How feminist is the ‘feminist capital’?

Terry Christensen

San Jose State University, San Jose, California, USA

San Jose, in California ‘s Silicon Valley, is the self-proclaimed ‘feminist capital of the United States’ and, along with Santa Clara County, has a female majority on its council. This article describes the rise of San Jose’s women to positions of power and their impact on public policy.

San Jose is known today as the capital of California’s Silicon Valley, but the USA’s fourteenth largest city gained fame as another sort of capital in 1974 when it made Janet Gray Hayes the first woman mayor of a major US city.

Although the label may have been as much self-promotion as national recogni- tion, San Jose was instantly proclaimed ‘the feminist capital of the United States’.

Even 10 years ago, San Jose feminists could boast strong local chapters of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and the National Women’s Poli- tical Caucus (NWPC), both instrumental in encouraging and backing women candidates and lobbying on feminist issues. The more reserved League of Women Voters and American Associa- tion of University Women were also large

and active, providing training grounds for several women candidates.

Beyond the organizations, San Jose and Santa Clara County, in which the city is located, had already elected women to school boards, the city council, the coun- ty board of supervisors and even the state legislature.

By 1980, women had a majority on the San Jose City Council and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, where they appointed a woman head of

‘a majority of the women residents of the city are employed’

administration. Women served on the city councils of all but one of the other 14 cities in the county.

To put this in perspective, Professor Janet A. Flammang of the University of Santa Clara found that during the same period only 3-6% of elected officials in counties and 4-13% of those in cities around the USA were women, and in

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‘Janet A. Flammang, Political Women, Sage. Beverley Hills, CA, 1984.

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1978 only 6% of cities had female mayors. ’

More would follow - Chicago and San Francisco soon had female mayors - but no city or county advanced quite so far as San Jose and Santa Clara County.

Why? Certainly the high level of orga- nizing activity helped, but demographics and issue trends had an influence, too.

San Jose is, in its way, the ultimate Yuppie community. Having grown from just 90 000 in 1950 to 700 000 today. it is a young city. A majority of the women residents of the city are employed. This has given them experience and expccta- tions that may have led them to politics and also made local men relatively accepting of female candidates.

Political attitudes in San Jose and Santa Clara County are also basically progressive, especially on issues of equal opportunity, and virtually all elected officials are Democrats and mild liberals.

Finally, women candidates were close- ly associated with two key issues of the late 1970s. Watergate put clean govcrn- ment on the agenda and women seemed cleaner than men. They also took the lead on environmental issues. fighting to manage growth in a more sensible way in the burgeoning metropolis. Their en- vironmental campaigning conveniently positioned them in opposition to devclop- ers, who were the bad guys in allegations about local corruption.

The combination of organizing, de- mographics and issue trends produced a growing phalanx of women councillors and supervisors in elections throughout the 1970s. but it was a change in the structure of elections in 1980 that brought women majority status on the San Jose City Council.

In order to break the power of the 19th century political machines and their dis- trict organizations. reformers in 1916 introduced ‘at large’ elections for the San Jose city council, a system by which all seven members were elected by the entire city. This raised the cost of campaigning, making it difficult for women and work- ing people to win and impossible for

members of minority groups to be elected. as well as denying direct neigh- bourhood representation.

No minority person won direct election to the city council under the at-large system, despite the fact that a third of San Jose’s population was Hispanic, black or Asian; only three women won at-large elections in 60 years.

But in 1978, a coalition of minority. neighbourhood, labour and feminist groups won voter approval for a change in the system from at-large to district elections, with neighbourhood-oriented districts of about SO 000 people each electing its own representative. When the system came into effect in 1980, women won a majority of seats on the city council; several had working-class back- grounds, and one was Hispanic and another black.

Women candidates, most of whom relied on grassroots campaigns, benefited greatly from the smaller districts, but the change probably also muted residual sexism in San Jose. Under the at-large system, voters picked several candidates from a list. It seems improbable that they would have consciously chosen a female majority, even if there had been a suffi- cient number of credible women candi- dates in an at-large race. But in districts, voters choose only one representative, picking their own preferences without concern about the sex or race of the majority on the council. The female majority was simply the result of the cumulative choices of a majority of the districts.

In the same year that San Jose voters elected a female city council majority, the voters in Santa Clara county gave women ;I majority of seats on the Board of Supervisors.

But it became apparent that female does not mean feminist when several of the victors and beneficiaries of the trend denied the label.

Now. IO years after the revolution, what difference has it made? A common conclusion in the feminist capital itself is ‘not a lot’. Local (male) establishment

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figures grumble that elected officials these days are inept, but most observers agree that they are no more so than their male predecessors. At least none of the women have been convicted of graft or forced to resign in disgrace, as have some of their male colleagues.

