Redefining Feminism : Five Local Women Honored for Grass-Roots Activism

If you asked 10 people to define feminism--even 10 feminists--there would probably be 10 definitions.

“Most people think of feminism in terms of equal rights,” said Vivian Hall, co-founder of Women’s Network Alert, a nonpartisan coalition of Orange County women activists.

“But that’s only part of it. Feminism is a philosophy that encompasses all the best human values: peace in the world, environmental concerns, education, survival of the family.”

Today five local feminists will be honored by Women’s Network Alert at the Seventh Annual Suffrage Day Luncheon at the Balboa Bay Club. This year’s honorees are peace activist Marion Pack; businesswoman and Cal State Fullerton lecturer Gail Reisman; Cypress College professor Gloria Haney; homemaker and volunteer Lis Dungan, and political activist and Cal State Long Beach instructor Wendy Lozano.

Among those honored in past years have been feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb and Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy.

This year Women’s Network Alert chose feminists who, although involved in a wide range of issues, “share a commitment to the community and to grass-roots organizing work,” Hall said.

“With representatives at the federal, state and county level who have absolutely no concern for women’s issues--many, in fact, who are vehemently opposed to our ideas--it becomes the responsibility of grass-roots organizers to be active. By honoring these women, we emphasize their causes and ideas.”

Of the women being honored today, Marion Pack is perhaps the best known outside Orange County’s feminist circles. Pack, 40, is executive director of Alliance for Survival, a 6,000-member peace organization devoted to nuclear disarmament.

Pack made headlines in 1985 when she and others were arrested and charged with blocking the path of defense contractors en route to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station during the Winter Conference of Aerospace and Electronics Systems--an annual convention, closed to the public and press, at which contractors and military representatives discuss weapons.

At her trial last year, Pack chose a five-day jail sentence rather than a year’s probation that would have required her to refrain from civil disobedience.

“Many people think nonviolent direct action is so extreme,” said Pack, who has been arrested eight times in the last six years during protests. “It’s not; it is one way for people to be part of the political process--to be heard. We live in a democracy, and we need to take advantage of it.”

Pack said she became involved in the nuclear freeze movement in the 1970s, when a nuclear power plant was being built near her home in Painesville, Ohio.

“If I had any confidence in nuclear power before,” she said, “it ended the day my daughter came home from school with a booklet describing how we should build a backyard bomb shelter. This was a booklet printed in the ‘50s--remember the duck-and-cover days?--and it was just too ridiculous.

Sense of Urgency

“The more I became involved, the more I read and researched, the more I felt that now is the time for every person to become involved in this,” said Pack, who lives in Norco with her husband and three daughters.

“Maybe women feel more strongly about (nuclear disarmament) because we’re the ones that produce the future generations. Maybe the sanctity of life, and guaranteeing a future for our children, is somehow clearer to us.

“To me, being a feminist means being ready to take leadership roles in all the decisions that affect us, whether it’s child care or equal rights, or making the world a peaceful and safe place.”

To Gail Reisman, being a feminist means “making the social, political and economic rights of women a top priority.” In Reisman’s case, it also means participating in enough activities to keep two feminists busy.

Reisman is a lecturer at Cal State Fullerton, where she teaches human development, and a business consultant whose partnership, Interaction Associates, helps companies adjust to the changing roles of women in the workplace.

She is also co-chairwoman of Women For: Orange County, a political action group, and is an organizer of the “Great American Write-In,” an annual letter-writing event at which local, national and international nonpartisan activist organizations provide information to the public on issues and pending legislation.

Reisman also sits on the boards of the Anaheim chapter of the American Association of University Women, Temple Beth Tikva in Fullerton and the Women’s Issues Commission of the American Jewish Committee, and is a member of the steering committee of the Association of Jewish Business and Professional Women.

All this for the community--and she’s not even a U.S. citizen.

Not a Radical

Reisman, 42, came to Orange County with her husband and two sons in 1980 from her native Canada. The daughter of a holocaust survivor, Reisman said she has been an activist “from childhood.”

