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SPEAKER 1: Historian Sara Evans of the University of Minnesota is a founder of the women's studies movement in this country. Today, we hear Sara Evans's views on the history of women in this country. She's the author of four academic books and scores of articles. She helped pioneer the study of women as important figures in American history. Evans has taught at the university since 1976.

The FM News Station's Stephen Smith visited her at her home in St. Paul. Sara Evans says women's voluntary organizations, such as temperance unions, charitable groups, and literary clubs, moved women into positions of public power.

SARA EVANS: They created environments in which people could act publicly as citizens, in addition to the formal structures of government. For women who were excluded from those formal structures, this was the only way they could act publicly. They couldn't vote. They couldn't serve on juries. All of this until 1920. So women needed places where it was possible to begin to develop the skills of public life.

Now, I would argue that those kinds of voluntary associations are essential for all citizens, because we don't otherwise-- it's only a very, very restricted group of people who have access to those kinds of skills, the skills of setting an agenda, of raising money, of deciding what one wants to accomplish and then going about the business of accomplishing it. Of learning to make public speeches or argue a point with someone else.

For women in the 19th century, who were defined very domestically-- though of course there were many women who worked outside the home, through no choice of their own-- the definition of a proper woman was fundamentally private and domestic. And women took dimensions of that self-definition, that is to say, their emphasis on morality, and began to push it out from the home by creating missionary societies or mothers' clubs, and finally getting involved in evangelical reform, things like abolition and temperance. And it's through those efforts to change the world that they began to develop public skills and redefine the nature of where public life occurs.

STEPHEN SMITH: Why was this process ignored? Why did historians tend to overlook it? Because they viewed these things as often genteel, meaningless tea society?

SARA EVANS: Right. Well, the female-dominated groups were basically seen as ephemeral and not important. They were associated with women, so what they did was not serious. It didn't make much difference. The other thing is that history, until about 25 years ago, was dominated by a focus on formal politics, and it was seen as a study of what people, what legislators do, what presidents do, what diplomats do, what generals do.

And so those other layers of social activity were simply outside the arena of what was called history, and what was studied. And particularly when those layers were associated with women, they were assumed to be of little importance. What I'm arguing, and what many others now argue, is that those layers of activity are essential and fundamental to understanding the broader shape of social change.

STEPHEN SMITH: You grew up in the South.

SARA EVANS: Yes.

STEPHEN SMITH: Whereabouts?

SARA EVANS: I grew up in South Carolina, mostly in the Piedmont area. My father is a Methodist minister. So we moved around, and in eighth grade I moved to Dallas, Texas. So I went to high school in Dallas.

STEPHEN SMITH: Mm-hmm. What was your mother doing? Was she working outside the home?

SARA EVANS: No. My mother was trying very hard to be a minister's wife, which didn't actually fit very neatly with who she was. She had a degree in landscape architecture from North Carolina State University. She was one of the first few women to go there. So we had incredibly beautiful yards while I was growing up. She was an avid birdwatcher. And she really found herself, I think, later, as an environmental activist.

STEPHEN SMITH: Hmm. How do you mean, she found herself? Did she become a feminist through the environmental movement?

SARA EVANS: Well, I think she was a gut-level feminist her whole life. She always did different things, and yet she never felt she had a lot of choices. So I grew up with an awareness of her, an underlying layer of anger about the fact that she really should have been a scientist. She should have done animals and plants. She grew up on a farm. She subsequently raised prize-winning canaries and many kinds of finches and other kinds of birds. And she has an incredible collection of Appalachian wildflowers that people come from all around to see.

But when I was young, and she had four kids, and she was trying very hard to fill another role as a minister's wife, she didn't feel free to pursue those interests in a more professional way. And by becoming an environmental activist-- this was about the time I'd gone off to college-- she created a life for herself.

STEPHEN SMITH: Now, when you started graduate school in the what-- in the late '60s?

SARA EVANS: Late '60s. 1969.

STEPHEN SMITH: In North Carolina.

SARA EVANS: Yes.

STEPHEN SMITH: There was no such thing as women's history, was there?

SARA EVANS: That's right. And there were no women teaching American history in that department.

