THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Jeanne Paquette Atkins

“I had no idea what I was going to do with this law degree except hopefully make the revolution happen.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, December 2024

JA:  I’m Jeanne Paquette Atkins. Paquette is my birth name, and I use it as a middle name. I was born in Bremerton, Washington, which is a navy, shipyard town, across the water from Seattle, and born in 1949.

JW:  Great. Well, thank you. So, tell us a little about your childhood, you know, siblings, parents, maybe ethnicity. What kind of things do you think led you to become the person you are?

JA:  Well, I was the second child, of the post war era. The shipyard town where my parents lived in Bremerton was obviously a wartime community, and my sister was born in 1945, 4 years before I was. My father was very planful about these things. He’s a man who had a vasectomy in 1949 because he said, “I’m a teacher. I’ll never be able to afford college for more than 2 children, so this is what I what I do.”

He was French Canadian. His family came from Montreal, across Canada, trying to take advantage of the time when they were offering land for farmers to use in the middle of the country, just like the U.S. did. His family was not successful at that, but his dad was a trained mechanic, machinist. And so, they kept going west to Vancouver to the shipyards and then down ultimately down to Bremerton, where his dad worked in a shipyard.

Luckily enough for him, a local church had connection to Lynnfield College in Oregon, which is in McMinnville, Oregon, and encouraged him as a smart young man to go to college, where he met my mother who had grown up in Portland, and too, had a local church that supported low-income kids, getting to go to college.

Her family was quite impoverished. She was the youngest of 7. Her mother was born in Texas and her father in Glasgow, Scotland. And he somehow, I’ve never known the story of quite how he got as a teenager across the ocean and all the way to Texas, but he picked up my grandmother and many pregnancies, and itinerant mining and sheep sharing jobs later, they ended up in in Portland and my mother at Lynnfield.

My parents had a wonderful marriage, but I think significant for how I came to feminism in some ways. He was definitely the wise one, the leader of the family. My mother became a music teacher; middle of grade school she went back to work as a music teacher. You know, women could be smart, and talented, and needed to be, but men were in charge. And as I grew up, very early bitten by the romance bug, I went off to college expecting I was going find somebody like my mother found and that they would determine what my life looked like.

I was smart enough to do well in school, but not smart enough to work hard at it, ever. But I think that that family is a European American family. We’re white folks, majority in the northwest as we were, but they were a blue-collar history family. They were the first ones to go to college in their families and they were progressive for their time in the fifties and sixties. President of the teacher’s union, that sort of thing.

JW:  And got a vasectomy.

JA:  He was very planful about how life should be and my mother followed along with that and was crazy about him. But, you know, it worked for them for 70 some years. So, hard to criticize that; and raised 2 daughters and indeed put us both through college.

JW:  Well, when did you first get involved in the women’s movement?

JA:  Well, I think all the way through college I was very untethered. ’67 to ’71 were my college years, and the whole world changed in those 4 years. I think there’s no question. I got to the University of Washington, the big school across the water, in Seattle, right when all the rules went away. There were no more curfews, no more limits on what you could wear, or any of that stuff.

Quite a change, and I was very immature and not really prepared to make my own decisions on a daily basis. So, it was a rough go. I was very lucky to ultimately graduate successfully from college, but spent a lot of time worrying about dating and worrying about boys and partying and pretty frustrated with myself. But sometime very late in college during my senior year, two things happened.

I went wandering down the University Way near my apartment, and wandered into a bookstore and picked up The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. And at the same time, I started dating a guy, John Atkins, who became my husband. All these years he’s been my husband, who was very interested in what I had to say, and what I thought, and what I would be doing with myself. And so, lights went on, and recognition of, you know, I was in charge of me, and sort of feminist theory. I don’t think I ever made it all the way through The Second Sex, but I remember reading to him from it. “Can you imagine this?” It was a revelation.

My involvement for the next couple of years really just was internal and close by. I was reading everything I could read. I got a job as a teller in a savings and loan in downtown Seattle, and I remember hearing that Ms. Magazine was going to be published. I would walk down Third Avenue to Magazine City every night on my way to the ferry boat; I was living at home in Bremerton, trying to find that first issue of Ms. that came out. I just became very passionate about all of that, but it was just me doing that myself. We got married and moved to Centralia, Washington for one year and then ended up in Corvallis, Oregon, where John had a job at a newspaper there. That’s where I got very engaged.

