"One of the most enduring public images of Ms. Schroeder is of her crying when she announced in 1987 that she would not run for president."

"At an outdoor event in Denver, she choked up with emotion, pressed a tissue to her eyes, and at one point leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder. The episode outraged some feminists, who said her tears had reinforced stereotypes and set back the cause of women seeking office. It was an ironic charge against a woman who had done so much to promote that cause. Ms. Schroeder was the first woman elected to Congress from Colorado and the first to serve on the Armed Services Committee. She had to fight blatant discrimination from the start, facing questions about how, as the mother of two young children, she could function as both a mother and a lawmaker...."

From "Patricia Schroeder, Feminist Trailblazer in Congress, Dies at 82/Ms. Schroeder, who had a long career in the House, helped steer passage of legislation on family leave, pregnancy discrimination and other progressive causes" (NYT).

That indelible crying:

Many people believed — for a long time, people believed there could be no crying in politics. Before Patricia Schroeder's tears, in 1987, there was Ed Muskie, in 1972, who dropped out of the presidential race perhaps because of that stray tear, which flowed perhaps because of snowflakes. But Schroeder didn't drop out because she'd cried. She cried because she was dropping out.

Had I ever blogged about Patricia Schroeder? You'd think this topic of crying in politics would have come up some time in the last 19 years, but no.

And yet her name did come up once before on this blog, in a post from 2004 that began "An Italian gynecologist of Somalian descent, Omar Abdulcadir, proposes an alternative to female genital cutting/mutilation...'a piercing of the tip of the clitoris that would draw just a drop or two of blood and would be largely symbolic'":

The first problem is, as the Times article reveals, perhaps no one would move to the middle ground: 

Several opponents said immigrants who were deeply invested in tradition would probably deem the alternative insufficient, while immigrants who were liberated from that tradition would feel no need for a substitute. 

Sometimes there is no middle ground. The second problem is that becoming involved in developing a middle ground seems to legitimate the evil extreme, and it participates in evil. So we can't trust that everything else would remain equal. [Jacob] Levy has written a book on multiculturalism, which I haven't read, but I rankled at his blogged comment "A Seattle hospital considered doing precisely the same thing a number of years ago, until it was bullied out of it by activists and by Patricia Schroeder." 

There is at least a basis for principled disagreement here about whether compromise is acceptable....

Sometimes you need to cry and sometimes you need to do what somebody's going to call bullying.

Thanks for all your contributions, Patricia Schroeder.