[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 34 (Wednesday, March 13, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H2193-H2194]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF THE NATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for giving me this 
time. I guess we are not finishing the bill today. I must say I hope 
Members think about the bill that we had under debate when the 
committee rose, because at this moment we still have the President in 
Egypt talking about terrorism, and what I think has happened is we have 
gutted the terrorism provisions in this bill. So while the President is 
away trying to say we will not

[[Page H2194]]

allow terrorists to terrorize us into not pursuing peace, we are here 
undoing the terrorism bill, and I do not think that is a happy 
conclusion for anybody. I feel like we should ring him up and say, 
hello, President, guess what we just did.
  I do not think the President is going to be too happy about that. I 
think tomorrow we are going to have an opportunity to reinstate the 
terrorism provisions, and I hope Members think about that. This was a 
very strange day procedurally.
  While I have the floor and while it is still March, I would like to 
also continue talking a bit about Women's History Week, because it has 
been a very interesting month in that every time I talk about it, it 
seems there are some people who absolutely cannot stand the fact that 
women have done anything in the great history of this Nation. I have 
been talking about women in the history of the military, the fact that 
there were women in the revolutionary war. In fact, one of them is 
buried at West Point. About Mrs. Washington going off there. Today let 
me talk about Mary Goddard. Let me talk about Dr. Walker, who was one 
of the surgeons during the civil war.
  There are so many women in history that contributed to this country 
and so few of us know about it that that is why we have this month, to 
try and reinstate some of the history that we know about.
  On July 4, we all celebrate the wonderful independence day, the 
Declaration of Independence, how exciting it is, but the thing that 
very few people really realize is that while these esteemed forefathers 
wrote this, writing it was not a crime. Printing it was a crime. 
Because obviously you didn't have radio, you did not have television. 
Printing it was how you could distribute it. If you had to sit down and 
hand write every copy of the Declaration of Independence, we would 
probably still be waiting for the revolutionary war. So as a 
consequence, printing such a document was treason by virtue of an act 
of the crown, and when they got done with this, they went around trying 
to find somebody who would print this document.

  Everyone, many, anyway, would see it and say, well, thank you very 
much. We wish you well with the revolution, but we are not really into 
treason this year. You know, that is kind of a high price to pay, and 
it will be my neck that they will come after.
  After searching diligently to try and find a way to get this printed 
so they could disseminate it to the 13 colonies, they found a woman 
named Mary Goddard who had a printing press, agreed to print this, and 
in fact wrote her name on the bottom because the register of the press 
had been in the name of one of the male members of the family, and she 
wanted the king to know that she had done this because she had not 
transferred the seal over to her name yet.
  I think that was a very courageous thing to do. If this thing had not 
worked, she would have been the first one they would have gone after 
and she would have been the first one to lose her head by order of 
George III. Now, for that she became the highest paid Federal employee 
in the history of America and that was postmistress of Baltimore.
  If you look at where we got freedom of religion, it is no secret that 
many of our forefathers who came here really were about freedom of 
religion. They were about freedom to practice their way but they did 
not want anybody practicing any other way, so they were very repressive 
once they got here to anyone who did not agree with them.
  It was Anne Hutchinson, her husband and her followers who were chased 
out of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, through a trial 
that took them two or three times to finally try and convict her 
because she was so popular in the area. They tried her for heresy, and 
she left and went down to what we now know as Rhode Island.
  It used to be called Rogues Island because they thought only a bunch 
of rogues would live together and be for freedom of religion. It went 
from Rogues Island to Rhode Island. It is wonderful and many women are 
very proud that a woman founded the colony, and it was the first colony 
that had freedom of religion in its charter.
  There were many, many women who were forgotten. We all remember 
Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, who kept writing him during the time 
that the Constitution was being drafted. She kept saying, ``Remember 
the ladies,'' and he wrote back sarcastic things like many of our radio 
hosts fire off over the radio every day. He would write back these 
sarcastic things, and of course they did not remember the ladies. They 
wrote the Constitution and left women out.
  But Abigail raised her son very properly, and many years later he was 
writing in his memoirs and letters how tragic it was that with each 
year that passed, people knew less and less about the contributions 
many brave women had made during the colonization of America and during 
the Revolutionary War period. We all know about Paul Revere riding 
through Boston, but we do not know about Sarah Luddington saving 
Connecticut, riding through there.
  These things are all important. These things we celebrate. I must say 
I get very, very tired of people trying to minimize this. It is not 
that we are saying we did it all and men did nothing. We are saying 
both men and women contributed to this great country.
  That is our model of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and this is a 
time where we should really go back and reinstate women in history 
rather than continuing to pretend like they did not do anything, they 
came here on cruise ships, they sat around and ate bonbons, sat around 
and got their hair done and nails done, waiting for everything to be 
done so they could celebrate.

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