Best of BackStory

The Time Joanne Freeman Went to Congress

05.15.20

As BackStory moves towards the end of its production, we’ve asked our hosts to select memorable moments from the show that we’re publishing as episodes once per month.

Joanne Freeman joined BackStory in 2017, and has since had hundreds of conversations on a huge variety of topics. But during this time, a few of these interviews surprised and moved her as a historian, and as a woman in unexpected ways.

So in this best of BackStory, Joanne presents three of these striking conversations from her time on the show. You’ll learn about a decades-old family secret, and find out why we can never truly recover the past. Then, you’ll hear from Senator Tammy Duckworth about changing the culture of Congress.

We need listener submissions for our June Best of BackStory! Find out more in our announcement.

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

Keep it In the Family

Writer Karen Tintori describes how she discovered her family’s decades-old secret — that her great-aunt had been murdered by her brothers in an honor killing.

Music:

No Turn Back by Ketsa

Beautiful Rain (stripped down remix) by Ketsa

family; honor

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JF: Welcome to BackStory — the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

JF: If you’re new to the podcast, each week, along with my colleagues — Nathan Connolly, Ed Ayers, and Brian Balogh — we explore a different aspect of American history.

JF: Now, I joined BackStory in 2017. And although I was the only female co-host, I didn’t join the team thinking about that … nor did I give much thought to my identity as a historian. All of the co-hosts were historians. That was a given.

JF: But during my time at BackStory, different show segments surprised and moved me as a woman, and as a historian in ways that I hadn’t anticipated.

JF: This is the second-to-last installment of an ongoing “Best of” series we’re doing as BackStory starts to wrap up after more than 12 years.

The final one will be Best of BackStory – the Listener Edition, which means we’re looking for submissions from YOU. Let us know what interview or BackStory moment was most memorable for you, and tell us why! Just check the show notes to find out how to get in touch.

As for this episode…I’m excited to have the chance to share these three conversations with you. And I hope you enjoy them, too…

You’ll learn about 19th century Antiquarians, collectors nostalgic for the so-called “olden times.”

And you’ll hear from Senator Tammy Duckworth about her life of service and what it takes to change the culture of Congress.

But first, we’re going to talk about honor culture in America.

JF: Now when you think about honor culture, you probably think about duelling in the 19th century. We’ve all heard the story of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and their notorious duel. The affair was all about honor, and the culture demanded that men protect their good names and reputations by any means necessary.

We might not see a lot of duels anymore, but in many ways, honor culture lives on today…

A couple years ago, I spoke with writer Karen Tintori about how she discovered a decades-old secret. It was a secret that connected her family to honor culture in a surprising and disturbing way…

JF:My interview with Karen Tintori, who reconstructed and wrote about a family honor killing from generations past, grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. Even when I was preparing for the interview, it brought tears to my eyes; I remember feeling compelled to call a BackStory producer to process my thoughts. There were many aspects of the story — and the interview — that touched me. But perhaps most of all, I was deeply struck by this attempt to erase the life and identity of a woman, and the work and passion that went into recovering her story and acknowledging her life.

JF: So here is my conversation with Karen from the show, “Death Before Dishonor: Shame and Reputation in American History.”

And a warning. This story contains disturbing descriptions of violence against women.

Joanne Freeman:
Several years ago, Karen Tintori discovered a devastating family secret. She’s a journalist and writer from a close knit Italian American family. And while she knew a lot about her father’s side of the family, she realized she knew very little about her mother’s family, which had immigrated from Sicily in the early 20th century. So she started asking her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt some questions, but for some reason they didn’t want to talk.

Karen Tintori:
They would say, “Okay, come over on Tuesday.” And then Monday night I’d get a phone call. “Well, Nope. Grandma has a doctor’s appointment.” Et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t realize for many years that I was getting the runaround.

Joanne Freeman:
She finally managed to get her grandmother to agree to speak with her about the family.

Karen Tintori:
I walked in and my grandmother was already agitated and sputtering in Sicilian to my aunt, “Who is she going to show? Who is she going to tell?” And on the corner of the table was an old shoebox filled with documents and the top one was a family passport. My aunt, Grace, opened it up and pointed to a line in the list of children that had been obliterated with a black pen and she said, “That’s the one they got rid of. Did your mother ever tell you?” And it took about another hour for her to explain that my grandmother had a sister next to her, a year younger, who was murdered by her brothers about 1920 in Detroit in an honor killing.

