Women’s Week Focuses on Status, Issues

Women are trained for private virtue, men for public power, psychologist Patricia Hannigan told an audience at Rancho Santiago College on Tuesday during Women’s Week 1988.

Speaking on power and gender, Hannigan, who is in private practice in Newport Beach, said a consistent lament from women clients is a sense of powerlessness. They try, she said, to be “decent human beings, to do the best they can, and be what they thought they were supposed to be. And then say say, ‘How come I feel so powerless?’ ”

Women’s Week, a series of lectures and workshops continuing through Friday on the Santa Ana campus, was launched eight years ago, according to Sara Lundquist, a college employee and one of the founders.

All sessions, which vary from intimate 20-person seminars to groups exceeding 100, are “geared to both students and the community,” Lundquist said. They have also been scheduled to coincide with class times so students can attend them as class assignments or for personal enrichment, Lundquist said. Last year, she said, attendance reached 1,500.

“Some people park themselves here all week,” she said.

Five to eight topics are offered each day, ranging from women’s issues to job-search strategies and career opportunities, such as adult re-entry to college and possibilities in entrepreneurship and in the criminal justice field.

On Thursday, for example, professors of political science and sociology will discuss the significance for women of the 1988 presidential campaign, and the impact of apartheid on women and children in South Africa. Other workshop topics this week include self-esteem and relationships. Workshop leaders will be professors and outside professionals, such as a psychotherapist and a business executive.

On Friday, several artists will present a multimedia exhibit based on ethnic experiences. Poetry readings will include work by Laguna Poets director Martha Mitrovich.

The program, which operates on a $3,000 budget from the college’s staff development fund, culminates in a dinner Friday featuring feminist author and lecturer Betty Friedan.

Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique,” has become a classic of feminist literature since it appeared in 1963. Now a teaching fellow at the University of Southern California, Friedan will speak on making decisions between home and career.

Five Orange County women will be honored with plaques at that awards banquet, including the county’s first woman state legislator, Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach).