Illustrated Daily; 4006; New Mexico's Grand Dames II

Ufff… trl least ... nd nd nd nd nd The Illustrated Daily, Managing Editor How Roads. Good evening. Last night in a fascinating visit with two of New Mexico's leading political figures, we began an inquiry into one of the most significant and potentially volatile issues in our political life today. It has to do with women in politics, notably the long struggle of a growing number of women active in electoral politics. In part one of this attempt at understanding we probed the thoughts and the experiences of an earlier generation of women in New Mexico electoral politics.

Francis Shipman, 74-year-old former Republican National Committeewoman from New Mexico, six times a candidate for public office. Dorothy Klein, 79-year-old Democrat, former chairman of the Bernalillo County Commission, elected delegate to the state's 1969 Constitutional Convention. When I was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago, the professor with whom I was working in the field of public administration Leonard White, was asked one day what women could do in Washington. He said, well, if you want to get ahead, what you have to do is to become a secretary. And then probably you can work your way up. I was very naive at that stage. I thought all you needed to have was courage and initiative and the right spirit. And you could do anything you wanted to do. I didn't realize for a while that being a woman was a handicap in public affairs.

But that gave me a clue. Now, if I go to Washington, am I going to have to be a secretary because I'm a woman? Here I'm going to get a degree in public administration. Well, that's what you found out when you were in Washington. Maybe you couldn't, maybe you couldn't because you're a woman. There was a prestige about this, about women in politics. The Republicans felt that it was not a ladylike thing to do. The only reason I ever put my foot in the political ring was because we were over at a rally in Santa Cruz. And this old gentleman by the name of Mr. Garcia looked at me and he got up and they said, we want candidates, nominate candidates for the legislature. And he got up and he put his hand in his liberal roles. Took his gloves off. He always wear gloves, you know. And he said, I want to propose that Mrs. Sheepman be our candidate for the legislature. And my husband turned to me and he says, you can't refuse an invitation like that of bidding politics ever since.

And I've gotten a lot of offices here in the county on the land use planning committee, on the soil conservation committee, and everything like that. So you don't see it as an excuse? I don't see it as that at all because they keep coming at me and wanting me to do this, that and the other. And they want me to take an office, but as long as I don't get paid for it, it's okay. Now there are those who would like to believe attitudes of that sort have changed, but have they. Tonight we continue and our focus is upon the current generation of New Mexico women active in electoral politics. And like their predecessors, Democratic state representative Judith Pratt and Republican state representative Lynn Titler are movers and shakers whose careers have taken them to the very center of the electoral process. Judith Pratt, three times a successful candidate for a seat in the New Mexico House of Representatives, where she is presently chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. Lynn Titler, active in New Mexico, Republican United States Senator Pete Domenici, successful reelection campaign in 1978, elected to the state legislature in 1982, where she serves on the House Appropriations and Finance Committee.

Lynn, Judy, I'd like to pick up with an observation that Dorothy Klein and Francis Shipman shared with us last evening about the period when they were coming to their political maturity. And certain axioms about the legitimate involvement of women in politics. Francis Shipman said it was just simply not thought to be lady-like for a woman to get involved in politics. Dorothy Klein said her mother told her, quite frankly, it was a dirty business and she shouldn't be in it. And you tread that territory today. How tenacious are those attitudes, Judy? The thing that I've encountered most is just sheer astonishment on the part of my parents at each juncture. They're amazed that I'm still in there and that I actually can win an election. It seems to be mainly just astonishment.

Lynn? I think my father was talking to the mother of last night's commentary. He was very upset about my initial decision. He knew I'd been involved in politics for a long time, but on a staff aspect of it working in Washington, working on people's campaigns. When I decided that I was going to become a candidate myself, he was appalled and mother just shook her head. The larger outside the family environment, the larger tenacity of that point of view, does it encumber women who want to be involved in electoral politics still? I think it does in some respects. And again, it depends upon the attitude toward women of the people that you're talking to. I know when I was knocking doors during my campaign, several people asked me how I could possibly think of running for politics because he would stay home and take care of my husband and my children. So that still exists.