Oregon State University had just started a women’s studies program. They had turned over what had been, I think, a police campus building, to the women’s studies director. And there became the focus of a lot of group meetings, a lot of speakers coming in, we set up a speaker’s bureau and started going out to high schools and other places and talking about feminism. And we started consciousness raising sessions that were big. I mean, 50, 60 people would show up. Eventually, that group very much winnowed down and became a group of 10, that well, if 7 of them hadn’t died, they would still be my friends today. There are 3 of us left, and we still communicate.

I think it was very important that I had that very personal, very deep support from a group of women, most of whom were older than I, which is why so many of them are gone. They were professors’ wives or had other connections at the university that caused them to start to question what was going on in their own lives, but they became very dear friends. So, I spent a couple of years doing that work at Oregon State, and also taking some classes where I could show that I could do well in school because my record at a UW was not so exciting, for the possibility of graduate school, but then decided to go to law school and commuted to Eugene from Corvallis to the law school at University of Oregon for 3 years.

JW:  What year was that, may I ask?

JA:  ’75. I took a little extra semester. I still wasn’t the best of students, I still was more interested in politicking than I was in reading cases, I’m afraid. So, it took me a little extra semester and I graduated in ’79. So ’75 to ’79. One of the things that I had kind of discovered during those years at OSU was, while I wasn’t that much of an academic, I really enjoyed the process of explaining the feminist issues to high school kids or community college classes or whatever.

I had no idea what I was going to do with this law degree except hopefully make the revolution happen. So, rather than try to go out and get a clerk job or something in the summertime in law school, I developed a Women in the Law class, and I went to Linn-Benton Community College and sold it to them as a, I don’t know, they had a term for just classes members of the public could sign up for, and 2 summers I taught that. I just ran into the folder that had all of the notes I had for how I was explaining what the problems were for women and why the law was not supporting them adequately. I really enjoyed that piece of it, more than thinking that I would practice law.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. I graduated and took the summer to study for and pass the bar in Oregon, but a little bit of a miracle saved me from having to make too quick a decision. My husband was at the newspaper in Corvallis, and he got a job as press secretary for a congressman from the First District of Oregon. His name was Les AuCoin, and we moved to Washington DC. from Corvallis quite suddenly.

Not having necessarily stellar credentials to go sell to folks in DC, I just did everything I could to find groups that were working on women’s issues. That was the most important thing to me. And after a number of months, I was very lucky to get an internship and then become the first staff attorney that Woman’s Equity Action League hired. I think folks in this project have talked with Sharmaleson [?], who was the executive director then, and I know that you’ve done an interview with Pat Russo, who was our lobbyist. I spent from ’81 to ’86, doing work at WEAL.

JW:  What were some of the issues you worked on?

JA:  WEAL had a very broad base of issues that they worked on. Their membership, which was never huge, a couple thousand at any given time, I think, had come out of academia. A lot of the leaders and folks who formed it were a little uncomfortable with NOW for some reason and formed their own organization. And so there were a lot of academic women on the board, and a lot of interest in the difficulties women had in academia, getting tenure, being promoted, being paid fairly, etcetera.

Initially as legal intern and then as staff attorney, one big piece of my job was to take in requests for support from women who were litigating on those issues and present the board with the option of whether to support them or not. Now, we didn’t have big money to give them, which litigation cost, but we did a lot of amicus work in combination with other women’s groups or even sometimes on our own. Sort of battling through the issues of where Title VII did and did not work in academia.

Some successes, lots of failures, but I think [we] moved the law forward on those issues. WEAL also had a project on Women in the Military, both uniformed women and families of military service people and we did a good bit of work. One case that I’ll always be so proud of – because I came out of Bremerton, Washington – is a woman who was a shipyard worker on the East Coast, not in Bremerton, but still, who was kind of the lead worker on repair of a sounding system for a submarine. And it was time to go out for sea trials. Those repairs had been done appropriately, and the navy would not let her go because you couldn’t have a girl on a submarine.

