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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
I learned early that failure is not a problem as long as you keep trying to get better. Very often, I had a position that had no power and I had to learn to be influential or be a leader from
Marlene M. Johnson:that place.
Lori Sturdevant:This book offers a Minnesota specific look into a particular period in the hundred year quest for American women to exercise their full potential for leadership.
Elisabeth Griffith:Women can offer resources to each other that we don't even name or identify and possibly not value enough.
Lori Sturdevant:I'm Laurie Sturtevant, a retired editorial writer and columnist at the Minnesota Star Tribune and the author of a number of books about notable Minnesotans. I'm delighted to be with former Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Marlene Johnson today to talk about her new book, Rise to the Challenge, a memoir of politics, leadership, and love released this month, September, by the University of Minnesota Press. And we are also joined by an outstanding historian of the American women's movement, Elizabeth Griffith. She's the author of In Her Own Right, The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and in 2022, the book Formidable, an American Women and the Fight for Equality nineteen twenty to twenty twenty. Betsy, it's an honor to have you with us, and we will get you into the conversation in a moment.
Lori Sturdevant:First, I wanna start with Marlene. Marlene, I must report with some regrets that it's been more than thirty years since your name was on a ballot or regularly in the news in Minnesota. So let's begin by introducing you to listeners who may not know the name Marlene Johnson. Give us a brief summary of your story, please.
Marlene M. Johnson:Yes. Well, it is true there are people who aren't old enough to have heard my name in when I lived in Minnesota. I, went to Macalester. I'm a Macalester alum, and after college, I started a small business with another woman, Jeanette Wagner, and for twelve years, I was an entrepreneur in Saint Paul. Then in 1982, former governor Rudy Purpidge recruited me to join him on a ticket running against the Democratic party candidate for governor, lieutenant governor in 'eighty two, and we won that primary and then subsequently won the election in fall of nineteen eighty two.
Marlene M. Johnson:And I served for eight years as lieutenant governor. We lost in an effort to seek a third term, which was unprecedented. It didn't happen. We lost that election. And so later in in '19, '93 no, 1991 rather, I, moved to Washington, DC for a job in the Clinton administration in the first term, working at GSA.
Marlene M. Johnson:It was a terrific opportunity. Then I spent a short time at a private company, a small manufacturing company. And in 1998, I started a position as CEO of NAFA, Association of International Educators, a position I held for nearly twenty years. It's an association NGO representing all those in higher education who work in either study abroad or supporting international students. It was a very exciting, interesting opportunity, and, I retired from that position a few years ago.
Lori Sturdevant:Tell us why you have decided to write a memoir, and why now?
Marlene M. Johnson:Yes. Well, you and others among us know that I have kept a journal for a long time. Started keeping a journal in 1972, kind of to check on my own personal sanity, I think. And then when I was elected, I had a strong sense of doing something historical. There were only six women elected lieutenant governor in 1982.
Marlene M. Johnson:I knew that I wanted to stay with my journal on a personal basis, but then I decided I should keep a separate journal, a working journal that I kept with me at my desk in meetings with the governor. Many times during those eight years, I was the only note keeper for a meeting with the governor because some of his old pals will know that he didn't like staff people in his many of his meetings. So I was very often the only person with a record. Later, I was keeping some versions of a journal during the years, when my husband suffered a brain injury and was in a nursing home for several years prior to his death. And when he died, I called my friend Pauline Boss.
Marlene M. Johnson:Many Minnesotans know her very well. She's the author of Ambiguous Loss and Loving Someone Who Has Dementia. She's just a very special person. And she said to me, You must write about this time. I don't know anybody who's done what you've done and it needs to be written about.
Marlene M. Johnson:So I lived with that thought for a few months, and finally, six months into COVID, I decided to start writing. And I wrote 50 pages and I showed it to Pauline and she said, Well, it's great. You've got lots of wonderful stories here, but you need to tell your whole story if this last part is gonna make sense. So then I took a deep breath and had Betsy Griffith in my brain because, of course, Betsy has talked to me over the years about my journal writing and how valuable it was. So I started writing and I wrote and wrote and wrote until I had 300 pages and started looking for a publisher.
