Oral History Program Gaye Littleton Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 5 August 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Gaye Littleton Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 5 August 2019 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Littleton, Gaye, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 5 August 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Gaye Littleton (far left) 15 September 1974 Gaye Littleton (center) with daughter (left) and grandaughter (right) 2008 Gaye Littleton 5 August 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Gaye Littleton, conducted on August 5, 2019 in her home in Sandy, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Gaye discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Alyssa Dove, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is August 5, 2019, and we are in the home of Gaye Littleton for the 2020 project at Weber State University and the Stewart Library. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Alyssa Dove is filming. Thank you for your willingness to do this. I am very grateful. Let's start at the beginning: when and where were you born? GL: I was born in Idaho. Parma, Idaho. Raised in Fruitland, Idaho. LR: When was that? GL: November 1, 1938. LR: So born in Parma? GL: Parma, Idaho, yeah, it’s a little tiny town. LR: But you were raised in Fruitland? GL: In Fruitland, Idaho, which is not a little tiny town. It's right on the Oregon border with Payette county. LR: So it is very north. 2 GL: No, it's in the center. North would be Moscow. My first degree is from the University of Idaho in Moscow. That's very north. Coeur D'Alene and Moscow. We 're in the middle. We're in the thing where it goes like that [draws in air.] LR: Growing up in Fruitland, what are some of your earliest memories? GL: Well, I come from a family that had found Fruitland, and we were fruit growers and my grandfather was in politics. In fact, I think my father was County Commissioner and my grandfather was Secretary of Agriculture, and there'd been times in the Senate and in the House. I think he was the last Democrat ever elected out of committee. I'm very happy to come from a small town, because I think you get a lot more chances to be very active and do lots of things. My family was always focused on public service. Voting was very important. When I was little, tiny, my grandfather had lots of meetings at his house and stuff was important and then he'd say, "Gaye! Get up there and tell them what you are!" And I'd say, "I'm a Democrat! I'm a Democrat!" Then he would talk about voting, how very important voting was and he felt that we would never be taken over from the outside, we'd be taken over from the inside and that it was a duty to be informed and to vote and you did not have to vote partisan, vote for the best person. If you didn't know who the person was, then you could vote party. He was a conservative person, too. In the old days, you know all the parades they used to have in little towns? We had this woman, very flamboyant woman, one of the first women probably in Idaho being in the legislature, and she had bright red hair. She would ride in convertibles and when I was about twelve or thirteen I sat in with my grandfather and I said, "When I grow up I want to be like her." I think 3 her name was Gracie Post. My grandpa said, "Oh no, you do not want to be like her, you want to be a school teacher!" I remember that so clearly! LR: What did your mother do? GL: My mother was a homemaker. She did not work outside the home, she just married young. My mother was nineteen when I was born. In those days, they didn't get to go outside the home. LR: That is true. How many siblings did you have? GL: I was the oldest and I had a sister and a brother. LR: So you were the oldest of three. What are some of your memories growing up with them in a small town. I grew up in a very large town, so I'd like to get an idea of what it was like, some of your memories of going to school and growing up with your siblings? GL: Well I was three-and-a-half years older than my sister and I was like ten years older than my brother, so I was in charge. In school, you know it was small, I only had like thirty-five in my class, so of course I got to be an officer all the time. I was very interested in lots of activities. One of the things I most remember is I got kicked off the track team cause girls weren't allowed at that time to run track or be on track, it was just the boys. We had no organized sports for us. We had to wear dresses, even when it was cold and you had to catch the bus. By the time I was a Junior in high school, in like 1955, because I was in pep, they let us wear black slacks on Friday. Women had lots of rules. I just think I had a lot of opportunities. I enjoyed it, but I always knew I wanted to go away to school. 4 There was only about seventeen girls or so and I think one other girl, Margo, and I were the only two that went to college, 'cause in those times it was not expected that girls went off to college. I graduated from the University of ldaho in 1960. I helped found a sorority. They picked women from all different majors and things to start the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority. LR: You mentioned that you had all types of opportunities, besides just college? GL: Yeah, I was never worried about being a sterling scholar, I was much more into activities. I liked to be in the middle of everything. I was the only outspoken one in my class on things, and I had a lot of courage when it came to teachers. Mrs. Wren would encourage me a lot, "Be active, especially in local government." We did a lot of stuff. LR: As a young girl, who were some of the women that you looked up to? GL: Well I had some great-aunts. Every Sunday we went to Parma where I was born, it was about twenty miles from where I was raised in Fruitland, and my great-grandma was there living with my grandmother, and then all my grandmother's sisters would come. People would call them overbearing, I