A Woman's Place
Margolies-Mezvinsky, Marjorie & Feinman, Barbara
W hen a white male member of Congress jokingly referred to Rep. Marjorie MargoliesMezvinsky as "the three-M girl," the freshman legislatrix tasted gall and wormwood. His sobriquet was "inaccurate,...
...Martin's Press...
...laments: "Women often aren't taken very seriously...
...But working at Laws 'R' Us was not all bliss...
...They seem to have forged a mutual commiseration pact and turn to each other whenever a (white male) congressman is mean to them...
...Leslie Byrne (D-Va...
...are mere Knights of Magistral Grace, "whose nobility consists only in their knighthood itself...
...Each May they sponsor a virtual Woodstock of n.o...
...Their husbands are not merely supportive but "wonderfully supportive...
...I took pity on my out-oftouch colleague and pulled him aside to let him know it's time to thaw out, that the ice age is over...
...I was so flabbergasted about what he was saying to me," Karan told MMM...
...The Knights of Malta provides a taste of such reactionary pleasure, but the hauteur is generally too high-minded THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA H.J.A...
...Imagine, twenty-four women walking down the aisle, not to get married but to be sworn in to the United States Congress...
...Mom," I said, "if he calls me, he's a goner...
...My voice was weak and raspy and I was totally humiliated and embarrassed...
...Sire urges caution...
...MMM, a 51-year-old mother of eleven—his, hers, theirs, plus three legal wards—is the former NBC-TV journalist from suburban Philadelphia who went to Congress in the Year of the Woman and fell on Bill Clinton's sword on the Night of the Long Knives, when she cast the deciding affirmative vote on his budget...
...Without your vote, I can't win...
...The entire rest of our agenda depends on getting this behind us...
...magazine...
...Liberals may hint at it, when invoking Roosevelts or Kennedys, but they never speak the words—perhaps because everyone knows by now that when politicians acquire noblesse, it's taxpayers who take on the oblige...
...I thought, I couldn't be more proud of all this noise, because it represents all walks of life...
...And besides, the future of her children and all of America's children was at stake—the epilogue is entitled "Our Legacy to Our Children...
...lifts hers from the first issue of Ms...
...had been left destitute by the no-fault divorce that feminists demanded, with "a job that paid a pathetically inadequate salary...
...There also was supposed to be a postscript, but evidently it wasn't ready in time for inclusion in the reviewer's reading copy—and is missing from the hardbound copy as well...
...Also missing from the final copy is the "Interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton" advertised on the book jacket...
...Freshmen congresswomen are not only bright but "incredibly bright...
...71 W ho takes noblesse oblige seriously anymore...
...You mean that pile in the corner of the bedroom...
...Elizabeth Furse A WOMAN'S PLACE: THE FRESHMEN WOMEN WHO CHANGED THE FACE OF CONGRESS Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, with Barbara Feinman Crown /220 pages / $22.50 reviewed by FLORENCE KING 66 The American Spectator June 1994 (D-Ore...
...That is really good true-confessions writing, but most of the time MMM burbles with good cheer...
...I lost track...
...Women could never feel comfortable curling up on a couch and sleeping in public...
...All she says is that when the ayes reached 217 of the 218 needed for passage, Clinton, his voice sounding "drained and tired," phoned her and asked simply, "What would it take, Marjorie...
...Oh my God, laundry...
...Nevertheless, to those who would turn the Knights entirely into an order of merit, H.J.A...
...George Washington, the father of our country, surrounded by men, staring down at me...
...John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, have been caring for the poor and the sick since the eleventh century, when the Blessed Gerard founded a hospice for Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...Are we supposed to do that...
...I really did it...
...It certainly would be nice to have a wife...
...M MM's chapter on The Vote is disappointingly—and suspiciously—skimpy...
...Of course, the Order's history is also marked by the perfidy of the pedigreed, but the aptly named Sire maintains that aristocracy is a unique source of "energy and esprit de corps...
...MMM invokes Karan English so often that the book frequently takes on the flavor of the "my best girlfriend said" testimonials in Cosmopolitan magazine...
...Sitting up in bed, I blurted out, "Wow...
...Knights of Justice, the only ones eligible to sit on the Sovereign Council, must show sixteen quarters of nobility...
...A Woman's Place, written with the aid of a former researcher for Woodward and Bernstein, is about breaking the barriers, overcoming the hurdles, finding her way, paying her dues, and what Pat Schroeder said to Leslie Byrne...
...She is not above lifting a cliché from Golda Meir...
...The ceremony also drew raves from Karan English (D-Ariz...
...who "tried to end her own life, to stifle the pain, disappointment, and frustration that had somehow enveloped her and was squeezing the hope and strength out of her...
...W e also meet the recovering suicide, Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y...
...It may be that for once in her life, HRC is mad at a woman who played hard to get with Bill...
