A Feminist Well-Versed in the Value of Nuance

Marjorie Sims has a smile that could disarm a lectern-pounding right-wing conservative and open the wallet of an ill-tempered millionaire.

That’s good, because she will be expected to do those things--charm, fund-raise and win over political opponents--in her new post as executive director of the California Women’s Law Center, which focuses on the civil rights of women and girls.

Sims assumes her post in the center’s Koreatown offices at a time when feminists feel a new urgency--and fear. They believe that women’s issues are already losing ground under the new Republican administration and could lose more. “There is a fundamental difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, with regards to women’s reproductive rights,” Sims said, pointing out that on his first official business day in office, Bush imposed a “global gag rule,” which banned U.S. aid to international planning groups that perform abortions or offer abortion counseling.

“If that is one of the first steps he takes,” said Sims, “that signals trouble.”

Sims, 44, has spent many years as a women’s advocate. Her last job was at the International Center for Research on Women in Washington, D.C., a private nonprofit group that supports women’s roles in developing countries, where she was a policy analyst. She arrived six weeks ago and will take over for Abby J. Leibman, who co-founded the center 12 years ago and has run it ever since.

Leibman is a tough act to follow.

As an attorney and a self-described “raging feminist,” Leibman raised the profile of the organization both locally and statewide, transforming it into a powerful voice for women and a legal force to be reckoned with. In some ways the understated, polite Sims is an unlikely successor to the sometimes raw, outspoken Liebman. Sims, who is not an attorney, refers to herself as a feminist only when it suits her purposes.

“Some people think feminists don’t have a sense of humor, don’t have fun, don’t like men,” she said. “I can meet a young woman and say, I support women’s rights, but I’m not a feminist .... I try to engage people where they are. I’ve found you can’t be really confrontational and get things done.”

Last year her 13-year-old nephew approached her uncomfortably.

“So, you’re like some feminist or something, right?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, that OK with you?’ I saw him looking at me, like, ‘She’s one of them ... but she’s OK.”’

Leibman, 44, would never back away from the feminist label, but she said--diplomatically--that the word has become more nuanced in recent years. As younger women, who control pop culture, age and become part of the leadership structure, they bring those nuances with them. “For me, I made a decision that I would own the word and I would define it,” Leibman said. “It worked for me personally and for me when I represented the law center.”

Sims, who is single, said she often sees herself as African American first, woman second.

“My race affects how I look at issues,” she said, adding that she rereads Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” every summer for inspiration. “Women of color have not always been supported by upper-middle-class white women.” When women fought for the vote, for instance, African American women were largely disenfranchised from that effort. And when it comes to reproductive health issues, it is sometimes difficult for middle-class white women to understand that access to health care varies from community to community.

At times Sims sounds wonkish--slipping into abstract policy-speak. But her sophisticated knowledge of lobbying and politics is apparent.

“Her job will be much more one of management, doing public relations, speeches and testifying in front of the legislature,” said Allison Thomas, former co-president of the board of directors, which helped hire Sims. “She is great at translating issues from the legal sphere into a language everyone can understand--without being condescending.”

The idea for a center that would secure and advance the civil rights of women and girls was hatched in 1988 by a trio of lawyers: Leibman, Sheila Kuehl and Jennifer McKenna. (Leibman was running the Child Care Law Project at the public-interest law firm Public Counsel. Kuehl was elected to the state Assembly; she is now a Democratic state senator. McKenna was an executive director of the Women Lawyers of Los Angeles.)

Although not a household name, the center has helped secure important victories for women. In 1990, it joined forces with the ACLU in a court appeal that secured the right of California mothers to maintain custody of their children even when they move.

In 1991, the center undertook a project on behalf of immigrant women in California and joined forces with women farm workers in the Coachella Valley to develop and conduct sexual harassment workshops.

