Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 328.73092 GIL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Foreword by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Fourteen years before Kirsten Gillibrand succeeded Hillary Rodham Clinton as senator from New York, she heard her future mentor say these life-changing words: "Decisions are being made every day in Washington, and if you are not part of those decisions, you might not like what they decide, and you'll have no one to blame but yourself." A young corporate lawyer at the time, Gillibrand felt as if she'd been struck by lightning. She instantly knew that her voice-- all women's voices--were essential to shaping the future of this country, and that she had a greater purpose in life: to speak up and effect change. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the senator, wife, and mother of two recounts her personal journey in public service and galvanizes women to reach beyond their busy lives and make a meaningful difference in the world around them.
Off the Sidelines is a playbook for women who want to step up, whether in Congress or the boardroom or the local PTA. If women were fully represented in politics, Gillibrand says, national priorities would shift to issues that directly impact them: affordable daycare, paid family medical leave, and equal pay. Pulling back the curtain on Beltway politics, she speaks candidly about her legislative successes (securing federally funded medical care for 9/11 first responders, repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell) and her crushing disappointments (failing by five votes to pass a bill protecting survivors of sexual assault in the military).
Gillibrand also shares stories of growing up the daughter and granddaughter of two trailblazing feminists in a politically active family in Albany, New York, and retraces her nonlinear path to public office. She lays bare the highs and lows of being a young (pregnant!) woman in Congress, the joys and sacrifices every working mother shares, and the support system she turns to in her darkest moments: her husband, their two little boys, and lots of girlfriends.
In Off the Sidelines, Gillibrand is the tough-love older sister and cheerleader every woman needs. She explains why "ambition" is not a dirty word, failure is a gift, listening is the most effective tool, and the debate over women "having it all" is absurd at best and demeaning at worst. In her sharp, honest, and refreshingly relatable voice, she dares us all to tap into our inner strength, find personal fulfillment, and speak up for what we believe in.
Praise for Off the Sidelines
"Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, in offering this compellingly personal account of her journey to the U.S. Senate, fulfills a vital public purpose. Writing in a voice that is honest, funny, blunt, and strong, she urges women to get off the sidelines and start changing the world." --Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and founder of LeanIn.Org
"What do you get when a woman is the third generation of fierce, kindhearted, and brilliant political activists? You get Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who writes irresistibly, helps in real-life terms, and uses her clout to get more women elected. Off the Sidelines is one of the most helpful, readable, down-to-earth, and truly democratic books ever to come out of the halls of power." --Gloria Steinem
"Kirsten Gillibrand has written a handbook for the next generation of women to redefine their role in our world. With Off the Sidelines , Gillibrand shows that it's not about getting to the top, or choosing between career and family--it's simply about getting involved." --Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post and author of Thrive
Author Notes
Kirsten Gillibrand received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1988 and a law degree from the UCLA School of Law in 1991. Before becoming a member of Congress, she worked as an attorney in New York. She served in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing New York's 20th Congressional District. She has been U.S. Senator from New York since 2009. Her first book, Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World, was published in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