suppose, but I thought that's the way women were. They were argumentative and they had opinions on everything. I think they taught me a lot of lessons, and their husbands were all sort of meek and mild. So as I grew up I thought that's the way we were supposed to be: stand right up there and say what you think. I had one great-aunt, Lottie, and she could switch the subject, if she thought it was too boring or 5 nobody talking about the one side, she would switch and go over to the other side of the argument. She should have been a debater, I suppose. Eleanor Roosevelt is who I really, really loved and admired and our family was very strong for Roosevelt. One of my earliest memories of my dad growing up was when I was very little, and I remember them crying when they announced that Franklin Roosevelt had died. Eleanor, I really admired a lot. I think we were fairly isolated in those small communities, as far as nationally. I loved this Gracie Post, she was this flamboyant woman legislator. But it was not really until I got highly involved with equal rights and working for women's rights that I was looking for mentors in women. Men mentored me as much as women in the early days. I admired my grandpa because he was a bigwig. In those days, we had a telephone, but everybody shared the line. We had two rings, and my grandpa, he would be needing to make a call to Boise or something, so he'd get on there to the neighbors and say, "This is Guy, and I have very important business, please get off this line!" I was the favorite, and I was an old spirit kind of girl, so that was good. I had lots of advantages. I came from a very good family. They only told us that we could do what we wanted to do and we were raised that you never disrespected anybody and you never got over-impressed with anybody no matter how high up they were. You just treated everybody the way you would like to be treated. So that's kind of the way I was raised. AD: I know we talked a little bit about when you were in high school and how you were involved in everything, but you talked about getting kicked off the track team? 6 GL: Yeah, not the team, we didn't even have a team, I got kicked off the track. When the boys weren't doing anything, my girlfriends and I, we couldn't run around the track that was only for the boys. I suppose that's why in the later years, in the early 1970's, we worked really hard with the voters to get Title IX. That was a big deal for me. It warms my heart today, as old as I am now, to see girls excel in sports. I just love to see girls competing and doing well because that was not the way in the early days. I just think it's so great. Title IX was very controversial at this time, and Beverly Dalley and I worked on that. We did a lot of stuff together, we went to the National Women's Year together in Texas and through the League of Women Voters we did in-service for all of the primaries and high schools for Title IX throughout Weber County and Ogden City. Took us quite a while to meet with all the teachers and everybody to try to get them to accept Title IX, 'cause they didn't want to do it. Title IX allowed girls to be in ROTC, and it allowed girls to get into shop, and boys into home ec. and all those things. My daughter got kicked off the drill team at Ben Lomond because of my work with Title IX, 'cause she wore a "N.O.W." t-shirt, and because she had black curly hair too and all the rest of them were blondes. I didn't even want that much 'cause I wanted her to be an engineer, I didn't want her in all that stuff. All her teammates, many of their mothers, who were all LDS, they went and raised hell to call the high school for her being kicked off, 'cause she wore this t-shirt that said N.O.W. on it. It was wild days. When they kicked her off they said, "And if 7 your mother passed that Title IX," when Alyssa came home and told me, I said, "Geez, that's great, I wish I was in the Congress so I could have passed it." By that time I had gone and gotten my graduate degree from Weber State combined with Utah State, because I interviewed to be in the Sex and Race Equity Center that was not part of Weber State, but it was housed at Weber State. It was a federal program, and it was there because the superintendent in Logan said that he would never allow a woman to be an administrator on any level, even in elementary, not a principal or an administrator. So when he said that, it was the beginning of the busing issues and some of those things, and so the feds decided to put the Sex and Race Center in Weber County. They should have just called it Equity, because saying the word "sex" was a very scary thing for people. So they decided to put it in Utah because of what he said, like "These people need it worse than anybody." I wanted to work there with Barry Gomberg and Dr. Koffman and a few others. I went into my interview, but they hired Dr. Koffman instead of me 'cause she had a PhD, and I only had my Education BS. So I decided I really wanted to work there, so I had to go get a Master's degree. So that's why I did that. I worked for them and we covered the six states here and west to try to work for Title IX and educational equity and getting the men not to be so sexist against women. That was kind of hard, but we went to Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota. That was a big lesson. LR: Alright, so I'm going to go back just a little bit. I know that you went to college, but were you encouraged to pursue an education? 