Oregon State Library Association Quarterly
Summer 2009, Vol. 15, No. 2

Oregon’s Passage of the Equal Rights Amendment - Excerpts from With Grit and By Grace  

Mary Ginnane, Oregon State Library Association President and guest editor for this issue ofthe Quaretly, makes a comparison between Stubborn Twig (authored by Lauren Kessler and the 2009 Library Association’s choice for its “One State, Many Stories” project) and With Grit and By Grace. 

“The consciousness-raising about prejudice toward immigrants that Stubborn Twig fostered is mirrored in the selected excerpts about Oregon’s passage of the Equal Rights Amendment by Betty Roberts and Gail Wells. Betty Roberts keynoted at the 2009 OLA Conference and told stories from her legislative and judicial career that are important to remember. Our presentday workplaces and our lives are better due to the movements of recent history with which Betty and others worked. Betty’s stories are rich with lessons about collaboration, consensus, and compromise as illustrated in her memories of the E.R.A. in Oregon. One of the repeated human stories is that patterns of prejudice can be overcome, often assisted by the passage of civil rights statutes.”

To read the full excerpt, and other articles in the Quarterly, go to  http://data.memberclicks.com/site/ola/olaq_15no2.pdf.

An Electronic Periodical Published by The Law and Courts Section, The American Political Science Association (E-mail: wmcintosh@gvpt.umd.edu)

Link directly to the online review: www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/reviews/2009/07/with-grit-and-by-grace-breaking-trails.html or read it here in its entirety.

LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW
ISSN 1062-7421, Vol. 19 No.7 (July, 2009) pp.489-491

Reviewed by Julie Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY.
Email: jnovkov@albany.edu.

WITH GRIT AND BY GRACE is Betty Roberts’ fascinating personal account of her liberal feminist journey from a hardscrabble existence in Texas as a child to the Oregon Supreme Court. While Roberts is telling her own story, she narrates two other stories as well: one of a state and its sometimes tumultuous political development, and another of the path of professional American women from the era of the feminine mystique to an era of equal rights under the law. Roberts is justly proud of the progress she identifies in both of these narratives, but she is by no means complacent that feminism hascompleted its work.

Overall, the book is a lively, arresting read in which Roberts establishes herself as a tireless worker and keen political strategist, but also speaks in a no-nonsense, lightly humorous, and quintessentially Oregonian voice.

Roberts begins her narrative with her childhood in Texas, discussing the struggles of her mother to raise her family in the face of Roberts’ father’s absence and illnesses. In 1941, she began college at Texas Wesleyan, but in 1942 met and married a banker from Oregon serving as an Air Force drill instructor. She and Bill Rice moved to Oregon after the war, beginning her lifelong investment in the state and its politics as a determined Democrat. Fourteen years and four children later, after dropping out of Texas Wesleyan, Roberts returned to Eastern Oregon College to complete her degree, much to the consternation of her husband and their social acquaintances, who had trouble accepting a banker’s wife as a college student. Roberts graduated from Portland State and became a teacher, but her decision to enter the workforce signaled the end of her marriage (pp.31-42).

Roberts, newly divorced, still managed to win her first political campaign for a seat on the school board. Her involvement in politics contributed to the development of her relationship with Frank Roberts, a Democratic Party leader, whom she married in 1960. Both she and Frank ran for the state legislature in 1962 but lost primary races. In the mean time, Roberts had completed a master’s degree at Portland State and considered entering a Ph.D. program and becoming a professor. The chair of the University of Oregon’s political science department, however, informed her that she was too old to begin the program at 39; Roberts noted that the department had never had either a female professor or Ph.D. student at that point. This roadblock was a turning point for her, as she opted to matriculate in the Northwestern College of Law instead, earning her degree in the mid 1960s (pp.51-54). She began her service as a legislator in 1965, joining six other [*490] women in Oregon’s House of Representatives.