STEPHEN SMITH: How did you A, convince yourself to do it, and B, convince the university to let you?

SARA EVANS: Well, I convinced myself because I'd become active in the women's movement in 1967. And so my involvement in what we then called women's liberation persuaded me that we needed a history. Women needed a history. If they were going to make history, which we definitely believed we were doing, we needed to know that people like us had ever made a difference in the past. We were up against those very ideas that render women invisible, that say they've never done anything that made a difference, that they are biologically determined, and so there's no history to talk about. Women have always been the same, and that is a subordinate sameness.

So I went back to graduate school in 1969 with a mission, which was to discover the history of women. Now, what I didn't know at that time was that I was one of several hundred people doing exactly the same thing. I really am part of a generation that was motivated by the women's movement to ask a new set of questions, and we went to graduate school to ask those questions. Some people ran into tremendous opposition from faculty who thought those were inappropriate questions.

The way I studied women's history in graduate school, and the way everybody else in my cohort did, was regardless of what the course was about, we wrote papers on women. And it doesn't matter. The course can be on the Civil War. It can be a colonial period course. It can be a political history course. It can be a social history course. It doesn't matter. You can always, just by asking, where were the women and what were they doing? Suddenly doors open and new arenas open up for study.

SPEAKER 1: Author and University of Minnesota historian Sara Evans talking with the FM News Station's Stephen Smith. You're listening to highlights from our series Voices of Minnesota. By the way, Evans's most recent book is Born for Liberty-- A History of American Women, published by the Free Press. We'll hear in about 15 minutes from retired Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Wahl. Now, Sara Evans continues her conversation with Stephen Smith.

STEPHEN SMITH: Now, in Personal Politics, your book about the roots of new left feminism, you link it directly to the civil rights movement. That one, that the civil rights movement-- you say that there were two times in history, really, that racial movements acted as midwife to the feminist movement. Were you part of that?

SARA EVANS: Yes, I was. I was on the fringes of the story that I ended up telling. But because I grew up in the South and went to college in Durham, North Carolina, right in the middle of the civil rights movement, that movement was extraordinarily important to me. I became involved in it on a local level. My first action my freshman year was a kneel-in at the First Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, where we were not allowed to go to church, because--

STEPHEN SMITH: A kneel-in.

SARA EVANS: A kneel-in. It wasn't a sit-in. We went to the church to go to church, but because we were an integrated group, the ushers barred us at the door. And so we actually didn't kneel. We stood on the steps of the church for the rest of the hour, and read out loud the scripture passages that were in the bulletin and so forth.

STEPHEN SMITH: What was it about these movements that led the women fighting for someone else to think about their own condition?

SARA EVANS: One thing was just the ideas. In both of those movements, the analysis of racial oppression and racial ideology was linked to a sort of deeply egalitarian ethos, which women could then appropriate and apply to themselves. If they re-evaluated their own experience in terms of the values of that movement, it came up somewhat short. And so the movement gave them some words, some language to use to describe their own experience. That language, if pushed too far, of course, doesn't work, because gender and race are not the same.

I think even more important is the fact that those movements taught women something about themselves and gave them some fundamental skills. It gave them an experience of equality. In the abolition movement, women exercised their only political right, which was passing petitions, and they gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. In doing that, they had to go door to door and argue politics with their neighbors. They had to learn how to think through how you exercise power. What is the petition about? They learned to speak publicly. They became very eloquent and powerful speakers in behalf of abolition.

As they exercised these newfound skills and capacities, they ran into opposition within that very movement. Within the abolition movement, women were attacked for speaking publicly. Sarah and Angelina Grimké toured the north, drawing huge crowds, as Southern women who grew up in slavery and could speak from that experience about the evils of slavery. They were attacked by a group of ministers for being unwomanly.

STEPHEN SMITH: Were other women attacking them as well?

SARA EVANS: It was mostly ministers that attacked them. For women to attack them, they would have had to speak publicly as well. So at that point, you don't get that. Later in the 19th century, you get women organizing against suffrage, for example. But in the 1830s, it was just too strange of a thing for women to speak very publicly.

