[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 20]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 27619-27620]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            RECOGNIZING THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF MARY M. LASSEN

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. MICHAEL E. CAPUANO

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, December 6, 2005

  Mr. CAPUANO. Mr. Speaker, I rise in tribute to Mary M. Lassen, who 
has served more than a decade as president and CEO of the Women's Union 
in Boston. Mary Lassen has been an extraordinary force for social 
justice and effective reform. The Women's Educational and Industrial 
Union, established in 1877, supported suffrage, legal rights, and wider 
opportunities for women. Mary Lassen built upon those historic triumphs 
and led the union into a new century, working with and on behalf of 
poor and immigrant women. Under her leadership, the union has provided 
job training for women moving from welfare to work, supportive housing 
for survivors of domestic abuse, and compelling advocacy for family 
economic self-sufficiency.
  Mary Lassen graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College, 
determined to secure

[[Page 27620]]

liberty, justice, and opportunity for all persons. Her struggle against 
poverty and injustice has been both intellectual and pragmatic. She 
believes in rigorous analysis and sustained collaboration. After 
working as a community organizer, she became executive director of the 
Committee for Boston Public Housing. In that office, she introduced 
early childhood, antiviolence and community building programs in 
several of Boston's public housing developments, and then, 
characteristically, she took time to reflect. In a sabbatical year, as 
a fellow of the Mary I. Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, she 
produced a study of ``Community-Based Family Support in Public 
Housing.'' During a public policy fellowship sponsored by the Japan 
Society, she explored women's employment and workforce development in 
East Asia. She has inspired the union's important research on Family 
Self-Sufficiency and helped forge the Massachusetts Family Economic 
Self-Sufficiency Project, MassFESS, a statewide coalition of 
organizations, to measure the real costs of living, working and paying 
taxes without subsidies and to frame policy in terms of these real 
costs.
  Under her leadership, the Women's Union opened Horizons II, 
increasing by 30 percent the number of supportive transitional housing 
units for battered and homeless women and their children in the city of 
Boston. This year, the Women's Union celebrated the opening of a newly 
designed, state-of-the art, woman-focused technology training center. 
The title of their report expresses their goal: Achieving Success in 
the New Economy.
  Several of the most daring, inspiring, and influential women in the 
history of our country have been associated with the Women's Union, 
sometimes as supporters, sometimes as clients: Louisa May Alcott, Julia 
Ward Howe, Helen Keller, and Amelia Earhart. Mary Lassen deserves a 
place among them.

                          ____________________