...This is followed by a foreword, which is followed by a prologue, and then we come at last to the first chapter and MMM's breathless description of how it all began: The morning after the election, I woke up and squinted at the morning sunlight Florence King is a regular columnist for National Review...
...Sire Yale University Press /305 pages / $45 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA The American Spectator June 1994 67...
...MMM was wiped out by the swearing in...
...The first thing MMM did was count the serpents in the garden...
...Of 190 statues and busts in the Capitol, only seven are of women...
...All problems are "real problems," seeing is "perceiving," and virtually every page contains an assertion that women of the nineties are "focused"—the word is her Rosebud...
...It did sound like an elementary schoolyard...
...Lynn Woolsey analyzes the feminine penchant for detail: "Men are more broad-brushed, so they can go into these committee meetings and maybe they just soak it up, and they get it or it doesn't matter that they're just swishing through...
...When I eatin the members' dining room, I look up and what do I see...
...Everywhere I turn, I see sculptures and paintings depicting white men," she complains...
...Neoconservatives find the implicit social and ethnic elitism repugnant...
...He still didn't get it...
...I knew he was the one, from the first time we met...
...shares with MMM her thoughts on the connection between team sports and the uses of power: "Men, as little boys, get it woven into their very fabric...
...Ed was serving in Congress when we met...
...When I was at work, I felt I should be at home...
...This lowest rank now comprises a majority of the members in many National Associations, especially outside of Europe...
...Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash...
...pilgrims to the Holy Land...
...I thought it was a delight...
...Some of the (white male) old timers complained of the lack of decorum, but English brushed them off...
...But that's okay...
...it seeps into their inchoate bones...
...We don't have enough power to do it...
...i.e., all their great-grandparents must have had coats of arms...
...This, says Karan English, proves that males and females have different "comfort levels...
...Maybe it's because of their speaking style...
...Imagine Junior Miss recast for feminist policy wonks and you've got it...
...Association with the rich and powerful can draw the wrong sort of attention and the wrong sort of people: witness the Italian financier, a Knight of Magistral Grace, implicated in both the P2 Lodge and Banco Ambrosiano scandals of the 1980s...
...In the Year of the Woman (1992), twenty-four new congresspersons were elected, making a total of forty-eight females in the House...
...I was just so amazed that he was attacking me personally, because no one does that...
...Sure it was disruptive, but it was real life...
...She had to sell her house and trade in her new station wagon for a very used Volkswagen Bug...
...Yep, maybe it is...
...My husband, Ed, looked at me and smiled...
...When she demurred, he revved up his tone of exhausted self-pity and floored the guilt pedal...
...She says she couldn't live with herself if she "let him go down in flames, let him be cut off at the knees...
...The left, as ever, considers it a charade to distract the oppressed from fundamental inequities in society...
...What would it take...
...streaming through the window, yawning at the new day...
...She caved so quickly that something else must have been said that she's not telling...
...If we're asleep, we seem, look, and are vulnerable...
...is not only a nice idea but a principle of action, Members of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St...
...Now I'm going to have to serve...
...They take their nobility as seriously as their obligations...
...Famous members such as Peter Grace, Alexander Haig, William Simon, and William F. Buckley, Jr...
...when I was at home, I felt I should be at work...
...That is just what she got, along with a lot of flak from her constituents...
...forced to rely on welfare and food stamps to feed her children...
...I think my administration will grind to a halt without the passage of this budget...
...The right, with George Bush painfully fresh in mind, sees it as a fancy term for Republican me-too-ism...
...I interviewed him for a story and came home and called my mother...
...It would really take an entitlements conference," she chirruped...
...Ed, a former congressman himself, had been there...
...I could hardly believe it...
...We were married within the year...
...There are still at least 10,000 people for whom n.o...
...Another member of the Class of '92, Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif...
...Then it all came back to me...
...who knows a legislative snuggery when she sees one...
...these members raise most of the money for charity...
...And then there's the cloakroom, where congressmen stretch out and take naps with their ties over their eyes...
...I did it...
...at Lourdes: Dames in caped nurse's uniforms emblazoned with the eight-pointed cross, Knights in plain dark suits, thousands of them wheeling around the ill to Mass and prayer...
...Nowadays the Knights of Malta bring relief to the distressed everywhere from the Amazon to Vietnam...
...The book begins with an introduction by Barbara Jordan in full Churchillian roll...
...There were kids coughing and crying and young voices and everybody was excited...
...In an age of universal tolerance and pervasive boredom, something like a risque thrill can be produced by contradicting the notion that all men are created equal...
...When we were sworn in," she recalls, "there were a lot of kids on the floor...
...Her first book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, published in 1975, has just been reissued in paperback by St...
...His sobriquet was "inaccurate, demeaning, and pathetically behind the times," she fumes, ignoring his accurate M count...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
