in sixty eight I went to work for the group
of ten congressmen who were the most
the key opponents to the vietnam war and were
organized and vocal about it
and to give a translation of it you would have to
think %uh if there were ten republican congressman
during the run-up to the iraq war if they
had organized and held public hearings %uh opposing
it and bringing in experts to explain how disastrous
the planning was and the policies so
it was quite a radical
%uh group at the time  people our age will
recognize names like dan fraser don edwards
ben rosenthal
%uh bob eckhardt you know and your
experience with this group despite their putative
liberalism is was astonishing
well they were 
symptomatic
of the culture
as a whole only one of them i think had a
wife who worked
%um they were from ten to
twenty years older than i was and they had
come up in politics
at a time when politics was a man's game
women %uh were
largely volunteers
you know raise money
you know addressed envelopes sent out appeals
and in congress itself
%uh although there were thousands of women
working on capitol hill for the most part
they were all secretaries or receptionists
so they didn't have
any experience in working with women as peers
I think you know they'd gone to law school
it had all been men
so they a professional environment
for them was an all-male environment
and %uh so the first problem was that they
paid me
close to between a half and two-thirds of what
they paid the man who had had the job before
me which was typical everywhere
which unfortunately was typical everywhere
and then my paycheck would get held up
wouldn't get deposited in the account
and i rotated
the payrolls of the different congressmen
and when i
objected to this they said well isn't your
husband working has your husband stopped working
I said I write my own checks I don't like to have
my own checks bouncing
well we'll get it cleared up
but it kept happening and it kept happening
like it
and as ben rosenthal said when we finally
got together about this he said well
paying a woman is just not the same as important
as paying a man
and at meetings I've 
known
female lawyers who have  expressed  this
people in their fifties now
%uh treated badly called the crazy lady
objections if you dare to make a
comment about something this
was really quite a different world that you were pioneering really
in which you were pioneering well and they were 
I mean I have to say that i learned a lot
about negotiating and how power works
but they were
as liberal as the political system allowed
and they did not have a clue about women's
rights
