Here is another design for Nancy Pelosi. (I had made the first one in 2019.)

Nancy Patricia Pelosi, born March 26, 1940, to a political family in Baltimore, was the Speaker of the House of Representatives from January 4, 2007–January 3, 2011, and again from January 3, 2019–January 3, 2023. Representing four-fifths of the city and county of San Francisco, CA, she assumed her office in the House of Representatives on June 2, 1987. Nancy Pelosi is the first woman to hold the rank of Speaker and after she stepped down she was widely called one of the most effective and consequential holders of that office.

This is the second design I have made for Nancy Pelosi and I will include some background on my first design below. Several things have prompted me to make something new for Nancy. For one, people kept asking for a Nancy fridge magnet and my previous design from 2019 was too complicated for such a small object. The biggest thing, however, is the video of her actions during the attack on Congress by the right wing extremists, instigated by the 45th President. Her daughter, Alexandra, filmed her mother reacting calmly to the unprecedented events: calling local governors to get National Guard backup; telling the Vice President not to let anyone know where he is (while ripping open a meat jerkey snack with her teeth while she held her phone); and trying to put things into place so that Congress could reconvene to install the next President … KEEP CALM. Mostly I admire her for standing up face to face to an extreme and dangerous President, with style and grit … HOLD ON. Finally, I was impressed by how she gave up the speakership and blew a kiss to her successor when she gave him her vote on the floor of the House. That just seemed so Nancy … LET GO.

I decided to make the first perSISTERS print for Nancy Pelosi [TAKE POWER] because of the suggestion of a young man I met in one of my Female Power Project booths at a street market in D.C. He had previously worked for Pelosi and admired her. He also told me about the “people don’t give you power, you take it” comment, which I found cited in numerous places. Pelosi is, and has been for a while, the most powerful and effective woman in American politics. Her story, and peoples’ stories about her, are a telling distillation of America’s ideas about female power. It isn’t rocket science; it isn’t subtle at all. Americans hate and distrust powerful women. According to a 2010 paper by Yale researchers cited by Peter Beinart in the April 2018 issue of The Atlantic, when presented with the same description, both men and women reacted negatively to an ambitious, power-seeking leader with a woman’s name, while the same description attached to a man’s name elicited support. 

Beinart goes on to write, “As the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2015 paper, Americans generally believe ‘that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such as competitiveness, self-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness.’ But ‘these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality.’ In fact, ‘the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness.’”  

I challenge Nancy’s critics on the right and the left to mindfully address their unexamined bias against powerful women.

DESIGN NOTE

This image is based on a 2018 photo by Andrew Harnik showing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (then in the minority party in Congress) leaving a meeting with the president at that time. The way she is dressed, in a burnt orange coat, donning sunglasses in the D.C. winter brightness, caused a stir in the social media sphere. She radiates panache. Nancy is a master of this sort of Female Power: the power of the bright colored garment. It makes her stand out in the sea of dull colored power suits that most of her male colleagues wear. If you are going to be the exception to the rule of men holding the power, then do it exceptionally. A garment always means something. I hope as women gain parity in the halls of power we can continue to take up space brightly, as Nancy Pelosi does.

Read more about Pelosi on Wikipedia, and at these links: 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/14/do-you-believe-this-new-video-shows-how-nancy-pelosi-took-charge-in-capitol-riot

From the Times.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/

http://time.com/5388347/nancy-pelosi-democrats-feminism/

“Well, I have a choice here. I can accept the injustice or rewrite the law.”

Amanda Nguyen (born c. 1991) is the founder and CEO of Rise, a civil rights legislation organization. The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of citizens to petition Congress to make a law, but the process of getting a law passed is difficult. Rise has developed a structure and techniques for helping people to pass laws in the United States. The organization is responsible for the passage of the Federal Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, as well as numerous state laws guaranteeing and rationalizing the rights of survivors of sexual violence. Nguyen and Rise also succeeded in getting the UN to pass a resolution urging countries to take effective measures to help survivors of sexual and gender-based violence to access justice, remedies, and assistance. It is the first time the UN has addressed sexual violence in peacetime.

“We are leaders from #MeToo, #StopAsianHate, Women’s March, and March for Our Lives—the largest grassroots organizing moments in recent US history. We started by fighting for survivors of sexual violence and collectively we’ve passed more than 60 laws. We’ve gathered our experience to teach you how to pass your own law for your community.”  –from risenow.us

Amanda Nguyen has a background in astrophysics and national security. While she was a student at Harvard someone raped her, and then she learned how broken the justice system is for survivors of sexual violence. Across the country there was a wide variation in the way rapes are investigated and adjudicated. Of particular concern to Amanda was that in Massachusetts the evidence collected (the “rape kit”) would be destroyed after 6 months if charges hadn’t been filed, but the statute of limitations didn’t run out for 15 years. Meanwhile, to try a rape case takes about 2 years of traumatic work. Amanda had to choose whether to give up her job offer in Washington D.C. or to stay in Massachusetts and receive justice. She thought this was just wrong, so she took her Washington job and also started Rise—in her spare time!—so that she could fix the system for other rape survivors. We have seen this before in the stories of perSISTERS: Amanda turned pain and outrage into purpose and regard for other people.

