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| Andrews |
As a beginning, I'm going to ask each of you to tell me briefly about your growing up years. Your family, community, school? How you developed your ideas about your role as a woman at home and in society? And which one of you would like to start?
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| Sale |
Jean Marie. You might as well just start off with a big one there.
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| Andrews |
Jean Marie is going first.
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| Brough |
I grew up with four brothers. I'm in the middle. My father was a veterinarian histopathologist, and my mother a lab technician. So most of my life , there was always something we went over at a laboratory, someplace. That was my education at the dinner table, so to speak, had to do with science. I was born in Washington, DC. And when I was nine years old, we moved to Alabama. Mostly because my father took a position at a university there, a teaching position, because my oldest brother was ready for college. And with five kids, there was no way they could afford college, unless we lived close by. So we moved to Alabama, and I spent my formative years there.
And I graduated from college in Alabama. Stayed to get my master's degree because I had met a man and he was still in school. So we courted, and I worked in a teaching school nearby in Columbus, Georgia. Got married in 1965, moved to Texas where he was working. And two months after moving to Texas, we moved to Seattle. Been married to the same guy since 1965, so almost forty-two years. We have one child. And I'm trying to think of what were formative influences in my life: expectations that I would do well scholastically, because that was just part of our family upbringing. No politics at all, except for my grandmother—after her husband died, she became a tax assessor. And she ran on the Democrat and Republican and Socialist Party ticket, and was elected.
And she managed to hold that position long enough to afford college, 'til my mother finished college, because my mother was in college at the time. This was in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. That's the only politician that we ever had in the family, that I know, or that anybody will fess up to. I think that my mother sort of came along with me into the woman's movement over some time. Because I do remember this marvelous thing when we were back in Washington, DC, lobbying in congress on the Equal Rights Amendment, that she came to pick us up to take us out to lunch, because they were living nearby at that time. And I can still remembering her going toe to toe with Phyllis Schlafly out in the hallway. [all laugh] But Mother worked and raised children, so she knew the realities of woman's existence in American society.
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| Andrews |
What's your mother's name, for the record?
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| Brough |
Clara. Clara Seibold. So that's about it. The only other influence I had is that I got involved in a sorority in college. Because I had four brothers, this was my first interaction with a group of females. And I loved every minute of it.
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| Andrews |
Okay. Same question, Dorothy.
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| Sale |
I was born in New York City. The first place we lived, which I don't remember, was in Queens, just outside Manhattan. But I was actually born in Manhattan. Then when I was four-and-a-half, we moved to Manhasset, which was a town, an old town, on the north shore of Long Island. That's where I grew up, went through school, all the way through high school and so on.
I had one younger brother. My father was a salesman. I should say I was born in 1932. I'm ten years older than Jean Marie. [laughs]
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| Brough |
I didn't say, if you'll notice.
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| Sale |
Which has made no difference in our relationship at all, as far as I know. We were new feminists at the same time together, and clicked right away.
My mother started teaching while I was in grade school. I think it's when my brother, who's five-and-a-half years younger than I, started going to school regular time. She had almost gotten a PhD in English lit at Columbia before they married. And she went back and got a master's, using that. And this was early in World War Two, and the men, the male teachers were all being drafted and so on. So there were opportunities for women that wouldn't have been there otherwise, I think. She ended up, after a couple of earlier things, teaching young women in Hunter College High School, which is associated with Hunter College in New York. And that's what I remember.
But Roger and I, I was behind him a year in school. He was in graduate school getting a PhD. I was an English major but fell in love with art history, and did a lot of both at Swarthmore. Then went to graduate school as a librarian, and got a job at the Cornell University Library, which is where he was studying, and where he grew up, actually. His father was a professor of English at Cornell, and he grew up in Ithaca, New York. And we got married and went to Ithaca, New York, where I was working in the Cornell University Library. And instantly got pregnant. My son was born at nine-and-a-half months later. [laughs] And I stopped working, because that was what you did in those days.
Two years later, Roger got a job at Amherst College when he'd finished his PhD, and we moved to Amherst, where my daughter was born. And in 1962, we left Amherst and came to the University of Washington, and have been here ever since. The year after we came here, we found a house in the Central Area, and we've been living in it for forty-four years now, very happily. So that's where I was living when all of this happened. At what point do we shift? Is that enough of the personal?
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| Andrews |
Yes. And thank you both for that. So what were your major affiliations and networks in the 1960s and '70s, particularly relating to women or relating to your activism? And what roles did you play in them?
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| Brough |
1960s, I was still in college, at the beginning of the decade. My sorority was important to me.
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| Andrews |
What sorority?
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| Brough |
Kappa Alpha Theta. And then graduated from college in '63, got my master's in '65. Got married in '65. And then we moved out here. So I don't think I belonged to anything. I was continuing graduate studies because I was a public school teacher, and wanted to get up on the highest in the pay scale. I did not join any organization until after 1969. I can still remember having my daughter in 1969, and after six months sitting in Joan Lefevre's kitchen, saying, "What do people do all day?" Because I was not working.