Marlene M. Johnson:I got an editor interested before I got a publisher, but he stayed with me long enough till he finally was ready to recommend to the University of Minnesota Press that I was worth publishing. So it's been a great journey.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, I would say it's a terrific product. And, Betsy, thanks to you and to all those others who encouraged Marlene along the way to do this. I would say about a third of this book is a political story, but it is 100% about the resilience that you acquired through life and then exercised in all of your leadership roles, whether it be politics or higher education, and ultimately the caregiving role that you played so well for your dear husband, late husband, Peter. We'll talk about resilience in a moment, but now I wanna be sure to get Betsy into this conversation. Betsy, it strikes me that this book offers a a Minnesota specific look into a particular period in the hundred year quest for American women to exercise their full potential for leadership that you've so chronicle so well in your book.
Lori Sturdevant:And again, I wanna mention the title of your book, Formidable American Women and the Fight for Equality 1920 to 1922. It was published in '22 by Pegasus Press. Welcome, Betsy. And please tell us a bit about the national context of Marlene's story. What were the 1980s and 1990s like for American women?
Elisabeth Griffith:Laurie, thank you. I'm delighted to be here as a Midwesterner. I feel like I'm back home. You picked the exact right decade, clearly the decade in which Marlene becomes a political candidate and an office holder, but she'd been politically active for the decade before that. But 1980 was a turning point for American women.
Elisabeth Griffith:You'd had the optimism and the energy and the turmoil of the 1960s, the antiwar, the civil rights, the women's rights movements had really all been launched, but they'd created a considerable backlash by the 1970s. You had southern segregationists who were mad about civil rights. You had evangelical Christians and Catholics concerned about the Roe decision. And you had a lot of, middle of the country people who just were upset by the turmoil and the incivility. They didn't like long haired sons burning draft cards or braless daughters marching in the street.
Elisabeth Griffith:Women didn't feel like other women did not respect their traditional roles as homemakers. So there was a pretty strong pushback. And Phyllis Schlafly, a name that everybody should know because she was a brilliant political strategist, she was just on the other side of everything Marlene and I ever believed. But she pulled this coalition together. She killed the Equal Rights Amendment pretty easily.
Elisabeth Griffith:But what she did that was more significant was realign the political parties. Younger people don't even remember when both Republicans and Democrats had conservatives and moderates and liberals, and that's why so much legislation got passed because people crossed the aisles. But Phyllis divides that group. She brings conservative Democrats into the Republican Party, and she espouses positions that more liberal and moderate Democrats did not like. So the parties split.
Elisabeth Griffith:And you now have these two silos of parties that we are dealing with with very little motivation to work together, and I think it's brought the country to a standstill. But it begins in 1980 because Phyllis takes this new coalition, this family values moral majority coalition, and hands it to Ronald Reagan so that he can win the Republican nomination in 1980. And that and the platform, back when platforms mattered and were more than 16 pages and didn't just come in capital letters or in things published by the Heritage Foundation, but years ago, there were issues that were laid out very clearly. Since 1940, the Republican party had always endorsed equal rights for women, and for a long time it had been in favor of family planning, as well as a lot of other reasonable things. But the Reagan platform in 1980 eliminated the Equal Rights Amendment and put in a litmus test that the only judges that would be appointed in his administration would be anti abortion judges.
Elisabeth Griffith:And that, you know, got some attention at the time, but I don't think anyone predicted the long term consequences of that Republican platform, because Republicans were then in power for twelve years. Lots of judges were appointed, sort of culminating with Clarence Thomas. The kinds of momentum that women had in the 1970s, congressionally, Title IX, the Equal Credit Act, pregnancy discrimination, all kinds of successes in the Congress, and many successes in the Supreme Court brought by Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was still working for the ACLU. So you'd had this forward momentum that pretty much comes to a standstill. In addition to dividing the political parties, it divided feminists over abortion so that a purity test was introduced.
Elisabeth Griffith:It would eventually lead to the creation of EMILY's List so that you had a political action committee to endorse Democratic candidates because that would help women gain. And I'm trying to remember, I think in 1980, there were 17 women members in the Congress and only one senator who was not a Democrat, and it would it would increase very slowly through that decade. So Marlene comes into her formal political life, her elected political life, in a very partisan environment where she and her governor, I think, were trying to counter that in the kind of programs that they as she describes in her book, the kind of programs they were supporting.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, Betsy, I think that's a very good assessment of the position that Marlene found herself in in 1982 when she said, yes, she would be the running mate of a governor who was pretty enlightened about lots of things feminist, but was still at least nominally anti abortion rights. Right, Marlene? That's right. And so in Minnesota, we still had this division within the two parties, as well as the continuing tug that you described, Betsy, with the parties realigning around the abortion issue. And Marlene, as you remember that period, I noticed in your book, you spoke about the subtleties of gender bias that you were encountering at least in the 1970s, maybe again still in the 1980s when you ran for office.