8 GL: Yeah, I think it was expected. I was never put much pressure on doing it. I just did it. I think it was expected of me to go on, and I wanted to go on to school. I did not want to get married and have babies. I wanted to go to school and be a teacher, so that's why I went. LR: Did you ever become a teacher? GL: I did just for a short time. I graduated in 1960 and I got married after I graduated. My husband was an engineer for Boeing, a missile engineer, and I taught school up there. Then I got pregnant and if you were pregnant, you couldn't teach. So I stopped, then we moved down to California and I didn't go back. I substitute taught to get money for my graduate degree at the school, applied and then did it, 'cause it was close to my neighborhood there in Ogden. But as far as teaching, I really wanted to be a community servant. I wanted to be out in the community, so that's why I majored in public administration. I do like teachers. Teachers I hired at the YCC are the best people that I ever hired to do everything for all my centers and things that I started. Teachers could do everything, they could run support groups, they could write reports, they could do everything. When I'd hire social workers, they didn't know how to do anything but just have little support groups. I just admire the teachers, 'cause they're very broad-based in their education. LR: You mentioned how the track experience in high school is one of the things that encouraged you to work on Title IX. Is there anything else as you were growing up that you looked back on and said, "This is what encouraged me to do this?" 9 GL: Well, not really. I always felt like I had lots of advantages, and I think I was fairly isolated, or secluded in small towns in Idaho just like Utah. I've never been a huge city girl, I lived in Seattle after graduation and those people were dam unfriendly. I'm used to everybody waving, and everybody knowing all your business. I don't think I got really activated until-I was thinking, when I got in Utah, immediately they came and wanted me to join Junior League. I had made up my mind that I wasn't going to be joining Junior League, because I was not going to join any group that would not let everybody join. I wanted to be democratic and open. When they came to visit me, they found out that I was nine months too old for their group, so I couldn't have joined it anyway. Instead I found out about League of Women Voters, and I got active in the League and then we were really busy in the League on lots of issues. I think that's where I got highly interested and where I got into making those studies and doing things on a national level, a local level as well as state level on issues. I was young and married and I got in right as I had my last two children, and I had four children. I do remember when I was selected as one of the women to represent the state for International Womenship right after Ezra Carter. Laura and Stacy were little tiny, they were like five and six, maybe, and the phone kept ringing, 'cause I was the head of child development. They had assigned me to child development and child care, so Laura and Stacy would answer the phone and say, "No, I don't, Mama's not going to take your kids away, Mama's not going to make you ... !" I think being in Utah radicalized me a bit, and the women were thanking me because you were supposed to use your husband's name, and I got 10 kicked out of the editor's office at the Standard Examiner because I wanted to talk about equal rights and he wouldn't listen and he threw my paper in the garbage. So I told Gene Hatch, who was the owner, about it and boy, he got in trouble. I think those things radicalized me much more. I know I shouldn't use the word "radicalized," that's scary. I got wanting to make changes. I wanted social change and then the statistics of Utah scared me. The average girl was sixteen when she got married, and pregnant before she even got to go out of school. I was worried about teen pregnancy when I got here to Utah, and those were the things I worked on. I think that got me going. I wanted women to have more choices. LR: So, you went to college and you got married after college, and then that’s what brought you— GL: When we moved to Seattle, he was with Boeing in Seattle and they were going to send him to Louisiana or maybe Alabama, Huntsville, with the missiles. We didn't want to go there, so he took a job with the government and we went to San Bernardino, California. My son was born there and then they closed that base, 'cause it was during Vietnam, and they sent them all here. So that's how we got to Utah, and we liked it because we were a day's drive to my place and he's from Spokane, Washington and so we liked coming to Utah. LR: Where did you meet your husband? GL: My best friend, my sorority sister in college, it was her brother. AD: So you got your first degree at Idaho State? 11 GL: Yeah, I did. I graduated in 1956 from high school, and then I did go to the College of Idaho for one year. I had a scholarship, from a big name in Idaho. Then I got there and really didn’t like it, and I only went there ‘cause my best friend talked me into it. I should have gone to a university then. SO the second year I went to University of Idaho and graduated University of Idaho in 1960, and got married right after that. AD: And is that where you got your Bachelor's? GL: That was my Bachelor's of Education was University of Idaho. AD: Where did you get your Master's? GL: That was the first year Kennedy ran, and I wasn't going to be old enough to vote. I graduated when I was seventeen from high school. Then I get married and I wasn't twenty-one yet, but they let you register to vote, so that was a big deal, the vote. LR: So, you had to be twenty-one to vote? Not eighteen? GL: Well, maybe it was eighteen. My memory's not that great, but I did get to vote, I signed up in the state of Washington, in Seattle. That was good. When did I get my Master's degree? I can't remember. I graduated the first class of Masters for Weber State, and Utah State people came to teach the class. LR: It was 1980. AD: So you got your Master’s at Weber State? GL: Well, combined, Utah State and here. So I actually take credit for both. 12 LR: ‘Cause Weber State was a college then, it wasn’t a university yet. GL: Yeah, you keep me straight. That's why I pulled that binder out. LR: Once you were in Ogden, you stayed there for a while. GL: Stayed there for, oh, fifty years. All my community service is in Ogden really. I didn't move down here 'til I retired. I did a few things down here when I first retired, but not much. All of