Amazingly, I didn't get as many of those sort of stereotypical inquiries that I expected. You did expect them. Somehow I have two young children, and I expected to get that kind of question. But for the most part, I was so issue-oriented. I'm so issue-oriented that that's all I let people talk about, so they didn't have a chance to question any of the personal side of it. Well, that raises another question I'd like to follow up from the conversation with Dorothy Klein and Francis Shipman last night. One of the last questions I asked them was, what would they like to think, what legacy would they like to feel they'd bequeathed to your generation of women in politics? They actually had a hard time dealing with that question. They hoped they served you well as predecessors. But your perspective, do you owe them any debts of gratitude? Did they plow territory that otherwise you might have found more difficult? Oh, there's no question about it. I mean, they are the grand aims for New Mexico, and we have so much admiration for them and owe them so much.

But the thing that probably is a little bit discouraging is that the progress has been so slow. They plowed ground that seemed, for instance, I'm a chairman of a committee, and there hasn't been another female chairman of a committee since something like the late 40s. Was that culture or tease of Peña de Clevverne? She was a majority leader, wasn't she? She was a majority leader, and there was a woman who was the chairman of agriculture somewhere in maybe in the late 50s or so. I don't want to get back there, but I'd like lends insights into what you owe that generation. I think we all owe them a major debt of thanks, because they have given both of them their lives to New Mexico politics. And I know Francis within the Republican Party is the one of the two that I know know much better. She has created an atmosphere for women in politics in New Mexico that couldn't have been achieved without dedication like hers, and I would say thank you to her every opportunity I had, and to women like her.

I was going to say the larger group of them, not these two necessarily, but all of them. I think all of the women who have spent so much of their time and dedication to both major political parties and to issues and causes outside a straight political realm have opened doors for Judy and myself and for the other women in a legislature, and those who will follow us. Well, let's talk about that, if you don't mind. In the early 1940s, let's see, I think there were something like eight women in the state legislature. Today there are nine. Now my instinct is to ask you, is this a definition of progress, but I think that would be rhetorical. There was an increase of women during the 30s and during the war, and then after the war, maybe it was a part of this whole phenomenon after the war of women should be back in the home, but you saw such a long decline. And not as many women came to the fore in the 60s, either, surprisingly. And just maybe in the last few years, we've started to see an increase again.

I'd like to know all the historical reasons for that. I'm curious. You've got any thoughts on that, Lynn. You've got insights into the historical forces we're working with here. I think Judy has probably put her finger on them. I think most of the women who were so actively involved in so many areas of our life during the 40s, the war years, it was back home, back to families, back to the traditional values for women after that. And we're just now seeing a new emerging group of women, a larger number of women. There have always been women, I think, like those you spoke with, who have been active and have refused to take a more traditional role or a backseat role. But I think the numbers of women who are wanting to become actively involved and to get into the elective side of it are increasing because we're seeing that's where things are going to have to happen for women in general. And we can't just sit back and let somebody else do it for us. Let's move into the world of the two-party system, the American two-party system, the responsiveness of the two major political parties, two women interested not in serving on committees, but in running for public office in the electoral process itself.

Putting your personal partisanship aside if you can. I was asking a lot, I know. Is there any evidence whatsoever that one of the major parties is more responsive to women interested in electoral politics than others? If I can jump on that one first. I think the party that I'm affiliated with has taken a lot of heat on that subject and I think unjustly. I'd like to first of all speak from my perspective as a woman, as a Republican. There were no barriers put up for me nor were there any special invitations to me to run just because I was a woman. But I think nationally the Republicans have, while we have fewer elected officials, and I've just been doing some research on that for some talks, I've been giving to various groups around the state, there haven't been any barriers. I love to give Judy a hard time on this because Republicans theoretically are holding women down, but our numbers in the state legislate are twice that of the Democrats. So here in New Mexico, that's definitely not a problem.

Judy, I see why she wanted to jump. She wanted to get that shot in. Well, they are. The Republicans outnumber us two to one. We've got a ways to go in the Democratic Party here to encourage and support women who run for office. But I always say, well, there's women and there's women. I think that we've got women public officials who have not been supportive many times of those issues that are especially pertinent to women who have not been supportive of services to women. And so I'm not really in the classic sense of feminist. I think that many times we have men who are much more sensitive to the issues that I'm concerned about than maybe some women public officials. So I certainly am pushing my party to come along and start promoting women candidates. There are some traditional values there that have somewhat held them back.