And she got me involved in the League of Women Voters. So that was my step out the door. I met a lot of interesting women, including Dorothy, through the League of Women Voters. And I think that the role that I had, I was president of my sorority, I know that. And the League of Women Voters, -- eventually, I was on the Status of Women Committee. And eventually got on the board of directors while I was still at home, as a mother. Because I was a math major, they put me on finance committees, things like that. So just the practical details of life. I've always been a practical detail sort of person.
The first big thing I ever did was Helen Sommers' fault. Because I was on the League finance committee, and the League Status of Women Committee. So she got me involved with the campaign committee to establish a state equal rights amendment, HJR-61, 1972. That was a political campaign, and Helen was the treasurer of that campaign in 1972. She bagged it to run for the legislature. [laughter] I can still remember the phone call when she called me up and said, "Jean Marie," she said, "I'm not going to be able to do this because I'm going to run for the legislature."
So I said, "Okay, I can do that." So for the next six months, I raised money for the state equal rights amendment campaign, and did all the treasurer work. This was fortunately before the PDC days.
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| Andrews |
Before the what days?
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| Brough |
The Public Disclosure Commission days. That came shortly thereafter. That's always been a burr under my skin.
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| Sale |
That was a League issue. [laughs]
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| Brough |
But when that campaign was over, I sort of went back into the kitchen for a month or two, because really, I put out a lot of energy in that campaign. I don't think I got involved with NOW until '74. So it was a year later.
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| Sale |
I was president, so it was '74.
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| Brough |
The group of us who had been the League Status of Women Committee, there were basically five of us that were functioning, continuous members, started lobbying the state legislature in Olympia to get a federal Equal Rights Amendment ratified. So we did that in 1973. And we did that maybe twice a week for the entire legislative session. Some group of us was in Olympia doing this thing. I had a good friend who provided me childcare, and I think I was the only one that really needed childcare at the time.
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| Sale |
Well, Jackie had Matt. I don't remember, if I did, too.
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| Brough |
So then I joined NOW in 1974, because they needed somebody who had some legislative experience, because they needed a legislative liaison person. So maybe Dorothy probably talked me into doing that. And then we became co-presidents of NOW in '75. Then I went on the by-laws commission to reorganize national NOW in 1976. In '77, while this was going on, I was on the national board of directors for NOW. Meanwhile, we moved to Federal Way, and my kid started school, so I had more time to spend on women's things.
And that was about it. There was a lot of activity here in the state of Washington in the late '70s, but I was sort of focused in DC, lobbying Congress first for an extension for the ratification of the ERA bill, or for the Equal Rights Amendment itself. So a lot of traveling back and forth and business in DC. So that took me through the '70s. Do you want to do the '80s, or is the '70s– ? [laughter]
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| Andrews |
No. No. Right now we're just doing the build up to Ellensburg.
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| Brough |
But this was it. International Women's Year was not necessarily anything that I had much responsibility for, except the politics that all of a sudden was dumped in our laps, where you had to pull the divergent feminists together.
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| Andrews |
We'll talk about the conference in just a minute. I'd like to give Dorothy a chance to weigh in. And then I'd like to go back and talk a little bit about the accomplishments in the early '70s. Dorothy, just to remind you of the question, what were your major affiliations and networks in the '60s and '70s, and what roles did you play?
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| Sale |
Can I go back a minute? Because, from your first question, I realize I forgot something, which has been very important. And that is, I always had a church life. My parents were active. We were in, actually, a Dutch reform church with a remarkable man who was born in Russia and was a chemist, and then became a minister. I loved him. I taught Sunday school. I had a church background, and I got a very strong sense of what was fair and what wasn't, a lot of it right straight out of the Bible. And I just want that to be in the background, because when all of this that we're talking about started, I was a member of a mostly black Presbyterian church in the Central area, in Madrona, which is our neighborhood, and had been very active in the Civil Rights Movement in the earlier '60s. And that was some of the segues into this current question, which is the major affiliations.
Well, I started at the League of Women Voters fifty years ago this year.
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| Brough |
Fifty years?
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| Sale |
Fifty years ago. 1957, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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| Brough |
You are old, aren't you? [laughs]
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| Sale |
I am, dear. How old is old? Ten years older than I am. Yes. [laughs] I've always been old for you, dear.
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| Andrews |
So this is the fifty year anniversary celebration of your LWV membership --
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| Sale |
And Roger and I are going to be seventy-five this year. I remember when my mother was seventy-five, it was a big deal. My mother was always a huge influence on me, and I loved her dearly. She was wonderful when I discovered feminism. She was right there reading the things and talking with me about them. And we went right on like that forever. Yeah. My father was also supportive, but not in the same way. He's not as much of an intellectual. And my mother was pretty intellectual.
So, in Amherst, Massachusetts in the late '50s, there was Amherst College, which did not have women. There was the University of Massachusetts, which was just beginning. And the town was pretty eighteenth century and closed. And if you had any broader interest in anything, the only game in town was the League of Women Voters which, for the size of the town, was large. It produced a national League president, who was president of the Amherst League, when I joined. And I began learning about government in a different way from the kinds of things I'd learned in high school, and got very interested in it all, and in the process. And Massachusetts towns are run by town councils, and everybody's involved. It's very down to earth.
