Women Urged to Enter the Main Arena of Politics

Flight attendant Ellen McGuire, a recent striker against Trans World Airlines, stood before 200 participants at a women’s political conference in Santa Ana on Saturday and nervously appealed for a boycott of the airline.

Immediately, Nampet Panichpant-M of South Laguna, a recent Thai immigrant, stood up and, to cheers, ripped a TWA ticket to New York into shreds.

“That’s like burning a draft card,” quipped Cypress Mayor John Kanel, one of the few men in the audience.

But for many, this was more than an act of protest. It symbolized the message underlying the nearly daylong conference at Rancho Santiago College: That women who seek power must become involved in big business, big labor and all levels of politics. They should aspire to the presidencies of General Motors, the AFL-CIO and the United States. But first, conference participants were warned, they must add issues such as U.S. foreign policy, trade and transportation to their political repertoire.

Do Not Impress

Issues such as child care and the equal rights amendment, while important, simply do not impress the public sufficiently to win elections for candidates who dwell on them, several speakers said.

But when women speak out on foreign affairs, for example, they are often told by male politicians that they don’t understand the complexities involved, the speakers added. Also, male politicians often say they cannot afford to adopt a “feminist” perspective on foreign policy for fear that they will appear weak, the speakers said.

“They’re afraid of being accused of being spineless when they’re up for reelection,” said Norma Chinchilla, an historian and Latin American affairs specialist at California State University, Long Beach.

Addressing a workshop titled “Invisible Women: American Foreign Policy,” Chinchilla said that foreign policy is steeped in a machismo mystique that weakens women’s influence on decisions made in Congress and at the White House.

That machismo leads to fascination with “military gadgetry, not diplomacy,” added fellow panelist Sue Embrey, an Asian-American activist and educator.

The conference, titled “The Political Woman,” was sponsored by the Women’s Coalition of Orange County and several organizations of women activists.

And although the conference was nonpartisan, it had a decidedly Democratic bent: Former Orange County Republican Party Chairman Lois Lundberg, one of the panelists, observed that there was “Democratic but no Republican propaganda” in conference literature packets handed to each participant. And Orange County Democratic Party Chairman Bruce Sumner received an emotional ovation during lunch because of his current 341-vote recount lead over Art Hoffmann, a follower of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., in the 40th Congressional District’s Democratic primary.

Also, the 1986 election battle between Republican County Supervisor Bruce Nestande and Democratic incumbent March Fong Eu for Secretary of State spilled into the conference. Nestande was allowed to address participants at the last minute to balance Eu’s long-scheduled appearance and designation as “special guest” in the printed program.

However, both Eu and Nestande gave nonpartisan speeches aimed at encouraging women to seek new political challenges, and did not ask for political support in their respective campaigns.

And there were lighter moments: Ed Dornan, an English teacher elected to the Irvine City Council this month after what he called grass-roots support, held up one of 20,000 herb pots distributed to voters; Embrey told how she was the only Asian-American introduced as a delegate from Japan at a Copenhagen conference in 1980; and Saddleback Valley Unified School District Trustee Kris Kister demonstrated the proper way to shake hands with a male voter by simultaneously grasping his upper arm.

But the conference agenda was dominated by serious issues. The most-attended workshop, for example, involved discussion of a United Nations conference on women held in Nairobi, Kenya, a year ago.

Margaret Prescod, head of an international effort called Wages for Housework, said that conference taught her to ask herself everyday how she can help empower people with less power than she has. First, she said, they must realize their labor has value.

Value of Unpaid Work

Prescod said she successfully worked in Nairobi for adoption of a policy aimed at forcing governments to include in their measurement of gross national products the value of the work women do in the home and in the fields but for which they receive no pay.

Another panelist, June Dunbar of the Los Angeles County Commission on the Status of Women, said the United Nations conference awakened her to conditions for women in other countries. For example, she said, in some countries land automatically passes from father to son, and a widow is powerless to do anything about it. Pakistani women who are raped, she said, must have four male witnesses to substantiate her accusation; otherwise, she is publicly flogged. And in Gambia, she added, women in the fields harvest 95% of the rice but receive no payment.

Throughout the Santa Ana conference, participants expressed a variety of reasons for their attendance.

Continue With the Struggle

Mauroor Marconi said she was there because of “my desire to continue on with the struggle for women’s equality--to achieve this we must make strides in the political arena.” Referring to the workshop about the United Nations conference, she said:

“I teach high school home economics and child development, and I feel my students need to know and realize they are part of a much larger world than Westminster, California. Their problems are similar to problems of young women in many other parts of the world.”

Registered nurse Teresa Lee Rowe said she had no plans to seek office but wants to learn skills useful in the internal politics of her profession’s state and national associations, and to better understand her husband’s situation. “I’m not a candidate,” she said, “but my husband is; he’s running for the (City) Council in Huntington Beach.”

Career Decisions

Shannon Christian of Cowan Heights, a graduate student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said she was trying to decide whether to pursue a job in the federal bureaucracy or aim instead for politics and policy-making at the state or local level.

“There’s a lot of discrimination against women right now in the federal government,” Christian said, “so I’m looking at other options.”

Jean Bender said she was attending Saturday’s conference to pick up skills needed for her planned 1988 bid for a seat on the Westminster City Council. She lost a similar bid in 1984.

Finally, Carol Carlos, a counselor for sexually abused people with the county’s Victim Witness Assistance Program, said she was interested in learning political skills because laws passed by politicians affect the criminal justice system and because programs like hers constantly seek money through the political process.

Asked if she was interested in seeking public office someday, Carlos replied, “Maybe.”