A book such as Winning Their Place: Arizona Women in Politics,
1883-1950 should be a cause for celebration. For too long, the
mainstream media has ignored the success of women in their long,
righteous fight for their place in local and state politics. A quick
Lexis-Nexis search reveals hundreds more newspaper and magazine
articles devoted to the minutiae of superficial Hollywood lovelies than
to the Fab Five in January 1999.

What were the Fab Five, you say? It was the occasion when Arizonans
elected five women to the state’s highest offices: governor (Jane
Hull), secretary of state (Betsey Bayless), attorney general
(ex-governor and current secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security Janet Napolitano), treasurer (Carol Springer) and
superintendent of public instruction (Lisa Graham Keegan). Arizona
remains the only state to claim such a feat. Here’s a story of women’s
political participation that had yet to be told—until now, with
the publication of Heidi Osselaer’s book.

I say it should be cause for celebration because of the
obvious: Politics is suited for dimwitted psychopaths.

Napolitano is neither dimwitted nor psychopathic. Still, recent
actions suggest she’s happy to stick to the fear-mongering fashioned by
Condoleezza Rice. Like Rice, Napolitano spreads the absurd notion that
terrorism is everywhere. If you haven’t already seen a DHS report sent
to law-enforcement agencies called “Rightwing Extremism: Current
Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and
Recruitment,” do yourself a favor. In the same way right-wingers
tremble at the notion of tree-hugging, Hummer-scorching eco-fetishists,
so, too, are liberals panicked by mindless Glenn Beck fans showing up
uninvited at town halls.

This so-called book critic rants about Napolitano, because she
provides the foreword to Winning Their Place. It’s a dubious
move, since Napolitano’s presence imbues the project with an aura of
apparatchik propaganda. This, combined with the fact that the
University of Arizona Press is a state-run publisher (and less likely
to be critical of women in government), makes the whole affair
difficult to swallow.

But not impossible. After all, the story is fascinating and more or
less objective on Osselaer’s part, especially given everything we
already know about suffragists and Prohibition. Indeed, as the author
observes in the book’s opening chapter, “Early woman suffrage
supporters in Arizona, regardless of their religion, were primarily
interested in using the vote to limit alcohol consumption in the
territory.” Forget the lip service paid by men toward the idea that
entering the political arena might degrade women. It was the
unthinkable scenario that wives and daughters might squelch the right
to drink that put the fear in so many (if not most) men’s hearts.

Prohibition failed, of course, but not the suffragist movement.
After women won the vote in Arizona, they ran for office. Osselaer
introduces the lay reader to a parade of significant ladies in Arizona
politics, including Isabella Greenway, wife of a wealthy
industrialist:

Greenway was unique not only because she became so powerful in
the state but also because of her national reputation, a result of her
close association with the Roosevelt family. She had been raised in
privilege and associated with political elites as a young woman, but
she had also lived in frontier conditions in the West as an adult. When
Isabella Greenway came to Arizona in her 30s, she was both dazzling and
down to earth, equally at home with national leaders and with Arizona
veterans, miners and ranchers.

Not only was she successful in uniting women within the Democratic
Party (way back in the days when Democrats dominated the state); she
also did much to, as Osselaer puts it, “break down the hostile
relationship between men and women in state politics.” And if you
consider that, prior to 1928, there were no female appointments to the
state Legislature, then you have to give her immense credit.

You really have to credit Osselaer for bringing to light
almost-forgotten stories of old campaigns of ambitious souls like Ana
Frohmiller, who lost her 1950 gubernatorial race to Barry
Goldwater-advised Howard Pyle. As someone who has read much about
Goldwater’s senatorial career, yet little about his tactics as a
campaign manager, this chapter (“Professional Politicians”) was
particularly fascinating.

Regardless, while the story of women in Arizona politics is mostly
uplifting, the results are questionable. Where are today’s strong
women? Sadly, and because of the book’s timeline, they’re nowhere to be
found in the pages of Winning Their Place.

This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2009.