Women Come of Age in Orange County Politics : Government: Despite sexism and setbacks, 40 will sit on city councils by next month--double the 1978 total.

In 1965, Harriett M. Wieder, then a young staffer for Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, was hustling to a lunch, running late. As she took her seat, she noticed the cold stares from her companions, every one of whom was a man.

She reached for a cigarette to steady her nerves, and one of the men growled: “My God, she smokes too.”

Twenty-six years later, Wieder, the only woman ever elected to the Orange County Board of Supervisors, now gets to do a little growling of her own. When a middle-aged man came to a board meeting last month to present his views on a controversial development proposal, he repeatedly addressed the supervisors as “gentlemen.”

Wieder brought him up short: “Do you want me to listen . . . or just them?” she asked, gesturing toward her four male colleagues.

For Wieder and other women officeholders in Orange County, the battles against sexism are daily and sometimes tiring, and they persist even as women secure more prominent positions in public life. Still, the past two decades have brought notable gains, and Orange County politics will mark a milestone of sorts for women next month.

When Lake Forest and Laguna Hills officially become cities on Dec. 20, the number of women who serve on Orange County city councils will hit 40, nearly twice as many as held those posts when Wieder was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1978.

And there are other signs of women’s growing political influence:

* Five Orange County city councils now have women majorities; in 1978, there were none. Two cities today also have women mayors.

* Before 1978, no woman had ever represented Orange County in the Legislature, and no woman had ever been elected to the Board of Supervisors. Today, the county’s legislative delegation includes two women, including one state senator. And Wieder continues to sit on the board.

* In the late 1970s, the all-male Board of Supervisors employed very few women. Today, three of the four supervisors who have chiefs of staff have women in those posts, and more than half of all the supervisors’ aides are women.

“What we’re seeing is a slow but absolutely steady increase of women in local politics,” said Sandy Sutphen, who chairs the political science department at Cal State Fullerton. “In that respect, at least, Orange County is in step with the rest of the country.”

At times, the progress has seemed agonizingly slow and the gains unnervingly fragile. Thirteen years after Wieder was elected--the same year in which state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R--Newport Beach) broke the gender barrier by becoming the first woman to represent an Orange County district in the Legislature--only one other woman candidate has ever seriously challenged for a spot on the Board of Supervisors. That was just last year, and she was taking on Wieder.

Women candidates today continue to battle enormous obstacles. Some men, and even some women, view elected office as a male domain. And women candidates often have less political experience than their male opponents, a fact that makes it harder for them to mount credible candidacies.

Most importantly, money--the so-called “mother’s milk of politics”--flows overwhelmingly to men, leaving many women candidates with an extreme disadvantage as they enter political races. Even those women who can raise contributions find that they often have to turn to men for them.

Partly because of those obstacles, the political progress of women in Orange County and elsewhere has been slow and dotted by setbacks. When Bergeson ran for lieutenant governor last year, she was defeated handily. And when Wieder sought a seat in Congress in 1988, her campaign was derailed by the revelation that she had pretended for years to have a college degree that she had never earned.

But where Wieder and Bergeson--along with a few other notables--were once almost alone on the women’s ramparts in Orange County, today they are surrounded by peers.

“We’re seeing a great deal of involvement by women at the state level,” Bergeson noted. “I think women are becoming a more important part of public life in this county at all levels.”

Today’s generation of Orange County political women has built upon the ground-breaking work of predecessors, women who won office in the 1970s and early 1980s. For many of those women, the early years were trying as they were tested and sometimes ignored by male colleagues.

“It was hell at first,” said Barbara Brown, who in 1980 became the first woman ever elected to the Fountain Valley City Council, a post she held for more than eight years. “I was challenged for everything, every detail.”

Other women recount stories of being slighted in ways both serious and frivolous.

“During the first couple of years, I would get letters that began: ‘Dear Sir, I have followed your career closely . . . ‘ “ said Bergeson, laughing. “They didn’t get many responses.”

But time, experience and cooperation helped many of the women overcome those problems as they steadily claimed a place in the county’s political structure.

“When you were elected, it was an all-boys’ club, and the boys had problems sharing with you,” Brown said. “But there was an informal group of women here. We would meet a couple of times a year and call each other when we had questions. We all needed to help each other, and it crossed political lines, city lines. . . .”

In many city councils and even at the county and state levels, the presence of more elected women leaders helped bring other women into appointed positions. Women began appearing on planning commissions, in high-ranking department positions and throughout the political hierarchy.

Many of the women who now hold city council positions in Orange County got their start in community politics: on city commissions, school boards, parent-teacher associations, even Little League baseball.

That process--of starting at the bottom and slowly working up the political ladder--is important for almost all politicians, but especially for women. Because women often find it harder to raise money than men do, it is all the more important to be able to demonstrate grass-roots political experience, according to candidates and political scientists.

Only by persuading people with money that they have a real chance to win are women able to pry loose contributions. That’s especially true because many women’s organizations have only short political experience, and therefore do not offer women candidates a secure source of financial backing.

“Women’s organizations aren’t particularly well-known as political contributors,” Sutphen said. “I don’t think that it’s because there’s something inherently different about women. I think it’s because they don’t have any money.”

Irvine Mayor Sally Anne Sheridan takes a different view: “Women control the world’s money. They just don’t part with it.”

Whatever the reason, the relative absence of women from political fund-raising machines remains the most challenging problem for women candidates, most experts agree. But even there, the past two decades have brought some progress.

“When I first ran in ’71 for the Los Angeles City Council, I would go to these women’s groups, and they would say that their by-laws did not allow them to support candidates,” Wieder said. “I was shocked.”

Today, Wieder said, she collects a sizable portion of her campaign war chest from women and women’s groups. “That’s a real change,” she said, “and an important one.”

Success breeds success, and many of Orange County’s leading women politicians say that they are experiencing fewer of the impediments that they encountered in their earlier years. There are still awkward moments--Sheridan notes that she occasionally attends functions and watches in amusement as her hosts introduce her husband as Irvine’s mayor--but they are fewer and farther between.

Bergeson said experience is the ultimate leveler in Sacramento: “When you’re first elected, you’re a woman,” she said. “After that, you’re a legislator.”

Time has also helped cure another unfortunate habit that Bergeson remembers running across during her early years in Sacramento.

“It used to be that I’d have men who were testifying address themselves to the ‘assemblymen’ on the committee,” she said. “I’d remind them that we all had votes, not just the men.”

These days, Bergeson said, just about no one makes that mistake. “It’s easier now that the title is just ‘senator.’ ”