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From
Immigrant to Feminist:
My Role in the Women's Rights
Movement
I was born
in Berlin, Germany, to a family that also included my parents and my
brother, Hermann, who was 14 years older than I. My parents were Polish
but had lived in Germany for over 20 years and my father was in the men's
clothing business there.
In 1933,
when I was five years old, we had to leave Germany to escape Hitler, the
Nazis and the Holocaust. We spent a number of months in Antwerp, Belgium,
and then boarded a ship for the United States.
We docked
in New York City on May 1, 1934. Except for Hermann, none of us knew a
word of English. My parents at that time were both about 40 years old, my
father had never gone to school and did not know how to read and write in
any language except that he could read printed Yiddish. We wondered how we
would make a life for ourselves in this new land.
Two years
ago, I was one of five women inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of
Fame, followed by a reception in the governor's mansion in Annapolis. I
want to share with you tonight some of my feelings and experiences during
my journey from that dock in New York City to the governor's mansion in
Annapolis.
When we
arrived in New York, we first settled in the Bronx and that's where I
learned to speak English. Our apartment was in a building that was built
in a semi-circle around a small garden. I would stand in the garden
listening to the other children at play, and whenever I caught an
unfamiliar word, I'd run upstairs, repeat it to Hermann, and he'd give me
the German equivalent.
A month
after our arrival, I turned six and started kindergarten.
My father
initially returned to the business he'd been in Germany. He opened a men's
clothing store in Manhattan with a partner. But he didn't like the pace of
life in New York City, and so we moved to the Catskill Mountains of New
York State, a resort area about 100 miles from New York City-a place we'd
visited briefly on a summer vacation. There my parents went into the
summer resort business, a business my father had never been in before and
about which he knew absolutely nothing.
Initially,
my parents rented and ran a rooming house in a village called Woodridge,
and then we moved to the larger nearby town of Monticello, where my father
built and ran a 26-bungalow colony. Because my parents weren't fluent in
English, from childhood on, I was involved in their business dealings. I
drafted the rental contracts for the rooming house and the bungalows and
was an active participant in their business lives. I'm sure that was a
factor in my becoming a lawyer years later.
An
immigrant is defined as a person who "comes into a new country, region or
environment, especially in order to settle there." The operative word in
that definition for me is "new." It's challenging and exciting to do
something new, something different, something everyone else isn't doing.
But it's also scary to embark on a new venture. So to be an immigrant is
to be continually caught in the tension between the excitement and fear of
being in a new situation.
Immigration has a long history going back to the Bible. I was reminded of
this last month when I heard Bruce Feiler, the author of a new book called
Abraham, talk about Abraham, who is a central figure in three great
religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Feiler, who has spent much of
his adult life traveling to foreign countries and writing books about his
experiences, said that at his bar mitzvah when he was 13 years old he read
a passage from the Bible, which has guided him throughout his life. That
passage, in the very first book of the Bible, Genesis, chapter 12, refers
to the time when G-d spoke to Abraham and commanded him to: "Go forth from
your land, from your birthplace and from your father's home to the land
that I will show you." Often, to achieve our maximum potential, and
sometimes to save our lives, we have to go forth from our birthplaces to
strange and foreign countries.
It is a
wrench to leave the country of your birth and the feeling of dislocation
never leaves you. Sir Walter Scott said it well in his poem The Lay of
the Last Minstrel when he wrote:
Breathes
there a man with soul so dead,
Who never to
himself hath said,
This is my
own, my native land!
Whose heart
hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his
footsteps he hath turn'd,
From
wandering on a foreign strand!
To be an
immigrant is to constantly reflect on who you are, where you come from,
and how you are different from those around you.
I'm an
American citizen-but I wasn't born here so I'm not totally an American.
I'm certainly not a German either.
When I see
photographs or movies about Germany or hear German songs, I wonder who I
would have been and who I would have become if Hitler hadn't caused my
family to leave the country of my birth. That is, of course, a speculation
to which one can never have an answer. But it is the kind of speculation
that haunts immigrants.
I became
an immigrant at the age of five-and have remained one all my life. The
fact that I left the country of my birth and came to the United States has
colored everything I've been and done since then.