Joanne Freeman:
Tintori Spent more than a decade piecing together the whole story, she eventually published a book about her great aunt’s murder. She learned that the one they got rid of was her grandmother’s sister, a girl named Frances. She’d come with her siblings and parents to Detroit from Sicily in 1914, but Frances disappeared from the census records in 1920. She would have been about 16 years old.

Karen Tintori:
She had been promised to a “mafioso” who was 20 years older than she was by her father. And because she broke that engagement and she eloped with the man she was in love with, her older brothers were very upset with her that she had blackened the family name, she had dishonored the family by disobeying the father and by ruining their chances to get a leg up in a better street gang. The brothers took matters into their own hands, they were so angry with her that they kidnapped her and they took her to Belle Isle, which is an Island in the Detroit river. And the story was that they cut off her hands and her feet, and weighted her down with cement and threw her in.

Joanne Freeman:
What led you to call this an honor killing?

Karen Tintori:
Everyone in the family when we talked and they said it was an honor killing because she dishonored the family, she blackened the family name. When I called my mother later that day and said, “Is what Gracie told me true?” She said, “Oh, she had hot pants and she was fooling around with boys in the alley.” And that did not make sense to me at all. And I thought, “You know what? She was 16 and no matter what she did, if she did anything, she didn’t deserve the fate she got.” But to that older generation of the family in Sicily and transplanting that culture to the United States, the honor of the family was tied up in the chastity of the women, the appropriate conduct of the women, the way they dressed, the way they behaved, obedience and just not doing anything out of line in public.

Joanne Freeman:
Because to do that would bring shame on the men.

Karen Tintori:
Oh, to do … Yes.

Joanne Freeman:
Yes.

Karen Tintori:
It was control, I guess is what you want to say is. That the men could not keep their women under control, that dishonored the men. That they weren’t … I guess that it boils down to virility and manliness. And if they couldn’t keep their women in control, then they weren’t really men.

Joanne Freeman:
Absolutely. So honor is always in some way about manhood.

Karen Tintori:
Yes. Whether it’s fighting a duel or killing your sister because she goofed up your chances to run in a better mob.

Joanne Freeman:
Wow. In reconstructing this, how much did you find out about Frances and who she was, and what her life was like?

Karen Tintori:
Well, when my mom was dying, one of the younger brothers, her uncle, came to visit. He was the one when he was a little boy, he hated his older brothers for murdering Frances and vowed that he was going to grow up and kill them. He said that she was sweet, that she would take any little money that she had and buy the little brothers ice cream, and that she was really the sweetest and the kindest of all the sisters.

Joanne Freeman:
And did you get any sense of what her life was like before she eloped?

Karen Tintori:
Well, here she is murdered in 1920 about, right when women in this country are getting the right to vote, when everything is opening up. I mean, the future that she would have had, had she been allowed to grow up. Women basically they cooked, they cleaned, they ironed. I understand that the brothers threw their shirts down. They’d wear their shirts, two, three shirts a day, and then she like my grandmother being the first two girls would do the cooking, the cleaning, the ironing with the starch. And it was pretty much a life of toil.

Joanne Freeman:
Now, how did your family respond as you began unraveling this?

Karen Tintori:
Well, it was quite interesting. My mother of course was outraged that I was going to follow up or ask any more questions. And part of my family was horrified by the news of this family secret that had been kept for 80 years, and my mom said, “We heard about it when we were little kids and our parents thought we were sleeping. I would hear my mother and her sisters talking about Frances and crying.”

Joanne Freeman:
So you’re putting together this amazing story, then what led you to go the next step and then to publish it in some way?

Karen Tintori:
Well, because of the stigma and the honor of my own family in telling this tale that they thought was so horrific, I thought, “You know what? We’re honoring the bad guys by protecting them from what they did, and dishonoring her.” The night they murdered her, they came back and destroyed everything of hers, her pictures, her clothing. And I just thought, “No, I have to give her back her name.” There’s a Jewish curse, “May your name and your memory be erased.” And that’s what I thought of when I saw that line of litigated in the passport and that they burned everything of hers that night, it was like they obliterated her as if she never existed.

