Of Mouse and Women

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As Schiff explains the origins of "Lighting the Way," she sips water in the living room of the Upper East Side apartment she shares with her husband, Drew, a physician, and their two children, 6-year-old Wyatt and 4-year-old Anna. Built-in bookcases line one wall. There's a ladder in case anyone needs to reach the upper shelves.

In November 2000, she says, she was exhausted from campaigning and looking to focus on her family. Still, she headed down to Washington now and then to be with her parents -- "sitting on the train or the shuttle and trying not to listen to all the conversations around me, because they were so painful" -- as her father contested the Florida election result.

Just losing would have been bad enough. But losing the way Al Gore lost . . . well, it was "a very dark time."

It got worse with 9/11 (Schiff and her family were in Manhattan that day) and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. She was stunned by the way people who disagreed with the administration's decision to go to war or even questioned the way the war was to be conducted were "shut up and shouted down and pushed aside and more or less called traitors."

Cynicism seemed a logical option, but she didn't want to go there; she had seen too much of it among her generational peers. Instead, she sought refuge in the American past. She would tell the stories of women -- maybe not presidents or even politicians, but public servants just the same -- who had changed the world for the better despite the scorn the "mainstream" heaps on dissenters.

Take anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Born into slavery in 1862, she became the nation's leading agitator against the barbaric practice of stringing up black men for the merest hint of an offense -- never mind if it was false -- toward a white woman. Nothing seems easier today than to say that lynching is wrong, but that was a less-than-mainstream notion in the 1890s. Schiff cites editorials in this newspaper and the New York Times condemning Wells-Barnett for her "exaggerations," as The Post put it, and for her shameful failure to highlight black crimes against whites .

Take Alice Hamilton, a pioneer in occupational medicine. Hamilton "saw men and women poisoned and crippled by their work," as Schiff writes, and became "at the height of the Industrial Revolution, one of the only physicians who made workplace safety her mission." In 1919, she became the first woman appointed to the Harvard faculty, though Schiff notes that the university barred its new hire from ever taking part in commencement or -- God forbid -- receiving "the treasured faculty football tickets."

Or take labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, better known these days for lending her name to a left-wing magazine than for her efforts to confront the early 20th-century horrors of child labor. Mother Jones's personal story (she lost her husband and all four children to a yellow fever epidemic) fascinated Schiff, but she was equally concerned to sketch the forgotten context of Jones's activism.

"It was totally accepted by the leaders of the business and the political worlds that 8-, 10-, 11-year-olds were going into factories, working 12-hour days, getting maimed by machinery and poisoned by new chemical processes," she says. "There was no recourse and there was no accountability. They just blatantly defended that, saying, 'That's the free market.' "

Schiff writes about Septima Clark, whose "citizenship schools" were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement, and about Virginia Durr, who fought segregation from the other side of the color line. In addition to Durr's own accomplishments, she witnessed what Schiff calls "one of the most striking moments in United States history."

At a conference in Birmingham, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was evicted by police when she sat down in the section reserved for blacks. Refusing to abandon the principle of integration, Roosevelt found a folding chair and plunked herself in the middle of the aisle separating black and white. The New York Times, which covered the Birmingham event, failed to mention this.