The effect
of my being an immigrant had many facets. First of all, it made me
different from most of those with whom I came in contact after I arrived
here. Actually, today more than 40% of all living Americans-over 100
million people-can trace their roots to an ancestor who came through Ellis
Island. The influx of immigrants to the United States between 1892 and
1924, during which time 12 million immigrants were processed at Ellis
Island, was the largest human migration in modern history.
But I
didn't know that when I was a child. What I knew was that I was different
from my classmates. I had European parents and was European myself. My
classmates in the Catskill Mountains of New York State were all born in
this country, as were their parents, by and large. My parents spoke a
foreign language at home and they had ideas and customs that differed from
those of the parents of my classmates. My mother sent me to kindergarten
wearing knee high hose; I longed to wear ankle socks like my American
classmates.
My parents
were also older than the parents of my classmates because my mother was 36
when I was born. I was different in other ways, too. I wore glasses for
nearsightedness and astigmatism from the age of eight. In Monticello, we
lived out of town so I could not easily get together with my classmates
after school. In effect, I had no siblings at home because my brother,
Hermann, married when I was 10 years old and left home. I had no close
cousins with whom to play and no grandparents in this country.
And I was
Jewish. When I was growing up in the 1930s and '40s, being Jewish wasn't
what it is today. Today it's chic to be Jewish or to be a member of
another ethnic minority. Back then it set you apart from the mainstream of
the culture. I remember feeling particularly excluded at Christmas
time-the beautiful Christmas trees, the lights, the carols, the exchange
of presents, the family gatherings-all that was not for me. I was the
outsider. That's what immigrants are. They are outsiders to the culture.
Ultimately, I became a writer. Writers, too, tend to be outsiders. So they
can look at the culture and see it from a vantage point that differs from
that of those who are an integral part of it.
I was an
outsider in other ways, too.I became a lawyer in 1957 when 3% of the law
school graduates in this country were women. I chose to have a career when
most women opted for marriage and a family. I got married at the age of
42, twenty years after most of my contemporaries had gotten married, and I
gave birth to my daughter when I was 43½-when most of my friends' children
were in college. And even when I retired, I chose a different
route-instead of relaxing, I embarked upon a career as a writer and public
speaker. Being an immigrant had something to do with all that.
Because I
escaped from the Holocaust, I felt that I was not free as other girls and
women were to simply seek happiness through marriage and family. I felt I
had been saved for a purpose and that there was something I needed to do
with my life to contribute to society.
These
feelings led to my attending law school in 1954, taking a job with the
newly-created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in
Washington, D.C. in 1965, and becoming a founder of the National
Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. I concluded that the contribution I
could make to society was to fight employment discrimination based on
race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Minorities and women in
this country were set apart, treated differently, and discriminated
against-all conditions natural to immigrants.
Although I
became a citizen on my father's citizenship papers five years after our
arrival, I was never comfortable with the fact that I did not have my own
papers. So while I was a student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York, in the '50s, I applied for my own papers. Thereafter, there was a
ceremony just for me where I was given my own citizenship papers. That was
quite a thrill. I have always felt that I appreciate the privilege of
living in this country more than those who were born here and I have
never, ever taken it for granted.
I made a
wonderful discovery when I was researching my memoir, Eat First-You
Don't Know What They'll Give You: The Adventures of an Immigrant Family
and Their Feminist Daughter. It was my recollection that the ship on
which we came to the U.S. was the Red Star Line's S.S. Westernland.
My Parents used to have a little male doll in a navy blue uniform and
white cap in our house and I remembered that the label on his cap said,
"S.S. Westernland." But that doll got lost, and I wasn't sure my
recollection was accurate.
Then a
friend told me that the manifests (passenger lists) of most ships that
arrived in the United States were at the National Archives in Washington,
D.C.
I went to
the Archives and was told that the information on the manifests was on
microfiche. I got the microfiche for May 1934, inserted it into the
viewing machine and looked for the name Pressman, but I could not find it.
I did not know whether that was because the microfiche was so unclear or
because I didn't know the way the manifests were organized. So I asked an
Archives technician who was standing nearby, if he could help me. His name
was Dan Law and he has been a friend of mine ever since. When he came over
to help me, Dan told me that some of the michrofiche was old, had
deteriorated, and, therefore, was hard to see. He sat down at the machine
and asked me for my brother's first name, explaining that the manifests
were organized in terms of the passengers' first names. After I gave him
Hermann's name, he asked if I knew how old he was in May of 1934. "Of
course," I said. "He was 19."
