The Imperative for Women in Government

Carol Williams | Former Senator, Montana Senate

In the early ’80s we had a very big scare of what the nuclear buildup in both the Soviet Union and in the United States could bring. It was a very tense time. What I noticed after many months of paying attention to the nuclear debate issues was that almost nobody was on television expressing an opinion of a woman.

They were all generals and colonels and scientists. But they were all men.

I got to talking with a few friends, and we decided that it would be really interesting if we could start a group that would be just for women to explain nuclear technology and the importance of the issue in terms of everyday concerns around the kitchen table, of how it would affect your education and lack of spending on schools because we’re spending all the money on nuclear weapons.

Consequently we got to visiting with friends, and a woman whose husband was in the United States Senate at the time, Betty Bumpers, was very enthused about it and she said, let’s just start a group to take care of the problem.

So we did. It was an international women’s organization called Peace Links. I came on board in 1985 to run the organization, and basically what we did was travel around the country to talk to women about why the use of the nuclear weapons was important to them and their children. We figured that if a woman cares enough to give her kid a vitamin before he goes to school in the morning, she should care enough about whether we’re all going to be blown up by a nuclear weapon.

What we found out was there was an enormous amount of women who had this concern, but nobody was speaking out about it. I had an interesting thing happen in Missoula, in fact on campus. I was finding that everywhere I went and gave speeches about the importance of getting involved, and I remembered that almost never did women ask questions. They never raised their hands. Consequently after I had finished my speech and asked for questions I said, “Ok. Now I’m not going to take any questions from men until the women are through talking. The women can ask the first questions. When they are all finished then you can talk.”

I said this because I found the mood in these meetings stifling for women. They just didn’t feel like they knew enough about it. Yet if you could get two or three people to talk about it, they’d open up and they’d take over the whole meeting.

We had another concern, that at every meeting people would raise their hands and ask, what about the Soviet Union? Well, we really couldn’t deal with this question without any first-hand experience. So we decided to bring women from the Soviet Union to the United States and tour them around the country and have these conversations. We were sure they were having the same conversations we were, and of course that was true.

We started the very first exchanges in 1985 with women from the Soviet Union, touring them all around the United States for about a decade. It was an extremely interesting experience. We had great discussions everywhere we went; they had similar concerns about their families as we did. They worried about education. They worried about child care. They worried about equality. We felt this was a great contribution, and that while history says Ronald Reagan, because of his speech in Berlin, brought down the Berlin Wall, I think all these women on courthouse steps had a lot to say about what happened during the 1980s.

After the Peace Links, my husband, Pat, retired from Congress and we came back home to live in Missoula. I wasn’t here more than three days before somebody called me and asked me to run for the legislature. When I came home and told Pat about it he said, “I thought we came home to get away from all this.”

And I said, “No, that was you.”

The things that concerned me, and I noticed it when I first went to the legislature, was that all the committees in the legislature were chaired by men. Even in the years when Democrats were in the majority and there were a lot of women who were elected, it was not a good balance in terms of the ratio between men and women. Thus I decided in 2007 to run for the Majority Seat in the Montana Senate, and was fortunate to get elected with help from my colleagues.

I was the first woman that had ever been elected Majority in the Montana Senate, which takes me back to Jeanette Rankin and her difficulty in going around the state working on women’s equality. Here we were in 2007 and I was the first Majority Leader. It made me more committed on how we can make a difference in the lives of women.

For instance, of those serving in legislative or governor’s seats, only 20 percent are women. That’s troubling because we are 51 percent of the population. To be 90 years into women’s suffrage and not have a better demographic than that really troubled me. Here’s the problem with women being elected. You can’t get elected if you don’t run. And women don’t want to run; they really don’t want to be involved because it’s getting to be very contentious. Elections are hard. It’s time away from your family and your job.

The best thing that any woman could have, if they decide to run for office, is to have a wife. Because I notice that no man who is asked to run for office says, “Oh I’m not sure I can be away from the kids that much.” Or, “I don’t know if they’ll get their dinner, how they’ll get to school, how they’ll get to violin practice, etc.”

Men don’t make those decisions that way. But women have to.

Consequently it’s harder to get women involved. This made me wonder why we have more women on campuses than we have men but we don’t have as many women who are professors? Why do we have in the Fortune 500 companies, still only 17 that are led by women? Why do we have, and this is of particular interest to me, more lawyers that are women than we have who are partners in law firms?

It reminds me of a story about when I was contemplating being a lawyer after I graduated with my teaching degree. I came down to Missoula to visit with the law school dean at the time, and he said to me, after he walked me back to my car because he didn’t think my dad would like me to walk across campus when it was starting to get dark by myself, “You know most women, dear, don’t want to be lawyers. They want to marry lawyers.”

It really struck me in 1964 on the campus where Jeannette Rankin lived,  after she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1914, that here we were with the same mentality.

That year, I looked back, and they only picked one woman to accept into the law school.

Now, more women are graduating from the law school than men. But they are still only 18 percent of the partnerships of major law firms.

So we have a lot of work to do. The challenge I think is getting more women to run, getting more women elected. To do that we have to reach young people. We have to make it clear that we still only make 77 cents of the dollar that men make; there are still issues of choice. All of those things we thought we were going to solve in the 60s haven’t gone away. It’s taken longer than we thought. It’s going to be the challenge for those of us who are still involved to reach out more to younger people and bring them into making the same kinds of sacrifices that we’ve made.

Because we aren’t going to have equity in this world, we are not going to have real democracy in America, we are not going to have justice in America, until we have equality in America.

It’s not because women are smarter, it’s not because women are better. Women lead differently. Women have different ideas. And with the challenges we have in this century, we cannot change America and make it better without everybody at the table, everybody putting their best foot forward, and everybody making a sacrifice to meet this challenge.

If we don’t do it, we can’t be who we started out to be. We’re about to celebrate the women’s suffrage anniversary and I’m hoping that we can use that as a vehicle to engage young women around the country into caring and participating more in their political system than they do currently.

That’s the challenge for all of us.

We need to do it.