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About Karen Fraser:
Lacey, Member of Ellensburg IWY Conference Coordinating Committee, Chair of Elections Committee. At the time of the conferences, she was Mayor of Lacey and a pilot trainer for a career development program for women in state government. A Democrat, she served as Thurston County Commissioner from 1981-88, in the Washington State House of Representatives from 1989-92, and in the State Senate from 1993 to present. She is a sponsor and founding board member of the 2007 Women's History Consortium. Pro-ERA.
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| Andrews |
Karen, as a beginning, would you tell me briefly about your growing up years? Your family, your community, your school? How you developed your ideas about your role as a woman at home and in society?
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| Fraser |
I spent my school years growing up in northeast Seattle and lived in the same house from first grade through twelfth grade. Went to the public schools: Bryant Elementary School, Eckstein Junior High, and Roosevelt High School. Never planned to go to university anywhere else other than the University of Washington, because we lived in the area. I think my major growing up influences were family, neighborhood, school and church. Pretty normal, I guess.
The one thing that was different about my family is that my parents were divorced while I was in grade school, which was a very unusual thing in those days. I didn't meet anyone else from a divorced family until about my second year of living in dorms at the UW. So that had a major influence in stimulating my thoughts and curiosities about social interactions and societal patterns. Why did this happen to my family? It didn't happen to anybody else's family that I knew. In the summers, my brother and I would go down to California to stay with our dad. So, we kind of grew up with two lives as we went down there: had a life down there in the summer, and then came back for the school year, and had our life in Seattle. In retrospect, I realize that this resulted in my seeing each parent independently engaged in the full range of adult household management responsibilities (cooking, cleaning, finance, clothes washing, child raising and working full time. Thus during my major growing up years, I didn't observe major gender role differences in my parents in these regards.
In terms of discrimination against women, as a child, I don't think I was overly aware of it, especially regarding the workplace. However, I do recall puzzling about some social patterns of the times, but never enough to be assertive about them. Some examples:
I recall that in Language Arts (English) class in fourth grade, the teacher explained that the word "he" had two meanings; sometimes it stood for men and boys, but other times it referred to all people. In contrast, the word "she" referred only to women and girls. At the time, I wondered what this was all about. I guess I was so puzzled, I remember it to this day! Of course, later in life, I became aware of how confusing much language is regarding women. This is among the tricky things a woman regularly deals with in figuring out where she stands as a woman.
During junior high and high school, my brother had access to "boys" jobs" such as delivering papers and mowing lawns, which paid more than "girls' jobs" such as babysitting. Of course, I didn't envy how early in the morning he had to get up.
During junior high, girls were required to take home economics (sewing and cooking) while boys were required to take "shop" (making things of metal, wood, etc.) I sometimes thought it would be fun to take "shop" but it was not an elective for girls.
A particularly illuminating example is when, as a high school senior, I took the University of Washington's "Grade Prediction Test." The large majority of students at my high school took this, since ours was the high school closest to the University of Washington and many students would attend the UW. It was s standardized test that gave grade predictions in many subjects for each student. When I looked at my results, I noted that the box for "Engineering" was blank. Boxes for all other subjects had a predicted grade in them. I asked why there was no grade prediction for Engineering. They told me the reason was that there were hardly any women engineering majors so they were not able to make a prediction for females! I thought this was odd. What did gender have to do with ability to learn and apply engineering principles? In an earlier aptitude test they had given students, I was in the 90-plus percentile for ability to understand spatial relationships. And, I had excellent grades in math. I puzzled still more when I noted they had given me a very high grade prediction in Astronomy. How many female astronomers are there? I was told that boys received no grade prediction in nursing for similar reasons—no male nurses.
What other little anecdotes can I remember? I remember one time, I asked my mother why there weren't women radio news announcers. Of course, this was before much TV. She said, "Well, women don't have authoritative voices."
Another thing I recall is an experience my mother related when I was in junior high school after she had gone back to work after the divorce. I remember one time she told us she was denied a promotion, which I'm sure she fully deserved, because her boss felt that since she had children, she shouldn't travel. So her boss made that decision, without even giving her a chance to organize her life to accommodate whatever amount of travel was involved. So that decision by her boss probably contributed significantly to our ongoing financial struggle. [laughs] As I said earlier, while staying with each parent, each lived independently and had to do all household duties. So, I didn't grow up with strong assumptions that household chores were divided up by gender. My mother never remarried and my father did so only after many years.
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| Andrews |
What kind of work did your mother do?
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| Fraser |
She did, I guess you'd call it a combination of legal secretary and high level administrative assistant kind of work. This was with the federal Labor Department, too, who so discriminated against her. [laughs] But I don't think I was really aware of overt discrimination against women in education or the workplace until I actually went to work after I graduated from the University of Washington. However, thinking further, I must have been more aware than I now recall, because of an experience I had when I was a UW senior, and applied for a Ford Foundation Legislative Internship in Olympia. It was a fulltime paid internship. The cover of the brochure advertising the internship had a picture of only men sitting around a table. I remember asking if women could apply. So things were different in those days, including want ads for jobs. There were men's jobs and women's jobs in the classified ads when I was growing up. So I remember that, too.
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| Andrews |
So when was it that you went to Olympia?
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| Fraser |
January, 1967, immediately after graduation from the UW in December, 1966.
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| Andrews |
So that was just before the women's rights movement–
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| Fraser |
Before it really built.
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| Andrews |
It was getting off the ground.
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| Fraser |
Yes. At that time, the Washington Legislature and many other state legislatures had hardly any staffing. The Ford Foundation had a program to try to strengthen, you might say, democracy at the state level. They were promoting better staffing for state legislatures by selecting a number of states, and saying, "We will pay half the salary of recent college graduates to go and work for you." Their hope was that participating legislatures would see the value of improved staffing as a means of strengthening the legislative branch. I was selected for one of the several internships with the Washington State Legislature. The Legislature paid half the salary, and the Ford Foundation paid the other half. After the internship ended, I enrolled in the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, now renamed the Daniel J. Evans School. I learned about the program from a House of Representatives employee, Virginia Galle, who later became a Seattle City Council member. I ultimately received a Master of Public Administration degree. While a graduate student, I got a couple of other internships and jobs back in Olympia. Working my first jobs in Olympia in state government is where I really became particularly aware of discrimination in the workplace against women.
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| Andrews |
What was it like?
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| Fraser |
Well, for a while, I worked for the Highway Department. The first thing that puzzled me was that they kept referring to "man hours" for employees. I thought, well, wait a minute, women work here too. [laughs] I'd never heard of that term before. But a lot of people still use it. But it seemed to me you could call them "staff hours," or something similar. Reminds me of my fourth grade language arts class puzzlement. After the internship ended, they decided to create an ongoing position to do a lot of what I had done as an intern. At first, they didn't want to hire me because I was young and female. I was told they were concerned that I might get married and have a baby and leave the Department. The context of this concern is that in those days it was customary for most department employees to have 30+ year careers there. My immediate supervisor, Roger Polzin, went to bat for me and managed to overcome this stereotyped notion, and I was hired. I have a lot of little vignettes about attitudes toward women in the workplace, but I'm not sure that's what the whole interview is about.