"Here he
is," said Dan.
The
information on the microfiche allowed him to locate the manifest in a book
of manifests. He showed it to me and said, "Would you like to have a
copy?" Would I? Dan ran off a copy for me and then I held in my hand a
copy of the manifest of the S.S. Westernland with my parents' names
on it, Hermann's name, my name--and even that of my grandmother Udel, who
was not on the ship but on whom the ship had a record.
When one
thinks about immigration, the two symbols that come to mind are the Statue
of Liberty and Ellis Island.
Next to
the flag, the Statue of Liberty is our country's most famous symbol for
freedom and has been referred to as the most famous immigrant ever to come
to this country. It was a gift to the U.S. from the people of France in
recognition of the bonds formed between our two countries during the
Revolutionary War, as a lasting memorial to independence, and to show that
France was also dedicated to the idea of human liberty.
For many
immigrants, the statue was their first sight of America.
When I
visited the statue years ago, I read again the poem on the bronze plaque
at its base, the poem that is almost as famous as the statue itself. The
poem, entitled "The New Colossus" and written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus,
ends as follows;
Give me
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched
refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these,
the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my
lamp beside the golden door.
More
recently, in 1996, my daughter and I took the ferry at Battery Park in New
York City for the trip to Ellis Island.
From 1892
to 1924, Ellis Island was the principal federal immigration station in the
United States for passengers traveling in third-class. Third-class was
also called steerage because those passengers were housed on the lower
decks of the ships where the steering mechanism had once been housed.
These immigrants traveled in crowded and often unsanitary conditions near
the bottom of the steamship with few amenities, often spending up to two
weeks seasick in their bunks during rough Atlantic Ocean crossings. They
traveled in terror that during their examinations at Ellis Island they
would be found to have a contagious disease or considered likely to become
a public charge or an illegal contract laborer and they would returned to
their countries of origin. Actually, only 2 percent of the immigrants who
passed through Ellis Island were turned back--but that translated to over
250,000 people whose hopes and dreams turned to tears.
If you
have an opportunity to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, I
recommend your doing so. They are very moving places to see. One of the
outdoor exhibits at Ellis Island, the American immigrant wall of honor,
honors America's immigrants regardless of when they immigrated or through
which port they entered. The wall is currently inscribed with over 600,000
names. You can see that wall and those names on the Internet.
Immigration to this country and to the DC area has changed a great deal
since those days, particularly since the 1990s. Today more than 800,000 of
our region's 5.5 million residents are foreign-born, the biggest
proportion since the Census Bureau began keeping tabs in the 1800s. One in
six area residents is foreign-born. This is part of a larger American
story. One in 10 U.S. residents today is foreign born. There's an
informative article about Washington's new immigrants in last month's
issue of the Washingtonian magazine and I commend it to you.
Let's move
now from my status as an immigrant to my involvement in the women's rights
movement. I mentioned earlier that my parents had built and run a bungalow
colony in Monticello, New York. I graduated from high school there, went
on to Cornell University, worked in New York City for four years, and then
went to law school at the University of Miami, Florida. I graduated from
law school in 1957 and went to work for the federal government in
Washington, D.C., because at that time the government was hiring women
lawyers, while private law firms and corporations generally were not.
After working for the Department of Justice and the National Labor
Relations Board, in October 1965, I joined the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission-EEOC-as the first woman attorney in its office of
the general counsel.
The EEOC,
which had begun operations only three months before I joined it, was
responsible for enforcing a new law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of
1964. When I came aboard, that law prohibited discrimination based on
race, color, religion, sex, and national origin by employers, labor
unions, and employment agencies. Some years later, age discrimination and
discrimination against persons with physical or mental disabilities were
added.
In 1965,
few Americans were aware that there was such a thing as sex
discrimination. When I mentioned "women's rights" in my early speeches,
the response was laughter. Words like "sex discrimination" and "women's
rights" hadn't yet entered the nation's vocabulary.