Lori Sturdevant:Tell us about what your experience was then and what you are referring to when you talk about gender bias in that period.
Marlene M. Johnson:In the beginning, during during the time we were in business, my partner was married and I was not, and we couldn't get there wasn't such a thing as a business loan for a woman owned business at the time. And then later on, when I had the business on my own, getting a loan was not possible without the signature of a husband or a father, neither of which I had at the time. Ultimately, I got a loan from a bank that was a client of mine that was guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. And that was in the early stage that there was a small business support for loans, and they were just beginning to look for women owned businesses to give them to. So I did have a loan in the later part of my business life to buy the first computer.
Marlene M. Johnson:I mean, when I think about what I paid for that first computer, I believe it was $10,000 if you can believe that. I mean, it was a lot. But then in politics, the year that I became a candidate, both political parties in Minnesota had rejected having a woman on the ticket running for Lieutenant Governor. You'll recall that Republicans rejected Nancy Braddis. Nancy was a very well known, highly regarded, respected businesswoman and state senator.
Marlene M. Johnson:She would have been a fabulous candidate for lieutenant governor. And she was rejected by the Republican party. And on the Democratic side, Warren Spannus was encouraged to select Joan Groh, who was a very popular secretary of state, ultimately served for secretary of state for many, many more years. And Laurie has written with Joan her biography, but the party wasn't ready to have a lieutenant governor candidate. And I think because of that, Rudy Perpich saw having a woman running mate as a competitive advantage in a primary in which he was going to run against the party's endorsed candidate.
Marlene M. Johnson:That issue was changing, even though once I became the candidate, I would get a lot of questions, both from purpish supporters and others. Do you really think you could be governor? I mean, really? Even Sandy Keith, who became an ultimately a very strong supporter of mine, and he'd known me since I was in college, he was very reluctant in the first couple of weeks. He really had some hard conversations with George Perpich about why this was such an advantage to Perpich in terms of winning the election.
Marlene M. Johnson:And Sandy came around ultimately and became a very strong supporter, but it was unusual. And there were a lot of people with heartburn over it.
Lori Sturdevant:I covered that campaign in 1982, and I remember thinking that it was a smart move on the part of Rudy Perfic then coming back for a comeback after being he ran as a former governor that year. I think you were instrumental in helping him win that primary.
Marlene M. Johnson:There's a famous conversation I share in the book at the day after the primary, when we're gathering all the people who didn't support us to, you know, create a new campaign. And I was in a small conversation that included representative Begich. He got upset with something I said, and he said, what the heck did you ever contribute to this campaign anyway? And I said, only 3,000 votes, which was kind of what we won by, you know, just smiled and continued the conversation.
Lori Sturdevant:Since, Betsy mentions though the abortion issue and what a motivator it was in both political parties in those years, how did it work for you to be a clearly pro choice woman, one of the founders of the organization in Minnesota now called Women Winning, but one of
Marlene M. Johnson:the oldest state based campaign finance arms expressly financing the campaigns of pro choice women? How did that work when you were serving a pro life anti abortion governor? Well, when we talked about it, and it was in our very first conversation, of course, the governor said, I understand that you're pro choice, and I don't ever expect you to do anything other than support your own point of view. He said, I also don't plan to make any major changes in state policy. So, even though he was supported by the anti choice people, he had said to me privately that he did not intend to implement any different legislation than had currently was currently in play.
Marlene M. Johnson:And in fact, I think our state investment in Planned Parenthood and other such services only grew during the time we were in office. The other thing he said to me was that his commitment was to increase the number of women and people of color in all boards and commissions, and he wanted our cabinet to reflect the diversity of Minnesota. He had some very personal reasons for caring about those issues. He had been on the Hibbing School Board when, women teachers got fired when they became pregnant. He was on the school board initially when there weren't women on the school board.
