FEMINISM’S REAL DEBATE
ANTHONY RUSSO
BY KATR IN BRIDGET SNOW
Judging from recent newspaper and magazine covers, it
seems the season's hot feminist debate is whether women are
overdoing their victim status and whether feminists hate sex.
Not to diminish the possible worth of those questions, but
there’s a hotter, if less orgasmic, debate taking place in
feminist circles nationwide about why there are so few women
of color involved in feminist coalitions. At issue is not the
success or failure of women's coalitions, but who are they
serving and who is left out? As the women's legislative
coalition in Oregon examines record success this year, its
leaders admit the coalition is vulnerable to the classic fault
lines of the women's movement: race and class.
With a few significant exceptions, the Year of the
Woman turned out well for feminists in the Oregon legislature.
The 1993 legislature enacted a record number of bills on the
women's agenda. Lawmakers approved insurance mandates for
mammograms and gynelogical exams and ordered state agencies
to equalize funding for girls and boys services. They
criminalized stalking and banned sexual harassment in the
capitol building. And, in a session driven to record length by the
state's budget crisis, legislators nevertheless funded the
Commissions for Women, Black Affairs and Hispanic Affairs.
All told, the coalition navigated 20 bills into law and blocked
10 it considered detrimental to women.
The bill requiring insurance companies to cover
mammograms exemplifies particularly well the strategies that
drove women's legislative success this session: argue on
economic grounds, never take no for an answer, and generate a
large public outcry. Originally, the bill was destined to die in
committee without a hearing. Believing that regulatory and
other required costs were already breaking small business, and
that most women could afford to pay for their own
mammograms. House Commerce Committee chair Eldon Johnson
(R-Mcdford), allowed the mammorgram bill to languish in
committee for months. In addition, the Republican leadership
in the House has long had a basic policy against insurance
mandates, according to Representative Mary Alice Ford (R-
Portland). "It didn't matter if it was a good mandate or a bad
mandate, the word mandate just set everybody's spine a'tingle
down there," Ford said.
But when the bill passed, it sailed through both
chambers with unanimous bipartisan support. Lauren Moughon,
lobbyist for the Women's Rights Coalition, credits the
persistence of breast cancer activists who flooded the offices of
Johnson and House Speaker Larry Campbell (R-Eugene) with
applying enough pressure to break the dam and get a courtesy
hearing scheduled.
"(The bill) was going to receive a hearing just so that
people could come up and give their testimony, and to sort of
shut these people up because they'd been tossed their bone,"
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Moughon said. Johnson at the time confirmed that he did not
intend to schedule a vote on the bill. In fact, he was absent for
the hearing. But Johnson said after reading the testimony, he
was moved to schedule a vote. At that point, say its proponents,
the bill began to move on its merits, but they believe it would
have died without the grassroots pressure that leveraged a
courtesy hearing.
Grassroots politics buys access for organizations
without the money to wine and dine. Women are said to be
naturals at building coalitions and finding consensus, but that
may be partly because they don’t have the money to play
insider politics.
"We can't play the games that the big boys play," said
Moughon, who watched wealthier lobbyists threaten to yank
their support when they didn't like how one of their bills was
turning out. "I don't have a huge bank account to give money
during the election years, and so it's a lot harder for me to walk
away from the table. There's this expectation because I'm a
woman lobbyist, and because I work for a non-profit, and
because we don't give much money, I and my issues can just be
walked all over."
A Democratic triad led the legislative coalition:
Salem Senator Tricia Smith, and Portland Representatives
Kate Brown and Gail Shibley. Conventional wisdom said that
to move the bills they would have to back down stiff opposition
from the Republican male leadership in the House. On occasion
that wasn't the case. But in most cases the bills battled their
way to the floor through the bitter partisanship that governed
politics in 1993. "When we needed in-your-face people, and
there were times when we did, we sent me,” said Senator
Smith, easily-the most controversial architect of feminist
hardball. "A peacemaker, or someone who is gentle and says
please and thank you wouldn't have gotten anything but
patronizing in leadership offices in the House. It took every bit
of in-your-face before we were even listened to."
Smith's bad cop approach had its counterpart in Rep.
Brown, who played good cop and believes the dynamic moved
the agenda forward. "If we don't have people like her out
there, then my position, or my compromise stuff, starts to look
radical," Brown said, "and 1 think without our radicals we
don't move anywhere. That's how we move forward — through
the radical feminist movement. If we don't have them, we're
not going anywhere."
But while some called Smith's confrontive style and
uncompromising stance effective, her critics called it
haranguing and made it an issue. House Speaker Campbell at
one point told a House colleague that simply putting Tricia
Smith's name on a bill would prevent its passage. But the issue
is not only the Senator’s style. Being an advocate of gender
equality means something different to any two women. But for
many, it threatens fundamental gender identities. During her
campaign for the statehouse, Rep. Fatty Milne (R-Woodbum)
said some women colleagues urged her to tout feminism, and she
refused. "I said, 'Why, docs that legitimize me?' I couldn't
understand that," she said. "I didn't see that I needed to prove
to other women that I was a woman."
