Narrator: Jean Marie Brough
Interviewer: Janice Dilg
Date: August 27, 2008
Transcriber: Teresa Bergen
[Begin Track One.]
Dilg: Good morning. This is Janice Dilg. I‟m with the Washington State Women‟s
History Consortium Equal Rights Amendment Oral History Project. Today is August 27,
2008. I‟m interviewing Jean Marie Brough in her home in Federal Way, Washington.
Good morning. Why don‟t we start with the basics; if you would state your full name and
date and place of birth.
Brough: Jean Marie Brough. I was born in Washington, D.C., February 20, 1942.
Dilg: Why don‟t you start by telling me a about your family, who they were, your
siblings, a little bit about your family life.
Brough: Well, I was the middle child of five, the only girl. Two older brothers, two
younger brothers. I had a father and a mother who were married for fifty-four years
before my father passed away. We were preparing for a fifty-fifth anniversary when he
died. We were in Washington, D.C. because the war had started and my father worked
for the Department of Agriculture. He did research on infectious diseases, and he did a lot
of that in his lifetime. He was a veterinary pathologist and he was working on things like
African sleeping sickness and hog cholera and foot and mouth disease. A germicidical
warfare against the animal population that would have wiped out our agricultural industry
had somebody dropped the wrong germ in the wrong place, so they were looking for
preventions and cures.
My mother was a stay-at-home mother until my youngest brother started school.
Then she went back to work. She had studied pre-med, but the Depression had interfered
with going on to med school. She graduated from college in 1930, from Swarthmore
University. She worked as a lab tech, and my father worked in laboratories, most of their
lives. So a science community was what I grew up in.
My two older brothers became engineers. Actually, the first one, engineering
physics, the second one, chemical engineer. My youngest brother is a medical doctor.
Dilg: when you were growing up, what were your family roles? What was household life
like? Did you live in the city, in a rural area?
Brough: Well, in D.C. we lived in an apartment, and with five of us it was, shall we say,
cramped. When my oldest brother was a senior in high school, my father took another job
and became a professor at Auburn University in Alabama. Then life went from a city
apartment to somewhat rural. I mean, we had a big plot of land with a large garden in the
back and about a two-mile drive into town. Just wonderful hills and woods and cow
pastures to roam through, and that was back in the days when children could roam.
Dilg: Right. What was your schooling like? Did you attend public schools or private
schools?
Brough: There were no private schools in Alabama, and I don‟t know about D.C. I lived
in D.C. and started school there in kindergarten. I skipped a half a grade because I was a
February birthday and so we started school in February. The district either dropped
people a half year or bumped them up a half year when they went to September through
June school years. So I was the youngest in my class in school when we moved to
Auburn, Alabama. As far as I know, my education was no more or no less than any other
public school education.
I had a good, probably a fairly good, education in Auburn, because Auburn was,
at that point, a college town. There were two groups of kids, unfortunately. We were
divided between the college preparatory, i.e. all of our parents were in the college, versus
the local farm kids that came in. All white, because schools were not integrated back
then. So I think we got a fairly good education.
I do know that I was about the only college bound kid in my class who did not
join the band. I don‟t know why. [laughs] I can‟t remember why I didn‟t do it. My
brother right above me was very musical, he was, “the musician” in the family. I don‟t
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think we had enough instruments, quite frankly, because there were too many kids to
feed. So I took Home Ec., and became friends with both groups of people.
Dilg: Did you have particular interests? Was education interesting for you? Did you have
any teachers that mentored you and helped move you along that path to college, or was
that something your parents expected of you?
Brough: Well, it was just a given that we were all going to go to college. My father was
the son of immigrants, and his one benchmark for success in life was college-graduate
children. I don‟t remember anybody ever sitting us down and talking about it; it was just
something we grew up with. That and my mother was a college graduate, which was
highly unusual. Very well educated. I mean, she went to Swarthmore! So she was
intellectually quite bright; they were both very bright.
I had one high school teacher that I remember, Mr. Guthrie, who was the physics
and chemistry teacher. I assume he must have taught the sciences, too. Out of our
graduating class of about ninety people, forty or fifty of us went into science or math. I
don‟t remember at a personal level having much of a relationship, but he must have
inspired us, or interested us, in science and math.
Dilg: I would guess at that time, too, that there were not as many young girls who were
interested in science and math. Was that part of your experience, or did Mr. Guthrie
include everyone, and it was pretty equal?
Brough: I think Mr. Guthrie included all of his students, half the class, practically, went
into science and math, of those who went to college. Which was actually most of us,
because we lived in a college town. That‟s what you did.
Dilg: Right.
Brough: I don‟t remember discrimination educationally until much later in the process.
Then it became very blatantly clear, but not in high school.
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Dilg: So you headed off to Auburn.
Brough: Mm hmm.
Dilg: you did both your undergraduate and master‟s degrees there.
Brough: Yes.
Dilg: Why don‟t you talk about choosing Auburn and a little bit about your college
experience.
Brough: Well, choosing Auburn, I walked to class. [laughs] We had moved into town by
that time. Actually, my father had gone back to work for the government in research, and
had moved to Long Island, New York, to a research laboratory there on Plum Island,
where they worked with infectious diseases. He had left his teaching post at Auburn. But
my oldest brother had graduated. He was very bright. He started school at sixteen and
finished at nineteen, in eleven quarters with honors. So he went right through. the reason
they had moved to Alabama was, basically, so we could go to college and they could
afford it. So the next three of us went to Auburn. The youngest one went to school in
New York. So it wasn‟t a choice; it was just what we did.
I stayed at Auburn for my master‟s because I had met Bill, my husband, my
senior year, his freshman year. I took a job teaching in Columbus, Georgia, close by, and
commuted to graduate school, and spent the summers on campus. I took a course every
quarter to get my master‟s degree while I was teaching. courted Bill. After he graduated,
we were married.
Dilg: So this was 1963 when you graduated as an undergrad?
Brough: I graduated first in ‟63 and got my master‟s in ‟65, and married in ‟65.
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Dilg: So you briefly said discrimination in education didn‟t come along until later. Did I
understand that correctly? What was your experience at Auburn, studying math and
science?
Brough: Well, I was the teacher‟s pet in my honors chemistry. [laughter] That was
actually a very good thing. I was adopted, if you will, by a group of men who were Navy
NESEP, [Navy Enlisted Scientific Education Program] but they were enlisted men who
were bright, and the navy decided to give them a college education. So here I was with
these older guys, all in my honors classes, and I was the cute little female person. So I
was like the pet. So I got to study with them and became friends with them. They did all
sorts of interesting things, like started a literary magazine. I got to be on the scene and do
things that were not the norm for young women.
But, unfortunately, or fortunately, I met a young man when I was teaching
swimming at summer camp at the end of my first year of college, and eventually
switched over to education so I had, shall we say, a better basis for employment. That
was a reality check. To be in science or a mathematician, I would have had to stay in
school forever and got a PhD., and probably not have been particularly employable. So I
made the pragmatic decision, or wimped out, I‟m not too sure. Grades were all right. I
graduated pretty high in my class.
Dilg: Well, if you were in honors classes, you were doing okay.
Brough: Yes. [laughs]
Dilg: So you met Bill when you were still—
Brough: In college.
Dilg: In college. Before we move on to that, let‟s talk a little bit more about the times that
you were in college. By the mid-sixties, the civil rights movement was really picking up
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steam. The women‟s movement was starting. Probably the early edge of antiwar
activities. Was that on the radar in the South, or your radar?
Brough: Well, certainly civil rights for African Americans. I don‟t remember antiwar
activities from college; that came later. I don‟t particularly remember anything about
women‟s things. I do remember—oh lord have mercy—that was probably my first
woman‟s fight. First of all, you have to understand I went to school in Auburn, Alabama.
We had no black people in our school, and women were protected. The ratio of men to
women was like eight men to every one woman, and women had to live in the dorms or
at home. They couldn‟t have apartments and live freely, because they had to be protected
against the men. So we had very strict curfews and rules.
I remember working with the Pan-Hellenic Council at one point to try to get, I
believe, extra time, late nights, so to speak, for our sorority proms. [laughs] It seemed
very basic that we would all be able to stay out late on prom night. we had it all passed
with a resolution, and the dean vetoed it. So I can still remember being disgruntled about
that. We thought we were doing something that was not particularly outlandish, but a
practical thing. Because we often had proms a long drive away from Auburn.
So that was my first skirmish with the realities of the protective cycle that women
were under in the South. I hadn‟t run into that much in high school. Like I say, it was a
free time. We could go exploring, we could ride our bikes. I mean, we rode our bikes into
town. We could go swimming, go out to the state park to go swimming, and didn‟t worry
about being molested, or any of the awful fears that people have now with their children.