Joanne Freeman:
So in telling this story about this honor killing, basically you were redeeming her honor in a way.

Karen Tintori:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Joanne Freeman:
So over the course of researching the book and writing about it, did you come to feel differently about your family’s honor?

Karen Tintori:
That’s an interesting question. I did. I had considered honor, but not exactly in the word “honor”. There’s a Italian word, “[foreign language 00:07:27].” The [foreign language 00:07:28] is the shame. So shame was more the word than honor. And the shame was on the brothers, the shame was not on Frances. I mean, it was okay for them that didn’t dishonor the family, that they murdered their own flesh and blood? It’s mind boggling.

Joanne Freeman:
Has your family sense of themselves changed now that the secret is out?

Karen Tintori:
I think there’s a sense of relief in a sense of closure. Some of the women cousins we’ve talked about going to Belle Isle and doing a Memorial service for her, but we have not yet been able to do that. When you go to Belle Isle, there’s a beautiful Scott fountain there and people would go, because it was like a wedding cake of a fountain and the bridal party would go down there. My parents went. My aunt, Grace went. We have wedding pictures of everybody gathered around the fountain. And you go to the Island and go, “Well, did they kill her on this side? Did they kill her on that side?” It’s like if we knew where she was, we could really honor her by doing something like that.

Joanne Freeman:
So your family comes from Sicily to Detroit. In all of your research … and you did so much, did you get a sense of what that world would have been like coming from Italy to America? How different it was or how similar it was?

Karen Tintori:
In Italy, in Sicily, they came from poverty and they lived in stone house, and scrambled for something to eat. And America was a promise of food on the table and a better life for the family. But it was also an insular community in the Detroit area. They brought the food, and the customs and, and the culture with them, they just lived in different kinds of homes.

Joanne Freeman:
So in a sense, I mean the family, it got transported to America and by being in a Sicilian Italian community, everyone else shared that same sense of honor and family honor. And so they all felt bound by the same rules and by the same customs, and I guess by the same demands it sounds like.

Karen Tintori:
Yes. And it’s not just limited to the Detroit area. When the book came out, the feedback that I’ve received from readers who grew up in a Sicilian American family has been astounding. Some people were upset because they said, “Oh, well that didn’t happen in my family, and it gives a bad name to Sicilians. You’re dishonoring Sicilians by publishing the story because it’s reflecting badly upon us.” But one woman wrote to me and she said … 70 years old. She said, “All my life, I thought it was my fault and now I understand where all of this honor and female second place business came from.”

Joanne Freeman:
It’s such an amazing thing because this kind of honor culture generally, it’s obviously deeply powerful to the people who are in it, right? It means a lot to the family, it means a lot to the community. It’s this enormous network, and then it’s a thing that no one talks about.

Karen Tintori:
That’s the [foreign language 00:10:30], that’s the keep quiet, keep your mouth shut, keep your head down and obey.

Joanne Freeman:
But it shows you how absolutely powerful it is, right? If no one even needs to talk about it, it’s just something that everyone knows is the way things should be.

Karen Tintori:
Exactly. It ripples out like a pebble in a pond and it does, it affects everybody.

JF: Karen Tintori is a journalist and author of Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian American Family.

The Age of Antiquarians

Historian Seth Cotlar tells Joanne about 19th century Antiquarians, collectors nostalgic for the “olden times” (i.e. the 18th century.)

Music:

So Far So Close by Jahzzar

collection; historic preservation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JF: Karen’s story spoke to the power of recovering the past. And this next story shows how that process of recovery is something Americans have been doing — or attempting to do — since at least the early 1800s.

Back then, the United States was still young. The nation was charging into the future, and cities were modernizing at a rapid pace. Most Americans were focused on the nation’s future. But not all.

JF: In this next segment, you’ll hear me chat with Seth Cotlar about early American “antiquarians,” people who made it their business to collect and preserve the past.

