Inside the New Mexico Senate: Boots, Suits and Citizens is a legislative history with a human face. Here maverick leaders, shameless special interests, and earnest advocates clash in the unique arena that is the New Mexico Roundhouse. The New Mexico Senate comes alive, with stories of grit and grace, honor and disgrace. DeDe Feldman was elected in 1996 to New Mexico’s state senate representing Albuquerque, where she served for four terms. In this account she reveals how the work of governing is actually accomplished. For students of government, advocates and lovers of politics this book is invaluable.
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Fair Game How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government by Valerie Plame Wilson has been made into a motion picture. Valerie Plame Wilson’s career in the CIA included work in counterproliferation operations to ensure that enemies of the U.S. could not threaten America with weapons of mass destruction. She now lives in Santa Fe, NM. Fair Game is her historic account of the personal and international consequences of speaking truth to power and her betrayal as an undercover CIA agent.
The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age by Myra MacPherson tells the story of Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin. For a few years in the 1870s, sisters Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin were the most notorious women in New York, treating the social strictures of their age as no more substantial than the spirits with which they claimed to communicate. Myra MacPherson’s captivating dual biography opens on Wall Street in 1870, as Tennie, “a bodacious beauty in her early twenties,” and her charismatic elder sister descend from their open carriage amid a throng of reporters and rubberneckers. Dressed in matching dark-blue outfits, with “shockingly short” skirts grazing their boots, they declared their new brokerage firm open for business. The sisters had the backing of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, which lent their business legitimacy — even if the stories they told about their rich father and their business training were lies, and even if the rumors of Tennie’s affair with the recently widowed Commodore were true. Before the decade was half-over, the sisters had started their own radical newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, with the profits from their brokerage; Victoria had addressed Congress and run for president (with Frederick Douglass); and Tennie had been named colonel of New York’s 85th, the state’s only African American regiment. The sisters tangled with suffragists, spiritualists, socialists and conservatives, including Karl Marx, antivice crusader Anthony Comstock and the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (their newspaper published a report that triggered the famous
preacher’s adultery trial, a landmark of Victorian hypocrisy). They had the backing of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but they clashed with stricter suffragists, who wanted a single-minded focus on the vote and judged Woodhull a trashy distraction. Yet it was Woodhull who stood up in front of the House Judiciary Committee to argue that the 15th Amendment and other sections of the Constitution guaranteed rights to “citizens” — forcing Rep. John Bingham of Ohio to sputter out, “Madam, you are no citizen — you are a woman!” The sisters’ doctrine of “free love” earned similar horrified denials in a world that accorded women no bodily autonomy.