So that was different. The dog went to class with us. [laughter] It was different.
Dilg: You mentioned you were part of a sorority, and that you were asking for this
curfew change on behalf of them. Was that an important group for you when you were in
school?
Brough: It was. I was president of my sorority, which was probably my first actual
success with women, so to speak. [laughs] As I said, with these brothers, I had a very
close group of friends in high school. We were not the in-group, but we were the Girl
6
Scouts. We did camping, and we did wonderful fun things now that I look back at it. I
really have this fresh in my mind, because my fiftieth high school reunion is this next
year, and we‟ve been circulating emails and talking. I just talked to a friend that I hadn‟t
heard from in fifty years. They‟re really in my thoughts right now.
The sorority was a bond of sisterhood that I had not experienced before. it was
very strong. Yes.
Dilg: what was the sorority?
Brough: Kappa Alpha Theta.
Dilg: So that was one of your support groups at college. Did you have other mentors, or
maybe your family who you bounced ideas off? Helped figure where you might—
Brough: Well, my family had left by that time. My oldest brother was long gone. My
closest brother, who was not quite two years older than I am, we‟re the only ones close in
age in our family, the rest were all four years apart. He was there, but in his own world. I
had a couple of roommates that were important to me, people that were there and that
gave me support. The older sisters helped us through the first crisis of dating and all that
foolishness, because I didn‟t do much of that in high school. So this was good.
Dilg: So in ‟65 you graduated with your master‟s in education and you got married that
year. Correct?
Brough: Yes.
Dilg: How did you and Bill end up out in the Seattle area?
Brough: Boeing. [laughs] I got my master‟s at the end of the winter quarter. He graduated
in March, and I got my master‟s in March, but I was teaching school in Columbus,
Georgia. So I finished that year, and we were married in Auburn in June. Then I moved
7
to Grand Prairie, Texas. [laughs] Lord have mercy, what a hot place that was! Bill was
working for Ling-Temco-Vought, LTV, an aircraft company that‟s long since been
incorporated by somebody else, and Boeing hired him, I think, in July. We married in
June, and moved up here in August. We didn‟t spend much time in Grand Prairie, Texas.
Dilg: when you arrived in Seattle, you began teaching.
Brough: Well, I had been teaching in Columbus, Georgia, and I had my master‟s degree,
so I went down to get a job. They had apparently telegrammed or sent me a letter saying
that I‟d been accepted to the teaching position, but I hadn‟t responded because we were
moving, we were between Texas and Seattle. So they found me a job at a junior high
school, and I worked at Eckstein for a year. That‟s when I met really strong women.
Eckstein was an established school in Northeast Seattle. The teachers at that
school were proprietary about their space. I mean, I sat in a chair in the teachers‟ lounge
and was told to move because that was Mrs. So and So‟s chair. I found the group of
smokers—unfortunately, I was a smoker at the time—that met in the boiler room, and
learned about alternative approaches to things. [laughs] I can still remember a couple of
those people. They were wonderful.
The only thing the principal had good to say about me that year was that I was
healthy. They had me moving among five different classrooms; I was a floater teacher.
From portable to portable and the playground, trying to teach math to seventh and eighth
and ninth graders. It was a miserable job. I went down to the school district, and I said, “I
have a master‟s. You need to get me a high school where I have some stability in my
classroom, or I‟m going to work for Boeing.” They gave me a high school.
Dilg: That was a better teaching experience?
Brough: It was at Franklin High School, and it was my first experience with a whole
mixture of ethnicities. I think they were evenly divided, 20 percent into African
Americans, Asian Americans, the Jewish community was big there, a whole bunch of
recent immigrants for whom English was a second language. The kids that I‟d been
8
teaching all along, which were basically white kids, and I learned an awful lot. My spare
period there, I shared with a black woman, and it was my first personal long term
friendship with somebody of a different race. There was a Japanese woman who‟d been
born in an internment camp, also there.
So I had my eyes opened. I never knew about these things. Growing up in
Alabama, history was not a big deal. Once you got to the Civil War in school, you just
spent the rest of the year on the significant—
Dilg: There was nothing else worth considering. [laughter]
Brough: Yes. So whatever happened after the 1860s was a blank in my head. I learned
different perspectives about things.
Dilg: Then 1969 was the year that your daughter Stephanie was born.
Brough: So I taught until ‟69. I quit Christmas of ‟68. I had three years at Franklin and a
year at Eckstein. They were good experiences. I learned a lot, and got along pretty well
with the kids.
Dilg: So I‟m guessing your life changed a bit once you had a child.
Brough: Well, I also went to school at the University of Washington, because the public
schools had pay grades for teachers. If I had like ninety more hours or something,
postgraduate coursework, I would be at the top pay scale. So I took wonderful things. I
went to summer school and I took Greek and Roman mythology and drama. I took
differential equations, because I had not done well in that subject in college, so I could
really learn it. Things like accounting and stuff that I had no concept of, including
something called Modern European Lit, which was a real eye opener for me because I
thought that professor was a real kook. He thought I was really dumb, and I‟m not used to
being thought of as dumb. So I actually dropped that course mid term. It was about
Dadaism, and we read Gunter Grass and things like that. I had no basis in my background
9
to accept that any of this stuff was anything other than gibberish. So it was an eye opener
for me.
But then when Stephanie was born, I was at home. I was going to be a good
mother and stay at home, and go back to teaching when she started school. Now about six
months into baby raising, I can remember having coffee with my friend Joan Le Fevre. I
said, “What do women do all day? What do people do to keep from going stir crazy?”
[laughs]
She said, “Oh, why don‟t you join the League of Women Voters.” That was the
beginning.
Dilg: So was that your first political activity, or your first political involvement?
Brough: Pretty much, other than student government in college. That was, Yes.
Dilg: So talk about what the League of Women Voters was about. What you did with the
League?
Brough: Well, we were groups. I went to a night group, mostly because of childcare, Bill
could keep Stephanie. They studied government. They studied issues. 1970 was the year
that we passed the abortion referendum here in Washington, and that was an eye opener
for me. I had never thought about abortion one way or another, I don‟t think, consciously.
I met people who actually could talk about the issue in a rational way, and that was
exciting, and I learned a lot.
Then I joined the Status of Women Study Group. It wasn‟t women‟s rights, it was
status of women. Because I was, quote, “a mathematician,” they put me on fiscal issues.
[laughs] But the League was always about good government. They did the campaign
financing reform, and we did a proposal for a state income tax in ‟73, which is where a
lot of my energy went after the ERA; I went into tax reform stuff. So there was some
woman‟s movement activities that I was not involved with at that time.
Dilg: Who were some of the women that you met through the League of Women Voters?
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Brough: Well, my rap group, these women. [laughs, points to photograph]
Dilg: When you say “these women,” name them, for the record.
Brough: In my rap group were Jackie Griswold, Dorothy Sale, Bev Corwin—Beverly
Corwin—and Elizabeth Ellisor. She was Elizabeth Murray at the time. We were five
League ladies who were basically at-home wives. We were not in the workforce at the
time. We were on the Status of Women Committee. When the ERA hit, we all went into
that activity, Dorothy and Jackie joined N.O.W.
Dilg: Would this have been Seattle-King County N.O.W.?
Brough: Seattle King County N.O.W. I remember meeting Judge Starr, Evangeline Starr,
who had started the Seattle chapter. I remember her as a remarkably little old articulate
lady. Itty bitty little sharp very old lady, is my image of her. But she talked about status
of women. I was beginning to read. I had a lot of time then. I read feminist literature.
I also noted that when we went out socially, Bill and I—it‟s always hard for me to
talk about this, an awful lot of my feminist friends would look at me like “What‟s your
problem, Brough?”—that my opinion was no longer valid because I was an at-home
mother. People didn‟t ask my opinion, and if I volunteered it, it wasn‟t of interest to
people. Bill‟s opinion was, of course, important; mine was not. I thought, hmm, maybe
it‟s presentation, I don‟t know. But it was, to me, a personal hurt that lingered for a long
time that I was just of no value.
That‟s what made me a feminist, I think, more than anything else. The contact
with these incredible women. I mean, every time I turned around I met a woman who was
doing something that they didn‟t know how to do, but who did it anyway. I went from
one thing to another to another, each time developing another skill, learning how to do
whatever needed to get the job done. Even defining the job sometimes. But the wonderful
debates and arguments were educational for me about how to approach problems. I had a
short course in how to do effective politics, basically, at the grassroots level.