JF: Less dire, but no less moving (given the intellectual climate of April of 2020) was my interview with historian Seth Cotlar about early American “antiquarians” — people who made it their business to collect and preserve the past. The interview was fun — which is obvious when you listen to it. But what moved me was the ardent, sometimes unstructured and unplanned, often random, but heartfelt efforts of people in the early nineteenth century to record and collect memories and memorabilia of the American past. Of course, this was a white male past without question. But in the end, Seth and I were telling a story about people trying to recover the past in some way — and it drove home the undeniable realization that the past can never be recovered.

JF: So, here’s our conversation from the show “Saving American History.”

SETH COTLAR: My name is Seth Cotlar, and I teach history at Willamette University.
JOANNE: Cotlar says if a 19th-century American visited a Revolutionary War battlefield, they would probably just encounter apathetic farmers.

SETH COTLAR: People would come by, curious about these places, and would ask people about them. They’d say, oh yeah, I guess something happened here. I don’t know. Maybe it was over there.
[LAUGHTER]
Ask Bob. I think his farm is where they were fighting, or something.

JOANNE: Even some of our most revered historical sites were in danger of being flattened.

SETH COTLAR: Independence Hall– I think at one point they were considering just tearing it down because it was in the way of new, modern construction.

JOANNE: Why? I mean, it’s hard to imagine these places being really taken for granted in that way. So what do you attribute that to?

SETH COTLAR: I don’t know. Do you have theories about this? I mean–

JOANNE: Well, it’s a really interesting question. Maybe it really is that it isn’t the founding yet, to them. It’s just that stuff that just happened.

SETH COTLAR: Right. And the nation itself doesn’t feel monumental and grandiose yet? Perhaps that’s it? That it’s like a junior varsity country?

JOANNE: But that started to change by the 1820s. That’s when Americans realized that objects, and people, from the 18th century were starting to disappear.

SETH COTLAR: And then when Adams and Jefferson die on the same day of July 4th 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence, it leads again to this sense of the passing of this generation, who bequeathed to us this nation in which we now live.

JOANNE: Americans started snapping up biographies of George Washington and other political figures as part of this new appreciation for the past. These biographies were mostly written by elite men of property who knew the founding fathers. But less famous people began collecting stories from the past, too. They called themselves antiquarians

SETH COTLAR: Was it the age of antiquarians?
[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: Yes. This is, indeed, the age of antiquarians. Now, Cotlar told me about one of the first antiquarians, a Philadelphia bank clerk named John Fanning Watson.

SETH COTLAR: In his 30s or 40s, probably, in the late 1810s or early 1820s, he just became obsessed with what he called ancient Philadelphia and the olden times and started collecting information in his spare time. And apparently he also did some of this on his work time, as well, which made the manager at his bank not very happy with him. One of his–

JOANNE: Well, and like what? What was he doing during work?

SETH COTLAR: He was probably looking over old books and taking notes on them, or– gosh, I don’t know. He certainly wasn’t browsing the internet.

JOANNE: Much of the best information on ancient Philadelphia– which, by the way, was pretty much the 18th century– was preserved in family letters stashed away in trunks. So, in the hope of saving some of that stuff, John Fanning Watson started walking around the city, knocking on the doors of prominent Philadelphians.

SETH COTLAR: And he would just go knock on the door and say, hey, did you know that your house was 100 years old? And, by his account, If we can trust him, people would be really excited about this and would want to know more and would start asking him questions. So I think he felt himself like he was sort of the Pied Piper of the olden days. He would try to go around and get other people excited.
He also liked to go around interviewing people, old people. He basically deputized a bunch of other people, who– hey, if you run into someone in their 80s or 90s– the list that I found had, like, 30 questions on it. It involved things like, tell me about Blackbeard and what you know about Blackbeard. Tell me about natural hair and the first time you ever saw natural hair, which I assume means men without wigs, not wearing wigs.

JOANNE: Wow

SETH COTLAR: He asked about carriages, to tell them about carriages. He asked them whether or not young people stayed out as late back in the days as they do now, whether people had porches on their houses or not. It was very much the stuff of what we, today, would call cultural history or social history. He wanted to know about the texture of daily life in the city of Philadelphia in the late 18th century 30 or 40 years in the past, with this sense that it was just really different. What it looked and smelled and felt like just was really different than what it is now.