Milne cites her votes on the mammogram bill, on a
similar bill requiring gynelogical exam coverage, and on the
girls' equity bill as support for the women's agenda. Milne
opposed the Commission for Women budget and legislation
guaranteeing safe access to abortion clinics. She insists she
pounded her fist in Republican caucus meetings to generate
caucus support and said women who consider themselves
feminists shouldn't be leery of women who don't catagorize
themselves that way.
Even as strong a supporter of feminism as Rep. Ford
admits her uneasiness. "I guess sometimes with the women’s
agenda I get a little leery myself," she said. "Because, I want
the women's agenda without question. But I also want an
agenda for men. I want everybody to have the same
opportunities. I don't want one side up over the other."
While its adherents may be skittish about feminism,
lobbyists have to appeal to a number of its outright detractors.
"Feminism is the 'F word of the 1990s," said Laurie Wimmer,
director of the Coalition for Women. "Most of us who have any
savvy at all describe ourselves as women's rights advocates.
I've often joked that the reason I take my children to
(legislative) hearings is to show that we don't eat our young,
and I'm only half kidding."
On the record of its achievements, the feminist
coalition won far more than it lost, at least of the issues it set
out to win. But critics and even members of the coalition say it is
vulnerable in its homogeneity.
Some Republican women fault the coalition for being
too narrow, lacking in men and Republicans. "We acted as
women alone, it seemed, without the partnership of male
colleagues," said Senator Jeanette Hamby (R-Hillsboro).
Hamby blames part of the isolation on partisanship — it was a
session lacking in trust and, at times, overflowing with vitriol.
But Republicans and men weren't the only ones absent
from the coalition. "We are being too narrow, we are being too
elitist," said Rep. Shibley, who is a lesbian. "We're too white,
we're too straight, we’re too middle class, we're too urban­
centric, we're too Democratic, we're too lots of things."
Reaching across those divisions means women are
taking a look at why they exist, an uncomfortable quest.
Moughon said one of the most difficult and painful things she
learned during the legislative session was about herself.
"There is an Old Girls network, and I’m part of it,” she said.
"I'm so used to complaining about Old Boys networks which I'm
not a part of, but I'm part of an Old Girls network that doesn't
reach out, often, to women of color and to women who are
economically disadvantaged.”
When the outreach does happen, say some, it may not
go far enough. Representative Avel Gordly is a Portland
Democrat and African-American. Gordly says she is frequently
asked to serve as the voice of diversity on task forces that have
only one diverse voice: hers. She refuses those kinds of
invitations. "It's a burdensome role to be seen as speaking for a
whole community, or the race, which is ridiculous," she said.
"Would I expect one of the white persons in a given group to
represent their whole race? It’s strange, it's crazy."
Some believe the biggest unexamined political rift on
women's issues is the state's urban/rural split. Rep Ford, for
example, says she knows women legislators from rural districts
who share her views, but won't vote them. "Their constituency
does not favor those votes, and they're representing their
districts," Ford said. "They really struggle within themselves,
but they don't do it. Men don't do it, either, but I think this has
been a real problem for some of the women."
Lobbyists and legislators who worked on the women's
agenda in 1993 realize that the people who attended meetings,
testified, and drafted policy were largely white and middle
class. One reason task forces don't become more multiracial,
according to many Black leaders, is that racism is often more
painful to women of color than sexism is, so the tasks that get
top priority may be different. But, ultimately, many say the
reason is that the priorities are different. In health care, for
example, abortion is the reigning woman's issue. But Rep.
Gordly says that in her district and for African-American
women, access to basic care is far more important. And for
farmworker women, pesticide regulation and documentation is
more important.
Bridging race, class and gender divisions requires
changing the methods by which women achieve their goals,
according to feminist leaders. Susan Jeffords directs the
women's studies program at the University of Washington in
Seattle. Jeffords points out that as women moved closer to the
center of American political life, the women's movement
pushed aside the concerns of women of color and working class
women. Now, she says, the movement must challenge itself to
put their concerns at the top of the agenda. Not simply to
establish diversity, she says, "but to fundamentally challenge
the whole principle on which that notion of power was
originally constructed and to change the idea of what power is,
finally. So that perhaps we might produce a notion of power
that would not depend on exclusion and oppression of someone
else, but would depend more on self-empowerment...that didn't
depend on someone else getting less in order for one person to get
more."
Broadening the movement for equality in Oregon, say
some women, will mean allowing groups with less power to
work from the beginning in drafting policy. In the same way
that women once challenged men in power, women of color are
challenging leaders of the mainstream women's movement. If
its leaders can't bridge their internal divisions, women's
coalitions will remain vulnerable to criticism and opposition
from some of the very groups feminists say they most want to
serve.
Katrin Bridget Snow is a freelance journalist and writer
living in Portland. She covered the 1993 Oregon Legislature for
Oregon Public Radio. She is a former program director of
KMUN-FM radio in Astoria and a semi-regular contributor to
the NCTE.
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