Know Your Power – Book Review

knowyourpower

I picked up a copy of Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters by Nancy Pelosi on a flight from Salt Lake City to Dallas.

This book gives insight into how a housewife with five children became the first female Speaker of the House in America.

It’s a fast easy read too. I always loved a good autobiography as a tween and teen. This book would be appropriate for a 5th grade reader and up. I tried to get Ainsley to give it a go, but Junie B. beckoned her instead.

What I liked best about Nancy’s retelling of her rise to power is that it wasn’t necessarily a rise to power. It was more like a gradual, softly stepping up where she was needed after her first priorities had been met.

She doesn’t talk about anxiously awaiting the time when her children were out of the house so she could finally make an impact on the world. Rather she acknowledges that making babies and growing children was the most fun, and most important thing, she felt she could be doing when she was a housewife.

She was an active Catholic and an active Democrat, participating in her local Democratic Party, which is where her rise to the most powerful woman on Capitol Hill began.

At the mundane Democratic meetings accepting positions like Library Board Member and behind the scenes Democratic Chair, first local and then national, positions.

Only when her oldest child was a senior in high school and told her mother to “get a life,” did she first run for a Senate seat. Twenty years later, with a hundred baby steps in between, she finally achieved Speaker of the House status.

I just like that story. I don’t know about you, but I often have to remind myself that I will have a long life after my children are grown up. There is no rush. Baby steps is how everything great is done. Enjoy this phase of my motherhood, because it is short and fleeting.

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