THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Kathy Patrick

“The relationships are probably the biggest thing. The early realization that it’s a driving personal belief that a group of committed women can accomplish anything, if they organize and work at it. There’s nothing we can’t do.”

Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, December 2021

KP:  My name is Kathy Patrick, and I was born in Minnesota in 1960, but we moved to Wisconsin when I was two. I’m a Wisconsin girl for my whole growing up time and growing up in Wisconsin turned out to be pivotal in my development as an activist in the women’s movement later on, simply because of the mentors that I had access to. I thank the universe for that one because it dropped me into the right place at the right time. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood but surrounded by farmland was interesting.

I grew up in New Berlin, Wisconsin, which at the time was pretty rural on the outskirts of Milwaukee, and it was a pretty monocultural place in the 60’s and 70’s when I was growing up. It was very white. It was mostly Catholic. My parents were unusual in that they both had college educations. My dad was an electrical engineer who worked on navigation systems for the Apollo space program, and my mother had been a political journalist in Michigan until she got married and followed her husband to his job in Minnesota and then had me and transitioned into this very ill-fitting role of housewife and mom.

She was great at being a mom, but she really didn’t like that whole housewife thing. It was, I think, an incredibly stifling and frustrating experience for her to have gone from this place where her intellect and her ideas were highly valued and really mattered in the world, to a context in which they really were disregarded anywhere outside the four walls of her home. Her frustration levels were pretty high and for a lot of good reasons. But one of the things she did was she found Ms. Magazine and subscribed to it.

My first exposure to the women’s movement was reading my mother’s copies of Ms. Magazine, which she thought was great. She was like, yes, you read that. You need to know that stuff. I was an avid Ms. Magazine reader from when I was 13. That was what was going on in my house.

MJC:  What were their names?

KP:  My dad’s name was Bob Patrick, and he worked at AC Delco for many years. My mom was June Patrick, later Dr June Patrick, which was a fun turn of events. When she was 40 and I was twelve, she decided that she was going to try to fulfill a long-standing dream of hers, which had been to become a doctor.

Her goal originally when she was a teenager, getting ready to go off to college, which was a big deal because she was the first in her family, first in her generation to go, she really wanted to go to medical school, and her father said, no, I won’t pay for it. I will help you go to college, but not for that, because that’s not appropriate for women/girls to do. She went into journalism instead and was great at that. But her dream had always been to be a doctor. When she turned 40 and I was old enough not to need her futzing around with me, she decided she was going to give this a go. She enrolled in pre-med courses at UW Milwaukee and did fantastic at it.

She was always a way better student than I was. She really loved school. She aced her pre-med stuff and then started applying to medical schools and kept getting turned down because she was too old. At that time, 40 was considered absolutely ancient in terms of somebody trying to go into medical school. The notion of a nontraditional student who might be coming to a career later in life was simply not part of the picture.

Out of high school, you went to college, you went to your professional advanced degree in succession. If you didn’t do it that way, then it wasn’t right. Her pre-med grades were better than over 90% of her classmates, but she was struggling to find a school that would take her. Finally, she got into medical school at Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan. The only problem was that we lived in Wisconsin. She went and fortunately, her sister and brother-in-law were in Michigan, and my aunt and uncle were incredible sources of support for her.

They just were enthralled with this idea and did everything they could to help her out. So that was fantastic. But my mom went off to medical school and she did a full-time accelerated program, so she’d only have to be gone for three years. In the meantime, my dad and I stayed home and just kept the household running. He had no notion of there being traditional gender roles about who does what in the household when it was just the two of us. We just got stuff done, and there were no roles. It was whoever had time got the laundry done, whoever had time made dinner, whoever had time once I could drive, did the grocery shopping, stuff like that.

So that was an education for both of us. I’m actually really grateful for that time because it gave us an opportunity to be very close, and he did not live a lot longer than that. He died when I was 20. That time together turned out to be a very big deal. Anyway, my mother graduated medical school on the exact same day that I graduated high school. My aunt and uncle, who had been so supportive that entire time, did not have a lot of resources, but they as their graduation gift to both of us chartered a plane and we went to my mother’s graduation in Michigan in the morning, and they flew themselves and my parents and my grandmother to Wisconsin so that we could go to my graduation in the afternoon.

We managed to make both graduations, which was pretty awesome. So that was a big part of my growing up influences. The other thing that’s really important to talk about is both as an aspect of my sort of pre-women’s movement life, but also where and when I grew up was the extreme challenge of growing up as a young lesbian in a conservative community in the early to mid-1970s. It was completely unsafe to be out, so I wasn’t. I remained closeted until basically the day I graduated high school and was free to go live my own life on my own terms and not have to worry about what might happen.

The good news is that I had already discovered the women’s movement, and when I discovered the women’s movement, I also discovered the lesbian community. The support and sense of belonging that I got from that was critical. It’s also really important to talk about the fact that at least the Milwaukee chapter where I spent most of my chapter time in NOW was completely welcoming and had a lot of out lesbians among its membership and its leadership.

I was out to all of my NOW sisters and never felt anything but acceptance and support from them. I know there may have been other pockets and other places in the organization where that might not have been true. But for me, NOW was an incredibly nurturing space to be in, both as a young activist who was learning her craft but also as a young lesbian who was finding her way in the world and looking for support from other women. So that turned out to be super important.

MJC:  Yes, I can imagine that’s a great experience to talk about. How did you find NOW?

KP:  When I was about 16 or 17, a local NOW chapter in my neck of the woods had formed and they did an ERA walkathon, and I thought, that’s interesting. There was a little blurb about it in the New Berlin Citizen, which was our local newspaper out there, and I saw that they existed and the coverage was after the fact. I’m looking at it like there’s all these women and they’re working on stuff that I care about.

I hunted them down and found out when they met and just went to a meeting. In those days in particular, I don’t know how it is now in chapter life, but in those days, if a warm body walked through the door and was offering to help, you got put to work right away. It didn’t matter that I was just a kid. They were like, hey, you’re here. Here’s some stuff to do. And they just gave me very minimal work with no responsibility, but they had work they needed done.

I did work and got to know people. The first big thing that happened was the chapter newsletter. About six months before the big ERA rally in March in 1978. There was going to be a July 9th rally that was kicking off the effort to get the deadline extended for ERA ratification. I’d never been to Washington. I’d never been to a big rally. I’d never been done any of that. There was a little blurb in the newsletter written by the chapter President, who was a very good marketer. She had a little Tom Sawyer in her.

What she needed was somebody to coordinate everybody from that area going to the march, and she needed somebody to organize the transportation and just take it on as a project. But she pitched this as if it was the most amazing opportunity in the history of life and that it was the best thing you could possibly be doing with your time in the world. She hooked me. I called her up going, I hope no one else took this job because I really want it. And she had to be laughing to herself. I got the job.

MJC:  What was her name?

KP:  Chris Riordan was the chapter President at the time, and she had organized the west suburban Milwaukee chapter of NOW, which was my local chapter for the first year or two of my involvement until I moved to Milwaukee. Chris was very good at marketing, and she sold me on that. I got to organize the Amtrak train of transportation. Somebody else did the buses. We sent a substantial delegation and going to that march and rally that summer again, this is all 1978. I graduated high school in May or June, and then July 9th off we go to Washington.

