders of the California Democratic Party, 5th District Congressman Phillip Burton. In 1976, Pelosi was elected as a Democratic National Committee member from California, a position she would hold until 1996. She was elected as party chair for Northern California on January 30, 1977, and for the California Democratic Party, which she held from 1981 until 1983.Pelosi was appointed Finance Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the U.S. Senate Democrats, in 1985. That same year, she ran to succeed Chuck Manatt as chair of the Democratic National Committee, but lost to then-DNC Treasurer Paul G. Kirk. Pelosi left her post as DSCC finance chair in 1986.Nancy Pelosi is among the richest members of Congress,with an estimated net worth of approximately $58 million, the 12th highest estimated net worth in Congress, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. While members of Congress are not required to disclose their exact net worth, organizations such as the Center for Responsive Politics prepare estimated ranges based on public disclosures. The CRP's midpoint estimate of the Pelosis' net worth is $58,436,537 as of 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available, with a possible range from $7 million to $124 million. In addition to their large portfolio of jointly owned San Francisco Bay Area real estate, the couple also owns a vineyard in St. Helena, California, valued between $5 million and $25 million.[citation needed] Pelosi's husband also owns stock, including $1 million in Apple Inc.[citation needed], and is the owner of the Sacramento Mountain Lions of the United Football League.She definitely made history. While I know there are a lot of people out there who love her or hate her, I feel pretty meh-- indifferent about her. The first African-American Congresswoman, Shirley Anita Chisholm represented a newly reapportioned U.S. House district centered in Brooklyn, New York. Elected in 1968 because of her roots in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Chisholm was catapulted into the national limelight by virtue of her race, gender, and outspoken personality. In 1972, in a largely symbolic undertaking, she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. But “Fighting Shirley” Chisholm’s frontal assault on many congressional traditions and her reputation as a crusader limited her influence as a legislator. “I am the people’s politician,” she once told the New York Times. “If the day should ever come when the people can’t save me, I’ll know I’m finished. That’s when I’ll go back to being a professional educator.” Shirley Anita St. Hill was born on November 20, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the oldest of four daughters of Charles St. Hill, a factory laborer from Guyana, and Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados. For part of her childhood, Shirley St. Hill lived in Barbados on her maternal grandparents’ farm, receiving a British education while her parents worked during the Great Depression to settle the family in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The most apparent manifestation of her West Indies roots was the slight, clipped British accent she retained throughout her life. She attended public schools in Brooklyn and graduated with high marks. Accepted to Vassar and Oberlin colleges, Shirley St. Hill attended Brooklyn College on scholarship and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in sociology in 1946. From 1946 to 1953, Chisholm worked as a nursery school teacher and then as the director of two daycare centers. She married Conrad Q. Chisholm, a private investigator, in 1949. Three years later, Shirley Chisholm earned an M.A. in early childhood education from Columbia University. She served as an educational consultant for New York City’s Division of Day Care from 1959 to 1964. In 1964, Chisholm was elected to the New York state legislature; she was the second African-American woman to serve in Albany. A court-ordered redistricting that carved a new Brooklyn congressional district out of Chisholm’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood convinced her to run for Congress. The influential Democratic political machine, headed by Stanley Steingut, declared its intention to send an African American from the new district to the House. The endorsement of the machine usually resulted in a primary victory, which was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic area. In the primary, Chisholm faced three African-American challengers: civil court judge Thomas R. Jones, a former district leader and New York assemblyman; Dolly Robinson, a former district co-leader; and William C. Thompson, a well-financed state senator. Chisholm roamed the new district in a sound truck that pulled up outside housing projects while she announced: “Ladies and Gentlemen … this is fighting Shirley Chisholm coming through.” Chisholm capitalized on her personal campaign style. “I have a way of talking that does something to people,” she noted. “I have a theory about campaigning. You have to let them feel you.” In the primary in mid-June 1968, Chisholm defeated Thompson, her nearest competitor, by about 800 votes in an election characterized by light voter turnout. In the general election, Chisholm faced Republican-Liberal James Farmer, one of the principal figures of the civil rights movement, a cofounder of the Congress for Racial Equality, and an organizer of the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s. The two candidates held similar positions on housing, employment, and education issues, and both opposed the Vietnam War. Farmer charged that the Democratic Party “took [blacks] for granted and thought they had us in their pockets.… We must be in a position to use our power as a swing vote.” But the election turned on the issue of gender. Farmer hammered away, arguing that “women have been in the driver’s seat” in black communities for too long and that the district needed “a man’s voice in Washington,” not that of a “little schoolteacher.” Chisholm, whose campaign motto was “unbought and unbossed,” met that charge head-on, using Farmer’s rhetoric to highlight discrimination against women and explain her unique qualifications. “There were Negro men in office here before I came in five years ago, but they didn’t deliver,” Chisholm countered. “People came and asked me to do something … I’m here because of the vacuum.” Chisholm portrayed Farmer as an outsider (he lived in Manhattan) and used her fluent Spanish to appeal to the growing Hispanic population in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. (Puerto Rican immigrants accounted for about 20 percent of the district vote.) The deciding factor, however, was the district’s overwhelming liberal tilt: More than 80 percent of the voters were registered Democrats. Chisholm won the general election by a resounding 67 percent of the vote. Chisholm’s freshman class included two African Americans of future prominence: Louis Stokes of Ohio and William L. (Bill) Clay, Sr., of Missouri—and boosted the number of African Americans in the House from six to nine, the largest total up to that time. Chisholm was the only new woman to enter Congress in 1969. Chisholm’s welcome in the House was not warm, due to her immediate outspokenness. “I have no intention of just sitting quietly and observing,” she said. “I intend to focus attention on the