It Isn’t Well-Known. It’s Not a Social Club and It’s Not a Political Group. But Its Members Are Among the Most Influential Women in Southern California. : The Trusteeship
A party was in progress--or so it seemed: valet parking outside the grounds of Brooke Knapp’s home in Bel-Air, caterer busy in the kitchen, bartender pouring wine, a crowd of about 50 circling the buffet table or standing in clusters. All women.
Singer and songwriter Helen Reddy, entrepreneur Sharon Timmer, Mount St. Mary’s College President Sister Magdalen Coughlin and International Olympic Committee member Anita DeFrance sat in animated conversation in the living room, leaning intently toward one another. (“We were talking about whether I should wear a habit or not,” Coughlin said later with a laugh. “We never did reach consensus.”)
Later in the evening, they would listen to Willie Campbell describe the work of the group she heads, Overseas Education Fund International, which funds development projects for Third World women. And, as they started to disperse, Frieda Caplan of Frieda’s Finest/Produce Specialties Inc. would remind them to take home a supply of the miniature pumpkins she had brought from her market.
Just pop them in the microwave, she called out. Sweet and delicious.
So this is The Trusteeship, the high-powered but publicity-shy group of prominent women in business, academia, the professions, the arts and government? This is the group that, in less than a decade, has drawn to its ranks almost 100 of the most influential women in Southern California?
Founded as an Alternative
Did Knapp perhaps have a smoke-filled back room where the group’s real wheeling and dealing was taking place?
It was indeed the regularly monthly gathering of The Trusteeship, but even though the group was founded partly as an alternative to the old-boys clubs that many are convinced run the country, it hardly resembles them.
Formed in 1980 as an informal, loosely structured but exclusive selection of women of achievement, its members have generally kept it quiet. Until recently, the group pretty much avoided publicity. Members would often feign ignorance of its existence, deny membership or simply clam up.
“It’s never been a secret organization,” said President Judy Miller, vice president for marketing at Braun & Co., a public relations company. “But it was agreed from the beginning that there was no reason to seek a high profile. We weren’t taking positions; we weren’t endorsing candidates. . . .
“We’re doing things on a more public level now. But before, there was nothing to say.”
If today the group has more to say, it is perhaps because its members tend to be so prominent in the public eye.
Impressive Roster of Names
Among those also present at Knapp’s house were Appeals Court Judge Joan Dempsey Klein, Motown Productions President Suzanne de Passe, Democratic Party pillar Liz Snyder, Cal State Fullerton President Jewell Plummer Cobb, Orange County Supervisor Harriett Wieder, assistant dean of the UC Irvine graduate school of management Judy Rosener, television executive Yolanda Nava, and former City Hall powers Pat Russell and Maureen Kindel.
Knapp herself is a record-setting aviator and president of the Knapp Group, an investment firm. And among the other members in good standing are former First Lady Betty Ford, consultant to the Republican National Committee and First Daughter Maureen Reagan, philanthropist and editor Wallis Annenberg, Councilwoman Joy Picus, movie executive Sherry Lansing, philanthropist Joan Palevsky, former Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Burke, Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, and writer Judith Krantz.
It is, in one sense, the ultimate women’s networking group. But to Miller, “We’ve gone beyond that. There was a rash of them in the 1970s, outgrowths of women entering the business and professional fields. Networks were created to help women break through barriers.
“Women are still doing that. But (Trusteeship members) are not mid-level people trying to make it. They don’t need the organization to be a success in their own field.”
“The women’s movement has evolved in different kinds of ways,” said Cobb. “Networking has been one of the most important parts of that. I see The Trusteeship as the result of a 15-year evolution of women leaders rising to the top and contributing to society.”
It all started in 1979 with a chance encounter between advertising executive Adrienne Hall and attorney Cynthia Maduro Ryan at a function of a women’s organization. As much as they liked the group and enjoyed the members, they both recalled recently, something was missing.
“There was a feeling maybe there could be something beyond that--an organization that could never be preempted--in terms of the achievement of the women, their recognition and their spheres of influence,” said Hall, who is vice chairwoman of the Eisaman, Johns & Laws advertising agency.
Ryan agreed. “Many women were isolated,” she said. “Women could join professional groups or women’s groups, but the focus was narrow. They couldn’t get exposure to business, politics, (all aspects of) life. There was no synergistic effect.” From the start, they knew they wanted a diverse group, and one based on achievement, not prior friendship, Hall said. They wanted women from far-flung fields, with no one group dominating, women who otherwise might never have known each other.
They would come together, Hall said, “to be a collegial group, to be able to know others, share ideas. . . . We would not raise money, not support candidates, not take on issues.”
Then just what would they do? Even today, trusteeship members aren’t always very specific. “We tend to talk about it mysteriously,” said Ryan. “You have to experience it.”
The one word most used by members to describe what the Trusteeship is all about is access . It’s the notion that, collectively, the group will give its members an entry to the world of real power, serving as a supply chest for potential appointments to corporate and high-level nonprofit boards and public service office.
“An organization like ours can make a real impact in presenting a pool of qualified people,” Hall said.
Legally, it is a nonprofit mutual benefit corporation known as The Trusteeship for the Betterment of Women Inc. Trusteeship was Adrienne Hall’s word. It meant to her a protection, a nurturing, she said.
Ryan takes that concept further and speaks of “almost a fiduciary responsibility” of successful women to young, upcoming women.
The group’s members seem to agree that it’s still lonely at the top for women. They are isolated in the corporate structure, and seldom invited to the pre-meeting meetings or informal get-togethers where decisions really get made. And, outside corporations, women in leadership do not have many peers with whom to share their experiences or to look to for models of leadership.