IN SOME WAYS, the measure of a good political autobiography - which almost invariably is a campaign document masquerading as a reminiscence - boils down to its ratio of originality to bromides. Kirsten Gillibrand's "Off the Sidelines," though, is an interesting case, because it ticktocks in perfect 4/4 time between the two, often on the same page, which means one is never quite sure whether to applaud New York's junior senator for her honesty or toss tomatoes in irritation. There are stretches so platitudinous that it's almost impossible not to hear blah blah BLAH blah Blaaaaaaaaaaah chiming in one's head: "I'm a big believer in making your own luck." Then there are moments of immensely appealing self-disclosure that seldom appear in other books of this genre: "I was a slightly straighter arrow than my mother. O.K., I was a massive kiss-ass and lived for positive reinforcement." Though "Off the Sidelines" is obviously a political book, it's not a book only about politics. Gillibrand's legislative career is still embryonic, insufficient for a whole volume, which means we get a fusion dish: a campaign biography wrapped in a "Lean In" shell with an Oprah toothpick stuck through. Gillibrand talks about her life in the House and Senate, sure, but she also discusses female friendship and her weight and the fact that, yes, she bought everyone on her staff a copy of the self-help book "The Secret," which she acknowledges was a bit kooky to do. Her title, "Off the Sidelines," is an echo of Sheryl Sandberg's best seller, and the introduction is a feminist manifesto, arguing for affordable daycare and paid family leave. She declares that this generation requires its own Rosie the Riveter "to elevate women's voices in the public sphere and bring women more fully into making the decisions that shape our country." There's nothing wrong with another book that encourages women to aim for the top (indeed, there's room for dozens of them). But such a book should have something new to contribute, rather than merely piggyback on a publishing trend. In this regard, the success of "Off the Sidelines'" is mixed. Part of the problem is that "Lean In" is a genuine cri de coeur for a movement, whereas Gillibrand's memoir is ultimately, tacitly, about advancing her own lot as well as other women's. She's very interesting on the subject of her struggles with work-family balance. But when she moves from there to stump-speech mode, delivering what are supposed to be iconic tales of ordinary women's more urgent suffering, the effect is the opposite of sincere - even if she means it - with each vignette landing as thuddingly and impersonally as they do when plopped into the middle of a State of the Union address. The other problem is that in order for a "Lean In"-style book to succeed, the author needs to practice what she preaches. But Gillibrand - who's already been called Tracy Flick and a raft of other names a man arguably wouldn't have had to endure - cannot fully own up to the scope of her own ambitions, and at a crucial moment she obscures them. The moment in question is when Gillibrand learns that Hillary Clinton is stepping down as New York senator to become Obama's secretary of state. The way Gillibrand tells it, "various news sources had started listing my name as a possible replacement," as if she were a passive agent in the process, and her appearance on these lists came as a total surprise. "Questions started swirling in my head," she writes, presumably to convey how dizzying she found this development. But the odds of a one-term representative randomly materializing on such lists are essentially zero. At the very least, she had to give the go-ahead to her allies to float her name and agitate on her behalf. Gillibrand then adds, "I was dead last on every list, but my name was there nonetheless," as if again to suggest, Golly, little old me, what a shock. The problem: The Washington Post, not exactly an obscure rag, listed Gillibrand as their No. 2 favorite in a seven-person lineup, showing just how serious the behind-the-scenes efforts must have been to get her on the map. It's possible Gillibrand forgot. (Trying to think: Would I forget if The Washington Post listed me as a top contender for a United States Senate seat? No. I don't think I would.) Rather, I imagine what this omission suggests is that in politics, a tale of charming humility is better than a tale of ambition - that leaning in, in some sense, is at loggerheads with the traditional political underdog narrative. Male candidates face this problem, too, of course. Ambition in politics seldom looks good on either sex. (Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former New York representative, wore his about as gracefully as a neon tie.) But Gillibrand also includes a chapter on being kind (called, literally, "Be Kind"), which one cannot imagine a male politician would ever feel compelled to write, and she sometimes sounds genuinely insecure, pleading the purity of her convictions. She describes, for instance, a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in which she got angrier by the minute, excoriating generals for failing to enact policies to protect women in the military from sexual assault. No one has ever doubted Gillibrand's commitment to this issue. It's one of her signature causes. But then she needlessly adds: "An expert on nonverbal communication later analyzed my rate of speech and my body language. ... He declared that my out-of-body experience up on the panel behind the microphone must have been authentic." As if she were on the hot seat, not the generals. Yet there are also moments in "Off the