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We also had a couple of mentors in there; Rod Chandler was a mentor—his
campaign people in 1972 when we were doing Equal Rights Amendment. We had open
access to his campaign gurus if we had a question about “how to,” which was a lovely
thing. Magnuson was the same way, Warren G. Magnuson. We would meet occasionally
with “Maggie.” I remember a couple of meetings with him. I still remember him in his
office lecturing us, too. [Dilg laughs] That was about the time that telephone banking
started as a political tool. It was not done before then, and “Maggie” basically started it.
Dilg: So most of your activity was happening through the League of Women Voters at
this time?
Brough: At that time, yes.
Dilg: How long did you remain a member of the League, and work through them?
Brough: Well, until they got mad at me because I called the school board sexist. [laughs]
I was not authorized to do so.
Dilg: So you were representing the League.
Brough: Yes.
Dilg: When was this, and what were the circumstances?
Brough: I don‟t remember. I do remember it was written up in the Seattle Times. You
should probably read an editorial about this League lady that came and called them
sexist. They were not happy. I was called into the president‟s office and lectured about
my loose tongue.
I‟m trying to think. Being on the Status of Women Committee, the five of us that I
named that were my rap group, the League did not have a Status of Women Committee at
the state level. So when we had a state action for ratification of the federal ERA in 1973,
12
they asked the League of Seattle to provide them the manpower, so to speak. So the five
of us that were on this committee that became the state League group that lobbied for the
ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment. I have wonderful stories about that.
At the end of that time, the five of us, my rap group, met at Jackie‟s house one day to put
together care packages for the unratified states. So we put together what we thought were
our best information sheets and our best tactics, made these care packages for the
ratification efforts in the other states, and sent them out. We decided that we were such
good friends that we had to continue our friendship. So we formed a feminist rap group,
which was all the rage at that time.
Dilg: Why don‟t you define that for people who might be listening to this who are
younger, or aren‟t familiar with “rap” used in that context.
Brough: Oh, well, rap is now music. It was a chance to talk. Rapping was talking, and rap
groups were an awareness technique. Women formed rap groups and met to reinforce
each other and to learn from each other. Our rap group was a support system, just an
amazingly strong support system. The five of us, we know things about each other that
nobody, I don‟t even think our husbands, know about it. Went through two divorces,
some health problems, a separation, children‟s ups and downs—some downs were very
bad—and shared all that with each other, and gave each other support in an incredible
way.
I drew back when I was elected to the legislature. Because at one point I said I
just can‟t talk honestly about anything anymore, because everything I say will come back
to bite me sooner or later. I have to be fairly measured in my commentary, and I wanted
to be able to talk freely with my rap group, and I found that I really couldn‟t. They were
upset if I said things that they didn‟t like. [laughs] So I didn‟t have that. I had different
support at that time in my life. It was also very hard for me to get into Seattle, because I‟d
moved to Federal Way by that time, and they all still lived in Seattle. But we all still meet
occasionally. A couple of times a year we‟ll have a meal or go up to Decatur Island,
where Bev has a place, spend a weekend. It‟s fun. Have a spend-the-night party.
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Dilg: So the five-member Status of Women Commission. You said you jumped in on the
federal ERA campaign. Why don‟t you elaborate a little more about what your approach
was and what your activities were. If you remember, who did you send those care
packages to?
Brough: Well, we sent them to the unratified states. Now I‟d have to go back in a history
book to—I think we were like the thirty-eighth state. No, no. We were the thirtieth?
Thirty-five?
Dilg: Thirty-five was, ratification never got past thirty-five states.
Brough: So we were like the thirtieth or the thirty-first, or something like that. I think we
sent out twenty packets. That‟s what I remember, but I couldn‟t tell you exactly.
Dilg: You‟ve got some nice spiral bound notebooks here.
Brough: I kept logbooks just to keep track of my phone calls. For the most part, they‟re
dated; sometimes, unfortunately, they‟re not. I learned later to put outcomes, go back and
fill them out because some of this stuff didn‟t mean anything.
We had a lobbying workshop, preparation on how to lobby the legislature. Now I
don‟t know who put this on, maybe the League, maybe Women‟s Political Caucus. I
think we‟d formed then, or it was just coming online, but I went to this workshop and
took wonderful notes. How to defeat a bill, a typical day in an amendment, what are
lobbyists‟ roles, citizen lobbyists. Who sponsors bills. All of this stuff that is particular to
the legislature. We had James Dolliver, who became a Supreme Court justice. Norm
Schut, who I think was very active with AARP. Joan Thomas, who was a Seattle city
council person. Pat Thibodaux and Dottie Smith. Just people who—Lois North—was on
the county council for a long time. But I think she was something different then. I think
she was still a private attorney. Peggy Maxie, who started a whole bunch of feminist
activity in the central area of Seattle. Georgette Valle, who was elected to the state
legislature. Helen Sommers, of course, who we had elected. Well, not “we,” because I
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didn‟t get to vote for her, in ‟72, to the legislature, and who‟s retiring this year. June
Almquist from the Seattle Times, because newspapers were at that point still in the
mainstream as opposed to the fringe. We learned an awful lot about the process.
We went to Olympia and I met Judy Turpin. She is just an amazing individual.
She spent a career lobbying the legislature. When I was in the legislature, she was the
lobbyist for the environmental community, the Environmental Council At this time I
think, earlier on, she was in AAUW. She was always active in AAUW, still is, but she
lives here in Federal Way. She guided us through some of our early days in Olympia.
But of the five of us, we went down there, some subset of us, twice a week, and
lobbied the legislature. We made appointments, we talked to legislators, we worked the
committee system, and just did what citizens are supposed to do. I don‟t remember what
clearinghouse we had, because we must have had a way to report back in. It could have
been like Judy that handled that. There was also the Status of Women Commission at that
point, or at the state level?
Dilg: There was the Legislative and Interagency Commission on the Status of Women.
Brough: Gisela Taber was a hired staff person in Olympia. So we had a central
headquarters to go forth and lobby, and maybe to report back in. “Representative so and
so said, „Yeah, maybe so.‟”
Dilg: The Washington State Women‟s Council would have been in existence from ‟71 or
‟72 on. It had been the Interagency Commission—
Brough: Yes, that‟s it!. Gisela was the—
Dilg: She was the first executive director of that.
Brough: Gisela was there. I remember the day that the abortion rights decision came
down. That was ‟73. Roe v. Wade. The celebration—because we learned it from Gisela.
That was good. We basically cut our teeth; we didn‟t necessarily know what we were
15
doing. You‟d go in and talk to a representative, and they‟d want to talk about a swimming
pool in their district, and you wanted to talk about equal rights for women. So you had a
couple of points you wanted to make, and you tried to keep them on subject. A bunch of
idiots, I thought. [laughs] A couple of them made moves on us, different ones of us. I
mean, it was a different time.
Now we were all very ladylike in our approach. Helen Sommers, who had been
elected, wore slacks and pantsuits, which was what people wore back then in the mid
„70s. We all had our little skirts, and were proper ladies when we went to Olympia. We
worked very hard.
I have a schematic here in my book, the Senate Rules Committee, which seemed
to me to be the weak link in the whole process. This ERA got ratified in the House, and
moved over to the Senate, and those guys played games with us. When they needed a
majority vote, and I can‟t remember how many votes that was, but if there were eleven of
them, we needed six positive votes. So our five people would show up, and then the one
wouldn‟t. We didn‟t know how they voted. Somebody would say, “Well, I did vote.”
But we started to watch them, and they started to change their habits. They voted
very strangely. They would move like their hand just in front of their chest, right down on
the table or something. There were no hands up in the air. So when they got to a vote, we
were onto their game plan. We would have ourselves stationed around the room to watch
them, we each had an assignment. We needed to know how so-and-so voted. So we had
assignments, and we watched. When they took a vote, we stood up and peered at our
guys, and made them nervous. They rearranged the Rules room the next year so you
couldn‟t sit around them. [laughs]
Dilg: We‟ll have to make a photocopy of this, but I‟ll try to describe it a little bit for the
recording. You have drawn the table in overhead view and written the names of elected
officials over the table. Behind them, there‟s your name and Dorothy and Jackie and
Bev, and little arrows pointing to the people that you‟re supposed to be watching. So it
was very systematic. [photocopy of schematic in interview file]
16
Brough: Oh, you better believe it. Some of these were right-wingers, and some of them
just needed to be stroked enough—and maybe stroked is not the word when you‟re
talking about a bunch of old men—but they needed enough attention and enough respect
or whatever so that they would grant you the largesse, i.e. a vote. Not because the issue
meant anything to them, which was really, also, an eye opener. I remember being in
[Don] Talley‟s office during his lunch break. He said, “I don‟t usually talk during my
lunch..” He was watching the stock market on television or something, but he gave us a
little bit of attention. But some of these guys—right-wingers—John Stender from South
King County, oh boy, he was an original John Bircher, I think.