That was a big year for me in terms of exposing me to the larger women’s movement. The biggest impact that experience had on me was realizing how many of us there were and what the impact and power of a collective movement could be. That’s the first time that it really hit home for me. I knew that I was part of something bigger, but it’s like, well, here I am in this NOW chapter, and there’s all these other NOW chapters. I don’t know how that all fits together. I stood there in a sea of 100,000 women in Washington, and I was like, that’s how this fits together. When there’s this many of us, we are powerful. That was really formative for me in terms of my understanding of that.

The other big thing that I did that same summer in August was I went to my first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which was transformative in another way. It was kind of a ridiculous story. Here I am, this starving college student or about to be a college student working at McDonald’s or some fool thing that summer. Nobody involved in this project had any money, but two of my friends from the Milwaukee chapter said to me, hey, we know this woman who has a car and she’ll drive if we chip in for gas and somebody has to bring a tent.

I had a tent because I was a camper from way back, so that was my contribution to the project. Off we went to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and I had never been part of anything like that. It was four days of a complete community run by and for women. It was a cultural experience that was amazing. Obviously, it was about music, but it was also about all sorts of other opportunities to learn from one another. There were all different stages, and you could just declare a workshop in the woods.

It was literally like pull up a stump and learn about “fill in the blank.” There’d be a drumming circle, there’d be a workshop on self-defense. There’d be whatever anybody felt inspired to create in the moment and to teach other women. They had the space and the freedom to do that. It was amazing. It was its own little village. They had their own water and sanitation. They had figured out how to cook for I don’t know how many thousands of women. They had a kitchen and the food was terrible. You paid a little bit of money to get in and then the requirement was you had to give them a minimum of 4 hours of work, doing something to contribute to the community.

MJC:  It was a partnering system, basically.

KP:  Yes, it was just collective creation. And with everybody contributing their 4 hours, and a lot of us did more than that. You could volunteer to work in the kitchen. Or if you knew about sound stage stuff and theater stuff, you could help set up the stage and run the lights. If you knew about mechanics, they needed vehicles maintained. Everything was done on site. I didn’t know anything about anything. I volunteered in the parking lot. I could direct traffic because that was all I knew how to do when I was 18 years old. So that was my contribution, pointing cars in different directions.

But the experience of being in a women’s collective, basically, that was formed, not spontaneously. It took an enormous amount of work to organize it, and they planned all year to create this. But to just even show up and be able to be part of something like it that was materialized out of a field and woods with the efforts and ingenuity of a bunch of women who said, this is important, and we’re going to do it. That was my second lesson in the span of two months of the amazing things we’re capable of when we work together.

MJC:  Wonderful. Women had their own Woodstock.

KP:  Basically, and we had it every year for years. That festival went on for close to 25 or 30 years.

MJC:  Whereabouts in Michigan? Who ran it? Can you talk about those women?

KP:  It was just outside of a little town called Hart, Michigan. It’s kind of in the upper middle section of the state, and I think they leased the land from somebody. They now own it. There’s a whole story behind it. That should be a whole series of interviews of all those women who put that together. But actually, it closed down a few years ago. I think it’s Lisa Vogel who was really the organizer behind it. There were a lot of Wisconsin women who were critical organizers in that.

Norma Jean Bunton was a regular. She lived in Madison and was a huge contributor to the organization of that festival every year. I got to know Norma Jean later when I lived in Madison. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the other names right now, but it was kind of the original mother of all women’s music festivals. There were a number of others that sprung up around the country during the late 70s and early 80s. The only one I ever went to consistently was the one in Michigan. But I went to that most years for a long time, as long as I lived in Wisconsin.

MJC:  So now you’re in college, going to the Michigan music festivals in the summer. What did you study in college? And how were you involved in the women’s movement through your college years?

KP:  I started out as a pre-veterinary medicine major because I was absolutely certain that was what I wanted to do with my life. I was basically a full-time student and a full-time activist at the same time. I went to UW Milwaukee and was taking my biology and physics and chemistry courses, being a good little pre-vet major. I loved all those things. I was having a good time. I love the sciences. I love math. I was happy, but I was also taking a bunch of women’s studies courses just because it seemed like, why not? They’re there and it was an opportunity. There were some interesting conflicts between being involved in women’s studies and being an activist, which was fascinating.

One year I remember I was taking a class called Women in Politics. I needed to go to Indiana for a week to do some field organizing and I explained this to the instructor who informed me that that had nothing to do with her class, and I would not be getting any sort of a pass for being gone for a week. I thought, I don’t think I need to take any more classes from you. That does not seem to be a women’s studies person who is terribly grounded in the actual women’s movement. I’ll be letting that one go.

But other than that, I was fortunate enough that first of all, my tuition, this is amazing to say in this day and age, my tuition was $365 a semester, plus books. I had a tiny apartment in Milwaukee that cost $115 a month, including utilities. It cost me about $300 a month to live, and my parents very kindly paid for my $365 tuition. It was not a big strain for them.

Considering I’d been applying to a lot more expensive schools, I think they were breathing a huge sigh of relief that that’s where I wound up. I actually chose UW Milwaukee because I’d started to get involved enough in the Milwaukee chapter of NOW, and I was meeting important mentors and starting to build a reputation for being good at organizing. I didn’t want to give that up. I felt like if I changed cities that I would have to start over in the women’s movement and start at the bottom.

Because I started young, I already had a few years of experience under my belt, and I just wasn’t comfortable starting over. I was being given work to do that was important and took real responsibility. I made the decision to go to school in town rather than leave. But as a consequence, I got to live really cheaply, and my mother was kind enough to support me in that. She wrote me a check for $300 every month so that I could work on my women’s movement stuff instead of getting a job at the bookstore or whatever.

That was huge because I couldn’t have been a full-time student, a full-time activist, and nearly a full-time employee somewhere. There aren’t that many hours in the day, so that support from my mom was huge. I transitioned to the Milwaukee chapter because that was what was right down the street from me. At that point, what was going on was we were in the middle of two things we were trying to get done. We were trying to get an extension on the deadline for ERA ratification, and then once that was won, then we rolled into trying to get the ERA passed.

The summer of ’78 was a busy time because the other fun thing that I did that was really important to me was I got sent with another member of the Milwaukee chapter, Susan Luecke, who later became a very good friend of mine. But we barely knew each other at this time. In August of ’78 we got sent up to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, to turn around a probable no vote on ERA extension. The local member of Congress up there was Father Cornell, who was a Democrat, but who was not enamored of the notion of this deadline extension thing. He was signaling that he intended to vote no, and we needed his vote. Susan and I got sent up there.

We hopped in my totally beat up, barely running car and drove on up to Sturgeon Bay, where we met the local Door County NOW Chapter President, Diane Dickinson, and we get to her house. We set up shop in her dining room, in her kitchen. We were operating out of her house because she had two separate landlines, which was unusual. But it was because she ran a business. She had her business line and she had her home line.