Sidelines" when Gillibrand gives us a frank sense of what kind of drive one needs for a life in national politics. And they're written with far more loopy verve and detail. She talks unapologetically about signing large checks in order to gain entree into Clinton fund-raisers (you may not need money per se to "lean in," but it sure helps refine your hinge); she chronicles her adventures in ingratiation with the New York political establishment; she describes crashing one of Senator Patrick Leahy's fund-raisers to lobby for her dairy bill. One sees just what it takes for a mother of young children to succeed in politics - and why, perhaps, there are currently so few. Gillibrand was willing to go back to her job part-time in Congress just three and a half weeks after giving birth to her second child so as not to miss key votes; she had to tailor her family life to an institution so outmoded it doesn't allow children on the Senate floor. I do wish she'd written more about her husband. He is there, coming off as secure and supportive, but also as a bit of a cipher - his appearances are mainly limited to aphoristic encouragements and calling her "Bunny." She does, however, include one very real, very raw exception, when he blurts out, "Your job is the reason we don't have more kids!" (Props to both for not omitting that one.) Gillibrand warns us that her speech isn't very ladylike, which at first seems like a naked pander to a younger generation of supporters, but by Page 51, when she's dropped the two marquee oaths of the English language practically back to back, you're pretty well convinced this isn't your mother's political memoir. Gillibrand recounts having to find a way to ditch an early-evening shift of presiding over the Senate because her breasts are too engorged with milk (she doesn't use language so graphic, but she goes there, and bless her for it); she admits to losing it with members of her staff when she was densely overscheduled and pregnant; and, as has been widely reported, she talks about smilingly tolerating various observations about her weight from male colleagues, including, "Good thing you're working out, because you wouldn't want to get porky." (What she writes here in response is something you wish she had said aloud.) You can call parts of this book many things - politically calculating, slightly klutzy - just as the senator herself has been called. But moments like these make Gillibrand hard not to admire and impossible to ignore - as her colleagues are slowly but surely finding out. JENNIFER SENIOR, a contributing editor at New York magazine, is the author of "All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood."
Library Journal Review
There's a tendency for political memoirs to have the kind of metric tonnage a freighter would envy, but Gillibrand takes a lighter, albeit still serious, tack in this book. The first-term senator from New York delves into her political origins, which she traces to hearing Hillary Clinton highlight the importance of citizen involvement in politics, particularly by women. As Gillibrand is the daughter and granddaughter of two pioneering female political activists, Clinton's words fell on receptive ears. Two years after the corporate lawyer won a seat in the U.S. Congress, she was appointed to a vacancy in the Senate, a post she won outright in the 2012 elections. Gillibrand has a young family, and it's the wife-and-mother aspect of her story that might resonate with women who face their own challenges balancing personal and professional lives. This blend of politics and family life makes for an enjoyable listen. Gillibrand's somewhat earnest delivery doesn't harm her narration; it's the upstate New York version of homespun. Actor Susan Denaker delivers a throaty introduction written by former secretary of state Clinton. VERDICT Recommended.-Kelly Sinclair, Temple P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 I'm One of Polly's Girls My mother took her criminal-law exam two days after giving birth to my older brother, Douglas. A year and a half later, she stood for her New York Bar character exam three days before she gave birth to me. I should note that my mother, while having more strength and guts than almost anyone I've ever met, is only five foot two, so her torso did not leave a lot of room for housing or hiding a baby. Alarmed by the sight of a tiny, very pregnant woman in a huge tent dress, the distinguished gentlemen in the New York State Supreme Court chambers lobbed her three softball questions, told her she passed the character review, and waved her out the door. The year was 1966. Given that she was one of only three women in her law school class, my mother knew she was doing things differently. She believed in her generation's women's rights movement, but that wasn't what motivated her. She built her law practice alongside her family not out of ideology but because she never considered doing otherwise. She wanted a career and she wanted to be