I think they feel a responsibility to tell their stories and claim their successes. When Philadelphia County Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Engel Temin was a criminal attorney new to the bar in the mid 1960s, she found a Pennsylvania sentencing law that required convicted women be sentenced to the maximum allowed by law, while men could be sentenced to anything up to the maximum. Well, nobody bothered with it before I came along because no one was interested. Women see things that relate to women that men don't see. She successfully challenged the law's constitutionality.
Women always have to be aware of how they're perceived.
If you're too passive, you're considered docile and ineffectual. Former Pittsburgh Mayor Sophie Masloff knows firsthand it isn't easy being a woman in politics. She tells Wymard in the book she wasn't welcome at the Duquesne Club when she first started going there, but she showed up anyway. The public and media ridiculed her when she had city architects draw up plans for a new Pittsburgh Pirates stadium in the early 1990s. Today, two new stadiums are on tap.