INDIANAPOLIS —
Last month, when the Democratic and Republican candidates running for governor announced they’d each picked a woman as a running mate, the news seemed almost ho-hum.
As Brian Howey, veteran political observer and publisher of the Howey Political Report, noted in a recent column, the ranks of influential women in the Indiana Statehouse are rising as they climb the political ladder. Indiana’s current lieutenant governor, Becky Skillman, is in China as I write this, leading a delegation of Hoosiers on an important trade mission in search of some Chinese investment dollars.
Men (white men, that is) still dominate the show at the Statehouse, but women do much of the heavy lifting, both on the floors of the state House and Senate and behind the scenes. The two women running on Democratic and Republican tickets — state Sen. Vi Simpson and state Rep. Sue Ellspermann, respectively — have every right to say they bring more qualifications to their tickets than just their gender.
Even asking them about what it’s like to be a woman candidate seems almost archaic these days.
But as Howey also noted in that column, it ain’t always been that way.
One of the critical hinge moments of history — when a seemingly stuck door swings open — was in October 2003, when Kathy Davis was confirmed as the first woman lieutenant governor of Indiana. It wasn’t a moment anyone would have intentionally chosen; she was selected to fill a vacancy created by the sudden death of Gov. Frank O’Bannon and the ascension of then Lt. Gov. Joe Kernan into the governor’s spot.
The Democratic Kernan-Davis team got beat the next year — by a Republican ticket that included Skillman.
Davis hadn’t served in an elected office until she was confirmed by a unanimous vote of the Indiana General Assembly, but she was whip smart and accustomed to breaking gender barriers. She was a graduate of both MIT and Harvard at a time when both institutions were overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Her entry into school, her career at the Indiana-based Cummins Inc. and later in city and state government as a budget and finance expert, was made easier by a 1972 law known as Title IX. The landmark law barred gender discrimination in education, but it also pushed open other stuck doors and helped us change the way we think about who can do what.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of that law and Davis is being honored, along with several history-making women, at a pre-game celebration hosted by the WBNA’s Indiana Fever and Indiana Humanities on Thursday at the Banker’s Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
The lineup includes Judge Sarah Evans Barker, the first female federal judge in Indiana; Sue Anne Gilroy, Indiana’s first secretary of state; Myra Selby, the first female on the Indiana Supreme Court; Fever coach Lin Dunn, one of the winningest coaches in basketball; and former Olympian Ann Meyers Drysdale, the first woman to sign a free-agent contract with the NBA. Also on the roster: former U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh, considered the “father” of Title IX for his shepherding of the legislation into law.
Much more about the program — and Title IX — is online at FeverBasketball.com. Look, too, for more coverage of the 40th anniversary of Title IX coming soon in this newspaper.
Maureen Hayden is the Indiana Statehouse bureau chief for CNHI, the parent company of the Tribune-Star. She can be reached at maureen.hayden@indianamediagroup.com
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