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The Real Thing or Nothing: Women Mayors of King County
by Eileen Nicol

Bertha Knight Landes did not vote until she was 51 years old. Not because she didn’t want to – she was a college graduate and a community activist – but because she couldn’t until the passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Two years later, Landes ran for Seattle City Council and won by 22,000 votes. In 1926, she won the race for Mayor of Seattle, becoming the first woman to do so in any major American city.

Although she was also the last female mayor of Seattle, Landes started something. Today, a third of King County’s mayors are women. In cities small as Skykomish and large as Bellevue, as homogenous as Medina and as diverse as Renton, women mayors manage city employees, budgets and their own personal and political ambitions. Seattle Woman spoke with five of them, four current mayors and one who recently resigned, to assess the climate for female politicians in our region.

What inspires women to seek public office? For Landes in the ’20s, the notion of civic duty was paramount. She was passionate about public service, for women “who can render it without detriment to home or family interest. It is not only the right, but the privilege and duty, of women to take part in the administration of public affairs.” Landes, the wife of prominent University of Washington faculty member Henry Landes, had been active in her church and community for years. She said she ran for city council “to serve the best interests of the city; not to further the political ambitions of any one woman.”

She was appointed acting mayor in 1924, when Mayor Edwin J. “Doc” Brown was in New York attending the Democratic National Convention. She promptly caused a furor when she fired Brown’s police chief for failing to quell corruption in his department, and for insubordination in his letters to her. She was initially reluctant to run for mayor, only agreeing when it appeared no other candidate would emerge who could beat “Doc” Brown. But once she decided to run, she demanded full equality. “And I threaten to shoot on sight, without benefit of clergy, anyone calling me the mayoress instead of the mayor . . . Let women who go into politics be the real thing or nothing!”

Despite the passage of eight decades, Landes’ story is similar in many ways to those of the mayors we spoke with. She certainly wasn’t alone in needing a nudge to run for office. Renton Mayor Kathy Keolker-Wheeler was encouraged by former Mayor Barbara Shinpoch. “Barbara said to me, ‘I’m honored to be the first woman mayor of Renton, but I don’t want to be the last! So you’ve got to get off your butt and get in there!’ She was my inspiration and stepping stone.” The perceived mandate to excel as a woman mayor is still strongly felt. “I can’t afford to mess up because I want another woman to be able to come behind me,” says Keolker-Wheeler.

“It was never in my life’s plan to run for mayor,” says Rosemarie Ives, mayor of Redmond since 1992. “I’m Italian and I get passionate about things. I got involved with the planning commission because I thought the city’s idea for a shopping center in the Sammamish Valley was crazy. We would do lots of work and send out recommendations to the city council and the council would go the other way. That made me mad, so somebody said, ‘How come you’re not a decision maker?’”

“It’s important that you make the effort to take your turn,” says Becky Nixon-Bellah, who resigned as mayor of Duvall in late February. “I started going to city council meetings and felt excluded. It felt like an old boy network that wasn’t listening to the people. So I just saw a need. The mayor then had never been opposed. I was a single mom, I quit my job, I sold my Lexus RX300. I lived on that money and campaigned for four months.”

“After a variety of careers, my husband and I felt we needed to give back to the community,” says Bellevue Mayor Connie Marshall. She began by volunteering in schools and at Overlake Hospital, and soon a neighbor suggested she get leadership training. She took his advice at Advance Bellevue, a nonprofit organization that offers leadership skills and community knowledge classes. “I wasn’t a businessperson and felt a little intimidated by all the CEO’s in the class. But they chose me as class speaker, and one of them urged me to run for city council. My son was only four, so my family and I decided against it, but they came back again two years later. I talked it over with my family again, and my daughter Emily said ‘Oh, Mom, you volunteer for everything else, you might as well volunteer for the city!’”

Ava Frisinger, mayor of Issaquah, was devastated to lose her first council race by 39 votes. A man on the planning commission urged her to run again. “I said, ‘No, because nobody likes me.’ He said, ‘That’s ridiculous, you just lost the race.’ I finally said, ‘Well, I guess,’ and he said, ‘I take that as a yes.’”

These women acknowledge that balance – between public service and family, between being compassionate and being objective – is their toughest challenge as women mayors. “I had to wait until my kids were grown before I ran for mayor,” said Koelker-Wheeler. “I know myself and I knew I wouldn’t go home at five o’clock.”

“It can be lonely,” said Nixon-Bellah. “If you do the job correctly, you have to stand back. Because you have to make hard decisions, and friends will ask you for favors.”

“The biggest challenge is – I don’t want to say being taken seriously – but having the authenticity of one’s authority recognized,” says Frisinger. “In part it’s just a difference in communication styles. Men speak with authority whether they actually know something or not. Women don’t, or at least I don’t. People take that as a sign of hesitancy or a lack of true knowledge.”

Koelker-Wheeler puts it this way. “I have to be careful about what I say and how I say it. You don’t want to be perceived as being weak. But you still have to be human.”

Still, women have some natural advantages in the mayoral role. These mayors agree with Bertha Knight Landes’ assertion that there’s no fundamental difference between running one house and running a hundred thousand. “Being a parent is excellent training for management,” says Frisinger. “Conflict resolution, listening attentively, weighing information – being a mayor is a logical extension of those skills.”

