Unfortunately, you can’t get the entire piece without a subscription, but the Weekly Standard has a fine remembrance of IWF founder R. Gaull Silberman, who was buried last week. Here it is:
“We were saddened to learn of the death last week of Ricky Silberman, after a long and valiant struggle with cancer. Rosalie Gaull Silberman, Smith ’58, was the wife of Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the mother of three, and a lively and charming presence in political Washington for four decades.
“But she was much more than a vivid personality and loyal friend. As a Reagan appointee to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the fearless director of its Office of Congressional Compliance, and a member of the Pentagon’s Advisory Commission on the Status of Women, Ricky Silberman probably exerted as much influence as anyone in the past quarter-century on the role of women in American society, in the workplace, and the law. As a founder and longtime chairman of the Independent Women’s Forum, she was determined to change the terms of debate about women from, as she put it, “the fallacies and hypocrisies of radical political interest group feminism”–and she succeeded, perhaps beyond her expectations.
“It was the Supreme Court nomination of her fellow EEOC commissioner Clarence Thomas that pushed her decisively into action. “We were concerned that those who would speak for American women were neither telling the truth about Clarence Thomas nor making sense with respect to issues of crucial importance to American women,” she said later. ’We listened to the spin of those days–the litany that women are victims and men just don’t get it–and decided that those woebegone women did not speak for us, nor did we think that they spoke for the vast majority of American women.’
“All of us owe a debt of gratitude to Ricky Silberman. And like her family, friends, colleagues, proteges, and the countless beneficiaries of her energy and wisdom, THE SCRAPBOOK will miss this beloved and remarkable woman.”