What was
our country like in 1965? Basically, men and women lived in two different
worlds. By and large, a woman's place was in the home. Her role was to
marry and raise a family. If she was bright, common wisdom had it that she
was to conceal that brightness. She was to be attractive-but not too
attractive. She was not to have career ambitions, although she could work
for a few years before marriage as a secretary, saleswoman, schoolteacher,
telephone operator, social worker, librarian, or nurse. It was expected
that she would be a virgin when she married. When she had children, she
was to raise them differently so that they, too, would continue in the
modes of behavior appropriate to their sex. If she divorced, which
reflected poorly on her, she might be awarded alimony and child
support-although it was unlikely that she would actually receive the
monies for more than a few years. If she failed to marry, she was an old
maid, relegated to the periphery of life.
Married
women could work outside the home only if dire household finances required
it. Under no circumstances were they to earn more money than their
husbands.
Women were
not to be opinionated or assertive. They were expected to show an interest
in fashion, books, ballet, cooking, sewing, knitting, and volunteer
activities. Political activities were acceptable as long as they were
conducted behind the scenes.
Of course,
not all women were able to fit into this pattern, and there were always
exceptions. But most women did what they were told because society exacted
a high price from deviants.
Men, on
the other hand, were the decision-makers and activists. They were the ones
who became presidents, legislators, generals, police chiefs, school
principals, and corporate executives. They were the heads of their
households, and their wives and children were expected to defer to their
wishes. Men were expected to take the initiative in dating, to have sexual
experiences before marriage, to propose marriage, to bear the financial
burden for the entire family, and to have little or nothing to do with
running their households and raising their children. It was assumed that
they would be insensitive, uncaring, and inarticulate-and interested in
activities such as sports, drinking, gambling, extramarital affairs, and
making money.
Most men
did what they were told, too.
This
picture of our society was true for most of the population. There were,
however, other dynamics at play in minority communities. Historically, for
example, more African-American women than men attended college. But for
most Americans, this was the climate in which the commission and I, as a
staff member, were supposed to eliminate sex discrimination.
Not only
was the country uninterested in sex discrimination, so were most of the
commissioners, officials, and staff at the EEOC. At that time, there were
100 permanent employees at the commission and most were there to fight
discrimination against African Americans. They didn't want the
commission's limited staff and resources diverted to issues of sex
discrimination.
The
country and the EEOC were, however, in for a shock. In the commission's
first fiscal year, about 37 percent of the complaints filed alleged sex
discrimination. These complaints raised a host of new issues that were
more difficult than those raised by the complaints of race
discrimination.
In the
area of sex discrimination, the EEOC moved very slowly and conservatively,
or not at all. I found myself increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness
of most of the officials to come to grips with the issues, and to come to
grips with them in ways that would expand employment opportunities for
women.
Because I
was always raising the issue of sex discrimination, my boss, the general
counsel, called me a "sex maniac." I became the staff person who stood for
aggressive enforcement of the sex discrimination prohibitions of the act,
and this caused me no end of grief and frustration.
During my
early days at the commission, a writer came to the EEOC. She had become
famous through writing a book in 1963 called The Feminine Mystique,
which dealt with the frustrations of women who were housewives and mothers
and did not work outside the home. Now, she was interviewing EEOC
officials and staff for a second book. Her name was Betty Friedan.
When we
met, Betty asked me to reveal problems and conflicts at the commission. As
a staff member, however, I did not feel I could publicly speak out about
the commission's dereliction, and I did not tell her what was happening
with regard to women's issues. But when she came a second time, I was
feeling particularly frustrated at the commission's failure to implement
the law for women, and I invited her into my office. I told her, with
tears in my eyes, that the country needed an organization to fight for
women like the NAACP (National Association for Colored Persons) fought for
African Americans.
Thereafter, in June of 1966, the Third National Conference of Commissions
on the Status of Women met in Washington, D.C. The attendees were enraged
when the leadership told them that they did not have the authority to pass
a resolution demanding the enforcement of Title VII for women and the
reappointment of EEOC Commissioner Dick Graham, who was a feminist. As a
result, at a luncheon at the conference Betty Friedan and a small group
planned an organization that subsequently became NOW whose purpose, as
written by Betty on a paper napkin, was "to take the actions needed to
bring women into the mainstream of American society, now, full equality
for women, in fully equal partnership with men." By the end of the day,
everyone at the conference who wanted to join had tossed $5 into a war
chest and now had 28 members. Those 28 were NOW's original founders.