So when we moved to Seattle, I had my membership changed, so they knew I was coming. I don't know why I thought that would help, but it did, in a way. And that was in '62. Our kids went to the public schools. They were, at that point, seven and four. .
I became immediately involved in what was the growing civil rights movement in the town. Down at a beach on Lake Washington I met women from the neighborhood who were active in starting a preschool. And they were going to start the preschool in a Presbyterian church's basement. And so I went to the Presbyterian church, because I met the minister down at the beach on the lake and heard all this talk, and started going to that church. But also got involved with all the neighborhood things that were going on.
The PTA was very active. We used to, we were black and white together. It was enormously educating for me. [laughs] For both of us, Roger and I were both active. And we were a very active PTA. We used to march down to the school board regularly, demanding various kinds of things that we felt were not adequately being provided. So that led me into learning a lot about how political things operated in the city of Seattle, you know? And so when, when–
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| Brough |
You never got called on the carpet for calling the school board sexist, like I did.
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| Sale |
[laughs] Well, I don't know why not. I probably did, too.
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| Andrews |
Do you want to say more about that?
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| Sale |
I'm sure the school board members were. Everybody was in those days. . When were you, what were you doing? Do you remember?
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| Brough |
I was lobbying, they knew I was a League person, because I'd been down there for League stuff before. But I was lobbying for the alternative elementary school number two.
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| Sale |
Oh, okay.
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| Brough |
That Stephanie started. And they were giving us a whole lot of static about doing an alternative publicschool.
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| Sale |
So that was before feminism. It was just at the beginning?
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| Brough |
It was, you know, we moved here to Federal Way in '76. So this would have been in '74 or so. The League was where most of us met.
At one point, I remember Nancy Rust of the legislature doing some kind of, you know, resolution or something, talking about how many of the women who were in the legislature at the time had basically cut their political teeth, so to speak, on the issues in the League of Women Voters. That really was about the only show in town.
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| Sale |
Well, I chaired a big committee. We had an equal rights study, and it was divided in three subjects. And I co-chaired the education study, which had to do with the schools. It took a year to get a big reply out. And then I think nothing particularly was happening. And I got interested in women's issues by reading Simone de Beauvoir, and come on, who's our great–
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| Andrews |
Betty Friedan?
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| Sale |
Betty Friedan, yes. And then when the state League chose a status of women study in 1971, I think it was, I went and joined that committee, which was large. And full of people like Jane Noland and you and Jackie and, oh, all kinds of people. I suppose I could get a list. And we discovered things that shocked us like property rights, and that name changes, and whether you could do it or not. It was all very basic issues. It didn't have anything to do with all the humongous subjects. It was all these little things that had to do with daily life which just shocked you. You couldn't do things without your husband's signature and so on and so forth.
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| Andrews |
I have a copy of that report for the archives.
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| Sale |
Do you? Did I give it to you?
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| Andrews |
No. Helen Sommers did.
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| Sale |
Oh, okay. I found an extra one, too. Yeah, and, well, Helen was doing NOW at that time. But also I think national NOW had a board meeting in Seattle, and I saw them in the paper. And that interested me, because I had been reading about Red Stockings, I think, that group in New York, and other things on the East Coast. And when something seemed to be coming here, I was trying to find some group that I could talk to. I think I was curious about what was going on. So I did not go to, well, they were in the paper. I don't know whether there was anything public that they could do. That must have been 1970, '69 or '70. '70, I think. Do you remember?
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| Andrews |
I know that Seattle Now organized in 1970.
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| Sale |
Out here, they organized before 1970, I think. But nationally, it's '65, isn't it?
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| Andrews |
Here, it was 1970.
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| Brough |
Linda Miller was part of that group.
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| Sale |
Yes, Linda was. We really met in that League group. And then that took us, Jackie and I went to a NOW meeting in November, '72. I was so impressed by what was going on. I was very impressed with you because Helen had gotten you. Why you, I don't know. [laughs] But I was envious. And I learned a lot from Susan Lane, who had been in touch with Alice Paul. She still tells that story and gives me chills. You'll have to interview her someday. You know who Alice Paul is?
[Susan Lane was one of the executive directors of the Seattle Office for Women's Rights. Alice Paul (1885-1977), a Quaker with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, led the militant National Woman's Party and was jailed and force-fed during the crusade for the woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. After voters ratified the amendment in 1920, Paul noted that the original suffragists had asked for much more than the right to vote. In 1923, on the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention (where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others had launched the U.S. women's rights crusade), Paul proposed a new constitutional amendment: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." Proposed repeatedly, the national Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) had strong support in the 1940s and was nearly ratified in the 1980s. It is still being proposed in Congress.(ed.)]
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| Andrews |
Of course. And Susan Lane, too, but I didn't know they had met.
