>> [Inaudible] the library's Director of Congressional Relations and I'm thrilled I don't often get the opportunity to introduce book events and since I work at the library that's what we all care about so this is a particular treat for me and we are here to hear Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is part of the libraries Book and Beyond series sponsored by the Center for the Book. We'll talk about her new book and I hope you brought a copy or bought a copy. American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country. I want to thank Dr. Belington for inviting Senator Hutchinson to be part of our Book and Beyond series and I want to thank John Cole the director of the center and Ann Bonny who have helped us this evening. For friends that miss it this will be webcast on the library's website and the Senator has agreed to take questions and then we'll have a small reception afterward. So I want to tell you a bit about Senator Hutchinson and I have to say I always say if you want to have somebody who does a lot of things go to a really busy person and Senator Hutchinson was elected to the Senate of the United States in 1993. She was the first woman to represent the state of Texas and in 2000 she was elected vice chairman of the Senate Republican Conference so she's one of the senate's top five leaders and the only woman in that group. She's a leading voice on a range of international and domestic issues, ranging from defense, foreign policy, to transportation security, veterans affairs, education, and issues affecting women and families. She is chairman of the Military Construction subcommittee and a member of the Defense Subcommittee and the Veteran's Affairs Committee. Her intense legislative efforts have focused on the health needs of Gulf War veterans, retirement opportunities for stay at home moms and dads, anti stalking protection, and increased security for America's airlines, ports and rail systems in the wake of the attacks on September 11th. Senator Hutchinson was born, raised and educated in Texas and her family's history has shaped not only her but her new book American Heroines: The Spirit of Women Who Shaped Our Country. I will not steal her thunder as she talks about the book that she's written but only tell you the women she profiles range from Clara Barton to Amelia Earhart, Madeline Albright. I found when I read it there fields of accomplishment remarkably mirror the wide range of legislative interest in achievements in Senator Hutchinson's own career, including public service, business, education, health care and aviation. It is my great pleasure to introduce to you this evening member of the United States Senate and author Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson ^M00:03:11 [ applause ] ^M00:03:17 >> Well thank you very much for the nice introduction and I especially want to thank all of you for coming. This is such a wonderful opportunity for me to be able to talk to people who are interested in books and I have loved the book festivals that I have attended since I wrote my book and I will just say that it was such an enjoyment for me to be able to write a book because it's so different from what I do in daily life. The people in this field are different, what they do is different and I learned a lot. I broadened my horizons and expanded them very much not only in writing the book but in getting to know what it takes to write a book, and what it takes to sell a book, and what it takes to deal with people who do books, so I have enjoyed it thoroughly and I love the book. I just love the book. I love the concept and the reason that I do is because I've always felt that in America we were well a part of society, that we were respected as women even though many of us struggled to have opportunities and certainly I have known discrimination and every woman in my book has known discrimination but I've always felt that America was a great place to be a woman because we did have educational opportunities early on and I think that is the genesis of respect for women and for women to be in integral in the processes of running our country. But this was really brought to me when I started traveling overseas. I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan, I've been to Saudi Arabia, and when I go to places where women have been repressed, where they've not had equal opportunities and I have seen how that affects the society as a whole, I felt that this is what I wanted to write about. This was the book that I wanted to put forward because I think we owe a huge debt of gratitude to these first women who did go out and break barriers. And the format of my book is I tried to find the first women who broke barriers in different fields so I did of course Emma Willard who broke the barrier for education for girls. Her dream was public education for girls. She didn't see her dream realized but she did start not the first really great school for girls but one of the first great schools for girls that basically put out more teachers than they had ever had before and they were very well educated and she wanted to make sure that girls had science and math, whereas the girls schools at the time wouldn't teach science and math because they didn't think it was appropriate for the feminine mind and so Emma Willard came forward and Clara Barton, we all know what barriers she broke. Mary Cossette was one of my barrier breakers in the arts and she and [inaudible] Anderson were my two of course we all know that Marion Anderson broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera and had one of the greatest voices of all time and Mary Cossette was a very different background.  She grew up in a privileged family from Pennsylvania. Her brother was the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad but she too had to fight and struggle to be recognized. Her father was horrified that she would live in France of all places and that she would be an artist. He thought that this was just totally inappropriate for a woman of her background but she persevered and eventually won her parents over and they moved to be with her in France and of course she was one of the great impressionists of all time. And I wanted to read a couple of excerpts because I think that reading about what some of these women said does gives a flavor. In the introduction to my book, I start with the quote from Alexis De Tocqueville. Of course we all know he was the French Noblemen who came to America in the early 1800s because he wanted to see what this upstart democracy was all about and he wrote a wonderful book called Democracy in America that is so interesting today because his observations were so keen and he saw something in America that he didn't see in Europe and he saw how this democracy could see it and I quote from Democracy in America written in 1835 " If I were asked to what the singular prosperity at growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply to the superiority of their women." He saw, even back then, something different in American women from those in Europe, he saw that they were a part of society, that while the men were away writing the constitution, the women were running the farms, they were the shop keepers and they were treated as equals in the business world so he saw that that also made them give opinions freely, which was different from what he had seen in Europe. I wanted to read what Mary Austin Holly wrote and this was again in the early 1830s Mary Austin Holly was Steven F. Austin's cousin and Steven F. Austin was trying to bring more settlers into Texas so that they could have a revolution from Mexico. This was all Mexican Territory at the time and he wanted the story of Texas to be written so he asked his cousin to write a story and then distributed it on the east coast so that more American's would come into this Mexican Territory and give them the strength that they needed to rise up and take their independence. This is what Mary Austin Holly wrote in one of her first books about Texas. " It's not uncommon for ladies to mount their mustangs and hunt with their husbands, to ride long distances on horseback to attend a ball with their silk dresses in their saddle bags. Hearty, vigorous constitutions, free spirits and spontaneous gaiety are thus induced and continued a rich legacy to their children, who it is to be hoped, will sufficiently value the blessing not to squander it away in their eager search for the luxuries and refinements of polite [inaudible]. I'm going to quote from Thomas Rusk. In this same [inaudible] on women [inaudible]. Thomas Rusk was the Secretary of War for the newly declared Republic of Texas. Now we're talking 1836 and Thomas Rusk was also the first senator to hold my seat in the United States Senate. After Texas became a republic in 1836, they were an independent nation until 1845 when they became a state. Thomas Rusk and Sam Houston were the first two senators to represent Texas and the United States Senate I'm in the Rusk line. And as I said Rusk was the Secretary of War and Sam Houston was the Commander in Chief of the forces and he won the Battle at San Jacinto, which did win Texas independence from Mexico and Thomas Rusk was writing about the war itself and during the time that the Mexican army was coming into Texas, the women and children feared that the Mexican army was going to keep coming in and they were fleeing in droves, it was a mass exodus, it was called the runaway scrape and the runaway scrape was women and children going eastward toward Louisiana to escape the Mexican army and also Indians who had been harassing the settlers in that east Texas area and it was very rigorous. My great great grandmother took her four children to Louisiana, all four of them died. Every living child she had died and my great great grandfather was signing the Texas Declaration of Independence, he was part of the independence movement so he was hundreds of miles away during this time and Thomas Rusk wrote about this mass exodus of women and children. Thomas Rusk [inaudible] his own wife Mary helped ensure the calm evacuation of Macadotious observed. The men [inaudible] deserved much credit but more was due to the women. Armed men facing a foe could not but be brave but the women with their little children around them without means of defense or power to resist, faced danger and death with unflinching courage and my great great grandmother came back to Macadotious to meet my great great grandfather and had 9 more children and was part of the movement to make Texas a state. So they really did make a huge contribution in these early days and throughout the early days of the republic and then the state of Texas, just as they did in the United States in our fight for freedom. I wanted to also talk about Oveda Culp Hobby. She is one of the barrier breakers in my book. Oveda Culp Hobby was a Texan. She was married to the former governor of Texas named William P. Hobby and she was with him running the Houston Post the newspaper and she was very active politically, very active democrat as was governor Hobby and she came to the attention of many of the democratic leaders in Washington and when the war was just in its beginning stages, she was asked if she would help write a plan for a women's organization for women who would be trained to go into desk jobs when the war came so that men could be free to fight because at that time in the military it was all men and they did everything, they did the desk jobs as well as being in the field and the General Marshal knew that they were going to need every able bodied man in the field so they had this idea that they would have women take these desk jobs. And so they asked her if she would help them devise a plan to do this and she said well yes she [inaudible] plan on how you would recruit and how you would train the women who would become the WAC and they liked her plan so much that they asked her to please come and run the WAC and she said no. And her husband had found out, she didn't tell him she said no, but he found out that she said no, and he said this is unacceptable, you have been asked to serve your country and you must do it. So she did she was the one person recruiting arm of the WAC and she would go from city to city asking people to come forward and volunteer and become a WAC and serve their country and it turned out that this was a huge success and eventually of course the WACs became a part of the military and that began the integration of women into the military but it was not an easy thing to do and Oveda Hobby said that it was a constant struggle because she would have to go against the bureaucrats because she didn't want to pay the doctors the women doctors who were going to come into the WACs because they weren't technically military so she would have to go and get a bill passed by Congress to allow the women doctors in the WAC to be paid.  