Her Honor: Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women’s Movement

Chapter Eight: Gender Justice

x 161 xChapter Eight Gender Justice Women in the judiciary “have the exhilarating sense of making history ,” Rosalie told an audience in the mid-1980s. That sense was alive not only in the Minnesota judiciary, but also the legislative and the executive branches. Rudy Perpich returned to the governor’s office in January 1983 and brought with him Marlene Johnson as the state’s first female lieutenant governor. Perpich tapped Rosalie to administer the oath of office to him on January 3 at Hibbing High School. The return of the governor who had been their champion lifted feminist spirits.1 Just thirty-six years old when elected, Johnson had ranked among the leaders of the state’s women’s movement since graduating from Macalester College in 1968. As chair, she energized a flagging Minnesota Women’s Political Caucus in the mid-1970s, then became founder and president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, and later that organization’s national president . Choosing her as his running mate was Perpich’s signal to feminist voters that, unlike others in the running in 1982, he could be trusted to advance women in state government. That signal undoubtedly helped him defeat attorney general Warren Spannaus in the 1982 DFL primary. Spannaus had made a conventional choice for lieutenant governor, state representative Carl Johnson of St. Peter. In doing so, he bypassed the woman whom many DFLers considered an obvious choice, secretary of state Joan Growe. Feminist irritation with Spannaus gave Perpich a primary election advantage and Growe a leg up as she sought her party’s nod for the U.S. Senate in 1984. But Perpich may not have intended Johnson to be a feminist agitator within his own office. He likely didn’t think he needed one. Even before 162 x Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women’s Movement he won his comeback bid, he was at work recruiting and appointing more women to head state agencies than Minnesota had seen to date. His cabi­ net included Sandra Hale at administration, Barbara Beerhalter at economic security, Ruth Randall at education, Mary Madonna Ashton at health, Irene Gomez Bethke at human rights, and Sandra Gardebring, back again at pollution control after four years as director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional enforcement division.2 For the Department of Employee Relations, charged with implementing the new pay equity requirements for state employees, he tapped pay equity’s leading Minnesota advocate, Nina Rothchild of the Council on the Economic Status of Women. He interviewed her twice because of the personal rule he used when he appointed Rosalie in 1977: he wanted to feel that he could comfortably hug a potential candidate before deciding that he or she was acceptable. Rothchild, a Smith College math major, was supremely professional in her first meeting with Perpich, so much so that he couldn’t bring himself to offer her the employee relations post. But he valued her work at the council enough to call her back for a second try. That did the trick. Perpich told Rothchild to push the legislature to extend pay equity requirements to the state’s local governments. She dove into that assignment, and he signed a ground-breaking local government pay equity bill into law in 1984. Nevertheless, as Perpich contemplated the rare opportunity to appoint the first twelve members of a new court of appeals that the 1982 voters had given him, Johnson detected that the governor needed a femi­ nist push. Unlike Quie, Perpich did not assign the initial screening of judicial candidates to an appointed selection panel. He and a tight-knit team of in-house advisers did their own screening. Via the office grapevine , Johnson learned that Ramsey County Municipal Court judge Harriet Lansing was at risk of being removed from the list of candidates. Two of Perpich’s allies, former legislators Peter Popovich and Donald Wozniak, were at the top of his list for the first six appointments. Popovich and Wozniak were cool to Lansing, and Johnson was convinced that her gender, age (thirty-eight), and perceived pro-choice position on abortion were the reasons. Lansing had been St. Paul’s city attorney—the first woman to hold that position at any large American city—through divisive litigation over expansion of the Highland Park Planned Parenthood Clinic. Although she successfully navigated those battles and went Gender Justice x...