This file was prepared for electronic distribution by the inforM staff. Questions or comments should be directed to inform-editor@umail.umd.edu. THE GETTING IT GAZETTE April 20, 1993 Thinking of a Career Serving Your Country? Auntie Nan Wants You! Is watching so many excellent women rise to prominence in the Clinton administration igniting just a touch of envy? Are you a citizen in search of a cause? Nan Johnson, a 17-year county legislator from Rochester, NY, teaches a course on "Women in Politics" at the Univerisity of Rochester. Here are some of her tips for how women can gain access to the political process: Neighborhood activism is a great training ground for politics. Johnson started her career by getting active in local zoning and land use committees. Oregon's governor Barbara Roberts got into politics when searching for services for her autistic son. Don't lick envelopes. Political party big-wigs often tell women they have to start at the bottom - but how many men start out that way? Take an inventory or your skills and accomplishments and get involved in party politics at your highest skill level. Law school is not mandatory. "The data show that many fewer women than men in government have law degrees," says Johnson. So don't think you have to go back to school. Get appointed to a position on the zoning board, the villiage accounting committee, a mayor's advisory group. Testifying before commissions in an area of your expertise, or as a citizen, is another way to gain visibility. Campaign for promising women. Volunteering to help a candidate win is a great way to make a contribution, exercise your skills and gain essential experience. Lay it on the line. "Women still have trouble standing up and saying, I'm the best person to head this committee, or run for the Congressional seat," says Johnson. But practice helps women get over the "little me" syndrome. So does modeling yourself after the inspiring women in power. Use the Hillary halo. Political parties often have touble finding qualified people to run. Bring them evidence that you have a grass roots network and fund-raising ability. With Mrs. Rodham in the White House, the idea that women can handle tough jobs is spreading. --Ronnie Sandroff The Measure of Man by Lynn Phillips & Company The Getting It Gazette's "Guide to Sexual Congress" Returns It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a pesky wabbit. Spring planting with Tom Foley is confusing. When he isn't fertilizing our green hopes with freshman energy, he's nibbling our seedling-like gains to the roots. This season finds House Speaker Tom Foley all over the garden. [graphics excluded due to electronic limitations] * Winner, Birds and Bees Honeypot: Pushed through Family Leave Bill. What big muscles you have, T.F.! * Infertile fieldhand: Gray-thumbed Foley let women's issue committees shrivel and die. * Rising sap: Tom pumped a lot of oxygen to the new blood on the hill, promoting their rapid political growth. * Underplanting, poor germination, lack of cultivation: No women are chairing committees, and only a handful on subs. * Featherweight on spotted owl protection. * Chicken on term limits: hopes to come home to roost. * Yellowbellied coot on campaign fund reform. * Canada goose: Mated for life to power spouse. ...And the Personals Is Political THE I'LL CRY TODAY SO L.A. WON'T HAVE TO CRY TOMORROW AWARD to Melanie Singer, the former Highway Patrol officer called as a defense witness in the LA police trial, who wept as she described the baton blows she saw rained on Rodney King's head. WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE FIFTIES, MOMMY? The children can't believe the way it was. Give them THE FIFTIES: A WOMEN'S ORAL HISTORY, by Brett Harvey (HarperColins, New York, $20.00) Almost as horrible to read about as it was to live, except that it is OVER. Tell your teenagers there will be a test. Their future depends on not repeating our past. YES, HE IS BLACK, BUT HE HAS THIS PROBLEM: Harvard has asked Colin Powell to be commencement speaker-the slot that once made history when another General announced the Marshall Plan. Will Powell, openly squeamish about gays in the military, be presented with a Crimson version of the Lavendar plan? HAPPY TENTH ANNIVERSAY TO LEADERSHIP TEXAS: They said it couldn't be done, but this month the alumnae meet in Dallas to celebrate. Mayors, legislators, women carrying the word to other states will gather to hear founder, governor, El Jefe, Ann Richards herself. Thanks ma'am. SORE WINNERS: A sampler from George F. Will's adulatory review of THE REAL ANITA HILL by crazed, macho, right-wing, backlash tool David Brock. "No one who has worked with the two of them on a daily basis testified to believing her." Testified, no. But two other women were ready to testify and everyone knows it. "If Hill is a victim, it is not of sexual harassement or 'the power- lessness of women' in 'our misogynist society'. Rather she may be a victim of the system of racial preferances that put her on a track too fast for her abilities, that taught her to think of herself as a victim and made her fluent in the rhetoric of victimization." GOSH! It's hard to believe that Thomas actually won. What is the point of this evil codswallop? Could it be that the right wing it a teensy bit cross because Anita Hill cost them the election? BEIJING '95: First came Mexico City in 1975. Then Houston, Copenhagen, Niarobi - and next China! This time the world's women will meet to examine how sucessfully each country has fulfilled the requirement of "The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimation Against Women." One hundred and ten (110) countries have ratified the convention. The United States has not. How can we hold up our heads? Write to your Senator today demanding action. SPEAKING OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT: Coming to the Supreme Court this Spring Theresa Harris vs Forklift Systems, Inc. The president of the company said she was a "dumb-ass woman" and behaved in ways she considered abusive and demeaning. He said it was only a joke. The first judge said he was crude and vulgar but recommended for dismissal on the grounds that she had not suffered serious psychological injury. On a series of appeals the subsequent courts split. The NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund contends that requiring proof of serious psychological injury is a wholly unacceptable reading of employment law. The focus should be on the employer's harassment, not an employee's fortitude. At least (as far as we know) he didn't plead the "boys will be boys" defense, so popular with the Glen Ridge broomstick rapists and the spur posse in a California high school. TIRED OF GOD THE FATHER? Add a different voice to the dialogue. Add many voices. SACRED TEXTS BY AND ABOUT WOMEN, an anthology edited by Serinity Young (Crossroad Publishing, New York. $40.00) includes the stories of Antigone, the earlies women Quakers, and Sedna, an Eskimo sea-goddess. FIRST THE GOOD NEWS: The public no longer automatically blames the woman or excuses the man ("Oh well, he was drunk"). 90% would call the police if they witnesses a man beating a woman. But now the bad news. The survey conducted by Ethel Klein for the Family Violence Prevention Fund found that 34% of Americans have seen domestic violence, compared to 19% who have witnesses a robbery or mugging. The street corner may be a safer place for a woman to hang out. YO HILLARY AND THE HEALTH TEAM: Managed competition is an oxymoron. "...it's Canada, stupid." SPECIAL TO CONGRESSIONAL WOMEN'S CAUCUS (ADDRESS: LACE-COLLAR GHETTO): It's not the sytle page of the Post you want, it's the front page. Veteran house-watchers suggest you watch and learn from the Black caucus, which treatens to withhold votes and wield real power. CONFIDENTAL TO SECRETARY OF ENERGY O'LEARY: Say it ain't so, Hazel. On March 9, you were quoted in The Washington Post as saying the US would soon resume nuclear testing. Your department's request for $419 million for testing in 1993 and $461 million in 1994 (plus Research & Development funds for weapons labs at over $1.5 billion in 1993 and $1.3 billion in 1994) scares us. You call it "safety testing." We wonder if safety isn't better served by no testing at all. HELLO, MOM? Ninety (90%) percent of the old poor are women. Are we the people whose social security payments should be cut? Are we the people whose medicaid payments should be raised? Is this the thanks we get? Mother's day, smothers days. WANTED: More voices for sanity for these that followed the Gunn assissination. "The violence of killing in the name of pro-life makes a mockery of the pro-life cause." US Catholic Conference. "Responsible leaders have to speak out against this. If they don't we will just become a bunch of terrorists." Bill Price, Texans United for Life. Women Circle the Power Pyramid and Win by Jane O'Reilly Here is a tale of two ways to go about solving a big problem. The pyramid, or the circle? the corporate or the community? The patriarchal, or the feminst? Last August, most of south Miami, Homestead, and rural Dade County was blown apart by hurrican Andrew. Solution #1: George Bush (remember him?) appointed Alvah H. Chapman Jr. a retired chairman of Knight-Ridder newspapers, to the job of overseeing the recovery. "We Will Rebuild!" was organized, with Chapman as chairman atop an impressive if unweildy structure of 60 Directors and 200 trustees and 600 committees, drawn from influencial, mostly pale, male, civic leaders. Adjustments were made to include a few people that are female and/or from racial minorities. IBM lent office space in Coral Gabels - quite far from the most desperately needy area. An executive director was hired at $150,000 a year. Corporate contributions poured in. Meetings were held in stately progression and a vision began to emerge. According to Chairman Chapman, We Will Rebuild! was focusing on long-term relief. Roads! Bridges! Buildings! Some people thought they heard the soft snuffling noise of the civic establishment easing up to the trough. Hurricane? Make that windfall. "Meanwhile," says Lisa Versaci, a women's activist from Coconut Grove, "Women in Dade County were still tying to cook meals for their children on makeshift stoves in their back yards." Solution #2: In December, Lisa got together with a few women's groups. "We just created a structure to vent