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Women's Movement Has Never Slowed For New Port Richey Resident

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By LYNN ROTHMAN, Tribune correspondent

Published: January 26, 2008

If you look at the history of the women's movement, it appears to ebb and flow. Intense periods of protests - such as the 1920s, when women won the right to vote - are followed by dormant periods of seeming contentment with the status quo. The 1960s and '70s was a feminist heyday, marked by Betty Freidan, the birth control pill, Roe v. Wade and the drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. I was a young woman in my 20s then, living in Philadelphia and, later, Los Angeles, when women earned 49 cents for every man's dollar. I remember the rallies, consciousness-raising sessions and National Organization of Women meetings, selfishly hoping to be the beneficiary of improved job opportunities and equal pay.

Meanwhile, in New Port Richey, Joan Rees was lobbying the Legislature to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1972, Congress approved the ERA as the 27th Amendment to the Constitution and passed it on the states. The amendment needed the approval of 38 states in seven years. In that first year, 22 states ratified. As the pace slowed, women began to organize.

Lighting A Fire

In the1970s, Rees was living and working in North Carolina and was president of the Charlotte Business and Professional Women's Organization, which was active in women's rights. When Rees returned home to New Port Richey in 1980, she joined the West Pasco BPW and lit a fire under the membership.

"In the beginning, they did not want to participate," she said.

Rees was undeterred.

The deadline for the Equal Rights Amendment was fast approaching, and Florida had not ratified it. She teamed up with Dorothy Wylie, a longtime New Port Richey resident involved with the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and the American Association of University Women.

"It meant so much to me," Rees said. "We sat on street corners. We worked like dogs."

I recently met with Rees, now 73, to talk about those days. She owns Gone Again Travel, and her homey office at U.S. 19 and Main Street is a clutter of papers and artifacts chronicling decades of business and travel. It seems fitting that Rees is a travel agent. She's spent a lifetime charting her own path and marching for her beliefs. She's traveled to all seven continents and was headed for Dubai. Yet Rees lives on Washington Street - a block from where she grew up.

Rees' days of championing women's rights are reflected here, too. An overstuffed manila file is full of newspaper clippings and meeting notes from the glory days. One article shows the 47-year-old Rees waving flags on U.S. 19 in Hudson en route to Tallahassee and pledging to "walk as far as my legs will carry me."

"The black man is in the Constitution of the United States; the white man is in the Constitution of the United States, but the woman is not," she was quoted as saying.

Rees' files also include what she calls her "Road Show" - examples of discriminatory state laws denying women the right to work, keep their income, own property, divorce or inherit. Such laws were in effect some places as late as the 1980s. Reese made placards highlighting the laws and the states that had passed them. Many groups supporting the ERA marched with the signs. As I read the list, I was abruptly shaken from my own complacency about my gender rights. Having lived most of my life in more enlightened places, I was stunned by such legal backwardness.

ERA Still Being Pushed

In 1982, time ran out on the Equal Rights Amendment, just three states shy of the needed 38. Florida was among the eight states that failed to guarantee equal rights for women. Reese still rails against this failure, blaming "a bunch of constipated old men in the Legislature" and Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative political activist and antifeminist. Today, a quarter century later, the ERA has become a footnote for most of us women who take our rights for granted. For many younger women, the days of Gloria Steinem and bra-burning are quaint ancient history. This infuriates Rees, who gets annoyed with many younger women who "think they have it all," not recognizing the efforts of women who had paved the way.

In some ways, Rees brings to mind Alice Paul, the feisty suffragette crucial in the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote, and who in 1923 first proposed the Equal Rights Amendment, which was introduced in every session of Congress until it passed in 1972. I had assumed the ERA movement was over, but in researching the issue, I was pleased to discover the effort is very much alive and continues to be pressed in Congress, with efforts to extinguish the deadline and sustain the previous ratification.

Paul never lived to see the ERA become law, but Rees hopes she hangs on long enough to see it.

"I'm bound and determined to be in the Constitution before I die."

Lynn Rothman can be reached at rothmal@phcc.edu.

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