But the Grimké sisters then, to defend their right to do what they felt was their moral duty, their Christian duty, to speak against slavery, they had to defend the rights of women. And they had to articulate a vision of equality for women, of moral as well as political equality, and develop their own interpretation of scripture, for example, their own theology of women's equality.

Something similar to that happened in the civil rights movement as well. Women who had taught in freedom schools and registered voters and gone to jail found themselves in a movement which replicated the traditional sex roles that were in society. They were expected to clean the freedom house when they got home from jail. They were unthinkingly expected to do the housework, the cooking, and the laundry.

At the same time they also, in the civil rights movement, white women in particular, discovered in Black women a powerful and very different set of role models of womanhood. Because at the grassroots level, Black women were the backbone of the civil rights movement. So these movements provided models, they provided language, and they provided a kind of experience that allowed women to challenge the ways they had been told women could act.

STEPHEN SMITH: One of the arguments in favor of women's studies departments, and in favor of women's history as a distinct discipline, is the very lack of it in the past, the very fact that the shelves are empty when it comes to books about the contributions of women. And now we're in a political moment where there is renewed discussion of whether or not women's studies, women's history, deserve to be a distinct discipline. Even as these departments are now firmly ensconced and people like yourself have tenured positions and chair institutes for advanced feminist studies, and all this, the question still remains, do we need this? Or at some point will it--

SARA EVANS: Will it wither away? [LAUGHS]

STEPHEN SMITH: Either wither away or fold into the grander main narrative we tell ourselves about America and human history.

SARA EVANS: Right. Well, the problem is the assumption that there is a main narrative, and I don't think we believe that anymore. I don't think that's viable anymore.

STEPHEN SMITH: There's some people who really are arguing that it should be.

SARA EVANS: Yes, I know. And that is actually a major contested issue in American society right now. The shelves are not empty anymore in terms of women's history, or all the other branches of social history that it's related to. So we're no longer filling in a gap, though there's lots more to learn. What we are doing is rethinking everything using the lens of gender.

Gender as a category of analysis has brought into the discipline of history, and into many other disciplines, a whole new field, a whole new way of asking questions, a new point of view from which to ask questions. And those questions aren't only about women. But if you put women in the foreground and look at the past from their perspective, everything else is still there, but it looks different.

I also am of the persuasion that there is no one single narrative of Americans as a people or of human beings on the globe. There are multiple narratives, and the ways we've understood ourselves as a people have been very important in shaping who is empowered and who isn't, who is included and who isn't. When our founding document says we the people, at the time it was written, that we was a fairly restricted we. It was mostly white men who owned property.

STEPHEN SMITH: You're writing now a book. The working title is The Future of Feminism.

SARA EVANS: Right. [LAUGHS]

STEPHEN SMITH: I wonder, what is the now of feminism, if you will? Where are we in the feminist movement, do you think? And what is the future?

SARA EVANS: Well, I'm not sure the book is going to keep that title. For one thing, I am a historian, and I do always get asked about the future, whenever I give a talk. That book is going to be my effort to write the history of the last 25 years of the women's movement, and I'm not sure I'm far enough along to tell you for sure what it is today.

Certainly, there is a lively presence of feminism in American life. When I first started working on the book a few years ago, it was under siege after 12 years of Reagan and Bush and a dominant mood that was pretty hostile to the women's movement. There was a tremendous defensiveness within the women's movement, and a tremendous attack that was going on. That attack is still going on, but there's been a shift, I think. For one thing, it does make a difference to have a feminist in the White House.

STEPHEN SMITH: Do you mean Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton?

SARA EVANS: Well, I mean, Hillary. [LAUGHS] I mean Hillary, who represents a figure that reminds me a little bit of Eleanor Roosevelt, who made an enormous difference in American life and in American women's lives. It is true that the various women's movements, and they are various, are struggling to find a voice at the end of the century that is appropriate to the changes that have occurred. Things are not the same as they were in the 1950s and '60s. So the articulation of ideas of the women's movement in the '60s and '70s was around a different reality than we have now.

STEPHEN SMITH: Well, it was more of an oppositional politics, right? There was more of a monolithic society to oppose.

SARA EVANS: Absolutely.

STEPHEN SMITH: Whereas now, there's certainly still glass ceilings all over the place, but they're at different heights.