Marlene M. Johnson:He remembers when Native American women were raped and beat up and left by the side of the road for dead. He remembers when women of miners got their check on Fridays, got the cash on Fridays from their husbands when they came from the mines, and then the men would go off, beat up their women, and then go off and drink for the weekend. And so Rudy had a very strong sense of the inequality that women were experiencing and that Native Americans were experiencing, that black folks were experiencing. And he wanted our administration to reflect a different future. You know, one of the first things he gave me and actually talked about it in the campaign, although very few people really wrote about it much or took it very seriously, was changing the picture of the boards and commissions because the governor has huge appointing power, including not just judicial, but also, you know, the medical board.
Marlene M. Johnson:I mean, just all kinds of regulatory boards. Hundreds. When we left office, as I said, virtually every board and commission the governor appointed had been integrated by gender and race.
Lori Sturdevant:And once in a while, you had to push him. I remember a few judicial appointments where you might be had to push him, but by and large, this was something he did of his own volition.
Marlene M. Johnson:Yes. I mean, I helped him accomplish it. And I think, the Leslie Metzen story, which I share in the book, I don't think he was ever not interested in appointing Leslie Metzen to this job. I think he got stuck in some political situations with the speaker of the house that made it difficult to do it, and, ultimately, he did the right thing.
Lori Sturdevant:We should say that Leslie is, still serving as a senior judge in Dakota County and around the state as well. And she's a close personal friend of mine, so I'm glad that you told that story.
Marlene M. Johnson:Yes. It's a very good appointment. Yes. Yes.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, Marlene, when you wrote this book, you likely didn't expect that your book would be released at a moment when gender would again be a a dominant theme at our national politics, and and yet here we are. And it's been occurring to me, you know something about being the first woman in a visible elective position, an executive position, and and you know what it's like to try to move from a secondary role to a primary one when seeking elective office. I don't know if you've mentioned that you ran for mayor of Saint Paul after you left the lieutenant governorship. It, it, it didn't end as you might have wished, but you did that. So what's it been like for you to watch Kamala Harris this year?
Marlene M. Johnson:Well, I'm so excited. It just warms my heart. I think it's the right thing. Absolutely. I'm very proud of President Biden for stepping aside and endorsing her candidacy.
Marlene M. Johnson:I think that it was a very important step in this process. I believe she's extraordinarily well prepared for this position. She has had a front row seat for four years, but before that, she did really important things in every job she had as prosecutor and as attorney general. She was an attorney general on some very large national cases that made a huge difference for millions and millions of people. And virtually every attorney general who worked with her on those big cases has high regard for her.
Marlene M. Johnson:And that doesn't happen. I mean, you either earn that respect or you don't. And she earned that respect and high regard. So she came to the vice president's position really well groomed for leadership. And as vice president, I think she's had a front row seat to day to day policy decisions because she's been a good partner with President Biden.
Marlene M. Johnson:And so I think she's very much aware of everything the administration has worked on and has had her opinions paid attention to right through the whole four years. In addition to that, she has represented the administration and the country internationally many times. She knows dozens of international leaders on a personal basis, which puts her in a very good position to lead from day one. I'm thrilled that she's a candidate. I think she's doing an outstanding job and I believe she will be an outstanding president.
Lori Sturdevant:Oh, I, I share all of those views and I have to say, I, I, it, it strikes me as you describe her role as vice president, you're describing some things that perhaps in real time, it weren't being noticed by the American public, maybe not being covered by people in my profession, as well as they might have been. I wonder what you might say about what voters should know about that, that position of being in the second position in an administration, and then attempting to move to the top role?
Marlene M. Johnson:I think even though there were moments when I wish that people in your profession had covered me more, there's no question about that, It's also true that when one is vice president or lieutenant governor, one is not the president or the governor. There are some things that shouldn't be covered. I mean, the lieutenant governor or the vice president is in a different role. They're not making their own policy. They're learning and they're being prepared to be president tomorrow, but they're not the president today.
Marlene M. Johnson:Sometimes people have unrealistic, inappropriate expectations for what they should be seeing from the person in that second job. But I believe the country should know, should value that she has been there for four years. She was chosen by the president, and he was a vice president before. So he knows very much what the role of vice president is and can be. And to that extent, I believe that the reason I had such a good relationship with Governor Purpich is because he had been lieutenant governor before in a situation where he was not treated very well by his governor.
Marlene M. Johnson:And he wanted a very different reality for himself and his lieutenant governor. Yeah. And I believe President Biden clearly wanted a partner in his vice president. And I believe that he knew when he was and he obviously showed us when he was stepping aside, he wanted her to succeed him. And he didn't come up with that idea the day before he withdrew.