JOANNE: But so he’s giving these lists, seemingly, to his friends to ask old people. So it’s not even just– a historian might say, oh, I want to understand what this period was like. But this is bigger than that, right? He’s collecting on a much wider scale, right?

SETH COTLAR: Right. Yeah. And there really is a sense that he wants to preserve this. He strikes up these conversations with people on a canal boat, and it turns out that this person just happens to have fought in the Battle of Saratoga. And, oh, look, they happen to have a bullet with them in their pocket!
[LAUGHTER]

SETH COTLAR: [INAUDIBLE] And they just give him this stuff. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to believe, like, really? But there’s a way in which, when he when he starts asking these questions about the olden times of people who he meets, that frequently he meets with the response of, wait a minute! You’re actually interested in this? Well, let me tell you– And then people just kind of unburden themselves and start talking about this. It was almost like– not a taboo– but it was almost something that people were slightly ashamed, or felt was devalued, talking about this past of 40 or 50 or 60 years ago.

JOANNE: So we know that Watson certainly wasn’t the only person running around and collecting pieces of wood from old houses and pieces of clothing, and asking people about hair. But why don’t you tell us about some of the other people that were doing the same thing?

SETH COTLAR: Yeah, so there was a whole network of these local historians that began to emerge in the 1820s and ’30s. And they became aware of each other as a kind of loose community of antiquaries. Probably the most important antiquary– and that’s what they called themselves, they were antiquaries– of the 1820s and ’30s was a man named Christopher Columbus Baldwin, who was the first professional librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, which today, the historians in the audience will know, is probably the most important archive for studying the history of 18th- and 19th-century America. Christopher Columbus Baldwin took it upon himself to try to collect every single thing printed in North America before the time he was living.

JOANNE: Wow.

SETH COTLAR: In other words, he would hear about some old tavern in Boston that apparently had a full year of the Boston Gazette from the 1760s. And he would go to Boston and go to that tavern keeper and give him money to get that one year of the Boston Gazette that they didn’t have in their collection. He has this great account in his diary where he spends a week in Boston in August, sweating bullets in an attic going through all of these papers, part of which included part of Cotton Mather’s diary, which he saved from oblivion, because it was about to be just thrown out and burned because the person who had lived in the house had died. And he took all that stuff. And he rented several carts with– I think it was something like 2,000 to 3,000 pounds worth of materials–

JOANNE: Wow.

SETH COTLAR: –and trucked it all back to Worcester, Massachusetts to be housed in the American Antiquarian Society.
So I think they almost felt themselves to be a bit like the collectors of things that other people would do important work with. And Watson himself says that’s exactly what he intends. He’s just collecting as much stuff as he can, in really no particular order, and other people will then make of it what they will.
And that’s kind of interesting. His capacious understanding of what counts as history is something that makes him feel really modern to us– that he cares about what people’s hair looked like! I don’t think he knew why anybody would care, and I don’t think he even knew why he was interested in it. He just knew he was curious about it. And, thankfully, he was, because now, if we want to write about the history of hairstyles or the history of fashion– for example, one of the things he did in his manuscript version of the Annals is that he clipped sections of the dresses that women wore to the Meschianza in the 1780s in Philadelphia–

JOANNE: –which was this grand ball. It was a big dance, the Meschianza.

SETH COTLAR: Right, this big dance held by British officers stationed in Philadelphia, which is an event that a lot of historians have subsequently written about as this window into the culture of Philadelphia in the 1780s. And a lot of the raw materials that we use to do that were collected by people like John Fanning Watson.

JOANNE: So I have a question for you, Seth. So how do these people feel about the past? Are they collecting all these things because they’re longing for that time, and they want to go back to that time?

SETH COTLAR: I think that there’s an element of that. There’s a degree of melancholy about this, a sense of loss, that can’t be made better. But I think they understood that that past was not coming back. They understood that the railroad was here and was here to stay. What they’re registering is, when change happens, it produces both new things that are liberating and wonderful in some ways, yet, in the process of producing that new, it also destroys things from the past that we also maybe really like and really want.
And so it’s a way of kind of naming the harm that comes with change. The ideology of modernization tells you, you’re not allowed to feel that way. We’re not allowed to be sad and mournful for the days of walking between towns, or whatever it might be. That’s just silly, devalued nostalgia. But yet there’s also pleasure. This nostalgia always has– it’s always a mixture of pleasure and pain.

