The Pioneering Woman You've Never Heard Of

 

 

When you hear the name Clare Boothe Luce, I bet it does not register in your mind. You have never heard about Clare Boothe Luce in your history books, your government classes, or your women’s studies classes. Nevertheless, she is an important part of history, had a large role in our government, and was a very influential woman.

Fear not. If your teachers won’t teach you about Clare Boothe Luce, I will.

Clare Boothe Luce was born in 1903, sixteen years before women had the right to vote nationally in the United States. At the age of 30, she became the managing editor of Vanity Fair. This was a massive accomplishment, especially when you consider that Time Magazine, which started only ten years after Vanity Fair, did not have its first female Managing Editor until 2013.

Clare was also an accomplished playwright. Her most popular play, The Women, ran on Broadway for 657 performances and was made into a movie twice, once in 1939 and again in 2008. The 2008 version starred Meg Ryan (Top Gun, When Harry Met Sally), Jada Pinkett Smith (wife of Will), Eva Mendes (Ryan Gosling’s baby mama), and Debra Messing (Will & Grace).

Clare was also an accomplish war journalist for Life magazine, doing interviews with such people as General Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. Her interview with General Douglas MacArthur was on the cover of Life on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor.

Clare Booth Luce was elected to Congress from Connecticut’s fourth district in 1943. While in Congress, she became the first woman to sit on the Military Affairs Committee and was instrumental in the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In 1953, Clare Boothe Luce did something no woman had ever done before. She was appointed to be the US Ambassador to Italy, becoming the first woman to hold a major ambassadorial post. At the time, Italy was dealing with a land dispute with Yugoslavia and combating its communist constituency.

Italy was not receptive to Clare at first, but she soon proved them wrong. Within two years, the Trieste crisis with Yugoslavia was solved, and the port was returned to Italy. She also completed seventeen other diplomatic assignments during her time in Italy.

A story you’ll never hear is the story of how Clare Boothe Luce survived arsenic poisoning.

While serving in Italy, Clare became increasingly ill. Blood tests revealed that arsenic was to blame. Because Clare was so outspoken against communism, foul play was feared. A CIA investigation revealed the true cause of the poisoning. Clare’s bedroom ceiling was painted with ornate roses, and that paint contained arsenate of lead. The particles from the paint (triggered by the vibration of the washing machine above) were falling down onto Clare while she slept, relaxed, or worked in bed.

After serving as Ambassador to Italy, and briefly to Brazil, Clare served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Broad for Nixon and Reagan.

In 1983, President Reagan presented Clare with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, making her the first female member of Congress to receive the award.

Clare Boothe Luce blazed trails not only for women, but for Americans, and yet she is left out of history books as if she never mattered at all.

I challenge you to remember Clare Boothe Luce and investigate other important people in our nation’s history who have been seemingly forgotten.

If you are interested in learning more about Clare Boothe Luce, check out the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, named after this amazing woman, at cblpi.org

Several biographies have been written about Clare Boothe Luce, by authors such as Wilfred Sheed and Stephen Shadegg, and Daniel Alf.

 

Read this original post from The Odyssey Online

http://theodysseyonline.com/yale/who-is-clare-boothe-luce/136918

The 2016 Reading Challenge

Election day is just over 450 days away, and if you're like me, you still don't have your candidate picked quite yet. As a Conservative, I have an ocean full of fish to pick from. The Democratic candidate is not quite decided yet either, despite what the Clinton Camp would like you to believe.

 

I am an avid reader. I always have been, and I always will be. I love books, and I think they can reveal so much about the author, the muse, and the reader. Because of this, and because I'm at a loss for what else to read, I am going to spend the next 450 days reading books written by 2016 presidential candidates. I want to read for myself what these candidates think, and about their life experiences, and take each with a grain of salt. Then, I will decide which candidate I will support. Below is a little graphic for the challenge that I made. Feel free to print it out and play along. Many of the candidates have multiple books to choose from. Very few candidates are not published authors, including Graham, Christie, Gilmore and O'Malley.  That leaves me with 18 books to read by Election Day.

 

Wish me luck.

 



God and Woman at Yale: A Conservative Horror Story

Coming into my freshman year at Yale, I was already very strongly rooted in my conservative beliefs. Oddly enough, a lot of my high school friends swore I would come home at Christmas Break a liberal. Of course, I didn’t, but that was not for lack of the entire campus trying.  From the day I stepped onto campus, attempts at indoctrination into liberalism were everywhere.  I thought, for some reason, that doing a pre-orientation program called Cultural Connections would be a good idea. I’m from a small town in Kentucky, so I thought this program would be a great chance for me to explore different cultures. I imagined learning about different cultures through movies and speeches, but I was very wrong. 