That was a very emotionally important case to me, and one that I remember as a success. Both assuring that title VII applied so she was not excluded from this simply because she worked in a shipyard. And the Navy, you know, had its policies. Ultimately, it was settled. There was not a court decision that she was right or wrong, but ultimately, women were allowed to do that. But I’ll always remember the Navy’s position, which was that the presence of this woman, should she have gone for sea trials on this system, which she had led the repair of, was that it would unacceptably degrade crew habitability to have her aboard.

JW:  I’m sorry. Crew habitability?

JA:  Yes. Right. How could they live, night after night, and more than an 8-hour day, with a woman on the ship? Because where would she sleep, and where would she go to the bathroom, and how could they be boys on a ship if she were there? And it was a degradation of their habitability, which was important.

Anyway, the litigation side was one part of it and I think we moved the law forward, though we certainly didn’t win every case. There was a big case that actually was in Oregon. Our board president at that time, Mary Gray, was a mathematician by trade and she developed ways of doing regression analysis of pay on college campuses, which was kind of new and different at the time. And whether a statistical case could be enough of a prima facie case to move a wage case. Ultimately, Night Circuit didn’t let them move forward with that case and the Supreme Court wouldn’t take it up, but I always felt the law was moving forward and we were part of that.

There were a lot there were other kinds of things. WEAL also worked very hard on older women’s issues. Pensions, insurance, military pensions, the division of military pensions for women who divorced their spouses, or their spouses divorced them, and won some victories there. We were kind of the masters of the 1-page fact sheet, and I think one of the few women’s groups who actually had an active lobbyist on the Hill in those days in the first half of the eighties.

Not that people didn’t do good advocacy work and weren’t bringing it up to the Hill, but we had leadership that made everything we did move forward. We did a lot of work on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and how that was being enforced, and worked hard to try to get the regulations changed so that it covered business credit decisions as well as personal credit decisions. I just ran into a couple of pictures I have where I was on the Today Show talking about the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Boy, that was terrifying.

Very late in my career, I served for 2 years as Oregon Secretary of State. One of the jobs of the Secretary of State is also business registry, and I was asked to speak at a conference and I pulled out that old video. One of the women in the audience came up afterwards and said she had been turned down that very week, for a business loan, and the bank had suggested perhaps her husband could help her.

JW:  Now what year was that, do you think?

JA:  Well, that was 2015, 2014.

JW:  Oh my gosh.

JA:  Yes. Sort of feels like the abortion issue right now. We’re living it all over again. So, Title IX – WEAL had a project on women in sports. They had a hotline for people to call and figure out how to file a complaint. WEAL itself was a plaintiff in a suit against the federal government for failure to enforce Title IX, and got a mandamus finding that required the department of what was then, ATW, to have to respond to complaints within a certain number of days and close them out within a certain number of days.

National Women’s Law Center were the attorneys and WEAL and their members were plaintiffs in that lawsuit. I don’t think that’s still in place, but I don’t know when it went away. We would go and meet with the secretary and explain how they really could resolve these complaints if they wanted to, which they didn’t. I had the advantage of the law school education to sort of know my way around for how we could participate and support litigation. But I think my strength really was in our newsletters and our fact sheets and how to sort of explain legal issues to a lay audience.

JW:  So they would get it.

JA:  Yes. So, I felt very good about all of that. When we had a bit of time, trying to get the ERA passed, again, we live through these times again and again. WEAL was the organization that took on the issue of women in the military and the draft, and we planned and put together hearings. I don’t know if one of the people that the project has reached out to or that Shar gave you is Carolyn Becraft.

JW:  Yes. I talked to her just the other day.

JA:  Oh good. Anyway, she was spectacular as leader of that project, and we were able to put together hearings, not only that explained how it would work under the law if we had an equal rights amendment, but also how it was already happening. So, let’s not get all twisted out of shape about women dying in combat because they already were. And Wanda [last name?], she had connections that brought us wonderful women to testify about what they were already doing in in the military.

JW:  You may need her to do it again, unfortunately.