“We don’t have this big ego drive to be right all the time,” says Koelker-Wheeler. “In elected office, women are more likely to want to have the best solution for the community, and not as likely to want to have credit for the solution. I came after an autocratic mayor, and it took a while for my administrators to understand that I want to hear their ideas.” Several of the other mayors talked about having to break down the “silos” or “fiefdoms” in their city government, and they felt that their listening, collaborative styles made them more suited to that task.

“You are an idea broker,” says Marshall. “You hear something in a meeting last week that really helps a person next week and you just get those people in the same room. You listen a lot.”

Another huge advantage all the mayors spoke about was the support they give each other. The Eastside women mayors meet regularly for lunch. They share approaches to common problems and bolster each other’s morale. “We get together and let our hair down,” says Marshall. “All the little differences like oh, you’re a D and I’m an R – it shouldn’t matter, if what we’re really trying to do is fix 405.”

“I love the other female mayors,” says Nixon-Bellah. “A recurring theme among them is they serve, they share. If I called with a question, that answer was there.”

In the 1920s, Bertha Knight Landes’ formula for a successful woman politician included “courage without tears … personal charm … poise … endless physical energy … a sense of humor … but most of all – no tears.” Today’s women mayors had varying responses to the “no tears” aspect of that quote. “Well, you know, I’m not afraid of tears. How can you be Italian and not be passionate? I’ve been criticized and cartoonized and I think it’s somebody else’s problem if that’s viewed as a weakness,” says Redmond Mayor Rosemarie Ives. Nixon-Bellah says, “I don’t know, a lot of women are emotional and I am obviously. Don’t let that ‘no tears’ mask your compassion. Because compassion is what these people want. I mean, tears are a vulnerability, but without vulnerability you have no compassion.”

The other mayors feel they’ve taken the “no tears” advice to heart. “Since I was the only woman on the city council when I started out, I was very aware how identifiable I was,” remembers Marshall. “I trained myself not to be emotional, to be very objective.”

“There’s a really weird balance between being strong but not too strong, sensitive but not too sensitive, approachable but not too approachable,” says Keolker-Wheeler.

What advice do these mayors have for women considering elective office today? After some version of “Go for it!” they all stress the importance of listening. “Don’t try to get your point across right away. People have reasons for feeling the way they do; they have vested interests. Have respect for the people who came before you. Listen and learn,” says Keolker-Wheeler.

“Go ahead and get involved,” urges Frisinger. “Be willing to risk not winning. When you run, run as if your life depends on it. But at the same time, realize mentally that if you lose, your life didn’t depend on it.”

“Do it for the right reasons,” says Nixon-Bellah. “Do it to improve your communities for your children and their children.”

“My grandfather Luigi says if they elect me, they do me a favor,” says Ives with a chuckle. “But if they don’t elect me, maybe they do me two. You have to have something that grounds you, and be very true to your own personal values. I’ve always made decisions based on what I believe is in the best interests of the people of Redmond, even if they don’t understand.”

“I think listening is key,” agrees Marshall, “and finding a mentor. That’s critical if you’re as green and naïve as I was. You don’t realize the traps people lay for you. It’s not personal – at first I thought it was. It’s like earning your Gold Award in Girl Scouts – you have to earn it. No one is just going to hand it to you.”

It stands to reason that if you want to find a mentor, you have to be a mentor. All of the mayors spoke about paving the way for future women leaders in some way. Keolker-Wheeler participates in NEW Leadership Puget Sound Program, a part of the Center for Women and Democracy at the University of Washington. Each summer, a diverse group of 40 undergraduate women from schools throughout the state come to the UW for a five-day residential program designed to educate and empower the next generation of women leaders. “I stay in the dorm with students as a leader in residence,” she says. “Sitting around in PJ’s and eating m&m’s® with them gives them an opportunity to see scary elected officials in a different light.”

Ives believes one of the greatest gifts women leaders have is telling others they see leadership qualities in them. “Way back in 1984, when I was on the planning commission, a Bothell city council member gave me a check for $15. She told me it was for when I ran for elective office! I’ve made sure good women are brought forward for leadership positions in Redmond.”

Is there something about the Pacific Northwest that encourages women politicians? “I think it’s more that there’s nothing that discourages it,” says Marshall. Frisinger feels our region puts a greater emphasis on skills and interest, and less on gender-based roles. “We had a woman firefighter over 18 years ago. The Girl Scouts in Issaquah I talk to today have grown up seeing female police officers.”

We’ve come a long way in the century since Bertha Knight Landes arrived in our then-rustic corner of the country. Marshall put it well in a speech at a sorority Founder’s Day event. “We have to thank our great-grandmothers for giving us the right to vote, our grandmothers for going to college, and our moms for going to work – they created the glass ceiling. And our generation, well, I don’t go anywhere without a sledgehammer. Every generation adds their strength and wisdom to this process of promoting women. You have a huge responsibility to keep it going.” The women mayors of King County are doing their part, and loving it in the process.

©2005 Caliope Publishing Company