dissatisfaction, " she says. Women Will Rebuid formed a circle of 40 women's groups including BPW women, Haitian Women, Zonta women, Church Women United, AAUW, NOW women, all the WOMEN who have helped make Miami a great American city. An alternative vision began to emarge. The women see Miami as a polyglot city where quality of life is more important than quantity of monumental construction (which does create jobs- mostly for men, of course). When they look at the disaster areas they see immediate necessity for day care, housing, clinics, escape from domestic violence. And when they look at We Will Rebuild! they see themselves, their talents and their experience, locked out. Chapman responded to their request for more seats on the board by creating a new bit of bureaucracy to examine potential volunteers. Nonetheless, Women Will Rebuild has the key. A coalition, with information, making noise, demanding accountability and accessibility equal - in the Year After the Year of the Women - political leverage. So far, the women have won a promise that $2.1 million will go for childcare (for buildings, notes Versaci), and a grant will go to Planned Parenthood for a program to cope with teen pregnancy. What to do Now? Quotations from The Little Pink Sheet To Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Plant the Seeds of Positive Change by Ronni Sandroff Spring will be a little late this year. It can't be helped. The nuclear winter of the last 12 years is over, but the thaw is slow. Mother Earth and the rest of us mothers need a little time to recover from our learned helplessness of the Reagan/Bush years, when it took so much of our energy to try to stall government backpedalling on women's rights. Along with our winter coats, it's time to shed whatever outsider-blues, bitter cynicism, or "taking care of #1" approaches that may have helped us survive in the past. It takes time to unlearn the politics of denial, to take off the blinders some of us learned to use as we carefully stepped over the home- less, nimbly dodged bullets on city streets, or pretended that corporate greed, the raiders and collapsing industries were just another New Age innovation (see "Auntie Nan"). But, soft! the Getting It Gazzette sees the tips of the tulips planted long ago poking through the melting snow. Women of all ages report that the converstion around dinner tables, business lunches, in aerobic classes, even Easter and Passover parties has quickened. "People aren't talking about them- selves so much anymore," a friend reports in relief. "Everyone's talking about the new administration. What huge problems have been left in their laps." As the snow begins to melt, the tremendous potholes left by the last two administraitons are becoming more visible. The prospect of filling in all those craters is truly daunting. But as many of us learned from working on the '92 Presidential and women candidate campaigns, once you're involved you can't help but be more optimistic. Activists can see that some obstacles are simply: a bunch of well-organzied (sometimes well-meaning) people who can be persuaded, organizied, brought around, co-opted, converted, or forced to change. The Getting It Gazette--founded in July, 1992 to move women's issues to the forefront of the presidential campaigns-can now take on the time-honored task of the free press: speading zoo-doo on the new growth to help bring them to flower. Here are some of the tulips we've spotted lately: *The White House now receives 75,850 messages for President Clinton a day, according to USA Today - many thousands more than previous administraions. Guess we all knew that the Reagan/Bush administrations were deaf in both ears. *Despite dire predictions, the Clinton administation found no shortage of hightly qualified women and minorities to appoint to high office. Could it be that the Bush administration just wasn't looking? *April 28 introduces a new holiday - "Take Our Daughters to Work Day." Its sponsor, the Ms. Foundation, hopes the effort will enhance the self-image and career visions of adolescent women. *At press time, Women who Run With The Wolves is 35 weeks on the bestseller list. Ecology- and psychology minded women belive their "essential nature" is to protect the Earth for this, and future, generations. "It's no coincidence that the ascendance of women and a focus on ecology have emerged at the same time," says a twenty-something source. In 1992, American women learned how to vote our self-interest... and win! Now we need to do the same for our economic and social self-interest. How about support for Clinton's job program: Can you organize call and letters to lobby your senator? We also need to build constituencies to keep women officeholders active on our behalf. We need legislations that gets deadbeat dads to pay up. When an issue moves you, call a few friends - don't agonize, organize. Support Your Local Abortionist There's more than one way by Carol Wheeler When our new President elminated the gag rule and the ban on fetal tissue research and on RU-486, Jeri Rasmussen was in Washington. She'd gone there to attend the inaguration. It was like going into an occupied city and liberating it, said Rasmussen, who