We basically commandeered in the evenings because she couldn’t give up her business line during the day. We did our calling in the evenings, and our big strategy was first she gave us a list of all the women in Door County that she knew personally. And we called all of them. When we ran out of them, we started calling all of the women who were listed by their own name in the phone book.

When we ran out of them, we started calling all the people who were listed by a single initial, followed by a last name on the theory that most of them were probably women. Our objective was back then, the primary way to get a fast communication to a member of Congress, because your only options were basically letters, phone calls and telegrams. There was no email. The only way to get a fast message and the votes coming in two, three days so we’ve got no time.

Western Union had a thing they called a public opinion message, which was like a super cheap telegram, and it could only be used for communication with public officials. It was their combination good deed and profit center, I think. But we made heavy use of those things. We sent something like 125, 150 public opinion messages from residents of his district on this one issue in the span of three days. He had never gotten that many communications about anything ever. Frankly, I think, it freaked him out.

Maybe it impressed him or it motivated him and he turned his vote around. He voted yes. My very first field organizing experience was a win, and that feels really good. Winning is good. We like winning. Once I got a taste of that, I wanted a lot more of that. But the other thing was I’m pretty optimistic by nature anyway, and I’m inclined to think that just about anything can be done if you put your mind to it.

But having a win on that first experience and having it be an important win and a big win, pretty much made me believe that we could win most of the time. That’s how I approached everything I did for the rest of my time in the women’s movement. It was I don’t care if somebody says no, we’re going to get it done anyway because it’s possible. We just have to organize enough people. If we organize enough people and we push hard enough, we can win.

I learned later that that was not always the prevailing mode of operating or belief system being held by everybody in the world. I particularly got an awakening on that when I eventually went to Washington. But that’s later on in the story. So that’s what I was up to. Then while I was in college, I just kept getting sent on field organizing trips.

MJC:  Who was sending you?

KP:  I would just take phone calls from the state NOW President. I assume that what was going on was that folks in the National NOW office were coordinating with all the targeted states. At this point, working on extension was done by the fall of ’78. So at that point, we’ve got three years to get this done. We’re not going to get an extension on the extension. At this point, it’s about getting a yes vote on ratification in a handful of state legislatures.

Because the closest unratified state to us was Indiana, that’s where most of the Wisconsin folks got sent. I assume that what was going on is that Marion Wagner at the time who was the President of Indiana NOW was communicating with the national office and saying, we need people to work on these districts or to work on these legislators. We need to get more communications going. We’ve got our target list. We need people pushing on these people. I believe then what occurred is that the national office would then call the state presidents of NOW in the area and say, can you send some people?

All I ever knew was that I would get a call from the state president saying, can you go to Indiana and do X? I was a student and had more flexibility. I was a student who was fortunate enough not to have to be working at the same time at a paid job. I was able to pick up and go most of the time. Sometimes I went by myself. Sometimes I was able to get somebody to come with me.

The state coordinator would figure that out and would be like, here’s your partner for the weekend. Go visit these people. So those trips were amazing. Some of them were worthy of material for a spy novel. We went into some communities in Indiana where the local NOW people were darn near underground. They were so afraid that they would be penalized in some way, either at their jobs or in their communities for being active advocates on women’s rights stuff. There was a lot of underground hiding feel to stuff, meeting people way after hours, meeting people at 10:00 at night, in a dark bar or in a deserted campus hallway.

It was crazy stuff, but we would meet up with whoever our local contact was, and all we would be given, this was the other crazy thing. I don’t know why it had to be this way, but I can remember one trip to Terre Haute, Indiana, where, for whatever reason, I think because of a time crunch, we flew to Indianapolis and Marion Wagner left us her car at the airport with a note in it about where we were supposed to go next.

And we got in the car and we’re like, this is insane. We get in the car, we drive to St. Mary of the Woods College, somewhere. It’s way deep in the woods, or it felt like it. It was night. It’s in the winter, so it’s dark at 4:00 or whatever. It probably wasn’t that late at night, but it’s pitch-black outside. We drive to St. Mary of the Woods and Sister so and so met us in a darkened hallway, whispering because whatever she was doing wasn’t okay with somebody.

But she was our secret contact. Then she sent us to the next person who was going to be our host, because you didn’t rent a motel, you slept on somebody’s couch or their floor. That’s just what you did. I don’t think I ever went on a field organizing trip where I didn’t take a sleeping bag because I assumed I’d be sleeping on somebody’s floor. If I got a bed out of the deal, I’d consider it The Ritz.

We went to stay with this woman and she asked what we needed, and I said, “Well, we need to run a phone bank. We’re going to need a lot of phone lines. Who around here has got a lot of phone lines?” She was like, well, the only people I know who have that many phone lines are whatever the local Union was and I was like, great, who do you know there? And she knew somebody. It was a local where I had buddies back in Milwaukee in that local.

I took whatever name she gave me. I called up the guy and said, hey, you don’t know me, but your brother in the local in Milwaukee said that you’re a stand-up guy and that you could maybe help us out because they’re helping us out there and maybe you could help us out here. One of the things that was really amazing about working in Milwaukee NOW and in Wisconsin in general, was that we had tremendous allyship with the local unions, and a lot of the union women were very involved in Milwaukee NOW.

They turned around and involved their locals. I just assumed that was how things went everywhere, that labor and the women’s movement were working hand in glove. It wasn’t until I left Wisconsin that I realized, oh, no, that’s not necessarily the case everywhere. But that was how I operated as an organizer. I figured if there was a local in town, they were going to be the first people I called because they did have resources.

Generally speaking, with a couple of exceptions, there were a couple of unions that were not on our side. The Teamsters weren’t very friendly to us, but most of the other locals were. A lot of the locals had a lot of women in them and the sisters in the union were fighting for their own stuff inside the union. There was always a way in. In Terre Haute, that’s what we did. We went down to the local and rounded up a bunch of this women’s friends on the QT. We couldn’t let anybody know they were doing it. I don’t know what the powers that be in Terre Haute were going to do.

We would run phone banks that way. That was the kind of stuff we were doing when the state NOW president, would call and say, go to Indiana. It would usually be something like that. We would run a phone bank for a few days and get a particular legislator on board with whatever we needed them on board with at that moment. Usually, it was around ERA ratification. There were some other issues as well. That’s what I was doing a good chunk of the time when I wasn’t in class.

I can’t say that occasionally my studies didn’t suffer a little bit, but by then, I had switched to a political science major because I realized that I love animals and I want them in my life but I really wanted to focus on being an advocate, and I didn’t know at that time, and I don’t think it was common at that time that you could make a living doing that. I just knew that that was my calling, and that right then that was what I needed to be doing. I would figure out later what you do with the political science degree. But it seemed a lot more aligned with the work that I was doing and where my passions were than veterinary medicine at that point. I had made that switch.

MJC:  What was your next move within NOW?

KP:  A couple of things. One, I took a year off between my sophomore and junior year in college because an opportunity presented itself that made sense to take advantage of which was a woman I had met in the course of other advocacy work around town. Milwaukee is not that big a city to begin with, and the women’s movement community within it was small, but mighty. After a few years, I felt like I pretty much knew everybody in town who was working on any of these issues.

