Equality of rights under the law

shall not be denied or abridged

BY PAT SUMMERS, Special to the (Trenton) Times, Nov 07, 2006

Much like the woman in the classic poster, Dorie Rothman's rolling up her sleeves to work on another event this one, an afternoon about women's heroism and history and equal rights.

On Sunday, the ERA Education Fund Inc. will present a Women's Veterans Day Celebration "honoring New Jersey women heroes in the struggle towards equality."

It will be an occasion for looking back and looking ahead.  It will also mark a great woman's birthday and promote a constitutional amendment many people believe is already there.  An hourlong movie, "Rosie the Riveter," will be one of two films shown.  A second film traces the steps toward women's suffrage.

Those who come to the celebration will share a look back at the millions of American women, known as "production soldiers," who answered their government's call during World War II to "free a man for combat."  Trained for "men's jobs" in manufacturing plants and shipyards, they learned new skills and made major contributions to the war effort.  For many of them, this experience in 1942-44 changed their lives.

Rothman, president of the ERA Education Fund and a former "Rosie the Riveter," was one such woman.  Now a psychotherapist based in Lawrenceville, 60 years ago she took the bus from her home in West Philadelphia to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she worked for about two years often with a battleship, destroyer or aircraft carrier docked 30 feet away, awaiting repair.

A feminist and activist since the 1960s, Rothman talks easily about women's issues and history.  This weekend's celebration is a depar ture from the usual Aug. 26 Women's Equality Day events she has helped organize.  "Women veterans have never been honored the way they should be, and neither have New Jersey's women heroes," she says.

New Jersey's women heroes

Clara Barton (1821-1912), will be one woman recognized Sunday.  Known for organizing the American Red Cross, she had also started the state's first free public school in Bordentown while a New Jersey resident.  New Jersey native Alice Paul (1885-1977) will be honored, too.  She worked toward passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 and soon after that, articulated the need for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

In crediting Paul for getting women the vote and drafting the proposed ERA, Rothman says, "If we get that, too, one person will have done two great things to turn America around."

The celebration will also be a birthday party for Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), an early feminist and philosopher.  She wrote the "Declaration of Sentiments," adopted at the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, and long partnered with Susan B. Anthony for women's causes.

The "Women's Veterans Day Celebration" is expected to attract women veterans of military service and "production soldiers" from the Second World War -- often symbolized by the "We Can Do It!" image that came to be equated with "Rosie the Riveter."  Known as "Rosebuds," the daughters or granddaughters of "Rosies" also are welcome.

Rothman will share her "Rosie the Riveter" experiences.  Soon after President Roosevelt announced the attack on Pearl Harbor, she remembers the Navy's call for apprentice mechanics.  Not long out of high school at the time, she joined millions of other women who went to work to support the war effort.  In her job at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Rothman was trained to use tools very carefully:  hammers, screw drivers, punch presses, snips, grinders and riveters "anything men used, we learned."

For the first time in 2,000 years, women were invited into shipyards, she remembers thinking while feeling like a woman at the beginning of a whole new era.  She wore heavy work shoes and slacks ("Once you wear slacks, you never go back to dresses!") for her job as a sheet metal worker.

Two lifelong lessons came out of her Navy Yard stint.  First, one of her bosses told her "Never take a tool out of another person's hand" something she had just done, half in jest.  With that, she learned about recognizing others' boundaries.  Later, when art teachers would say, "Let me show you," she resented it.  "You can show me, but until I say it's OK, don't you do it."

And then, one day after a co- worker had wished her shift was over, a supervisor admonished her:  "Don't do that you're wishing your life away."  That was Rothman's introduction to the idea of living in the here and now; living every minute of every day.

No women need apply

The production soldiers' work ended without fanfare.  "Of course," Rothman says now.  "It was a job.  We were all in it to save the world for democracy."

After the war, when she tried to find work at sheet metal shops, she was told, "We don't hire women."

"That was it.  I got the whole message.  It's back to the kitchen, back to what it was before," she says.  So for the next 10 years she waitressed her way through school, earned her degree from Rutgers University and became a psychotherapist.  She married and had two children -- daughter Lynne Lyon is an adoption therapist and son Tony Rothman is a physicist at Princeton University.

A turning point in Rothman's life occurred in 1969 (three years after the National Organization for Women was founded) at an American Psychological Association convention in Miami.  There she heard four words -- "feminism, chauvinism, macho and sexism" that "blew her apart."  Suddenly, she understood "stuff I'd been mad about all my life."

"Boy, oh, boy, did that clear my head up," Rothman says.

She realized the sexism she had experienced "wasn't my imagination!  It was built in by law, by habit," she says, citing the quotas severely limiting women's admission to law and med schools, for instance.  "When you can name it, you can define it and change it," she declares.  "The woman who came back from that convention was not the same woman who left for it."

From membership in the Princeton NOW chapter, Rothman co-founded the ERA Campaign Network a few years ago.  The revived chance for adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment had given new heart to its backers.  She now heads the ERA Education Fund, a branch of the network.

Alice Paul first drafted the ERA in 1923, the year Rothman was born, and she says, "I'm still waiting for my birthday present!" adding, "I'll get it passed before I die or die trying."

The Women's Veterans Day Celebration will take place Sunday from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at the Freedom Project Building, 1 Freedom Blvd., Lawrence.  Suggested donation:  $10 per person.  Reservations appreciated but walk- ins welcome.  For information, call (609) 882-6815.

For more information on the Equal Rights Amendment, look on line (www.4ERA.org).