Marlene M. Johnson:President Biden has wanted Kamala Harris to succeed him for a long time, regardless of when he was not gonna be president again. So I think that she is very well prepared and we're very fortunate to have her as our candidate.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, thank you. And, and Betsy, I wanna ask you sort of a version of the same question. What should Kamala Harris and her campaign know about how Americans perceive female leadership today? Are there are there still these subtleties of gender bias that, Marlene found back in the nineteen seventies and eighties?
Elisabeth Griffith:Me three in terms of excitement and enthusiasm for a Harris candidacy, and I'm enormously proud of how capably she's handling this role. I think it's bringing the country together, and it is reassuring people who have any concerns about a woman in a presidential position. She certainly behaves in a presidential manner. But in terms of the background and history, those are the realities. But I'm thinking that a Harris presidency may be a whole new chapter in my book.
Elisabeth Griffith:It also relates to why she's not emphasizing gender or race or being a first female in any category because in a way, Hillary's campaign allowed us to move beyond that. The primaries in 2020, the elections in 2018. I think the national mindset has advanced on the capabilities of women, but the research does not yet show that because the research, of course, is based on facts that happened before the present day, and nobody seems to be answering or that I know of is asking these questions in-depth. For a very long time, American voters were reluctant to advance women from representative positions to executive positions. And there's been a lot of pondering about why that might be.
Elisabeth Griffith:It is absolutely true that the largest number of women in elective office are at the lowest level, which is the school board. And we are only 35 of school boards, and we are less than every other category below that, which is really discouraging when you think that we're more than half of the population. We register in larger number than men. We vote in larger numbers than men, but we are either not putting ourselves forward or we are not being supported when we do. But the data seems to suggest that there's this discomfort in seeing women in executive roles.
Elisabeth Griffith:And I think that that might be because there are just too few of us. I think Nancy Pelosi did a great job in showing. As your senator Amy Klobuchar said, she beats Trump every day, or did when she was leader. But it's not only in politics that women are underrepresented. There is no nontraditional field.
Elisabeth Griffith:So I'm going to put CEOs and corporate leaders in this category. There are barely 10 of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who are women. And even in more traditional fields, college presidents, teachers, women are not the majority of any of those unless they're in an elementary school. The numbers are too low and I think they need to be advanced, but I think there needs to be more exposure to it and more success. And there might be an opportunity at some point to ask what the barriers are that, Marlene sees today and continues to see.
Marlene M. Johnson:I would just point out that we do have several women governors right now.
Elisabeth Griffith:We have 12 and we have, 22 lieutenant governors at the moment. High points on both. But among elected, so there's something like three zero five women elected statewide across The United States, Ninety Nine are women, which is statistically one sixth. So again, fewer than the I think the high point is 40% across the country of women in any elected position, and the highest numbers are at the lowest levels. When Marlene and I started working together at the National Women's Political Caucus, I think women were 3% of state legislatures, and they're now 33%.
Lori Sturdevant:The Minnesota legislature has been at about 30% for, a long time since the nineteen nineties, and only in the twenty twenty two election did a a a big surge come forward. And now I think we're above well above 40% female in the Minnesota legislature, but we were stalled for a very long time at about one third. Well, and
Elisabeth Griffith:it was not until 2020, can you believe it, did every state have a woman in its legislature. Currently, Nevada has the majority, 60% women legislature. New Hampshire has always had high representation because they pay nothing. And so women are fifty fifty in New Hampshire, and Colorado and Arizona both have very high numbers of women. But you just would think that there would have been greater advances.
Elisabeth Griffith:It has been a hundred years since women got the vote.
Marlene M. Johnson:We have work to do. Yes.
Lori Sturdevant:Yes. I I must commit say the the last, epilogue section of your book, Formidable, is a a wonderful compendium of data about the progress or lack thereof that women have made. So I have to commend to our listeners that last section of the book, Formidable, for as a real re good resource on data as of the year 2020, where women stood in a variety of professional settings. You mentioned the Hillary Clinton campaign, and I have wondered if her campaign somehow has made Americans more ready for a woman president than they were in 2016. What would you say to that, Betsy?
Lori Sturdevant:And I'll ask you that same question, Maureen.