As a house member, Roberts worked with Democratic allies to advance their agenda, but also supported agendas for women, raising issues like workplace discrimination and reproductive freedom in the late 1960s. She also divorced Frank Roberts in 1966 and married Keith Skelton in 1968, which led to a struggle with the Oregon State Bar over whether she could continue to retain Roberts as her professional surname (pp.102-03). (She succeeded with the bar, but had to cast her 1968 vote for candidate Betty Roberts under the name Betty Roberts Skelton, as the Registrar of Elections refused to issue her a voter registration card under the name Betty Roberts.)

After moving on to the Senate in 1968, she fought for unrestricted access to abortion (ultimately contributing to the passage of a more limited legalization of abortion) and was instrumental in getting the Senate to adopt a bill barring racial and sex-based discrimination. She worked relentlessly on behalf of education and helped to steer Oregon’s innovative bottle-deposit bill through treacherous legislative shoals to adoption. She also contributed to the ERA’s relatively uncontroversial passage in Oregon (pp.147-58). These accomplishments inspired her to run for governor, announcing her candidacy in 1973. She came in second in the race for the Democratic nomination, but the name recognition she garnered in the campaign convinced the party to choose her as a replacement candidate for Wayne Morse, whose unexpected death mid-campaign against Bob Packwood for Oregon’s US Senate seat left an enormous void in Oregon’s politics (pp.186-96). Upon losing to Packwood, Roberts returned to the Oregon Senate and continued to work for women’s rights and to support Democratic and progressive initiatives.

In 1977, Roberts’ life changed again as she became a judge on the Oregon Court of Appeals, the intermediate appellate court in the state. She was the only female judge on the court, and had to struggle for acceptance and respect. Most egregiously, at a judges’ conference in 1978, another male judge groped her. She persisted, however, persuading her sometimes reluctant and clueless colleagues to recognize her professionalism. Nonetheless, it was not until newer judges were appointed in 1980 that the court became a moderately comfortable environment. In 1982, Betty Roberts became the first woman to serve as a Justice on the Oregon Supreme Court (pp.211-37). She remained on the Court only until 1986, but her impact was lasting on a state supreme court that was already known for its independence and creativity.

Roberts notes her most important opinion as HEWITT v. SAIF, in which a male claimant sought benefits after his female companion and the mother of his child died in an industrial accident (p.241). The state denied benefits on the ground that they were only available for female survivors. Roberts’ opinion identified gender as a suspect classification under Oregon’s constitution, generating an independent basis for the flowering of state equal protection law (653 P2d. 970 (1982)). As a Supreme Court Justice, Roberts continued to press both on and off the Court for more recognition of women’s issues. [*491]

In 1985, Roberts decided that she wanted to spend more time with her husband, who had begun the process of winding down his legal practice. After surviving a heart attack, he became a member of Portland’s Community College Board, and Roberts helped to found a new group, Oregon Women Lawyers, and became involved in arbitration and mediation. Skelton died in 1995, but as of the publication of her memoir, Roberts was still an active arbitrator and mediator, as well as a mentor for many Oregon lawyers (pp.252-65).

While Roberts describes a challenging journey, she clearly relished her successes along the way. Overall, the reader gains a sense of her as a relentless optimist, a woman who never allowed others’ negative attitudes or the adverse circumstances she faced to prevent her from moving forward. Her tone is deceptively conversational and down-to-earth, at times almost obscuring the extraordinary nature of her accomplishments: her repeated breaking of gender barriers with electoral successes in the state house and senate, her near capture of nominations for two state-wide offices, and her service as an appellate, and then supreme court judge. She achieved these milestones not just as a woman, but as a divorced woman with children in a time when both divorce and motherhood were seen as political millstones. While Roberts does not reflect extensively on why she was able to overcome these barriers, attributing it mostly to her persistence and good fortune, her narrative suggests that both elite Oregonians and Oregon voters appreciated her straightforward, matter-of-fact attitude.