“I’m a very established, upper-middle-class person. My home life is very traditional,” she said. “And none of the work I do in the community is in contradiction to that. I’m an activist, but I don’t feel at all radical. When I go picket and demonstrate, I don’t want to put on ripped-up blue jeans. I want our leaders to know that there are contemporary, educated, middle-class individuals who are very concerned about issues and want to effect change.”

That means “feminism is alive and well in Orange County,” she said.

And so is prejudice.

When Gloria Haney moved to Anaheim Hills in 1980, she found life “a little bit difficult.”

Haney said it made her “a little tense” when police followed her home, when they parked outside her house and when a friend staying with her and her husband was stopped and searched “to make sure he belonged in the area.”

“We were the first people of color in the neighborhood,” said Haney, who teaches literature and composition at Cypress College and Chaffee College in Alta Loma. “I don’t think people quite knew what to expect.”

While she is quick to say that “feminist is a new term applied to me”--and she laughingly declines to state her age--Haney said she has always been an activist. She credits her social awareness to her “very involved and active family”--particularly her great-uncle, the Rev. Christopher Columbus Harper, a Baptist pastor and academician. His speeches, articles and books are part of the Zale Library collection at Bishop College in Dallas.

Focus on Education

“My main concern is that people of color be brought into the mainstream in this country,” said Haney, a member of the Orange County-based Ethnic Women’s Network.

“And that begins with education that is complete and full, focusing on humanities as well as business and the sciences.”

Haney called teaching “one of the most beautiful tasks that I could have in life.” She wishes more people could reap the benefits of higher education.

“We need to change our thinking about education so that we see it as a right rather than a privilege,” she said. “I work at two community colleges, and I know they are really out of reach (financially) for a good many young people here. I am aware of that every day.

“I see education as the most important aspect of what’s necessary for change. If a person isn’t able to understand issues, how can that person work for change? My concern is that we’re losing the ability to communicate. We’re becoming an image society, a TV society that watches pictures instead of reading and writing and discussing.”

Lis Dungan joined the American Association of University Women more than 20 years ago so she could be “among women of like interests.”

“My children were very young at the time,” she recalled, “and I needed intellectual stimulation. I knew there was life after babies and bottles.”

Dungan is president of the Irvine chapter of AAUW and coordinator of Orange County’s “Imagination Celebration,” an annual children’s arts festival sponsored by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Before the birth of her children, who are now 27 and 25, Dungan had worked as a bookmobile driver in Arkansas, a secretary in Paris and a librarian in Los Angeles. Although she declined to reveal her age, she said her primary roles for more than two decades have been wife, mother and volunteer.

One of AAUW’s current projects--of particular interest to Dungan--is a study to determine the economic worth of volunteers and homemakers “for use in statistical measures,” such as the gross national product, she said.

“Obviously, no one is going to start paying homemakers for their work, but by measuring their worth, we give recognition to women who stay home for the important part they play in this country and this economy.

“You know when you go to a party and everyone’s asking, ‘What do you do?’ If you say, ‘I’m just a wife,’ or ‘I’m a homemaker’ you get this blank stare,” Dungan said. “It’s like saying you don’t do anything at all.”

Wendy Lozano got her first lesson in women’s rights--or the lack thereof--when she was growing up on Chicago’s North Shore.

“I can remember my mother, as a divorced women in the ‘50s, getting refused credit,” Lozano recalled. “I remember her working days and going to school at nights. I remember it being extremely tough economically for a while.”

Lozano, 45, is director of the Orange County chapter of the National Organization for Women’s Political Action Committee (NOW PAC). She is also legislative chairman for the South Coast chapter of NOW and is a lecturer at Cal State Long Beach in the women’s studies and sociology departments.

15-Year NOW Member

A member of NOW since 1972, Lozano said she sees “redefinition of the word success” as a key element in the women’s movement of 1987.

“We had taken a masculine definition of success, which does not include good interpersonal relations or intimacy,” she said. “We (women) are redefining success now with more emphasis on things that are emotionally and personally fulfilling--not just financially or professionally rewarding.

“As an academic,” said Lozano, who holds a doctorate in the sociology of sex and gender, “I teach women studies theory, which shows how all of the relations of power between the sexes are tied together, and how you can’t change any one aspect without affecting every other area.”

She is not without a sense of humor. “This is a difficult message to capture on a bumper sticker.”