THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Patricia Ramsdell Widmayer
“We didn’t just carry signs and picket…. The most memorable is the …. strategizing and organizing in the early days that built and built so that today a feminist woman is US Senator, and a feminist woman is Governor and a feminist woman is Attorney General and a feminist woman is Secretary of State. And all of this came from organizing during the early days. And it just built and built and built…and established a women’s presence in (Michigan) politics that is almost unparalleled in the states. (W)e cannot give up.”
Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, August 2023
(Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity)
MJC: Tell us your name and your birthday date?
PW: I am Patricia Ramsdell Widmayer. I was born January 21, 1943, in Buffalo, New York, although I did not live in Buffalo for long. My parents moved to Buffalo at the beginning of World War II, immediately after they were married. My dad had an assignment at Bell Aircraft where they were working on the development of the jet aircraft. Dad & Mom then returned with me and my infant brother to (their native) Michigan as soon as World War II was over.
MJC: Tell us anything you think is relevant about your family and how it might have led to your interest in feminism and other issues.
PW: I grew up in Berkley, a working class suburb on the northwest side of Detroit which was built up with post-war bungalows. It was a typical 1950s childhood with two parents (Lane & Betty Gillgus Ramsdell), my brother Dick (Richard Lane Ramsdell), sister Jan (Janis Ramsdell Cashette), and me. We walked to the local public schools – elementary, junior high, and high school — and much happened that was very interesting but typical of that era. Dad worked in the auto industry and Mom was a fulltime homemaker and organizer of the family.
When my father was laid off from his job as an administrator at Chrysler Corporation during a downturn in the auto industry in 1959, my parents bought a Dairy Queen in order to support the family. My siblings, and I were part of the team that ran the Dairy Queen, along with Dad and Mom. Then several incidents turned me to saying no, they are not going to do this to me again. Each of these incidents just seemed to be so unfair.
The most vivid was that my father would not pay me the same (hourly wage) as my brother because he said I could not lift what was called the hopper bucket that held the mix that went into what was called the freezing hopper. It was a heavy lift. I proved to him that I could, but that did not make a difference, my brother was still paid more. That was the seed. (Note: We kids were paid an hourly wage, which was set aside at a credit union to go toward college tuition.)
MJC: When it came time to decide whether you would go to college, was there any fuss about whether you would go or not?
PW: There was not. In my family, unlike most of the girls in my neighborhood, going on to college was expected. Both my parents had college educations – my Dad a BA in education from what is now Wayne State University, and my Mom an Associates Degree from Highland Park Junior College. Ultimately, as I’ll recount later, they really thought I was going to do different things than I did with my college education. But going to college was not a question.
MJC: Where did you go to college?
PW: I went to Michigan State University in East Lansing, majoring in political science that ultimately, totally, fascinated me. And you will find as we thread through my life, that political science keeps coming back and back.
MJC: So what did you do when you got out of college? What kind of work did you pursue?
PW: With bachelor’s degrees in hand, I went with Larry (and Carole) from married housing at MSU to Poughkeepsie, New York, where he had a position with IBM. That, as you know, at the time, was expected that you would follow your husband to whatever opportunity he had. That’s where I secured my first “real job,” teaching high school – world history and political science at Arlington High School in Poughkeepsie. Then, after two years, we returned to East Lansing for graduate school, he for an MBA and me for what began as a Masters’ in education, and ultimately turned out to be a Ph.D. in education.
MJC: Did you meet your husband at Michigan State?
PW: No, we met when we were in middle school. We were friends through middle school and high school and then it happened that both of us went to Michigan State. And somewhere along the way at the University, a romance happened, and we married when we were still in college.
We returned to Michigan State (from Poughkeepsie) in order to go to graduate school, and I had the opportunity of a lifetime when the dean of the college said to me, “We need more women who have PhDs. How long do you have?” I told her how long I would be able to stay on campus while (Larry) pursued his MBA. And, just like that, I became a PhD candidate and finished my PhD (in education research and policy) in 1971.
I was able to leverage that PhD for a whole lot of opportunities throughout my entire career.
MJC: What happened next? Got the PhD. Now what?
PW: Yes, I earned the PhD. But at the same time — and this is the seminal happening in my life — I experienced a molar pregnancy, that is a pregnancy that was not fully formed. I needed an abortion. But the doctor could not perform the procedure immediately because Michigan was still governed by the abortion laws of 1931. They made me wait eight weeks before the doctor finally got a negative pregnancy test, and I could get to the hospital for a safe procedure. That was the longest eight weeks of my life for both me and my husband. It turned me into an active feminist for the rest of my life because I didn’t want anyone else to have their health and life threatened as mine was. So, I started working with Michigan NOW (National Organization for Women).