Liberal feminism ‘the belief that women are inherently equal to men’ has been a lifetime lodestone for Roberts. She writes frankly about her own path toward extending her personal liberal principles of equality to incorporate sexual orientation; she eventually performed Oregon’s first same-sex marriages in Multnomah County. She has less to say about race, but most of her active political career encompassed a period in Oregon’s politics when racial struggles tended to be more local and often occurred outside of formal political structures. The liberal feminist principle of choice also characterized Roberts’ active career, both in her decisions to run for various offices and her decision in 1985 to step back from active engagement in high-level law and politics. Some might frame her choice to follow her husband into retirement as an anti-feminist act, but Roberts clearly understands it as representing her own secure capacity to choose her life path with wisdom and sensitivity toward achieving an appropriate balance for herself and her family.

I recommend Roberts’ memoir as an engaging read for anyone interested in the real world of law and politics. In particular, it would make a great gift for a starting law student or for someone who has just completed the bar exam

******* Copyright 2009 by the author, Julie Novkov.

Readers may redistribute these articles to other individuals for noncommercial use, provided that the text and this notice remain intact and unaltered in any way. No LPBR article may be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior permission from the author. If you have any questions about permissions, please contact Wayne McIntosh, Editor, THE LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW, Department of Government & Politics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, or by phone at 301.405.4156 or by fax at 301.314.9690.

All previously published reviews may be obtained at the Law & Politics Book Review web site: www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr

The Oregon Historial Society Quarterly book review of Betty Roberts’ memoir With Grit and By Grace.

Click on this link to read the review from the Spring 2009 issue, beginning on page 135.   ohsq-review1

The Oregon Humanities - A Journal of Ideas and Perspective, Fall/Winter 2008 issue, page 15. An excerpt from Betty Roberts’ book With Grit and By Grace.

oregon-humanities-fall-winter-2008
(Click on link to view pdf file of the excerpt as printed in the magazine.)

http://eugeneweekly.com/2008/09/18/books.html

Taking the Gloves Off
Betty Roberts, political animal
by Suzi Steffen

Talk about a determined human being. Betty Roberts attended her first sociology class wearing a dress, stockings, pumps and gloves. She was 32, a banker’s wife living in LaGrande, a mother with four children — and the year was 1955.

Fast forward to February, 1982. By this time, Roberts had been a teacher, a school-board member, a state legislator, a lawyer, a grandmother, a state senator and the first woman on Oregon’s Court of Appeals. She had run against Bob Straub in the Democratic primary for governor — and that same year, after beloved former Senator Wayne Morse died, she ran against then-Sen. Bob Packwood. 

Political to her bones, she understood running campaigns, so it wasn’t by accident or chance that she ended up breaking the state Supreme Court’s glass ceiling — she would have won the seat in an election, but she shrewdly maneuvered Republican Governor Vic Atiyeh into appointing her instead. Everybody won in that deal; everyone looked good. That was part of Roberts’ plan, part of her political skill.

Roberts’ honesty about political machinations in the service of a greater good to those she served makes her memoir, With Grit and By Grace: Breaking Trails in Politics and Law, a most fascinating read. Every page reveals a surprise, from the fact that Oregon’s legislature had to make it legal for places other than pharmacies to sell condoms to The Oregonian’s various sexist naming practices (calling the other Supreme Court justices by their titles but referring to her as “Mrs. Roberts,” for merely one instance). The UO doesn’t come off well; Burt Wingert, chair of the political science department (still not reputed to be a welcoming place for women), refused her entry into grad school because of her age and gender. 

Guess what? At that time, the department chair’s decision was perfectly legal — but because Roberts then turned to law school and the state legislature after the UO’s idiotic rebuff, she helped change discriminatory laws. That was some revenge, and of the best kind, for Roberts’ revenge cleared the way for many others to succeed. In a variety of ways, her entire career served as inspiration: Oregon Supreme Court Justice Martha Walters, a Eugenean and former labor lawyer, says, “Justice Roberts has been a far off beacon and close friend to countless women lawyers and judges throughout the state and nation,”

For political junkies, the memoir opens a treasure box of insights about campaigns, political planning and the process of gradual legislative change. Roberts explains that although she sometimes felt like marching in the streets with other women demanding equality, she understood her societal function as well: “I’d learned what it means to have unilateral power. I’d learned that power also comes from being informed and from building alliances — collaborative power.”

