|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Crusader for Gender Equity in the California Legislature: One Longtime Activist's Story
As the election approaches and many of us are scrambling to do something, anything, to impact its outcome, I felt compelled to feature someone who has played the political long game. For more than a decade, local activist Janet Cook worked to achieve gender parity–that is 50 percent female representation–in the California Legislature. The results of her efforts and those of her colleagues have been historic. This is Janet’s story.
As the election approaches and many of us are scrambling to do something, anything, to impact its outcome, I felt compelled to feature someone who has played the political long game. For more than a decade, local activist Janet Cook worked to achieve gender parity–that is 50 percent female representation–in the California Legislature. The results of her efforts and those of her colleagues have been historic. This is Janet’s story.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said, “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”
As recently as 2013 RBG’s assertion wasn’t even close to being the case in California where just 20 members of the 120-member California State Legislature were women. Today, that percentage has skyrocketed to 42 percent and the California Senate is almost assured of being majority female after this November due to recent primary results. Redwood City resident Janet Cook, a no-nonsense pragmatist whose activism dates back some forty years, has been on the forefront of that effort.
Janet was feeling particularly distraught about the intractability of society’s ills when, in 2013, Bay Area political consultant Mary Hughes tapped Janet to be in on the ground floor of Close the Gap California, an organization Hughes had just founded to recruit accomplished, progressive women to run for office in targeted state legislative districts, then help position them to undertake competitive campaigns.
“I realized I could continue spreading myself too thinly and running myself ragged working on the issues that I cared about like public education, women’s reproductive care, and a path out of poverty, and still not having a significant impact. Or I could solve those problems by helping elect progressive women who supported those issues,” Janet says.
The playbook
Janet had been retired for several years from her job as a project manager at a pharmaceutical company when she began volunteering for Close the Gap California. In that role she and her colleagues have spent thousands of hours identifying possible candidates, many women of color, in open districts, asking them to run and then helping to launch those candidates.
Janet’s passion is fueled by a deep-seated belief, borne out by research, that gender parity matters because women’s legislative priorities are different from men’s, adding that the need to elect women legislators in California is particularly pressing because of our size–we’re the world’s fifth largest economy–and because California is a pipeline for national leaders.
Janet’s first step in recruiting winning candidates was to undertake exhaustive research to identify characteristics that a candidate from a particular district needed to win. Was it essential for a candidate to have local roots or was the district a transient community where roots weren’t all that important? What major issues was the district facing? What did recent voting trends reveal about the beliefs and positions that were most likely to put a candidate on a path to victory?
“Redding is a lot different from Berkeley, so the progressive recruit I’d go after in Redding is a lot different than the progressive recruit I’d go after in Berkeley,” Janet says. (She is speaking from experience, having recruited candidates in both communities.)
After Janet and her colleagues developed a candidate profile and organized “search parties” to find potential candidates with the characteristics they’d identified, the Close the Gap California team reached out to gauge possible candidates’ interest in running. “A man rolls out of bed in the morning and thinks, ‘OK, I’m going to run for office, and all of my friends will give me money.’ A woman rolls out of bed in the morning and thinks, ‘Maybe I’d like to run. But do I have enough experience? Can I raise enough money? Is my family on board?’”
It typically required multiple conversations with multiple people to convince a prospective candidate to even consider a run. Once she did, the candidate was led through a comprehensive process to help her determine whether running for state office was right for her and, if it was, ensure she was prepared to launch a successful campaign, both in her district and in Sacramento where candidates typically go to fundraise.
Unlikely roots
Janet’s background is anything but progressive. Her parents were born and raised in Alabama and, even though Janet didn’t grow up there, her parents adhered to the strict gender roles and conservative religious and political ideology typical of white Southerners in the 1960s.
As a kid, Janet didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about society’s failings. But in college–she attended Auburn University in rural Alabama in large part because her older brother was a student there–her activism was fueled when an unwanted pregnancy caused her to need an abortion in a state where abortions were illegal. It didn’t escape her when a black man moved from the sidewalk into the street so she, a white co-ed, could pass; when the Auburn college president proudly reported to parents that their children would leave Auburn no different from when they came; when she realized that Auburn’s female students had a 10 o’clock curfew but male students had none; and when she observed that the Confederate flag was flying higher than the Stars and Stripes on the State Capitol dome.
After college, Janet followed her soon-to-be husband to Menlo Park where she was energized by the area’s diversity and openness to new ideas. But it was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that transformed her into an activist. She recalls, “I said to myself, ‘You’re never going to be able to look yourself in the mirror again if you don’t get involved in the ERA fight.’”
When she read that the National Organization for Women (NOW) was looking for volunteers for its “Missionary Project”, Janet signed up. It was 1981 and the ERA was three states short of the 38 needed for ratification. A major obstacle to the ERA’s ratification was opposition from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). In response, NOW launched its own Missionary Project, named to mimic the LDS missionary program in which church members go door-to-door spreading the Church’s gospel. In the NOW version, “missionaries” went door-to-door in Utah communities to dispel myths about the ERA and stem the flow of money from the LDS Church into the anti-ERA campaign.
Janet wasn’t exactly welcomed by the women whose doors she knocked on. Rather, many slammed their doors shut when they learned why she and her fellow missionary were there. When women did talk, it was to recount the perceived dire consequences of the ERA’s passage, like women being required to use same sex bathrooms, forced into combat and denied Social Security benefits. After leaving a house, Janet often could hear a phone ringing in the house next door. She soon realized that it was residents calling their neighbors to warn them that “those ERAers are on the way.”
Activist for life
We know how the story ended. The ERA never did pass. But Janet’s outlook was fundamentally altered by her experience in Utah. “It really changes your life when you see the impact of institutional patriarchy and rampant misinformation,” Janet says.
After returning from Salt Lake City, Janet became active in Palo Alto’s NOW chapter. She lobbied the Palo Alto Fire Department and the Palo Alto City Council to build separate sleeping quarters and restrooms for female firefighters and worked on a study that confirmed that Palo Alto’s librarians–all women–were being paid significantly less than men working in jobs requiring similar skills and education. From there she became vice-president of California NOW. Over the past several years she has campaigned extensively in Nevada in Presidential elections and elections for progressive Congressional candidates, often staying there for six to eight weeks at a stretch.
In addition to her political work, Janet is a certified posture instructor, teaching clients how to align their body weight through their bones by modeling the alignment of people in other cultures who maintain their strength and posture as they age. She also is an avid pickleball enthusiast and an intrepid traveler, having visited far-flung destinations like Afghanistan, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran.
With women currently occupying 50 out of 120 seats in the California legislature, Close the Gap California is tantalizingly close to meeting, or exceeding, its goal of 50 percent gender parity by 2028. At age 73, Janet says it’s time to step back from her work with Close the Gap California.
“I’m drawing back for really good reasons,” she says. “The young people who are now Close the Gap California leaders are building on our earlier work and are so much more professional, so much more efficient, so much more sophisticated than I ever was. But I’m extremely proud of what I’ve helped accomplish, particularly for women of color and families in California.”