nation’s problems.” She did just that, lashing out against the Vietnam War in her first floor speech on March 26, 1969. Chisholm vowed to vote against any defense appropriation bill “until the time comes when our values and priorities have been turned right-side up again.”She was assigned to the Committee on Agriculture, a decision she appealed directly to House Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts (bypassing Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, who oversaw Democratic committee appointments). McCormack told her to be a “good soldier,” at which point Chisholm brought her complaint to the House Floor. She was reassigned to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee which, though not one of her top choices, was more relevant to her district’s makeup. “There are a lot more veterans in my district than trees,” she quipped. From 1971 to 1977 she served on the Committee on Education and Labor, having won a place on that panel with the help of Hale Boggs of Louisiana, whom she had endorsed as Majority Leader. She also served on the Committee on Organization Study and Review (known as the Hansen Committee), whose recommended reforms for the selection of committee chairmen were adopted by the Democratic Caucus in 1971. From 1977 to 1981, Chisholm served as Secretary of the Democratic Caucus. She eventually left her Education Committee assignment to accept a seat on the Rules Committee in 1977, becoming the first black woman—and the second woman ever—to serve on that powerful panel. Chisholm also was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 1971 and the Congressional Women’s Caucus in 1977. Chisholm continued to work for the causes she had espoused as a community activist. She sponsored increases in federal funding to extend the hours of daycare facilities and a guaranteed minimum annual income for families. She was a fierce defender of federal assistance for education, serving as a primary backer of a national school lunch bill and leading her colleagues in overriding President Gerald R. Ford’s veto on this measure. However, Chisholm did not view herself as a “lawmaker, an innovator in the field of legislation”; in her efforts to address the needs of the “have-nots,” she often chose to work outside the established system. At times she criticized the Democratic leadership in Congress as much as she did the Republicans in the White House. She was an explorer and a trailblazer rather than a legislative artisan. True to this approach, Chisholm declared her candidacy for the 1972 Democratic nomination for President, charging that none of the other candidates represented the interests of blacks and the inner-city poor. She campaigned across the country and succeeded in getting her name on 12 primary ballots, becoming as well known outside her Brooklyn neighborhood as she was in it. At the Democratic National Convention she received 152 delegate votes, or 10 percent of the total, a respectable showing given her modest funding. A 1974 Gallup Poll listed her as one of the top 10 most-admired women in America—ahead of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Coretta Scott King and tied with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for sixth place. But while the presidential bid enhanced Chisholm’s national profile, it also stirred controversy among her House colleagues. Chisholm’s candidacy split the CBC. Many black male colleagues felt she had not consulted them or that she had betrayed the group’s interests by trying to create a coalition of women, Hispanics, white liberals, and welfare recipients. Pervasive gender discrimination, Chisholm noted, cut across racial lines: “Black male politicians are no different from white male politicians. This ‘woman thing’ is so deep. I’ve found it out in this campaign if I never knew it before.” Her presidential campaign also strained relations with other women Members of Congress, particularly Bella Abzug of New York, who endorsed George McGovern instead of Chisholm. By 1976, Chisholm faced a stiff challenge from within her own party primary by a longtime political rival, New York City Councilman Samuel D. Wright. Born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Wright was a formidable opponent who had represented Brooklyn in the New York assembly for a number of years before winning a seat on the city council. He criticized Chisholm for her absenteeism in the House, brought on by the rigors of her presidential campaign, and for a lack of connection with the district. Chisholm countered by playing on her national credentials and her role as a reformer of Capitol Hill culture. “I think my role is to break new ground in Congress,” Chisholm noted. She insisted that her strength was in bringing legislative factions together. “I can talk with legislators from the South, the West, all over. They view me as a national figure and that makes me more acceptable.” Two weeks later Chisholm turned back Wright and Hispanic political activist Luz Vega in the Democratic primary, winning 54 percent of the vote to Wright’s 36 percent and Vega’s 10 percent. She won the general election handily with 83 percent of the vote. From the late 1970s onward, Brooklyn Democrats speculated that Chisholm was losing interest in her House seat. Her name was widely floated as a possible candidate for several jobs related to education, including president of the City College of New York and chancellor of the New York City public school system. In 1982, Chisholm declined to seek re-election. “Shirley Chisholm would like to have a little life of her own,” she told the Christian Science Monitor, citing personal reasons for her decision to leave the House; she wanted to spend more time with her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, Jr., a New York state legislator she had married about six months after divorcing Conrad Chisholm in 1977. Other reasons, too, factored into Chisholm’s decision to leave the House. She had grown disillusioned over the conservative turn the country had taken with the election of President Ronald W. Reagan in 1980. Also, there were tensions with people on her side of the political fence, particularly African-American politicians who, she insisted, misunderstood her efforts to build alliances. While her rhetoric about racial inequality could be passionate at times, Chisholm’s actions toward the white establishment in Congress were often conciliatory. Chisholm maintained that many members of the black community did not understand the need for negotiation with white politicians. “We still have to engage in compromise, the highest of all arts,” Chisholm noted. “Blacks can’t do things on their own, nor can whites. When you have black racists and white racists it is very difficult to build bridges between communities.” After leaving Congress in January 1983, Chisholm helped cofound the National Political Congress of Black Women and campaigned for Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids in 1984 and 1988. She also taught at Mt. Holyoke College in 1983. Though nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica by President William J. Clinton, Chisholm declined due to ill health. She settled in Palm Coast, Florida, where she wrote and lectured, and died on January 1, 2005, in Ormond Beach, Florida. Photo by Leif Skoogfors, used with permission |
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