[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 135 (Wednesday, October 25, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1915]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              HONORING ADELLE GORDON ON HER 75TH BIRTHDAY

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. KAREN McCARTHY

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, October 25, 2000

  Ms. McCARTHY of Missouri. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Adelle 
Gordon, a psychiatric social worker from Rochester, New York, who is 
one of the unsung early pioneers of the women's movement.
  Back in 1951, Mrs. Gordon, then a graduate student at Columbia 
University's School of Social Work, wrote her dissertation on the 
conflicts of a group of young mothers who were torn between staying at 
home with their children or returning to work for financial or 
professional reasons. Her prescient paper, ``A Study of the Adjustment 
of Fourteen Professional Women to Motherhood,'' touched on the 
difficulties facing working mothers in that era, with minimal support 
from spouses and employers, as well as the frustrations of housewives 
who felt culturally pressured to stay home. Mrs. Gordon's research 
evolved at a Central Park playground, where she took her own toddler 
son and met the women who became her subjects.
  Mrs. Gordon, who will turn 75 on November 11, has devoted her social 
work career to counseling low income families, often referred by their 
local school districts. Starting out at the Hartford Family Service 
Society, she spent five years at the New Britain Child Guidance Clinic 
before joining the Rochester Mental Health Center in 1964. Recently 
retired, she has also taught at the University of Rochester. Married to 
David Gordon, she is the mother of two children, Bart (deceased) and 
Meryl, and has two grandchildren, Jesse and Nathan Gordon. As a working 
mother before the invention of the take-out, she developed her own 
domestic engineering system, cooking and freezing a week's worth of 
dinners in a day and defrosting the rest of the week.
  Mr. Speaker, women like Adelle Gordon are rarely mentioned in the 
history books about the feminist movement in the United States. But 
their quiet contributions are what made this enormous generational 
change possible. Please join me in honoring Mrs. Gordon for her 75th 
year and for her pioneering service to families with working mothers.

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