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| Andrews |
That's okay. I just–
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| Fraser |
Yes. But I could give a number of anecdotes about what it was like to work in state administrative agencies back in the late ‘60s. And, well, actually I could talk about the Legislature, too, because I was the only female intern. I didn't realize what an example of the entire female gender I apparently was. I found this out while working for a major legislative interim committee. It was revealed to me by Professor Hugh Bone, Dean of the Political Science Department and the UW administrator of the intern program, when he was visiting Olympia to check on the interns. He closed the door to my office and said in a quiet tone, "You've won them over." I hadn't realized until then that my gender had been an issue in my placement with the committee. This startled me. They'd never had a woman in a position other than a secretary before. I didn't realize it was a big deal for them to have a young woman as a Research Assistant. I mean, it seems so ordinary now. This implied the interim committee management had resisted taking me on as an intern because I was female. But back then, it was truly unusual for a woman to have a role in a government office other than secretary.
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| Andrews |
So after you, did other women follow?
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| Fraser |
Well, society changed. Society was slowly changing. Actually, every woman who was in any nontraditional position in that time became kind of a role model for the entire gender. Most women in that situation felt under pressure to do well on behalf of opportunities for other women. For example, when I became Mayor of Lacey, which was some years later in 1976, the first woman Mayor of Lacey, a lot of people asked me: "What's it like to be a woman mayor?" I'd think to myself it was a ridiculous question. I think I figured out various responses such as, "I don't personally have any other experience to compare it to. I've never been a man mayor." I can give a lot of examples of things like that. Those are just a couple, a few. Most likely, it was experiences in the workplace that led me to become active in the women's movement in order to seek changes in the law. That was always my orientation, the content of the law. Maybe part of that goes back to my parents being divorced. In their frequent disputes, they were always referring to "The Decree," meaning the divorce decree. "What does The Decree say?" You know, all kinds of arguments would come up. [laughs] So I was always oriented toward the law. Perhaps that's why I became active in this aspect of the women's movement.
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| Andrews |
And when did you get active in the women's movement?
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| Fraser |
Well, it was after I moved to Olympia and got into the workplace. So that would have been about 1970, '71 or thereabouts, when the big ferment was building. I joined in with the growing efforts.
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| Andrews |
What were your major affiliations and networks in the late ‘60s and up to the mid ‘70s?
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| Fraser |
I was particularly involved the National Organization for Women in Washington State. Their orientation was changing the laws. That's why I was attracted to working with them, joining in, trying to get the laws changed. My first major campaign work was to get our State Constitution changed by adding a state Equal Rights Amendment. I was also active in the Washington State Women's Political Caucus. I was very involved in processes for interviewing and endorsing candidates at the local and state levels. Having worked for the Legislature, I had observed first hand that it really matters who's in office, what their views are, and how they're going to vote. So I was very involved in that aspect of Women's Political Caucus.
I was very active in the labor movement, too. When I worked for the Legislature as an intern, I could see that no policy change happens automatically. It takes specific advocacy to make things happen. So, when I became a state employee in an administrative agency, I thought I ought to join the Washington Federation of State Employees, and do my little part with my dues and my participation to help get improvements, such as salary increases, for state employees. So I joined the Federation of State Employees mostly out of a kind of social conscience and duty, I guess. I started going to their meetings. I enjoyed my associations there, and subsequently became very active in the Federation, including being elected a delegate to multiple State Labor Council conventions from Local 443 of the Federation of State Employees.
The women's movement interested me there, too. I joined with a number of women from a variety of unions who, together, got a Women's Committee formed within the State Labor Council organization. We had to get a resolution through the state labor convention in order to get a it formed. It was surprisingly controversial. But, everything about women was controversial. After a lot of work and strategizing, we were successful. A lot of the male "old guard" was nervous about it at the time, but the committee still exists. Issues affecting women in the workplace are still very serious and evolve as society changes. A lot of workplace situations for women are different than those for the average man. So I'm pleased that it is still going on.
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| Andrews |
That's quite a legacy to have started that.
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| Fraser |
Yes it's a good one. As a State employee, I was selected for a couple of challenging roles relating to improving women's employment status in state government. I was selected to be a trainer for a Career Development Training Program for women, sponsored by the State Personnel Department to encourage women to think in terms of "careers" rather than just "jobs." I was later selected to serve on the committee that evaluated the content and responsibilities of state government jobs for the landmark Comparable Worth Study. This study found that there was a significant salary disparity between comparable job classifications dominated by women compared to those dominated by men.
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| Andrews |
Now we're getting up to 1977, the time of the Ellensburg conference. How did you view women's role in the home and in society at that time? And did you see a need for change?
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| Fraser |
Well, I don't think my views then were very much different than they are now. I believe that women should have a full range of choices in their personal lives and in their professional lives. If they want to be a fulltime person at home, that's great. If they want to be a fulltime person in the workplace, that's fine, or anything in between. I think that applies to men, too. I think everybody ought to have equal rights and equal opportunities within their interests and abilities.
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| Andrews |
What did you see as some of the major challenges and concerns at the time of the conference?
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| Fraser |
Oh, boy! There were many! And the debates were intense!
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| Andrews |
Leading up to it.
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| Fraser |
Well, I'd been super active in the women's movement, probably in ways I haven't remembered just now. [laughs] I can't remember everything I did during all the years. So I was generally concerned about women having equal rights, equal opportunities, equal respect, in society. I'd been working hard at the community and state level with the National Organization for Women. I'd become their State Legislative Coordinator, coordinating the legislative lobbying activities of all the chapters around the state. There were twelve or fifteen chapters at that time.
In 1972, the state Equal Rights Amendment was on the ballot. I was super involved with that campaign at the Thurston County level. That was the first big campaign I was ever involved in, and I think we did a very good, thorough campaign in Thurston County. The vigorous campaign in Thurston County helped carry the day, because the state Equal Rights Amendment won by less than one half of one percent. It was very close. So a strong campaign in Thurston County did count. The close results stimulated a change in state law regarding recounts in elections. Before that, there was no requirement for an automatic recount if a ballot measure won by less than one half of one percent. So after the close ERA vote, the law was changed so that there is an automatic recount if results for a ballot measure are that close. This is a good thing.
After the state Equal Rights Amendment campaign in 1972, I was elected the statewide Legislative Coordinator for the Washington State National Organization for Women, coordinating all the chapters' legislative efforts. The 1973 session was a huge one for women's rights. We, meaning many, many people, successfully lobbied numerous bills to change state statutes to implement the new state Equal Rights Amendment. They were on a lot of subjects, including the right to credit, I remember. By far the largest effort, however, was lobbying in coalition with many, many organizations around the state for state legislative ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment. That, I think, was one of the largest lobbying campaigns in the history of the state. That alone deserves a write-up of how that all came about.
