Mother and daughter crusaders
This didn’t start out as a Mother’s Day column. But when you’re talking to a psychotherapist, it’s probably an inevitable turn in the conversation. The twist here is that it was her mom we talked about. I was interviewing psychotherapist Sandra Eagle to hear about her recent work with RESULTS, an agency that unites volunteers to try to stem poverty around the globe. Eagle and her fellow members of the Coastal Connecticut Chapter pay their own way to the annual international conference in Washington, D.C., where they lobby members of Congress.
This journey to D.C. was different. RESULTS funded Eagle’s trip so she could try to sway U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. It’s not as though any of Connecticut’s Congressional delegation need convincing about the goal of replenishing The Global Fund to fight HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. President Joe Biden has already pledged $6 billion, along with a $1 match for every $2 from other donor nations. All in the hope of hitting a minimum of $18 billion.
Murphy and DeLauro have key roles on the Senate and House Appropriations committees. Eagle is a domino, nudging them to get others in line so Biden can focus on his peers in other countries rather than on members of Congress. Eagle wasn’t asked to contact U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, but she says he promised to deliver a House floor speech in support of the Global Fund.
RESULTS gave similar assignments to some 30 advocates, a sort of Impossible Mission Force dedicated to ending poverty. Most had tasks like Eagle’s, to try to push legislators forward as the Global Fund was knocked backward by COVID, just like everything (and everyone) else. About seven advocates had tougher missions. They had to pitch lawmakers who need convincing.
“This is the time,” Eagle repeats.
The pitch is simple: The investment saves lives as well as money. It protects traveling Americans, including members of the military.
Eagle, who lives in Stamford, speaks rapidly because she knows I’m familiar with the impact of the fund in saving a reported 44 million lives over the past two decades. She has her own version of “yada, yada, yada,” when words don’t need to be said, abbreviating the abbreviation to “da, da, da.”
As we talk about the big picture, I’m distracted by a smaller one behind Eagle. The collage depicts a woman rising like a tree and branching out. It’s a fitting backdrop as I inquire about her own roots as an activist.
Eagle’s smile promises a good story to come.
“I was born on the set of ‘West Side Story,’ ” she begins. “My mom is Puerto Rican and they didn’t want her marrying the Italian. My father is Italian and they didn’t want him marrying a Puerto Rican. So my parents eloped.”
Her parents separated in 1957, when she was 4, over a showdown mirrored in countless American households of the era. Mom wanted to work. Dad said no.
So Iris Iaccarino took her two daughters to Puerto Rico. Six months later, Eagle’s father brought the girls back to Brooklyn, N.Y.
“It was the initial trauma in my life to be without my mother at 4 years old,” the psychotherapist shares.
It may have taken a few rounds, but Mom won the fight.
“And what did my mother go to work as ...?”
It’s a provocative pause. My faith in a worthy answer is rewarded. “A business rep for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.”
Iris only had a 10th-grade education and lacked confidence in her own written English. So she recruited 10-year-old Sandra to write reports about people in sweat shops who needed eye surgery, or moms desperate for time off to care for ailing children.
“My mother was fighting for these people’s rights,” Eagle recalls.
Back then, it wasn’t political. Her mom was freestyling.
“There was nothing in our household that said ‘This is the left, this is the right. This is Republican, this is Democrat.’ What she was trying to say is that this was the human thing to do.”
Decades on, Eagle recognizes that her mother was a radical, in the way Mister Rogers was a radical.
In 1975, she was presented with the Borinquen Woman of The Year Award in honor of her work on behalf of Latina women and their families. A 1977 New York Times article documented Iaccarino as one of the first women appointed to a leadership position with the union.
Iaccarino died in Stamford last September at age 93.
“You have to have a heart for the working people,” she is quoted as saying in the Times. “You must be a real dedicated person, not think about time or money.”
Within the four walls of her Greenwich office, Eagle discovered the rewards of experiencing miracles with patients. But a self-awareness that she was primarily helping educated and affluent clients left her with a sense of personal irrelevance, a feeling “that my whole world was burning.”
That eventually inspired her to help start the RESULTS chapter in 2010, which led to that call to persuade members of Congress to reassure the president of the United States so he could prioritize rallying support from other nations. All for the benefit of strangers.
Eagle grew up “in the Kennedy years when the future belonged to us.” Her own sons became disenchanted. “Mom, what’s the use? Nothing ever changes,” she was told.
The events of Jan. 20, 2021 delivered an unexpected epiphany.
“I turn on the TV and it’s a woman senator ... reaching over to the woman vice president of the United States, to introduce her to the woman Supreme Court Justice,” Eagle says. She can’t quell her emotions or language as she relives the moment. “F--- yes, things have changed.”
“It validated my life. It validated my mother’s life.” The tears cease. And Eagle laughs. She sounds like she’s just had a conversation with her 4-year-old self, the girl who was “without my mom for a while.” The girl who couldn’t know her mom was always with her. She always will be.