Delaine Eastin held up an old issue of a Capital Journal magazine, its cover featuring five women in smart outfits and text on the side: “The freshman, a capital class.”
At the time, in the mid-80s to early 90s, those five were among a small group of women serving in the California Legislature.
Today, the legislature includes 50 women: 18 senators and 32 assemblymembers. That’s nearly a 30% jump from the previous session, and more than a 200% increase from when the Women’s Caucus was formed in 1985.
“I was a triple minority, a Republican among Democrats, a moderate Republican among conservatives and a woman among men,” Rebecca Morgan, who represented Bay Area communities in the Senate from 1984-1993, said during a recent presentation hosted by California’s secretary of state, Cal State Fullerton and the State Archives.
The oral histories of these two former state legislators, Morgan and Eastin, are the latest to be housed at the State Archives; Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced the re-launch of the Archives’ oral history project during the virtual discussion this week.
For Morgan, her time in public service was “a wonderful but lonely experience.” But that feeling of loneliness, Eastin said, was what made women in Sacramento stick up for one another.
“Women were especially close to each other in those days,” Eastin, a Democrat who served parts of Alameda and Santa Clara counties in the Assembly from 1986-1994, said. “Women did look after one another because we sort of had to, because we would be dismissed or spoken down to in some instances unless we stood up for each other.”
There were plenty of examples of sexism the female legislators faced, the two said, such as angry male colleagues when Morgan, one cold January morning, decided to wear a pantsuit, becoming the first woman to wear pants on the Senate floor. And then there was that time the Assembly speaker referred to the Women’s Caucus as the “Lipstick…
Read the full article here
