But appearances, as usual, are deceiving. Appleton in fact has been profoundly changed by the women’s movement-and over the past 20 years the city has made remarkable progress toward what used to be known, derisively, as “women’s lib.” It is now perfectly OK for women to take leadership roles in local politics—and it is OK for women to be recognized as business leaders, too. There are women cops and women firefighters, and there are women in managerial jobs in local business and government. There is firm community consensus, and generous funding with local tax dollars, for Harbor House, a shelter for battered women. And there is an active effort, in the Appleton public schools, to eliminate the invidious stereotyping that keeps young women in the velvet straitjacket of traditional gender roles. “Some people in this area have a difficult time with strong women,” says Diane Bunger-Thomas, an emigre from California who serves on a gender-equity committee that monitors public schools. “But the women here are a helluva lot stronger than I expected. They take on issues. They’re really chipping away at discrimination.”
Appleton feminists generally don’t wear their cause on their sleeves. Small-town politics is personal and intensely pragmatic: if you’re out to change things, it’s a good idea to avoid hot rhetoric and confrontational tactics. But the progress is real, and it has been occurring for a long time. Take Dorothy Johnson, for example. As a registered nurse, the mother of five and a schoolboard member, Johnson made the revolutionary decision to run for mayor in 1980. It helped that voters were fed up with the incumbent-but still, this was a woman running for the city’s top job.
“I remember one woman saying to me, ‘What if you fail? You will put us back years and years’,” Johnson says now. “I said I will not fail. I can do it.” She did, too, winning three straight terms before stepping down last spring. During the 12 years of Johnson’s mayoralty Appleton became Wisconsin’s fastest-growing city, expanded its tax base and pushed ahead with programs like a downtown retail mall and privatization of the city ambulance service. Though some of this was and still is controversial, Johnson proved so effective at building consensus on the city council that she never once used her veto-and never once, she says, lost an issue she really cared about.
Her real achievement was what Johnson herself describes as “a massive change in attitude” toward women in local politics. She never ran as a woman candidate, and she “brought no feminist agenda at all.” But her performance as mayor led to a gender upheaval on the city council, where six of 18 current members are women. That shift is paralleled on the Outagamie County board, where 12 of 39 members are women. “It took somebody to do this, to dispel the notion that women would somehow stumble or make a frightful mistake or collapse under pressure, or whatever the fear was,” Johnson says. Today, says Corinne Goldgar, a manager in the city transit company, “gender has become less and less of an issue. We’ve had good women on the council, and some women who make you want to hide your head in shame. I don’t think there’s a strong feminist movement here-some women are anti-feminist. But women are getting elected.”
Goldgar is a former president of the local League of Women Voters, which through the past two decades has become a powerful incubator for women candidates. The Fox Valley chapter of NOW, formed in 1972, has meanwhile pushed ahead on selected women’s issues-organizing a women’s center, starting a campaign against domestic violence, working with the schools to combat gender stereotyping. In the 1970s, says Mary Ann Rossi, a cofounder of Fox Valley NOW, the community was still resistant to nuts-and-bolts issues like day care. “We were still trying to convince people that women didn’t just work in order to have a little pin money,” Rossi says.
All this has changed dramatically. With more than 75,000 working women in the Appleton area, day-care services are offered by private nurseries and by the YMCA-and Y officials say fully a third of their day-care clients are single mothers. NOW’S crusade against domestic violence has entered the mainstream, too. Spousal-abuse complaints are up-which suggests that Appleton women, like women everywhere, are no longer willing to suffer in silence. Last year Harbor House served 125 women and 179 children and hundreds of others took part in education programs and support groups. Still, four area women have died in domestic disputes since January 1990-and in the face of those tragic statistics, no one can dispute the need for an aggressive anti-violence program. Mary Grundman, one of the women members of the county board and a staunch conservative, is a vocal supporter of Harbor House. “I’m not a NOW member and nobody had better call me a feminist,” she says. “But do you know how much tax money we end up spending in welfare and other services when we don’t try to repair troubled families? And besides, no one likes abuse.”
The Anita Hill case put sexual harassment on the front burner in Appleton. Rossi says she has been contacted this year by two women-a banker and a garbage collector-seeking help against harassment on the job. And Appleton has its own version of the Hill case, which involves a woman named Donna Ver Voort. From 1983 to 1986, Ver Voort worked in a local plant that made packing tape. By her account, she was subjected to “sexual remarks, touching … and men making remarks like ‘How can you stand to wear Tampax? Doesn’t it feel like you’ve got a pickle up your ass?’” When she saw other women crying in the restroom, Ver Voot would say, “Let’s band together. There’s strength in numbers.”
These other women, Ver Voort says, somehow lacked the nerve to fight back. Ver Voort didn’t. She complained to company officials, saying, “What if it was your daughter? Would you want her to go through this?” Nothing much happened. Then her men co-workers retaliated by slashing her tires and, she says, threatening her life. She took her case to a lawyer and the state. A hearing examiner dismissed her complaint in 1987. In 1989 a conservative Republican legislator named David Prosser took her case for free-and on appeal, the state labor commission ruled in her favor. She received $8,000 from her former employer in an out-of-court settlement, but the company denies any sexual harassment. “This is a person who invaded the traditional male turf on the factory floor,” Prosser says. “It was the co-workers who harassed her. The company got caught because they really didn’t do anything about it.” The case has never been publicly reported in Appleton, Prosser says, because “the company wasn’t anxious to get it reported.”
So the women’s revolution in Appleton has sometimes been public and visible and sometimes been mostly covert-just as it has everywhere else. It is a battle for hearts and minds, and both sides have learned and adapted. Men-even very traditional men-are taking women more seriously, and women are taking themselves seriously, too. “Women’s lib” is reality: some of it is inspiring, some of it is tragic and some of it is funny. Movement veterans like Mary Ann Rossi remember the day in 1975 when Fox Valley NOW presented the mayor of Appleton with a “national women’s agenda”-mostly because he kept them waiting for 30 minutes in an unmistakable gesture of contempt. That wouldn’t happen today, no matter who holds the office. “The other night I had an older man politely ask me whether it’s all right to refer to women as ’ladies’ in certain circumstances,” Diane Bunger-Thomas says with a sigh. “We’ve come a long way, but there’s a long way to go.”
In the past year have you: (percent saying yes) 36% Become more politically active 14% Given money to a feminist group or a group dealing with women’s problems 15% Given money to a political candidate 22% Changed your job or career goals NEWSWEEK Poll, Dec. 17-18, 1992
