Helen Sommers: An Oral History

pg. 260 Women Advances in Government
and jousting,” says Jane Danowitz, executive director
of the Women’s Campaign Fund, a bipartisan
national organization supporting abortion-rights
candidates.
U.S. Rep. Jolene Unsoeld, D-Olympia, who
was elected to the House in 1988, says the women
in Congress “tend to be more problem-solving,
goal-oriented than is the tendency with our male
counterparts.”
“I think it’s instinctive,” agrees Marilyn Rasmussen,
a Democratic state representative from
Eatonville, where she and her husband operate a
farm.
“It’s like cleaning the house,” says Rasmussen.
“When you start, you want to finish. When the
kids upchuck, it’s not a matter of delegating it to
somebody else, it’s just a matter of cleaning it.”
In Washington’s Legislature, women have chaired
more than a third of the House committees in the
past few years. Women, says Hine, “are far more apt
to bring in more people to try to bring a consensus
and less apt to come in with a preconceived notion
of what the answer is.”
Often, men get so locked into the win-lose framework
they can’t accept even a good compromise,
some women politicians say.
Unsoeld tells about a child-care bill that found
its way to the women’s issue caucus, an informal,
bipartisan group within the U.S. House.
After discussing differences, both Republican
and Democratic women felt they would be able to
resolve them in a consensus bill that would get broad
support. Other efforts had “bogged down between
territorial or turf wars” among three committee
chairs - who all happened to be men, says Unsoeld.
“So we volunteered our services to our respective
leadership. Who did not take us up on it. They
did the child-care legislation without us, and it was
a pretty poor job.”
In studying women and men in state legislatures,
the Center for the American Woman in Politics at
Rutgers University found that:
– Women were more likely to bring citizens
into the process.
– Women were more likely to opt for government
in public view.
– Women were more responsive to groups previously
denied full access.
“Women bring special attributes to leadership,”
says Dr. Beverly Forbes, lecturer and researcher in
leadership issues. Those include empowering others,
empathy, listening to others and cooperation.
Some women who’ve looked at politics from the
inside, however, say they don’t believe differences
are necessarily gender-related.
“I would not for a moment encourage people to
think that because a woman is in politics, a woman
will be consensual and self-effacing and a man is
going to be authoritarian and aggressive,” says
Mary Kay Becker, a Bellingham lawyer who spent
eight years as a Democratic state representative.
Women may tend to carry their “sense of compassion”
into office more than men do, says Veda
Jellen, former political director for the Washington
State Republican Party.
“But other than that, women are pretty nonmonolithic.
They vary as much as men do within
their own parties.”
And while women do have a “tendency to
work together,” says Jellen, now state director for
U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, “let’s not fool ourselves
and think that it didn’t happen before women
got into politics. Remember the phrase, `The Old
Boys’ Network’?”
– Women in public office have different priorities.
When she first went into politics in 1975, says
Becker, she was convinced gender made no difference.
“I was very theoretical,” she says, and sure that
legislators represented their constituents’ issues.
Period.
But over the years, she changed her mind. In real
life, she says, women have different experiences that
translate into having different priorities. And so,
while heavily into environmental and agricultural
issues, Becker also immersed herself in children’s
issues and mental health.
The Rutgers researchers found “a sizable gen