SARA EVANS: Yes, and we've changed the language. We've changed the way we use words a lot. There are not quotas on women at medical schools and law schools anymore. Women, at least in a token fashion, appear in all sorts of parts of American life from which they were almost completely excluded previously. So there is change.

Young women also know for sure that they're going to spend most of their adult lives working outside the home, whether they have a family or not. They know they will have to do that. Young women face a very different set of choices. They do know that they're going to face glass ceilings, that discrimination is real, that their incomes are likely to be less. But they know that they're going to be part of the public world for most of their lives, and they face a terrible dilemma about how to fit that together with having a private life.

We've changed a lot of public life, in terms of access. We have not really redefined the family very much. That's getting redefined just by the fact that families fall apart and women often find themselves alone as parents. But we haven't provided the support systems that let people, men and women, easily put together the demands of a meaningful life of work outside the home and a meaningful family life. We still, as a society, don't know how to help people do that.

STEPHEN SMITH: We still say one has to take the lead over the other. One will suffer.

SARA EVANS: Right. We still provide jobs that presume people in those jobs have wives, whether they're male or female. They just presume that there's somebody else taking care of that other side of your life. But none of us have wives anymore, of that old sort. So the stresses that younger generations face are extraordinary, but they're different now than they were 30 years ago. And I think the women's movement is struggling to figure out how to articulate those issues in a way that we can act on.

STEPHEN SMITH: You spoke earlier about the many choices now facing young women, especially women who probably are going to be working outside the home and potentially trying to balance the family back at the home or at the daycare center. What are the challenges for men in this situation? Where do you see men and feminism?

SARA EVANS: Well, I don't think feminism is something only women can be a part of, or a set of ideas that only women can understand. It's a point of view on the world that men can adopt as well. It's really important that we get clearer about what men's stake is in this. It is not only an attack on men. Men have a stake in it because in redefining what women are and can be, we also are redefining what men are and can be, and we are opening up to men the possibility of a very different role within the family, for example.

And I've seen many families change a great deal, even if it's incremental. Men's valuing their roles as parents has grown tremendously. Men's recognition that they are not the sole breadwinners, they don't have to be, and they actually can't be. Most families can't exist on just one income, and the tremendous burden that represents is now shifting. There is a spectrum of activity and emotion. If women can broaden the spectrum to which they have access, whether it's into sports or into professions or whatever, men also can broaden the spectrum to which they have access.

And I think 20 years ago or 25 years ago, I could talk this way with a sense that very soon, we're all going to understand this. Very soon, men will be in touch with their nurturing side and understand the importance of and the great benefits of being involved in parenting and so forth, and women will have careers as well, and the world will be more democratic across the board.

And it's just not as simple as I thought then. I still believe this. I still talk about it with a sense of belief and possibility, and a sense that my generation has lived very differently than our parents have, and that our children are going to live differently than we have. But change is slower than we thought.

SPEAKER 1: University of Minnesota history professor Sara Evans talking with the FM News Station's Stephen Smith. Evans' most recent book is Born for Liberty-- A History of American Women, published by the Free Press. You're listening to highlights from our Minnesota Public Radio series Voices of Minnesota.

Walk into almost any Minnesota courthouse, law school, or law firm and you see women attorneys and judges. Until last year, Minnesota's Supreme Court actually had more women than men. Women's entry into the law is relatively recent. 20 years ago, there were no women on the state Supreme Court. The woman who first broke the barrier, who opened the door for women who followed her, is Rosalie Wahl.

Justice Wahl became the first woman on the state Supreme Court in 1977. In our series of interviews, Voices of Minnesota, Justice Wahl talks about her life practicing law. She retired from the bench last year. Wahl told the FM News station's Catherine Winter, when she started practicing law in the late 1960s, there was not one female judge in Minnesota, and she says she never expected to become a judge.

ROSALIE WAHL: Back in the days when I became a lawyer, it just wasn't one of the things that was there that women aspired to. But I don't know. I'm not very ambitious, so I might not have aspired to it anyway.

CATHERINE WINTER: Are you really? Is that true, that you're not ambitious?