That collaborative power meant getting the famous bottle bill passed, maneuvering so that Oregon’s legislature supported the Equal Rights Amendment, protecting the state’s public beaches, allowing women to decide what last names they wanted upon marrying or divorcing men and even confronting Portland’s City Club when it didn’t allow women to become members. Beyond its value recounting displays of sexism (The Oregon House Speaker had a problem with women wearing slacks, for instance … hearing echoes in the obsession with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “pantsuits”?), the book becomes almost a quest to identify Oregon politicians and their fame. Hey, Tom McCall just got elected governor! There’s Vera Katz becoming a state rep! And oh look, here’s (now federal Judge) Ann Aiken graduating from the UO! 

But Roberts’ own story, from her hardscrabble life as a kid in Texas to her three marriages, from canning fruit to serving on the state Supreme Court, provides a strong narrative as well. No, not everything in the book has literary merit despite expert help from writer Gail Wells, and transitions can range from clunky to abrupt, but so what? This memoir, published by OSU Press, deserves a wide readership in Oregon and across the country.

Justice Betty Roberts reads from With Grit and By Grace at 2 pm Sunday, Sept. 21, at the Eugene Public Library. Get there early! The UO Bookstore will be selling copies of the book at and after the reading, so be sure to bring some cash as well.     

http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/trailblazing_oregon_judge_fought_shockingly_overt_sexism_and_won

http://www.registerguard.com/web/news/story.csp?cid=130176&sid=105&fid=35

Justice roberts recounts ACTS of injustice in her memoir

http://www.theoutlookonline.com/news/story.php?story_id=122127206143971500

Pioneer Oregon jurist frets over women’s political gains

Supreme Court Justice Betty Roberts says Sarah Palin ‘is a stranger to me’

By Sharon Nesbit, The Gresham Outlook, Sep 12, 2008.

Betty Roberts, Oregon’s first woman Supreme Court justice, came to Gresham on Monday, Sept. 8, to talk with two local book clubs about her memoir.

But the readers crammed into the living room of June Swan, longtime Gresham resident, could not ignore what Roberts quipped was “the elephant in the room.”

Roberts’ role as a leader in Oregon’s feminist movement is recorded in her book, “With Grit and By Grace.” But Robert’s talk led straight to the hottest topic in the nation, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Roberts, who saw the Equal Rights Amendment passed in Oregon, though it failed by a vote of three states nationally, pondered what to make of the Alaska governor who is Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate.

“Do we accept it as a new step for women, or have we just regressed?” she asked.

Roberts pioneered law to decriminalize abortion in Oregon while Palin opposes abortion. The next administration will likely make the Supreme Court appointments that could end legal abortion in the U.S.

“This is a new sort of reality,” Roberts said, adding that it brings her back to the 1970s and Phyllis Schafly’s arguments against the Equal Rights Amendment.

“She (Palin) is a stranger to me,” Roberts said, “I just don’t relate.”

Bur Roberts said Palin’s candidacy raises one question all women in all politics share: How can women in political life support a feminine side and still be tough?

Roberts didn’t start out tough. She was a banker’s wife in rural Oregon with four children. A bonafide member of the bridge playing set, she decided in her 30s to go back to school, finish her college education and become a teacher in order to help educate her children. The man who admitted her to Eastern Oregon University (then Eastern Oregon College) remarked that returning to school was “cute.” It was the first of many rebuffs she experienced as she worked her away through politics, into law school and finally to the bench of the state’s top court.

“You learn how to deal with disappointment,” she said.

Roberts has a close connection to East County. She and her family came to Gresham in 1956, staying in the same motel with Swan and her first husband, as both families looked for houses.