Culture Connections was more of a Liberal Indoctrination Camp than anything else.  From the beginning of the first session, we were taught that being white and conservative was equivalent to being Satan, if not worse.  If you spoke out against Obama or their revered Al Sharpton, you were immediately accused of being a racist. Everything you did could be called cultural appropriation if it didn’t suit their delicate sensitivities.  As one of very few Caucasian students there, and probably the only conservative there, it was a nightmare. School hadn’t even officially started and I was sure that I had made the wrong choice with schools. Yale had always been my dream school, but I was beginning to think it was just a liberal nightmare.  

Then, classes actually started and the parade of leftist speakers began.  We had big names come through, but never any big conservative names, of course.  We had Jimmy Carter come, and Joe Biden was the class day speaker my freshman year. The biggest shock to me was probably when “Reverend” Al Sharpton came in September. I was still wide-eyed and bushy-tailed with eagerness to learn, but his speech provided a rude awakening for me.  A huge auditorium was filled, and I was abhorred that people were actually clapping at what he had to say. Myself and my fellow conservatives in the political union were hissing as loud as we could (a tradition in the Yale political union) but we were extremely outnumbered by the Sharpton supporters in the room. That was when I finally realized that I was at Yale for a reason, and that God had put me there to add from Lux et Veritas, light and truth, to a school that desperately needed it. 

When I found the Buckley Program, it was like seeing the conservative light at the end of a long, dark, liberal tunnel. The William F Buckley Jr Program at Yale allowed me to grow and explore my conservativism, but also gave me a chance to experience the liberal bias on campus firsthand. Through the Buckley Program, we brought several conservative speakers to our school, and experienced various levels of backlash from fellow student groups during the process.  We brought speakers like Jason Riley, who received harsh criticism from the Black Men’s Union for his book titled “Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed”. 

Buckley also brought Christina Hoff Sommers to talk about freedom feminism. As you can imagine, any mention of the word feminism can incite a riot by itself.  Ms. Sommer’s speech was ridiculed and chastised by the campus women’s center, who later held an open discussion to talk about how offensive her speech had been. Being the strong Conservative I am, I decided to crash their little discussion, which was open to the public. At the event, which I attended directly after having dinner with Ms. Sommers, I found that the majority of these people who were so offended by Ms. Sommer’s speech had not even been present at the speaking event, but were eager to criticize Ms. Sommers at every turn.

This incident only inspired me to become more involved in conservatism at school.  The Buckley Program brought more and more conservative speakers to school in hopes of expanding intellectual diversity on campus.  They brought speakers such as Jim DeMint and Andrew McCarthy, but the biggest event, the event that garnered national attention, was the protests that the Ayaan Hirsi Ali event drew in the Fall of my Freshman year.  I had never seen student groups come out in such forces. There were petitions from the Muslim Students Association and the Women’s Center saying that if the Buckley Program did not disinvite Ms. Ali they would stage protests until the event was shut down. As you can imagine, these protests only led to inspiration.  The day of the event went off without a hitch. There were no active protests on site, and nearly every seat was filled. 

The event was a huge success for the Buckley program, and the insistence by other groups that Buckley should disinvite Ms. Ali only inspired the Buckley Program to host a Disinvitation Dinner in New York City this past April.  The keynote speaker was George Will, and the event garnered national attention. The event was written about in Breitbart and the Wall Street Journal multiple times. The success of that dinner, which served as a fundraiser so we could continue to bring great conservative speakers to our very liberal school, showed me that there are still good, conservative people out there, even if they are few and far between on my campus.

Since coming to Yale, and likely much to the surprise of my friends back home, I have actually grown more strongly conservative. Being forced to constantly defend myself and my beliefs has made me love myself and those beliefs even more than I did before.  Aside from my activism at Yale with the Buckley Program and my internship this summer,  I also write for a conservative website called Future First Lady.

 I love Future First Lady because it gives me a chance to reach thousands of young conservatives around the country and show them that the best parts of being a conservative, especially a conservative woman. My work with Future First Lady also allows me to grow as a writer and thinker, as I am constantly coming up with new, innovative ways to spread the conservative message in a fun and light-hearted manner to make it digestible and enjoyable.

My internship this summer has truly been a godsend. I have been able to work on developing resources for young Conservative women as well as sharpening my own skills to combat the illogic attempts at indoctrination by the left.  I have also gotten the opportunity to meet and work with amazing women in the Conservative movement, including Marji Ross, Cleta Mitchell, Katie Pavlich, Bay Buchanan, and Senator Joni Ernst. I am so grateful for this internship and know it will be a life-saver when I go back to fight the left on campus.

Looking back at my first year of school, I honestly believe that going to one of the most liberal schools in the country was the best thing for my conservatism. I cannot imagine the path that my life would have taken if I had not been given the opportunity to strongly defend my beliefs like I’ve had to this past year. Yale had always been my dream school, and I like to think that God knew all along that was the right place for me to be, not just academically, but also as a conservative.