a hands-on, present mom, and she made it work. As a girl, I wanted to be just like my mother: smart, self-sufficient, in control. I worked hard to be her favorite, but still she treated me, my sister, Erin, and my brother all the same. To this day, my mother likes to tell people that I am the way I am because, according to the Chinese zodiac, 1966 was the Year of the Fire Horse, a once-every-sixty-years event. Sagittarius girls born under that sign are said to be incredibly independent-minded, even disruptive. That may be true of me, but of course my mother and I both know that I am who I am because of my family. My mother and my grandmother are two of the fiercest, most capable, bighearted, and original women I know. They created my frame of reference for women and work. And they taught me the bedrock lesson of life: Be exactly yourself. From the outside, I had a childhood so conventional it was almost boring. Until I was four years old, my family lived in a tiny clapboard brown-and-white house on Putnam Street in Albany. My dad worked his way through law school, part of the time as a French teacher, even though, he now admits with a laugh, he didn't speak very good French. After Erin was born my parents built a split-level ranch that looked exactly like the Brady Bunch house: late 1960s modern, big windows, lots of light. It sat on a cul-de-sac, on the same street where my mother's parents, her aunt, and her two brothers lived. The night we moved in, before our furniture arrived, my mother set a small vase of flowers on a cardboard box that served as a bedside table next to my mattress, one of the thousand domestic kindnesses she doled out between hunting the Thanksgiving turkey with a twelve-gauge shotgun and earning a second-degree black belt in karate. Every weekday morning, from kindergarten through middle school, I pulled on my school uniform: white shirt, navy blue jumper, blue kneesocks, and blue cardigan. My father then drove my sister and me to the all-girls Academy of the Holy Names while my brother took the bus to Saint Gregory's. At the end of the day, my mother would come straight from work, picking us up at the last possible moment. (We all become our mothers, don't we?) Once home, she'd have dinner on the table within thirty minutes. On weekends, I played hide-and-seek and flashlight tag with my brother, sister, and cousins in the overgrown grass between my parents' and grandparents' houses. Summers, we'd rent a house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, for two weeks with my father's six siblings--a rowdy crew of aunts, uncles, and cousins. In many ways it was the stereotypical 1970s middle-class existence--cul-de-sac, family dinners. I even loved Catholic school, especially the older nuns. (I'm godmother to eight children today.) But you didn't even need to nick the surface to uncover the extraordinary. My maternal grandmother's mother, Mimi, lived just down the road from us. She'd worked at the Watervliet Arsenal during World War II, helping to manufacture ammunition for giant guns. She was extremely independent and tough. She kicked my great-grandfather, who drank too much, out of the house and chose to raise her children on her own, though she never divorced or stopped loving him, and when he became sick with lung cancer she took him back and cared for him until his death. My maternal grandmother, Dorothea "Polly" McLean, followed her mother's fear-be-damned lead. Polly was a spark plug, just over five feet tall. She was raised in Albany's South End, and she embodied her tough Irish neighborhood's pugilistic motto: South End against the world! Polly never backed down from an argument she knew she could win, and that was pretty much all of them. She told dirty jokes to forewarn men who underestimated her because of her size. She could rattle off strings of expletives as long as a string of Christmas tree lights--five, eight, even ten in a row, never the same curse twice. I must admit, with some regret, that I inherited her facility for colorful language, though I keep it to one or two expletives at a time. Once, when Senator Joe Lieberman, an elegant and religious man, asked me about the status of a bill, I responded with a recitation of political obstacles that apparently included an epithet I'm sure very few, if any, others had ever used in his presence. A few minutes later, a staffer pulled me aside and said, "You just said 'Fuck me' in front of Joe Lieberman!" I hadn't even noticed, and Lieberman hadn't flinched. God bless his polite heart. My grandmother didn't go to college. Nobody in her family ever had. In 1936, at age twenty, she married Peter Noonan, a devout young man from Watervliet, New York. Two years later, she took a job as a secretary in the New York State Legislature, and that's when her life started leaping to places most women of her generation never imagined. From the 1920s until the 1980s, Albany was an unrehabilitated Democratic machine town. One mayor held office