Elisabeth Griffith:I certainly hope so. I think in the aftermath of the Clinton campaign, people really recognized the depth of misogyny in the coverage of the campaign and the emphasis of that campaign. It had been evident in earlier campaigns, but it was really vicious. I think Kamala Harris has a lot of advantages over missus Clinton. She doesn't have quite the same depth of experience, and people keep saying she needs to introduce herself.
Elisabeth Griffith:People don't know so much about her. It may be an advantage to have less known about you and to not have a husband who comes with baggage. Hillary was bringing a lot of things with her, so she was vulnerable to criticism in a lot of ways. It's almost as though she had to be sacrificed to get us where we are today. But I hope I actually hope that that's true.
Elisabeth Griffith:And I was thrilled with the reception she got at the Democratic convention. I think people appreciate now the significance of that campaign. It'll be interesting to see, but I think we maybe actually see this as a clean slate and stop tagging women with all of these sexist attitudes and just see her as a very strong leader, deal with the policies, deal with her pragmatism, deal with how she addresses issues.
Lori Sturdevant:And how about it, Marlene? Do you think we are in a different place than we were as recently as recently as eight years ago with regard to women's leadership in this country?
Marlene M. Johnson:I I do. And and I think there's another factor here, and then there's another generation of women who are entering the voting population. And I was just hearing a poll result earlier today about the change in young women's preferences and young women's priorities and young women's intention to vote. One of the things that started turning them off was the deep misogyny of the Trump administration. Those people were just emerging into their voting years, may or may not have voted yet, but now they're going to vote, and there's a person like Kamala Harris on the ticket, I think that helps us a lot, because the younger generation, people 40, I would say, are generally growing up in a different environment than we did.
Marlene M. Johnson:I mean, not just politically, but in terms of how husbands and wives share housework and childcare and all those other I mean, there's just a change in mindset among many, many of the younger, younger people. And I think that political and social change comes in stages. And of course, it all builds on what has happened before to the point that Betsy made about the Clinton campaign. Kamala Harris is exactly right to focus on the future of the country and not focus on her role in it as such, in terms of her category of being female or black or She's there to do the job as opposed to breaking ceilings. And I think that's the right strategy, and I think it's where the country is right now too.
Marlene M. Johnson:We we really need less drama and more focus on what the country's needs are, and I think she is definitely the one delivering that message.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, thank you for this good political conversation. And but as I said earlier, Marlene, I think your book is about one third politics and 100% resilience. And so I wanted to come back to talk about that a bit. Yeah. Let's reiterate that the title of your new memoir is Rise to the Challenge, published by University of Minnesota Press.
Lori Sturdevant:And you describe a variety of challenges, not just in the political realm through your life and and how you seem to go through a rather intentional effort to acquire and exercise resilience at a number of stages as you face these compounding challenges. And I wonder what you learned along the way about how one acquires that kind of spunk.
Marlene M. Johnson:I'm not sure how one does, but I think for me, keeping a journal helped a lot. Also, what's been very important for me is that I've always had close friends with whom I process things, And not only friends who would tell me what I wanted to hear. Most of my friends have been very kind, so I don't say that I have ever felt beaten up by being corrected. But I have benefited a lot by people who could tell me the truth in a way that I could hear. So that's been really important.
Marlene M. Johnson:I learned early that failure is, is not a problem as long as you keep trying to get better, as long as you're trying to fix things. And, and I tried to always keep that in mind when I was leading NAFCA, for instance, that thethe idea was, I don't care if you make a mistake. I only care if you don't fix it. I remember when I had to remember that for myself when I made the wrong hire and I had to move that person out. And I thought, if I don't do it, that person is having a negative effect on the organization.
Marlene M. Johnson:Everybody will say, well, if she can't fix her problem, then I don't, I can't fix mine. I had to learn how much my behavior influenced other people. Now, it wasn't so much what I said, but whether or not I was willing to live by my own point of view. That was important, has always been important to me. But mostly I think it's having really good friends for a long period of time.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, I noticed that too. And you describe in the book, you would so often describe how a decision would come upon you and you would convene a group of good friends to, to talk it through, or, or you would make time after a long day at work for a walk with a friend to talk it through. Clearly, you worked at building and maintaining those friendship circles, and I wonder what advice you might have for people about doing that very thing.