In 1994, with the Fund for a Feminist Majority, it highlighted gender bias within L.A. County law enforcement agencies and indifference to crimes against women. The work led to the establishment of a Women’s Advisory Council to the Los Angeles Police Commission.

In 1999, on behalf of a Los Feliz woman, the center successfully sued Borders Books & Music for violation of a state law that allows women to breastfeed in public places.

Last year, with Kuehl, the center worked on a bill that requires health-care providers to state clearly what kinds of reproductive services they provide. The bill, which became law this year, was a response to the limiting of certain services by Catholic hospitals.

Already, Sims has waded into the center’s front-burner issues. After meeting him once, she sent a letter to newly elected Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo urging him to work out the final details of an agreement giving girls equal access to playing fields in the west San Fernando Valley. After Roman Catholic bishops declared that voluntary sterilization is “intrinsically evil” and will no longer be permitted at Catholic hospitals, she drafted a fund-raising letter soliciting donations for the center’s fight against such restrictions.

Seeds of Activism Planted Early on in Her Life

It was an after-school job that planted the seed of activism in Sims.

When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to abortion in 1973, the doctor for whom her mother worked as a nurse in Las Vegas opened a women’s health center. Cheerleader by day, Sims sterilized abortion instruments by night.

“I was the cleanup girl, but what I wanted to do was counsel,” she said. “I was seeing so many women in such difficult situations.”

Sims’ father was in the Army. She majored in home economics and education at the University of Nevada, Reno, and earned a master’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills. She started her career as an office clerk at a swimsuit manufacturer in Gardena.

One day, during the Reagan years, she read an article in Glamour magazine that changed her life. The piece was about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 Webster decision, which gave individual states greater latitude to regulate abortion and ended with a list of advocacy groups. Sims called the California Abortion Right’s Action League to volunteer, and before long her unpaid job was taking over her life.

“I thrived on all the political stuff,” she said. “I was learning something about politics, inside players, the capitol ....”

The lure of politics drew Sims to Washington, D.C., in 1992. She spent nine years there, working first in the office of Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and then for the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, where she drafted education, child-care, child support and civil rights legislation.

When the caucus lost its funding in 1995 in the wake of the Republican takeover of Congress, Sims co-founded and served as executive director of Women’s Policy Inc., which provides information to advocates, the media and congressional offices about how legislation affects women. The organization provided information that was so evenhanded, she said, “it was almost like news reporting.”

It dawned on her that she had drifted. “Advocacy without research is not credible,” says a quote on her office wall. “Research without advocacy is not relevant.”

In 1999, she went to work for the International Center for Research on Women focusing on issues of economics, health, population and reproductive health. In January, she got a call from a search firm urging her to apply for Liebman’s job. “I thought, quite frankly, I’m not an attorney,” she said. “Why would they want a non-lawyer?”

“My vision was getting limited,” said Liebman, who is now running a consulting practice, caring for the two children of her twin sister, who was murdered in a domestic violence dispute, and remains on the law center’s president’s council. “It was not good for the law center. The organization is so important, the work that it is doing is so critical, no one person can get in the way of that, including me.”

Funded by individuals, corporate gifts and charitable grants, the nonprofit center has grown slightly in recent years. There are 10 people on staff, including three attorneys. The center is compiling a report to see if boys and girls are offered equal access to park-and-rec programs. It is also developing a model policy for the state Department of Education and school districts instructing them on how to enforce the rights of students who are pregnant or parents.

Sims said she cares most about women’s economic status. Tales of discrimination in the workplace are what tempt her to break the speed limit on the way to work. “After so many years,” she said, “I just can’t believe women continue to get discriminated against because of their sex.”

The center’s most important mission now, she said, is to prevent legal backsliding, while pushing forward on new fronts. Loss of rights, she has learned, can happen incrementally and sometimes almost invisibly.

“Some of this stuff is really arcane. The average person is not going to get riled up about the really small steps that represent erosion in rights,” she said. “We have to keep our eyes on fighting battles that we thought were won.”