There was a state Women's Council at that time. It was appointed by Governor Dan Evans. If you're not interviewing Gisela Taber, you should. She was the Executive Director at the time. So she was a key person in information and advocacy for the bills implementing the state Equal Rights Amendment, and getting good information out on the federal Equal Rights Amendment. Susan Dunn was her Administrative Assistant. She lives in north Seattle, and would remember a lot. She would be another good person to interview.
So those were just huge, huge things during the 1973 legislative session.
It was in June of that year that I was appointed to a vacancy on the Lacey City Council. The women's movement was going full bore. And a lot of women, and men, were saying, "We need to get more women appointed to positions in government."
Around '71 or '72, I was appointed to the Lacey Planning Commission. There hadn't been any women on it before. The Thurston County League of Women Voters nominated me, somebody else nominated me, and I think the planning staff recommended me. To my amazement, Mayor Van Andel appointed me. Here I was: young, lived in an apartment, had an old car, wasn't married, and didn't have kids. I was very interested in serving, but didn't think I had a chance because I didn't think I fit the image. I was appointed to the Planning Commission, in my mid-20s. I loved being advisory to the City Council and became a very active member, soon being elected vice-chair.
In '73, two vacancies on the Lacey City Council occurred. I was appointed to fill a vacancy and became the first woman on the Lacey City Council. Then in January of '76, a majority of the City Council members decided they wanted to change who was mayor. The city, in a 1973 ballot measure, had gone through a governance change, going from a Mayor-Council form of government to a Council-Manager form of government. Under a Council-Manager form, the City Council members select one of the Council members to be Mayor.
One rainy December day, three members called me and said they would like to vote for me for Mayor and asked if I would willing. So, as a result of those dynamics, I became the first woman Mayor of Lacey. That was in January of '76.
In 1977, I was planning to get married in August.
I think it was in late '76 or early ‘77 that the International Women's Year Conference planning for Washington State started. I was invited to be a member of the Planning Committee, I think, because I'd been so involved in the women's movement. So I started driving up to Seattle to go to all the planning meetings. I think I have copies of a lot of the minutes in my files.
And then, of course, as the conference date approached, the Planning Committee had to allocate conference organizational responsibilities—"Who's going to do what". I was the only general purpose elected government official on the Planning Committee, I believe. So they said, "Well, Karen, why don't you be in charge of elections?" One of the reasons I said "yes" is because I was getting married in August. I figured that being in charge of elections would result in my being completely finished with conference responsibilities as soon as it was over. Then, I'd be completely free to concentrate on wedding preparations. With elections, I assumed there would be no follow-up, no follow-up reports, no follow-up meetings, no nothing. The nice thing about elections is that they usually happen on a specific date and then they're over. You are finished with your responsibilities. Right after it's done, you're done. [laughs] Famous last thoughts!
So I agreed to be in charge of the process of electing of delegates to the national IWY convention. I spent a lot of time getting it organized. And then, what happened just before the conference began was a particularly significant part of the conference. I hope you've talked with other people about it. The conference was scheduled to start on a Friday and end on Sunday, but there was no deadline for participant registration. As Elections Chair, I had paid fairly close attention to registration numbers because I needed to secure adequate election supplies– such as the ballots and sharpened Number 2 pencils, so voters could color in the little the circles on the ballot.
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| Andrews |
That's how we did it in those days.
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| Fraser |
Yes. That was modern technology back then. So, around Wednesday, we were expecting about 1300 people. That's what I was preparing for. And then, I think it was Wednesday or Thursday, someone called the chair of the conference and said, "Well, we have fifteen hundred more people coming. Just wanted to let you know." So for me, that meant I had to buy out every Number 2 yellow pencil in Ellensburg. They didn't sell-pre-sharpened pencils, so I bought two electric pencil sharpeners, and got volunteers to sharpen them. [imitates sound of electric sharpener] We had to put wet towels over the electric sharpeners, because the machines were getting so hot from sharpening so many. We had to quickly get ready for the sudden doubling of the number of people who were going to vote. So my whole experience at the Conference was solely election logistics. I don't think I had time to go to any of the meetings, because all of a sudden the number of the people who were going to be there doubled. My absolute focus was a fair election.
And then, another time-consuming, last minute thing happened. The College changed the location of the voting area from where I had planned it just a month earlier, with the College's approval.
In June, a month before the Conference my husband-to-be and I had driven to Ellensburg to check out the site and confirm the logistics. Voting was to be in the gymnasium. So I'd planned the whole set up on that basis. Well, I got over to Ellensburg for the Conference, and they'd suddenly changed the location. Suddenly we're not voting in the gymnasium any more. The College was worried about damage to the gymnasium floor. They abruptly changed it so that we would instead be voting in the narrow hallways around the gymnasium, a much smaller area, with a much poorer layout of space. So, on exceptionally short notice, we had to substantially reorganize the set-up. We did that. But a most unfortunate outcome of that change was that there was no place for people to wait in line inside. So people had to wait in line outside to vote. Unfortunately, there was a strong, cold wind that night. I'm sure you'll hear stories of people waiting in line until eleven at night, freezing cold.
And let's see. What else. Then, well, I'm kind of getting into your question on elections.
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| Andrews |
That's all right.
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| Fraser |
We had a lot of election volunteers.
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| Andrews |
You're anticipating my questions.
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| Fraser |
Again, I really wasn't involved in the Conference other than just getting the election process going. It was exceptionally busy and intense for me, a race against the clock with the last minute doubling of attendees and associated complexities such as changing the voting location. I actually lost five pounds that weekend because I was so busy, probably ate so little, and slept hardly at all because of this.
So then after the polls closed late at night, we took all the ballots in the metal ballot boxes to the computer center, where a College professor was in charge. Some people, of course, had filled their ballots out incorrectly. For example, they didn't fill in the little circle and instead they put an "X" or something. So we had to convert the "X"s to colored-in circles. We did all this with witnesses and careful procedures. Then, before we put them all in the machine to find out the results, I asked everybody sign a form stating they agreed that all the processing had been fair and accurate. Everybody involved was absolutely dedicated to that. Everyone who helped with the process signed. That included a fabulous woman from the Blue and White Caucus. I don't remember her name, but she was really wonderful.
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| Andrews |
Was it Beverly Hubbert?
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| Fraser |
I'd have to look through my lists. There was just an absolutely wonderful woman from their Caucus. So, everybody signed. It was in the middle of the night or getting close to dawn. Then the professor put all the ballots in the machine. We all waited anxiously for the printout of the results. Soon, out came the results. They were printed in descending order of number of votes received. By way of background, there had been two slates of candidates: 1) What might be called a pro-ERA slate, and 2) a Blue and White Caucus slate. To our amazement, well, not amazement, but to our great interest, the results showed these two sides were very, very close. We quickly noted that positions 1 through 23 went to Pro-ERA candidates. Position 24 went to a Blue and White candidate.
