Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (born 1924) was the first Black woman to serve in the United States Congress. She served as the representative for the 12th district of New York from 1969 until 1982. In 1972, when she became the first black woman to actively run for the presidency of the United States, she won ten percent of the votes at the Democratic National Convention. 

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Barbadian parents, Chisholm was raised in an atmosphere that was both political and religious. Her father was a staunch follower of the West Indian political activist Marcus Garvey, who advocated black pride and unity among blacks to achieve economic and political power. Chisholm received much of her primary education in her parents homeland, Barbados, under the strict eye of her maternal grandmother. Chisholm, who returned to New York when she was ten years old, credits her educational successes to the well-rounded early training she received in Barbados.

Attending New York public schools, Chisholm was able to compete well in the predominantly white classrooms. She attended Girls' High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a section of the city with a growing poor black and immigrant population. She won tuition scholarships to both Oberlin and Vassar, but at the urging of her parents decided to live at home and attend Brooklyn College. While training to be a teacher she became active in several campus and community groups. Developing a keen interest in politics, she began to learn the arts of organizing and fund raising. She deeply resented the role of women in local politics, which consisted mostly of staying in the background, sponsoring fund raising events, and turning the money over to male party leaders who would then decide how to use it. During her school years, she became interested in the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and eventually joined both groups.

From Classroom to Congress

During the time that she served in the assembly, Chisholm sponsored 50 bills, but only eight of them passed. The bills she sponsored reflected her interest in the cause of blacks and the poor, women's rights, and educational opportunities. One of the successful bills provided assistance for poor students to go on for higher education. Another provided employment insurance coverage for personal and domestic employees. Still another reversed a law that caused female teachers in New York to lose their tenure while they were out on maternity leave.

Chisholm served in the State Assembly until 1968 and then decided to run for the U.S. Congress. Her opponent was the noted civil rights leader James Farmer. Possibly because Chisholm was a well-known resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Farmer was not, she won easily. Thus began her tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 91st through the 97th Congress (1969-1982). Always considering herself a political maverick, Chisholm attempted to focus as much of her attention as possible on the needs of her constituents. She served on several House committees: Agriculture, Veterans' Affairs, Rules and Education, and Labor. During the 91st Congress when she was assigned to the Forestry Committee, she protested saying that she wanted to work on committees that could deal with the "critical problems of racism, deprivation and urban decay." (There are no forests in Bedford-Stuyvesant.)

Chisholm began to protest the amount of money being expended for the defense budget while social programs suffered. She argued that she would not agree that money should be spent for war while Americans were hungry, ill-housed, and poorly educated. Early in her career as a congresswoman she began to support legislation allowing abortions for women who chose to have them. Chisholm protested the traditional roles for women professionals — secretaries, teachers, and librarians. She argued that women were capable of entering many other professions and that they should be encouraged to do so. Black women, too, she felt, had been shunted into stereotypical maid and nanny roles from which they needed to escape both by legislation and by self-effort. Her antiwar and women's liberation views made her a popular figure among college students, and she was beseiged with invitations to speak at college campuses.

Presidential Contender

After her unsuccessful presidential campaign, Chisholm continued to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives for another decade. As a member of the Black Caucus she was able to watch black representation in the Congress grow and to welcome other black female congresswomen. Finally, in 1982, she announced her retirement from the Congress.

Final Years

In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated Chisolm as Ambassador to Jamaica, but due to declining health, she withdrew her name from further consideration. 

September 24, 2004:Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed, a documentary about Chisolm's campaign for U.S. president in 1972 directed by Shola Lynch, was released by Latern Lane Entertainment. Source:New York Times, www.nytimes.com, September 24, 2004.

January 1, 2005: Chisholm died after suffering a series of strokes on January 1, 2005, in Ormond Beach, Florida. She was 80. Source:New York Times, www.nytimes.com, January 3, 2005. [She was interred in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, NY]

Copyright Thomson Gale © 2005

Address To The United States House Of Representatives, Washington, DC: May 21, 1969

Mr.Speaker, when a young woman graduates from college and starts looking for a job, she is likely to have a frustrating and even demeaning experience ahead of her. If she walks into an office for an interview, the first question she will be asked is, "Do you type?'' 

There is a calculated system of prejudice that lies unspoken behind that question. Why is it acceptable for women to be secretaries, librarians, and teachers, but totally unacceptable for them to be managers, administrators, doctors, lawyers, and Members of Congress. 