The head of the local battered women’s shelter, which is what we called them at the time, lived next door to me, and through her, I met all of the people who were working on sexual assault and domestic violence issues, which is how I met Debbie Neese, who was running two organizations at the same time. She was running the task force on battered women. The City Council actually had a task force on sexual assault and domestic violence that was funded by the city and was basically an adjunct to the City Council. Debbie Neese was also running that, and they needed somebody to do all of the admin and organizing work for that.

She hired me to do that and I did that for a year. That was really helpful, because what it required, among many other things, was to be at the table literally, during City Council meetings. I saw firsthand how that worked and how a City Council operated, how the horse trading operated, how all of it got done, how the sausage got made, so to speak.

That was a huge education, because there’s no way that I would have been at a table like that at my age any other way. I was wallpaper. I was not large and in charge. I was just sitting there taking notes and being a good administrative person. But I was in the room. As Hamilton says, being in the room where it happens makes a huge difference. At that stage of the game, the huge difference for me was simply I got an incredible education. Then I got an additional education because as I got to know all of the task force members who were much more experienced and savvier than I at that point, they would debrief with me.

This is amazing. They didn’t have to do this. They were debriefing, in part for their own purpose, but they could have done that in five minutes. An experienced crew can debrief a meeting in less than five minutes. But they would take a half an hour and walk me through what had happened because they wanted to make sure I got it. A lot of times I hadn’t gotten it. Stuff had gone right over my head. I was taking things at face value, thinking that what was said was what mattered.

They would say, well, you know what just happened here. When so and so said this, well, that means blah, blah, blah. I’m like, oh, I had no idea that’s how the world worked. I learned a lot in that process and then finished out college. But by then, when I finished that gig with the task force, I did that from 1980 to 1981. Then we rolled right into sort of countdown year on ERA. I was working on other issues. There was a move afoot to enact a gay rights bill in Wisconsin, which ultimately did pass and was the first in the country.

I was not super involved in that, but I was part of the local groups in Milwaukee that were working on it. I had my hand in a lot of places, but as an organizer who had responsibilities, it was primarily in the context of ERA. The convergence of a bunch of things: the countdown year for ERA was happening and also going into that year was the year that I ran for Vice President of Wisconsin NOW, and I ran against the incumbent. It was not a popular move. It was the first time there had ever been a contested election in Wisconsin NOW. It made people extremely uncomfortable.

Many people came to me and to the incumbent and said, can’t you guys work this out? Can’t you maybe be co-vice presidents? My response to that was, no, I’m running against her because she’s not doing a good job. I was like, she’s not doing anything. And this is an important year. We got to be busy. It was complicated by the fact that the state president had had a personal tragedy in her own life and was not able to be as involved as she normally would have been. She’d been great, but she had to deal with some very serious things in her own life, and she was focusing her attention where it needed to be at that time.

But that meant that the VP needed to be stepping up. In my view, they weren’t. So, I ran against her. I did not win. It was a very close vote. I was proud of the campaign that I ran, but I did not win. At the state conference where this election happened, when it became apparent that I had not won, then the next order of business was to fill out the task force chairs for the state for the year. I just volunteered to run the state ERA task force. So that’s what I did for the next year and a half.

MJC:  Wisconsin had already ratified.

KP:  Yes, they were long ratified. They were early birds. But we had a state ERA task force because we saw a responsibility to get this done in our neighboring states. We had organizing work to do. We had fundraising work to do. There was a lot of work to be done and it didn’t feel like just because we’d ratified, we could sit back and chill out until the rest of the country got stuff done.

MJC:  Let me clarify, Kathy. You’re talking about 1982. Indiana had already ratified. Where was your concentration for that year?

KP:  We switched to Oklahoma. So that became our new project state. I don’t remember if we had a connection or if we were just told that’s where the need was greatest.  So that’s where we started sending people. There was a big campaign operation in Tulsa. I was starting to recruit people who were willing to go for months at a time. So that shifts who you’re recruiting and how. But we got a lot of people to go, and they were having such a good time down there it started making it easy to recruit more people because they felt like what they were doing really mattered. They felt they were making an impact, and they were having a positive experience.

At the time I was also tending bar at a local women’s bar. I discovered that that was an outstanding recruitment tool, that after people had had a couple of beers, they were much more open to thinking about going to Oklahoma for a month or two. I wasn’t above whatever technique would work.

We held fundraisers at the bar every month to support the ERA campaign and to support the organizers we were sending down there. We were raising money to help them in their expenses. We had to get them there. Basically, once they got there, local NOW members and supporters would volunteer rooms in their home for people to stay. I went down for about five weeks. I stayed with a lovely couple named Bill and Sue Forney in Tulsa.

They not only gave me a room in their house, they gave me a car because one of their kids was off at college and didn’t need the car during that time, and it was sitting in the driveway and they’re like, are you a safe driver? Here are the keys. I was able to ferry a bunch of people around town because at least I had access to a car. That was the level of commitment. I hadn’t met these people. They took on faith that I was a good human and would not steal from them or ruin their house or wreck their car. There’s, like, you’re here. The national NOW sent you. You must be good people. We’re turning over our space to you.

That happened over and over again. It was remarkable. I miss that we don’t operate that way. It’s good that there are more resources behind the work now and that you can actually send someone somewhere and put them up in a hotel. But what we miss in that process is the bond that happens when you actually live in the same space with people and form deep relationships with them. I kept in touch with them for years, and that story just kept repeating itself. Everybody I knew was staying with someone in town, and they built friendships with those people that they took with them, and that lasted until somebody died.

MJC:  Before we move on, I know that you have a special feeling for some of the founders that were helpful in developing your commitment to feminism. I don’t want to leave that period before we talk about that.

KP:  Yes. Thanks for reminding me. One of the amazing things early on, like in the first year I was involved in NOW, a couple of people, Chris Roerden, who was the chapter President at the time, and Diane Pryor, who was a state President at the time. Both of them recognized some talent and also, just like, maniacal energy that I was supposed to bring to the project. But they also recognize some talent and ability. And you don’t turn that away if somebody’s volunteering and they show promise, you bounce on it.

They mentored me a little bit. More importantly, they introduced me to other people. Among the people they introduced me to were Kay Clarenbach, who was an original NOW founder, Catherine Conroy also, and Gene Boyer. All three of those women became mentors to me in one degree or another. I probably wound up having the closest relationship to Gene, actually. For whatever reason, she just liked me and decided that she wanted to spend time with me. I spent more time with her. But I got to spend quite a bit of time with the other two as well, and they were unfailingly generous with their time and their expertise and their wisdom.

It was always informal with Conroy. More often than not, there was a bar involved and you’d be sitting around, maybe you’d been at a fundraiser or a phone bank or whatever you’d been doing. And that was the other thing, especially with Conroy. She was a big deal in her Union. She was a big deal in NOW, and that didn’t mean she wasn’t working the phone banks with everybody else. She was right there in the trenches.

She could have been up on her lofty perch directing traffic, and she did plenty of that, too, because she was really skilled. But she was also in the trenches. So that’s how I got to know her. A bunch of us would go out for a beer after a long night of phone calling and just kick back a little bit and start telling stories. I didn’t have any stories to tell, but they had stories.

