Helen Sommers: An Oral History

pg. 262 Women Advances in Government
just that women are different.”
– Women leaders will bring different experiences,
which are needed.
Any woman who has ever tried to take a bus
with two children and then stop at the grocery
store and the dry cleaner looks at transportation
needs quite differently than most men, says Karen
Campbell, executive director of the Women’s Funding
Alliance.
“Transportation is a woman’s issue,” she says,
but typically, no female voices are at the table where
decisions are made.
Hine, who has raised six children, notes how
her one son was able to get higher-paying summer
jobs than her daughters. “I’m sensitized to economic
policies,” says Hine. One of the first pieces of legislation
she worked on was the comparable-worth bill.
It’s time to value these experiences, say many
women.
“We have a whole Congress full of heroes, astronauts,
basketball stars, Rhodes scholars,” says
Danowitz. “This year we’re going to elect women
who have championed causes of education, women
who have been on welfare, adopted refugee children,
women like (Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate)
Lynn Yeakel, who have spent their lives raising
money for battered women and rape crisis centers.
“Who’s to say that raising five children and
holding down a job isn’t as courageous as being a
prisoner of war?”
That’s something state Senator Roach can relate
to, even though she does not believe women’s
priorities are fundamentally different than men’s.
The mother of five children, she went back to
work after her husband was laid off. Her youngest
was 6 weeks old.
Those experiences can’t be created “vicariously,”
says Roach, who’s running for Rod Chandler’s
vacated U.S. House seat.
“If it’s been a career woman, who’s never been
at home, never had children, never been involved
in the education world, the PTA,” says Roach, “if
it’s a person who’s never been out there with the
people, working with them, if they’ve never had
children and stayed home with them, they’re in the
same position as a man.”
– Women don’t know “where the card game is.”
And anyway, they’re not good players.
One autoworkers lobbyist, quoted in Atlantic
magazine this month, said it didn’t matter whether
a woman was Republican or Democrat or hard
or soft on the issues. What mattered, he said, was
that “there’s a card game in the back room and you
women don’t know where it is.” And the boys like
it that way, he added.
Unsoeld can’t argue with that. Looking back at
the child-care bill, she says: “When it came down to
the power decision-making role with some authority
to it, we were not permitted into the inner circle.”
Another major obstacle for women, says Unsoeld,
is having to prove you’re effective.
“For some darn reason, society seems to think
that men - I don’t know why, because they wear
the pants? - are effective, but women have to prove
it,” she says.
“Even after you’ve done a whale of a good job
in a term of office, you have to prove it all over
again . . . as though somehow your past work were
a fluke.”
While women probably have to work harder to
be recognized, there is nothing about women that
makes them less effective, says Jeannette Hayner,
the Walla Walla Republican who’s retiring this year
as state Senate majority leader.
“People often say women are more emotional,
too sensitive,” she says. “I don’t find that to be true
at all.” In fact, she adds, women may be stronger
“because they’ve been confronted with a greater
variety of things they have to deal with.”
Citing the Legislature’s battle over pension benefits,
state Rep. Helen Sommers of Seattle says:”It’s
the women who are far more able to stand up to
that pressure than the men.”
Rasmussen concurs, recalling a no-compromises
battle between Sommers and state Sen. Alan Bluechel
over the capital budget. “Hardball was being played
and it had nothing to do with gender,” she says.