Dilg: So this lobbying effort was—
Brough: Successful.
Dilg: Successful. This was for the ratification of the federal ERA, which was happening,
in some ways, simultaneously with the effort for the Washington State.
Brough: No, the state had been the year before. So we had a state ERA at this time, which
was a good tool when you‟d go down to lobby. “Look, the voters approved us!” Of
course, they only approved it by two and a half votes, or whatever. That was a very tense
couple of weeks.
Dilg: Right.
Brough: That was one of your questions, as I recall. How did you feel that—every Friday
they had another vote count, because they counted whatever little bit of absentees had
drifted in. So one Friday we were up, one Friday we were down. Fortunately on the last
Friday we were up. It was an amazing emotional roller coaster for us.
Dilg: It was about three weeks.
17
Brough: It was three weeks. Three different Fridays.
Dilg: Had you been involved in the earlier state ERA campaign?
Brough: Yes. Absolutely.
Dilg: Talk about how you got involved with that process, too.
Brough: I was on the Status of Women Committee, and the fiscal issues, the League
asked me if I would serve on the fundraising committee for the state Equal Rights
Amendment campaign. I said, "Yes." I had no idea how to raise money or anything like
that. About two weeks into that process, I got a call from the chair of that committee,
Helen Sommers, who said, “Jean Marie, I have decided to run for the legislature this
year, and somebody needs to chair this committee. Will you do it?”
I said, “Yes.” Now why I said yes, I don‟t know. What would have happened if
I‟d said, “What?!” [laughs] So I ended up chairing the finance committee, which was
basically the fundraising and the treasurer. I did everything. I kept the books and raised
the money. I had wonderful help, this was not something that I did on my own. My
dining room table at that point, I think I had like four leaves in it. They went in and they
stayed in. The dining room table stretched all the way across into the living room to the
front of the fireplace in the house where I lived at the time. We had mailing parties once
a week on my dining room table. I loved the tale of—we basically made fundraising
appeals by letter to a lot of people.
One of the big disappointments in this process, and I can still remember, was a
group called the Matrix Table—which were honored women in communications, and
women leaders in the community—would not share their list with us to fund raise. I
thought, these are tough women. These are women leaders and people in the community.
We did get their names, but we had to find their addresses because somebody who had
gone to one of their events had a list of the people that were in this Matrix Table.
There were ups and downs.
18
Dilg: So describe what was in the letters, what were you asking? What did a mailing
party look like?
Brough: A mailing party looked like women [laughs] who giggled a lot, but got a lot of
work done. This was before the age of computers, you have to understand. We did this all
by hand, and mimeographed or Xeroxed— well, mimeographed. I can‟t remember the
quick copy place down in the UW that made copies of documents that was my lifeline. It
was a fifteen minute round trip, practically. We would fold and stuff letters. I have a
letter here that just said, “Why is passage important? Equal rights and treatment under the
law is something we all support. That sex discrimination will no longer determine the
rights of individuals.” Then who supports it, with a listing of the groups, and how much
money we needed, and how much they needed to help us. We would get these letters
signed by people that were appropriate, depending on who was receiving the letter. There
was a tear off at the bottom for sending their check in, and we sent the little envelope
with it. We also sent a little card to sign up volunteers and things. We had some things
that came back into us that would help.
I don‟t know where these women all came from. They were N.O.W. members,
they were League women, and they were Women‟s Political Caucus. They were just
friends of friends, they were my next-door neighbor. I mean, they were just people who
would show up and work.
I love to tell the tale that my three year old learned to sort mail by zip code. She
learned her numbers by counting “98357,” [laughter] and then taking the letter and
putting it in the right pile. I had to keep an eye on her, but she was part of the process,
too. Just soaking it all up by osmosis.
I also had to hire a staff person. I interviewed people and we hired Michelle
“Mickey” Pailthorp. I think Jeanette Williams helped me with that. She was on Seattle
City Council, tough lady, really wonderful. It always amazed me that people just assumed
you could do whatever they asked you to do. So we did. [laughs] We all did. Then
Mickey was hired to run our office. We had an office that we found downtown on Union
Street. I had to go through the rigmarole of hiring somebody with all the paperwork with
the feds and the taxes and all this stuff. You know, it was a whole other thing for me to
19
learn to do. But it took me a while after the campaign to get it all settled and organized.
We were sending out thank you notes as contributions came in.
Dilg: So you would go to this office every day?
Brough: I didn‟t go to the office that much. I went down there when I needed to get
things, or to drop things off.
Dilg: Fundraising central was your dining room table?
Brough: Yes.
Dilg: Then were you going to Olympia to lobby?
Brough: No, no. The fact that the ERA came through the legislature that year was
something that I was basically not aware of. That was just a nice thing that they did. But
then it was a. federal constitutional amendment, it needed to be ratified by the voters, so
we had the campaign.
Dilg: The campaign lasted several months.
Brough: Well, this was probably June through November. It was a summer activity.
Dilg: Were you a part of Seattle N.O.W. at that point?
Brough: No. I met a bunch of Seattle N.O.W. people doing this, of course. Dorothy and
Jackie of the “fearsome five” were N.O.W. members. When we went down in ‟73 to
lobby for the ratification of the federal ERA, we wore whatever “label” was appropriate
at the time. We were not AAUW, but Judy Turpin was often with us. So she was often
AAUW. So we would be N.O.W. or League or Women‟s Political Caucus, because we
were all a part of that except that I was not a N.O.W. member yet.
20
Dilg: When did you join Seattle N.O.W., and what was your involvement then?
Brough: I had done fundraising in ‟72 for the state ERA, and at the end of that year, there
was the big movement for the Seattle Women‟s Commission, of which I was not a part. I
was at home balancing the books, getting the last thank you notes out, and having
Christmas with my family while the feminists of the world were organizing this other
thing. Then we worked on the ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment. We
got that done in the legislative session.
I can remember being angry and disappointed with the legislators that they were
so oblivious to what I thought was an important issue. We would have to bring them back
to reality over and over again. “This is a big deal!” Then when people started
implementations of the state ERA, I was working on tax reform. I missed, basically, the
feminist activity of ‟73 once the federal ERA was ratified, because I was off doing tax
reform with the League. Which was my first time to really go out and push on an issue. I
was swimming upstream, and quite often in debates with a man called Dennis Dunn.
Dilg: How do you spell his name?
Brough: Dennis Dunn. D-u-n-n. He was chair of the state Republican Party. They put me
out against a big gun, but nobody else was foolish enough to do this. I can remember
talking about equal rights at one luncheon with, oh, gee, I don‟t know if it was the
Grange, or basically farmer‟s wives from around the state. They had a big convention in
Seattle and I was the guest speaker. The only thing I really remember learning about that
is never drink milk before you give a speech—oh it was dairy wives—because it sits like
a rock in your stomach. Never assume that women share your perspective of things.
Because these dairy wives were in the field, so to speak, with their husbands, side by
side. So to talk about some of the things that were important to me were nothing that they
were interested in.
Also I worked on the revitalization on Pike Place Market, too. There were all
these activities going on. So I was doing a lot of stuff.
21
I didn‟t join N.O.W. until ‟74, when Dorothy [Sale] came to me—I think Dorothy
and Jackie ganged up on me, actually—“Jean Marie, we need a legislative coordinator,
and you‟d be the ideal person to do this, because you know how the legislature works.”
I said, “Okay.” So I joined Seattle N.O.W. early in ‟74 to be their legislative
coordinator.
Dilg: What were the issues that you were coordinating at that time? I like how organized
you are. This is the 1974 spiral bound notebook.
Brough: [laughs] Yes. This is a state meeting in ‟74. We did comparable worth, salary
survey, maternity leave, the women‟s bank, which was a whole other side issue that I got
involved with. Issues to watch for, the rape bill. State issues. The Women‟s Council, rape
and prostitution, abortion, human rights commission, and the laws against discrimination.
[coughs]
Also, the industrial welfare orders. This was probably the issue that I worked the
hardest on. Because we had passed the state ERA, the protective orders that supposedly
protected women in the workplace, were now gone. If there was a law that said a woman
couldn‟t work more than forty hours a week, it was off the books. If a woman can‟t pick
up more than eighty-five pounds, if she‟s waitressing, it was off the books. There were
women who were not happy about this.
