I re-acquainted myself with Eleanor Roosevelt last weekend when I received the Eleanor Roosevelt medal for public service at Val-Kill, her Hyde Park retreat.

When asked who my role models were, Eleanor Roosevelt led the list. My mother read her column "My Day" every day. I discovered she wrote 8,000...

Call it payback time for former Harvard President Larry Summers (remember he opined that the reason women were rarely found amongst top scientists was because they didn't want to work that hard and that their brains might be different) but female scientists made history with this year's Nobel Prize awards.

I recently got a lesson in how diverse this country is by speaking about my book, Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead on Nantucket, El Paso, Texas, Chicago, Illinois and Greenville, South Carolina.

When I walked into the Nantucket Athenaeum, I inhaled the air of history....

When I heard the yell “You Lie!” during President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress the other night, I thought it might have been some rabid outsider who was let into the chamber by mistake.

I was wrong. It was an insider. Joe Wilson is a Republican...

At the 1980 Democratic Convention I was not pleased with Senator Ted Kennedy. Why was he challenging the incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Presidency, and thereby hurting his chances for re-election?

The convention was deeply divided between Carter and Kennedy supporters. But we sat shoulder to shoulder on the convention...

A female secretary of state who identifies with the plight of women is making a difference. We’ve had two female secretaries of state with Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. But Hillary is the first one to spend seven days in Africa and use her time there to put a bright...

“This is socialized medicine!” was the charge leveled by opponents of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, when these two landmark pieces of legislation were being debated.

The debate was a bit more civil then, but the scare tactics were exactly the same as they are today as we debate health...

There are few purely joyous moments in the course of daily global events. The homecoming of the two female journalists from North Korea -- Laura Ling and Euna Lee was one of these. Hurray!

The sight of these two freed women, stepping off the plane which brought them back, broke...

The death of a famous person is different from the death of a loved one, whether it is Michael Jackson, Frank McCourt, or Walter Cronkite. We didn’t know any of them personally, and yet, we experience a sense of loss.

Fame lends itself to a different kind of intimacy --...

Judge Sonia Sotomayor has displayed admirable self-control and patience throughout this Senate hearing process. I, on the other hand, found myself yelling at the television screen more than once during the question periods from some of the senators.

The first time was when they characterized her statement about a...

Twenty-six year old Neda Agha Soltan’s face has become the face of the Iranian protest movement. She was an innocent Iranian student, standing on a side street close to the protesters, when a bullet struck her. The video of her collapsed bleeding body, and the posters of her forthright gaze...

The cries of distress about "identity politics" which have been issued by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh over the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court make me almost feel sorry for them. Poor privileged white men. Their stranglehold on power is slowly being loosened.

Strangely, they have lost...

Will have spent two and a half days in Beijing, which, according to our guide (we will call him John) is the size of 24 Hong Kongs, has 81 McDonald's, 70 Kentucky Fried Chickens, lots of Pizza Huts, Subways and Starbucks. The permanent population is 16 million and an additional...

China Journal, May 16, 2009

We have been tourists for the last two days, traveling from Guangzhou to Xi-an, site of the capital of China for 1,300 years for 13 dynasties and known as the city of Kings and Emperors.

Crowded two and a half hour flight; we were the only Westerners...

There used to be “old China hands” who spent a lifetime trying to figure out China. I’m beginning to conclude that it could take another lifetime to figure out who China is and where it is going today.

A conversation with Zhu Jiangang, director of The Institute for Civil Society,...

“When I came to Vermont I could see the Milky Way, so many stars, it was so beautiful. I haven’t seen stars since I was a child in Beijing, fifty years ago,” Zhang Ye, the Institute for Sustainable Communities country representative in China told me last night.

That observation sums...

May 10, 2009 Guangzhou, China

We (my husband and I) arrived in Guangzhou, China last night at 8:35, some 24 hours after we had left Burlington, Vermont. We are here to officially open the office for the Institute for Sustainable Communities, an NGO I started 18 years ago to address...

I spoke recently to four different audiences in different parts of the country about my book, Pearls, Politics and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead.

The first speech was to about 700 men and women who are getting graduate degrees at an online university named Walden. They were...

The sight of Afghan women marching for their rights in Kabul this week, shouting, "We want our rights!" was both exhilarating and terrifying. Exhilarating because this appeared to be one of the first public protests staged by women in Kabul against repression, prompted by a new law that permits marital...

Right after the Vermont legislature voted (100 to 49, precisely the 2/3 needed) to over-ride Governor Jim Douglas' veto this morning of a law permitting gay marriage, my daughter got a text message, "Yeah, Vermont!"

She was not the only one cheering when the vote was announced. I felt an...