The unspoken assumption is that women are different. They do not have executive ability orderly minds, stability, leadership skills, and they are too emotional. 

It has been observed before, that society for a long time, discriminated against another minority, the blacks, on the same basis - that they were different and inferior. The happy little homemaker and the contented "old darkey" on the plantation were both produced by prejudice. 

As a black person, I am no stranger to race prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black. 

Prejudice against blacks is becoming unacceptable although it will take years to eliminate it. But it is doomed because, slowly, white America is beginning to admit that it exists. Prejudice against women is still acceptable. There is very little understanding yet of the immorality involved in double pay scales and the classification of most of the better jobs as "for men only." 

More than half of the population of the United States is female. But women occupy only 2 percent of the managerial positions. They have not even reached the level of tokenism yet No women sit on the AFL-CIO council or Supreme Court There have been only two women who have held Cabinet rank, and at present there are none. Only two women now hold ambassadorial rank in the diplomatic corps. In Congress, we are down to one Senator and 10 Representatives. 

Considering that there are about 3 1/2 million more women in the United States than men, this situation is outrageous. 

It is true that part of the problem has been that women have not been aggressive in demanding their rights. This was also true of the black population for many years. They submitted to oppression and even cooperated with it. Women have done the same thing. But now there is an awareness of this situation particularly among the younger segment of the population. 

As in the field of equal rights for blacks, Spanish-Americans, the Indians, and other groups, laws will not change such deep-seated problems overnight But they can be used to provide protection for those who are most abused, and to begin the process of evolutionary change by compelling the insensitive majority to reexamine it's unconscious attitudes. 

It is for this reason that I wish to introduce today a proposal that has been before every Congress for the last 40 years and that sooner or later must become part of the basic law of the land -- the equal rights amendment. 

Let me note and try to refute two of the commonest arguments that are offered against this amendment. One is that women are already protected under the law and do not need legislation. Existing laws are not adequate to secure equal rights for women. Sufficient proof of this is the concentration of women in lower paying, menial, unrewarding jobs and their incredible scarcity in the upper level jobs. If women are already equal, why is it such an event whenever one happens to be elected to Congress? 

It is obvious that discrimination exists. Women do not have the opportunities that men do. And women that do not conform to the system, who try to break with the accepted patterns, are stigmatized as ''odd'' and "unfeminine." The fact is that a woman who aspires to be chairman of the board, or a Member of the House, does so for exactly the same reasons as any man. Basically, these are that she thinks she can do the job and she wants to try. 

A second argument often heard against the equal rights amendment is that is would eliminate legislation that many States and the Federal Government have enacted giving special protection to women and that it would throw the marriage and divorce laws into chaos. 

As for the marriage laws, they are due for a sweeping reform, and an excellent beginning would be to wipe the existing ones off the books. Regarding special protection for working women, I cannot understand why it should be needed. Women need no protection that men do not need. What we need are laws to protect working people, to guarantee them fair pay, safe working conditions, protection against sickness and layoffs, and provision for dignified, comfortable retirement. Men and women need these things equally. That one sex needs protection more than the other is a male supremacist myth as ridiculous and unworthy of respect as the white supremacist myths that society is trying to cure itself of at this time.

Sources: Congressional Record - Extensions of Remarks E4165-6. Also available online at http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/equal

When the 91st session of the United States Congress convened, I arrived a little late and broke one of the venerable traditions of the House before I was even sworn in as a member. They had just finished calling the roll when I got there, so I rushed onto the floor with my coat and hat on. At least three members told me that I was breaking a House rule. I went back to a cloakroom to leave my hat and coat and returned to take the oath.

There was nothing like the decorum I had experienced the first day in the New York State Assembly. Members were walking around shaking hands and slapping each other on the back, talking without paying any attention to the proceedings. Up behind a raised platform high in the front of the room sat a gaunt, frail-looking old man, Speaker John McCormack. I was shocked by the way the members milled around and set up a din that drowned out both the Speaker and the men who were taking turns giving brief speeches. The speechmakers were talking on an incredible variety of subjects that seemed of no importance to me. Each talked for one minute, then broke off and handed a copy of his speech to a clerk. The next day it would be printed in full in the Congressional Record as if it had really been given and the other members had listened to it.

Only a few of the faces were known to me, but everyone knew who I was. They were cordial, but in many greetings I sensed aloofness. Men kept asking me, "What does your husband think about all this?" They acted as if they were joking, but they meant to imply that, after all, "a woman's place..." I told them all that this was nothing new for Conrad and me; we had met while I was running from one meeting to another; during the early years of our marriage when he worked as a private detective, he was often away from home; then when he became an investigator for the city and was home every night I was away in the state Assembly four days a week, so my being in Washington four days a week would be nothing new.

After several weeks I realized that everyone had been expecting someone else, a noisy, hostile, antiwhite type. Some of my new colleagues admitted it frankly. "You're not the way we thought you'd be," one said. "You're actually charming."

When the campaign ended, I had taken three weeks' vacation in Jamaica, sleeping and eating, trying to gain back a few pounds. The months of campaigning, broken up by a major operation, had drained my vitality. I knew I should be in Washington rounding up a staff, but first I had to have some rest. When I came to Washington in December, I had to do everything at once. I interviewed a string of applicants for my office staff. Many new Congressmen reward their supporters by putting them in staff jobs. I knew from my experience in Albany that this would be a mistake. What I needed was experience, to make up for my own inexperience in Washington, and after that, of course, I needed competence and loyalty. Before long, I decided my staff would be composed of young women, for the most part, from the receptionist to my top assistants. Capitol Hill offices swarm with intelligent, Washington-wise, college-trained — and attractive — young women who do most of the work that makes a Congressman look good, but often get substandard pay for it and have little hope of advancing to a top staff job. The procedure in my office, I decided, would be different. I have never regretted it. Since then, I have also hired some outstanding young men, on my district and Washington staffs, but the majority is still female. More than half are black, but there has been pressure on me from some of my constituents to hire all all-black staff. "If you don't, who will?" I have been asked. What I have done is hire the best applicants I can get. If they are black, so much the better. But the young white women on my staff are every bit as dedicated and hard working. Even the most suspicious folks from Bedford-Stuyvesant, once they come in contact with them and see how they are working for me and my district, are won over. One constituent paid one of the girls what he thought was the ultimate compliment. "She's black inside," he said. 

"We Americans," I said in my maiden speech late in March, "have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are the good guys, everywhere, in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it's true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.

"I am deeply disappointed at the clear evidence that the number one priority of the new administration is to buy more and more and more weapons of war, to return to the era of the Cold War and to ignore the war we must fight here, the war that is not optional. There is only one way, I believe, to turn these policies around. The Congress must respond to the mandate that the American people have clearly expressed. They have said, 'End this war. Stop the waste. Stop the killing. Do something for our own people first.'..."

I concluded, "We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote 'no' on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war."

In a movie, of course, the House would have given me a standing ovation and members would have crowded around to congratulate me and confess that they had understood for the first time what was happening and were behind me from then on. But the reality of Congress is that no one is usually swayed one way or another by any speech made on the floor. Debate in the House is not discussion, give-and-take to clarify the issues, an attempt to make up other members' minds. It is a succession of monologues in which everyone gets his predetermined stand on the record. Sometimes it is like a poker game, in which each side reveals some of the strength it has, trying to make it just enough to convince a waverer that there is a lot more being held back and he'd better join the winning side. It is seldom that anyone listens to what is being said on the floor of the House.

All that happened was that as I walked out I overheard (probably was meant to overhear) one member say to another, "You know, she's crazy!" Later other colleagues told me that even if I really believed what I had said, it was not a wise political move to say so publicly. After all, the country was at war and responsible Congressional leaders shouldn't say they are not going to support defense bills. Think of the soldiers over there: how do they feel when they read that the country isn't behind them and that some people are talking about not even supporting them even with the material they need to stay alive?

Only a handful of members of Congress dared to defy such logic — at most twenty of us. You can't argue with someone whose premises are completely different from yours, where there is not even an inch of common ground. What I wanted was perfectly plain. It was not to deny support to servicemen in Vietnam, for heaven's sake, but to bring them home at once, to stop forcing them to risk death or disfigurement in the defense of a corrupt puppet dictatorship. What I saw was this country at war with itself, and no one in a position of power paying any attention, our lives deteriorating around us and scarcely anyone trying to find out why and stop it.

In the 91st Congress, I am a sponsor of the perennial Equal Rights Amendment, which has been before every Congress for the last forty years but has never passed the House. It would outlaw any discrimination on the basis of sex. Men and women would be completely equal before the law. But laws will not solve deep-seated problems overnight. Their use is to provide shelter for those who are most abused, and to begin an evolutionary process by compelling the insensitive majority to reexamine its unconscious attitudes.