Another
twenty-six, of whom I was one, were added that October at an organizing
conference in Washington, DC. We met in the basement of the Washington
Post building and adopted a statement of purpose and skeletal bylaws.
Most of us
did not know each other. One of the realities of those days was that there
was no national network whereby women and men interested in women's rights
could come to know each other and work together. What we had in common was
a frustration with the status of women and a determination to do something
about it. Women's rights was an idea whose time had come.
As a
result of pressure by NOW, which filed lawsuits, picketed the EEOC and the
White House, and mobilized public opinion, the EEOC began to take
seriously its mandate to eliminate sex discrimination in employment. It
issued guidelines and decisions that prohibited sex-segregated advertising
columns and, with narrow exceptions, required that all jobs, including
jobs as flight cabin attendants, had to be open to men and women alike. It
ruled that a woman could not be refused employment because of the
preferences of her employer, co-workers, clients, or customers, or because
she was pregnant or had children. A woman who needed time off in
connection with pregnancy, childbirth, or after the birth of a child was
entitled to the same benefits of sick pay, leave, and pay during leave
that her employer provided for employees in general who requested time off
for illness or other reasons.
State laws
that prohibited the employment of women in certain occupations, and
limited the number of hours they could work and the amount of weight they
could lift were superseded by Title VII. Laws that required benefits for
women, like seats, restrooms and rest and lunch breaks, could be
harmonized with Title VII by providing the same benefits to men.
Men and
women doing substantially equal work were entitled to equality in pay and
other benefits, including insurance, pension and retirement benefits. They
also had the right to be free of sexual harassment on the job.
Men also
used the remedies provided by Title VII, although to a much lesser extent.
They complained when they were excluded from traditionally female jobs,
such as nursing, or were prohibited from wearing beards, mustaches, or
long hair on the job.
NOW was
the first organization formed to fight for women's rights in the mid-'60s,
but it was followed by many others. New laws, executive orders, and
municipal ordinances were passed and issued that prohibited sex
discrimination and new government agencies were created to enforce those
laws.
Discrimination based on sex or marital status in the sale and rental of
housing and in the granting of credit was prohibited. Title IX of the
education amendments of 1972 prohibited educational institutions, from
preschools through colleges and universities, that received federal funds
from discriminating on the basis of sex against students and all
employees, including administrative personnel and faculty members. One of
the effects of Title IX has been the requirement for equality in
expenditures for school athletic programs.
Due to all
this activity, the American public became aware that there was a new
national priority: equal rights for women.
Where are
we today?
Our
society has undergone a massive change.
Women are
now found in large numbers in professional schools and in the professions,
and, to a much lesser extent, in executive suites and
legislatures.
They work at a host of technical and blue-collar jobs previously closed to
them. In 1976, women were admitted to West Point and our other military
academies, a development that was unthinkable before the women's
movement.
Women-owned businesses are now one-third of all businesses in the united
states and employ one out of five American workers. Over six hundred
colleges and universities, including this one, have women's studies
programs.
The
effects of Title VII have spilled over to every area of our society. Laws
have changed women's rights with regard to abortion, divorce, alimony,
child custody, child support, rape, jury service, appointments as
administrators and executors of estates, sentencing for crimes, health
care, and admission to places of public accommodation, such as clubs,
restaurants, and bars. Our spoken language has changed, and work continues
on the development of gender-neutral written language in laws, textbooks,
religious texts, and publications of all sorts.
In 1984,
eighteen years after the founding of NOW, Geraldine Ferraro was the first
woman vice-presidential candidate on a national party ticket, and in 1993,
Janet Reno became the first woman attorney general of the United States.
A
little-known law, a relatively small organization, the developments in
this country, and similar movements worldwide have completely changed the
face of this country and are well on their way to changing the face of the
world. The increase in the number and proportion of women who work has
been called the single most outstanding phenomenon of the twentieth
century.
We've
achieved a lot, but much remains to be done-and new problems face us.