“I didn’t want to join. . . . It was an ego problem for me. I thought I was special and unique,” said Sharon Timmer, president of her own sale support communication company, Timmerco. “I’m not a college graduate. I achieved contrary to the rules. I found out there was a whole bunch of special and unique women out there. It didn’t make me feel less special; it made me feel more so.”
Sister Coughlin of Mount St. Mary’s thinks of the group as people with a common experience. “If you’ve had to do something difficult like fire three people or have some other stressful situation, it’s such a relief to be able to go to this group and say, ‘Oh, thank God.’ ”
(Beyond that, she grinned, “I just like ‘em. I think they’re fun. You can just kind of be yourself and be relaxed.”)
To some extent, then, the Trusteeship really is an old-girl’s network. They send each other business. They get involved in each other’s causes and good works. Almost any member can offer examples.
Three members of the Trusteeship serve on Mount St. Mary’s Board of Regents: Julia Thomas, chairman of the board of Bobrow/Thomas and Associates, an architecture and planning firm; public relations executive Barbara Sayre Casey; and Caroline Nahas, partner in Korn/Ferry International executive search service.
“And, I’ll be asking some more,” Coughlin said.
In turn, Coughlin said, Julia Thomas got her involved on the United Way Independent Study Committee, and through the recommendations of members Maureen Kindel and Fran Savitch, both former powers at City Hall, Coughlin sits on the city’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Willie Campbell’s board at OEF International, and her special national business advisory council draw heavily on members of the Trusteeship and the International Women’s Forum, an umbrella organization of similar groups in other cities.
Subtle Pressure
Hall has personally nominated several Trusteeship members to the UCLA Foundation, of which she is a member. And several Trusteeship members said they think Yvonne Burke’s appointment as a UCLA regent and Anita DeFrance’s appointment to the International Olympic Committee were influenced by subtle Trusteeship pressure.
“There has been a subtle agenda, without flag waving, or proposing or endorsing,” Kindel said of Trusteeship’s modus operandi. “It’s been quite informal.”
But there are not dozens of examples, and, Hall said, “We have a long way to go.”
Just how to get there is an issue that troubles many members and has divided the group at times.
Some ask whether “betterment of women” in the group’s formal title refers to all women or only to members of The Trusteeship. It is the trickle-down theory of power: Access to power for women at the top will eventually benefit all women.
For others, that’s not enough. They think the Trusteeship should be doing something more specific.
“It’s because so much needs to be done,” Joan Dempsey Klein said. “Women are not at a place where we can coast on our laurels. These are very successful women. . . . But we’re limiting ourselves. Surely all this talent has got to count for something.”
From the beginning, the group has talked of power. But “power to do what?” she said. “We have not manifested power. We have not set ourselves an agenda that requires power.”
As a first step, the Trusteeship has been planning a mentoring project that will provide some form of leadership training to younger women. Klein said it should also consider sponsoring scholarships, as an example of “something visible in support of women not quite so fortunate as we are.”
“I’m one of those who’d welcome the group opening itself to the possibility of doing more,” said Rabbi Laura Geller of the Hillel Foundation at USC. “As a group of powerful women, we could be in a position to raise questions--for example, questions regarding legislative issues relating to women; questions we’d want to see all candidates addressing. Some issues cut across party politics.
“Very good things happen from people meeting each other,” she said, describing how fascinated she was by a session on corporate takeovers. “Belonging to the Trusteeship helps me better understand the world we live in. I become a better rabbi. If it is just an old-girls’ network, that would not be bad. But it’s not enough for me.”
This basic philosophical division has boiled over at times in debates over how the group is run, with questions raised about the power of the three original founders: Hall, Ryan and Kindel.
‘A Matter of Concern’
“There’s power to be gained. It is currency,” said one member who asked not to be identified. “To the extent it gets more public, when the governor needs a regent or a commissioner, he calls the group and asks, ‘Can you think of three women. . . .’ Whether that currency is controlled by a few or rests in the Trusteeship is a matter of concern.”
After a confrontation that caused a few members to leave, what had been a loosely defined and organized group emerged as a more formal organization with bylaws, votes and a recruitment committee and regular meetings. Today, the Trusteeship costs $700 to join, $450 in annual dues and about $35 each for monthly events. (Adjustments are sometimes made for less-affluent members.)
By accident, Ryan said, the current membership is about half-Republican, half-Democrat and is a diverse group racially, ethnically, professionally and in their attitudes toward feminism.
“It’s not a mobilization tool,” Miller said. “You utilize an organization where its strengths are. Our strength is in our diversity.”
If The Trusteeship seems to have been concerned about privacy in the past, perhaps it has to do with an image problem that such groups sometimes have among high-achieving women.
Miller said women executive sometimes encounter among their male counterparts one of two attitudes about women’s groups: “It’s either, ‘You’re wasting your time on something unimportant,’ or ‘You’re going to come and storm the bastions.’ ”
“A lot of women who have been successful,” said Harriett Wieder, “have not been identified with the women’s movement. There was a time when they would not have said, ‘Oh, I belong to an all-girls’ group.”
As a result, Miller said, they have “an immediate reluctance to belong to anything labeled a women’s organization. They may see it as unimportant, fluffy. Men have not had to contend with that--with how it looks to belong to the Rotary, the Jonathan Club.”
Perhaps the Trusteeship’s biggest accomplishment to date, said philanthropist Joan Palevsky, vice president of Immaculate Heart College Center, is that it has erased some of those prejudices. “They’re finding out they enjoy being with other women,” she said, “and that other women are really quite intelligent.”