my activity was in Weber State, and was in Weber County. LR: Alright, so you became involved with the YCC in 1981? GL: It was the YWCA before that. We were YWCA and we had the old Browning Mansion on 22nd and we started the rape crisis center there. I was President of the Board then, I was working at Weber State for the Sex Equity Center. We had a little difficult time with the YWCA and that. They were very restrictive about things and they really wanted to just push racism. That was their big deal at the time. We were going from the League of Women Voter Studies, after we studied things, and then we'd put them into action and implement them 'cause by then I left that job at Weber and became the director of the YWCA. We would implement the program with the YWCA, but we outgrew it. Bev and Pat, and a couple of others bought the house and the trust for us next door, but for the crisis center it was just not a good house. So then we decided we needed a building so then I led a fund drive and raised a million and a half community dollars to bring the center where it's at now. What happened is as soon as we got into that building I had already decided that we weren't going to solve domestic violence, 13 we weren't going to solve a lot of the issues that we were working with, unless we worked with men and women. At the same time, they had passed that nonprofit organizations should be inclusive and the Rotary Club was hounding me to become a member. I turned them down a few times and then decided I would do it (mainly 'cause one man said if they let a woman or me or anybody in, he was going to get the club called in, so I thought for sure I should join). It made no sense! If Rotary Club let women in, why don't we let men into the YWCA? So we made a decision that the men had to be feminists if they were going to come on. We weren't going to put any men that didn't believe in women's rights in YWCA. We just thought that we would want some of these important people in the community, men, to be on our Board of Directors, because they're the ones that help raise the money and also to have their input. We wanted to work as a team, and I got away with it for quite a while, but I was breaking their rules. Well, someone called New York, to the YWCA, and said, "What are you going to do about Ogden YWCA? They're letting men in they're doing this, blah, blah, blah. What are you going to do about it?" So of course, they kicked us out. That's how we got disaffiliated. It wasn't a bad move, it was a good move. We had to think of a new name and get incorporated and continue our non-profit status. Since we were the YWCA, we wanted to keep the Y, so that's why we ended up being "Your Community Connection," YCC. That's how that happened. I'd already built the big building by that time, and it was shortly after that we got disaffiliated. They never even came out and interviewed us, we were strong feminists! 14 LR: I’m trying to imagine what it would be like, but as you’re leaving the YWCA and creating the YCC, how did you vision expand? I’m not asking this correctly. GL: Did it change our vision? We changed, sure, we did. We worked hard on that. We went in with the question, "What kind of organization do we want to be?" National Y had never been with us much anyway, so we didn't have to follow some of the things that the National Y was stating at that time, which was really upsetting the community too. So we could soft-pedal some of that and focus on the very things we wanted to do. We didn't have to put out what the YWCA put out: 'Elimination of racism by any means!' in others words start war or something like that. We still worked on that. I started the Spirit of the American Woman right away, and it started with the Sojourner Truth Award for Black women to honor women in the community. Then we decided we should honor all kinds of women in non-traditional positions and that's what turned American Woman into quite a big deal. LR: How did having men on the board make it better? GL: Well, we just had a broader representation of the community, and we never really let them be in charge, I'll say that. We had already made quite our own idea that we just wanted them to look good. I don't know. It was a wild time, though. Barry Gomberg was one of our first males that we put on, 'cause he was up there at Weber working on his studies, and he did a good job. I just think it helped us as we looked at and started the first programs working with domestic violence. We tried to work with court-ordered men that had committed domestic violence. I got funding for that and then I found out for about a year or two that it wasn't really 15 helping the men too much. In fact, they were learning how to play the game in front of the judges and say the right words, so I eliminated that program and spent the money for children that were victims of domestic violence. But the men helped us in some of those things, and we did have a representation from the law enforcement. I just think that it was very much more representative of the community. As an agency, it made us be able to be really activists but not look like we're shoving everything down everybody's throats. Before I left, I started that "Real Men Can Cook," and that was to show that men can do something other than beating up their wives or raping them. So we were running those kinds of programs, and I see that still going. AD: Through all of this, did you have mentors that were helping you? GL: I had co-conspirators. We'll call them co-activists. Pat Braun, because she was not just in the YCC and YWCA, she was great with ACUL. She took all of the local Weber County and Ogden calls that they took that they needed to have a suit for ACLU. Bev was a good gal and a good worker on my board, all those women. We started also an annual women's conference. They let women that wanted to go from IRS, and I was on the equity pay boards and things at Hill Air Force Base, and they brought a bus in with these women. When it got hot and heavy, then Weber let the opposite group, that did not