On the other hand, we worked with unions, and we got protective orders in for all
workers. But that was not an easy thing to do. I couldn‟t tell you the details, but it had to
do with hours and overtime and lift loads and things that were vital to people who were
doing manual labor, where their bodies were at risk because of stress. There were women
who would tell us, “The fact that I can only work thirty hours a week because this job is
hard means that I‟m not desirable and I don‟t get the job. They hire a man to do the job
because they don‟t have the work orders.” Which is why the ERA was so important. But
we couldn‟t lose some of the protections that were valid. So that was the issue that I was
working on.
The rape bill was the other big issue in ‟74. I don‟t know that it passed until „75. I
put the rape advocates for the changes in a room together and said, “I‟m locking the door,
22
and I‟m not letting you out until you have a one-page fact sheet. You cannot lobby the
legislature with reams of material. They won‟t read it, and they won‟t understand it. Pick
out two or three important points and stress those, and make your case.” They did.
Dilg: Who were the advocates?
Brough: Jackie was one of them, and I think Sue Lane. I don‟t honestly remember who
all was working. Elaine Latourelle was, I‟m sure, part of it. But there were women from
all sorts of organizations that were working this issue. But those were the N.O.W. people,
perhaps. They came up with a one pager. I wish I had it, I could give it to you. [laughs]
But my role was not so much lobbying the legislature about the rape bill, but it
was making sure that the people who were, were doing effective jobs.
Bill Brough: [sound of footsteps approaching] The person you should be interviewing
was the guy that had to put up—
Brough: The rape bill was really an important thing. At that point in history, and you
have to take all of this in historical context, rape was a capital offense. Juries were very
reluctant to execute somebody or send them to prison for life because they had sex.
There was just no getting around the fact that prosecutions weren‟t happening and jurors
were not finding people guilty because the penalties were heavy. The tack that we took
was to break rape into different degrees of rape. The amount of force that was used,
whether or not there was penetration—and it didn‟t necessarily have to be penetration
with a man‟s penis into a woman‟s vagina—but any use of a weapon. Also, the business
about the sexual history of the victim being part of the trial—women were reluctant to
pursue.
We were trying to get changes in the law that would impact those issues. We did
a lot of things. We brown bagged it with judges. We‟d go and have our little brown bag
lunches with judges to try to talk to them about what we perceived the problems with the
rape laws currently in the state. Because they were unaware, particularly, some of them
23
were not aware, because Pete Francis—who was an attorney not a judge—was very
active. I think he was in the legislature then, or if it was later, from the Green Lake area.
One of the things that happened is that we not only educated judges and the
legislature. We also found other issues as we delved into rape problems. For the first
time, child sexual abuse and incest moved to center stage. They weren‟t issues that
people even kept records on. We found the only people that kept records on any child
abuse were, I think, the police in Bellevue. I hate to talk about other issues that surfaced
because of our delving into rape, but those issues came to the table for the first time, as
far as I know, for societal discussion and a hard look at. I thought that was very, very
positive.
Dilg: I‟m sure these were controversial.
Brough: Oh, yes.
Dilg: Probably just like with other discrimination legislation, or anti-discrimination
legislation, I‟m sure there was some push back, and there was a fair amount of an
educational process. How did the group that you worked with address the opposition?
Brough: I don‟t know that there was opposition to the rape legislature. Not like
opposition to equal rights. There weren‟t homemakers against equal rights things out
there. It was just a lack of understanding of the whole process. We found the same thing
with the divorce laws. We had so many issues to work on. I wrote a list of issues out.
[shows Dilg list, laughs] But divorce legislation, the no fault divorce, which some women
were concerned about, and some women thought would be a good thing. You don‟t have
to find somebody fooling around with somebody else to get a divorce.
Dilg: This was a very active time on a lot of fronts. How did you juggle all of these
issues?
24
Brough: [laughs] It was amazingly active. We did it all. We just did it all. We didn‟t sit
down and say, “We can‟t work on abortion issue, because we have to work on rape.” We
just had another committee. If you didn‟t have enough people, they went out and found
people. Like they got me into N.O.W., because they needed somebody to coordinate. I
don‟t know where the energy or the drive for some of this came from. I think it was that
we supported each other and reinforced each other.
There was always somebody that was in charge that had a mission in life. I can
remember the woman who wore her IUD on a chain around her neck. She had lost a child
because the IUD had failed and had, I guess, miscarried a deformed a child because it
was wrapped around the IUD. Now she wanted abortion rights, [laughs] and she wore
this IUD, and was willing to flash it to anybody under any circumstances. That was her
issue. You didn‟t bother her with divorce or rape or anything else, but she worked that
issue. You just had to keep people in there, focused.
When we put a group activity on, we came together. We did rallies. We did an
ERA rally. Talk to Rita [Shaw] about the abortion rally, the first big rally that Seattle
N.O.W. put on, which was in, I think, ‟75. It dealt with abortion rights. Now why were
you dealing with abortion rights when the state had passed an abortion law, and the
federal law had changed with Roe vs. Wade? I don‟t know that I have the answer to that,
other than there was always the opposition to abortion.
Somewhere along the line, the right wing caught on to what was happening. They
were a little slow on the uptake. I think the Ellensburg conference was the first time we
saw a massive effort to make women come out to fight women. We hadn‟t seen that. I
mean, there were these fringe groups. But they weren‟t a problem particularly to us
except for Phyllis Schlafly at the national level.
But I think [Warren] Magnuson talked about it to us. He said, “This is a cynical
ploy on the right wing‟s part. They have to instill fear and rile people up about something
awful and scary to get them to join their organizations.” They were getting more and
more effective at it. So the backlash hit, but it didn‟t hit right away. We were still in the
formative time here.
After the ERA passed, we had a lot of wonderful things. Because we had equal
credit, or equal access to credit. I remember the mother who came and testified that she
25
was a single mother, but because there was a father someplace, she could not sign the
documentation to let her son have a paper route, because she was not fiscally responsible.
I mean, it was just amazing. Little details of life that fouled people up that we tried to
make right. They were endless. There was no question they were endless. I don‟t know
why we didn‟t get tired. We probably did.
Dilg: It sounds like the group dynamic was an essential element of all this that kept
everyone going.
Brough: Very supportive. I mean, the fact that we did things. I kept doing things that I
didn‟t have any background to do. I‟d never gone down and lectured judges about rape,
or discussed it with them. Interviews by newspapers, public speaking. I mean, stuff that
was just totally beyond any of my personal experience or training or anything. It was
something you did because it needed to be done. I think most women were probably in
that situation.
There were some women who were much more aware much earlier than I was.
You have a question in here about Seattle N.O.W‟s success at fundraising. I was thinking
about that I wrote down three names. Linda Miller, who did the original Golda Mier
poster, “But can she type?” Also, Shirley Kaplan and Joy Belle Conrad-Rice. They just
kept cranking stuff out—[laughs] maybe they sat together and had brainstorming
sessions. I don‟t know where all this creativity came from. We had the practical—Shirley
Kaplan,—got the T-shirts silk-screened, did the things that needed to be done to make it
all work.
You have to remember, back then we made buttons by hand. We didn‟t have
professionally cranked out buttons. Most of these old buttons are handmade buttons—
little crunching machines.
Dilg: Little crunching machines with the plastic, and putting it all together and the paper
in between. But Seattle N.O.W. was very successful at both fundraising and coming up
with these creative ideas, which were sold nationally and really ended up being some of
the iconic phrases and images of that time.
26
Brough: Yes. Oh, yes.
Dilg: Do you know how Seattle‟s reputation and merchandise spread to the national
arena?
Brough: Well, we took them to state and national conferences. My friend, May Gerstle—
I don‟t know if she was a N.O.W. member, but she was a friend of Linda Miller—the
Golda lady. May went to a N.O.W. conference in 1973, just to staff the fundraising table
for N.O.W. It was not ours at the time, because I wasn‟t there yet. May was my friend,
and we swapped childcare. She kept Stephanie any day I had to go to Olympia. I called
her up and said, “May, I‟m going today,” [makes sound of movement] and she would
take Stephanie. So there was no commotion about childcare, which would have been a
big issue for me.
Now how Seattle N.O.W. merchandise got to that position, I don‟t know. But they
were very successful, and of course success breeds success. Having had one T-shirt sell,
the next one was easy. They did mail order, too, out of the Seattle N.O.W. office, which
was a big deal. It took a lot of grunt work.
Dilg: [laughs] So you joined Seattle N.O.W. in ‟74 and became their legislative
coordinator.