for over forty years. By the time I entered politics, the city had progressed, but in Polly's day, Chicago had nothing on the capital of New York. Back then, Albany ran on loyalty and favors. You needed a pothole filled, or your uncle needed a job raking leaves because it would just kill his spirit to be out of work? You called somebody who knew somebody--and, before long, the person you called was my grandmother. She loved her city and the people in it. She always insisted that Albany had no political machine. "It's not a machine! It's a well-oiled organization," she'd say. "A machine has no heart." In Polly's era, secretaries didn't see themselves as having careers, but they did have real power. They typed letters on old Royal Quiet DeLuxe typewriters with actual carbon paper. Often they wrote the letters themselves; sometimes they drafted entire bills. A clear-thinking, well-spoken secretary reflected extremely well on a legislator's entire office, so before too long, human nature prevailed and the men came to depend on the women. This system of the (perhaps great) woman behind the (perhaps not-so-great) man gave the Albany Democratic Party machine a lot of hidden freedoms. Say party bosses wanted to put a handsome but not well-educated or articulate war veteran on the ticket because they knew he could get elected and would vote with the party. No problem, with the right secretary! Realizing the invaluable role women played in composing correspondence and maintaining relationships--and unable to restrain herself from filling a need--my grandmother took control of the New York State Legislature's secretarial pool, recruiting and vetting capable talent so that when a new state legislator showed up from Long Island, Buffalo, or New York City for the three-month legislative session, she could match him with a secretary who was an expert writer or a gifted smoother of social gaffes, whatever might be the perfect fit. Before long, Polly found herself in the center of the city's political dealings--helping to organize election campaigns and galvanizing volunteers to staff the polls. She became vital to so many parts of government that legislators began requesting that she be in two or three places at once. Polly, who loved being essential and was also very funny, rose to the challenge. She brought the roller skates she wore in her house's basement into the office. Then she laced them and glided up and down the legislature's grand marble halls, much to the amusement of the press. To the day she died, my grandmother was in the middle of the action. She worked closely with her mentor, Mary Marcy, the founder of the Albany County Democratic Women's Club, and together with other women, they transformed the way local elections ran. Over time, my grandmother took over the organization, and the women who worked with her started calling themselves "Polly's girls" (inspired by a homemade T-shirt one of them made that read: i'm one of polly's girls). The club did much of the city's grassroots campaigning. They hosted rallies, circulated petitions, threw fundraisers, and knocked on doors. When Mario Cuomo first ran for governor of New York in 1982, he asked my grandmother to organize a women's event. There was a blizzard the day of the event, but five hundred women showed up anyway, and they did so because my grandmother galvanized them. She showed the women of Albany their power to set the agenda and the importance of being involved. I remember joining the assembly line that Polly's girls formed in the campaign headquarters in downtown Albany one August at the beginning of the election season. I must have been about eight. Ten or fifteen ladies in sleeveless blouses and shift dresses gathered around a long table. I sat among them, mesmerized by their jiggling upper arms as they folded flyers, stuffed and addressed envelopes, sealed and stamped the mailers, and placed their finished handiwork in a box. My grandfather Peter was quiet, gentle, and thoughtful--a perfect complement to Polly's salty gregariousness and warmth. (I have a similar yin-and-yang dynamic in my own marriage.) While my grandmother hurled herself into politics, my grandfather worked at a freight-car-wheel manufacturing plant and then the new local cement plant. Every year, he prepared Thanksgiving dinner, except for the pies (those were my mom's purview). My brother inherited his culinary talent, and he's the best cook in our family now. My grandfather also played the piano beautifully, and I loved taking piano lessons and practicing at his house. He liked to fish and hunt and welcomed the quiet of the woods--qualities he passed on to my mother, if not to me. To this day, she relishes a 4:00 a.m. trek into a marsh, to be ready when the ducks start to fly. Once, on a hunting trip with friends to Newfoundland, she bagged a moose. She brought it home and butchered it in our garage. Every Sunday, my grandfather did collections at 9:00 a.m. mass at Saint James in Albany, and