Women can’t let issues like gender equality be pushed aside from the national dialogue during times of crisis, Harvard Law Prof. Susan Estrich told about 60 students Thursday night in Annie May Swift Hall.
“If we (ignore these issues), we’re going to find that one day the coffers will be empty and our agenda will be forgotten,” Estrich said.
Estrich spoke about the power government has and the changing role of public service jobs after the Sept. 11 attacks to a crowd of mostly women. She said it was important not to overlook issues that have received less attention since bombings began in Afghanistan, including education, health insurance and gender equality.
“Everything else government needs to do is being pushed to the side right now,” she said.
She said Sept. 11 marked a reversal in the public view of the government, as people stopped mocking government officials and began looking to them for guidance.
“September 11 was a life-defining day, ” she said. “Everybody changed their assessment of the role of the government. … All of a sudden the government became a friend, a protector. If we don’t have people in government who know what they’re doing, nothing else matters.”
She said she hoped Americans could forge a positive future from the traumatic terrorist attacks. Estrich said she has used a dark incident in her youth as motivation to improve her life.
Estrich said that when she was 20 and about to graduate from college, she was raped by a man who held an ice pick to her throat. She said the most difficult part of the rape was learning how to live without fear.
In the years since, Estrich has worked to establish rape laws and pioneered teaching classes about rape law, a course she said is now taught at law schools nationwide.
“If I had given up then, that bastard would have won,” she said. “It would have been more than a violation that one day, he would have had my whole life.”
As a political strategist and campaigner for the Democratic Party during the 1980s, Estrich said she brought the Equal Rights Amendment and gay rights into political discourse.
She recalled inserting issues she cared about into speeches while working for Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign, then gleefully watching then-President Jimmy Carter scurry to keep up. In 1988 she became the first woman to head a presidential campaign when she worked for Michael Dukakis.
Estrich said she loved having political power because it allowed her to effect change. Women need to grasp for power more often, she said, and those with power should use it to help other women. She mentioned Harvard Law School’s first female professor, Barbara Owens, who received tenure to fill a quota but then voted against other female faculty members until Estrich herself was given tenure.
“Those of us who have power have an obligation to help other women,” Estrich said. “You have to look to the women beside you and above you and demand they help you.”