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| Sale |
Well, I'll let her tell her story, but I heard that story then. And I knew that the rest of you had been on ERA as the subject before, not you, I guess, but them, the others, before I had. And Susan may have learned it all when she went to DC and met Alice Paul and got into the National Women's Party building and did all of that. Because I must have talked to her, to Susan Lane then. And do you remember that group that you were doing the money stuff with had given up on whether Congress would ever pass out the national Equal Rights Amendment, and decided to go for a state one. And the very year that they started doing that, Congress passed the national one out on March 22, 1972, was it?
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| Brough |
Yeah, well the state--
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| Sale |
Yes, but I came in too late to help with that. I was on the League committee, but I didn't get involved with that. And I think it was really NOW that was behind doing the state Equal Rights Amendment, getting it going. Well, it was very, very close in November. Do you remember? It was three weeks or something.
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| Brough |
Three weeks, yeah.
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| Sale |
Yeah, before we knew whether it was going to pass or not. But it did pass. So that's when, well, that was probably in December when we found that out, and January was the next legislative session. And it was a full legislative session, wasn't it? It was '73.
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| Brough |
It would have been an initial year.
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| Sale |
An initial year in a two-year thing. So at that point, then, with the League committee, and then in NOW, no, it was before we went to NOW. But really, those of us really on the League committee, it was you and me and Jackie Griswold and Linda Miller and Elizabeth Ellisor–
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| Brough |
And Bev.
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| Sale |
And Bev, Beverly Corwin, who was chair of the League committee, actually it was a state study, but it was based in the Seattle League. I think because that's where so many of the people were. But anyway, we had a lot of people, like twenty, twenty-five people on that list. But at any rate, a lot of people. So we were there, and we decided that we would lobby ratification of the national Equal Rights Amendment then. If we just had passed, the people had just passed a state one, you had a lot you could take with you to argue with in the legislature. So we did that. And Jean Marie described doing that. I remember back and forth trips. And I also remembered I was with Jackie a lot. And we would go talk to, I wish I could remember the legislator. Maybe I could get it later. They would ask us questions, and we would come tearing back to Seattle to go to, who was it who worked on it in Bellevue?
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| Brough |
Marilyn Ward would do everything.
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| Sale |
Marilyn Ward, well, whoever it was. But there was somebody else who ended up moving away. And it was Helen [Sommers], for one thing, because she was working.
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| Brough |
She was in the legislature.
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| Sale |
She was in the legislature. I remember going to her office at some point. Well, they would ask us questions, and we would have to come back and get the answers and take it back to the legislature and so on. But we ended up ratifying the ERA exactly a year after it came out. March 22, 1973, a year after it came out of Congress. And then we formed a rap group. We decided, Jackie really decided, that we had learned a lot doing that. And remember, she made sure that we collected all the material that we had used. The handouts.
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| Brough |
She made kits for all the other ratified states. She put everything that we had amassed in the way of fact sheets and good information or how tos.
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| Sale |
What the questions were, and responses to the questions, and all that. And we mailed them to every ERA committee that we got the name of, probably from national NOW.
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| Brough |
We knew which states--
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| Andrews |
How did what happened in Washington compare to other states? Getting all of this done in one year?
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| Brough |
We were about the last one to ratify for umpteen years. We'd only raced the federal plan right out of the gate. And then a year later, well I don't think anybody came after us for a long time.
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| Sale |
For a long time? I ran across some of that when I was looking. Well, the stuff I was looking at last night, I don't remember which states they were, but there were two states that ratified. But I was looking at more Ellensburg time, so it would have been several years later. And then it came down to four, and we never got better than four. But that's a different subject.
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| Andrews |
I'd love to hear more about your rap group.
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| Brough |
Well, the five of us that drove back and forth to Olympia, we were there at least twice a week, some subset of us, because we were all basically at home. Not working at the moment.
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| Sale |
Yeah. Jackie was on leave from teaching.
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| Andrews |
So that was the two of you, and Jackie Griswold, and ...
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| Sale |
Bev Corwin.
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| Brough |
And Elizabeth Ellisor.
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| Sale |
It was a different name then. It was Murphy.
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| Brough |
Murphy, I think, at the time. She's been divorced since then.
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| Sale |
Murray? I think it's Murray.
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| Brough |
Anyway, she works for City Light.
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| Sale |
Yeah. She was the youngest.
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| Brough |
We became really good friends.
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| Sale |
We did. Yes.
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| Brough |
I was driving, and Jackie was musing. Jackie is a muser. She said, "Do you suppose I'm a feminist?" I still remember this conversation. And we said, "What?"
She said, "Well, if you think about this word feminist, then I must be, according to the dictionary definition." You believe in the equality, the social, political, economic.
And she said, "I guess that makes me a feminist." And I said, "Of course it does!"
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| Sale |
I remember looking up feminism in the dictionary and saying, "Well, yes, of course. So I guess I am." We had an age range, too, because Jackie was a year and a half or something, or almost two years older than I.
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| Brough |
Yeah, you and Jackie were the oldest.
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| Sale |
And then Bev was six years younger, and then you're ten years, and Elizabeth is a couple of more years. So it was really very nice, you know.