In the process, both relationships were built. Wisdom and perspective were shared and lessons imparted. I remember Conroy being particularly sort of “Obi-Wan Kenobi-ish” in that she would impart wisdom without you even knowing it. Then you’d go back the next day and think about what she’d talked about and you’re like, oh, my God, that was amazing. I just learned this incredible thing. Kay was great. I got to know Kay better later when I moved to Madison, which is like the next chapter in my NOW involvement. But I knew her a little bit.

Then I also got introduced to some legislators who were really significant, both Barb Ilichney, who at the time was our local assembly person from Milwaukee who was super involved in NOW. I got to know her because she was a member of the chapter, and she hung out. Then she went on to become a state Senator, in large part because all the NOW people campaigned like crazy for her.

Then when she moved on to the Senate, Barb Notestein, who was running the hunger task force in Milwaukee early on for years, ran to replace [her]. When Barb Ilichney moved to the Senate, Barb Notestein ran for her assembly seat, and we got her elected. Then we got some county board women elected and so organically I was also learning about electoral politics and how campaigning worked and how putting the collective organizing power of an already organized group of women behind somebody’s campaign could make a huge difference. Now, technically, we couldn’t do that as a NOW chapter because we were a 501(c)(4) and we weren’t allowed to do that.

But we all knew each other, and it’s like, okay, I’m doing my NOW work now. Then when I’m done with that, I’m mentally clocking out. Now I’m going over here and I’m working on the campaign, and it was all the same people doing the work for the candidates as well. We got some amazing women elected to the legislature, and in the process, the other thing that was going on that I didn’t even think about it at the time is that here I am, 20 years old and I have a close relationship with multiple city Council members, a county board member, a couple of state assembly people, a state Senator, and it just kind of happened.

It’s not like I set out to build relationships with those elected officials, but some of them became elected officials because of the work we did. But those relationships became very important as well. So those were not so much mentorships, but also key in the whole process.

MJC:  It’s even more valuable maybe than that college education right there.

KP:  No question. I needed the degree because the collective wisdom was you needed to have the degree to get a decent job. It didn’t matter what the degree was in, you just had to have a piece of paper. I did my bit and I got my piece of paper, and actually, I don’t mean to dismiss it. I had some great experiences in classrooms, but I got my real education in the women’s movement, no question.

MJC:  Oklahoma – so the ERA does not get ratified. What happens next in your organizing life?

KP:  One of the people that I persuaded to go to Oklahoma was Denise Matyka, who was a good friend of mine in Wisconsin NOW already. She was at a point in her life where she was ready to do something different. She committed and went down for several months. I think she was down there for six months, and when she returned, we agreed, basically that she would run for Wisconsin NOW President, and I would run as her VP because we saw an opportunity to be elected.

We were a little bit returning heroes for having gone and done that work. There was a big spotlight on us. We were a lot younger. Denise is about five years older than me. I was 23-ish, and she was maybe 28, and we would not normally have been afforded the opportunity to run for those offices and win. But this was a window of opportunity, and we thought, if we want to do this, we need to do it now. So, we did, and we won. That was also a contested election, but I had learned a lot in the first one, and we won that one.

That was the beginning of a whole bunch of other things. Once I graduated college in the spring of ’83 because I’d taken that gap year, and moved to Madison immediately because it made a lot more sense to be there. If I was going to be a statewide officer, I wanted to be in the state capital, and Denise was already there. That was where she had moved to when she came back from Oklahoma.

In the meantime, I also needed to pay the rent. I had been applying for jobs and had discovered that it was actually possible to apply for jobs that paid money that involved advocacy work. I got a job as the Midwest regional director for the Gay Rights National Lobby (GRNL). That job was relatively short lived, mostly because GRNL was on the ropes financially and was struggling in the larger landscape of national gay rights organizations.

There was the NGLTF, and then there was the Human Rights Campaign Fund, as it was called at the time. Those two organizations were the big gorillas in the room and GRNL was kind of this odd little organization that was specifically about lobbying but didn’t really have a separate constituency. Between the financial challenges of the organization and it not totally making sense to be an independent, it merged with, I think, the Human Rights Campaign Fund.

But when that happened, I left to go do other things. But that was how I was paying the rent for a while. Then Denise and I are running Wisconsin NOW and navigating some very interesting generational shifts in leadership. Denise is a peacemaker by nature and did a great job. She was the ideal person to be the first of the new generation in that role. My edges tend to be a little harder than hers. She was able to calm people’s worries about these young upstarts coming in here and running this organization. She did a fantastic job.

But in addition, she was ideal. I’m a lot better at that now, but at the time, I was not a particularly diplomatic person and Denise was. She did a really good job of helping people adjust to a new generation of leadership in the organization. She ultimately decided to stay for just one term. She wanted to do other things. When she finished out that term, I ran for President and was elected. That was my role from ’84 to ’87.

MJC:  So, you have GRNL. Do you have other paid work in the movement?

KP:  While I was still VP, I’m still working for GRNL. The writing was on the wall that the GRNL job was probably going to go away with this merger. I started looking for other work and wasn’t finding anything making me very happy. I was on unemployment for a little while, while I continued looking. I get a call from Gene Boyer who says, can you come up to Beaver Dam and have a cup of coffee? I want to talk to you about a project, and I’m like, sure, I’m on unemployment, I’ll come up and have a cup of coffee.

I go to Gene’s house, and she’s got an idea. A piece of federal legislation had recently passed about a year earlier called the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which basically was the replacement for CETA. It was a major shift for how national job training programs and systems were going to operate. The job that I had at the Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Task Force existed because it was a CETA position.

The way CETA worked, a lot of the time was, money was funneled to states and localities that then created jobs for people to acquire experience and job skills. There was some training involved. But mostly it was creating jobs. A lot of us in the movement, one time or another, had a CETA funded job, and I was one of them. That was my familiarity with that system was, oh, yeah, I had a CETA job once. Gene is all worked up about this Job Training Partnership Act that I hadn’t even heard of and she says, I’m really concerned. It’s a whole new structure. All the CETA jobs are going to go away, which is a problem.

They’re replacing it with this whole system. It’s going to be the system of job training programs that are run in the States, but by local entities that are going to be called these private industry councils and private industry is going to have the majority of membership on these local boards that will decide how the money is spent and who gets training and all of this stuff. And she says, I don’t like how that’s shaping up. I think women are going to get screwed.

Gene probably didn’t say it quite that way, but pretty close. She said, I think we need to watchdog this. I want to do a watchdog program to make sure this gets run right in Wisconsin and that women benefit. What do you think? I said, I think that’s a brilliant idea. I don’t know anything about job training, but what I do know about is political systems and organizing and it seems to me that in part what you’ve got here is an organizing project on your hands. Somebody is going to have to make these people do this.

They’re not going to do the right thing on their own. We just have to make them. You can have a project that’s a watchdog, but it’s got to have a pressure component or it won’t work. She’s like, Great, you run the pressure component, and I’m like, Great, is there a job involved? She said, well, let’s create a project that has a watchdog piece and a pressure piece and we will get it funded from a grant. I’m like, okay, I never have been involved with grant writing in my entire life but if you say so. What she wound up doing is she recruited some other people who knew more about that, and she figured out who she wanted to be her watchdog people and we got those people involved. Lonnie Weiss was one of them and Anne Brixen. The four of us started hashing out, well, what does this need to be?