ROSALIE WAHL: Well, I had to think pretty hard. Well, it may be. Once I set my mind on something, then I can turn on the pressure. But to just sit around and wish I was this or wish I was that, I don't spend a lot of time doing that. [LAUGHS]

There was an old legal fraternity that was a woman's legal fraternity. And the only reason I joined it, because I'm not into organizations with Greek names, was because it was women, women lawyers. And I'd never known any women lawyers. And I can still remember walking into this-- they had a breakfast, oh, this would have been in the early '60s, when I was in my second year in law school. And I walked into this room and it was full of women lawyers, and all of a sudden, I felt like the ugly duckling.

[LAUGHTER]

I'd thought I was a duckling, and suddenly, I discovered I was a swan. [LAUGHS] Because here they were. And it was great.

CATHERINE WINTER: What year would that have been?

ROSALIE WAHL: 1964, the spring of 1964. And we became Minnesota Women Lawyers. And one of the early things that we did, and this was in the early '70s, we thought, well, the reason the governor doesn't appoint women to judgeships and to boards and commissions and all that thing is he doesn't know we're out here. He doesn't know-- I mean, it's a very naive point of view. It's like, if the governor knew, he'd appoint.

So we thought, well, we'll do a questionnaire amongst our membership, which wasn't very great. In those days I knew every woman lawyer in the state. And we were asking women what their area of practice was, and if they would be willing to serve on boards or commissions or if they'd be willing to serve on the bench. And there were a number of questions, and we sent this questionnaire out at length.

And I got one of them, and I had about two years before I sent it back. And one of the reasons was that when I came to the point of thinking, did I want to be a judge? I really wasn't sure. And then finally, I concluded that you either had to put up or shut up. We were saying, appoint women. And so you had to be willing to do it. And then once you make the decision to get involved, then you really work. Then you don't sit around and wait for it to come to you, because it doesn't come to you.

CATHERINE WINTER: Did you think the Supreme Court would come to you, or were you expecting maybe a district court judgeship?

ROSALIE WAHL: Oh, it all happened so relatively quickly as this was coming together. In the early '70s, you see, there was a lot of movement amongst women. And the Women Lawyers were developing, the Women's Political Caucus, the DFL Feminist Caucus, and the IR Feminist Caucus. All of those were developing in Minnesota now. They were all developing along about the same time in the early '70s.

And there never would have been an appointment of a woman to a Supreme Court, certainly not at that time, except that the DFL Feminist Caucus had really gotten out there. And they were, at that time, saying, if we can't make policy, we won't make coffee. And they were the ones who said to the governor, they looked at the Supreme Court, and they said, 9-0 won't do it.

They knew a governor can appoint women all over the place, but he's out of office or she's out of office, and there go your executive appointments. But if you're on the bench, that's a long-lasting thing. And women really begin to set their sights on having-- they hadn't had women on the bench, and here they comprised half or more than half of the population.

CATHERINE WINTER: I know that I've read accounts, and when the governor did make the announcement of your appointment, there was wild cheering, and I'm sure it must have made national news. And overnight you went from being Rosalie Wahl, one of many women lawyers, female lawyers, to being a symbol. What was that like?

ROSALIE WAHL: That was the year that the Congress had given every state money-- I don't remember how many thousands-- but money so that there could be a meeting of women from throughout the state. And women worked on it a long time, and it was across the board. It was all kinds of organizations, all classes, all races.

And Joan Growe stopped the meeting, and first I think she announced that Governor Perpich was going to appoint Esther Tomjanovich to the district court in the 10th District, and there had never been any woman there. And then she announced who the person that he had chosen to appoint to the Supreme Court. And the women were just standing and cheering, and even those who were a little disaffected by some of the issues forgot themselves and cheered.

And this was at a time when the ERA was a possibility still, and we were working to get that approved as a constitutional amendment. And I made some comment in the speech about remembering Sojourner Truth and how she said, ain't I a woman, too? And I said, ain't we women, too? Ain't we women enough to make the ERA the law of the land? And everybody just stood up, and everybody just stood up and cheered.

I think that whole-- and my knowledge of what it meant to women who had-- it was like the vote, in a way. But it was something that affected you in every part of your life, and you'd never had anybody there, and this was a person. That was one of the reasons why it was very important to me to, as they say, stay the course and stay on the court till my time was up.