Marlene M. Johnson:Well, it's very nice to look at Betsy when you're asking me this question because one of the ways that I have stayed in touch, and Betsy and I have stayed in touch over the years when we didn't live so close, is postcards. And just a couple of weeks ago, I found a postcard that Betsy wrote to me more than twenty years ago. She and I are probably among a handful of people that any of us know that still write handwritten notes on a regular basis all the time. We both keep volumes of postcards handy and we keep stamps handy. And I've always done that.
Marlene M. Johnson:I just remembered there's a personal story that I think is in the book, but I should share it. In 1982, when I was campaigning, Betsy was in Minnesota. I think she was talking about the Elizabeth Cady Stanton book at St. Catherine's College. But at any rate, we had planned to have dinner when she was in town, and that was before I was a candidate.
Marlene M. Johnson:So then I became a candidate. So I had to say to the governor, I can't work tonight. I'm having dinner with my friend Betsy Griffith. And he wanted to know who that was. I told him and he said, well, can't I join you for dinner?
Marlene M. Johnson:So so what do you say to the governor? You can't say, no, I want to talk privately to Betsy. Sure, you can have dinner with us. So we did. We had dinner together, the three of us.
Marlene M. Johnson:And at the end of dinner, Betsy wrote a check for the campaign. Now, at that time, Betsy was a Republican, and she was married to John Deardorff, who was a Republican political strategist and had worked for Al Quih, who had defeated Rudy Perpich in 1978. John Deardorff had run that campaign. And, but anyway, Betsy handed this check for our campaign. And Rudy looked at me like, you're really a gold mine because at that point, my mother had written the largest check the campaign had received and somebody else oh, I had Elmer Anderson wrote a check, and he was also a Republican.
Marlene M. Johnson:So anyway, Betsy was, sort of an early model for many people in, staying in touch and putting your money where your mouth is. So just to keep the record straight, my husband and I only voted for one Republican president ever, and it was Jerry Ford because he was engaged
Elisabeth Griffith:in that campaign and, again, a Midwesterner. And John secretly supported quite a lot of Democrats.
Marlene M. Johnson:I know he did. I loved her husband.
Elisabeth Griffith:By the mid nineteen eighties, because of the Reagan platform, the Republican National Committee was telling candidates not to hire my husband and his firm because they were known to be pro choice, pro ERA, pro civil rights, pro environment. And so that's another example of how divisive party schism became. But I was asked to blur Marlene's book. In addition to just this depth of friendship, I'm not sure, I'm in the journal for when we met. I think we met marching on a protest in a March, but it may have been in some internal fight within the National Women's Political Caucus, but we have been friends for more than fifty years now.
Elisabeth Griffith:We are also sisters, sister feminists. The note writing, the journal keeping. One of the reasons I'm passionate about Marlene is because she practices the arts that are going to keep historians like me in business.
Lori Sturdevant:That's right.
Elisabeth Griffith:Unless people are printing out their emails and their notes to their children, there's not going to be the kind of archival richness that historians need to write about. The Minnesota Historical Society should be honored to have the cache of journals that Marlene has contributed. Some future graduate student is going to write a brilliant book about Marlene or about women in the Midwest or about women in leadership based on that. But in addition to, you know, being a participant, she's also been an archivist by being a journal keeper. I've admired her because I had a career in education, and her whole role in the in helping assist foreign students in this country is huge because that's educating all young people when they have opportunities to come together.
Elisabeth Griffith:I was also the CEO of an organization. And every time I would come away from lunch with Marlene, I would think, crumb, why didn't I know that before I made that decision last week? I could have done such a better job. I really have learned from her my entire life and those many of those lessons are in this book. I admire enormously her commitment to diversity.
Elisabeth Griffith:She's the first person I know in a very liberal friendship group who consciously made sure that she was reaching out to people who were different than she was and initiating friendships. Not everybody was gonna respond, but enough people did. She would never join a board unless it was a diverse board. She wouldn't found an organization unless it had diverse membership. And if it didn't, she figured out how to bring those people in, how to bring them together.
Elisabeth Griffith:Our country needs all of us to be behaving in that kind of way, to cross lines. What vice president Harris said, more in common than we have that separates us. I absolutely believe that's true, but more of us need to practice it. So when I was asked to blurb the book, a line that they cut was that I thought it would be a challenge for bookstores to figure out what shelf to put this book on because you could see it as obviously memoir or biography. You can see it as women's history.