MJC: What year was that, Patricia? Do you remember?
PW: 1969. And there was a piece in the Detroit News or Free Press, that said there was this meeting of women for Michigan NOW. Come to Christ Episcopal Church on Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit. So I said, I’m going. I thought there would be casts of thousands, but what I found were 8 -10 women around a table in the lounge at Christ Episcopal.
Patricia Hill Burnett, Marge Jackson Levin, Joan Israel, Harriet Alpern, and others that you probably have recordings of or papers from, because there were just ten of us, and each one distinguished herself over a period of time both in the women’s movement, as community organizers and as professionals. They made me the corresponding secretary of Michigan NOW. The reason why? Because I had an IBM Selectric typewriter, which was the most sophisticated of desktop machines at the time, so I could do the newsletter.
But during that period when I was deeply active with Michigan NOW, we did such things as the demonstration against Michigan Bell in order to call for more women in the better paying crafts (and someone from the phone company actually tapped my phone line during that encounter). We held Equality Day events (August 26th), at what was then called Cadillac Square and now is known as Hart Plaza in downtown Detroit, to bring attention and create headlines about our issues. And we organized so many other actions, often with our kids in tow.
Then, I met several women from the State Capitol who said, “We hear there’s a policy analyst’s position at the Speaker’s office in Lansing. Patricia, you have a PhD and you have other things that you’ve been doing that create credibility. Will you apply?” To which they expected, frankly, that I would be rejected and that they could make an issue out of it. Instead, I went to work for the Speaker of the House in 1973.
By the way, the meeting, interestingly enough, that I had gone to the Capitol for, as well as to have my interview with the Speaker’s Chief of Staff, was the hearing for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment that had been sent to the states. The Senate (and, ultimately, the House) instantly passed it, ratified for Michigan, and I was there; and got the job with the Speaker’s staff as well.
MJC: Let’s give the speaker a name.
PW: His name was William Ryan (D-Detroit). In order to control the House Democratic caucus, Speaker Ryan had a centralized staff to whom he made all requested research and key legislation assignments on behalf of all the members of the House (who had only individual secretarial staff at the time). And my assignments were women’s rights and education.
MJC: What was your personal life like at that time?
PW: By the time of the Molar pregnancy I described to you – and its seminal effect on me — we already had one child. Carole (Carole Lane Widmayer) was born in 1964, so she traveled with me during those early years within the women’s movement. Then our son Chris (Christopher Almon Widmayer) was born in 1971. By the time we moved back to East Lansing for my position with the Speaker of the House, I had two kids, and my husband traveled back and forth from Lansing to Detroit in order to continue his work with IBM.
MJC: Wonderful. You turned into a modern family mighty fast there.
PW: We did. Carole was born while we were still undergraduates between our junior and senior years, and then Chris came along as I finished my PhD.
MJC: All right, this is quite amazing. So you’re working for the Speaker. Did they control all three branches at that point?
PW: No, the Dems controlled two of the branches. They controlled the House and the Senate. But the governor at the time was William Milliken, who was a Republican, but a very liberal Republican. And his First Lady was Helen Milliken, who was very active in the women’s movement. So the Republicans were very strong for choice then. They were strong for the ERA. They believed in civil rights.
MJC: Do you think the fact that the Millikens were in the Governor’s mansion was one of the reasons the ERA was ratified in Michigan so quickly?
PW: Actually, support for the ERA was not even questioned out of the Governor’s office, and the vote with the Senate and with the House just happened in, like, 48 hours or whatever, swiftly in 1972.
MJC: That’s amazing.
PW: By the time I arrived at the Speaker’s office, I was given an assignment to cover women’s rights. It included the ERA, which was never questioned. There was an attempt at one point by some activists out of Grand Rapids to get a rescission in 1975, but it came and went.
MJC: Excellent. All right, so you’re with the Speaker’s office. Do you want to talk about any other developments in the legislature that you were working on then?
PW: Well, there was the Equal Credit Legislation. That was one of our first victories. And then another interesting one arose at the same time. We could not, in Michigan, use a name other than our given name on our birth certificate or marriage certificate on our driver’s licenses. We started sending a barrage of holiday greetings cards to the Secretary of State demanding that we be able to use whatever name we chose….and he held out for a while.