Part of Amanda’s success comes from her social—and social media—abilities and her ease in engaging with famous people to spotlight her issues. She is at ease in fashion shows and filmed interviews. She is brilliant, analytical, and articulate. But it is evident that her rape and her creation of Rise has sidetracked her from what she really wants to do with her life, which is to be an astronaut. Changing the world is just a side gig. She’s working on it, though, and you can follow her training on her Instagram feed (@nguyen_amanda). Maybe having a public life will help her achieve her dream. 

About the phrase HACK THE SYSTEM

Hacking has two main senses. One is destructive: a hacker gains unauthorized access to software and manipulates the code to destroy the program or to make a profit on manipulating the program. Another sense is creative: for example, a hack is using some system devised for one purpose in order to make something unrelated work better. In effect it means to make a system work for one’s particular goal. Amanda’s goal is justice for people who don’t usually have a platform to access justice.

What that hack looked like:

“We put together this basic set of rights and aimed to pass it in the United States Congress. And when we first started out, we were a group of 20 something-year-olds with no money, no connections, no power. And people thought we were a joke. And we just kept relentlessly organizing [and] putting our heads together.”

“I did not have the political luxury of a cathartic performance. I had urgency. My rape kit had a literal timeline to be destroyed. … My justice would be literally thrown in the trash. … I needed to work with anyone and everyone within the legislative process in order to pass these laws. That profoundly shaped the way that I negotiated my rights. … Democracy inherently requires its citizens to hash things out. And so when survivors at Rise or any organizer enters a room of a Senator, they leave their political tribalism at the door.”

“When I got there, even our lead sponsors, the lead senators and representatives who work on this bill, said, ‘I’m so sorry. It’s not going to pass this time.’ And for the next 14 hours, the Rise team and I literally just walked into the decision-makers’ offices and said, ‘I’m here. Here’s why I care about this issue. Respectfully, please listen to our stories.’ We asked people to call into the speaker’s office. I witnessed those calls come in person. And at the end of those 14 hours, he brought it up for a vote, and it passed.”

RESOURCES

risenow.us

My favorite thing is this “School of Greatness” video podcast interview, this is where she uses the phrase “Hack the System”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtkLeG6h7Kg

And a written synopsis of the podcast: https://lewishowes.com/podcast/take-your-power-back-with-amanda-nguyen/  The Amanda quotes above are from this synopsis.

“Remember it was transgender people who gave you this liberation.”

“We were all involved in different struggles, including myself and many other transgender people. But in these struggles, in the Civil Rights movement, in the war movement, in the women’s movement, we were still outcasts. The only reason they tolerated the transgender community in some of these movements was because we were gung-ho, we were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose. You all had rights. We had nothing to lose. I’ll be the first one to step on any organization, any politician’s toes if I have to, to get the rights for my community.”

Sylvia Rivera (July 2, 1951 – February 19, 2002) was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist. She was a passionate advocate for queer unhoused youth in New York and created the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR) group together with her friend, Marsh P. Johnson. They occupied a building where they provided housing and support to unhoused trans and gay youth. They struggled to find funding and were not supported by the wider gay rights community. Later in her life Sylvia managed the food pantry at the Metropolitan Community Church of New York. The love she found with her partner, Julia, and her commitment to helping people, did actually save her life when she was drinking herself to death. She had to fight for someone. She had to fight for something. 

With a later version of STAR, Sylvia fought for trans inclusion in New York State non-discrimination laws. The assimilationist mainstream gay rights leadership regularly neglected transgender rights as too extreme and off-putting to straight politicians. They claimed that trans rights could be added later. Sylvia demanded that transgender people be included in the discussions and their rights be included from the start. As a multiply marginalized person, she knew that inclusion needs to be there at the start, otherwise it is not inclusion at all. Because drag queens were at the front of the protests when cops were bashing heads, they clearly should be included in the laws establishing gay rights.

Born in New York City, Sylvia had a Puerto Rican father who abandoned her family, and a Venezuelan mother who died when Sylvia was three. She was raised by her grandmother who was severely ashamed of Sylvia’s effeminate behavior. Because of this, Sylvia began living on the streets in 1962, just shy of her 11th birthday, and supported herself with sex work. She was taken in by the local community of drag queens, who gave her the name Sylvia. She used mothering language to describe her relationship to her community.

Sylvia described herself as a woman trapped in a male body. She also identified herself as a drag queen. She was most active at a time when the language describing herself was fluid, and she grew tired of making distinctions: “I’m tired of being labeled. I don’t even like the label transgender. I’m tired of living with labels. I just want to be who I am. I am Sylvia Rivera. Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia. And that’s who I am.”

Sylvia was all over the gay rights movement and you can find a lot about her online. 

Here are some useful things I found:

Wikipedia, as always. (Send them money! I do.)

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-rivera

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/24/nyregion/about-new-york-still-here-sylvia-who-survived-stonewall-time-and-the-river.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEXmJL9nadc

https://wams.nyhistory.org/growth-and-turmoil/growing-tensions/marsha-p-johnson/#

The Piers: Sylvia Rivera, 1990s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Rivera

https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/gay-power-is-trans-history-street-transvestite-action-revolutionaries

The Banal and The Profane: Melissa Febos