“We each knew the other was not somebody we wanted to know,” Roberts said. “There I was in pedal pushers with clunky shoes and she was in black velvet toreador pants with high-heeled wedge shoes.”

But Roberts knew how to cook, a skill she learned from the women she knew in La Grande, and Swan, who later became a fine cook, began to borrow recipes. Swan, twice widowed, married Stan Swan who was Congresswoman Edith Green’s aide.

With a head full of lesson plans and a passion to teach high school social studies, Roberts, when she came to Gresham, was primed to teach. But her husband said no.

“So, I made a choice,” she said. She was divorced in 1960.

“You have to remember what life was like then for women,” Roberts told the book clubs from Boring and Mount Tabor. “Women couldn’t get credit … you couldn’t get a divorce without proving that the other party was a no-good person.”

Roberts began her teaching career first in Reynolds High School, then Centennial. And when Superintendent Harry Thompson wouldn’t let her run for political office, she moved to David Douglas High School, “which would take me, win lose or draw,” she said.

She first ran for the Legislature in 1964. She served on the Lynch School District Board. Roberts married twice again, first to Frank Roberts and then to legislator Keith Skelton.

Her third marriage, she said, “was when I finally got it right.” Skelton died in 1995.

Roberts earned a master’s degree in political science at the University of Oregon and was seeking a doctorate when an adviser at the University of Oregon denied her, saying she would be 45 years old when the degree was earned and would have “only 20 years to repay the state of Oregon.”

She turned to Northwestern School of Law, attending classes at night. In the Legislature, she was part of the pioneering Oregon Women’s Political Caucus. She was the first woman on the Court of Appeals in 1977 and the first on Oregon’s Supreme Court in 1982. She still works as a senior judge in mediation and arbitration.

“Here I am over 80 and still working for the state’s taxpayers,” she said.

http://www.theoutlookonline.com/opinion/story.php?story_id=122127024669552300

Roberts’ book has East County backdrop

By mark garber, The Gresham Outlook, Sep 12, 2008.

Betty Roberts’ fine autobiography – “With Grit and By Grace” – is at least three history lessons woven together:

• It’s the personal history of a woman who, although born at a time when people of her gender had limited options in life, overcame overt discrimination to eventually become Oregon’s first woman Supreme Court Justice.

• It’s also a history of Oregon during its most fascinating and progressive period – the 1960s and 1970s.

• And it’s a recounting of the women’s movement or what Roberts refers to as the second wave of feminism.

Along the way – and perhaps of most direct interest for Gresham-area residents – the reader will pick up more than a few anecdotes about East Multnomah County in the 1960s and ’70s. This area, like the rest of Oregon, was a place filled with colorful personalities who at the time played a central role in the heady issues of the day.

Among the cast of East County characters mentioned in Roberts’ book are Mt. Hood Community College founders Poly and Betty Schedeen, former legislators Ross Morgan and Vern Cook and, of course, Betty Roberts’ second husband, Frank, who went on to become Oregon’s First Man when his third wife, Barbara Roberts, was elected the state’s only woman governor.

HER PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIVES ADVANCE THIS STORY LINE
The East County references – Betty Roberts worked at Reynolds and Centennial schools before she got into politics – are enough to draw the interest of local readers. But there’s more to this book, published this year by Oregon State University Press, than name dropping.

Roberts tells her story in a matter-of-fact manner that keeps the book moving at a reasonable clip. And it turns out that the former justice is a surprisingly good storyteller. (Want to know the real reason that the aforementioned Morgan decked Cook at a Salem event? You’ll find it in these pages.)

But underlying Roberts’ capable writing style is a story that truly needed to be told. Roberts grew up and married her first husband during an era when the expectations for women were extremely restrictive. She divorced that husband because he didn’t want her to work outside the home. Her desire to obtain a PhD. in political science at the University of Oregon was thwarted by a chauvinistic department chairman. The rebuff led her to become a lawyer and eventually a legislator.

While in Salem, Roberts was in the thick of the monumental issues of her time: decriminalizing abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Beach Bill, the Bottle Bill and statewide land-use planning.

