2 Activists Say Now Is Their Time to Speak Out : Women’s rights: As local leaders of the National Organization for Women, they prod city councils to deal with sexual harassment.

Sandwiched between bureaucratic announcements and the even-more-tedious planning and zoning debates of council meetings is an innocent little item which a pair of activists have honed as a weapon against City Hall.

“Public comments are invited on non-agenda items,” the typewritten announcement on the City Council agenda says between parentheses. “Speakers must limit comments to three minutes.”

For months now, staples among commentators from the public have been two young women, not Newport Beach residents but two who are determined to shake up city officials. Catapulted into action last fall when 10 women filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the city and former Police Chief Arb Campbell and Capt. Anthony Villa, these feminists swear that they will not stop commenting publicly until sexism is an oddity.

“You do these things for women, all women, as a group,” explained Lisa McClanahan, 34, a coordinator of the National Organization for Women’s Bayview chapter and one of those who has attended about a dozen council meetings since September. “For yourself and the women you know and care about.”

“I’m doing it for women--you, me, my neighbors, the people I don’t know . . . especially the people I don’t know,” added Tamara Mason, 32, the other Bayview coordinator and a regular at council meetings.

“We have a much bigger long-term goal,” Mason confided. “Not to help one woman, two women, but all women.”

The women in the lawsuit never asked for NOW’s help.

Mason and McClanahan and about a half-dozen other Bayview members simply jumped into the ring after reading about it in the newspaper. Within a few days, they released a statement of outrage, held a press conference and rallied on City Hall steps. Soon they made their debut at a City Council meeting. They promised to come back, every two weeks, until the issue was “resolved.”

Since then, Bayview members also have spoken out at council meetings in Irvine, where the Police Department is the target of another sexual harassment suit, and have protested outside the offices of a federal agency where women have complained of discrimination.

Serving as a sort of local version of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings which sparked new interest nationwide in feminist organizations, the Newport Beach case has rejuvenated Bayview NOW and swelled its membership to 200.

NOW leaders have missed a few Newport council meetings, but they have attended many more, often sitting through seemingly endless debate before getting their precious three minutes at the microphone.

At key times, such as when the crew of the television program “48 Hours” visited to film NOW activists for a segment on sexual harassment that will air next week, a dozen or more women carried placards and wore white ribbons of solidarity to the meetings. But mostly Mason and McClanahan have waited alone, sitting quietly through the agenda until their moment arrives.

McClanahan talks philosophically, in lofty terms, about misogyny and patriarchy and power structures. Mason follows with specifics about hiring, sensitivity training and damage awards.

They rarely communicate with the plaintiffs in the sexual harassment suit. That is not their primary focus.

“I’m a woman, we’re all women, this is about women. It affects us all,” McClanahan said last week in her sunny Fountain Valley kitchen. “It affects all of us. Our friends, our mothers. We want to change it.”

Whether they have changed anything is unclear. Earlier this month, city officials reversed several of the decisions they had made throughout the year that NOW had counted as small victories. Campbell and Villa, who had been fired, were rehired and immediately retired with full disability benefits and a promise that the city would pay their legal bills.

Mason and McClanahan, though, insist that council members’ raised voices and obvious frustration when they rise to speak shows their activism is having an impact. They point to phone calls from the community, letters of support in the local newspaper and increased attendance at monthly NOW meetings.

Besides, they say, changing the city’s decisions is not the whole point.

“It’s made me feel more free in this world,” McClanahan explained. “In the end, I feel empowered by it because (I am) getting out there and doing something.”

“I’ve never been so alive,” Mason said of her new, activist existence. “It’s a change for the better. I feel so alive, I’d never go back.”

Mason is a computer programmer who used to believe that talking about politics and religion would only lead to arguments and unhappiness. She dropped out of high school as a sophomore and ran away from her home in a small town on Arizona’s border with Mexico, only to start school again a year later and work her way through college.

In the Huntington Beach home Mason shares with her boyfriend of nine years and their two cats, funky art adorns the walls, and feminist tomes line the bookshelf. A vegetarian who likes camping and music, Mason’s only previous brush with politics was an elementary school interview with the local mayor.

McClanahan, a free-lance artist who is taking courses in women’s studies, has two young sons on whom she practices what she preaches.

Her car bears the bumper sticker, “Pro-Child, Pro-Choice,” and on her desk Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” sits next to battered copies of the 1970s radical journal “Redstockings.”

Born and raised in the mountains near Fresno, McClanahan was named “Most Likely to Become a Women’s Libber” (a category made up especially for her) in the yearbook.

“It was not meant as a compliment, but I knew I was doing something right if people were paying attention,” she recalled.

McClanahan’s political rumblings quieted as she studied design, working as a waitress to get her through school, and then taking jobs in the fashion industry. She voted, went to hear former President Jimmy Carter speak once in Los Angeles and passed around a peace petition but never made much of a fuss.

Until Anita Hill.

“I was just disgusted,” McClanahan recalled of the nationally televised hearings in which Hill, a law professor, testified that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had harassed her on the job. “I’d just had it. I had to get involved and do something.”

Mason, too, credits Anita Hill with her politicization: “I just watched that and just got angry and went to the meeting and found women that were angry too.”

Indeed, Bayview’s long-dormant NOW chapter was revived by the 1991 Hill-Thomas hearings, but until the Newport Beach case, the group’s main activity was monthly lectures. Now they intersperse speeches with consciousness-raising workshops, and the dozen active members meet almost weekly to strategize.

“It was like watching the whole (Anita Hill) thing over again in my back yard. . . . It just fit for us to do something about it,” McClanahan said. “We read about it in the paper, and we were on the phone saying, ‘Look at this, it’s happening in our own community.’ ”

“We just thought this was something that we could walk our talk,” is how the more practical Mason puts it. “Here, right in our own community, we could have an impact.”

Billi Thompson of Huntington Beach, 70, the daughter of a suffragette who was a charter member of Bayview NOW in the 1970s, said the feminist movement has never been so strong in central Orange County. And Patricia Ireland, NOW’s national president, said grass-roots campaigns like the one in Newport Beach are key to the organization’s overall goal.

“If I go into Congress to urge that there be effective policies against sexual harassment, I don’t get any response from them unless constituents in their district have been raising those issues,” said Ireland, who met with Bayview members several weeks ago.

“Even two women, (speaking out as) consistently and as persuasively as they can may be able to catch the eye of a politician,” Ireland said. “There’s the squeaky-wheel syndrome: If you speak up often enough you may have an impact.”