Brough: Then I was elected president. Dorothy and I were co-presidents in ‟75. Why, I
don‟t know, but that was just something that happened. That was the year that N.O.W.
almost dissolved over the infighting and the dominance of an East Coast clique in the
organization.
Dilg: Why don‟t you talk about that, because you did become involved then in the
national politics of the organization.
27
Brough: In the national politics, because up until then, I was just doing local issues. You
need to talk to Elaine or Judy Lonnquist about that. They were living it day to day
because they were both on the national board. Betty Kersh, who I think lives in New
Orleans now, was also on the national board. Which in one way was positive, because it
gave our chapter a lot of status, but in another way it was a negative, because it took a lot
of their energy and focus on stuff that had nothing to do with all of the issues we‟ve just
talked about, the nuts and bolts of women‟s equality.
N.O.W. was coming apart at the seams because there was a clique. Karen
DeCrow and Ellie Smeal were running their own little thing there, and expecting us all to
pay homage to them. It was not feminism, I didn‟t think. It was not west coast Seattle
N.O.W. based feminism. The gay rights thing is probably the most obvious example for
that. In all this time, I never knew a gay person in my life that I knew was a gay person
until I joined Seattle N.O.W. Then there were gay people all around, lesbian women. But
they were in equal relationships. They were two women who came together out of love or
affection or politics or whatever, but they were partners in it. Back in the East, it wasn‟t
that way at all. There were these dominatrixes and these wimpy little women that were
their pets, almost. That was lesbianism to me, from New York state and the East Coast.
Lesbianism was a big issue. It was the issue in 1975 for national N.O.W. Look at
our agenda; we had nuts and bolts about industrial welfare orders and rape laws and
credit and child abuse and all this stuff that was important to daily lives of women, as
opposed to this major, major focus on gay rights. Like I say, with us, gay rights was
another committee it wasn‟t the dominant theme. By being the dominant theme, it was
turning people away from N.O.W. It‟s hard to fight against something that instinctively
you know is a positive thing to support, but the way it was just shoved—this is what this
organization is. I thought, wait a minute, I joined N.O.W. because of all this other stuff. I
mean, I support gay rights. I‟m perfectly happy to organize and work with people who
want better rights for gay people. But it‟s not the reason I joined N.O.W.
When we got back to that conference, it was a tough time. They were after our
national board people. Judith Lonnquist had moved to Seattle from Chicago sometime in
the year or two preceding that. Elaine Latourelle, Betty Kersh. I don‟t know that Betty
28
was going to run again, but we wanted to keep them on the national board. So we went
back there—
Dilg: Where‟s “back there?”
Brough: Philadelphia in 1975. [laughs] I found my badge. [holds up her conference ID
badge] So it was in October, I think. I found this little button, too. [button with green
grass that says „grassroots”] We wanted an organization that was representative of the
entire country, not this East Coast clique, so we had a big political fight. The way we
won was by passing a resolution the last day of the conference. At that morning‟s plenary
session that set up a bylaws commission to redo the bylaws of the organization so that
there was more representation from all these outlying places. The East Coast women did
not like that. When I say East Coast, I‟m really talking New Jersey, New York,
Pennsylvania, I mean, there was a core of activism there. They said, “You can‟t give
Montana a voice. There‟s nothing in Montana but trees!” I remember that statement.
I said, “Wait a minute. There are a couple of women who live there.”
The reason that we got this resolution passed was by the fact that we were
organized and prepared to do a resolution. We wrote it on the spot. I had one of my
logbooks—I can‟t find it, so I‟m sure it‟s someplace in somebody‟s archives—where we
wrote down ideas that needed to be in this resolution to have a constitutional convention.
We had rented a mimeograph machine and we had a typewriter, and we typed out
mimeograph—whatever you call them.
Dilg: I think they were stencils.
Brough: Yes. We ran that sucker off in our room, and had it ready to hand out in the
morning so that every single woman that came into that plenary session had a copy of
this resolution in their hand. It did pass. We had a bylaws commission, and we got new
bylaws eventually. It took a year.
29
Dilg: So this was all Seattle N.O.W. women who put together this resolution? Or had you
connected with some other representatives?
Brough: We connected with some other people. Probably more Elaine and Judy‟s friends
on the national board. It was the Seattle N.O.W. women who did the grunt work, who did
the typing and the mimeographing and the passing out and guarded the plenary session.
We‟d been up all night, so we were just dead tired. But we took over the podiums in the
audience and kept them, protected them, so that we could have our voice heard. I mean, it
was warfare. It was just amazing to me. The fact that we were successful was good, but
seeing women like this fighting each other was a big turnoff to me. I disliked it intensely.
I still have no respect for Eleanor Smeal, even though she‟s some big national leader. I
just thought this woman is nasty. I found out more so about how nasty she was when I
served on the national board.
Dilg: I want to go back to a couple of different points. Let‟s just talk about the technology
for a minute.
Brough: What technology? [laughs]
Dilg: Well, it‟s just a different technology. You had mentioned earlier about this was
before computers.
Brough: How much easier this would be today.
Dilg: Well, and you mentioned a mimeograph machine. That‟s come up with several
other narrators in this project.
Brough: Seattle N.O.W. had a mimeograph machine. We were vicious. I mean, we were
organized. [laughs]
30
Dilg: You had an agenda. You had an idea. Talk a little about it, because I think it‟s
interesting for people to understand how pamphlets were made, or how contacts were
made with people in a pre-cell phone, pre-computer, pre-email era. How did you
communicate with each other? Define what a mimeograph was.
Brough: What a mimeograph was. [laughs] It was a machine that cranked out copies of
documents from a stencil and ink, and it was usually a messy thing. We communicated
by telephone. I don‟t think we had call waiting or caller ID or even answering machines
at the time. We just rang a telephone until somebody answered it. But people used to
answer their telephones. Unlike today, when all you get are message machines. There
wasn‟t much technology. I think later on, when I was running for public office, we
bought voters‟ lists, registration lists, from Labels and Lists. Businesses appeared
somewhere in this process that would have helped.
Dilg: Basically, you were hand compiling and typing up lists.
Brough: Hand addressing or typing. We didn‟t stick labels and stamps on. We hand
addressed envelopes and put on stamps, and then sorted them by zip code. You had to
have them bundled and the right zip code and little codes on them. I had little stickers
from the post office. I mean, a ridiculous lot of busywork that is non-existent today
because of computers. If you have any budget at all in any campaign, you buy your list
and you take them to a mail house and they stick them on and crank them out.
Dilg: Clearly you were all prepared in Philadelphia; you took a typewriter, you—
Brough: We rented machinery, we obviously had to prepare for this ahead of time.
Dilg: Right. Did you have any sense of what other support there might be for this
resolution to rewrite the bylaws with the national before you got back there? Because
you‟re describing a very tense—
31
Brough: It was very tense. I think that Elaine and Judy and Betty, our three national
board people, gave us a sense of what we were going to be up against, and had contacts in
the organization that were much broader than Seattle N.O.W. So we did work in coalition
with people, but they were other people. I mean, we circulated and we talked and we
kibitzed and caucused on different issues. I don‟t remember that we had help from a lot
of people other than our chapter members in the mechanics of the thing, but obviously,
we certainly had people speak on behalf of it when it hit the floor. We were sitting on the
floor writing these things out in that afternoon ahead. We were not just Seattle N.O.W.
people. So there were other people that were concerned. Probably not from New York or
New Jersey or Pennsylvania.
Dilg: There must have been enough concern if the resolution passed.
Brough: Yes, obviously, there was.
Dilg: Seattle N.O.W. seems like an interesting mix of, I‟m always struggling for the right
terms, but more mainstream women who came from the League of Women Voters, or
Business and Professional Women, and women who were with Radical Women or the
Socialist Workers Party or groups like that. Do you think that was unique in Seattle
N.O.W., and how that shaped—
Brough: We didn‟t get along with a couple of those radical women‟s groups, no. Because
Rita [Shaw], a Socialist Workers Party person, was active in our organization, we had an
understanding. When Rita worked on an issue, Rita worked on an issue. I mean, there‟s
no question. But she came, she worked on our agenda when it crossed her agenda, when
they merged, and abortion was her big issue at the time, as I recall. So that wasn‟t a
problem. That may have been why we were working on abortion, because of the strength
of Rita‟s personality. She was a dominant person.
But Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party and those other groups were
basically enemies. They took shots at us and tried to destroy things that we did and called
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us middle class housewives and that stuff, which didn‟t go over with some of our people
who were not that way at all. [laughs] It was a merging of perspectives.