every night, he knelt beside his bed for his prayers. For a time, my grandmother broke with the Church over the issue of birth control (why shouldn't a woman plan when to have her babies?), but, like me, she never stopped loving the Catholic community and the people in it. In those years, the early 1950s, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, the order that taught my mother and her brothers and sister at school, had a very austere life. When my grandparents found out the nuns didn't even have a proper table to gather around, they built one for them, sanding and varnishing the wood to a deep glow. My grandmother always felt sorry for the sisters because, back then, they had to wear thick wool habits, even in the summertime, and the convent buildings had no air-conditioning. So every Thursday during the summer, my grandparents gave their house, with its swimming pool in the yard, over to the nuns. My grandfather would set out food, soda, and beer. My grandmother would lay out cigarettes and ashtrays--"just in case," as she said. Then my grandparents would leave, placing sawhorses across the road behind them so no friends or deliverymen could invade the sisters' privacy. Before too long, word got out among the other convents in the area, as more nuns than just those from the Sisters of Saint Joseph were swimming in the Noonans' pool. That was my grandmother. She took care of people. She welcomed unmarried pregnant girls into her home, never mentioning the houseguests to anybody in town--or even to my mother or her siblings, who would arrive home from school to find a round-bellied stranger on the couch. One priest my grandmother particularly liked, Father Young, ran a rehabilitation program for ex-convicts and recovering drug addicts in Albany's South End. One morning, as a favor to Father Young, my grandmother drove to Mount McGregor Correctional Facility, picked up a newly released inmate, and brought him back to Albany. Later she learned he had been imprisoned for homicide, but not even that fazed her. Her response: "He was such a sweet boy to me!" As much as she loved politics, Polly's greatest joy was being a grandmother to my siblings, my cousins, and me. She stayed home and looked after us every Friday until we were old enough to go to school. Throughout my childhood, when I had a stomachache, she'd sit by my side and rub my tummy until I fell asleep. She loved taking us canoeing in her pond, which she always kept stocked with fish, or making jams with grandpa and us with raspberries we picked together from her garden. When we were old enough, she recruited us to work on campaigns, clothing us in matching T-shirts at rallies and cutting us loose to bumper-sticker cars. She didn't do anything halfway. She used to say, "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right!" Later in her life, she trained as a drug counselor to help Father Young. Once she got into a shoving match with a reporter but remained unapologetic, claiming that she didn't like the reporter's attitude (as if that were a defense). Only five foot one, she loved ladders and she loved to paint--not landscapes or portraits, the house. She kept a pet wolf named Tasha that, according to family lore, was a descendant of the one Nikita Khrushchev gave to John F. Kennedy. (This turns out not to be true, as Khrushchev gave Kennedy a mutt whose mother was one of the first dogs sent into space.) She wasn't much of a cook, except for her cheesecake, which was the best in Albany. She gave the recipe to no one, but if you asked how she made it, she'd deliver one to your door. One of the most unconventional aspects of my grandmother's life was her relationship with Albany's longtime mayor, Erastus Corning. No one in my family talked about it. I didn't even know it was strange until I was an adult. Polly and Corning met when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-eight. He was the state senator in charge of the Scenic Hudson Commission; she was the commission's secretary. The two of them remained close for the rest of their lives. My grandmother attended parties, Elks Lodge dances, and strategy meetings with Corning, who was married. She often joined Corning as a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. Rumors flew, which my mother and her siblings hated, but my grandmother just lived her life, not caring what others thought. Corning's connection to my family was far more meaningful and complex than almost anybody knew. He may well have been in love with my grandmother, but he also loved the whole family. Most evenings, he sat in a reclining chair in my grandparents' living room, drinking Scotch with my grandfather. Most mornings, he'd drop by the house and drive my mother and her siblings to school. Saturdays Corning worked until noon and then often took my mother, her sister, and her brothers fishing. Some winters, Corning spent a week ice fishing with my grandfather and some other friends in a shack in Maine. In the