Unfilled Void Where Women’s Panel Was

It’s been more than seven months since the county’s Commission on the Status of Women was disbanded for budgetary reasons, but for Nina Hull, the pain and disappointment of losing the advocacy panel is still vividly felt.

“To this day, I am still extremely hurt,” said Hull, 52, who served on the panel for six years--four of those as chairwoman.

“It did not have anything to do with me personally,” she said. “The women of Orange County lost a commission that was their voice to government.”

For most of the final two years of the panel’s existence, Hull said, it struggled to maintain women’s advocacy programs while warding off threats that it would be dissolved because of budgetary constraints.

The ax fell in August, when county supervisors approved a proposal by Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, who had nominated Hull to the panel, to dissolve the 16-year-old commission and have its work assumed by the Human Relations Commission.

The Commission on the Status of Women had made advances in educating the public on a wide range of issues: domestic violence, employment discrimination and child care. But the board’s decision led Hull to conclude that among county officials, “it’s still an old boys’ network out there.”

Hull looks back with pride at the work conducted by the commission while she served: a conference held in 1988 that drew 100 business leaders--

mostly men--to discuss child care and efforts to change the record-keeping system in local police departments so cases of domestic violence would be monitored separately from assaults.

The panel also proposed legislation on domestic violence and was a clearinghouse that helped women to get economic, legal and health services.

Because the panel’s operations were discontinued immediately after the supervisors voted, Hull was left to wonder how much work could have been done last fall when the issue of sexual harassment exploded on the national scene during the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I did get a lot of phone calls, and I went and spoke to women’s groups and community groups on sexual harassment,” Hull said.

In fact, Hull has continued using her membership on Republican Party committees at the local and state levels to advance the causes of women, she said.

Hull said she is not very optimistic that the Human Relations Commission can assume the workload once handled by the women’s panel, partly because political realities force it to worry about funding--not programs--if it is to survive the next round of county budget cuts.

Nor does she believe that the Human Relations Commission places the same level of importance on women’s rights as it does on issues regarding discrimination against minorities and hate crimes, Hull said.

“The women are the largest victims of hate crimes, and rape and domestic violence are never classified as hate crimes,” she said.

The issues of women require separate attention, if they are to be addressed fully, she said. “Women’s issues are separate issues, with their own set of problems. A woman can lose her job, and her problems are extremely different” from that of a man.

She said she knows from personal experience the need for a support system.

“I was a victim of domestic violence years ago,” she said. “I know what a terrible thing it can do to a woman and her children.”

But until different women’s groups from across the county band together to renew the commission and until the “mental attitude” of government officials changes, the cause of women’s rights will suffer and will be left up to individuals to carry forward, Hull said. A former member of her panel was recently appointed to the Human Relations Commission.

In the meantime, she said, she will continue working in the political arena to advocate programs for women.

“A few years ago, we did not have a women’s issues committee at the state Republican Party,” she said. “We do now.

“That’s the road I am working on now. It’s what I did before I became a commissioner. You do what you can.”