JOANNE: And all the more pleasurable, as you say, because they know they can’t have it again.
SETH COTLAR: Yeah, there’s a kind of bittersweetness to it, and a kind of acknowledgement of the pain of change, but without this kind of humorless desire to just stop it in its tracks and keep everything the same.

Seth Cotlar is a historian at Willamette University. He’s working on a cultural history of nostalgia in early America.

Towards An Inclusive Congress

Joanne talks to Senator Tammy Duckworth about her life of service and what it takes to change the culture of Congress.

Music:

Beautocracy by Podington Bear

Tammy Duckworth; U.S. Congress; diversity; inclusion/exclusion

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JF: We’re going to wind up this show in the present day, with my conversation with Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth.

JF: One of the most surprising and memorable segments that I did was an interview with Senator Tammy Duckworth. I was excited and honored to be interviewing her — in the U.S. Capitol itself — but in the course of our interview, I was moved by our discussion as well. A woman in a supposedly “male” field like myself, it was remarkable to hear her acknowledge the power of imposter syndrome, the frustration of having men repeat what she said in meetings without acknowledging her, and the joy of having enough women present to continue a conversation in a restroom during breaks. There was a kind of bonding there that I hadn’t expected. The fact that I shared so much with this incredibly accomplished woman was reassuring and frustrating at the same time. I think the power of that realization comes through in the interview.

JF: So here is this conversation, from the show “The Year of the Woman: A History of Women in Congress.”

[Music]

Joanne Freeman: Congress wasn’t built for someone like Tammy Duckworth. As a woman of color, a new mother, and a disabled veteran, Tammy Duckworth has had to make Congress work for her. I spoke to Senator Duckworth and started by asking her what it felt like to first enter the male-dominated space of Congress in 2013.

Tammy Duckworth: Well, it was really interesting in that we had Leader Pelosi, and so we were led by a woman, a very strong woman who had been Speaker. It was, I think, very fortunate to have that role model that you could look to someone who was very active in teaching new members, especially the women members, to speak up. One of the things she always said was when you sat around in a circle … Especially as a freshman, you’re afraid to say something because the imposter syndrome is very real. When I would go into the chambers, even though I’d served in combat, I’d often been the only woman in an all-male unit, I had this real strong sense of imposter syndrome like, “What am I doing here? There’s so and so. There’s Sam Farr,” who’s been a congressman for literally in the decades, and all of these people that I’d seen on TV.

Tammy Duckworth: It was very intimidating, but Leader Pelosi was one who she didn’t let your turn pass by without saying something, and then if you said something and then the next person … The conversation moved on, and two other people, and then somebody else, a man picked up what you had to say, she’d be sure to say, “Wait a minute, Tammy said that,” and direct it back.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Tammy Duckworth: She really left it on you to push yourself-

Joanne Freeman: But, she was back up, basically.

Tammy Duckworth: … but she was back up, which it was a good example to have.

Joanne Freeman: Wow, that’s powerful actually, and I would wish for that in a lot of moments in my life too.

Tammy Duckworth: Yeah.

Joanne Freeman: Now, I wonder then, thinking more recently, I know that you somewhat recently had a daughter.

Tammy Duckworth: Yes, my second one.

Joanne Freeman: How did you think about that knowing the rules that were in place at the time? What went through your mind as to how you might have to adjust, maybe changing things or hoping to change things to allow for you to bring your daughter on the floor? How did that progress?

Tammy Duckworth: I had my first daughter at 2014, so the second year of my first term in the House of Representatives. It was actually while I was on maternity leave with her that I decided to run for United States Senate.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Tammy Duckworth: I will say that with my second daughter, I was definitely much more of a rule-breaker. I should say, maybe I was more of a rule-follower my first term because there’s imposter syndrome, I’m new, and all of that. I actually had my first daughter at home and was out from Washington for three months, and took my maternity leave then, but I missed all those votes. Now, here we are in 2018, and I’m about to give birth to my daughter. I’m now in the Senate, and the difference in votes was two, so every vote counted. We couldn’t afford to have me out for three months.

Tammy Duckworth: If you go on maternity leave, the Senate rules say you are now allowed to vote, and you’re not allowed to introduce legislation. Whereas in the House, I was able to, but in the Senate, I couldn’t. I couldn’t officially take maternity leave, and I, in fact, had to decide to give birth in Washington, D.C. so I could be nearby for votes.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Tammy Duckworth: Knowing that, empowered me to say, “Well, dammit, then if these are the rules, then I’m bringing my baby when I come to vote.” In fact, when she was just 10-days-old, they needed my vote.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. So, you came with her …

Tammy Duckworth: So, I came with her, yeah.

Joanne Freeman: How did that feel?

Tammy Duckworth: It felt fabulous. Fantastic. It also felt long overdue. It was funny because I received support leading up to it that the fight to be able to bring her onto the floor from … There was definitely a lot of strange bedfellows. Certainly, the Democratic women were very supportive, but then I had some of the Republican men came forward. It was almost generational. Some of the younger members … Remember Marco Rubio, whom I don’t think I ever voted the same with him on 10% of our votes, came up to me on the floor and said, “Tammy, I hear you want to change the rules and bring your daughter onto the floor,” and I was steeling myself for what he was going to say. He goes, “I will support you. I’m backing you up, whatever you need. I wish I could have brought my children,” because his kids were young too. I was blown away.

Tammy Duckworth: Roy Blunt of Missouri, whom I campaigned against, came up to me and said, “Tammy, as soon as I’m the chairman of the Rules Committee, I will change the rule for you because I remember when I could bring my children on the floor when I was in the House and how great that was. I want that for here.”

Joanne Freeman: That’s so important to say, that as much as we’re sitting here talking about gender issues, that there’s a generational component in this too for sure.

Tammy Duckworth: Right, and yet, some of the members who were a little bit older had questions like, “Well, is she going to breastfeed on the floor?” Like that was some horrible thing, or that would be such a scandal. They asked what the dress code was going to be for the baby.

Joanne Freeman: No!

Tammy Duckworth: Yeah, yeah. Because there’s a Senate dress code. You have to wear blazers, and you have to wear closed-toe shoes and no hats. I said, “Well, she’s a baby so probably a beanie, and I’m not taking that off of her.”

Joanne Freeman: Oh, my gosh!

Tammy Duckworth: She’s probably be in a onesie. I guess I could put a blazer on her if I need to, and she’s too young for shoes, so socks.

Joanne Freeman: Wow!

Tammy Duckworth: Literally, it was the most inane questions. Why are you asking this?

Joanne Freeman: Rules.

Tammy Duckworth: Rules.

Joanne Freeman: Some people are just thinking rules. Right.

Tammy Duckworth: I did put a blazer on her that day.

Joanne Freeman: Oh, my God! I’m going to go online and find that just to see if there’s an image of that because that’s wonderful.

Joanne Freeman: I also want to say, as a woman who works in a largely male field, seeing you sitting here and talk about imposter syndrome, as you have a couple of times, on the one hand, is infuriating, and, on the other hand, is really empowering to hear you say that since I feel the same thing. I also don’t necessarily bring it up because I think, I don’t know, I guess I feel I want to have people not assume that I’m worried about that sort of stuff. But, you’re right. Actually, related to that, when you were saying that Speaker Pelosi was backup, are there ways in which you think as a woman legislator that your strategy is different in how you address or interact in Congress?

Tammy Duckworth: It’s a cliché, but I think it’s definitely consensus building, and really working a lot of those relationships. We are very fortunate in the Senate that we do have the women’s senators group, so we do support each other as much as possible, and try to back each other up across the aisle. You’ve seen there have been some images of Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins who voted on some choice issues or some things like that, where it was Democratic women senators who stood next to them to provide them with support as they were making some really tough votes that they were really being harassed for by their male colleagues. Yeah.

Joanne Freeman: Does that feel different in the Senate then it did in the House on that account?

Tammy Duckworth: It does because there were many, many more women in the House. Again, we have a female leader. In the Senate, Chuck is great, but we just don’t have that type of leadership over in terms of … We have Patty Murray. She’s the first. She’s the first woman leader over here on the Senate side, so we certainly could use more representation.

Joanne Freeman: Now, looking in from the outside and seeing the large number of women that came in in this last election … I was on the outside cheering and thinking, “Yay!” But, what I’m really curious about is, did that offer a different sense of a we to you being on the inside? Did that awareness, above and beyond the fact that we need more representation from women, did that change the ethos for you in any way?

Tammy Duckworth: I just felt like we had more center of mass. I don’t get to go over to the House side very much, as we’re just over in the Senate side. So, the total number of female senators didn’t change. I will tell you that on the House side, I was over there, I don’t know, before the State of the Union or something, and there was a waiting line for the female stalls in the female bathroom. It was the first time that had happened. There’s so many of us now, we actually have to wait again.

Joanne Freeman: Oh, my gosh!

Tammy Duckworth: I was like, “Well, then you need to change it. Get some more stall over here.” But, it was nice. We’re all standing around talking to each other, and that was really nice. There’s a lot of shop talk going on as you’re just chatting with each other-

Joanne Freeman: That’s hilarious.

Tammy Duckworth: Yeah, it was a good feeling.

Joanne Freeman: I wonder also, given what we’ve been talking about here, in looking at the historic number of women right now who are running for president, what are your thoughts at this moment?

Tammy Duckworth: I’m so proud, and I’m so proud that there’s no questions of whether or not they’re qualified as there was with Geraldine Ferraro or for the women before her. I think Hillary Clinton and all the women who ran prior who showed that women are just equally qualified … What I really like is the fact that no one has questioned these women’s ability to do this job. Maybe it’s a reflection on who’s in the White House right now, but I don’t think people look at any one of the women that are running and think, “Oh, she’s not capable.”

Tammy Duckworth: It’s definitely more how to rack and stack the various people who are running in terms of almost more experience. Some of these women are seen as having more experience as many of the men who are running who are very young.

Joanne Freeman: I guess I’ll ask one last question, and it’s kind of a goofy question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. If you were bestowed with magical political powers and could do anything right now to make the space in Congress feel more inclusive, what might you do?

Tammy Duckworth: I would get more diversity in the staff at the highest levels because that’s not there. We’re trying very hard to do that. The staff are even, I think, in many ways less diverse than the membership, especially if you look at the House. It’s still a largely white, male workforce, and there are not very many female chiefs of staff. There’s not very many female legislative directors. These are people who are advising their representative or their senators on the bills to write, so if you have … Even though you could have a female senator, if her advisors are all white men, they’re not going to be as attuned to criminal justice reform issues, economic injustice issues, equal pay, and all of that.

Tammy Duckworth: I’ll give you an example of how it makes a big difference even though it’s not about the loss. My chief of staff, Kaitlin Fahey, has been with me from the time she walked on as an unpaid volunteer. My deputy chief of staff is a woman as well. They belong to the women’s chiefs group who get together in a bipartisan way and try to solve some of these issues, and agree to bring up some of these legislation, work together on the legislation, and nudge their bosses in the right direction. Also, Kaitlin is the one who’s been my right-hand person developing my own leave policies.

Tammy Duckworth: We have 12 weeks of paid family leave for birth of a child, adoption, fostering, also to take care of an ill family member. So, it’s open equally to men or women in my office, and this is something that Kaitlin helped me develop. Having a female chief was really important as part of that process. She and I were pregnant, and we gave birth within three months of each other.

Joanne Freeman: Oh, wow!

Tammy Duckworth: My deputy chief is pregnant now.

Joanne Freeman: On, my gosh!

Tammy Duckworth: That changes the ethos in the office because now the young men in my office sees it as perfectly okay for a woman to go have a baby, and take time off, and then come back to work. The senator did it, and the chief-

Joanne Freeman: It makes it pregnant [crosstalk 00:40:14] real-time.

Tammy Duckworth: And, it actually didn’t hurt anything. Everybody was just fine. Now, I’m waiting. I’m just praying that one of my male staff members actually has a child and takes the family leave and sets the example.

Joanne Freeman: Tammy Duckworth is the Junior Senator from Illinois.

JF: That’s going to do it for us today. Thanks for joining me in this look back to some of my favorite moments from BackStory.

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