So you've both of you in a way to find a sort of taken a shot at some of the conventional wisdom here. Your right, the perception is that the Republican Party is less responsive to women and politics than is the Democratic Party. But if that is not the case, I suppose the question have to be how comes it to be that so many political analysts, including many leading Republican analysts, are today saying that Republicans may well have a very hard time, the 1984 presidential election, for want of supportive women. We've got the gender gap question is a real question. And one of the things that it's done is I think it's activated women and it's got them really starting to look at politics. Traditionally, probably the biggest group of non-registered voters has been women. And this has got to change. And I see a lot of interest in women actually jumping in there and not just staying in the back rooms and like in the envelopes but getting right in the forefront in politics.

When you have a situation that's as volatile as this one has been under this administration around women's issues, it does at least get people thinking about politics. I find the whole discussion of gender gap amusing because first of all, women as a group are not going to vote as a block. There may be some statistics that are showing approval ratings as certain policies or certain people show a higher disapproval or more dissatisfaction among women as a whole. But we're no more going to get women to vote and mass for a candidate. Then we are all men or all of any other group. Everyone has a different opinion of how they want to do things. And while as Judy mentioned, women historically may not have been as active in registration, being registered to vote, nationally the statistics that I've been looking at lately show that there are more women registered in the country than men and more women voted in the 1980 national election than men. And that's a significant number and there are certain areas of the country where perhaps a major turnout by women might shift or might swing an election and that's why I think both major parties are giving a lot of attention to it but it's not going to happen that we're going to vote as a block.

I agree, except that the one time when it will have an effect is when there is a difference between the two candidates on those issues that women traditionally are most concerned about. Then I think we'll see the women's vote as not a total block but a big force. One of her predecessors last night, I think was Dorothy Klein said that upon making her decision, I think it was in the early 1950s to enter upon, take a shot of elective office. It was just axiomatic that she oughting because she would be a political liability to the rest of whatever ticket it was she was thinking of running on. She ran anyway, she lost. The question I wanted to ask you in that connection is can women who run for elective office today expect a larger share of the vote, the women's vote, than their male counterparts? In other words, is it now a political asset in some instances given your statistics that you just shared with us to be a woman in politics?

Certainly seems to have an effect in my races in my district. I lead the ticket in number of votes in my district. I get more votes than the governor or whoever else is running because probably partly because I'm an aggressive campaigner. But I have a tremendous base among the women in my district and it's clearly a very influential factor. I don't feel that it's an issue in my district. I think my support in district 27 here in Albuquerque is across the board it's broad-based and I don't feel that I'm gaining more support from women as a group from being a woman candidate. I think what I'm achieving in the legislature and the issues that I ran on initially are what will maintain the base that I have and I don't see it focusing on a gender group. Let me try the question slightly different fashion. Forget you whole public office and that you have run and you have won and that sort of thing.

What about inside your political parties when it gets down to decision-making time? Do people ever say let's run Judy Pratt because she's a woman and we'll pick up some of the women's vote that we might otherwise get or let's run Lynn Titler for that same reason within the Republican party? No, that's one thing that I'm pleased about and I would be disturbed if the Republican party started doing that. Obviously we have to look at what factors are going to enter into a close race. Is there something that's going to swing it one way or another? But I've heard no discussion of that within the New Mexico State Republican party and I really hope there wouldn't be one. I don't want to get into the situation of being a token or being run simply because of my gender and I don't think most New Mexico women want to see that happen. I think the issues to me most women's issues and there are some that are clearly defined as women's issues but to me most issues are not women's issues per se. It's broad based. I don't want to see us getting into divisiveness, whether it's minorities, minorities, Hispanic, Black women. I just don't want to see that start.

Judy, can you take a shot of that for me? Well, I don't know about the Republican party but the Democratic party pretty much let's the candidate rise to the surface. You're pretty much on your own. You decide to run, you do it. For instance, my first primary, there were five candidates and it was mainly a test. The survival of the fittest, whoever could run the best campaign and whoever could get the most votes, then got the party's blessing. It's really dependent on the individual, very much so. When we're looking for candidates anywhere, we're looking for somebody who's eager enough and hungry enough to run and clear enough about the issues and intelligent enough to go out there and run a campaign. Gender, in fact, doesn't enter. Going way back into history, there was that period of time, the suffragettes, the drive for the vote and the 19th Amendment, who argued very strongly that women must be included in the political process because, quite frankly, they would bring us a more moral politic, a more ethical politic. Dorothy Klein last night said that, and she admits to being a teenage suffragette, that she shares some of those attitudes.

