You really have to look at campaigns, I think. When Terry ran, I really
in effect co-managed his campaign. Bert Bennett was his campaign manager
and I was head of the women's activities, but I was involved in all the
smoke-filled room meetings. Terry had me in all of them. But I also had
a women's group and our theme, because this was Terry's theme and this
was the way we were able to organize women, was education. It was that
simple. For education, the money situation in North Carolina has never
been good, but it was very bad at that time and people were really
concerned and so we organized the people. We had mass meetings at six or
eight places around the state, had a steering committee. Now it wasn't
just to organize. We reviewed position papers and brochures and so on
and so forth. I think Liz Hair of Charlotte was a part of that group. We
were into the substantive part, which is the way Terry operates. He
doesn't put people off to the side, and so we were operating on
Page 11 both levels, organizing and working on the
education agenda. Education, clearly, in that election was preeminent.
Now, when he was elected, he asked me if I wanted to go on the
Democratic National Committee and indeed I did go on it and then I
became a member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National
Committee. Then Doris [Cromartie] and I organized all these Democratic
women's clubs around the state. In terms of issues that I was interested
in, I think we wanted, back then even, to get more women on boards of
commissions. I went to Terry at some point and asked him if he would
form a commission or a council on the status of women. He said that he
certainly would, for me to get up the list, and so I did. And I got Anne
Scott,
2 who still lives in Chapel
Hill, to agree to be chairperson of that commission. I went for people
like Anne, and there were others, although she's certainly outstanding.
I didn't want it to be a club-type thing. I wanted it to be
issue-oriented. Now, we didn't know enough to go for money and didn't go
for money. We must have had a little bit for maybe traveling and stuff.
But Anne did, she and the group—I didn't go on it myself—did a report on
the status of women in North Carolina, mostly as far as work is
concerned, that's my memory. That report has got to be somewhere, I
don't know where it is. But it was a good report. But we didn't have any
money, we didn't really know enough, as I say. It seems to me the first
time we asked for money, and got it—I don't even know that we asked for
it before this—was when
Jim Holshouser was governor.
Grace Rohrer and several of us who
Page 12 were active in
the Caucus [North Carolina Women's Political Caucus] went to see
Holshouser about appointments and also money for the Council on the
Status of Women and we got some money, no doubt from the legislature,
but Holshouser supported it. Prior to that time, I certainly was
beginning to be conscious of the status of women. I remember in the
early '60s I gave a talk to a group of women students and my talk was
based on Simone de Beauvoir's book,
The Second Sex. I
think our Commission on the Status of Women—and as I say, I can't
remember if it was called a council or a commission—was the first in the
country. Terry just did it by executive order.