We sent Valentine’s cards that began the “Give us our name” campaign because we wanted to be able to use our maiden name, or whatever other name we chose that was legal, for our driver’s license. So it was “Give me my name for Valentine’s Day” and then “Give me my name for Easter “and then “Give me my name for Memorial Day weekend” and “Give my name for the 4th of July” and on. And then here’s the letter that I have from the assistant to the Secretary of State dated February 13, 1974 that said all right I give up. “We’ll take a look at all the computer systems and figure out how to do this and you’ve got your name.”
But, that would be the easy part of things. A group out of Ann Arbor, led by a woman by the name of Jan BenDor, brought to the legislature a proposed revision of the rape laws in Michigan. That group, amazingly, managed to get some very conservative Republicans to lead the way in advancing the legislation because “they wanted to protect women.” The alliance was very quite extraordinary, although not without significant opposition. We, passed through the House and the Senate and to the Governor, a model piece of rape legislation that allowed for victim’s testimony to be provided in court that was more appropriate for charging criminal sexual assault. That would have been also in 1974.
That was early, it was very early in our work to advance legislation in support of women’s right. And I am pleased to have a picture of the Governor signing that model rape legislation as well (and I am in the photo). So, we moved on to other issues, but with the victory in terms of the equal credit legislation and the rape legislation we were able to form a broader coalition of women’s and key special interest organizations across the state.
I started building from the Speaker’s office and, ultimately, when I worked for Congressman Bob Carr (1975-77), for the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (1977-1983), and for Governor Jim Blanchard (1983-1985), I just kept on going in terms of helping to strategize and organize all the women’s organizations in Michigan under the umbrella of the Michigan Women’s Assembly.
MJC: When did you leave the Speaker’s office and where did you go next?
PW: I left the Speaker’s office (at the Capitol) in 1975 and moved right across the street to the U.S. Federal building in order to be Chief of Staff for the new Congressman. His name was Bob Carr (D-East Lansing) and he served in the Congress, ultimately, from 1975 to 1994. I was with him for just two years and then I moved on to a longer term assignment with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Through all of this, I became the chief strategist, organizer and chair for the collective organizations. Ultimately, there were 20 or 25 organizations together as the Michigan Women’s Assembly. The first of the Women’s Assemblies was 1000 women (and some men) at the Lansing Civic Center. We held workshops about how to run for office and how to raise money.
MJC: That’s amazing. 1000 women.
PW: And we were a bipartisan group at that time. We held the first Women’s Assembly in 1977. We followed with another one in 1979, and then two more in 1982 and 1985.
MJC: I see corporate sponsorship on the program you have saved. Do I?
PW: You do. The corporate sponsorship is Chrysler Corporation, Steel Case, Upjohn, and General Motors.
MJC: Impressive.
PW: They knew to be on the right [side] at that time. The coalition of organizations included the Michigan Education Association Women’s Caucus, Mujares United, which is the Hispanic organization, the Women’s Political Caucus, Church Women United, the League of Women Voters, the AAUW, the YWCA, and the National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, the United Auto Workers Women’s Department and the Coalition of Labor Union Women.
The lead sponsor by alpha [order] is Connie Binsfeld, who ultimately became the lieutenant governor, Republican. And Patricia Hill Burnett, Republican. And there’s Justice Mary Coleman. She was a Republican elected Supreme Court justice. And you will recognize other names. There’s Mildred Jeffrey, who was such a mover and shaker, and Helen Milliken and Elly Peterson, who was then the Republican party chair.
I was recognized with the Feminist of the Year Award from NOW in 1976. And we just kept moving along.
We also did what we called the Unity Caucus for the first International Women’s Year (1975) to choose the delegation from Michigan. I was the chair of the Unity Caucus. And we again ended up back at the Lansing Civic Center with thousands of women, of which a few were opposed to the ERA and tried to weasel their way in, and we just strategized and shut them down.
MJC: Good, good. So that’s amazing. I mean, that decade for women in Michigan, is very memorable.
PW: Yes. And we just kept organizing. We created the Women in State Government, which represented women from 19 departments. And again, we were looking for equal opportunities in the same way as with the Unity Caucus and the Women’s Assembly.
MJC: Talk about your job in the State Education Department?
PW: I served for two years with the Congress (1975-77) and then worked with the Michigan Department of Education (1977-1983).