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| Andrews |
Let me interject this, could you explain Blue and White Caucus just so that the listener will know–
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| Fraser |
Yes. The Blue and White Caucus consisted of the large group of people who had registered at the last-minute, per the last minute phone call from the person who called the Chair of the Planning Committee to advise her that there were suddenly going to be fifteen hundred more people coming--or some number like that. I don't remember the exact number. But it was going to at least double the number of people there. Maybe we had twelve hundred registered, and then they were going to bring fifteen hundred additional. Anyway, their whole strategy was to shift what they had perceived to be a probable Pro-ERA philosophical direction of the Conference, to shift the direction by trying to overwhelm the Conference with new registrants of a different philosophical persuasion. I think that was the purpose.
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| Andrews |
And these were conservative women.
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| Fraser |
I don't like labels, but maybe you could characterize them as not supporting the ERA, just to give a general label. I don't know what these "conservative" and "liberal" labels mean. I mean, I'm a mixture myself. But they were people who didn't support the Equal Rights Amendment. You could at least say that.
Oh, one other thing is, with the elections, due to the huge influx of last minute registrants and the intense philosophical competition involved, there were other last minute elections procedures we had to figure out. A particularly important one was creating a "challenged ballots" process. The federal rules required that only people from the State of Washington could vote. For example, you couldn't have somebody from Idaho vote. We already had procedures in place to check ID. However, because this new group came with clear intentions to dominate the conference, and there were a lot of out-of-state license plates in the parking lot, particularly from Idaho and Utah, the question of, "Well, where do you live?" became a big deal. So each "side" set up an observer at each of the election check-in points to look at each voter's ID. The voting area check-in was controlled by the physical layout, with multiple check-in points where only one person at a time could go through, each with volunteer "clerks" checking ID. They'd check that the person was registered for the Conference, and check their Washngton State ID. A driver's license was acceptable ID.
At each check-in point, there was allowed one observer for each caucus. Thus, there were two observers at each check-in point, as I said. Each "side" had organized slates of candidates they were supporting. Each "side" had had big meetings to figure out which candidates from their side they were going to endorse. Neither side wanted to "dilute" their votes with too many candidates when it was that close. So you had a slate of candidates for the pro-ERA side, and you had a slate of candidates for the Blue and White Caucus (that were not ERA supporters). I know that at least on the pro-ERA side, there had been an exceptionally intense process to narrow down the interested candidates to a recommended slate of exactly twenty-four nominees. During the campaign, then, each side would hand out the piece of paper with a list of names on their slate to their supporters, admonishing them to, "Vote only for these people. Vote only for these people." There were a few additional candidates who were not part of either slate, who got very few votes.
So all that was going on. Of course, I didn't attend any of this, but I heard about it. At the polls, we had people voting "challenged ballots." They were challenged by observers for one side or the other, based on their questions about the validity of the voter's ID. So we established a "challenged ballot process." It worked pretty much the way it works now at regular elections polling places. If you want to vote, but there's a question about whether you're a registered voter or not, you can vote, but your ballot is put in an envelope, and not counted immediately with the rest. It's saved, and your identification is checked later to see if you are an eligible voter or not. If you are eligible, then later, your ballot is counted. So that's what we did for challenged ballot voting. In the end, there were about eighty challenged ballots.
In the middle of the night, when we got the preliminary election results, they were so close that the outcome of counting these challenged ballots could affect the philosophical makeup of a significant portion of the delegation that would represent Washington State. It was that close. So we had to announce these as "preliminary" election results, subject to making determinations on the challenged ballots. Again, the preliminary results, printed out in descending order of who got the most votes, showed that all but one of the candidates who won (who were among the top 24 positions) were on the pro-ERA side and one was from the Blue and White Caucus. Candidates with totals less than the total of Position 24 were very close behind. And the non-ERA side was just right in there with a very close number of votes following Position 24. It wouldn't take many votes to shift the philosophical balance of the delegation.
Therefore, the election was still hanging in the balance when the Conference adjourned on Sunday. I remember, I heard that anti-ERA forces were winning all the votes on policy resolutions in the big plenary sessions. I can imagine their puzzlement when the announcement was made in the plenary session on Sunday that the pro-ERA people had won all but one delegate spot to the national convention." They surely wondered, "How could this happen?"
Well, the explanation was this. As soon as the large Blue and White group announced prior to the start of the Conference they were coming, and by implication trying to dominate the Convention, many women from the pro-ERA side went to the payphones–(this is pre-cell phone). They were steadily on the payphones for hours calling back home and imploring their friends, "You've got to come and register and vote and return home. There are no available motel rooms for fifty miles around here, but we need you to come, fill up your car, bring your friends, come, register, vote, and leave. You'll have to go back home. Or go a hundred miles away to get a motel room or something."
So that's what happened. A lot of people came and kept registering for the conference up until voting started on Saturday night. They stayed long enough to vote, and then drove away. So they did not attend and vote at the plenary sessions. That is what happened. That's why the voting for delegates turned out differently than voting on resolutions in the plenary sessions.
So in the middle of the night, we counted all the ballots. The results were announced the next morning, Sunday. That was also the day the Conference was over. As I departed Ellensburg, I put all the ballot boxes, which were locked, and which were metal county ballot boxes as I remember, in my little old Volvo. The car was totally full. I then drove directly to downtown Seattle, where the leadership of the Conference, along with two attorneys, met me on a corner of downtown Seattle with a Brinks Armored Car Company truck. I believe the attorneys were Betty Fletcher and Elizabeth Ozenbaugh of the law firm Preston, Gates and Ellis, now renamed K & L Gates. Dorothy Hollingsworth, Planning Committee Chair, was also there. We immediately put all the locked ballot boxes into the Brinks truck. It was a secure truck of the type that's used to transport cash. From then on through the rest of the challenged ballot process, they were in the custody of an armored car company.
We had to have a big meeting to decide what to do about the challenged ballots. I think we had it at a hotel in downtown Seattle After much discussion, we decided the best way to verify identity and eligibility to vote would be to would send a letter by "certified mail, return receipt requested" to each challenged ballot voter. This meant it would be delivered to the address they had registered with; they would have to sign their name and then return it to us by a certain date. Upon their return, we could verify address and signature. I looked at these records recently. The law firm that handled the case for the committee, now K & L Gates , still has them in their archives. I went to the law firm to look at them recently and noticed the return address we used for the mailing was Lacey City Hall. It wasn't somebody's home. So this was all formal. The Conference gave me money to hire secretarial assistance to help with all this. I hired June Hansen of Olympia who did a fabulous job of keeping all the paperwork organized.
So then we had second meeting of the Elections Committee at the old Queen Anne High School [in Seattle] to make decisions on the returned signed receipts. I remember the armored car company wheeled all the ballot boxes into the meeting in front of the approximately 150 people present to watch. We had all the signed return receipt envelopes in front of us. We opened them there, after verifying addresses and signatures on the receipts. The Elections Committee was sitting up on the stage. The mood was very intense. Very, very intense. Remember, the members and philosophical orientation of the Washington State Delegation to Houston hung in the balance.
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| Andrews |
Were they from both slates?
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| Fraser |
Oh, yes. Both sides were there. I remember the ballot boxes were sitting there, and they had locks on them. I think armored car company locks or something, I don't recall. One woman loudly challenged the quality of the locks by stating emphatically, "I could open those locks with a hairpin! That's how poor those locks are." They were concerned about tampered ballots, which I would never, ever let happen.