The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. They must become revolutionaries. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" to the American adage, "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority; too many of them believe the male fiction that they are emotional, illogical, unstable, inept with mechanical things, and lack leadership ability.

The best defense against this slander is the same one blacks have found. While they were ashamed of their color, it was an albatross hanging around their necks. They freed themselves from that dead weight by picking up their blackness and holding it out proudly for all the world to see. They found their own beauty and turned their former shame into their badge of honor. Women should perceive that the negative attitudes they hold toward their own femaleness are the creation of an antifeminist society, just as the black shame at being black was the product of racism. Women should start to replace their negative ideas of the femininity with positive ones affirming their nature more and more strongly.

It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact. The warmth, gentleness, and compassion that are part of the female stereotype are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the values of our world begin to shatter and fall from our grasp. The strength of Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King was a strength of gentleness, understanding, and compassion, with no element of violence in it. It was, in short, a female strength, and that is the kind that often marks the highest type of man.

If we reject our restricted roles, we do not have to reject these values of femaleness. They are enduring values, and we must develop the capacity to hold them and to dispense them to those around us. We must become revolutionaries in the style of Gandhi and King. Then, working toward our own freedom, we can help the others work free from the traps of their stereotypes. In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — antihumanism. The values of life must be maintained against the enemies in every guise. We can do it by confronting people with their own humanity and their own inhumanity whenever we meet them, in the streets, in school, in church, in bars, in the halls of legislatures. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those we have of ourselves and others.

In particular, I am certain that more and more American women must become involved in politics. It could be the salvation of our nation. If there were more women in politics, it would be possible to start cleaning it up. Women I have known in government have seemed to me to be much more apt to act for the sake of a principle or moral purpose. They are not as likely as men to engage in deals, manipulations, and sharp tactics. A larger proportion of women in Congress and every other legislative body would serve as a reminder that the real purpose of politicians is to work for the people.

The woman who gets into politics will find that the men who are already there will treat her as the high school counselor treats girls. They see her as someone who is obviously just playing at politics part-time, because, after all, her real place is at home being a wife and mother. I suggested a bright young woman as a candidate in New York City a while ago; she had unlimited potential and with good management and some breaks could become an important person to the city. A political leader rejected her. "Why invest all the time and effort to build up the gal into a household name," he asked me, "when she's pretty sure to drop out of the game to have a couple of kids at just about the time we're ready to run her for mayor?"

Many women have given their lives to political organizations, laboring anonymously in the background while men of far less ability managed and mismanaged the public trust. These women hung back because they knew the men would not give them a chance. They knew their place and stayed in it. The amount of talent that has been lost to our country that way is appalling. I think one of my major uses is as an example to the women of our country, to show them that if a woman has ability, stamina, organizational skill, and a knowledge of the issues she can win public office. And if I can do it, how much more hope should that give to white women, who have only one handicap?

Whenever I speak to student groups, the first question they ask me is "Can't you do something about the war?" The next one usually is "How can you stand to be part of this system?" They mean, "How can you stay in Congress and keep talking about progress, about reconciliation, after all that this society has done to you and your people?" It is the hardest question I could be asked, and the answer is the most important one I can offer. I try to explain to them:

"You can be part of the system without being wedded to it," I say. "You can take part in it without believing that everything it does is right. I don't measure America by its achievement, but by its potential. There are still many things that we haven't tried — that I haven't tried — to change the way our present system operates. I haven't exhausted the opportunities for action in the course I'm pursuing. If I ever do, I cannot at this point imagine what to do next. You want me to talk to you about revolution, but I can't do that. I know what it would bring. My people are twelve percent of the population, at most fifteen percent. I am pragmatic about it: revolution would be suicide."

What is the alternative? What can we offer these beautiful, angry, serious, and committed young people? How are we all to be saved? The alternative, of course, is reform — renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation. This is our only hope. If my story has any importance, apart from its curiosity value — the fascination of being a "first" at anything is a durable one — it is, I hope, that I have persisted in seeking this path toward a better world. My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone. When I wrote my campaign slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought," it was an expression of what I believe I was and what I want to be — what I want all candidates for public office to be. We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence — who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation's ideals.

Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans — black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor — who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short.