CELEBRATING WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH:  HELEN GAHAGAN DOUGLAS

Helen Gahagan Douglas (November 25, 1900-June 28, 1980)

She was an American actress and politician and was the third woman and first Democratic woman elected to Congress from California; her election made California one of the first two states (along with Illinois) to elect female members to the House from both parties. She was also married to actor Melvyn Douglas from 1931-1980. After she died,  Senator Alan Cranston of California eulogized her on the floor of the Senate: "I believe Helen Gahagan Douglas was one of the grandest, most eloquent, deepest thinking people we have had in American politics. She stands among the best of our 20th century leaders, rivaling even Eleanor Roosevelt in stature, compassion and simple greatness." 

Her autobiography, A Full Life,  was published after she died. In it  she chronicles her life as a Broadway actress, her political life, opposition from Richard Nixon, her three terms in Congress from 1944-1951 and her crusade for women's rights.

The following speech from her autobiography was given at Marlboro College in Vermont to address the commencement in 1976.

We have the capability of destroying life on this planet.  As I see it, nothing will come right if we do not stop the arms race. Nations still talk of peace and the need to control nuclear weapons but the arms race that began in the fifties between the Soviet Union and the United States goes on at an accelerated pace--and the nations around the world that can ill afford to do so have been buying non-nuclear weapons at an accelerated rate.

Albert Einstein had this to say about the arms race of the fifties: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes..." The United States and the Soviet Union together have already stockpiled nuclear weapons with the force of ten tons of TNT for every man, woman and child on earth. But apparently that's not enough...In this bicentennial year, we must reeducate ourselves to the American dream. Ideas are powerful in the evolution of the human family.  We will not strengthen democracy by the power of our weapons but by the example we set here at home of a vital democracy.

Graduation is not the end of learning. Learning goes on daily or one stagnates. As you go through life you will have to make, at times, decisive decisions, under strain, which will affect your future and your character. . .

Success, more often than not, depends on the fulfillment of one's maximum potential, rather than on competition with one another. If one is trustworthy, if one's word is one's bond, he or she will have stature. It is so with a nation.

Character isn't inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains. The challenge to us all is to stay alive in life, to remain open, receiving, responding to nature, friends, passersby; to learn the art of love, of giving one's self, and asking nothing in return.