Elisabeth Griffith:You could see it as a corporate business book. You could see it as a book about international affairs and education, but it's also a love story in her romance, Peter, her care for Peter. And so it is a very compelling book. I might have shared with the University of Minnesota Press when I accepted the assignment, not sure I told you this, Marlene, that I thought it would be easy because I know her so well. I didn't really need to read the book.
Elisabeth Griffith:But I started to read the book. I could not put it down. It's a Paige Turner book, and I know, you know, and I know her well. So it was it was a book full of insight and surprise and warmth, and I commend it highly. I think it's gonna be a best seller in whatever category, on whatever shelf it appears.
Elisabeth Griffith:It's gonna do really well.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, thank you, Betsy. That's a nice ringing endorsement that I I must second all of it. I think this is a particularly timely book, not just because of the political moment that we are in right now, but almost for sort of demographic reasons. Marlene, I think you represent the kinda leading edge of the baby boomer generation. And while our generation's numbers are eroding here by the day, we are still the second largest age cohort of Americans.
Lori Sturdevant:We may, in this election, be the largest voting cohort. We'll see if that's true. And a large number of us have ahead of us some of the challenges of caregiving and career transition that you describe. And so thank you for sharing your story now. And I wonder, what would you want a friend who is experiencing such challenges or have such challenges ahead to glean from your experience?
Marlene M. Johnson:The most important thing is that what I noticed when I was, hanging around the nursing home so many hours of the day and for so many years, is how easy it is for families to feel at a loss for what to do and to feel like they couldn't influence. And what I learned is that one's leadership is different from that perch. In my life, sometimes, very often I had a position that had no power and I had to learn to be influential or be a leader from that place. And then I was in charge and that was of course a different one. But when I was a family caregiver, of a person in a nursing home for nine years, I was very focused on how life could be better for Peter.
Marlene M. Johnson:But I wasn't in charge of that on a day to day basis. So I had to figure out how to engage with the staff and be respected by them and have them consider me a member of the team so that my ideas would feel like, something they could do and would even want to do. And over time would improve his care. And I think I learned to do that in a very good way, in a way that was good for me, it was good for Peter, and it was good for them. Because I was probably at the nursing home more than most families were, just because of the way I was and because of the geographic need to come back and forth all the time.
Marlene M. Johnson:And it was all, you know, special. I think that the way that I engage with the staff also improved the care of the other residents of the nursing home, too. I would just encourage people, and of course, I would always also encourage people if they're facing, brain injury or other kind of reason like this, reading Pauline Boss's book, Loving Someone with who has dementia, or just understanding ambiguous loss better is so helpful. I mean, I kept Pauline's book very close to my heart on a regular basis during those years because there were insights that were just helpful. And it's very important in that situation to stay sane, to stay uplifted, to be able to function in the rest of your life, because one has to.
Marlene M. Johnson:It's very important to be able to function in the rest of one's life too. But at the same time, feel like one is doing as well as one can in support of the person that you are caring for.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, thank you for that good and practical advice. And, thank you for sharing a story that I think will be meaningful to a lot of people. Thank you, Betsy, Elizabeth Griffiths. Would you like to have one last word, Elizabeth?
Elisabeth Griffith:I wanted to reinforce a theme of Marlene's book throughout and and of what she just said. The social connections, your female friends over time, and what you learn from each other, those people on the nursing staff in a very subtle way were being mentored by Marlene. That kind of informal mentoring goes on in our friendship networks. So I think it's important for people either in that very challenging situation or just in our whole lives, to maintain our social connections, to cherish our friendships of long standing, to be willing to welcome more people into that circle. Life is hard and life is earnest, and you need to seize joy, but to be able to have friends that you can turn to in good times and bad is essential.
Elisabeth Griffith:And I think one of the things that comes out of women's schools or women's organizations or feminist sisterhood, There are so many ways in which women can come together in their religious organizations, in their neighborhoods, as moms and play groups. Women can offer resources to each other that we don't even name or identify and possibly not value enough, but they are there. Every page of Marlene's book, reminds us of the strength and value of those connections.
Lori Sturdevant:Well, I think that's very well said, and I think that many people who read this book will find a friend in Marlene Johnson. So thanks to both Betsy Griffith, and especially thank you Marlene Johnson, and thank you to the University of Minnesota Press for the opportunity to talk about Rise to the Challenge, the new book out by Marlene Johnson. I'm Laurie Sturtevant. Thanks for listening.
Marlene M. Johnson:Thank you very much, Laurie.