Fun, Feminism Draw Women to Workshops

In one room, women closed their eyes, slumped in their chairs and tried to visualize breathing.

Next door, women scribbled notes about tax-free municipal bonds.

Down the hall, women nodded knowingly as a tense mother recounted losing control and hollering at her children.

From “Retirement Planning” to “Eating and Emotions,” nearly six dozen workshops offered practical tips and feel-good advice as part of Saturday’s 14th annual Creative Options Day for Women at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

More than 1,000 women--from college students to senior citizens--attended the daylong event, co-sponsored by the American Assn. of University Women and Cal Lutheran’s Women’s Resource Center.

They spoke of empowerment and women’s rights, of sisterhood and support networks. But mainly, participants said, they came to have fun.

“This is a totally personal day, not like a seminar for work, where I have to learn something and then take it back to the office,” said Sherith Squires, 26, who works for a financial service company.

“It’s not all radical feminism--some of it is relaxation, and some is just fun stuff. You can get as much or as little out of it as you want,” added Squires, a Thousand Oaks resident who came with two friends so they could fan out and hit as many seminars as possible.

After two standing ovations for keynote speaker Shirley Mount Hufstedler, the nation’s first secretary of education and a circuit court judge, participants scattered around Cal Lutheran’s sun-drenched campus for workshops led by local professors and professionals.

Still chuckling over Hufstedler’s description of the post-World War II vision of women’s roles--”to go to the suburbs, to a home brimming with electrical appliances, where they would be joyously happy”--they delved into topics from resume-writing to gardening to self-defense.

The eclectic range of the 69 workshops (with titles such as “Break the Glass Ceiling,” “Your Child, Sex and AIDS” and “How Do You Play the Game of Life?”) seemed to please the participants, many of whom had attended previous Creative Options Days. The $18 registration fee supports scholarships for adult students re-entering Cal Lutheran degree programs.

“I love this day because I spend a lot of time at home with my son, and today I can finally feel like I’m Kate Hughes rather than Ian’s Mom--I can be me,” said Kate Hughes, an occupational therapist in Simi Valley.

“I’m challenged intellectually. It makes me stop and think about what I’m doing with my life,” Hughes said as she crammed feminist books, a Creative Options mug and women’s health pamphlets into a plastic bag.

Through panel discussions, free-association writing exercises, role-playing and question-and-answer sessions, Creative Options students received “a lot of feedback from other women,” said Simi Valley resident Ellen Drake Learned, describing the day as “very empowering.”

In a class titled “Anger: Make It Work for You,” for example, women discussed their problems controlling rage as a family counselor taught them how to redirect negative energy. Participants emerging from another workshop, “Assert Yourself!” turned to their friends and tentatively practiced looking them in the eyes and saying “I want.”

The women-only program “gives you the boost you need every now and then, to show you that you are making--or can make--important contributions to society and your own life,” said Gretchen Graham, a 26-year-old insurance underwriter.

Or, as keynote speaker Hufstedler put it, the day reminded women that they “were not suffering from defects because opening and closing the refrigerator door was not the maximum they wanted from life.”