The answer came honestly, partly because of the expertise of who was in the room. If it had been different people, they would have come up with a different project. But we were designing something that we knew how to do. We came up with something that was going to be one part pressure, one part watchdog and two parts training of these new private industry councils. They would be smarter about serving women.

That actually became the core of the project was making the private industry council smarter and more able to be responsive, which was the right answer. But we didn’t get there in an easy way. Gene figured out how to get funding for the program. She was good at prying money loose. But we had a grant for a one-year project, and I think that the Wisconsin Commission on Women might have been involved at some point in prying some money loose. It might have even been their money.

Anyway, we think we have this all set, and we go to a meeting to unveil this in Madison. And it turns out there was a local women’s employment program already there, and they were not happy to learn that this had happened without their input. At the time, that outfit was called Skilled Jobs for Women. It later became Employment Options while I was there. But essentially, a spirited disagreement erupted and Samantha River, who was the executive director of Skilled Jobs for Women, said no. If anybody should be running this, we should. What do you think you’re doing? You people don’t know anything about women’s employment. Who do you think you are coming in here and going to do this project? You don’t know the first thing about this, and she wasn’t wrong.

We all got schooled a little bit that day, but where we landed was basically, Samantha, you’re right. But this is still a good project. How would you feel if we put the project at your shop and it became a project of Skilled Jobs For Women and you got to take some admin money? Would that work? And she decided that would work. Frankly, I think she wanted to make sure we didn’t screw it up.

Because in fact, we didn’t know anything about women’s employment, but being housed at Skilled Jobs For Women, we were able to get a fast education in what was most important to know and their direct service experience informing us about how they did their work and what a really high quality, highly effective women’s employment program looked like and how it ran and what it did that made it so effective, formed the basis of how we then taught those private industry councils how to do it right.

In the end, it was a perfect partnership. The project went for a year. We did a lot of good work. We went and worked with all 18 of the private industry councils in the state. The four of us went around and did training. We invented some really good curricula and did some good work, and shifted some hearts and minds which really needed to happen. Very importantly, we were able to bring a nontraditional jobs mindset to the process because Skilled Jobs for Women was originally founded to get skilled jobs for women in the building trades.

Over time, they had expanded their mission to be a broader focus women’s employment organization. And they even had a little displaced homemaker project on the side that was funded through some federal money. Without their particular focus on nontraditional jobs for women, we wouldn’t have been able to bring that sensibility into the training for the private industry councils. We were basically going around teaching the private industry councils how you run a program that actually works for women and not just for men.

Because most program designs were designed for men, and they didn’t take into account the notion that, oh, your participants might need child care in order to attend the training. They might need to deal with the fact that they’re in an abusive relationship before they can participate in training. They might need to deal with a whole bunch of things that men don’t think about. That men don’t worry about when they’re a trainee and that men running programs don’t worry about when they’re designing programs.

It was a whole sensibility shift. That was my introduction to the world of women’s employment. I was already in my role as Wisconsin NOW President. Once my attention was no longer laser focused on ERA and because I was now responsible for an entire portfolio of issues, my real passion was around economic justice issues that touched on women’s lives in one way or another.

That’s where I put a lot of my energy. We had task forces to deal with many different issues, but where I put my time and attention, aside from making sure the state organization was running well, then making sure that our chapters were thriving and had what they needed, my issue focus was really around economic justice issues. Sliding into women’s employment in my paid job was a nice synergy, and that allowed me to not divide my energies quite so unhelpfully.

So that project lasted a year, and then I wound up staying on. They changed their name. They went from Skilled Jobs for Women to become Employment Options to reflect their broader mission. I basically wound up working in a combination of direct service and relationship building and special project management. But this direct service work that I did was with women who were looking to get into the building trades. I got a much more intensive education on that whole piece in that process.

The other thing I got an education about was the deep workings of JTPA because I was involved in relationship building work with the people who were running the local system, who were fantastic people. I can’t recall their names, but they were an incredible team, and they ran the most progressive local job training system I have ever seen.

It was great for me to again have exposure to working with local systems people whose job it was to administer all the money. Because it turned out those private industry councils basically just function like boards. Those boards have a staff, and the staff are the people who run everything and actually create the systems and do all the work. They’re the ones you have to focus on, which we learned in the course of that. So that was my introduction to women’s employment, and when I reached the end of my desired tenure, I could have run for a fourth term as Wisconsin NOW President.

Whether this was wise or not, up until I got elected, we had one-year terms and a two-term limit for any state office. My considered opinion was that was dumb and didn’t allow people to build expertise and capacity to serve longer if they so desired. None of these were paid positions. If somebody was good at it and wanted to do it for four years, I thought they ought to be able to do it for four years. I pushed really hard and got the bylaws changed to go to four one-year terms, and in the interest of not appearing to have been self-serving, I felt it was better that I not stay for those full four terms.

I wanted people to get it, but this had been about the principle, not about me wanting to be in charge for four years. I made the decision to exit after three. At that point, I knew that I was going to be looking for something else.

I really wanted to continue working on women’s issues. But I wanted to get paid. I also really wanted to be operating on a national stage. I was looking for jobs in Washington, DC. In 1987. I moved to Washington to take a job at National Displaced Homemakers Network. One of the things that got me that job was the knowledge I had acquired around women’s employment in general. JTPA in particular. They needed a JTPA expert. They didn’t have one and here I was.

When I first got there, they didn’t totally know what to do with me because they had just hired themselves an organizer and they didn’t have an organizing job. What they did was they handed me all their special projects that they didn’t know what to do with. So that was a mess. They had basically gotten a couple of grants to do a project on older women’s employment. And on this one, I did know something about.

The project description was like something to do with JTPA. It had no definition whatsoever. And neither did the older women’s one. They said, “Here, create these, please”. I got busy. The older women’s thing was not that useful. It didn’t turn into anything. But the JTPA thing did. What I did with that was I basically said, the experience we had in Wisconsin is not unique. This was a big switch for everybody, even though at this point, JTPA had sort of been around and being implemented for three or four years. It took a while to get it up and running. The initial data coming in was that outcomes for women were pretty terrible. Their wages were dramatically lower than the men’s wages as they come out of training.

A lot of women were dropping out, not surprisingly, because there was no child care available, and they were being funneled into very gender traditional jobs that pay lousy wages, lots of cosmetology programs. No disrespect to cosmetologists, but it’s not a job that has a lot of opportunity for economic security. I said, “Why don’t we just find three or four states and do a version of making JTPA Work for Women in those states that we did in Wisconsin? I already know how to do it. I’ve got a curriculum I can borrow. Let’s do that.”

So that’s what we did and it was actually pretty successful. It started me thinking about how we could be a lot more effective with the field that we had. At the time, and this is a really important piece of history that I think is not widely known, there was a giant piece of federal legislation called the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act. They covered a ton of stuff. It’s basically all the federal money around vocational education and federal programming.

