‘Human Dignity’ : Bird Delivers Nonpolitical Talk in Irvine

Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird came to Irvine on Wednesday night with a nonpolitical, inspirational speech about the need to bring compassion into human affairs and to accept failure as well as success.

Before 170 members and guests of Women in Business of Orange County, Bird discussed the changing status of women, from the time when they were not allowed to practice law to the present, when women handle the same jobs and stresses as men.

Mentioning political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as film maker Ingmar Bergman, Bird urged her audience to “bring heart to the workplace so that the stress of competition can be replaced by true feelings of community.”

And she urged the businesswomen to make of their work “more than simply selling more widgets, making more money and accumulating more wealth. . . . Your work should be more than just a job. It should be a calling.”

Campaign Not Mentioned

If you don’t put “the values of love and community” in your work, “then your whole life seems hollow to you,” Bird added.

Nowhere in Bird’s 22-page, 40-minute speech did she mention her own political troubles. But the chief justice--the first female justice to serve on the California Supreme Court--is facing perhaps the stormiest confirmation vote in California history this November with several groups--a mix of crime victims, politicians and prosecutors--campaigning vigorously against her because of her alleged refusal to enforce the death penalty.

But if Bird did not discuss the effort to remove her, she spoke again and again about handling failure, about what to do when “you have taken a risk and lost.”

“You really can’t control very much of what happens to you in your life,” she said at one point. “This is not an easy life for any of us. . . . But in each life, there is not only joy but sorrow, not only success but failure, not only health but sickness, not only hope but despair.”

Urges Social Conscience

Still, Bird urged, “don’t let others be your measure. Remember the words of Shakespeare: ‘To thine own self be true.’ ”

Bird also asked the female entrepreneurs in the audience to develop a social conscience. Saying that the gap between rich and poor in this country is widening, Bird mentioned “bag ladies” and described a private library in New York that had placed barbed wire over its heating grates to keep the homeless from sleeping there.

Women could do something about this, Bird argued, because “women, I believe, have a special understanding of the unfairness of economic injustice.” They have experienced sex discrimination and “they can speak out from the barrios to the board rooms about the need for human dignity and mutual respect,” Bird said.

Although Bird’s tone was mostly serious, she opened with a joke.

“How do you like my hairdo?” she said with a wide grin. Bird who used to wear her blonde hair in a matronly, pulled-back style, now wears it in a looser, more glamorous, casual look.

Bird said the style she wears now is the same she had at the age of 4, “so I’m trying to convince the press that I’m really conservative.”