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Newly elected to represent Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, Chisholm was placed on the House Agriculture Committee's subcommittee on rural development and forestry. Colleagues warned her that freshmen who protested committee assignments were punished. She protested anyway, forcing the question before the Democratic caucus, and was reassigned to Veterans' Affairs, remarking that her district had more veterans than trees.
Chisholm rose through the Unity Democratic Club, an insurgent Brooklyn reform club that challenged the regular party organisation in her Assembly district. Its volunteers, many of them women, did the canvassing and turnout the machine normally supplied. Independence is only real when the resources that elect you come from people the institution does not control.
Chisholm argues that in her political career she met far more discrimination for being a woman than for being Black. Male politicians, including Black men, treated a woman seeking power as presumptuous in ways they would not openly treat race. Her point is that sexism was more socially acceptable to voice, and therefore more openly obstructive.
The seniority system tells newcomers that standing is earned by waiting quietly and accepting whatever they are given. Newcomers who accept this reproduce an order that was not built for them. Chisholm reads an unwanted assignment as a test of whether you will consent to your own marginalisation. Refusing it early costs less than the permanent discount that comes from accepting it.