It’s worth noting that most vocational education funding actually comes from the states. The Feds do not have a primary role, but they do have a very important role in terms of funding specific programs. They also fund things like Pell grants through that. There’s a very important set of stuff there. Along the way, a coalition of national women’s organizations that had included the National Displaced Homemakers Network and Wider Opportunities for Women, among others. And this was before I got there, they had gotten into the Perkins Act, a very important funding set-aside.

That said, that a percentage of the total funding in a certain category had to go for education and training for single parents and displaced homemakers. That had to happen in every state, because the way the money works in that legislation, as it did in JTPA, is basically it gets sent to the states on a formula and then is dispersed based according to rules. The other provision in it was that every state had to hire and fund a gender equity coordinator whose job it was to ensure that there would be some sort of gender equity programming in all of the vocational education and community college institutions in the state, which was a big deal.

When I got to Washington, this was already in place. There were these 50 gender equity coordinators around the country, most of whom were really awesome, and a few of them were in a couple of states would be like, oh, we’ll put Joe Schmo in there and call him a gender equity coordinator as our thumb in the eye of the Feds. Those offices didn’t do anything. But most of them were fantastic women who were doing great work. But very importantly, that set-aside money, that dedicated money for that programming meant that there were some 1200 women’s education or employment programs around the country.

There is nothing like that today. There had been nothing like it before. Most of those programs made a big difference. What you got out of that was there were distinct displaced homemaker programs and distinct single parent programs, typically. And they had obviously a different focus. We were the National Displaced Homemakers Network, so we were the umbrella organization for all the displaced homemaker networks. Our sister organization down the street, literally in Washington, Wider Opportunities for Women, had a bit more of a focus with the single parent programs. But they also dealt with all of the nontraditional employment programs. And there was also a little piece in Perkins for them, for the nontraditional programs.

MJC:  Who was the director?

KP:  Cindy Marano, by the time I got there. There had been a series of directors prior to that, but at the time that I got to Washington City, Cindy Marano was running the place. They were busy. They kind of owned the nontraditional programs and some of the single parent programs, and we owned the Displaced Homemaker programs, and there were a lot of programs that were members of both organizations because it was in their interest to do so.

We basically were serving all 1200 of the single parent displaced homemaker programs if they wanted us. Obviously with a special expertise and focused on the displaced homemaker stuff. If we want to have fun with background, Tish Summers, who was originally in NOW, created in the late 70’s a national NOW Task Force on Displaced Homemakers and got the first Displaced Homemaker funding. She actually founded the Displaced Homemakers Network.

For a long time, it had almost no money and was like a PO box somewhere. By the time I got there, they had been able to achieve something that was, I believe, unique in a strategy for getting funding for a national organization, which is that they leveraged money from the US Department of Labor Women’s Bureau via the appropriations process. We wrote grants and got funding for things in other conventional ways, but the majority of the funding for the organization and its operations came from USDOL Women’s Bureau and not necessarily with the total loving support of the Women’s Bureau because from their perspective, we were taking their money.

The strategy was and this was brilliant, and I’ve never seen it replicated anywhere else, was the folks at DHN went to members of the Appropriations committees in the House and Senate and lobbied for report language, saying that part of the Women’s Bureau’s money should be used to support the work of this organization because it’s directly tied to the success of women in employment. Good logic.

Enough members of the Appropriations Committee agreed. DHN organized like crazy to get support for that. Then because they knew that would not be well received if the Women’s Bureau’s budget stayed the same, and we took their money that we also lobbied for more money for the Women’s Bureau. It was neutral on net for the Bureau. But we got dedicated funding. Once that was established in Appropriations report language, it was a lot less heavy lifting to go back every year and say, do it again, please. We would go in and say, hey, here’s how we’ve been spending your money. Here’s all the awesome results we’re getting. It’s a tiny piece of money. You’re getting incredible results. Why wouldn’t you do that again?

For years and years and years, that’s what the strategy was, and it worked really well. It got really dicey during the Bush years when the Bush administration installed a hostile director as head of the Women’s Bureau. Since Bush, it’s been standard practice, lest we think elections don’t matter on so many levels, here’s a tiny microcosm where when Bush got in, we went from having Alexis Herman as the head of the Women’s Bureau to a woman who had no background in labor or employment issues, no background on women’s issues, and was put there to get rid of the Women’s Bureau. That was her assignment.

So needless to say, during those years, we saw it as a big part of our mission to make sure the Women’s Bureau stayed intact. We marshalled those 1,200 programs to do massive lobbying campaigns to every member of Congress to keep the Women’s Bureau. In the process, it bolstered our ability to then leverage the appropriation. I just thought it was worth mentioning as a strategy because it’s unique and a unique way to fund a national organization.

I don’t think you could accomplish that today. There’d be no way. But that was a time when, generally speaking, we worked with both sides of the aisle on just about everything. We never, ever would consider going to only one party to get something done. One of our biggest allies in the Senate at the time was Orrin Hatch. For weird reasons, you can’t always choose the motives of your allies, but if you’ve got an ally, take them. He loved us because he thought that it was terrible that homemakers had lost their job as a homemaker, and that homemaking was the most noble profession on the planet for women.

He wanted them to all be able to go back to being homemakers. But in the meantime, he realized they might need to work. Okay, we’ll take your vote. There were times when we really needed him, like when there were Republicans in the White House where Republicans were in charge on the Senate side, his voice and his support often kept us alive on one issue or another. The Perkins Act would get reauthorized from time to time and in order to keep those set-asides in place, we counted on Orrin Hatch as one of our critical allies to be able to make that happen.

Trent Lott was another one. That was a case of more relationships, the local displaced homemaker’s person whose name I cannot remember, literally her daddy’s daddy and Trent Lott’s daddy were hunting buddies or fishing buddies. And because it was Mississippi, that was enough. She leveraged that relationship and got his vote on some stuff that there’s no way we could have gotten that vote any other way. So that’s a digression may or may not belong here.

But I think that some of the strategy considerations that were relevant then are worth paying attention to now, just because we sometimes forget that allied relationships can happen outside of politics. These are still elected officials. Their job is politics, but sometimes a personal relationship or a personal connection to an issue will move them in a way that their party politics would not allow for. And if it’s not on something that’s highly polarizing, you can sometimes get stuff done. A lot of what we got done legislatively was done that way.

National Displaced Homemakers Network changed its name to Women Work in about 1993. The reason was we realized that our mission had become much broader. That as the success of the women’s movement in general, of increasing women’s access to a broader range of occupations that pay better wages, that women’s participation in the labor force and their ability to become breadwinners for their families, as opposed to just being supplementary income, was becoming a far more widespread phenomenon than it had been, and that the phenomenon of a displaced homemaker was becoming relatively rare. It still existed, but it wasn’t as common.

What was common were single parents who needed the exact same help and were struggling with child care issues and everything else and we were the people advocating for that and was like, wait a second, our name no longer reflects the work we’re doing or the scope of services and advocacy that we’re doing. We need to update. We became Women Work: The National Network for Women’s Employment. And that was the identity of the organization until it closed its doors a few years ago.