But you can tell that from the committees—we had the women who were forming
a bank. We had the women who were doing the Women in Religion task force. We had
all these different interests, but Seattle N.O.W. was the venue where they all played
together. It was very reinforcing. Probably it couldn‟t have lasted forever because there
were too many interests. For me, it was the environmental thing that always got to me.
I‟d turn around and need some feminist to do something, and they‟d be off doing
something for the environmental community. [laughs] I‟d say, “No! Come back! Come
back home!”
Dilg: You went back to the Philadelphia convention in ‟75. Then the bylaws were
changed, and at some point you became a national board member.
Brough: I was elected to the bylaws commission. So the resolution that we passed set up
a commission to formulate new bylaws and present them. So we had a bylaws ratification
convention, in Kansas City the next year. This is the bylaws convention in Kansas City.
It‟s the only picture I could find in my whole collection. [laughs]
Dilg: This is a great photograph of Jean Marie. She‟s got on many political buttons on her
jacket, some of which are in her collection that are on her dining room table here next to
where we‟re interviewing. The photo is inscribed, “Much love and appreciation, Seattle
N.O.W., 12/76.”. You‟re definitely looking like you‟ve got all your issues on your chest.
[both laugh]
Brough: I have collected buttons. I have three boxes of buttons. I just dug out a couple for
you to see.
Dilg: There is a wonderful collection of buttons here that I‟m hoping we‟ll get a chance
to incorporate some way into this project, because they really help tell the story of the
many issues that you‟ve been discussing during our interview.
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Brough: But the bylaws, the constitutional convention and the bylaws commission took a
lot of my time and energy in ‟76. So there were other issues going on, but I was a bylaws
commissioner, I‟d been elected at the state conference to do that. We had several
meetings, regional meetings. I don‟t know if we had national meetings or not. We put
together ideas for bylaws, and then we met in a convention and made new bylaws.
Dilg: Then did you become a board member of the national N.O.W.?
Brough: Yes.
Dilg: There was an intersection of your work here in the Seattle area. You mentioned
earlier about putting together the care packages to send to other non-ratified states of the
federal ERA. You were on the national board of N.O.W., which was involved with
getting the ERA passed.
Brough: I was on the national board, which was probably ‟77, ‟78, because I think
Dorothy came in in ‟79, I had a pretty good long term there, we were basically working
on extending the ratification time period for the federal ERA. That was the ERA issue at
the time, extension.
Dilg: What was your involvement?
Brough: Lobby Congress. [laughs]
Dilg: You would fly back to D.C.
Brough: Well, all the national board meetings were basically in the D.C. area the whole
time that I was on the national board, because we were working the D.C. problems, so to
speak. It was fun. I‟d have a New York woman say, “I can‟t ever get in to see my
representative. You fly in here and meet with them at six in the morning, and they meet
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with you! How is that!” But then she said, “Because I can drive here and you have to fly
here, they probably don‟t see that many of their constituents.” But we worked, we
worked.
I can still remember sitting in Magnuson‟s office on Capitol Hill, and him
lecturing us about, “Don‟t you tell me how to handle myself in the Senate.” He said, “I
don‟t vote early. I vote late. I bring people with me.” We worked; we worked the issue.
We did get an extension, as I recall.
Dilg: Yes.
Brough: Unfortunately, the ratification didn‟t happen in that little time period that they
extended. But they did hearings on the legislation, and we lobbied our representatives and
others on the hill as we could get to them. It was much harder to get in to see federal
representatives than it was state representatives. My mother and father lived in
Gaithersburg, Maryland, during some of this time, so Mother came down one day to pick
us up after this big public event to take us all out to lunch, which was very nice of her.
But I can remember her in the hallway arguing with Phyllis Schlafly. She was going at
her! [laughs] My sweet little mother. She said, “I raised five children, and worked, and
did this. How can you possibly say that women don‟t need equal rights?”
Which is something else that happened somewhere in there. My mother turned
sixty-five, was forcibly retired, and was very unhappy about it. Because what would she
do all day. The kids were all gone by that time. I can still remember she became addicted
to television, because the impeachment hearings for [President Richard] Nixon were on at
that point in time.
Dilg: It was an interesting summer, those hearings. I wasn‟t sure if you were involved
with the Friends of Equal Rights.
Brough: I‟m sure I was. I have their buttons. [laughs] I don‟t remember it being a major
activity, particularly much.
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Dilg: That group was also put together to aid—
Brough: Didn‟t somebody come up with a repeal of our equal rights amendment
somewhere about ‟76? That‟s when we fought that. I don‟t think it got on the ballot. I
think it was an effort to get signatures on a petition. But did it make a ballot? I don‟t think
it did.
Dilg: I‟ll check on the specifics.
Brough: But we were organizing ourselves to do another campaign. I don‟t think we had
to. That was in mid ‟76, somewhere along the line.
Now in the meantime, I had moved to Federal Way. In ‟76, Bill left Boeing and
went to work for Weyerhaeuser. So we moved south, and I left my Seattle home, and
people thought I‟d moved to outer Siberia, I guess. It was more difficult to maintain
contact, shall we say.
Dilg: It sounds like your activity lessened in 1976.
Brough: I resurfaced in spurts for different things. Like the Ellensburg conference or, like
I say, Friends for Equal Rights. I was working on the bylaws in ‟76. I was often off on
another issue. So I wasn‟t necessarily part of this day-to-day stuff that was going on.
Dilg: As much energy as you had, you needed to choose your issues. You can only focus
on so much.
Brough: When I was in the legislature, I would say, I‟ve just got to focus on two or three
things that I think I can impact, as opposed to this wide array of stuff that goes on.
Dilg: So you ran for the Washington State Legislature in 1982.
Brough: Yes.
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Dilg: Did your earlier activism play a role in your desire into becoming part of the
legislative body?
Brough: Yes and no. I‟m trying to think, in ‟76, I did N.O.W. bylaws. In ‟77 and ‟78,
probably into ‟79, I did national N.O.W. activities, which was basically lobbying
Congress. I organized N.O.W. in Oregon, too. That was one of my responsibilities as a
national board member. So there were several new chapters. I did not get all the way
through my region. Dorothy did a much better job with that. She did Idaho and Wyoming
and Alaska. [laughs] I don‟t think Hawaii was part of us, unfortunately.
Anyway, we had moved down to Federal Way Easter of ‟76. So I got involved
locally with some school activities, school levy stuff because Federal Way was in a world
of hurt at the time; they hadn‟t passed levies forever. Now I had originally planned to go
back to work in ‟75 when my daughter started elementary school, or kindergarten. That
was a year that Seattle failed a levy, and they “RIFed” (Reduction in Force) all teachers
with less than nine or ten year‟s experience. So I would have been “RIFed.” There were
just no jobs.
I looked for jobs. I still remember writing resumes and doing things and trying to
get a job as an analyst or an organizer for the city of Seattle. It‟s probably a good thing
that I didn‟t, because I would have died of the commute. But there was nothing down
here.
I got involved with a group of people who wanted to work on an incorporation
effort for Federal Way. I was on a steering committee that was working on an
incorporation effort, and we got an issue on the ballot, and I ran for city council in ‟81. I
won my election, so I would have been a city council person had we incorporated, but we
didn‟t. So at the end of 1981, I‟m sitting here thinking, “Well, what‟s next?” I can win an
election, yes, because I know I can win an election. That was right after the redistricting
of ‟80, so there were new legislative boundaries and open seats in the Thirtieth
Legislative District. I didn‟t have to challenge an incumbent.
I didn‟t run as a feminist. I ran basically on the need for local government, the
need for better representation, and somebody to take our problems to, i.e. incorporation,
37
and the lousy state of the public school system in this state. Those were the issues that I
ran on. The feminist core of me was just part of me at that point. You had a question in
here about feminism in the legislature, and whether these issues carried over; they
certainly did. I had a wonderful time working on rape laws, especially for statutory rape,
because that was the issue when I was there. Comparable worth, something that we had
worked on diligently in ‟74, ‟75, finally came to pass in the first cycle of the legislature. I
didn‟t give up on those issues, but they were not the dominant reason that I ran for public
office. The first four years that I was in the legislature, my agenda had to deal with
incorporation. We got the laws changed, and we did eventually incorporate. So that was
good.
Dilg: Did people remember you from your lobbying of feminist issues?
Brough: No. Actually the year that I was elected in ‟82 was the biggest freshman class
that they‟d ever had in the legislature. We met as freshmen, Rs and Ds together. What are
there, ninety-eight representatives? There were forty-five new people or forty-eight new
people. We were practically the majority. Gary Locke, it was his freshman year. We met
as the freshman caucus, and it scared the bejeebers out of the power structure. First of all,
Rs and Ds aren‟t supposed to do that together. We had a lot of clout, but there were six
women in my Republican caucus at that point, and they were all feminists. I mean, there
was just no question. Katie Allen, who is, unfortunately, no longer with us. Louise Miller.