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| Brough |
And we became very good friends. One of the things we had learned from all those readings was rap groups, and just the trust amongst people. And you could talk about just about anything. And so we met–
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| Sale |
Weekly.
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| Brough |
We met at Friday nights. And we met for years at my house.
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| Sale |
Yes. You had the baby, yeah.
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| Brough |
For dinner and talk.
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| Sale |
Yeah. We brought things, didn't we?
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| Brough |
Yeah. It was a round robin, whoever was hosting it. We took turns. But we know more about each other than I know about anybody else in the universe.
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| Sale |
We helped each other through good and bad times. The bad times, as well as enjoying–
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| Brough |
We don't meet, the rap group, much anymore. But we still do occasionallygo for a weekend up in the islands, or out for dinner or something like that. We've stayed good friends. Bev is in Paris right now.
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| Sale |
Yes, she is...
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| Brough |
But we also, and I can't remember precisely when, started the Women's Political Caucus as one of our little side projects.
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| Sale |
Yes, we did a lot of things like that.
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| Brough |
The League was too stodgy.
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| Andrews |
Was that an outgrowth of NOW? The Women's Political Caucus?
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| Brough |
More an outgrowth of those of us who were frustrated with the League's inability to give a political approach we needed.
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| Sale |
That's why we went to NOW. At least, that's why I went to NOW. I've never dropped my League membership, which is why I can say I've been a member for fifty years. [laughs] And I admire, and I understand, I think we all like League and the way it goes about things and what its history is and so on. But at that point in time, actually, it was funny while we were doing the ERA work, because the League didn't have any ERA position at that point. It was brand new. They were slow.
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| Brough |
They were very supportive of us, but at the same time, very worried about what political things we would do.
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| Sale |
That was locally. Yes. Yes.
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| Brough |
Because we were just doing this thing. We could put whatever label we needed to wear when we got down there. So we could be a NOW member, or a Women's Political Caucus member or a League of Women Voters member.
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| Sale |
Or just a constituent.
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| Brough |
Depending on who we were talking to. And that's when we met Judy Turpin. She lives just down the road.
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| Sale |
Does she? Is she that close to you? She's retired. She became a lobbyist, a professional lobbyist.
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| Brough |
She's one of these people that knew everything, and knew how to do everything, and smart as a whip. She was a mentor for me.
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| Sale |
She's a good person for you to talk to, too. And her basic organization was AAUW [American Association of University Women]. So you get a different, you'll get a somewhat different view that way. She's a good person to have down. This is why I want to do fundraising for more of this [Women's History Consortium's oral history project].
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| Brough |
Somewhere along the line, we started a woman's office here, an office of women's rights. That was right after the ERA. The state office that was headed by Mary Helen Roberts and Gisela, Gisela Taber.
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| Andrews |
The State Women's Council.
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| Sale |
But it's the governor [Governor Daniel Evans] who did it, though. And he did it really early, before we were aware, I think. Lois North can tell you about this. She's former \Senator Lois North. She's ten years older than I am, I think.
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| Brough |
Once Lois gave me advice never to think about running for Congress, because I was a Republican and they would never, ever have a majority in DC.
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| Sale |
Oh! [laughs] She was a Republican. Well, that's funny. That's funny.
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| Brough |
Let's get back to the Washington Women's Political Caucus. We were part of the group that saw a need for it and put it together.
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| Sale |
Yes.
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| Brough |
And then we left it in capable hands.
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| Sale |
Yes. And that was partly because of things that the caucus could focus on that–
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| Brough |
Wheel and deal politically.
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| Sale |
Yes, and they were focusing on, would focus on candidates and that kind of thing, which is more than NOW wanted to take on. I can't remember when there was anything against it, but the League wouldn't.. So, and then after the Women's Council was, well, the question about the state Women's Council is another subject altogether, really.
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| Brough |
The Office of Women's Rights in Seattle started the fall after the ERA campaign. I remember you guys all marched on city hall.
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| Sale |
That's right.
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| Brough |
I was home resting from the campaign, and balancing the checkbook.
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| Sale |
I was really involved with that. I don't remember how, but I was at that meeting. Jackie and I had started going to these meetings. And I think NOW was so new, the NOW chapter was so new. It was in the downtown YWCA. It was just a meeting place. And we were concerned about support for the very new Office of Women's Rights. I can't remember what it became, and what it was in the beginning before that, in the city of Seattle. Millie Henry was the head, and then I guess there was one staff person. And it was kind of buried under another, it was a small group inside of a larger group, and didn't get much of a focus.
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| Andrews |
The Seattle Women's Commission?
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| Sale |
Well, that's the appointed group. And the Office of Women's Rights was the part of city government.
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| Brough |
It was a part of the Department of Community Development or something. It was a little subgroup–
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| Sale |
Yes. Yes. And what we did, we did leave that building and march to city hall, where there was a meeting going on. And Shirley Bridge walked down that aisle and interrupted what was going on. And said, with all of us behind her in the aisle, that we had an issue that they needed to hear about from us. And she was wonderful describing it. I've forgotten whether she was on, I think she was on the commission, so she was a commission member. And that started us off.
