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Swanee Hunt's passion is helping women move into political leadership. As she became involved in grassroots organizing, she began to think big about influencing politics as a major donor. First in a series on women funding serious political change.

(WOMENSENEWS)--When you grow up as I did with a father zealously committed to political change, it gets into your blood.

Dad was a Texas oilman with far right-wing politics. He relished this work and pulled his children into it when he could. My sister and I sang patriotic ditties to visiting dignitaries, and I sometimes delivered warnings about Castro's communist threat as a warm-up to his speeches. In 1964 I accompanied him to the Republican convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco; like a young Hillary Rodham, I was a banner-waving Goldwater Girl.

By that time our nation had already plunged into a sequence of social movements that would reshape my politics: civil rights, anti-war, environmental and women's movements were underway. Dad died when I was 24, and my inheritance allowed me to become a philanthropist.

Five years later, in 1979, I made a reservation for a table in the male-only Main Dining Room of the Dallas Petroleum Club. (With a name like "Swanee," no one knows. . .) At the door, the stately but flummoxed black maitre d' had to turn me away or lose his job. He and I had more in common than met the eye: Neither of us were welcome in the hallowed mess hall where deals might be made. I moved on.

Worked in the Grassroots

By 1992, I'd become a grassroots organizer and funder, steeped in a different sort of politics in my new home, Colorado. My work to reform mental health services in Denver introduced me to Federico Pena, who became Denver's mayor and, eventually, the U.S. secretary of transportation, then secretary of energy. For Gov. Roy Romer I created, then chaired, a statewide commission on housing and homelessness. I also co-chaired Mayor Wellington Webb's Human Capital Initiative, which made recommendations for every aspect of Denverites' lives: employment, security, education and health care.

During those years I contributed to national campaigns, but never in a big way. Yet, in 1992 I met Bill Clinton in the home of a friend. His views and values were consonant with my own, and I left behind a check five times larger than the admission price. I was still a spectator, but I began pondering: What knight in shining armor am I waiting for to sweep me up into political action on a scale commensurate with my ability?

The Republican convention pushed me over the edge that year. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots sparked by the police beating of Rodney King, GOP speakers demanded a religious war to take back our cities. I was offended by the mean-spirited, ad hominem attacks on Hillary Clinton and the jeering of crowds as one right-wing speaker spewed hatred against homosexuals. "It was probably better in the original German," I remarked dryly to my husband.

Planning for Something Big

In the weeks that followed, I began talking with my friend Merle Chambers about our doing something big. She and I decided to put together a million-dollar fundraiser in the form of an issues-oriented symposium featuring Hillary and Tipper Gore, to make the point that women were an untapped fount of ideas as well as resources.

I thought I would stretch and make a $20,000 contribution; 10 times more than I'd ever given to a political cause before. Merle stopped me right there: $200,000, she said.

That's what friends are for. I would sell some stock. Once I wrote the check I'd pretend I'd never had the money.

Now that I was committed, I crisscrossed the country, raising money. The event met our financial goal but, more important, we created a new template for fundraisers that was based on conscious values and intellectual curiosity rather than showing off shoes and rubbing shoulders.

My mega-contribution led to attention I wished I hadn't had in the national media (I was listed in the New York Times on a short list of the largest contributors), but also the astounding--and unexpected--opportunity to join the Clinton administration. As U.S. ambassador to Austria, I supported the advancement of women's leadership across Eastern and Central Europe.

Later, at Harvard's Kennedy School, I founded the Women and Public Policy Program, working around the world to spread policies with the greatest benefit for women. It's gratifying work, because when women are significantly represented (somewhere around 30 percent) in a governmental body, priorities shift from military overspending to investments in education and health care.

Giant Step for Women

Needless to say, Hillary Clinton's candidacy this year meant the world to me, and given my work in 50 countries, I mean that literally. As she ran, the global population imagined a woman as president of the United States, and whether it was a hope or fear, that image opened doors. One giant step forward toward respect for women.

But then four steps back. A woman of much, much less gravitas has been popped through the opening, straight onto the Republican ticket. Now, in what I would describe as a pandering ploy, an examination of her distortions and weak record is labeled harassment. But those of us who have worked for decades for women's opportunities don't confuse overconfidence with competence.

For women to move into politics, they need preparation and education. But research shows that, unlike men, they also need inspiration. That's why in Denver in August, during the Democratic convention, I staged Unconventional Women, a symposium for 3,000, inspiring women to political leadership. Serious issues. Serious women. Serious change.

Getting women into political leadership is my own political passion. Fortunately there's a growing number of women who are putting not only their time and talents but also their financial resources toward political progress.

