Fonda Among ABC, Home Journal's "Great Women" -- 04/30/1999

Fonda Among ABC, Home Journal's "Great Women"

30 April, 1999

By Justin Torres
CNS Senior Staff Writer

(CNS) – The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and the Ladies Home Journal have named Jane Fonda, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Anita Hill, Children's Defense Fund head Marian Wright Adelman, and U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright as some of the "100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century."

Fonda appears this month in the Journal and tonight on ABC's A Celebration: 100 Great Women of the Century at 9:30 p.m. EST.

An entry under Fonda's name at the ABC web site remarked, "In the last four decades, Jane Fonda has expressed a remarkable malleability as she shifted personas to fit the times."

It continues, "That 'bimbo' image changed radically, however, when Fonda came out against the Vietnam War. She became known as 'Hanoi Jane' after a trip to North Vietnam. In the 1970s, Fonda earned a reputation for being a talented actress who starred in politically conscious dramas. . . . In another dramatic transformation, Fonda remade herself as an exercise guru in the 1980s with her wildly popular aerobics videos. In the 1990s, she announced the end of her acting career and married media-mogul and billionaire Ted Turner."

Other women featured in the story and ABC broadcast include Catholic nun Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Holocaust victim Anne Frank, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, author Zora Neale Hurston, civil rights activist Rosa Parks, and social reformer Jane Addams.

In 1972, Fonda broadcast a message to American servicemen in Vietnam, saying, "One thing that I have learned beyond a shadow of a doubt since I've been in this country is that Nixon will never be able to break the spirit of these people; he'll never be able to turn Vietnam, north and south, into a neo-colony of the United States by bombing, by invading, by attacking in any way. . . . Every bomb that is dropped only strengthens [the Vietnamese] determination to resist. . . ."

"The people have taken power into their own hands, and they are controlling their own lives. . . . After 4,000 years of struggling against nature and foreign invaders–and the last 25 years, prior to the revolution, of struggling against French colonialism–I don't think that the people of Vietnam are about to compromise in any way, shape or form about the freedom and independence of their country, and I think Richard Nixon would do well to read . . . the poetry written by Ho Chi Minh."

Fonda's movie credits include Barbarella, The China Syndrome, and On Golden Pond.

Edelman is described as "A civil rights activist and children's rights advocate . . . a successful campaigner for the needs of the downtrodden."

Describing the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas imbroglio, ABC remarks, "Despite the outcome, the hearings brought public attention to sexual harassment, an issue that few Americans had understood."

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