What we were demanding was that the Office of Women's Rights would become part of the executive branch, and have direct access to the mayor. I think that was it. And this required rewriting the ordinance that created both. And I got involved with Melissa Thompson, another name for you. And oh, there were several other people whose names I now don't remember. Didn't find those pages to look at. And for some time there, I don't remember whether Jackie was doing that or not. But I know I spent a lot of time, I actually rewrote it myself, I think. I don't know whether anyone else thinks so, but I can show you the drafts. [laughs]
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| Brough |
I believe you.
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| Sale |
I don't throw anything out, you know. I must have learned that as a librarian.
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| Brough |
We were very busy.
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| Sale |
We were terribly busy.
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| Brough |
We had all these projects, but we had mentors. Jeanette Williams was sort of a main one.
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| Sale |
Yes. Yes.
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| Brough |
And Phyllis Lamphere was also there.
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| Sale |
And they were wonderful. Both of them were members of the Seattle City Council at the time.
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| Brough |
Lee Kraft, was she a judge?
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| Sale |
No. I think she was just an attorney.
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| Brough |
Smart as a whip.
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| Sale |
Yes.
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| Brough |
Right around the time of the Ellensburg conference, we had an attorneys' group put together. [Washington Women Lawyers]
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| Sale |
Put together, yes. Because women started being allowed to go to law school. And we knew some of those early ones. And our friend–
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| Brough |
Jane Noland got into law school. At UPS?
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| Sale |
Yes. Yes. And that was early, because I remember her telling me that when she was pregnant in the League committee. And then George, Georgianna–
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| Brough |
Schuder Ellis
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| Sale |
She's now Dr. Ellis.
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| Brough |
Her name was Schuder. But when she finally graduated from medical school and got a divorce, she went back to her mother's maiden name, Ellis. She was a NOW president two years after us?
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| Sale |
The year after, the year after us, she was, yeah. The year I went to England.
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| Andrews |
There was a lot that was accomplished–
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| Sale |
Oh, I tell you, it was going on like crazy.
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| Andrews |
And along with the ERA, what was some of the other legislation?
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| Brough |
Well, the other legislation was the rape legislation.
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| Sale |
We were getting into that, because Jackie was–
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| Brough |
Jackie was focused.
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| Sale |
Jackie was focused on it. And she did not become active in NOW right away, because she got appointed to the Women's Commission, the Seattle Women's Commission. And that's when we started having rape groups together where you shared, speak outs, that's what we called it, wasn't it?
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| Brough |
Well, the rape legislation was, I think, '74? Or maybe '75? Maybe it took two years.
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| Sale |
Yes. She was on there for three years.
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| Brough |
In this period of '72 to '78, all of this stuff just happened, one right after another. The rape legislation was, I think, Jackie was the prime mover on that.
NOW got involved in that, which is one of the reasons they wanted me to do legislative stuff. We were lobbying for rape provision. And who was doing brown bag lunches with the judges? I mean, we were trying to educate everybody.
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| Sale |
Oh, yes. I went to a number of those. I remember meeting with judges in the fancy legal office someplace downtown. And they just couldn't get it. They just didn't get it. And we had to figure out exactly what that meant, and what exactly, and how to proceed. And that went on for some time.
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| Brough |
I would be the person that would put three of them in a room and lock them in and make them write a fact sheet, you know. And so legislators could possibly, you know, ingestsome of it. Because Jackie would overload them with materials.
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| Sale |
Yes.
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| Brough |
And my contribution to this was making sure they didn't delay it all, if that would make it work.
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| Sale |
There was one of us that was just right for each purpose, right?
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| Brough |
But that was the big legislation. The other stuff happened relatively easily, I think.
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| Sale |
And things like changing your name and all that was pretty easy.
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| Brough |
Yeah. It was really sticky.
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| Sale |
It was really changing how people think.
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| Brough |
And sort of a spinoff, if you will, (this was an awful use of the word) thatsort of surfaced when we were doing research for rape, was child abuse. It had been one of those things stuck under the carpet, never discussed, ever, in any situation. And the more we delved into rape situations, and what was going on with the courts and stuff, the more this child abuse business was just sort of hitting us in the face continuously. I don't know that we actually passed legislation, but it became a viable issue in the women's movement around that time. Then we went off and fought with NOW for two years.
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| Sale |
What do you mean? Oh, on the national level. Yes.
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| Brough |
The reorganization of NOW took place in '75, '76. I don't honestly know what the major division was. It had something to do with gay rights, but it mostly had something to do with power and socialist, socialism versus mainstream politics and stuff. And the mainstreamers eventually did win, but we had to reorganize NOW to do that. It was not an easy job.
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| Sale |
No. I just read about that last night. The night we stayed up all night making–
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| Brough |
Rewrote the by-laws. The members of the by-laws commission rewrote the by-laws for the national organization to give grassroots some input into how the organization was run.
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| Sale |
There's a lot of information about that. Yeah, we went too, good experience, good experience.