CATHERINE WINTER: So you begin your appointment with this heady excitement, being among all these women. And then the next thing that happens is that a whole bunch of people start saying, she's not qualified. And three men, I think, filed against you in your first election, even though at that time, and even now, hardly anybody ever runs against Supreme Court justices. You ended up beating all three of them. But I wonder if-- do you think that their filing against you was at least in part prompted by the fact that you are a woman, that you were a woman?

ROSALIE WAHL: I don't know that it was specifically because I was a woman. I don't think any of them would have thought that or said that. But I think they saw my being a woman as being a sign of weakness, and that I wasn't political and that I didn't have connections, and that I was vulnerable. And when there have been races on the Supreme Court, ordinarily you'd do it the first time around, because that's before a person has run statewide, has had their name on the ballot and so forth. So I think it wasn't unusual. But after all, I was taking a job that was a man's job. Judge and male were just synonymous in those days. And I'm sure there was some of that thought. How could I be qualified? I mean, I was only a woman.

CATHERINE WINTER: The claims that were made as to your supposed inexperience or your not being qualified also, my understanding is, arose from the fact that you didn't come from the traditional background of a Supreme Court justice. You hadn't worked for a private law firm. You worked for the state public defender's office, and you taught law, I think.

ROSALIE WAHL: Yes.

CATHERINE WINTER: But do you think perhaps that background actually helped you as opposed to hindered you as a Supreme Court justice? I know that you've talked in the past about how much experience you had working with people who didn't have any money, working with people who were the underdog.

ROSALIE WAHL: And I actually think-- yes, your answer to your question is yes. But I actually think that that's the reason that Governor Perpich did choose me eventually. Partly because I had a criminal defense background, and there was never been anybody on the court who did have. There were prosecuting attorneys. In many ways, it made as much difference that I knew how hard it was to make a phone call from the jail as it did that I was a woman.

CATHERINE WINTER: Do you think that background influenced the decisions you make? The other criticism one hears of Rosalie Wahl is that she's a liberal. She was a liberal justice. And you did, for instance, author decisions such as the one dealing with crack cocaine and powder cocaine. In that decision, I believe the finding was that it was illegal to make the penalties for crack more severe than those for powder cocaine, because Black people are more likely to use crack and white people more likely to use powder cocaine. And there are other decisions you've made regarding search and seizure, that sort of thing. Were you a liberal?

ROSALIE WAHL: Well, when I was a student of the law at William Mitchell, I really liked constitutional law, and I really was committed to the protection of the rights of the people. And I suppose because of that, I served as a public defender in the appellate area. But the thought, the whole idea that you don't take somebody's life or their property or their liberty without due process of the law, has been a really guiding principle with me.

And it's so easy to overlook some of these rights that may have been ignored or violated when you've got somebody who's guilty. [LAUGHS] We always had what we called the so guilty rule. I think it's called weight of the evidence, et cetera. So you had to be really careful, I felt. So if that's liberal, I hope it was.

But my whole time on the court it was like, when I think, well, did I plow any new ground and open up any new horizons? It almost felt like the whole time-- and I did. There were some things. But for the most part, I felt like I was fighting a rearguard action because the kind of rights that we had, and that people were-- that protected them from the government and the violation of their rights were being rolled back by the US Supreme Court. And it was like just trying to at least keep what we had rather than eroding, seeing it erode. And so I did. I fought.

SPEAKER 1: Retired justice Rosalie Wahl, the first woman on the Minnesota Supreme Court, talking with the FM News Station's Catherine Winter. You're listening to highlights of the Minnesota Public Radio series Voices of Minnesota. Justice Wahl also talked about her work to make the court system more fair to women and to people of color.

CATHERINE WINTER: When I talk to people about you, they often mention this passion for justice. And it does seem to run through both your work and your life. You chaired the task force on gender fairness in the courts, and didn't you also chair the task force on-- the race bias one? And I've read recently even back when you were in college, when you were at the University of Kansas, you worked to try to integrate the dormitories there. Where does that come from in you? Did that come from some person in your life, or some event, or do you know?