The other thing that I want to mention about my parallel work there was that again, going back to my early work with the tradeswomen in Madison at Employment Options, I had developed relationships with individual tradeswomen and leaders in the tradeswomen movement, but I had also developed a reputation as being trustworthy in that universe. It is not a particularly trusting universe by and large, with good reason. Most tradeswomen, particularly women in the building trades back in those days and even now, would often be the only woman on the job or one of maybe two women on a giant job site.

They took a tremendous amount of harassment and discrimination. They learned to be really tough and really suspicious of just about everybody because that was the only way you could survive. Anybody offering to help, you kind of had to prove it. When a group of tradeswomen in 1989 decided they wanted to try to organize, the Ms. Foundation for Women, gave them a grant to try to organize. They decided they needed a facilitator because they were going to kill each other if they were in a room together and didn’t have somebody to help, which they freely admitted on their own.

I got recommended to do that facilitation and I wound up doing that. I was working at DHN. But Cindy Marano recommended me for that. They asked her because they trusted Cindy. Cindy didn’t want to do it and she recommended me. I facilitated a several days meeting with them, and we hammered out a structure for an organization and a way of operating that they could live with. And they went off into the world to try to do that work. They struggled through several iterations, but they continue in yet a new form to this day.

MJC:  What’s the name?

KP:  I think at the time it was Tradeswomen Now and Tomorrow, or TNT. It is now the National Trades Women’s Network I think, with much the same leadership as the people who spearheaded it back then, plus new people. The big spear headers of that in 1989 were Connie Ashburg from Oregon, Lauren Sugarman in Chicago, Lisa Deal in West Virginia, Ronnie Sandler from New Hampshire, and several women from California. There were three different tradeswomen’s programs in California. There was somebody from Seattle too.

But the ones that I named were the ones who were sort of the prime organizers in that moment. But they’ve continued to try to do work around that issue. One of the successes that they had was in federal transportation legislation. Every five years or so, there’s supposed to be a national reauthorization process for federal transportation legislation that basically is the funding for roads and bridges in the country.

Every time they reauthorize it, they give it a new name, which is really unhelpful. It’s been various names over the years, but it’s some version of the Surface Transportation Act, and it’s always got a clever acronym. They were able to get a tiny set-aside following the set-aside strategy in Perkins for training programs, and associated services to help women get into transportation construction trades, road and bridge construction trades.

They were able to do a lot of really interesting stuff with that. Probably the most famous of which was the Portland Bridge project in Portland, Maine. It was about a three-year project. It was a huge bridge construction project and they had an entire training center for women that had full time child care for the trainees and the workers. It was huge.

They had more women on that project than I believe to that date there had ever been on any single transportation construction project in the country, and they did a whole documentary about it. There is a lot of wonderful documentation. They should all be interviewed. And that may not be germane here, but that was all going on during the late 80’s, and into the mid 90’s when that funding was out there.

I guess the reason I draw it in is that the through-line with the displaced homemakers and single parent programs, and then those transportation programs is money. Dedicated money in federal legislation that says, a), this is a priority, and b) there is money to pay for it. Those set-asides didn’t happen without a huge amount of pressure and lobbying, and they didn’t stay there without a huge amount of pressure and lobbying because there’d always be somebody every five years during reauthorization process with both of those pieces of legislation that would want to get rid of it.

Either it would be a hostile administration and the Department in charge would say, we don’t need that, take that out, or it would be other congressional forces saying, we don’t like that in there. We don’t think that should exist. You’re never done. Even when you get something, you have got to keep fighting to keep it.

MJC:  I think it’s obvious that the women’s movement has had an enormous impact both on your personal and professional life. What would you say are the highlights at this point in your life? How would you describe the highlights of your involvement and your accomplishments?

KP:  The highlights of my involvement are the community of women. I have so many friends to this day that I met in my early days in NOW or that I met along the way or that I met in my work at Women Work, where I was traveling around the country all the time teaching and training these local programs how to be more effective in one way or another. Very often, how to be more effective in advocacy work. I’ve met thousands of women in the course of that work, many of whom have become close friends and have stayed close friends for decades.

The relationships are probably the biggest thing. The early realization that it’s a driving personal belief that a group of committed women can accomplish anything, if they organize and work at it. There’s nothing we can’t do. That’s the sensibility that I take into my work today. I’ve been on my own as a consultant for the last 20 years, and the work that I’m doing today is absolutely tied to all of that. My mission in life is to help progressive nonprofit leaders become more effective in their advocacy work, to become a more powerful voice in their community and to have the ability to be drivers of change.

My particular focus is on direct service nonprofits, because so often they’re busy with just keeping the roof over their head, the lights on and the service is delivered. But they feel like they don’t have time for advocacy. But in fact, it’s the most important work they can be doing because without it as we’ve talked about, one of the biggest lessons I learned was “if there ain’t no money, there ain’t no services.” You’ve got to fight for that all the time. And how much better is it to be a powerful voice for that than to be an ineffective, frustrated, quiet voice?

So that’s the lesson that I took and that I’m continuing to apply as I teach people today. Of accomplishments, I’m really proud of some things that I did in Wisconsin NOW. I mentioned that there was a big generational shift that happened when Denise and I took over, and then when I was running the place for three years. I really broadened the methods of impact for the organization. We opened an office in Madison so that we had a presence in the State Capitol.

We hired staff for that. We raised money to pay for the staff for that. At the time, we were one of the few statewide women’s organizations that didn’t have an office there. And it was like, we can’t have this if we want to be having an impact, we’ve got to be present. We got to be here every day. That was one of the things that I was very proud of.

The other thing I was very proud of is I saw to it that we created political action committees and raised money for them and became involved legally in electoral politics. It just was so clear that if we weren’t having an impact on elections, in addition to the advocacy work we were doing, we were missing half the equation, and that met with a lot of resistance initially. There was a lot of fear, a lot of sense of that’s outside our mission. We can’t be getting involved in that. My view was we can’t not be getting involved in that. I fought for those things and made them happen and in the end, everybody came around and loved it and was thrilled.

But there was a lot of resistance. I’m very proud of the fact that I had the vision for that and saw it through. I felt like those were the moments when I was being an effective leader. Then at Women Work I think the work I’m most proud of is all of the people that I taught. I’ve had people say to me 30 years later, I learned what I know about advocacy because you taught me. I know how to be effective in a meeting with a legislator because you taught me. I know how to do fill in the blank because you taught me, and that to me is the most rewarding thing possible. It’s great work. So that’s why I keep doing it.

MJC:  Is there anything else that you want to talk about that we haven’t had the opportunity to talk about?

KP:  Yes. The importance of fun. I’ve been talking about all the work and all the dedication and that was absolutely there. But we also had a whole hell of a lot of fun. Emma Goldman said: if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. Absolutely. We danced. We had fun. We created culture together. We created music together. We created art together. We created community together. And that community, that love and friendship and strength of support, and just plain fun was what kept us going.

We won a lot of stuff but we also didn’t win a lot of the time. When you haven’t won, and when you’ve poured your heart into something and you come out on a losing side, it can be devastating. And to be able to get up the next day and do it some more. Boy, if you don’t know that there’s some fun to be had too, and that your sisters are with you, I don’t know if it would be possible.

You just can’t overstate the importance of that and of the camaraderie and the fun and the relationships which is what made that movement be what it was.