What about today? Do women bring anything to politics that their male counterparts don't? Well, a few years ago, I might have said no, but I'm beginning to feel like there are certain things about women. I guess I don't know, I hate to say biologically, but that, in fact, there's a certain nurturing side of women that is environmentally, probably, and biologically determined. This is a risky thing to say. But that, in fact, what I've begun to see is that there is a certain kind of sensitivity that comes from women in politics that's slightly different from what you get from men. Now, I don't want to carry it too far, because I don't want to over generalize it, but I think there's a difference. One of the things that happens, too, is that sometimes we find it a little more difficult to be in confrontational, direct confrontational kinds of politics.

It's hard to risk. It's hard to stick your neck out and take a certain attack. And that's probably, historically, environmentally learned. But I think there is a certain distinction. Some of Judy's colleagues would probably say a representative titler doesn't back off from confrontational politics. I think, in some respects, women might be more inclined to maneuver or negotiate. But overall, I would have to say that women are people, too. And there are going to be people in politics who are amoral. There are going to be people in politics who are very concerned with morality. And whether or not they're male or female, the time that I've spent in the political process, I haven't seen that women would necessarily be more or less moral in politics. I think, in Santa Fe, particularly, partly because I'm a freshman representative, a new representative, women probably tend to be back a little bit more on confrontation.

What do you mean by that? I think if it starts to get hot and heavy in some committees, the women will tend to sit back for a while and not jump into the middle of it. But on the other hand, if it's an issue that I firmly believe in, that I'm really, I've got an opinion on this issue, I'm not going to back down, I'll jump into it. And I've seen Judy do the same thing. Nobody's going to roll over either one of us. If it's something we really strongly feel, we've got to say or do what we feel we need to do. And I've kind of gained the reputation, I guess, of jumping into the middle of things, especially budgetary matters. I pretty much stayed quiet the first couple of weeks, got my sea legs and jumped in. Do you ever canvassing your districts out on the campaign trail? Do you ever encounter women, voters who say, I'm sorry, I do not believe women should be involved in politics?

I haven't. I've had some of them question me who were more traditionally oriented. But I've never had one flat outside, you shouldn't be doing this, you're a woman. I think it's because, maybe because I'm so forward on the issues and they're always out in front. I don't find that, but I've had maybe more from women than anyone. I remember one woman, I came to her door and she said, I know who you are, slam. And you assume that had to do with the issues. I have had a number of women in politics tell me that they often find that the women with whom they come in contact as potential voters, ask them harder questions, are more demanding of them, have higher expectations of them somehow. Has that, in any way, jive with your experience?

I think it's some of the professional groups that I've addressed, especially those, the professional organization for women or some of the other feminine oriented groups that I've been meeting with, tend to have some pretty hard questions because they're politically active and politically aware. Door to door, I'd say 50-50 again, I've got an extremely aware district and they both sides come on. Before we run out of time, I want to ask you both, is the same question I ask your predecessors, if three decades from now we were to reassemble, what would you like to be able to say you'd bequeathed to the succeeding generation of women in New Mexico electoral politics? I'd like to be able to have left a legacy of a certain fighting spirit for the rights of the people, for the rights of the working person, for the rights of people to fight for a decent standard of life and to leave that as an example that other people can follow. Our philosophies are going to show here. I think if anything, I would want people to remember my contribution to politics in New Mexico is being one of focusing on individual responsibilities, individual rights, and the need for government as a whole to serve the purpose that government should but to withdraw from areas where it is not legitimately serving the people.

And I hope that I would also have encouraged other women to follow in our footsteps and run for elective office. Representative Lynn Titler, Representative Judith Pratt, thank you so much for helping us better understand this terribly significant issue in our lives today. Thank you, Hal. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. I'm Hal Rhodes. Good night. I want to ask you both a question. Will and should the time come when a conversation of the sort we have had over these past two evenings be quite beside the point? I hope so. Women are advancing in the political arena and there's all this attention placed on women or breaking into this area, but I hope soon enough there are going to be so many women involved that it's not going to be an issue. I would agree. I would agree with Lynn. I think she put it very well.

That's your hope. Well, it happened. I think so. I think it's a matter of survival at both parties for one thing. Yes, I know what you mean. Can we be like drops of water falling on the stone, splashing, breaking, dispersing in air? Can we be like drops of water falling on the stone, splashing in air? Can we be like drops of water falling on the stone, splashing, breaking, dispersing in air? Can we be like drops of water falling on the stone?