want women with equal rights, they let them bring in Phyllis Schlafly and have a dual workshop at the same time. So then we brought in Bella Abzug and then they decided that it was federally not appropriate that these women could take leave and come to the workshop during work week. So they didn't get to come any more. There's just 16 lots of women that cared about these issues, that wanted to make things better and easier for women of the next generation. LR: So you talked a lot about the Equal Rights movement, and it almos.t sounds like it was just happening as you were working in the YCC and it was just part of ... GL: We weren't part of YCC then, it was YWCA then. We supported women's equal rights, and we did polls and it was like eighty percent of people supported Equal Rights for Women. Then Lee, who is now the senator, his father was the legal advisor for the Mormon church, and then the church came out and opposed Equal Rights and it changed immediately to forty percent in favor in Utah. So it made a big difference. I used to go speak a lot, one side against, one side for and after a year or so of that I just said, "That's not going to work anymore, I'm not going to speak anymore for that." We were three states short, and I see every year they would bring it up, here even at the legislature in Utah now. LR: So I know the Equal Rights movement was in the 1970's. GL: 1972, 1974. LR: Did working in that movement shape what issues you... GL: It shaped a lot of what we worked on and even programs for the Y. In fact, women couldn't even get credit in their own name, and those issues were important for us. Women also were widowed and didn't even know how to handle their bank accounts or anything, so we started "Get a Loan" programs, and we started lots of programs connected to empowering women. Even in women's domestic violence shelter, and even in the rape crisis center, we tried to 17 empower women to speak up and be assertive. Even in the rape crisis we found that if women were more assertive, even before they got attacked and things, if they looked really assertive and tough and like they could handle it, they were usually left alone a little better than women that were submissive. We did a lot of work on those things, and then in the big building, we just expanded. We identified the barriers, and then we tried to develop a program to overcome the barriers. We worked with Weber State a lot, we worked with other agencies in town, and we did a lot of things together. I don't think you can do a lot of stuff unless you work in coalitions and things. America Association of University Women helped us a lot, too. LR: I’ve heard that name before. GL: Yeah, they were very big in education for women. IN the early days, I think it was 1942 or so that the YWCA was formed in Ogden. Mrs. Hinckley and others, they were all AAUW women. They’re the ones that came back and helped organize the YWCA. So we had a little input from American Association of University Women, plus they were very strong for education and they still are for STEM programs and other things for girls. LR: You have here that you were on the Ogden City Council for about five years. GL: Two terms. I made a decision too that I would only ever do two terms. I felt that it should be public service, you should go in, help with your community and things, but it’s not a career it should be strictly public service. So I was at large, covering the whole Ogden city for two terms, but then I chose not to rerun. I 18 could have stayed longer, but that was my philosophy. I think it would still be better if they had limited terms. They don’t. LR: So, what made you run in the first place? GL: I think my family background, and also because part of our advocacy for Women's International, Women's Year for Equal Rights and all that was one of the things where we wanted to see more women in that office. If you wanted to see them, you better try to do it. So I did. I was the second woman in council, and probably the first non-LDS woman. I think they were quite nervous about me, but in the end they were ok. I had to correct them all the time: "Honey," "Girl." [Makes a noise of frustration.] When men ever called me, "Honey," or when they'd start talking about their church business, I'd be like, "We're here at the city council." I just kept them all straight. I didn't accomplish a lot on the city council. One of the things I was really proud of, I introduced the Martin Luther King celebration, 'cause every community was supposed to do that. They voted in favor of it and I was so proud, and I wrote to Pat Braun, "I'm so proud," that night that we got it pass. I went back the next week and they came back and said, "We want to bring that up again," and they voted against it. So every week or so I'd bring it up. They hated that. Then Salt Lake passed it, Provo, some of these other cities. But they changed the name from Martin Luther King 'cause they couldn't have that name so it was "Human Rights" or something vague, which I did not like. I thought it should be Martin Luther King Day. LR: And then after that, or in conjunction with that, you were on the Public Housing Authority. 19 GL: Yeah. Four years, I was a housing commissioner. Yeah. Many, many years. When I came down here I was Salt Lake County's housing commissioner for seven years, or eight years. LR: What were some of your duties in the Public Housing Authority? How did you use your activism? GL: Well, I was looking for affordable housing for low income families, that's what it was about, and trying to get more section eights and things like that. It's a federal program, and we had to fight sometimes, depending on who was president, they'd try to eliminate it, try to cut back section eights. I always wanted to put women with children ahead of some of the other populations. Sometimes they wanted to just put homeless men and I would fight hard to make sure we put the women and children and their issues ahead of the homeless men. It was just more of keeping funding going and access to housing and trying to cut down on the waiting list, 'cause that was always a problem. I started transitional housing, first in the state, at the YCC because we had the kind of money to do some of those things. We bought some houses and things to help people for housing, 'cause that was a big deal. A lot of the reason people or families were homeless at that time was because they'd have huge medical bills and stuff and lose their houses and things like that. So it was a way, I thought, to try to help people move a little out of poverty. I think it was that they didn't have to pay more than forty percent of their income. I think they've raised that now. I enjoyed that. We'd go to Washington and lobby for access for housing and stuff. 