Strong women, in the city and on the plains

By Susan Ager
Free Press Columnist

Tuesday night:

I call Cecelia Fire Thunder, an Indian chief in South Dakota who, in defiance of a new state law banning abortion, vows to open a women's clinic on the sovereign land of her reservation.

Word of her ambition, and her compelling name, has filled her mail with donations of $5 and $10 and even $100, more than $8,000 in the past week.

Wednesday morning:

I watch Katie Couric say good-bye to "Today." Her eyes tear up, but she can't wipe them because she's prepped for publicity, in heavy mascara and eyeliner. She is heading to CBS as the first solo female evening anchor.

Reports are she'll earn about $14 million annually, plus or minus a million. That's $1,600 for every hour of her year, whether awake or asleep.

Votes and Oreos

Katie is 49, and a pal. We've never met but I've sipped coffee with her for 1,000 mornings or more.

Cecelia is 59. We connected for 40 minutes by phone. She is not a pal, but a sister.

I am proud to be American in a nation that can accommodate and respect both women. And I'd expand what ABC's Diane Sawyer said about Katie to apply to Cecelia, too: "I'm just so happy when women are in strong positions everywhere."

It hasn't always been so, which some young women do not realize. Three or four generations ago, women were trusted to run nothing more complex than a household, as challenging as that is. Many did not trust themselves beyond their homes, either.

Women were not deemed smart or important enough to vote until 1920, recent history. Older than women's suffrage are the automobile, the air conditioner, airplanes, motion pictures and even the Oreo cookie.

Women are now apparently smart enough to run tribes and evening news broadcasts.

A matter of choice

Far from Manhattan, in a corner of South Dakota, Cecelia Fire Thunder is the first woman elected president of the 40,000-member Oglala Sioux tribe.

Regardless of whether state voters overturn a legislative ban on abortions, she says she will open a clinic to teach young women, on and off the rez, about choices.

"We have failed to provide options to these women," she says, many impregnated too young by older men under the influence of drugs or alcohol. "We have been negligent in training them about contraception, because the best solution to abortion is to not get pregnant.

"I made my first choice for my body when I was 22 and decided I wanted no more children," she tells me. She had two sons and an unhappy marriage but was too busy and poor to end it.

"I used an IUD, a Lippes loop," says Fire Thunder, a former nurse, "and it worked. I've been making decisions for my body ever since."

Finally, I ask about her name, which one woman on the Web vowed to give to her firstborn daughter. She laughs with gusto and admits, "Fire Thunder was my ex-husband's name. I liked it, so I kept it."

Another smart, powerful choice.