When my kids were in school, they and their friends thought my journalism job at a daily newspaper was the coolest ever (I had to agree). I would regularly invite their classes to the newspaper for a tour, pizza and a conversation about news. But besides the pizza, the highlight of the visits may have been the stack of photographs I gave them from the Associated Press wire, discards that the newspaper didn’t need. I would cull the photos and set the best ones aside for weeks before the visits.

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The boys would get pictures of sports heroes.

The girls? I would always give them pictures of female presidents and prime ministers. Alas, they were always from other countries – Panama, Ireland, Great Britain.

The girls would ask me why America had never elected a female president. My answer was always the same: You will see it within your lifetimes, and maybe mine. But because most other countries have a parliamentary system of government, I would explain, the equivalent of a prime minister would be our Speaker of the House of Representatives, the leader of the majority party in the most representative body of Congress.

Reuters/Downing

That hadn’t happened, either, but someday it might, I would say.

Then Nancy Pelosi came to power; she ultimately wielded the speaker’s gavel for eight years. She had the confidence, before she took her oath of office, to invite all children present to come join her at the podium. They came running, surrounding her in that ornate room, with its marbled pillars and aura of history, to share even more history with a woman leader not afraid of showing her love of kids.

Pelosi, who stepped down from party leadership in 2022 and announced this week she would not run for re-election next year, had standards and morals that she applied to government policy. Obamacare never would have been signed into law without her. Despite its flaws it has given millions of Americans the closest we have ever come to government health care for the masses. This became personal when my son went to graduate school; with his small income, he went on Obamacare and paid exactly $3.87 a month for insurance coverage.

When President Donald Trump came to office, he tried to bully and belittle Pelosi, showing for her the contempt and misogyny he shows most women. She wasn’t having it. She consistently refused to back down. When Trump stormed out of a meeting with Democrats during his first term, she said to reporters, “I am the mother of five, the grandmother of nine. I know a tantrum when I see one.” Pelosi led two impeachment attempts against Trump, which passed in the House but failed because of political cowardice in the Senate.

Pelosi on Trump: ‘The worst thing on the face of the Earth.’

No surprise, then, that there is no love lost between the two. Recently Pelosi described Trump during a CNN interview as, “The worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Trump, upon her announcement this week that she would retire next year, described her as, “an evil woman.”

Part of Pelosi’s public appeal goes well beyond policy making. Pelosi stood up to Trump in a way that he could do little about but fume. Yet he is enraging to me and millions of other women not merely because of his abundant character flaws, but also because we know his type. Most of us have worked with someone like Trump – someone who is ignorant, supremely confident withno apparent justification, sexist and yet too often has the upper hand.

I remember the compositor in charge of pasting up my editorial pages who would ignore corrections and deliberately send them to press with glaring errors; the abusive newsroom troll whose stated goal was to make female reporters cry. They were and are the weeds of the workplace. Pelosi has been not only the anti-Trump, but the anti-bully as well, a woman who knows how to smack down the office thug.

Pushback is sweet, even if it never comes often enough.

When I worked as an alcoholism counselor in Buffalo in the years before I became a journalist, a very high-level New York state official came one day to lecture employees of a local public detox center - people with the toughest and most thankless jobs, in the front lines of providing care to the poorest people. The official was arrogant and condescending. When he stopped talking, the room was silent.

Then one woman on staff raised her hand. Rose Creehan was a recovering alcoholic with decades of sobriety, a veteran of helping street people get sober. “Can I ask a question?” she said. The high-level bureaucrat nodded curtly. Rose had been smoking (we all did then). She stubbed out her cigarette, looked directly at the official, and without raising her voice, said. “What are you, some kind of an asshole?”

Rose instantly became my hero. Decades later, Pelosi did, too. Standing up to bullies is an act and an example that never dies.