20 AD: So, I know a lot of people have their own ideas of what feminism means. How would you define feminism or being a feminist? GL: Well, supporting women is the first thing. I don't like this dividing up, "This is a woman's issue, this is a man's." I think all issues are women's issues, as a feminist. I guess, equal rights for men and women together, a partnership. That's what I believe. So when I talk about that a man has to be a feminist, it's that he needs to support women, don't try to hold them back. Women sometimes are their own worst enemies, seriously. If women used their vote, we'd be much better off. When women are running for office and things, it'd be nice if women would support women. I don't think they have to blindly support them, there's some women you don't probably want to support. But that's what I see it as, just working for giving them all the same opportunities. Not making the distinction if you can, between say, if you're raising children and you have boys and girls, making sure you're encouraging girls the same as boys and not closing any doors. Letting them do everything they can do. I haven't thought of that for a long time. LR: You mentioned something that got me thinking about when Title IX, when that actually passed women could be part of teams, not only in high school but on the college level. How did that make you feel? GL: Well, I was really happy about it. Bev and I, we wrote a grant, so that we could go in and do the in-service, ‘cause we knew you can pass all the laws you want, but if they don’t get implemented and they aren’t followed, it isn’t going to do any good. So we went all over, we even went up to Weber State and talked to them 21 too. I felt really great, and I feel better every year. As I get older, I love seeing the girls, you lmow, the soccer team, and I love them being so assertive and so wild. I love seeing softball girls. I really love seeing those girls that are strong and they get out there and "whack!" Anyway, I actually think that it opened so many doors. That's the important thing. In education, there were so many barriers in the university, on the higher level for women. First of all, women in the very beginning couldn't even hardly go to the same colleges, and then they didn't get tenure and then they didn't get assignments. There has been a lot of progress, but we still have lots of things for the young people to work on such as equal pay and right of choice. There's a lot of things we worked on that's all in danger now. That makes me feel bad. I feel really badly about us thinking that we'd opened doors and things were going to be easier. But I have a lot of faith that the younger generation and the next ones coming up, that they're going to fight to make sure they get treated right and have choices. They're not going to sit back. I don't think you can go backwards. They can try. I love seeing all these women elected in office, too. LR: It is fantastic. AD: How do you think education empowers women? GL: I think it empowers everybody. For sure women, but I think it empowers our whole civilization. When we studied barriers and we're trying to get women out of poverty, always the number one barrier was education. I think today is no different. Access to education, even to get good jobs, you know I can't think of anything more important than education. For women and for all of our citizens. 22 This dumbing-down society doesn't work. In our form of government and democracy, we need an educated electorate, we need people that know about issues, 'cause they're very complicated and I just think there's nothing more important. I think higher education, and information access, at least through community colleges and things, should be much more accessible for both young men and women to go to school like other civilized countries. LR: That's crazy. How did you balance your home life with your work life and your activism? GL: Well, you have to do it. My husband was under the Hatch Act, and so he wasn't supposed to be involved in a lot of those issues I was involved in, and of course he didn't want to quit as an engineer, so he didn't get involved in any of that stuff. He didn't like it when I was trying to raise money from corporations and things that were big military people, but we just did it. Laura and Stacy, my two older kids were older and I made Alyssa come home from college to go campaigning for me and stuff. But Laura and Stacy were little and they would play in their closet like they were going to board meetings. They'd be peeking around the comer when I was having my meetings. I included them whenever I could. They passed out leaflets, and all four of my children are involved in public service in their jobs and careers and things. My one grandson was just sworn in as a firefighter for South Salt Lake and Rhia's getting her RN and Katie's getting her Master's in international relations/community relations, so they're all serving their community. I think involving them into it is important, give them a tease. 