Unbought and Unbossed

by Shirley Chisholm

“That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.” —Shirley Chisholm

Mrs. Chisholm, as I fondly recalled her, spoke of how she wanted to be remembered. “I want history to remember me not just as the first black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.”

"Women in this country must become revolutionaries,” she said. “We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes."

I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

The experience contained lessons that were valuable over and over. Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power. Their first rule is "Don't rock the boat." If someone makes trouble and you can get him, do it. If you can't get him, bring him in. Give him some of the action, let him have a taste of power. Power is all anyone wants, and if he has a promise of it as a reward for being good, he'll be good. Anyone who does not play by those rules is incompre- hensible to most politicians.

Our platform stressed integration, better schools, higher wages, more jobs, better health care, housing, and transportation, more lighting, sanitation, and youth services for the neighborhood, and full representation for black and Puerto Rican citizens.

But despite this prece- dent, I met with hostility because of my sex from the start of my first campaign. Even some women would greet me, "You ought to be home, not out here." Once, while I was collecting nominating petition signatures in the big Albany housing project — where Conrad and I had been captains for several years — one man about seventy lit into me. "Young woman, what are you doing out here in this cold? Did you get your husband's breakfast this morning? Did you straighten up your house? What are you doing running for office? That is something for men."

I understood too well their reasons for lashing out at black women; in a society that denied them real manhood, I was threatening their shaky self-esteem still more.

a bill to give state money to help church-run schools. I made a strong speech against the law, and voted with the minority when the bill rolled through the Assembly 136 to 18. "We are grad- ually eroding the public school system," I warned. "Each of us is going to have to make a very crucial decision soon as to whether or not we believe in the separation of church and state — whether we believe in our Constitution."

One bill that I introduced should become law in every state, but unfortunately it did not succeed even in New York. It would have made it mandatory for policemen to success- fully complete courses in civil rights, civil liberties, minority problems, and race relations before they are appointed to a police department.

I set up my own head- quarters, at 1103 Bergen Street. Before that time, at Unity Democratic Club headquarters, girls had been typing labels for mailings to registered voters. Then Tom Fortune would put them in an envelope and send them to me, with the num- ber of each district on the outside. One day Mac looked at four of the district envelopes and figured we were at least 9000 names short. I checked one election district where there should have been 470 labels. There were only about ninety. What had happened, as it turned out, was that the girls who were doing the typing had skipped all the hard names — the long Italian ones they had trouble spelling, and so on. But in the heat of the campaign, when every snag becomes a crisis, this failure by our own supporters, who should have checked carefully the number of labels commensurate with the number of voters on the registration books, became a major thing. Mac told me, with his voice breaking, "Shirley, they don't want you either. But as long as I'm alive, you will go to Congress. This is what they want, the white bosses and the would-be black bosses, but you're not going to fall into their trap."

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

As a matter of fact, when I was in the Assembly I had not been in favor of repealing all abortion laws, a step that would leave the question of having or not having the operation entirely up to a woman and her doctor. The bills I had tried to help pass in Albany would only have made it somewhat easier for women to get therapeutic abortions in New York State, by providing additional legal grounds and simplifying the pro- cedure for getting approval. But since that time I had been compelled to do some heavy thinking on the subject, mainly because of the experiences of several young women I knew. All had suffered permanent injuries at the hands of illegal abortionists. Some will never have children as a result. One will have to go to a hospital periodically for treatment for the rest of her life. It had begun to seem to me that the question was not whether the law should allow abortions. Experience shows that pregnant women who feel they have compelling reasons for not having a baby, or another baby, will break the law and, even worse, risk injury and death if they must to get one. Abortions will not be stopped. It may even be that the num- ber performed is not being greatly reduced by laws making an abortion a "criminal operation." If that is true, the ques- tion becomes simply that of what kind of abortions society wants women to have — clean, competent ones performed by licensed physicians or septic, dangerous ones done by incom...

The question will remain "Is abortion right?" and it is a question that each of us must answer for himself. My beliefs and my experience have led me to conclude that the wisest public policy is to place the responsibility for that decision on the individual. The rightness or wrongness of an abortion depends on the individual case, and it seems to me clearly wrong to pass laws regulating all cases.