Money is key. At all levels we must go beyond the traditional envelope-stuffing and phone-bank managing to supporting political change with the power of the purse. When serious women support serious issues with serious money, that's serious change.

Swanee Hunt is the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She has authored a memoir: "Half-Life of a Zealot," as well as "This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace," a winner of the PEN New England Award. Her foundation, Hunt Alternatives Fund, is known internationally as "provoking change for good."

This essay is part of a series on female political donors and fundraisers supported by the Sister Fund, for more information, go www.womensenews.org

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.

Everyone seems to be oozing sympathy for the fumbling vice-presidential nominee. Please. Cry me a freaking river.

Sept. 30, 2008 | Is this the week that Democrats and Republicans join hands -- to heap pity on poor Sarah Palin?

At the moment, all signs point to yes, as some strange bedfellows reveal that they have been feeling sorry for the vice-presidential candidate ever since she stopped speaking without the help of a teleprompter. Conservative women like Kathleen Parker and Kathryn Jean Lopez are shuddering with sympathy as they realize that the candidate who thrilled them, just weeks ago, is not in shape for the big game. They're not alone. The New Republic's Christopher Orr feels that Palin has been misused by the team that tapped her. In the New York Times, Judith Warner feels for Sarah, too! And over at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates empathizes with intelligence and nuance, making clear that he's not expressing pity. Salon's own Glenn Greenwald watched the Katie Couric interview and "actually felt sorry for Sarah Palin." Even Amy Poehler, impersonating Katie Couric on last week's "Saturday Night Live," makes the joke that Palin's cornered-animal ineptitude makes her "increasingly adorable."

I guess I'm one cold dame, because while Palin provokes many unpleasant emotions in me, I just can't seem to summon pity, affection or remorse.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just like all of the rest of you, part of the bipartisan jumble of viewers that keeps one hand poised above the mute button and the other over my eyes during Palin's disastrous interviews. Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in "The Godfather: Part III," Sarah Palin talking about Russia -- they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.

But just because I'm human, just because I can feel, just because I did say this weekend that I "almost feel sorry for her" doesn't mean, when I consider the situation rationally, that I do. Yes, as a feminist, it sucks -- hard -- to watch a woman, no matter how much I hate her politics, unable to answer questions about her running mate during a television interview. And perhaps it's because this experience pains me so much that I feel not sympathy but biting anger. At her, at John McCain, at the misogynistic political mash that has been made of what was otherwise a groundbreaking year for women in presidential politics.

In her "Poor Sarah" column, Warner writes of the wave of "self-recognition and sympathy [that] washed over" her when she saw a photo of Palin talking to Henry Kissinger. Palin -- as "a woman fully aware that she was out of her league, scared out of her wits, hanging on for dear life" -- apparently reminded Warner of herself. Wow. Putting aside the massively depressing implication that Warner recognizes this attitude because she believes it to be somehow written into the female condition, let's consider that there are any number of women who could have been John McCain's running mate -- from Olympia Snowe to Christine Todd Whitman to Kay Bailey Hutchison to Elizabeth Dole to Condoleezza Rice -- who would not have provoked this reaction. Democrats might well have been repulsed and infuriated by these women's policy positions. But we would not have been sitting around worrying about how scared they looked.

In her piece, Warner diagnoses Palin with a case of "Impostor Syndrome," positing that admirers who watched her sitting across from world leaders at the U.N. last week were recognizing that "she can't possibly do it all -- the kids, the special-needs baby, the big job, the big conversations with foreign leaders. And neither could they." Seriously? Do we have to drag out a list of women who miraculously have found a way to manage to balance many of these factors -- Hillary Clinton? Nancy Pelosi? Michelle Bachelet? -- and could still explain the Bush Doctrine without breaking into hives? This is not breaking my heart. It is breaking my spirit.

The Atlantic's Coates takes a far smarter, but ultimately still too gentle, approach to Palin in his blog. He writes, compassionately, "There are a lot of us lefties who are guffawing right now and are happy to see Palin seemingly stumbling drunkenly from occasional interview to occasional interview." Coates asserts that McCain "[tossed] her to the wolves" and notes that while she surely had some agency in this whole mess, "where I am from the elders protect you, and pull you back when you've gone too far, when your head has gotten too big."

Where I come from, a woman -- and especially a woman governor with executive experience -- doesn't have to rely on any elder or any man to protect her and pull her ass out of the fire. She can make a decision all on her own. (Palin was more than happy to tell Charlie Gibson that she made her decision to join the McCain ticket without blinking.) I agree with Coates that the McCain camp was craven, sexist and disrespectful in its choice of Palin, but I don't agree that the Alaska governor was a passive victim of their Machiavellian plotting. A very successful woman, Palin has the wherewithal to move forward consciously. What she did was move forward thoughtlessly and overconfidently, without considering that her abilities or qualifications would ever be questioned.

