The Alice Award Luncheon
By Ronda Bernstein on 09/25/2010 @ 02:00 PM
The Alice Award, given each year by the National Women’s Party and the Sewall-Belmont House, was named after Party founder, Alice Paul and is given to a distinguished woman that has made an outstanding contribution in breaking barriers and setting new precedents for women. This year’s award was presented during a lovely luncheon over looking the Capitol grounds. Sewall-Belmont staff members welcomed us and Cokie Roberts gave a wonderful talk on women’s history from Dolly Madison to the suffragists telling how women have always been the ones to look after the people left behind, creating social safety nets to help those in need.
Sewall-Belmont Executive Director Page Harrington with special guest, Cokie Roberts
This year’s recipient of the Alice Award was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. She accepted her award on behalf of all of the women that made her speakership possible and on behalf of all of the women that depend on Congress to do a great job so that they have more possibilities for the future. During her acceptance speech she shared a story about her first meeting at the White House as Speaker. There she was with President Bush, Cabinet members and other House and Senate leaders meeting in the Roosevelt Room. As they began to discuss the legislative agenda, she noted that she was starting to feel very crowded. Her chair felt smaller and smaller when she realized that sitting there with her were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Alice Paul, and Susan B. Anthony – all of the women that had worked so hard to advance the rights of women to vote and to participate in the political process. They said to her, “At last, we have a seat at the table.” And then they were gone! No time to rest on their laurels - time to get more women, more diversity at that table of power.
Speaker Pelosi told this story to remind those of us in attendance that we are standing on the shoulders of the great women that came before us. She asked us to think about what it must have been like for these women to leave their homes unescorted and unsupported to go to Seneca Falls, NY to preach the message of equality for women in an era when women weren’t allowed to travel by themselves, let alone make political speeches. The current generation of girls and young women are now benefitting from the generation before that was able to take advantage of the successes of these early fighters for women’s rights. This generation will be able to accomplish even greater things moving forward into the 21st century.
Speaker Pelosi then acknowledged the advances in the House of Representatives of legislation affecting women since she became Speaker of the House – the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Health Care Reform Act where being a woman is no longer a preexisting medical condition. However, she said, more needs to be done to help working women – women that need quality, affordable child care and to help women small business owners.
In closing, Speaker Pelosi reminded us that women in politics and government is so essential. “NOTHING”, she stressed, “Nothing has been more wholesome to the political process and for government than the increased participation of women.” Ninety years after passing the 19th Amendment, our journey for equality goes on. She asked us to respect the contribution that our foremothers made because we would not be here without their struggles and to remember our responsibility to the next generation.
To learn more about the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum and the suffrage movement, see our Women’s Equality Day video, part of the NoLimitsLive series.
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