In response to this challenge, I said, "Okay, we're going to stop the proceedings, and you have ten minutes to do it." So we stopped. But of course she couldn't do it. I mean, they were legitimate locks, and nobody could get into the ballot boxes. They were quality locks. So we went back to work. We checked the signatures of the returned receipts against the signature from the voting entrance area. I think we had a pretty good return rate. We determined which ones were valid to count. Virtually all of them were. Then we counted them in front of everybody, and it didn't change the election results.
Sometime thereafter, some attorneys for the Blue and White group filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court, alleging all kinds of things about the election process which were untrue. Among other things they alleged that people put ballots in a "cardboard box", which was absolutely untrue. But they got that rumor circulating.
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| Andrews |
Was that the group that was called the Concerned Women's Coalition?
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| Fraser |
Yes. I think they created a name for purposes of a lawsuit. At least I had not heard that name before. And so, all this took time and my wedding date was getting close. Instead of being done with the elections process as I had anticipated, I was now getting married in the middle of it! Before this lawsuit, I'd never even heard of a "deposition", I didn't know what it was, and pretty soon I'm doing one. [laughs] It was taken in the conference room of the attorney who brought the lawsuit for them. You should interview him, too. His name is Dick Durham. He's still an active Republican in the state. Interestingly, he worked for a law firm where my uncle was a senior partner. I have several human interest stories about the deposition that we might not have time for.
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| Andrews |
Preston, Gates and Ellis?
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| Fraser |
No, that was the one that advised the side I was on. He was with Davis Wright. It's now called Davis Wright. It used to be Davis, Wright, Todd, Riese and Jones. My middle name is Riese. John Riese is one of my mother's brothers and, hence, my uncle. My uncle John Riese died recently, about six months ago. Anyway, I have a number of quips about all of that. I have a great story out of it about my use of shorthand during the deposition. I also have some interesting family quips which you don't have time for today. But if you ever want, I can give them to you. They are kind of human interest matters.
Anyway, they filed this lawsuit. A couple of depositions later, I was the principal defendant because I'd been in charge of the elections. Finally, the day came for the U.S. District Court hearing. The papers in the boxes here [points to old boxes of papers she had brought from storage at home] are from this lawsuit. I had three attorneys. The litigating attorney was with the U.S. Justice Department, because this was a federal program. The International Women's Year Commission at the federal level had an attorney they sent out a program attorney. I also had an attorney that the State Planning Committee hired from Preston Gates. Her name was Elizabeth Osenbaugh. Her name is on the lawsuit papers.
So those were my three attorneys. But I learned that only one who could actually argue my case was the federal Justice Department attorney. She'd written a big thick brief which might be in those papers, or it might be what we'll get from the archives of the Federal District Court.
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| Andrews |
Those papers that Karen is referring to are being donated to the archives of the Washington State Historical Society for the Women's History Project.
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| Fraser |
Yes. These are papers I've saved in boxes over the years from this major event. So we appeared in the courtroom that day. My mother and two of my mother's sisters—Stella and Helen—came to give me emotional support, even though the law firm that Mr. Durham was with was my uncle's law firm, their brother. Presiding was Magistrate Weinberg, on behalf of U.S. District Court Judge McGovern. As the courtroom proceedings began, I became a little depressed because I wasn't allowed to speak. Only attorneys could speak. But what really shocked me was that when my attorney got up to speak, the Magistrate who was presiding in place of the Judge began berating her. He said he wasn't going to read her brief because she didn't get it in on time. He said that because she was with the U.S. Justice Department, she ought to know the Court's rules. He intended to punish her and make an example of her, I guess, because she hadn't turned in her brief on time. I was stunned. He wasn't going to read the well-prepared argument on my behalf. However, he stated he would read the deposition, but that was all, for our side of the case. So it was my deposition that became what he read about our side of the case and not the lengthy brief she had prepared. That was really depressing. On TV that night, I saw an artist's drawing of myself slumped on a courtroom bench.
Anyway, ultimately the Magistrate ruled in favor of my position. He didn't grant the motion that Mr. Durham had asked for, a Motion for Summary Judgment to basically cancel all the delegates from the State of Washington. Had Mr. Durham prevailed, Washington would not have been represented at the National Conference. But the Magistrate found, apparently, that that the sought after action wasn't warranted. As I looked through my old records in preparation for this interview, I couldn't believe how many records and how much effort I went to in handling the elections and the challenged ballots process. I think I was pretty thorough back then. [laughs]
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| Andrews |
That's a lot of documentation. (Referring to the boxes of records.)
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| Fraser |
I was looking back through my documents the other day. You can see how many there are. I visited the K & L Gates (Preston Gates) firm recently because of this interview coming up. They still have in their archives many documents from the challenged ballots process. These might include the ones that the armored car company had kept. Anyway, they still have documents there, after all these years. [laughs]
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| Andrews |
I'll have to see if we can get copies.
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| Fraser |
Yes, I think they'll let you go look at them. And if you need my help, that's fine, since I'm a defendant.
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| Andrews |
I might need your permission.
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| Fraser |
When I looked at them, I didn't have the case number. But now that I've found my boxes in the garage, I do have the case number. So that might help their librarians find whatever else they might have. If you like, I'll call them.
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| Andrews |
So when did this happen? How close was it to Houston?
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| Fraser |
Well, I recently saw some of the dates, just looking through the papers. I think the court decision was in October.
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| Andrews |
That was cutting it close.
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| Fraser |
And the Houston convention, I think, was in November.
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| Andrews |
Yes.
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| Fraser |
So that was a totally exhausting experience for me. Fortunately, I married an attorney, so he found it all very interesting. At the end of the whole process, the Planning Committee had some money left over, so they used it to send a couple of people as observers down to Houston. I was selected to be one of them. But I was still exhausted from it all. [laughs] But I did go there. I found in my boxes that I made a diary of the Houston conference and took a lot of notes that are in the file. Some of them might be in shorthand. If there's anything you need transcribed, I can do that.
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| Andrews |
Oh, wonderful. So at Houston, I assume that you got to go to some of the workshops and get involved in the issues. Or do you remember?
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| Fraser |
I probably went to workshops. I don't remember. I mainly remember watching the plenary proceedings. I remember that some of the delegates from the state of Washington were major national leaders at the national convention. Like Judith Lonnquist, for example, and Elaine LaTourelle, and some others. If Mr. Durham had been successful in canceling the delegates from the state of Washington, the national conference might have gone a little differently.
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| Andrews |
That's a chilling observation.
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| Fraser |
So, that kind of ties back to Washington being recognized as one of the "bellwether" states, kind of a cutting edge place regarding what's happening in the country. We were a "bellwether" back then, too. Many women who were active here were also active nationally.
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| Andrews |
How did the conference, both conferences, I guess, Ellensburg and Houston, influence your perceptions of women's role in home and in society? Or did they?