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| Andrews |
Were both of you on the national board for NOW?
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| Sale |
Yes. Not at the same time.
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| Brough |
She followed when I retired there.
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| Sale |
You made me promise I would. Don't you remember?
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| Brough |
No. But there was so much going on. And I missed a lot of this Ellensburg stuff, because I was doing national NOW stuff. And because I was on the by-laws commission and the national board. So I was off trying to work on this other stuff.
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| Sale |
Yeah. Well you remember what I was telling Mildred on the way here, driving here, because I was rereading about it last night. I wanted to try to get it straight in my head. One issue we did was to extend the amount of time that we had to ratify the national Equal Rights Amendment. And about this time, just after Ellensburg, or just at Ellensburg, we were working at doing that. There was a deadline in the original legislation, and we were trying to get Congress to pass an extension of it. And you came home from a national board meeting, and told me that they'd come up with a new way to work with the public, and with phone banks. And it was a new, I mean, we'd all heard of phone banks, but this was a different way to handle phone banks. And you asked me, I think we were both on this, you were national, but I was on the state NOW board then. And you asked me if I'd go to Oregon, and if I'd get in touch with national and figure out what this new method was, and go to Oregon, to Portland, and someplace else,- I went to two places, I remember.-- and teach them how to do this so that they could work on the extension from Oregon, as well.
And when I came back, it was NOW national conference time. And I'm sure you were all involved in that. And I stayed home and put up, started a phone bank in Seattle to work for extension with our people. And I can't remember the name of the friend of mine who's a lawyer who let us use his office downtown at night, where we had eight or nine phones. And that's when I learned all of that. You asked me to tell national that I was available, which I was. But that's another story.
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| Brough |
You were sitting there looking bored one day. You looked like you needed a chore.
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| Sale |
No, you said that you only wanted to run once, and I had to promise–
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| Brough |
When she was talking, I had a couple of thoughts about the kind of help that we got from external sources. You talked about your lawyer friend with the phone bank. And I can't remember who that was. During the state Equal Rights Amendment campaign, Joel Pritchard's campaign was, it seems to me that he had campaigning types of questions that we had given to his campaign staff. When you start talking about phone banks, Washington U. S. Senators Magnusson and Jackson had, Maggie had no opposition for one of–
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| Sale |
Yes. There was one right around there.
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| Brough |
So those people helped us learn how to make phone banks work. So these were not necessarily out in the front line, but they were helpful.
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| Sale |
And Lois North told us how to lobby for things, too. She's still around. That's so great.
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| Brough |
We learned not to giggle when they said stupid things.
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| Sale |
[laughs] Yes. To keep a straight face, yes.
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| Brough |
When we were lobbying for the ERA, the thing everybody was interested in was whether you shaved your armpits and were wearing dresses. Ridiculous stuff.
Helen got elected to legislature, and she wears slacks. So there was this business about, this feminist business, all these women, these macho women are going to come down here. So we all wore our little skirts and so forth.
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| Sale |
That's right.
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| Brough |
The day the ERA was ratified in Washington state, we have a picture of us on the Capitol steps.
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| Sale |
Which I couldn't find, yes. Yes.
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| Brough |
In short skirts. Because that's what the length of the skirts were.
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| Sale |
Yes. Yes. And you remember–
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| Andrews |
Do you have a copy of that someplace?
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| Sale |
I do. I do. But I didn't have it wherever I was looking last night.
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| Andrews |
That would be wonderful for our website.
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| Sale |
That is very important. And I got all ooh, like this, when I thought last night, I don't know where it is.
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| Brough |
One of us bragged about actually shaving her legs!
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| Sale |
Who said that?
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| Brough |
Rita Shaw.
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| Sale |
Rita. It was just a minute ago, that was the name I was trying to find. I remember, I testified, I don't remember whether it was in the House or the Senate, for the national ERA. And I wore my sexiest dress, and then said I was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and I had two children and I loved my husband, and I wanted to see this pass, please. [laughs] We could do it. We could act.
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| Brough |
We changed procedure a little bit. We, after sending it through the House, the Senate Rules Committee, it was just languishing in the Senate Rules Committee. So we used to just go to the Senate Rules Committee and sit–
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| Sale |
Yes, yes, yes. Sit in the chairs behind them.
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| Brough |
So the big table there was centered. We were seated on the wall around the room, each of us with a focused target. So when this came up for a vote, we could see what our guy was doing. Because the way they told us, we had sufficient number of votes. It just never seemed to come out of committee somehow. And we would stand up when it would get time for the vote to see what questions they were going to make, which upset them. We weren't allowed to disrupt the Rules Committee by standing up. And then the day that it passed, I wasn't there, because I had left because one of them wasn't there. So I found him and got him in there.
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| Sale |
Good for you.
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| Brough |
So, and George Scott–
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| Sale |
Yes. Yes.
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| Brough |
He was wonderful!
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| Sale |
Yes.
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| Brough |
George Scott, I don't know who our senator was.