23 In those days we did a lot more civil, nowadays people don't do all the civic stuff. In the old days we had teas you know, with all that style, and nowadays it's just paper plates. But my little kids, we just did it. I just managed to try to be home. I did have to travel a lot, it was no problem I guess. I just did it, I didn't ask permission. That's one thing I don't like women to have to do, I hope they're not asking permission anymore, because a lot of women did. Even when I'd go to the spa years ago, you'd hear a woman going, "I'd like to come on Tuesday, but I don't know if my husband's going to let me." I was like, "Don't ask permission, just come, and then when they find out about it, then deal with it!" I admired Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul. They spent fifty years of complete dedication to get the vote. It wasn't an easy fight. LR: You mentioned Bev Dalley. What are some of your favorite memories of working with her? GL: Well, the difference between Bev and I, 'cause she helped me in a lot of things, but I was not as active, I was not able because of my positions with city council, but also with League of Women Voters Leadership and with my YWCA and YCC. I never got highly involved in partisanship, even though I was a Democrat. Bev is much more progressive Democrat. She was active in the Democratic Party, she actually helped start N.O.W.-National Organization of Women-in Ogden, and she was active with ACLU. I never got active with ACLU, I wasn't even a member 'til I retired. She and Pat Braun were very active in the ACLU organization. Bev was a behind-the-scenes kind of person, she's much more quiet than I am. She liked to do research and back up stuff, even to this day, as old as she is, she gets all 24 stressed out when they ask her if she has to speak or something. She clips every newspaper article out to this day. I said, "You don't have to do that, Bev." That's an obsession of hers, I think. She has boxes of them. She would stay up until like two or three in the morning, I had to take care of my kids and stuff, I had to go home, but she'd stay there making posters and that kind of stuff. LR: This is a question we’ve been asking almost everyone. When you hear the term “women’s work,” what does that mean to you? GL: Well, I don't like that tem1. So first of all, "women's work" is everything. I don't believe in that term. I also think it's great nowadays that there's more shared work even in the home. That's a stereotype for women and their role. I think it's very important nowadays, and I think it's happening better, is that men and women both share work in the home. I do believe that some people think that it is a bad deal that women were emancipated with their control and get working outside. Women worked outside the home always, you know, a lot of them. But they have freed women up, and I just still believe that it's a role, a shared role. I do not believe there is any such thing as just "women's work." Like parenting is for both men and women, and cooking. I hear a lot of men are just as good or better cooks than some women. So I don't like that term. AD: So you talked about some of your memories of Bev. So what were some of your memories of Pat? GL: Well, I do know that I could never have accomplished the things that I accomplished in my leadership roles, even on city council, and with the YCC. 25 She's the one that actually helped us get incorporated. Ifl stepped over the line, she'd get me out of scrapes. She was the brains. She was the brains and smart as a whip. I really miss her a lot. She worked for the US Government; for the Forest Department where she worked on federal lands and if something had to deal with ranchers and things like that; and then she was a tax expert. When she retired, I talked her into coming and giving legal advice to battered women that needed to get their protection orders or all these things. One day she came down to me, which I had a little office up on the second floor, she comes and said, "Gaye, I'm having a very hard time. These women are calling me by my first name. I am Mrs. Braun or Attorney Braun, I don't like that familiarity." She wanted to be proper. She's the person that kept organizations going. She really truly believed in it. Her mother had been an activist in Oregon and an attorney in the early years. So she was raised with being active in her communities, too. Then she got here, and the first thing she did was she joined the League of Voters and met Bev and I and then we were all together. LR: If you were in a room with a bunch of young women, what advice would you give them today? GL: How old are they? College students? LR: I would say eighteen to twenty-five. GL: Well, I would try to encourage them to just follow doing what they want to do and keep going. Don’t give up their dreams. I think you’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing, so they need to find their niche that they’d like to do. I do believe there 26 are mentors out there and things, or they can be a mentor for younger girls, too. I would just encourage them to seek whatever they can and to be involved in the community, and register to vote! That's a big thing. We used to go to people's houses and get them registered, if they couldn't get out of their house and stuff, you know the old ladies, and encourage that they need to be invested in their communities, to make it better, 'cause that's where it all starts. You can make the biggest change in your local community, but you need to know what's going on in your state and national level. The sky's the limit. I don't think they should limit themselves. They don't have to have encouragement or acceptance from their peers or their family. They can follow their own, if they need to or want to. LR: Is there any other story or memory you want to share before I ask the final question? GL: No, I don't think so. I think I'm ok. You're emphasizing the voting, is that right? LR: I'm emphasizing everything about your life, because you've lived a great life. GL: I've had a great life. I had a good life, and I actually feel a little guilty that I got recognized way more than a lot of people that deserve to be recognized. I think it's 'cause I was so outgoing. I think Title IX has made a huge difference in my life and women, and maybe even in men 'cause they've opened