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| Fraser |
You know, I think I'm pretty stable in my views. But I think, politically, it was very interesting. I doubt it changed my views on anything, one way or another. But in terms of analyzing the politics of a situation, it was interesting. The, you might say, anti-ERA movement was very small in 1973. But later, it started to grow. So you saw some growth of it in '77.
On the other hand, acceptance of women being equal citizens in our society has grown to the point that it's just kind of viewed by most people as normal. That's why I think having some history recorded is important. A lot of young women don't realize how new this is, and maybe that it's still a little bit fragile. If you look at countries around the world where women live in horrible legal, political, social, economic, financial, family situations, you go, "Oh, my. How did this happen? Isn't anybody doing anything about it?" So you shouldn't take anything for granted. Nobody should.
I think there are a lot of values shared by women who are both for and against the Equal Rights Amendment. I think there's a huge middle ground in America. But, I think there are different ways of viewing how you get there. On the other hand, there are some issues on which there are still giant, giant differences. That would be a whole study in itself.
So, no, I don't think anything about the conferences changed my views. To me, the main lesson learned is that you've got to stay politically active. That's what the conferences reinforced. You have to stay politically active and politically tuned in. I don't think it changed my views on anything other than strengthening that pre-existing conviction.
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| Andrews |
In your opinion, what were some of the positive or negative outcomes of the conferences?
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| Fraser |
Well, I hope they had some positive impacts. I hope they at least achieved some positives in encouraging communications and sharing views. What really counts politically is having more people think similarly. Hopefully education and awareness occurred. Somebody other than me would have to study that. [laughs]
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| Andrews |
Let's see. In your opinion, -- it's very similar to the previous question-- but what was the significance of the IWY conferences?
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| Fraser |
In some respects it is hard to say! To a great extent they were a creature of the times—a reflection of their times. Probably their greatest significance was the intense competition between philosophies and how the balance came out at Houston. The conferences served as significant battlegrounds in the national war of philosophies and priorities about rights, roles and opportunities for women and girls. This is why everyone's efforts were so intense. Each "side" wanted their vision to prevail at the state and national levels. Each wanted their vision to shape the future nationally. What I call the "pro-ERA" side at that time had the momentum on ERA and other issues at the state level and wanted this momentum to grow and certainly not be slowed. The "Non-ERA" side wanted to slow, or if possible derail, the Pro-ERA side and shape national policy in a different direction. Resolutions were adopted. People came together. People lived out their commitments. Hopefully there was education, communication, and better understanding to lead us forward. However, it probably cannot be said that a specific law was changed as a direct result of a resolution adopted at one of the conventions. The impact was more diffused. The active debates and the intense energies expended became part of the whole political mix. They reflected the political mix of the times and hopefully helped propel positive policies and politics forward.
Most of the resolutions that were passed at the national convention were on what I would call the Pro-ERA side of the spectrum. Hopefully, those were used for positive political dialog.
I don't remember which resolutions were adopted at our state conference. I recall that I heard that the Blue and White Coalition won most of the debates on resolutions in the plenary sessions. But as I said, I wasn't there for that. I was busy with the elections. I don't think that the resolutions adopted at the state plenary sessions necessarily reflected the views of the majority of the women in the state, if you compare whatever those resolutions were with how politics has since evolved in the state of Washington. So it certainly showed good organizing on the part of the Blue and White group.
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| Andrews |
What kind of follow-up activities did you participate in, both in the short and long term?
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| Fraser |
Well, my commitment to civil rights is, I think, pretty steady. [laughs] This is a civil rights issue, in my view. So I continued on. We had a ten-year celebration reunion of the Ellensburg conference in '87 for conference leaders. There might have been a few others I couldn't go to. Yes, I think there were a couple others that a few people in Seattle organized called "We Were There." Overall, it was an intense, overwhelming experience for everybody involved. Those who were there wanted to continue to reminisce about their experiences. Regrettably, I wasn't able to go to those due to schedule conflicts. I wanted to go, however, because the people who were on the organizing committee were just fabulous leaders. Just fabulous leaders. People I greatly admire and appreciate.
Regrettably, after the Conference most of us didn't see each other that much. The people who were involved in all of this kind of merged back into, and carried on with, their various "regular lives." Thus, the organizers and activists then became a loose network of people who could communicate and interact when needed. For example, in the legislative process, if certain issues come up, there's still this sort of loose network that can spring to action if needed. So I guess maybe that's it. Plus, I think these experiences fortified individual commitments which carried on as people led their normal lives, participated in organizations, worked on issues, and engaged in their personal and political lives.
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| Andrews |
When was it that you were elected to the legislature?
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| Fraser |
I was elected to the State House of Representatives in November, 1988. I began serving in January, 1989. My quick political history is this: In June of 1973, I was appointed to a vacancy on the Lacey City Council. I was the first woman member. In the fall of that year, I was elected to a four-year term by the voters of Lacey. So I was the first elected woman on the City Council. I became a very active member, because I really enjoyed being involved in the democratic process.
Two years later, the City Council elected me to be Mayor. These are two-year terms. To become Mayor in Lacey, you have to first be elected by the citizens to a four-year City Council term, and then the City Council elects one of its members to serve as Mayor for a two-year term. The City Council elected me to a two-year mayoral term for the second half of my first four-year City Council term. Then in 1977, I ran for a second four-year City Council term. The City Council re-elected me Mayor two more times for two more two-year mayoral terms.
In January of 1980, the County Commissioner from my area of Thurston County, Del Pettit, told me he wasn't going to run for reelection. He encouraged me to run for his seat. County Commissioner is a fulltime elective job. City Council and Mayor are part time. I was working full-time for the state Employment Security Department at that time. A lot of people encouraged me to run, based on my track record as Mayor. So I finally decided to do it. A really tough part of making this decision was the federal requirement that I quit my job with the state to even announce for the position. This was because there was federal money in my salary, and The Hatch Act required this.
Fortunately, my husband didn't expect me to maximize my earning potential and was supportive of this decision to run and including quitting my job in order to do so. So, I was unemployed for seven months while I ran for Thurston County Commissioner. I was elected. I became the second woman to be a Thurston County Commissioner. Thurston County has the standard form of county government prescribed by the state constitution, unless changed to something else by county voters through a county charter process. There are three co-equal commissioners who jointly exercise general legislative powers, general executive powers, and quasi-judicial land use decision-making powers.
I was elected to two terms as Thurston County Commissioner, serving for a total of eight years. In the course of that, I became very active in the Washington State Association of Counties, and ultimately their first woman president. That experience had its own interesting anecdotes, too. It was fun. I had affection for every County Commissioner in the state. Knew them all well. I was planning to run for a third term as county commissioner when a series of political dominoes occurred. Then U.S. Senator Dan Evans decided not to run for re-election. As a result, then Third District Congressman Don Bonker decided to run for that U.S. Senate seat. The then 22nd District State Representative Jolene Unsoeld decided to run for Bonker's Congressional seat. So I ran for her House seat. I wanted to get back and pursue statewide issues a little more.