My title was Director of Legislation and School Law, and I represented the State Superintendent and the State Board of Education, which is an elected board in Michigan and, at the time majority Democrat, regarding finance and legislation across the state. I kept my portfolio with the women’s movement with the support of the Superintendent, and represented the Board before the legislature and Governor’s office on behalf of the best progressive policies for the students of Michigan.
MJC: Excellent. Wonderful. Great. And then what comes next?
PW: Then in January, 1983, I went to work for the Governor. I became the policy chief for the newly-elected Governor of Michigan, who was James (Jim)Blanchard. He subsequently assigned me to create and lead the Governor’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, for which we issued a report in 1985.
It was with that credential as Executive Director, as well as my PhD and my other work in the Legislature and the Department of Education in Michigan, that my family and I moved to Chicago seeking new opportunities, and I formed Widmayer & Associates, my consulting firm for higher education policy.
At the same time as our move to Chicago, I helped to organize – and this is the most exciting part – EMILY’s List. Now EMILY’s List is …what… today, 5 million, 10 million members and contributors. I was member number 35 – hear that – number 35, because I [supported] founder Ellen Malcolm’s strategy for creating EMILY’s List, which stands for Early Money is Like Yeast, it rises. We bundled our campaign money together – and still do — in order to support pro-choice Democratic women candidates who had the potential to win, with sufficient funding, beginning with US Senate and US House seats…..and then, ultimately, so much more.
And I became an organizer out of Chicago working with Ellen in order to grow the first 1000 members of EMILY’s List.
At the same time, in addition to helping the organizing work for EMILY’s List, I also became a trainer for the National Women’s Education Fund, which was giving workshops across the country on how to organize political campaigns and other issues of the women’s movement..
MJC: Right. Those organizations made a tremendous impact on the presence of women in politics.
PW: In the initial campaign for EMILY’s List in 1985 and 1986, we raised a fund of about $100,000 nationally to contributed to each of the two endorsed candidates. Our candidates were Barbara McCluskey of Maryland and Harriet Woods of Missouri. Barbara McCluskey won to become the first Democratic woman ever to win a Senate seat in her own right. And that was the beginning.
MJC: It was. Excellent. Wonderful, wonderful. Good story. So Widmayer & Associates became your vehicle for activity and income?
PW: It did, and it continued for 35 years. Very successful. And my list of people and organizations with whom I worked grew to nearly 50 overall in different states and different cities and different organizations and different colleges and universities, with my last assignment being in 2014.
MJC: Excellent. Great. Wonderful contribution. Excellent. How long did you stay in Chicago? Or are you still?
PW: I’m still in Chicago. There was a period of 22 years beginning in 2001 in which my husband and I also bought a Bed & Breakfast in northern Michigan, and we divided our time six months in northern Michigan helping to grow that business. And the other six months, in the “off season”, we still lived in Chicago. So Widmayer & Associates overlapped with the bed and breakfast.
MJC: All right, good. What do you count as your most memorable contribution to the women’s movement, if there is such a thing?
PW: My most memorable is organizing the coalition that was the Women’s Assembly, and how that brought together all of the supportive women’s organizations in Michigan, creating an infrastructure, over time, to win for women in electoral office, in legislation on behalf of women’s rights, and policies to benefit women across the state. From that strategizing and organizing in the early days, we built a “bench” and skills and savvy that now see Debbie Stabenow as Michigan’s US Senator, Gretchen Whitmer as the Governor, Dana Nessel as the Attorney General, and Jocelyn Benson as the Secretary of State. We created the initial momentum. And it just built and built and built so that, as the progressive women in Michigan refer to it, they now have the Trifecta leading the state.
MJC: And no accident and not unrelated to the work that you did in those early days. All of it built in and established a women’s presence in politics that is almost unparalleled in the states, I would say.
PW: And the interesting thing is that during those interim years, while there was one more woman who was governor, Jennifer Granholm, as well as Debbie serving in the Senate, for example, there were interim years that had regressive Republican governors. But the women’s movement persisted. Yet, too, today, it is so alarming and sad that the Republican Party has shifted to being anti-choice and believing that civil rights did not belong to women and minorities.
It was against some tides that were difficult sometimes, particularly since the funding for much of the regressive movement in Michigan came from the DeVos family with Amway out of Grand Rapids. So you were fighting internal money in big numbers. But the women’s movement kept building, and I’m very encouraged and excited by [the rights we achieved].