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| Sale |
George Fleming? A black–
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| Brough |
Fleming came in–
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| Sale |
He would have been mine. That was later?
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| Brough |
That was, I think later.
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| Sale |
Hmm.
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| Brough |
It was just crazy and then the next year, the Senate Rules Committee was arranged so that the table was no longer in the center of the room. [laughs]
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| Sale |
[laughs] I didn't know that. Jean Marie, how did you ever put up with being a legislator? [laughs]
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| Brough |
This was later. It never crossed my mind that I would be, either.
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| Sale |
You're looking at your questions. Should we get to Ellensburg?
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| Andrews |
Perhaps we should, right now. Is there anything else that jumps out at you before we get to Ellensburg?
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| Brough |
Well, other than the fact that I was very happy you sent this book [The Story of Ellensburg], because I had not remembered the fact that there was an initiative out there, and that's why we had organized Friends of Equal Rights Amendment. I kept reading my book here, thinking–
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| Sale |
Yeah, I didn't remember that, either. No.
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| Brough |
What's this Friends of Equal Rights? And why was I doing that in '77?
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| Andrews |
That preceded the conference. What was the initiative?
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| Brough |
The initiative was to rescind the state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Had it been on the ballot, we would have faced a tough campaign season. So we put together Friends of Equal Rights, a committee to prevent that. So we were interviewing for staff jobs and salaries and fundraising and bought stationery, that kind of stuff, to organize a campaign.
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| Sale |
Who's "we?"
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| Brough |
Well, why would it have been as late as '77? Maybe the dates are wrong.
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| Sale |
No, I think this whole business, that, as well as Ellensburg, came up while I was in England on sabbatical with my husband. And when I left in September of '76, I had no idea any of this, and nobody told me, either. So when I came home–
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| Brough |
Organizational, Jane Noland. Organizational logo committee, Rita Shaw. Sharon Dillan, coordinator. I don't remember who she is. Mary Lou Pierce Dickerson, for endorsements. Speaker's bureau was Sharon Dillan. Betty Fletcher was a legal advisor with Nancy Miller.
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| Sale |
Betty Fletcher, yeah.
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| Brough |
Nancy Miller. I forgot about her.
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| Sale |
Oh, yeah.
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| Brough |
Nancy Miller had been the president of the League of Women Voters and became an attorney.
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| Andrews |
The Story of Ellensburg lists five people in Friends of Equal Rights who served on a committee that put together a slate of prospective delegates to Houston. And that's Jeanette Williams, and you, Jean Marie, and Michelle [Mickey] Pailthorp. Shelly Roberts, and Beth Zimmerman.
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| Sale |
Well, Mickey is deceased.
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| Brough |
Well, according to The Story of Ellensburg, we were dealing with delegation organizing, and we were doing, not a slate, but we were getting feminists to put out for consideration. So we had like forty-nine, or forty-eight. I mean, it was twenty-four people that got elected. We had a list of twice that that wanted to meet all of the criteria of the age and the ethnicity and the geographic location and the interests and whatever else that was part of the organizers' interviews.
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| Sale |
What I remember was the point at which you realized that you had to have a slate. Because earlier than that, you were trying to get people to go to Ellensburg to become involved and to see what was going on, because it was going to be a very exciting thing, you know.
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| Brough |
This is the page of her notes with my scribbles. My spelling was miserable. Marcy Whitney, Jean Knights, Judith Woods. Gary Grant was assistant to Ed Chow. Woods' father was ill. Pearl McElheron said no. I mean, these were people that we were calling around the state, and asking if they were interested in–
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| Sale |
In going? Or being on the slate?
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| Brough |
It wasn't the slate so much as being a part of it, or having their names nominated for consideration.
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| Sale |
Well, that's very good work.
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| Brough |
Linda Schodt, Joan Singler, Harriet Wasserman, Carol Glickfeld-- office manager for Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman.
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| Sale |
Yeah.
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| Brough |
These are names that the callers showed responses. Debbie Ventenburg, kept track of a number of campaigns that need supervision. [laughter] Jennifer James, I have there for fundraising. A firm commitment in July from Ann Carlson, Citizens for Fair School Funding. Some others interested were Sarah Stanford, Coleen Patrick, Jean Ameluxen from Vashon Island, who was my roommate in Olympia for seven years. And I was just hoping while I was doing all of this stuff that pro-ERA-ers would be elected.
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| Sale |
I did not know that happened.
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| Brough |
Here's a note in my log. "IWY, a lot of busloads, Missouri, Oklahoma, anti-ERA busloads." And that date is June twenty-ninth.
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| Sale |
That's very late. We didn't know it. And yet this indicates that there were people telling other states that hadn't. Because we were late, weren't we, with our state, one of the last states? And you would have thought that we would have gotten some information from other states faster. I mean, it would have gotten through NOW or through League, or some national thing that would get it down to–
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| Brough |
Beth Zimmerman was [Women's] Political Caucus, Mickey was, what was Mickey at that point?
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| Sale |
ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]?
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| Brough |
Probably. I think she was their staff person.
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| Sale |
I think so. Yeah.
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| Brough |
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