Christopher Orr writes sympathetically about the scenario that Palin may have envisioned, in which she tours the country on the wave of adoration that buoyed her out of St. Paul and through a post-convention victory lap. In his mind, she might well have continued to give winning, grinning interviews, charming the pants off regular folks all across the country, if the accursed McCain campaign hadn't nervously locked her in a no-press-allowed tower. Orr compares Palin to a talented athlete who, as a result of being over-coached, doesn't soar to new physical heights but instead gets "broken down, [loses] confidence in his game, [becomes] tentative, second guessing himself even to the point of paralysis."

Surely if Palin's political muscles were as taut and supple as Orr suspects, the campaign would not have been so quick to put her on a special training regimen.

It was so predictable that we would get to a pity-poor-helpless-Sarah phase. The press was already warming up for it on the day McCain announced her as his running mate, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell speculated that McCain's choice was designed to declaw scrappy Joe Biden, whose aggressive style would come off as bullying next to the sweet hockey mom from Alaska. Now, of course, we know about the hockey moms and the pit bulls; the more-powerful-than-expected Palin juggernaut forestalled the pity/victim/mean boy/poor Sarah phase.

So here it is, finally. And as unpleasant as it may be to watch the humiliation of a woman who waltzed into a spotlight too strong to withstand, I flat out refuse to be manipulated into another stage of gendered regress -- back to the pre-Pelosi, pre-Hillary days when girls couldn't stand the heat and so were shooed back to the kitchen.

Sarah Palin is no wilting flower. She is a politician who took the national stage and sneered at the work of community activists. She boldly tries to pass off incuriosity and lassitude as regular-people qualities, thereby doing a disservice to all those Americans who also work two jobs and do not come from families that hand out passports and backpacking trips, yet still manage to pick up a paper and read about their government and seek out experience and knowledge.

When you stage a train wreck of this magnitude -- trying to pass one underqualified chick off as another highly qualified chick with the lame hope that no one will notice -- well, then, I don't feel bad for you.

When you treat women as your toys, as gullible and insensate pawns in your Big Fat Presidential Bid -- or in Palin's case, in your Big Fat Chance to Be the First Woman Vice President Thanks to All the Cracks Hillary Put in the Ceiling -- I don't feel bad for you.

When you don't take your own career and reputation seriously enough to pause before striding onto a national stage and lying about your record of opposing a Bridge to Nowhere or using your special-needs child to garner the support of Americans in need of healthcare reform you don't support, I don't feel bad for you.

When you don't have enough regard for your country or its politics to cram effectively for the test -- a test that helps determine whether or not you get to run that country and participate in its politics -- I don't feel bad for you.

When your project is reliant on gaining the support of women whose reproductive rights you would limit, whose access to birth control and sex education you would curtail, whose healthcare options you would decrease, whose civil liberties you would take away and whose children and husbands and brothers (and sisters and daughters and friends) you would send to war in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and wherever else you saw fit without actually understanding international relations, I don't feel bad for you.

I don't want to be played by the girl-strings anymore. Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness. It's a disservice to minority populations of every stripe whose place in the political spectrum has been unfairly spotlighted as mere tokenism; it is a disservice to women throughout this country who have gone from watching a woman who -- love her or hate her -- was able to show us what female leadership could look like to squirming in front of their televisions as they watch the woman sent to replace her struggle to string a complete sentence together.

In fact, the only people I feel sorry for are Americans who invested in a hopeful, progressive vision of female leadership, but who are now stuck watching, verbatim, a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

Palin is tough as nails. She will bite the head off a moose and move on. So, no, I don't feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for women who have to live with what she and her running mate have wrought.

Estelle Getty, who many of you remember as the zany "old" mother Sophia of Bea Arthur on "The Golden Girls," died Tuesday morning at the age of 84. She had been suffering from dementia and died peacefully at her home in Santa Monica.

She was the poster child for many of us of "it's never too late" to make it in Hollywood. Not only did she win an Emmy in 1988 for her role as Sophia, she also won a Golden Globe Award and an American Comedy Award.

Getty's career really began when she was cast at the age of 47 in an off-Broadway musical and was jettisoned to stardom in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Torch Song Trilogy," playing Harvey Fierstein's acerbic mother.

Check out the Comic Spotlight and our Videos for classic moments in Estelle's career. She will be greatly missed and leaves a great legacy behind her in the history of the funniest women EVER!