Albright, unchained

Maybe, just maybe, women are going to be able to chip through that glass ceiling, take and wield front-line power, and still remain, in the end, feminine.
Madeleine Albright, the first woman US Secretary of State, was a tough bargainer during her years globetrotting for the Clinton administration, negotiating with hard-liners Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, and Kim Jong-il, among others. In recent years, Albright (above) has written a memoir and a pair of policy books. But now she’s back with something quite different. ‘‘Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box’’ is a delightfully offbeat coffee-table book, in which she revisits key moments in her life, reflected in photos of the jacket pins that she wore at the time and that she has continued to collect. The book mirrors her personal growth from insecure Wellesley College coed in the 1950s to American foreign policy leader in the late 1990s.
Here are two entries, one about college life, the second about the world stage, showing how her use of pins evolved. ‘‘Wellesley women were, on the whole, excellent students,’’ she writes, but ‘‘the majority of us hoped to be engaged before we graduated. According to the tradition, one became ‘pinned’ while a junior and engaged as a senior before receiving — on the afternoon of commencement day — a diploma at two o’clock and a wedding ring at four.’’ Albright was far too independent to get married that quickly. She waited three days. Twenty years and three daughters later, the marriage broke up. Albright returned to school, became an academic, and moved into politics, rising quickly.
When she was Secretary of State, a bellicose Iraqi official once criticized her as an ‘‘unparalleled serpent.’’ She responded by pulling from her jewelry box and wearing a pin that she hadn’t liked much until then. It showed a snake coiled around a branch, a small diamond dangling from its mouth. ‘‘As the cameras zoomed in on the brooch, I smiled and said that it was just my way of sending a message,’’ she writes, delivering a pointed reminder to Iraq of the no-nonsense US maxim ‘‘Don’t tread on me.’’ Albright will discuss her new book Thursday, Oct. 8, at 6 p.m. at the John F. Kennedy Library, just off Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester. To register, visit www.jfklibrary.org or call 617-514-1643 .