ROSALIE WAHL: Well, it's hard to tell. When I was at the University of Kansas, of course, I was there during the years of the Second World War. And it was a time when it was not exactly like going to a girls' school, but in the sense of being able to exercise leadership, it was kind of that situation. Because the men were gone from the campus except for the military units and so forth. They were not in the student body in the same way, so we got to do all kinds of things.

We edited the paper and we edited the Jayhawker, and we headed the student council and all those things that there had never been women doing those things before. And it was really an idealistic time, a time when there was a great passion for social justice. And I was exposed to this there, and I became persuaded of a lot of the reasons for social justice.

And I was very active in the YWCA, the student Y, and so that was when we established a cooperative living house. There were only 10 of us. Five of us were white and five of us were Black. And we had to go through all of this stuff. We had to persuade the board, and the university insisted that we write and get our parents to approve.

Even the neighbor, we had a coal furnace there and the man next door didn't want this integrated living situation next to him. So he pulled out his-- he didn't put the coal in his feeder and we had to shovel by hand all winter long. But within two years after that, housing on the University of Kansas campus was integrated. I mean, because of that, because of that thing.

And at that time, this is before-- it's 20 years before the civil rights movement, or 15 or so. And those of us who lived in the house had all been members of the Y, so we at least had this common basis. But we agreed when we went in that no one of us would do what all of us couldn't do.

And it was at that point that I really realized, I think I would have had a revolution by then. I felt like, how can you stand this, to be treated this way? I mean, when you go to the movies, and you have to sit up in the-- and there was segregated seating in the movies. So we had sit-ins, and we had sit-ins at the Jayhawker Cafe. And we had swim-ins, and I couldn't even swim very well, in the swimming pool.

CATHERINE WINTER: Tell me what you think now about-- you did so much work on these issues, on race bias and gender bias in the courts. Are things changing? Are things getting better, do you think?

ROSALIE WAHL: Yes, things are changing, and yes, they're getting better in some ways. One of the ways that I think the change has really been-- and specific changes have been made. There are things you can do, and the court did immediately, like change all the language. You can at least have language that's gender-neutral in all your rules and your jury instructions, and all those kinds of things.

And you can change the rules of professional responsibility and the rules of judicial conduct. Those were done immediately. And legislation can be urged which will affect whole substantive areas of the law which were to the disadvantage of women, these kinds of things that came out. People are more free to come forward. There's more openness in the system.

We've never directly addressed one of the big, big issues in the race bias study, and one that we didn't have the funds and we didn't have the time to address, and it wasn't directly within our scope of our study. We were studying the race bias in the judicial system. Flashpoint in race bias is between the law enforcement and the communities. And this is long-standing, and it's smoldering.

The thing that would just break your heart would be to sit and listen to people of color talk about the things that have happened to them. When you learn that almost any Black man who goes through the Selby-Dale area at some point has been stopped and frisked. When Officer Haaf was shot, Black men driving through that area were stopped and searched. No matter if they worked for a law firm or no matter what. That kind of violation, if it happened routinely to those of us who are white, we would scream our heads off. But what do you do?

People of color have put up with so much, and they don't want to do it anymore. And yet we aren't somehow able to really be able to sit down and address those things. And I'm hoping that will happen more. They're working on implementing the recommendations. And we did that in gender, and we implemented a lot of them. But what difference has it made? That's the question you asked me to begin with, and that's something that I still don't know for sure.

CATHERINE WINTER: You eventually sat on the only Supreme Court that has ever had a majority of women on it, and there are now many, many women judges in Minnesota, female judges. Governor Perpich appointed a whole slug of you.

ROSALIE WAHL: Yeah. And so has Governor Carlson's done very well, too.

CATHERINE WINTER: And your own daughter is an attorney now, isn't that correct?

ROSALIE WAHL: Well, she's been an attorney since 1976, I guess. Mm-hmm.

CATHERINE WINTER: Do you think that she, or at least other young attorneys, other young women, young people, appreciate the work you had to do to pave the road for them?