And her personal story, as with all good autobiographies, intersects with the larger historical drama that surrounds it:

• Her peace-loving son is shipped off to Vietnam, promising that he won’t kill anyone.

• When she and Frank Roberts divorce, and she remarries, both the state bar association and the Oregonian newspaper try to bully her into changing her name. They relent only after she obtains an attorney general’s opinion and threatens a lawsuit.

• Roberts’ biggest disappointments – her historic, but unsuccessful races for governor and and the U.S. Senate in the 1970s – ultimately lead to her greatest achievement: being named to the Oregon Supreme Court.

ROBERTS HELPED OPEN WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES TO WOMEN
The personal details in the book, in fact, reveal the most about how opportunities have grown for women in the years since Roberts began her career. In today’s world, young women have few obstacles to pursuing any occupation they choose. And if they run up against discrimination, there are laws in place to protect them.

Few of those advantages – neither the laws, nor the expectations – existed when Roberts began her journey. Each step of the way, she had to violate the limits that others wanted to place upon her. Without the work of Roberts and others like her, it’s impossible to imagine that a Hillary Clinton or even a Sarah Palin would be standing where they are today.

As such, this book is a timely reminder that the barriers Roberts encountered didn’t fall from natural forces – they were pushed, kicked and intentionally dismantled.

http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2008/aug/17/bookmonger-trailblazer-in-northwest-politics/
Appeared August 17, 2008, in the Kitsap Sun, the Olympian and other Washington community newspapers. 

Bookmonger: Trailblazer in Northwest Politics Pens Memoir

By Barbara McMichael
With our primary election coming up early this year (next Tuesday — don’t forget to vote!), I thought it would be appropriate to look at a book about politics this week.

Perhaps you already know that 2010 will mark the centennial of women’s suffrage in Washington — in 1910, ours was the fifth state in the union to grant women the right to vote.

Our neighbor state to the south followed suit two years later.

Now “With Grit and By Grace,” the autobiography of one remarkable Oregon woman who has been a political force for the last half century, tells one of the many stories that have contributed to the rising trajectory of Northwest women in significant civic engagement.

Betty Roberts began her life in politics as a precinct committeewoman in 1960. She went on to become a school board member, a state legislator, a candidate for governor, and Oregon’s first female Supreme Court Justice. After retiring from the Court she embarked upon a new career in arbitration and mediation. In 2004, she performed the state’s first same-sex marriage ceremony.

But the story of her commitment to overcoming obstacles to women’s equal rights begins well before that, with Roberts’ childhood in Depression-era Texas.

She was born Betty Lucille Cantrell in 1923. When she was just six, her father succumbed to paralysis — he was one of many to be poisoned by drinking a certain bootleg liquor during Prohibition.

From then on, Betty’s mother was the breadwinner for the family, and Betty learned from her how to be pragmatic and work hard through very tough times.

It was that practicality that convinced Betty to quit college at the age of 19 and marry a serviceman who not only promised to take care of her but also to get her out of dreary Texas.

Fourteen years, a move to Oregon, and four children later, that same sense of pragmatism propelled Betty back to school, where she figured she could get a teaching degree to help support her growing family.

But this was the 1950s, and Betty’s husband resisted the idea that she would work outside of the home. Once she landed a teaching job, though, she had her mind made up. If she had to choose between work and marriage, work won out.

“By Grit and By Grace” describes the phenomenal changes that were taking place in Oregon and throughout the Northwest at the time.

As a lawmaker, Roberts was instrumental in passing legislation that legalized abortion in Oregon, and that allowed a woman to decide on her own name rather than accept her husband’s surname. Roberts was a force behind Oregon’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and was also involved in some of her state’s groundbreaking environmental laws.

Women in Washington are well placed at all levels of government. It might be easy to feel complacent about their progress in politics.

But Roberts’ lively and forthright memoir demonstrates that, for women everywhere, those gains were hard-won.