up systems to their gender too. I don't care much about the early YWCA stuff, it was a burden. But the YCC, it was my baby. But it's been there, done that, did that, so I had to turn it loose. For the first little while when I'd walk in there I could hardly deal with it. I'd look at my notebooks and [hyperventilate], and then they never, never reach 27 out to me. They don't know the history of anything. I think it's just wonderful what you guys are doing, because I think that it's really important to know your history, and even in our organization, they didn't care about that. So I really applaud you guys for what you're doing here. Now you're archives? LR: We’re special collections and the Stewart Library. GL: You have plenty of archives with all this, with your women. You don't need any more, you're good? I don't know, I'm sure you have International Women's Hour stuff. That's the Utah one. We got taken over for the Utah one. I was the coordinator for the state, one of the twelve I guess. Then when we got down there, they were tearing off all our signs, they took us over. They didn't vote correctly. They had men coming in, Relief Societies were ordered, and they didn't even know any better, they were ordered all over the state to come and they voted down eve1ything. Mine was child development and it got voted down and all of us that were nominated to be representatives for International Women's Year from Utah, we were all voted down. They only put church officials' wives to go, who did not support women's rights, to Houston. So we went as observers. This is the national one. It gets all the issues we were working on and they're all still today. I tell you, girls could write really good reports and theses in college on this, because it's got all the background information, on every one of our issues. I'm too old now, I don't think I'll ever need these two. This is the list of all the newsletters going clear back to the l 970's. 'Cause that kind of gives a whole history. AD: So just to clarify, and just for the record, what did YWCA stand for? 28 GL: Young Women's Christian Association. That was our problem. It took us half an hour to explain, when you have to tell people your name is "Young Women's Christian Association," and we're all middle aged and old, and then it's got "Christian" in the middle, we had a heck of time explaining who we were as an organization and what we stood for, and that would tum some people off. That was one of our problems in the early days with YWCA, that's why we always said we wouldn't use the name, but then it took us three months to decide our name. I'd stay awake at night thinking, 'cause I love titles and things, but somebody else, I think, thought up YCC. I wanted to have Y in it and I wanted it to be "Your." Now people use it all the time, it was never used as "Your Community Connection," and we did go through the process to, what do you call it, where people can't take your name? AD: Copyright? GL: Copyright it, but who cares. I see all kinds of it now, "Community Connection," and I'm not worried about it. First of all, 'cause I don't have any connection any more. But Pat did the copyrighting and stuff. LR: So did Pat help you create that, and Bev? Both of them? GL: Oh yeah, they were right there. By the time I retired, I think I had 2,400 volunteers. I used to have so many good volunteers, and now they're like, "We don't need volunteers." Well, of course you do, you're a local organization. We'd watch women retire from Weber State and IRS and we'd get them! They were the best, because they'd been working and they wanted to be busy. 29 LR: I think that's great. So I'm going to go ahead and ask my final question, and this is a question that we've asked everyone in the project. It's kind of a long question. But how do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? GL: Well, women are the majority. Let's say, nationally, let's start there. I think it made a huge difference on a national level to help women become full citizens in their own right, and part of the Constitution to be able to be respected as a full citizen. I also think it empowered women, hopefully, it helped women also see their value as a female. Now on the next level, community, I just believe that it was really important for us to become informed and have a part. We did lots of referendums and did a lot of voter service to try to get people out to vote, and if we weren't enfranchised, we wouldn't be able to do any of those things and make a difference in our community. I think it empowered them personally and as groups like League of Women Voters. League of Women Voters grew out of the Suffragette movement, I'm sure you guys know that. That was a really important thing on the national, local, and state level, always, was the right to vote, and women having the vote and using it. On a state level, well we were able to vote for our leaders and who we wanted to represent us. We would go down to the legislature and try to lobby. We didn't call it lobbying, we'd try to influence to think that women's issues were important, and if you have the right to vote and you can, like Martha Hughes Cannon. I'll tell you, that's an impressive woman. I haven't thought of these things for a long time. Martha Hughes Cannon was a woman, I just really admire her 30 because she was the first woman in Utah elected Senator. She ran against her own husband, she posed with her baby, she was a medical doctor, and she was a polygamous wife. She ran under the People's Party, and she beat him. She represented us in the legislature, and she started the hospital. Was it the Deseret Hospital, the first big hospital? She focused on helping women and their health issues. So she is a big hero of mine. Having the right to vote helped get her elected, I'm sure. So I just think it's sacred, I just think it's not only a right, it's a duty. The women fought for sixty, seventy years to get it, and we've got it and we need to use it. LR: Thank you. I think that's a great place to end. That was beautiful, thank you.