‘We Care About Issues More Than Power’

From seasoned veterans to fresh-faced rookies, the seven Republican women of the state House put differences regarding abortion aside to work together for Hawaii

Wednesday - March 08, 2006
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Women make up 51 percent of the nation’s population, 50 percent of Hawaii’s. Yet they hold only 30 percent of the nation’s elected offices. While Hawaii boasts its first female governor, it only does a little better than the national average if all elected women are considered.

Save among Republican members of the state House of Representatives. There women prosper. Seventy percent of the Republican House caucus are women.

To be sure, it’s a small caucus. Republicans number only 10 in the 51-member state House, down from 19 as recently as six years ago. Yet seven of those House Republicans are women. That’s far, far above the national average for party caucuses or legislative representation of either political party.

To some extent, of course, the small size of the Republican House contingent explains its high percentage of women. Nationally, Democrats do better in terms of women legislators. Of the 14 women who serve in the United States Senate, nine are Democrats, five Republicans. Sixty-seven women sit in the U.S. House of Representatives: 43 Democrats, 24 Republicans.

In Hawaii, not a single Republican woman sits in the state Senate. Six female Democrats hold Senate seats. In the state house, the seven Republican women are outnumbered by 11 women who run as Democrats.

To be sure, across the nation women are increasingly to be found in state elective office. Of the nation’s 7,382 state legislators, 1680 are women That’s a four-fold increase from a quarter-century ago.

Just under 23 percent of all state legislators are women. Hawaii does better: Women constitute one-third of the state’s 76 representatives and senators.

Hawaii’s Republican representatives are quick to point out that the female contingent in their caucus looks a lot like multicultural Hawaii: Japanese-American Barbara Marumoto, Filipino Lynn Finnegan, Caucasians Cynthia Thielen and Colleen Meyer, Chinese-Caucasian Corinne Ching, Filipino-Caucasian Kymberly Pine and African-American Anne Stevens.

The seven include new mothers, grandmothers, a divorcee and a woman recently engaged. One’s a lawyer, another a teacher, a third is a former Coast Guard officer. Two have sold real estate; four came to the Legislature from the ranks of legislative staffers. It’s a professionally disparate group.

Three come from traditional Republican districts: Marumoto from East Honolulu, Thielen and Meyer from Windward Oahu. Three come from swing districts: Finnegan from Salt Lake, Ching from Liliha and Stevens from Waikiki. And one - Pine - from a district that was held by Democrats since Territorial days.

In terms of years of service, the Republican reps offer both seasoned veterans and raw, raw rookies. Marumoto claims the longest tenure in the House save for Speaker Calvin Say; she’s been there since election year 1978. Both Thielen and Meyer have represented their Windward Oahu districts for more than a dozen years.

The other five? Minority Leader Finnegan and Ching are in only their second two-year terms; elected in 2004, Pine, a former MidWeek freelance writer, is in her first term. Stevens, appointed by Gov. Linda Lingle to the Waikiki House seat vacated when Galen Fox resigned, has held her post for six weeks.

So what? Does it make any difference that women so dominate the minority Republican caucus? Does gender trump party affiliation? Does it mean more to be a Republican than it does a woman, or vice versa?

It depends. Consider the most polarizing political and social issue of modern times, abortion. Three of the seven Republican women identify themselves as pro-choice, three as pro-life, one as moderate (wherever that is).

“There’s acceptance of our differences on social issues,” says Meyer, who opposes abortion and speaks with pride of the lead role Republicans played in raising Hawaii’s age of consent from 14 to 16. “We have two different points of view, and we recognize that neither side is going change its mind.”

Minority Leader Finnegan, also an abortion opponent, concurs: “Each of us believes what we believe based on our own experience. And we all know our feelings go deep. We really, truly respect that we have these differences.”

“There’s no tension on social issues,” says freshman Rep. Pine, a pro-lifer. “When abortion or other social issues come up, we disagree and go on. We’re not going to convince each other.”

The Republican caucus’s oldest woman in terms of years of service, Marumoto, and its newest, Stevens - along with Thielen - are pro-choice. Stevens’ position is pragmatic: “Women will choose no matter what they’re told by the government. Who cares what the law says? If abortion is legal, they will do it safely under a doctor’s care. If it’s made illegal, they will do it unsafely.”

Says the pro-choice Rep. Thielen: “We recognize that we have differences on abortion, sex education and other social issues. We don’t spend time debating them. That’s a male-dominated tactic, trying to hammer different ideas into the ground. We treat one another with respect and forge ahead. It’s demeaning to everyone to waste time that way.”

No such spirit of cooperation existed in 1988 when religious conservatives supporting the Rev. Pat Robertson’s candidacy for the presidency seized the Hawaii Republican Party. In the aftermath, moderate Republican women office-holders Donna Ikeda, Virginia Isbell and Ann Kobayashi found membership in the GOP uncomfortable. All three became Democrats.

Thielen feels that there’s a marked difference between how men and women approach politics: “When the Republican caucus was dominated by men, we were not as tight as a group, not as cooperative. They were more into power plays than achieving results.

“Women care about issues more than power. Male politicians are constantly jockeying for the next step upward. Women want to see something accomplished. Take an issue like workforce housing. If women were in power, issues like that would have been addressed long ago.”

Colleen Meyer puts it differently: “Women aren’t so ego-driven. The men often look like peacocks, strutting and trying to get into the limelight. Women behave better. The Republican caucus works much more as a team than before. We have more consideration for each other. We listen to each other. We support each other.”

All that strutting has frustrated Meyer over the years, the wasted time and lost opportunities that it too often produces. “I came from the private sector, a career in real estate, and the Legislature was far more frustrating,” she remembers. “At the end of my first session, I remember walking through the garage to my car and starting to cry. All the wasted energy. All the egregious wrongs we didn’t right.

“It took me at least four years to learn to step back, to worry less, and to recognize that this is an incremental game” - and a game dominated by males.

Nor more so than it was when Barbara Marumoto came to the Legislature. As a recently divorced single mother of four in need of a job, Marumoto went to work in the Capitol as a staffer in 1972. “I was doing research, writing speeches, providing constituent services for the minority members: Fred Rolfing, John Carroll, the Senate minority office, Pat Saiki. And I found myself asking ‘Why not me?’”

Why not, indeed? In 1978 Marumoto ran successfully for a seat in the constitutional convention of that year. In the fall, she won

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