I ended up serving two terms in the House. By that time, there were lots of women in the House. It was no big deal to be a woman in the House. I expected I would remain in the House for who knows how long, with the crystal ball getting foggy after a few terms. But in 1991, redistricting occurred. Our state got a new Congressional seat, as a result of our state's rapid population growth compared to national population growth. The State Redistricting Commission placed that new Congressional District in mostly Pierce County and part of Thurston. I was astonished when the new District took up about one-third of the land area of Thurston County. Next, our then State Senator Mike Kreidler, who I thought was going to be Senator-for-life, ran for this new Congressional seat. My House seatmate, Jennifer Belcher, who was a major statewide women's advocacy leader, already had plans to run for State Commissioner of Public Lands. That left me as the only remaining 22nd District incumbent. So I announced for the State Senate seat the day after Mike announced for Congress, and am still there. [laughs] Okay. What else did you want to cover?
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| Andrews |
This is a bit of an aside, but I'd just like to have your comment. I broached environmental issues, and I know that's a big concern of yours and of some of the other people that I've interviewed. Do you see a tie-in between environmental issues and women's issues? It seems so many women have moved their activism in that direction.
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| Fraser |
Hmm.
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| Andrews |
I don't know if that's, if you want to just say it's an irrelevant question, you can.
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| Fraser |
Oh, no. It's not an irrelevant question. It would be interesting to do a study on this question. I'm sorry I'm so oriented toward studies.
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| Andrews |
I thought perhaps one might have been done.
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| Fraser |
It would be an interesting study for somebody to look at women who've been, say, active leaders in the women's movement, and to what extent they shifted over to being leaders in the environmental movement. I don't think they're necessarily connected. I'm one who's been hugely involved, a major leader in the Legislature, in environmental issues. A lot of people involved in the women's movement, I think, support improvements in environmental policy. Maybe the commonality is that they are the types of people who see how one thing affects another thing. Because, if you care about how one thing affects another thing, and how the connection will make people's lives better or worse, you have to care about the environment. Environmental pollution makes people sick, die young, have birth defects, be victims of injustice. People don't talk about this enough. Environmental injustice arises if a decision is made to pollute one neighborhood but not another, or to drown one area in noise, but not another, and so forth. Do you care about the identity and quality of an area, such as the Puget Sound basin? Should future generations enjoy the same quality of life that current generations do?
So, I would say that a person becomes involved in the women's movement because they have a social conscience--they care about people other than just themselves and their immediate families. So that perspective would be a commonality between concerns for the status of women and the state of the environment. There's probably a common underlying attitude. But if you were to do a study to acquire data on whether women who were leaders in the women's movement later tended to shift over to become leaders in environment, you would probably find that some did, and some didn't. But I don't know if it would be at a rate higher than that of the general population. I'd be interested in an empirical study.
There are lot of different areas of policy emphasis people engage in as they work to advance the status of women. There's health care, there's the justice system, there's education, there's business, there's employment, there's labor. A lot of women come to the women's movement because of the sector of life they're already most involved with. And maybe they're more likely to stay with that sector rather than switch to environmental issues.
For myself, I never started out seeking to work on environmental issues. It just kind of happened to me. [laughs] It began while I was involved in local government. I was a sociology major; I wasn't a biology major. And I had no significant background in environment prior to becoming a local government elected official. I got involved in local government because I cared about democracy and I cared about other issues I'd been involved with. I cared about women's role in democracy. That's how I got into politics and elective office.
But then, when you get involved in city and county government, well, you inevitably become deeply involved in land use. If you get involved in land use, you get involved in environmental issues. These include water quality issues and Puget Sound issues, if you live around here. Becoming a County Commissioner in a high growth area in the Puget Sound Basin required me to constantly be making very difficult land use decisions-- decisions affecting growth, decisions affecting the economy, decisions affecting the environment, and decisions where all of these elements are involved and compete with each other. Such decisions greatly involve property rights--one person's property right versus another person's property right. As a County Commissioner, you're always in the middle of these highly controversial decisions to the point that– by the time I was finished being county commissioner, I was exhausted from those issues.
After I was elected to the House, the leadership asked me, "Well, what committees do you want to be on?" I put down education, financial institutions, anything but environment. [laughs] I was really worn out from it. But then the leadership called and said, "Well, we need you to be on the environment committee, because you know something about it."
So I became a member of the House Environment Committee right away. In my second House term, I was asked to serve on the Natural Resources Committee. By then, I had "recovered" and became really interested in it.
Then, all of a sudden in 1993, I found myself in the Senate as a result of the unexpected circumstances I explained earlier. That year, the Democrats got the majority back with a big Democratic majority. By way of background, after each General Election the Majority party of each legislative chamber appoints a Committee on Committees to advise and recommend a new committee structure for their respective Chambers for the next two years. They recommend what committees there will be, who will be the chair of each, how many members on each one, when they meet, the meeting schedule, and all that.
So after the 1992 elections, one afternoon while the new Democratic Majority's Committee on Committees was meeting, they called me and asked if I would chair the Ecology and Parks Committee. Here I was, a brand new member of the Senate being asked to chair a committee. It's very rare for a brand new Senator to become committee chair. The reason they gave me was about the same thing that had been said to me in the House, "You know something about it." [laughs]
So I continued as either chair or Democratic lead for environmental issues, water issues, and later energy issues for about a dozen years. Now, during the last three years, I no longer chair that committee. However, I'm still on it and on the Senate Natural Resouces Committee. I love the issues. I care passionately about them because I know so much about them, and much of their histories. I don't chair the committee any longer, but I'm super active. I chair the Capital Budget now in my role as one of two Vice-Chairs of the Senate Ways and Means Committee. I'm pleased that this budget has a lot of areas in it relating to environment, natural resources, and outdoor recreation. So I'm still playing a leadership role in these areas.
So to get back to your earlier question, we need more people to see the connections – to connect the dots between people, and between people and environment and the economy.
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| Andrews |
Oh, absolutely. From your perspective, how have women's lives changed since the Conference, and in what ways have they stayed the same?
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| Fraser |
Well, women's lives have changed hugely since the Conference, for a lot of reasons. The vastness of the changes and the public involvement in making these changes is the reason why I worked with others to get a state Women's History Consortium established. Some of these changes have been gradual and some of them have been rapid. Taken all together, they have been very comprehensive. The changes between then and now are so much a part of normalcy these days that women can basically do anything, and it's not negatively questioned anymore, as it used to be. For example, should a woman drive a car? Is one safe in a car that a woman drives? Well, nobody questions any of that anymore. However, I fear we are at risk of losing our collective memory of how much has changed if we don't deliberately work to preserve the history to help people remember and to provide a basis for research. That's why the consortium was created.
An example of one of the big ways we're in danger of losing knowledge of this is all these boxes of materials from these major conferences, in Ellensburg and in Houston. Both conferences were both a reflection of the major ferment going on with women's issues, and a stimulus for more to take place. This activity of promoting and responding to change has gone on with people all over the state. There are boxes and boxes of key historical materials in attics and garages all over the state. There is a serious concern that as people get older, and maybe they move, or they die, their heirs might have no idea these materials are politically significant and consequently allow them to be destroyed. Meanwhile women who were involved in making history don't know what to do with these boxes and boxes of historic materials.