MJC: I see the ‘Women are Not Chicks’ poster behind you. Can you explain how that came to be in your house?
PW: I have two of them I brought home from the women’s underground movement in Chicago, although created long before I moved to Chicago. The first is “Women are not Chicks.” The other is an original ‘Sisterhood is Blooming’. And in both cases, they’ve always hung in my home wherever we’ve lived because we must remember again and again, we cannot give up.
MJC: How how would you summarze the impact of the women’s movement on your personal and professional life?
PW: It’s had a very positive effect all the way around. I remember when there were times my husband would come home and say, “I just had a colleague who wants to know where I found you.” Because we’re a partnership and so many others did not have that. He was very supportive all the way through. And even as he left this morning to go play golf, he said, “I’m really proud of you. Go for it.”
MJC: That’s wonderful. What a bonus that is to have.
PW: Right. And in the meantime, my daughter Carole, who is here listening in on this conversation, she came through it all. She was five when I went to that NOW meeting on Jefferson at Christ Episcopal in Detroit. And she’s been with me all the [way], and my son as well. Incredibly supportive through the whole thing.
MJC: Wonderful. Is there anything we haven’t covered that we need to cover? Any final thoughts you have?
PW: No, I just want to know where I should leave my papers in perpetuity. I have records and memorabilia that I have saved that ought to be left for historians. It’s interesting that I’m trying right now to reach Debbie Stabenow’s US Senate office because I want to send them the sets of fundraising tickets I have from all the way back when she first ran for county commissioner and then for State House in Michigan. They ought to be in her archives.
MJC: Yeah, exactly. I know the kind of thing you’re talking about because I did the same.
PW: I have a file, for example, of what transpired during the conversation about the Rape Legislation in 1974, which probably still has great relevance because some states still have not gotten to the point where a woman’s word about how she was abused is honored. And I, as another example, have the full program from the 1973 NOW National Conference.
MJC: I was there, too.
PW: I’m not sure whether many copies exist of that program, but so many things. And I have the planning notebook from the Women’s Assembly in 1977 and 1979. Here are all of the topics, and here are all the workshops, and here are all the women who conducted the workshops. And I’ve saved all of those. I think pretty relevant things.
MJC: Excellent. They’re very relevant. Yes.
PW: They need to be somewhere that someone else can access them. Right?
MJC: Definitely. Well, that’s our assignment coming out of this encounter, right.
PW: Mary Jean, I met you the first time 50 years ago when I came to a regional conference for NOW in Chicago from Detroit. And in addition to doing all of the organizing and planning that you did, Mary Jean, you led us to go to Berghoff Restaurant on Adams Street in Chicago because they would not let women be in the bar. And you led us in to say to Berghoff’s, here we are, and we’re staying.
MJC: Oh, good. That’s a wonderful memory. I have that wonderful memory, too. Isn’t that fantastic?
PW: My daughter Carole was with us. She was there as a six year old.
MJC: I love it. That probably wasn’t even her first meeting.
PW: It was not her first meeting.
CW: It wasn’t my first, and it certainly was not my last. Yes, many that followed, and I, too, am an EMILY’s List supporter and Majority Council member for many years. While this was her passion, she shared it and passed it along, and we continue it to this day.
MJC: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Carole. I appreciate that. Well, this is a wonderful reunion, and thank you very much for participating and not to mention all that you’ve done and continue to do in this life of feminism.
PW: My discouragement of the last five years has now been renewed by the current president of the United States. I tell you, during the Trump era, my husband said I had gone in a depression for four years. And now we’ve got to still revive this whole thing because Dobbs cannot stand.
Note: this interview was conducted on August 9, 2023.
MJC: No. Well, I’m very proud of Michigan leading. I’m from Wisconsin, so Wisconsin is still in a pretty bad way. We’ve got a governor that’s a Democrat, but the control of the legislature is still in the hands of the Republicans, but Michigan is really leading the way in the Midwest. Proud of it, hopefully, and with lots of women in the leadership there.
PW: And of course, those of us who are in Illinois are extraordinarily proud of what we’ve been able to do to support reproductive rights, particularly during an era in which so much has happened in surrounding states that we need to be able to provide health care for women.
MJC: Illinois has been a beacon throughout this dark period, really, of the Democrats holding on and even some of the Republicans not being too bad, although we couldn’t get the ERA through with Governor Thompson. We tried, but yeah – so many good memories. Wonderful. Well, I thank you. Thank you so much, and it’s wonderful to see you again.