is head of an abortion clinic in Minneapolis. All that ugliness elminated with one stroke of Clinton's pen. But the effects of the 12-year-war against women's right to choose linger. In Buffalo, torn apart by last summers Operation Rescue invasion, an attempt has been made to heal the communtity. Search for Common Ground, an organization that deals in nonviolent conflict resolution in such places as Northern Ireland, began its first domestic operation with the Buffalo Coalition for Common Ground. Its proudest success so far is one day long workshop attended by both sides, simply an opportunity for recognizing each other's humanity. Of course there are people on both sides who feel too strongly to participate, says one board member. Dr. David Gunn is dead. Rasmussen quotes his son as saying he'd be alive today if the police had heeded the warning they'd received. And the clinic access bill Dr. Bunn's death inspired died, too, in the Flordia Senate just the other day. Operation Rescue is coming to Minneaplis July 9th to 14th. Rasmussen thinks they'll concentrate on homes this time. She's already had a brick thrown through her window, had pickets outside her door, men with attack dogs on her front lawn, been stalked and verbally accosted in shopping centers and restaurants. Rasmussen views it all as the death throes of a dinosaur. She thinks the craziness will get worse before it gets better, but even most people who disagree with the prochoice position don't want to be associated with those loonies: "They're beginning to realize what our position is, that we don't want to force anything, just give everyone the right to decide." What does the movement need? Some good investigative reporting, Rasmussen says, to expose the obscure ministers who come to town, stir up trouble, then leave turmoil behind them. For the last 12 years they were protected by the Justice Department. Rasmussen urges us all to: *Call local clinics and ask what they need done. (Realize there's some paranoia and be prepared to fill out some forms.) *If you have a clinic director, doctor or emplyee living near you, you can hold a house party to honor them. Neighbors can help, too, by being on the lookout for anti-choice demonstrators. *Go to your churches and synagogues, ask the ministers to speak out against violence against women. They needn't state their position, just say the violence has got to stop. The religious community has power; we have to make them use it. *Write your legislators. *Write to your daily paper. *Get your local government to pass ordinances. *Support no-stalking bills, clinic-access bills, bills to force medical schools to teach abortion skills. What Next, Gazette? The Movie? The Diet Plan? The Gazette moves on. Beyond mailing and broadcast faxes, beyond distribution by hand at places and on occasions where women gather (all of which we plan to continue), we're entering the world of cyberspace. We envision an electronic conference that allows many different kinds of women (you!) to contribute news and views to The Gazette. We imagine a whole web of regional contacts, downloading The Gazette, adding their local action agenda and spin, then distributing it through their own electronic networks. For now, when we're not cursing our software, we're blessing the promise it holds. But while we are getting the world on a string, it's still a shoestring. We are all vounteers. We can't offer you tax deductions. What we do offer besides our vision of equal power, opportunity and rights for women, is a positive body-image (even whe The Year of the Woan is followed by this, The Year of the Waif). We propose the simple diet regimen. THE GETTING IT GAZETTE DIET 1. When shopping for dinner or dining out, identify the seductive sweet with the highest calorie count. 2. Imagine eating every bit of it, but choose a nice piece of fruit instead. As you munch... 3. Imagine senate committee, prospective mayoral candidates and presidential head hunters calling you and your allies daily for your opinion on important topics. Imagine an equal number of women and men running your courts, your town, your state. Imagine ruling the world for a day. 4. Jot down the price of the treat you didn't get. 5. When all the rich, expensive, fattening things you didn't buy total at least $35 or $50 or more ($20 for low-income Gazetteers, of course), send us the money. In return, we will do everthing we can to help women gain our fair share of benevolent power (and lose any unwanted pounds), plus we will send you all the hot pink and tasty issues we publish this year. Think of it this way: You can't be too thin. We can't be too rich. The Getting It Gazette, 451 West 24th Street, New York, New York 10011; 212/229-0763 Yes, Gazetteers! Our needs coincide, so I am sending you _____$35 _____$50 _____$100 _____$100,000 My clothes fit better already, and I look forward to receiving all 1993 copies of The Getting It Gazette, filled with food for thought. I understand that if I have contributed $100 or more, I will receive a T-shirt with your famous Gazette logo. Name_________________________________Tel.________________Fax____________ Address____________________________________________________Zip__________