summers, the extended Noonan family would use the Cornings' camp in Maine when he wasn't there. From my perspective, the mayor was simply part of our family. He appeared at every family birthday party with the most fantastic present. Once he gave me a miniature microscope, which I loved because it wasn't a frilly girl's gift; it was a serious one, a sign that he thought I was smart and capable of becoming a scientist or a doctor. No one had ever given me a present like that before. He must have noticed how much it meant to me, too, because the next year he gave me a piece of amber with an insect trapped inside. I only remember going to Corning's home once. I was about ten years old. I'd heard that Mrs. Corning kept a greenhouse, where she cultivated gorgeous flowers, and that was indeed true. But what I noticed most at his house were his peach trees and how the fruit needed to be picked. We didn't stay long enough to harvest the peaches, but I desperately wanted to volunteer. My mother, who was named Polly after my grandmother's nickname, learned to be exactly herself from her mother, and in turn I learned from her. She didn't set out to take her law school exams fresh out of the labor-and-delivery ward. The timing just played out that way, and she powered ahead, undeterred. At age thirteen, she fell in love with my father, Doug Rutnik, a scrappy, handsome boy from the outskirts of Albany and the best athlete in town. "That goddamned Doug, he doesn't even say hello . . ." my grandmother would say with great affection when my father entered her house. He always walked straight to the refrigerator and drank all the orange juice. She admired his bravado, his charm, and his good looks. He was good at every sport he ever tried. It must have taken heaps of confidence in the 1950s for a man to appreciate all my mother had to offer and all she could do. She worked on the school newspaper in high school, and in college she wanted to try sports reporting. But when she tried to gain access to the press box at the hockey rink, she was denied. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, women did not wear pants in public, and the press box was above the stands, with a metal grate for a floor. Only an immodest young lady would walk, in a skirt, over the open grate above the bench, right? That's not how my mother saw it, and she didn't care what others thought. Her behavior caused such a stir that it was covered in The Boston Globe. At my parents' wedding, my mother held a glamelia bouquet made from white gladiolus and wore a Spanish comb in her hair; she was easily the most exotic bride Albany had ever seen. My brother was born in 1965, nine months and eighteen days after the wedding, and my parents celebrated his arrival with a roast beef sandwich. The birth had not been the most elegant affair, so the sandwich was fitting. Most of the medical residents at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital crowded around to watch my mother deliver. Few had seen a woman go through natural childbirth before. After I was born, my mother managed to fit in both childcare and her law practice by trading off babysitting days with her friend Carol Bartley, who had two girls, Kathleen and Elaine. Mondays and Wednesdays, my mother took both sets of kids. Tuesdays and Thursdays, Carol did. Friday, my grandmother watched us. My mother didn't know anyone else who did this, and she didn't intend to be a flextime trailblazer; it just made sense. She prioritized both work and family; I never imagined I would do otherwise. I was a slightly straighter arrow than my mother. Okay, I was a massive kiss-ass and lived for positive reinforcement. As a child, I wrote in perfect cursive penmanship, thanks to the nuns. I did all my homework as soon as I got home, and I kept my room clean. I tattled on my brother and older cousins, payback for them not including me in their games. This was probably for the best, as they were far more adventurous than I. They tried to catch frogs and built potato guns. I liked to organize clubs. My first, with the Bartley girls, was called Cricket. I was secretary and kept meticulous notes. Excerpted from Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World by Kirsten Gillibrand All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Foreword | p. vii |
Introduction | p. xiii |
Chapter 1 I'm One of Polly's Girls | p. 3 |
Chapter 2 From A to B, with Detours | p. 19 |
Chapter 3 So What If the Cows Outnumber Your Supporters? | p. 37 |
Chapter 4 The Best Lobbyist I Ever Met Was a Twelve-Year-Old Girl | p. 55 |
Chapter 5 Let's Clean Up the Sticky Floor | p. 69 |
Chapter 6 Ambition Is Not a Dirty Word | p. 85 |
Chapter 7 Now We're Yours | p. 100 |
Chapter 8 "You Need to be Beautiful Again," and Other Unwanted Advice | p. 122 |
Chapter 9 Be Kind | p. 139 |
Chapter 10 My Real Inner Circle | p. 150 |
Chapter 11 A Time Such as This | p. 163 |
Chapter 12 Get in the Game | p. 180 |
Acknowledgments | p. 189 |
Resources | p. 191 |