You might not think that Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford, who formed a reading club in junior high school and named herself president, would need a lot of encouragement to excel at anything she put her mind to.
But back in the 1950s, in an age when Father knew best and Mother stayed home (if she wasn`t a teacher or nurse), others who had a say in her future-in this case the students of Boyden High School in Salisbury, N.C.-believed a girl`s place was still in the home and not at the helm.
They rejected Liddy, as she had decided at age 2 she should be called, for student body president. It was only one of numerous occasions on which she has been told that, as bright and articulate and energetic as she was, her place wasn`t with the men who run the world.
U.S. Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole crinkled her eyes with amusement at another one of those memories.
”I walked into the Harvard Law School-this was the fall of 1962-and I`m 1 of 24 women in a class of 550,” she said one afternoon while chatting in her office overlooking the Capitol.
”The first words I heard (from a male student), literally, were,
`Elizabeth, what are you doing here? What are you doing in this law school?
Don`t you know that there are men who would give their right arm to be here, men who would use their legal education.` ”
With the outcome of her legal education now quite apparent, it would be unfair to Dole to speculate whether she could have overcome the insults, jumped the hurdles, pushed aside the barriers without any help from role models and mentors. Even she doesn`t know.
From the time she was president of the third-grade bird club, she was following her instincts, she says.
”I sort of grew up with that kind of curiosity and interest in things, whether it was books or whether it was student government. Political science then just sort of folded in with it. That led me on to law school, and then Washington was like a magnet to me. And I really think it was just following my instincts rather than having a blueprint or a game plan.”
She knew what she wanted to do with her life but help she had, she appreciatively admits, from a small group of women who served as guideposts in her long government career, which has lasted a quarter century and shows no signs of slowing down.
”I think clearly they`ve had a definite impact on my life,” Dole says.
From Dole`s mother, who encouraged Liddy to be the best at anything she did (though her goal was for her daughter to marry and raise a family), to a friendly word from a rare woman in the U.S. Senate to a presidential appointee who pushed her to the forefront, mentors have played important roles in Dole`s achievements.
Ambitious men have long known the benefits of making contacts, staying in touch with school chums, networking with colleagues and working with the elder statesmen in their field to advance their careers, according to Sharon Rodine, chair of the National Women`s Political Caucus, which encourages women for elective and appointive office.
”Women have realized only in the last decade how important mentoring is,” Rodine said.
Though Dole didn`t realize it at the time, the mentoring role began with her mother, Mary Cathey, who gave up a possible career as a professional music instructor to marry John Hanford.
”My mother was the kind of person who, if I finished my homework, she`d say, `Have you thought about entering this essay contest or doing some of the extra things that will broaden your horizons, stretch you and help you grow and learn?` ”
The Hanfords thought their daughter would study home economics at Duke University, which her older brother, John, had attended, but Liddy had another idea, to major in political science.
At Duke, a kindly English literature professor, Florence Brinkley, helped guide the eager student. As student government president-she finally won an election-Dole worked with the school administration and Dean Brinkley to create a leadership training program for women.
Dole didn`t know exactly what she wanted to do with her life after graduation from Duke. She worked a year in the library of Harvard Law School, spent a summer studying at Oxford University at Dean Brinkley`s suggestion, got a master`s degree in education at Harvard in 1960 and took a job working on Capitol Hill in a senator`s office.
Her time in the Capitol gave Dole a chance to seek out for inspiration the few women officeholders.
Her favorite visit was with Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), one of only two women in the Senate. ”She was very gracious about seeing me and advised me then to go to law school,” Dole said. ”I`m sure that has played a role in my career to have that background.”
To the White House
It was another two years before Dole followed that advice and submitted an application to law school. Her parents, still believing she would become a fine homemaker, were surprised. ”I remember my mother saying, `Well, that`s not exactly what your dad and I had in mind.` ” Dole recalls. ”But she certainly didn`t try and turn me off to it. She just made known that that was not their preference but if that`s what I wanted to do they would back me up.”
Though Dole failed to become a White House fellow as she had hoped upon graduation from law school in 1965, a contact she made in the competition led to a job in the Johnson White House in 1968 in the Office of Consumer Affairs under the leadership of Betty Furness.
The change of administrations brought a change of names-to the President`s Committee on Consumer Interests-and a change in leadership. President Nixon appointed Virginia Knauer, head of Pennsylvania`s consumer office, in a move that ultimately had great import for Dole.
In many government agencies and congressional offices, aides and assistants are not allowed to be quoted in the press or appear in public, so their bosses get all the publicity. Knauer was just the opposite to Dole, who was named her deputy.
”Virginia is a very unselfish person,” Dole said about the woman she has called her surrogate mother. ”She is a boss who wants her deputy to have every opportunity, every experience, giving you that opportunity to learn and grow under her mentorship.”
Knauer had Dole testify before Congress, speak to the business community, conduct press conferences. ”Just everything she did I did, too, as her alter ego,” Dole said. ”That was a tremendous learning experience.”