JA:  Yes. So, anyway, those were wonderful, wonderful years and I felt very lucky to have that portion of my career. But then we had a baby, and life got hard. My poor husband was expected to do half the baby duty and the Hill was not a very family friendly employer. I think it still really isn’t, but they didn’t call it the last plantation for nothing. You know, the ’80s were not particularly great. So, we decided it was time to come back to Oregon. I knew I’d never have a job like that again, because there wouldn’t be enough resources in the women’s community to support somebody doing full time women’s work.

There was a coalition of women’s groups in Oregon who were putting their resources together to have a lobbyist during the every-other-year Oregon legislative sessions. At that time, we were not an every-year session, it was every-other-year. So, for 6 months, the first part of 1987, I was the Woman’s Rights Coalition lobbyist. We worked on insurance discrimination, we worked on a variety of things about domestic violence, we wanted a marriage license tax to help support domestic violence related services in the state. That was very nice, but it was not a full-time commitment. And so, I handed that off to the next person after that.

And then I spent a number of years working for Planned Parenthood of Columbia Willamette, the Portland area affiliate of Planned Parenthood. So, while I didn’t do a lot of reproductive health things at WEAL – it was not a central focus for them – it kind of became who I was. Both as their public affairs director and lobbyist. And then, ultimately, I went into management and was patient services director. We expanded, added abortion services in Portland, which was a very big deal at the time.

JW:  What year about was this?

JA:  Would have been ’91, I think. Oregon, you may know, is a [ballot] measure state. All the way through the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, we had anti-abortion groups that put forward anti-abortion [ballot] measures. Constitutional amendments, and legislative things. So, we developed a pretty strong pro-choice coalition. My work involved chairing that coalition for a few years and we beat back pretty much everything, including a measure on parental notification which all the national groups said we couldn’t win, and we did.

We did really good polling and had really good messaging, and in every county that got those TV ads, we won. So, it was wonderful proof. I was glad to have my friends in DC then, because we actually, after that campaign, came back to DC. A tour was arranged for us to meet with legislators and meet with groups to explain how we did that because it was still kind of verboten. Those were great successes when those happened.

But then I went to the State of Oregon’s Public Health Department, and was hired by them to get an agreement with the federal government and then implement a family planning expansion program. The feds were at that time, under Medicaid, allowing you to give birth control to anybody up to a 100% of federal poverty limit, no matter what else you had in terms of restrictions in your Medicaid program. And we did that. It was also kind of radical because you could enroll at the clinic. This was the Clinton administration.

Things got dicey after that, but the Clinton administration agreed to let us enroll people who showed up for birth control at family planning, Title X clinics, and the planned parenthood clinics who also were involved. They wanted us very much to go through the traditional enrollment process, which meant it might be 2 months before you got approved and we explained that if you’re showing up on Friday at the Planned Parenthood Clinic, you’re probably not going to wait.

Anyway, I felt very good about having negotiated that, and then, we had great success in expanding the number of clients. The county health department clinics who were doing the Title X program had to see people on a sliding scale, and about 75% of those people were zero. You could charge them nothing.

JW:  Wow. 75%.

JA:  Yes. So, getting this Medicaid waiver meant those clinics would be paid for virtually every client who came in the door. That was a great learning experience of  how it is to try to provide those kinds of services when you’re in Wallowa County, Oregon, a conservative community.

JW:  Oh, is that right? I always think of Oregon in general as more progressive.

JA:  Well, if you’re west of the of the Cascade Mountains, and from Eugene northward, it is. But if you get on to the other side of the Cascade Mountains in Eastern Oregon, much the same in Eastern Washington, that’s where we have our 1 Republican congressman. It’s from that part of the state. And, you know, I couldn’t figure out why this 1 health department director was so upset about having what her finances would look like in her clinic. And I’m like, “You know, I’ve done nothing but hear how hard it is for you to serve everybody that comes in the door.” Well, the minute more revenue started coming in, she had to go see the county commissioner about budget adjustments. And then it becomes public that they’re providing birth control.

JW:  I see.

JA:  So, whether we return to those days, I don’t know. But, anyway, that was from, I don’t know, ’94 to ’98 or ’99. And then I really took a turn. I went to work for the House Democratic Caucus at the legislature. They had a new leader. Republicans had been in charge in the legislature in the house for 14 years, and we took the majority and our guy became speaker. He’s now the junior senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley.