Shirley Hankins. We had a tough group. So I had support. Nancy Rust from the League
was already down there. She was across the aisle, but the women gave each other support
regardless of party, I think, at that point. The partisanship didn‟t get miserable until
another ten years. It was always there, but we worked around it on a lot of issues.
Dilg: Reaching the goals of passing the state ERA and other legislation, and those were
tangible benefits from the experiences that you had of organizing and working with these
various women‟s groups and on these issues, but were there other personal benefits that
you felt like you acquired from—
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Brough: Well, I can do anything. [laughs] There‟s just no question. When I finally got
voted out of the legislature, I wrote newspaper columns. I never considered myself
literate, I‟m a mathematician, for god‟s sakes, but I knew that I could meet challenges.
Public speaking was always iffy for me; I was always a nervous wreck before I spoke
publicly. At one point when I was the floor leader for the Republican Caucus in
Olympia—first woman incidentally ever elected floor leader in any house on either side
of the aisle—I was the voice on the floor, so to speak, during the debate. The staff
member, Vito Chiechi, hired somebody to coach me. The coach said, “Why are you
doing this job?” he said, “How can you be nervous before you talk?”
I said, “I just am. I don‟t know. I just never had public speaking lessons in my
life. Just did it when I needed to do it.” It was an eye opener for me, but I was floor leader
for four years. I gave it up, which is unheard of, and which was the beginning of the end
of my political clout. I was tired of doing politics and not issues. I worked on education
reform then for the next three years. But if I‟d kept my power position, I probably would
have still been in the legislature.
Dilg: You talked a little about the opposition to the ERA, or you characterized them as
right-wing groups, that was slow to mobilize, but that they became an issue. You
mentioned Phyllis Schlafly played a role in the federal ERA amendment. Maybe talk a bit
about your interaction with those groups, how you think they worked in the state of
Washington, and about when the federal ERA amendment did not get ratified by the
extension deadline in 1982.
Brough: I think that was almost anticlimactic because it was apparent that it wasn‟t going
to happen. I couldn‟t recite exactly which states, but I have this Southern bloc fixed in
my head with probably Utah and all the places that the Mormons were particularly
strong.
The Mormon Church became, at one point, very politically active. I don‟t know
that they are as much as they were at that point. I think they were just evolving into
opposition to anything that wasn‟t one of their core values. Any status for women is not
a core value, to my thinking, for the Mormons. They have no respect for women, as far as
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I can tell. Women stay home and raise families. That‟s it. Which doesn‟t mean some of
them aren‟t nice people. Don‟t get me wrong. But they had not used this business as a
political organizing tool. They got pretty clever. They organized people based on fear,
the Mormons. The Evangelicals following close behind them, learning as they went
along, how to put fear in people‟s hearts.
We still see it. We see it at the national level amazingly so. Karl Rove‟s business
is just, I mean, how can they take a war hero like John Kerry and make a villain out of
him, I don‟t understand. Now they have their war hero, and they think he‟s wonderful. I
mean, it‟s a cynical thing that they do. It‟s just an organizing tool for their leadership; we
saw that. We saw it be fairly effective in this state at one point in time. I don‟t think it is
particularly strong right now. Unfortunately, they got strong as we were beginning to
wane. So there was a bit of a period that they had success. We couldn‟t keep that energy
level up forever.
Dilg: As I was doing some research for this project, I became aware that in 2007 a federal
Equal Rights Amendment had been reintroduced in the US Congress, a version in both
the House and the Senate, and wonder if you were aware of that, or if you have any
thoughts on the need for that?
Brough: I read about that once in the newspaper and thought, well, that‟s nice. Yes,
there‟s a need! Sexism still permeates American life; there‟s just no question. You saw it
in the media coverage of Hillary Clinton. The things that just make me angry to think that
we haven‟t come any further than they can say these kinds of things and get away with it.
Nobody‟s calling people on it. They do on racism. Oh, they play the race card anytime
they have any problem anywhere. But they can‟t play the woman card now. I‟d like for
them to be able to get to the point where that‟s a reality. Hasn‟t happened. I‟m sure we
need an equal rights amendment. We don‟t have equal pay. I mean, divorce is still a
problem. Rape is still a problem. Child abuse is awful. Incest. There are things that—
boys will be boys—we still have that attitude in a lot of ways. We shouldn‟t be there. We
should have passed that point. So, yes, I think there‟s a need for an equal rights
amendment. Because it would open the debate—if nothing more—it would open the
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debate for these issues. It would give the Supreme Court something that they have to deal
with when they come out with some of these rulings they come out with recently that are
just not good.
Dilg: That‟s all the formal questions I have. Are there other issues that you want to
address before we conclude our interview?
Brough: Well, you had a question in here that I actually wrote a couple of things down.
Dilg: Oh, sure!
Brough: Final reflections. I think I did that, didn‟t I? That I was no longer afraid of much
of anything. [laughs] Some of that comes with age. What is that? Hot flashes? What do
they call them? “Power surges!”
You talked about my reaction to only thirty-five states ratifying the federal ERA.
Like I say, this Southern block is fixed in my head. There were times when I was really
happy that I left Alabama and Texas and moved to the state of Washington. Bless Boeing
for hiring Bill and bringing him up here, because I would have never had these life
experiences in the South. I might have ended up a radical woman somewhere along the
line, but it would not have been as supportive and a challenging experience that I had. I
was this little Southern girl who had never done anything other than go to school and
teach school, all of a sudden doing all this stuff. I look back and I think, how did I do
these things? I read my logbooks before this interview, and I think I was out every night
of the week doing stuff. I just bless my husband‟s heart; he came along, too, for the ride.
There were a couple of things he did, early on, that set me back.
There‟s this ERA button that I wanted to talk about. [picks up button from her
collection] You see the graphic on this is a male figure and a female figure of equal
height and size. Equality between the sexes. Bill very sweetly did a banner for some
fundraising shindig we had. I don‟t know if it was when we had Gloria Steinem here. We
had activities as well as letter writing. But he did a banner with like a foot differential
between the man and the woman in height. [laughs]. I looked at that and I said, “No!”
41
He said, “That‟s the reality of our life.” He‟s a foot taller than I am.
I said, “You don‟t understand. There‟s a political message in this button.”
He said, “Yeah, I guess I don‟t understand.”
But one of the wonderful things that happened, is that my daughter grew up the
way she did. She is a strong woman, and an independent woman. She‟s in her
“Supermom” period right now, so we‟ll let that pass. But she is a feminist to her core, but
never questioned it. She said, “Mom,” she said, “I don‟t care who opens my door.”
I said, “Stephanie, this is not what feminism is about, who opens the door. It‟s
about whether or not you get paid as much as Joe Blow who sits next to you in the
office.”
She says, “Well, I get paid more.” [laughs]
That was, to me, a very positive thing to me that it took me out of this dominant
moment to moment contact with my daughter, and exposed her to an entire world of
strong women. When she got into the world of dance, and I got into the legislature, and I
was living in Olympia during the week and she was a teenager, she had two surrogate
mothers who took care of her dancing needs. They said, “Jean Marie, we‟re not political.
You can go do your thing. We‟ll take care of Stephanie.” That sisterhood from an
unexpected source—one of these was a Mormon mommy—was very positive, and a very
good influence for my daughter that other people stepped in and played a big sister role, a
mother role for her. She had more to deal with than just her wacko mother. So it was a
good thing.
I think of all the things that came out of the women‟s movement, the fact that, I
think I learned how not to be afraid of challenges and to know that I could succeed if I
worked hard enough and got other people involved. My mother wanted me to go to law
school somewhere along the line. You had a question in here about early influences on
me, and I don‟t think my parents were there, but they were just busy people. They had a
house to keep and a job to go to and five kids to raise. There was always something that
needed to be done. But somewhere along the line, we got closer as she got much older,
and she said, “Why are you doing all this stuff? Why don‟t you just go to law school and
make a career out of it?”
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I said, “I think I‟m past that point at this time.” It was an interesting a supportive
thing from my mother that I would have never expected. She was a woman with damaged
dreams. She wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to go to med school. The Depression
wiped that out.
Dilg: This has been a very interesting interview. I thank you for taking time to be part of
the Women‟s History Consortium Equal Rights Oral History Project.
Brough: Well, thank you. It was fun.
[End Interview.]
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