Knauer was responsible for two other advances in Dole`s life. She introduced her friend to a handsome Kansas senator named Bob Dole in 1972 and proposed that she fill a vacancy on the Federal Trade Commission in 1973.
A new mentor
Marriage to Bob Dole in 1975 did not slow her career, as her husband represented a new kind of mentor for her. They decided from the beginning that they would try to be a two-career family, encouraging each other`s successes and sharing responsibilities at home, a two-bedroom apartment in the Watergate complex.
”When I`ve got late working hours or weekend trips that are going to take me away, he absolutely understands and is totally supportive,” Dole said. ”He just takes up some of the responsibilities and does them, whether it`s walking the dog at night or making the bed in the morning.”
”It`s just a matter of practicality,” Sen. Dole said in an interview in his minority leader`s office down the hall from the Senate chamber. ”Not that I cook that much, but I can put the TV dinners in the stove. I know when 40 minutes are up. It helps her. It helps me.”
Elizabeth Dole has made some decisions that have rankled some of her colleagues and leaders of the women`s movement.
She took a leave of absence from the trade commission when her husband won the GOP vice presidential nomination in 1976, resigned from the FTC when he ran for the presidential nomination in 1980 and resigned as transportation secretary during his abortive bid for the 1988 nomination.
Sen. Dole said they approached the campaigns as ”joint ventures.”
”Opportunities were there for her, too, if we would have been successful,” he said.
But Bob Dole`s losing campaign against the eventual winner in 1980, Ronald Reagan, and again against the eventual winner in 1988, George Bush, did not harm-and some analysts said they helped-Elizabeth Dole`s upward mobility as the new Republican presidents mended fences with the still-powerful Senate leader.
For President Reagan, she served first as head of the White House Office of Public Liaison and then as transportation secretary. Then President-elect Bush named her labor secretary on Christmas Eve, 1988.
In her offices, along with all of her governmental duties, Dole felt a responsibility to return in a personal way and policy way some of the help she had received during her career. ”I call them sort of my extended family,”
she says. ”I feel like because Margaret Chase Smith and a couple of others back then were so open to sitting down and talking with a young woman out of college that they didn`t know from Adam, that I really feel a responsibility to do the same thing.”
While in the Nixon White House, Dole helped form Executive Women in Government to help women entering public service. At the trade commission she fought for equal credit opportunities for women and held networking sessions in her office.
She served awhile in the Reagan White House as head of the Coordinating Council on Women to increase opportunities for women in government.
As transportation secretary-and the first woman to head a branch of the armed services, the Coast Guard-she instituted a program of seminars, retreats and training programs to help women move up the career ladder.
As labor secretary, 62 percent of the positions she can fill by appointment are held by women or minorities. She also views herself as a mentor for ”at-risk” teenagers. They receive help through her department`s job training efforts. And, along with her husband, she has taken a personal interest in one of the local programs in Washington.
A new initiative will explore the so-called ”glass ceiling” in business, where women and minorities still make up only 5 percent of top management.
And Dole is encouraging the careers of several individuals, among them two former congressional staffers, Jennifer Dorn and Kathleen Harrington, whom she has spotted along the way and named to various positions and most recently promoted to assistant labor secretaries.
Government, sensitive to public opinion and operating at its lower levels strictly by civil service guidelines, has given Dole more opportunities than she might have had in the 1960s had she tried to break into the corporate world or seek a partnership in a major law firm, she believes.
”I would be remiss if I didn`t say that yes, being a woman in what really is still a man`s world is not always easy but overall I very honestly feel I have been fortunate,” she says.
Her office is in the Frances Perkins Building, named for the first woman labor secretary, in fact the first woman Cabinet member, who served Franklin Roosevelt from 1933-45.
Another of her predecessors, George Shultz, made the progression from labor secretary to treasury secretary to secretary of state. No woman has made such a progression to the uppermost cabinet positions at the Defense, State, Treasury and Justice Departments.
Asked if there is a glass ceiling in government, she said diplomatically, ”I think in the government more and more we see opportunities opening to women at all levels and all jobs. President Bush has appointed more women than any other president.”
Indeed, 21.4 percent of his appointments during his first year were women, and 15.9 percent were women in the first half of 1990, according to the Congressional Research Service. Reagan`s comparable figures were 13 percent in his first term and 11 percent in his second.
But if that is progress, there still are only two women in the Cabinet, Dole and U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, and there are only two women senators-Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.)-the same number as when Margaret Chase Smith advised Dole to go to law school.
”I guess my hope would be that sometime not too far in the future the words `role model` would not be necessary anymore, that we could have enough women coming in to policymaking positions that that`s not such an urgent need,” says Dole, adding:
”I don`t think we have reached the millennium. I do think there still is a need for role models, there is still a need to think about ways that we can be helpful in reaching out to younger women to maybe help them avoid a few pitfalls or guide them a bit in terms of following in our footsteps in government service.”
And when a young woman comes knocking on her door seeking career advice, Dole says, ”My door is open.”