So, I worked for Jeff for 10 years, both at the state legislature and then as his state director, managing all of his state senate staff once he won. He wasn’t supposed to win that race. Nobody thought he could win it, and he did. And he’s been there a long time now. But, anyway, that was probably the first time in forever that I had a job that didn’t have the word woman in it.

JW:  Now, I know you’re doing some stuff now. I don’t know what it is, but you have your hands in something.

JA:  Well, you know, I don’t as much as you might think. I retired from the Merkley team in 2015, and we had a little situation in Oregon where our governor, governor Kitzhaber, had to resign. And so, Kate Brown, who was our secretary of state, became governor. We don’t have a lieutenant governor in Oregon.

The secretary of state is the person who becomes governor if there’s a problem, and then she had to appoint somebody to finish up the last 2 years of her term and that’s how I became secretary of state, was her appointing me. Way back in the day, she had been one of the women’s rights coalition lobbyists, like, 2 after me, I think. So, we’ve known each other a long time. That was really wonderful. I got to make my own decisions and find my name a million times. It was quite a treat, but I didn’t run.

I had planned to retire, and I kept with that plan even though it took me 2 more years then to do that. Soon after that, I did become state chair of the Democratic Party of Oregon, which I did for 2 years. That was exhausting. It was right after the Hillary, Bernie thing, and we had quite a division in our party and I was asked to run so that I could try to fix that, which I don’t think I did. I think new fights took over from those fights. But, after that, I was very happy to be kind of retired.

I’m still involved in my county party. I’m involved in the Willamette women democrats, which is kind of a multi-county caucus of women within that, but I mostly hang out with the 2 who are left of my consciousness raising group from the ’70s and read books. My husband is 7 years older than I am, so we’re coming up on other things that’ll happen for us. And sadly for me, my 1 son, who’s wonderful, is a lawyer, lives in Dallas for God sakes, Texas, with his husband, and my grandson who’s now 4. I keep telling people I comfort myself by the fact that Portland does not need any more progressive lawyers now.

JW:  But he’s progressive in Dallas, which we need.

JA:  Yes. Definitely. He is involved in work to try to help some of the abortion funds in Texas get things straight for themselves as to what they can and can’t do under the law in Texas. And he’s involved in a big lawsuit against the Dallas police for how they dealt with the Black Lives Matter demonstrators. He does other stuff that makes money, and he and his husband run a jujitsu gym. So, they’re very happy, but they’re in Dallas for God sakes, Texas. When you live in Portland, it’s a little weird.

JW:  Yes. It’s kind of far, I get it. Well, you know, it sounds like your beginnings and maybe you should answer this, but it sounds like your parents really shaped the way you thought and what you became, would you say?

JA:  Yes. I do think their progressive values were there within their generation, and I think they were both fine with the work I did, and proud of the work I did. My mother worried a lot that I was a little pushier than I ought to be but at the same time, those values were there. I think just this last month and the election results here, just really sort of threw me back on my heels. Back to that whole sense of women weren’t quite all complete people, and how we could still be in that spot, just enrages me as well as frightens me.

JW:  Absolutely.

JA:  That’s just where I get crazy about my 4-year-old grandson growing up in Texas around all these people.

JW:  We’re going to count on your son passing on progressive values.

JA:  Yes. Indeed. But also, just basic respect. It really was the strong feeling that I was kind of missing something there. I wasn’t going to be in charge of myself, and then I had the chance to change that and I’m so grateful to the women’s movement to have given me that.

JW:  Oh, I totally am with you. I feel like I say it often, I am lucky that I was born when I was. It made a huge difference in who I became. Well, anything else you want to add before we close?

JA:  I’m just very grateful that you all are doing this work so that that particular middle generation gets documented. When I was secretary of state, they’d put me in front of groups of young women students, and they were just astonished to learn that in my first job as a bank teller, I had to wear a little double-knit uniform and so did the vice-president who was a woman; but the men, of course, didn’t have to. And that we all had to cook lunch for the whole group. Every week, 1 of the women was assigned and given money to buy it, but we had to cook for all of them. And, you know, how much has changed since then. I don’t know. They don’t know that history.