Women’s Conference Knows No Limits : Cal Lutheran: Keynote speaker Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) sees the military as ‘king of the hill’ now in Washington.

More than 900 women at a conference Saturday danced and defended themselves, spoke of politics and personal antics, debated abortion and studied handwriting.

And participants in the 12th annual “Creative Options: A Day for Women” conference at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, greeted keynote speaker Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) with two standing ovations.

“It’s one of the best kept secrets in America, but this month is Women’s History Month,” Schroeder told the crowd.

It was also their day. They chose from 67 workshops on topics ranging from folk dancing to self-defense, estate planning to career strategies. And they lounged on the lawns, lamenting the lack of federal funding for women’s health care or the dilemma of providing contraceptives to their teen-agers.

Women jaunted from workshop to workshop, discovering the history of women who flew fighter planes in World War II or finding creative ways to relieve stress.

“I’m kind of tired of the political types of stuff,” said a 74-year-old retired child psychologist. Dorothy Willard of Ventura, her gray hair braided on top of her head, sat instead through lectures on nutrition and biofeedback, a method of treating health problems through an understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body.

But if it was controversy participants sought Saturday, they could find it. Workshops abounded on feminism in Christianity and Judaism, abortion or affordable housing for women.

Marie McCoy of the Conejo Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center picketed the conference last year for its lack of anti-abortion representation. This year, she presented her views on a panel about abortion.

“I’m eager for a chance for all the voices to be heard,” she said.

Schroeder, too, encouraged her audience to let their voices be heard, especially in Congress.

“Military is clearly going to be king of the hill,” Schroeder said of the mood in Washington as the Persian Gulf War comes to a close. “It means real trouble” for family legislation, she said.

Throughout her speech, Schroeder lobbied for a package of health-care laws that she said will legislate equity in the number of women used in federal research studies.

The National Institutes of Health rarely, if ever, use women in their studies of heart conditions and cancers, for example, and therefore release data and cures that only relate to half the population, she said.

“The only study that the federal government has engaged in with a vengeance is in trying to see if they can make women fertile after menopause,” Schroeder said.

Afterward, as women from the audience clustered around Schroeder, one woman tugged on her silk suit sleeve and said, “I’d like to see you run for President again.”

Schroeder, who ran a brief presidential campaign in 1987, said later she thought it unlikely that she would run in 1992 because of the mood created in the country by the war.

“You know what their campaign commercials are going to look like right now,” she said. “They’re not going to be about child-care centers.”