Women today have to deal with new realities, such as combining a demanding
position with marriage and raising a family, and finding affordable,
quality household help and child care. Women increasingly find themselves
in the sandwich generation--having to be the caretaker both for their
children and their parents.
Women are
still subject not only to sex discrimination, but if they are older women,
women of color, or have disabilities, they may be the victims of multiple
forms of discrimination.
In the
year 2000, year-round full-time women workers earned $.73 for every dollar
earned by men. For African American and Hispanic women, the wage gap is
much greater.
Women are
still far from being equal in political and professional life. In the U.S.
Congress, thirteen of our hundred senators are women; that's only 13%. We
have 62 women in the House of Representatives-only 14%.
No woman
has ever served as president, vice president, speaker of the House of
Representatives, or majority leader of the Senate. Women remain
underrepresented in corporate boardrooms and executive suites and in top
positions in academia and unions.
The Equal
Rights Amendment-ERA-to our constitution has yet to be ratified by the
requisite number of states.
Sexual
harassment in the workplace remains a fact of life and student-to-student
sexual harassment appears to be on the increase. Congress has not yet seen
fit to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and only a
handful of states and cities have outlawed such discrimination. Thus, gays
and lesbians are, by and large, not a protected class of people in this
country.
Other
issues affecting American women today are poverty, homelessness, lack of
adequate health care, and violence. Poverty is a woman's issue because
women and children make up 76% of the poor in the U.S. A majority of
minimum wage workers are women.
A 1999
report from the CIA estimates that 50,000 women and children are brought
to the U.S. annually, illegally smuggled across borders to be used as
restaurant workers, domestic servants and sweatshop laborers, as well as
prostitutes and sex slaves.
When we
look past the U.S to the rest of the world, the status of women is often
shocking. In third world countries, culture, religion, and law often
deprive women of basic human rights and sometimes relegate them to almost
subhuman status.
Violence
against women and restrictions on their freedom are worldwide problems.
Female genital mutilation continues, as do polygamy, trafficking in, and
kidnapping, women and girls, stoning women to death for adultery, raping
women and children, child marriages, honor killings, abortions of female
fetuses, and female infanticide. In India and Asia, especially South Asia,
where women have the lowest status in the world, the poverty and
powerlessness of women are combining to make them increasingly vulnerable
to AIDS since they are in no position to negotiate safe sex. As a result,
some research groups are now calling aids a woman's disease.
Hunger has
also been called a woman's issue. 826 million people, most of them women
and children, throughout the world and particularly in developing
countries, do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs.
Another
problem in developing countries that particularly impacts women and
children is the lack of access to clean and affordable water and proper
sanitation services. Scarcity of water as well as skyrocketing water
prices put poor women in situations where they are obliged to walk long
distances to find cheaper water and use unsafe water from hand-dug wells.
Over 2 million people, mostly children, die annually from diarrheal
diseases related to lack of access to clean water.
On another
health issue, last month the Boston Globe reported on a study by
the Global Health Council, which concluded that inadequate reproductive
health services in developing nations are linked to a large number of
deaths among pregnant women. The report attributes the mortality rate
among pregnant women throughout the world to a lack of adequate
reproductive health services caused by a steep drop in international
family planning donations from the U.S. and other wealthy nations.
Despite
these serious problems, the changes we've seen in the past thirty-seven
years have been breathtaking.
In
thinking about my life and the women's rights movement, the common thread
that runs through both is change. Life is change-changes that happen to us
over which we have no or very little control. And changes that we
ourselves-on our own and working with like-minded people-can make. I'd
like to share with you something Anne Frank wrote about change. Anne was a
Jewish girl who was born in Germany in 1929, just about a year after I was
born there. From the time she was 13 until she was 15, she lived in hiding
from the Nazis in an attic with her family. After their hiding place was
discovered, Anne and her sister were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp where they both died of typhoid in March 1945, just a
few weeks before the camp was liberated. After her death, Anne attained
worldwide fame when her diary was discovered. I'd like to close my remarks
by reading you one of the passages in that diary:
"How
lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start
slowly changing the world!"
I hope
that all of you here today will change the world so that because of you,
it will be a better place for us all.
Thank
you.
© 2002 by
Sonia Pressman Fuentes
This talk was
given on October 8, 2002, at Montgomery College-Takoma Park Campus.
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