Washington was and still is a national leader in advancement of rights, opportunities, and respect for women. For example, when I go to conferences of legislators around the country, people ask me, "Why is Washington such a leader?" I think we need to be able to answer the question well. That's why we need the Women's History Consortium, to promote saving these materials and making them available, so people can research the question.
I think the way I answer it, generally, is that this state was founded with a populist tradition. And a populist tradition, in spite of a lot of restrictive historical attitudes about women, begins with respect for the individual. That's kind of the foundation. So I suspect that that perspective more or less carried through over time, and maybe laid kind of a philosophical foundation. And then there was the massive--just massive, massive, massive--political action in our state. There were untold thousands of people, women and men, who were advancing the cause of women in all aspects of life without seeking any reward, recognition, or return on it. They just believed in it. For example, they'd say, well, okay, there's an appointment on the parks board in some county somewhere. Let's get some women on it. And let's make more scholarships available for women to go to higher ed. And let's get more women in this or that profession. Let's get more women appointed to key state government positions.
This was a massive social movement. That's what a movement is. It's not just people doing something because they're asked or get a specific benefit from it.. It's people doing something people believe in. And that happened in spades in the state of Washington. So here we are today.
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| Andrews |
Here we are.
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| Fraser |
Yes, we're recounting history [laughs] with more history to come, too.
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| Andrews |
Well, I think we owe you a great debt of thanks for realizing the importance of this.
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| Fraser |
Well, I'm one of many. One of many. There were a lot of fabulous, fabulous people who worked tirelessly to advance the status of women in Washington. Flashing back for a second to getting legislation through the Legislature. You know, usually I didn't testify. It was women who were deeply knowledgeable about specific issues and courageous. Many would repeatedly make the big effort to drive down to Olympia, many of them from the Seattle area, who'd come down and testify to the Legislature. It's hard for people to realize now, but back then, there was significant antagonism to advancing many women's issues. Thus, it took courage to speak up for women's rights. It took huge courage. Because people might look at you and say, "Well, what kind of a strange person are you?" Or you would feel like you were risking your reputation, or that you would be verbally attacked. Or, you might worry that strange assumptions would be made about you. So for the women who made all this happen and all for these diverse organizations and for all the efforts big and small across the state, and for people who merely spoke up at family gatherings, it took courage. It took courage. But it happened.
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| Andrews |
Okay! I just have one last question. And you may have covered this. If there were specific issues that concerned you in Ellensburg or Houston during the IWY, how have these issues been resolved? Or are they still being debated?
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| Fraser |
Well, my focus has always been the law. I firmly believe the laws should treat women fairly, and assure they're treated fairly and equally. I'm still working on that as a legislator. I've always been very oriented toward "what should the law be", and I still am. There are a lot of us in the Legislature who are always watching for this. At the national level, in particular, there needs to be a lot more effort to assure equal women's representation in political affairs. So that's continuing. Huge achievements made: More to come.
In recent years, I've become somewhat more active in trying to work on issues at the international level. I've hooked up with a wonderful organization in Washington, DC, the Center for Women Policy Studies. They do a great job of connecting with women legislators around the country. They're helping us become educated on what's going on in the United Nations, and around the world, and how can we use our state legislative positions to try to improve the status of women around the world.
In fact, I'm going to another conference on this in May, back in Washington, DC. The United Nations has been women's best friend in the world. They've held conference after conference, engaged in effort after effort, passed resolution after resolution, to try to improve the status of women around the world. In fact, the immediate past Secretary General, Kofi Annan, among his final statements as he left office was the need to improve the lives of women around the world. I mean, how can you have half the people in the world live under such terrible circumstances that go on. For example, there's no right for women to inherit even their husband's property in certain countries. In many countries women are denied education, health care, personal safety, legal rights and economic opportunity simply based on their gender. There are articles in the paper on these and other horrors frequently. So I'm taking my experience and commitment from my work in domestic politics, to see what I can help do around the world, too.
Many others are doing it. It's not just me. It's a lot of dedicated people. We need to build more awareness about what people in this country can do to help women in other countries. So that's another big frontier.
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| Andrews |
Oh, absolutely. And a lot is happening.
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| Fraser |
Yes. And we need to get more agencies of the federal government to do more. One thing we can do is lobby Congress and federal agencies to do more. Fortunately, there are a lot of foundations that have money to put into this effort, and to spread information and awareness and facilitate bringing people together to figure out and implement strategies. So I'm excited about that.
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| Andrews |
Is there anything else you'd like to add, in summary?
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| Fraser |
Oh, I appreciate my husband, Tim Malone's, patience [laughter] over 30 years of marriage. Yes. Even planning our wedding was all intertwined with this Conference and its aftermath. And then the first several months of our marriage were all involved with the challenged ballots process and the lawsuit--dealing with all that. It took a lot of time to work on these issues. He's been patient about my not maximizing my earning potential so I can work on this and other issues.[laughs] Having two incomes helps, because mine, as a legislator, is not very healthy. [laughs]
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| Andrews |
Well thank you so very much, Karen. This has been a pleasure. And thank you, too, for all you did to get the Women's History Consortium established.
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| Fraser |
Thank you. And I'm glad you're working on this project.
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| Andrews |
I am, too.
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| Fraser |
I've long thought somebody should write this up. And I'm very eager to hear from other participants what I didn't have time to learn while I was there. [laughs]
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| Andrews |
It's been fascinating. And I'm sure you realize that not everybody sees it exactly the same way.
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| Fraser |
Yes, that's right.
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| Andrews |
The different perspectives make an interesting kaleidoscope.
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| Fraser |
Yes. That's why I'm so eager to see what all the interviews contain.
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| Andrews |
Well, I think we'll close at this point.
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| Fraser |
Oh, maybe one other thing to close with pertains to the Women's History Consortium. Most of the appointees to its advisory board are gubernatorial appointees. There's one legislator from each of the four legislative caucuses. Senator Roach and I are the two Senate appointees. On a lot of these issues, we come from different perspectives. But we get along very well personally in the Senate, and work on a number of common issues. Of course on some issues, we vote differently. It was at an early meeting of the Consortium that we each found out we each had been at Ellensburg. I was just astonished. When I was looking through my old boxes of records recently, I saw that she ran for Delegate to the National IWY Conference from the Blue and White Caucus. It's so interesting that 30 years later, here we are each senior members of the State Senate!
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| Andrews |
There's a photograph of her in the Seattle Times from that.
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| Fraser |
Oh, really?
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| Andrews |
Yes.
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| Fraser |
Great. But anyway, it's so interesting to learn thirty years later, that we were both at active at the Ellensburg IWY Conference. Now we're both senior senators. We still think differently, but we get along just fine.
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| Andrews |
Beautiful way to end the interview.
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| Fraser |
Yes.
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| Andrews |
Again, thank you so much.
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| Fraser |
Okay. My pleasure.
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[End Interview.]
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