ROSALIE WAHL: I don't know. I don't know if any of us appreciate what the ones that went before us did. I'm sure some of them don't really think about it. When I went to law school there were two women in my class, and now it's 45% women. It's just a completely different atmosphere. And I think women, the reason there's been such a furor and such a concern in the bar, women's involvement in the bar, is the glass ceiling. You can get in, but can you get up? And I think that's where it's really hitting people that you think to begin with, well, maybe gender doesn't matter, which it shouldn't. But then you find out that eventually, in our system, it still does.

CATHERINE WINTER: They made you retire, but it sounds like that's OK with you, huh?

ROSALIE WAHL: Well, they didn't make me retire. Let's put it like I hung in. I hung in till my time was up.

[LAUGHTER]

CATHERINE WINTER: But they do have mandatory retirement at 70.

ROSALIE WAHL: The legislature passed that back in, I think, the '50s. And I think that it's a good law. The legislators, at least at the time, they were lawyers who passed this. They were young lawyers, and they all had the experience of being in front of old judges who should have left the bench and who didn't. And we ourselves are not, I or other people, as we get older, we are less and less able to determine when we're really capable of doing something, and when we're not. And I think it's a reasonable thing, and we upheld it under the Minnesota Constitution.

CATHERINE WINTER: You said when you left that you were going to spend some time not being so reasonable. [LAUGHS] That you felt like school had finally let out. And I know that you do a lot of reading, and I know that you write some poetry. Have you been writing?

ROSALIE WAHL: I haven't had time, really, to write. And poetry it's been a very important part of my life, and other people's poetry kept me alive in law school. But from the time I started law school, I knew there was no poetry in the law. So for that whole period of time, I've done very-- very little poetry has come to me.

And I'm not a working poet in the sense that I'm going to sit down and write a poem. Poems get distilled out of my experience, and what happens to me. But I do have some from the earlier days, and a couple of years ago I did one when I made a trip back east with a friend, and we visited some of the haunts and burial ground of women writers who had been very important to me.

CATHERINE WINTER: Did you bring anything along of yours to share with us?

ROSALIE WAHL: Well, I brought that one. I also thought-- and my poetry has been pretty private, and I haven't published or anything at this point. But it has meant something to some people, and that's what cheers a poet's heart, I suppose. Earlier, I will just say, my relationship to nature is very important to me, and that's why I live where I live. And it was back in the '50s that this one came to me, which is, "There is some part of me would die if kept too long from earth and sky. From sweep of fields, from rush of cloud, an unreality would shroud that innermost vitality, that sense of being even me."

And then in 1962, I did this little four-liner about "On Considering--" the title's longer than the poem. "On Considering the Advisability of Studying Law." "That one who would through thistles pass, needs shoes, else barefoot, stay on grass."

[LAUGHTER]

And I had a friend who always referred to the shoes of the law, yeah. This is called "The Journey." "We bring them still our love. Cather and Jeffrey in the old burying ground. Dickinson anchored in family behind wrought iron in Amherst. Millay somewhere off the wooded hill road in the Berkshires, up from Austerlitz, to whom we came no closer than the shadow of the small post office on Mrs. Herron's front porch, from which Eugen never went up the hill again, either, after his death.

Others before us have come with gifts of remembrance. On Cather's grave, a rain-drenched clutch of brown-gold wheat with a ribbon the color of poppies, while balanced atop the stone marked Emily, two gladioli, magenta-hued and dewy. I bring only my Midwest heart, long nourished by these I come to find. But had I thought to bring out of such fullness some small offering, it would be this.

For Cather, all two hands could hold of the shaggy red grass under which the land near Red Cloud still gallops like herds of buffalo. For Dickinson, the tallest purple clover I've ever seen, growing wild amongst my flowers to make a prairie of, no bees required. And for Millay, the blue flags long since gone, why, burdocks, dear, of course, though her mother thought them weeds."

SPEAKER 1: Rosalie Wahl, reading some of her poetry. Justice Wahl retired from the Minnesota Supreme Court last year after serving 17 years, and she talked with the FM News Station's Catherine Winter as part of our Voices of Minnesota interview series. Tomorrow on Midday, you'll hear more from our Minnesota Voices series. Writer Jim Northrup, inventor Reynolds Guyer, and political activist Gloria Griffin.