Beyond that, women politicians seem to act somewhat differently. They are more attentive to detail (critics call it trivia), including minor neighbourhood matters that make a big difference to the neighbourhood affected. They are more willing to ask seemingly dumb questions, less given to pretence of understanding, and so more likely to poke holes in the arguments of putative experts. At the risk of sounding sexist, this appears to be because they are more willing to rely on intuition than the men.

Professor Flammang says they spend more time at their jobs, work harder at constituency service and are seen as being more honest, approachable and human than their male colleagues. They also tend to be less ambitious and arrogant, and more attentive to the job at hand than to the next step on the ladder. The county’s top woman bureaucrat told Flammang that the female legislators are more collaborative and supportive of one another, and less competitive than the men. They emphasize consensus and ‘working together’, which produces many unanimous votes. Unfortunately, it also mutes disagreements and differences be- tween their districts, but the avoidance of conflict is a high priority for the women

legislators. A male elected official told Flammang

that ‘the industrial community feels it can run the housewives. They feel they can play on the housewife elected official’s lack of experience in the business world’. But one of his women colleagues reached just the opposite conclusion, explaining to a reporter that the men ‘are taken with the mystique of power. They jump up to shake (a leading lobbyist’s) hand every time he walks in the door’. Both observa- tions have some merit, but male repre- sentatives do seem more eager to play in

the businessmen’s ball game than their female counterparts.

These conclusions are impressions, of course, and they are debatable; have women made a difference in terms of actual policy? Certainly San Jose re- versed past policies of rampant growth and replaced them with careful manage- ment and attention to neighbourhoods, a shift that coincided directly with the rise of the female majorities. Other policies, however, show a more recognizable

‘women office holders have been highly active in endorsing, raising money and campaigning for other women’

feminist commitment, despite the denial of that commitment by some of the participants. Once the feminist foot was in the door, the possessors made sure that others followed. Women office holders have been highly active in endorsing, raising money and campaigning for other women and they have unhesitantly opted for women when making appointments.

Several women councillors first attained office by appointment and Santa Clara County’s chief executive officer is Sally Reed, appointed by the female majority of the Board of Supervisors. ‘We plucked her out of obscurity’, said one of the women office holders of MS Reed, who was deputy city manager in San Jose before becoming county execu- tive. ‘We knew what she was doing. Her resume did not make her a candidate but we knew she was running the city.’

Affirmative action for both women and minorities has been a high priority for several of the women office holders and San Jose has been a pioneer at integrating women into the work force, especially the police and fire departments. The commit- ment to affirmative action has extended from hiring to working conditions and promotions with the strong support of the largest municipal employees union

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which, not surprisingly, has the bulk of its membership among women in clerical positions.

Both San Jose and Santa Clara County boycotted conferences in states that had not ratified the Equal Rights Amend- ment to the US Constitution. Both have introduced job sharing and flexible work- ing hours to suit working mothers. Both have special programmes for victims of sexual assault and have fought for the rental rights of families against landlords who will not rent to families with chil- dren. The County has long since estab- lished a Commission on the Status of Women and a care centre for battered women.

Beyond these, San Jose has, sometimes in embarassment, led the nation on com- parable worth. Also known as pay equity, comparable worth refers to the relative pay in job categories, that are predomi- nantly female versus equivalent work areas dominated by males. An indepen- dent 1980 study of city employees com- missioned by the San Jose council showed that job categories that were over 70% female were underpaid compared to male-dominated work categories requir- ing similar skill levels. The union that represented these workers demanded appropriate adjustments, but the new female majority on the city council was in an awkward position because California voters had mandated massive rate-cutting by approving Proposition 13 in 1978 and the city was broke.

Mayor Hayes found herself in con- frontation with the very people who had helped elect her in 1974 when the work-

ers went out on strike with the support of NWPC and NOW. The strike - the first ever on the issue of comparable worth - lasted nine days and ended when the city agreed to make $6 million in adjustments over a period of three years (averaging 9% for the clerical workers who were most affected). The union was dis- appointed, having won less than it wanted, but the female council majority had saved face and a significant prece- dent had been set.

Since San Jose broke the ground on comparable worth, Santa Clara county has moved to correct inequities, as have 100 other cities and counties in Califor- nia. The state legislature has endorsed the principal, although conservative gov- ernor George Deukmejian has vetoed appropriations for pay adjustments. Nevertheless, the state employees’ union managed to negotiate an extra 5% pay raise for female workers last year.

Perhaps what is most interesting and significant about the female majorities of the San Jose City Council and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors is that no one dares make an issue of them. They are established and accepted and so are their policies. All have won easy re-election and speculation about a suc- cessor to San Jose’s current (male) mayor focuses on women councillors. But with only one woman among the area’s 10 state and federal legislators, the real test for the feminist capital - and the major disappointment thus far - will be whether its women leaders can advance to higher office

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