She was offered because she was a kernel now, offered to be able to use the Army Navy Club but the invitation asked that she use the back door to enter the club because of course she was the only woman who was going to be allowed to use it in the general sense. Well the WACs turned out to be invaluable. The initial list of 54 of Army tasks that women might perform quickly mushroomed to 239 and in many of them ranging from office work to folding parachutes, the women's aptitude, experience and dexterity led them to outperform their male counterparts and the Army came to recognize it too. Within two years there were more than 600,000 requests for WACs from all around the world though the strength of the women's army wasn't authorized to exceed 200,000. So she did something that was a huge success and came back to Texas after the war and she had met General Eisenhower while she was in the WAC over in London and she thought he was such a great leader, that when he started running for president she decided to support him and became very active in his campaign and he then asked her to become the first secretary of health education and welfare, the new department that was created after the war and she accepted. So she became the first women cabinet officer as well. Oveda Culp Hobby is the only woman who has a quote in the WWII memorial right down the road, so she was very well regarded and did a wonderful job. One of the other women that I profiled Jacqueline Cochran was in the aviation section. Now Jacqueline Cochran was a contemporary Oveda Hobby's but she did not want to work with Oveda because she thought Oveda was too strong a personality and of course she was no fading violet so Jacqueline Cochran was a great pilot and she formed the WASPs. The WASPs in WWII were the women in the Air Force, not in the Air Force no, she did not want to be part of the Air Force, but they were women auxiliary to the Air Force they ferried planes all around where again they could free the men to be fighter pilots because that's what they needed. So Jacqueline Cochran was another very strong personality but she insisted that she not have to work under Oveda Culp Hobby so they had two separate organizations the WACs and the WASPs both of whom did an outstanding job in WWII and really made a huge contribution. I want to read one more excerpt from a pioneer and it's Marguerite Higgins. Marguerite Higgins was a journalist in WWII. She was the first woman journalist for international reporting to win the Pulitzer Prize and she covered WWII and for the New York Herald Tribune. She was the first person to walk into Dachau concentration camp right as the war was ending, literally the day the war was ending. [Inaudible] she went with a man named Peter First he was a German born Jew who was a soldier and a reporter for Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper and they were the first two, he was American because he had left and they were the first two American's to go into Dachau Concentration Camp right as the war was ending and she describes this scene. She said, "Marguerite and First headed for their first glimpse of the prisoners barracks, nothing could have prepared them for what they witnessed there. The inmates had gained control of that section of the camp the night before when most of the remaining SS guards had fled. They stayed inside their barracks until Marguerite and her companion opened the gate of the enclosure and walked through and they weren't sure if the SS guards were still out there, so the prisoners stayed in their barracks. Others soon followed them in and when the inmates realized that their visitors were American's, she describes it this way: Tattered emaciated men, weeping, yelling, and shouting long live America, swept toward the gate among those who could not walk, limped, or crawled. During a wild 5 minutes, they paraded all of them on their shoulders and embraced everyone enthusiastically. The excitement continued for over an hour. Afterward the sole American prisoner, an Air Force major conducted a tour of the barracks, where sick inmates lay dying and the torture chambers, which held 1200 corpses at the time." So this was her report that came back to the New York Herald on May 1st became the first time the American people really had a firsthand account of what was happening in the concentration camps. There were rumors that had come out but she wrote the first report, having seen it with her own eyes, of what it was and it was a huge revelation. I wanted to read a couple of other excerpts and then I'm going to take your questions. I want to read a few of the excerpts from the contemporary women that I interviewed following the chapters of the pioneer women. I would take the pioneer women in a field, for instance Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran in aviation and I would interview a contemporary woman who was still breaking barriers in the same field. So I interviewed Sally Ride the first woman astronaut at the end of that chapter. After Margaret J. Smith, the first woman senator to be re-elected four times, I interviewed Gerry Ferraro our first woman vice presidential nominee and Sandra Day O'Conner our first woman on the Supreme Court. After Oveda Culp Hobby I interviewed Carlie Theorena [assumed spelling],  Mickie Siebert the first woman to but a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice and it went on like that because in every one of these fields there are still women breaking barriers that we can talk to and I thought it would be interesting to do that. So I wanted to read a couple of the interviews that I read that I made because I thought they were interesting. Condoleezza Rice I asked her what was the best preparation for the rough and tumble of your life? "Being provost at Stanford University. In an academic administration where you have 1400 extremely smart people, who are basically independent contractors, because faculty don't believe they have a boss. I learned when it was necessary to persuade people, when it was necessary to inform and when it was necessary demand." I thought that was good preparation for the rough and tumble of her life today and Rosalyn Yalow, the first American born woman to win the Nobel Prize and she won it for medicine and science. She was a brilliant physics student at Hunter College and she did break through research in radio immunoassay measurement techniques. You got it? Ok but she said her most important trait for success, "perhaps the earliest memories I have are being a stubborn, determined child. Through the years my mother has told me it was fortunate that I chose to do acceptable things, for if I had chosen otherwise no one could have deflected me from my path. Lynne Chaney: Lynne Chaney was one of the contemporary barrier breakers after Emma Willard who was the barrier breaker in education and of course Lynne Chaney has written four bestselling books on history and especially history for children. I asked Lynne what was your best preparation for the rough and tumble of life. She said, " I've often thought that for today's women its athletics. Women in my generation didn't really have athletics so for me it was my baton twirling. You know it sounds silly to talk about that but it was good physical exercise. It taught you to keep going when you were tired, it taught you not to quit when you made a mistake, it inspired me to be competitive and I said "did you compete?" "Oh yes I was state [inaudible] of Wyoming for several years." To retrieve my dignity here she says, "I think I should point out that Justice Ruth Bater Ginsburg was also a baton twirler. Those are just some of the excerpts from the book that I wanted to share with you and I would be happy to open for questions and I want to say thank you to my college Senator Warner. How nice of you to come. I know you have so many things to do. Thank you. Yes.