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Show r by Marguerite Michaels AUSTIN, TEX. Dr. Lorene Rogers:"Doing a good is my contribution to women. job When I leave, I want no one to say a woman can't run this university." Mayor Carole McClellan: Women can ease the way to power by "not getting hung up" or "imagining more problems than are there." ere in the capital of Texas, where men are men, women are taking over the town. While football may be king at the University of Texas, the president of UT is "Queen" Lorene Rogers. Austin's "Mister Mayor" is Mrs. Carole McClellan. The city's representative in the state legislature is Wilhelmina Delco. The president of the Chamber of Commerce is bank vice president Dorothy Rowland. The leader of local Chicanos is a Chicana, Martha Cotera. Other movers and shakers of Austin include Liz Carpenter, who used to shake them up in Washington; political strategist Ann Richards, and the owner of radio station KLBJ and symbol of local woman power. Lady Bird Johnson. Why should Austin, a lovely and progressive university city of 300,000, be a place where women have won so much of the power usually held by men? "Why not?" answers Joe Frantz, a prominent Texas historian. "It's part of the Western feeling that everyone should carry their own weight. In frontier days, an extra hand was an extra hand, regardless of sex." Austin's leading women come from the mainstream: wives, mothers, PTA members, Junior Leaguers. Some of them are also feminists. Gradually, they are transforming the pioneer tradition of partnership into equality with their men. College president Rep. Wilhelmina Delco: "Women not a passing fancy. Once they join the job market, becomes significant." politics in politics is Bank executive Dorothy Rowland: " I'm no libber, but I realize that without militant women I would not be making the salary I do." Dr. Lorene Rogers, 63, is the first woman president of a major American university. In 1941, when her husband died, she decided to study chemistry his field even though his friends said women weren't welcome. Eventually she joined the research staff at UT but was refused a ch nistry professorship because, she was told, "We've never had women "and we never will." Dr. Rogers switched to university administration, becoming associate dean, vice president and in 1975, amid much controversy president of UT. Being a woman probably helped elect Mayor Carole McClellan last year. When two local businessmen called a press conference to say the job was too much for a woman, Austin's liberalism emerged and Carole was elected. A wife and mother, Carole may be the best example of the kind of woman coming to power in Austin. At 38, she is a former president of the Austin school board and a member of the Junior League and the Women's Political Caucus. She was also a high school civics teacher and womans tennis coach while helping put her husband through law school. Wilhelmina Delco, once a volunteer social worker, is the first black to be elected from Austin to the Texas legislature. Her political life, she says, developed naturally from rearing her four children. When they were in school, she was PTA president; and when she couldn't get things done there, she got herself elected to the school board. Now she's in the Texas House of Representatives. Bank vice president Dorothy Rowland, mother of two and not college-educatehas at 54 been working for years. Starting as a secretary at Capital National Bank, she has risen to vice president. Dorothy's position at the bank and her presidency of Austin's Chamber of Commerce got her involved with the city's other women leaders. When Martha Cotera and her husband Juan, Mexican-American- s, first came to Austin, they weren't able to rent a house near the university. An education consultant who went into politics "because of the needs of my community," Martha is today a leader among her people. She has achieved for Austin's Chicanos both a sense of ethnic pride and recognition by the city, including a new bilingual education program. Ann Richards, 48, has been in Democratic Party politics for years. "Oh I started with the same she says. "Babies and a nice home and parties. But I couldn't spend my whole life keeping my house decorative. Politics provided what I needed: people and issues I can do something about." She ran two successful state legislative campaigns for others, then won her own race in 1976 to become the first female Travis County Commissioner. Mary Elizabeth "Liz" Carpenter, 57, was a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus and now ERAmerica. A journalist, Liz and her husband Lesl e went to Washington to set up their own news service in the days of Franklin Roosevelt. Liz's career there spanned seven U.S. Presidents. Along the way she became the first d, self-imag- rs ' woman executive assistant to a Vice President (Lyndon Johnson) and then press secretary to his First Lady. Lady Bird Johnson once told Liz Carpenter that LBJ pushed her into any job she ever took and that she thought the women's movement was more her daughters' cause than hers. But lately, while still mainly devoted to environmental causes, she has apparently begun to identify herself publicly with her daughters' generation of women. She appeared at the National Women's Conference in Houston, and she is a major contributor to ERAmerica. She has been called "the intellectual fluid" of Austin, presiding over symposiums that bring distinguished people like Henry Kissinger into town. Described with words like "class," "digand "charm," nity," "graciousness" Mrs. Johnson is regarded as a bridge between Austin's traditional women and their new, more powerful sisters. In speaking about power, none of these women was altogether comfortable with the word. Dorothy Rowland felt it denoted force, was "dirty." "If we are supposedly powerful," says Ann Richards, "we're ambivalent about the role. guess I express it in terms of satisfaction instead of power." Most of the women had trouble wielding the influence of their office. The thing they found easiest to do was hire other women. Lorene Rogers pressured UT's chemistry department to get women. Carole McClellan helped hire Austin's first woman principal. I Unsure of role But they admit to having trouble using power for power's sake. Says Wilhelmina Delco: "I still can't pick up the phone and say, This is State Representative Wilhelmina Delco, and I want you to get right over here!' I'm still not sure they'll come." "We want to be in office," says Ann Richards. "We want to be effective. The problem is we also want to be loved." The Austin women are also constantly reminded that they are playing a game invented by men. As Delco says: "I didn't know legislators had parties on a boat on Lake Travis, where a lot of deals are made. I wouldn't have known that as a woman unless I'd been asked to cater." These women believe they have brought honesty to politics. "We're not continued |