Former EvCC director keeps an eye on women’s rights

Joan Tucker is a painter now, a painter and a poet. At 72, she is leaving the battles of her earlier years to younger people.

That doesn’t mean she has given up the mantle of feminism. Nor does it mean Tucker has forgotten heady times in the 1980s when she was director of the Women’s Center at Everett Community College.

“I gave up doing the activism. Younger people are perfectly capable,” said Tucker, who now lives in Lacey and has an art studio with her partner. “There’s a time to chill out and heal and plant flowers, and a time to be in the middle of the fray,” she said Monday.

In this first week of Women’s History Month — International Women’s Day is Sunday — I found an interview with Tucker recorded in 2010 as part of the “Voices of EvCC” oral history project. The Library of Congress Women’s History Month website is rich with stories from the distant past. Tucker reminds us how recently women were struggling for equality, and how that push continues today.

Tucker worked at EvCC from 1983 to 1994, and for much of that time was director of the Women’s Center. She moved on to Edmonds Community College, and retired in 2003.

She arrived at EvCC at a time when many women were turning to education. Re-entry students were often called “displaced homemakers.”

“The goals were hiring more women faculty, having more content about women’s lives in course work and honoring women,” she said.

Part of that era of feminism, Tucker said, was shedding light on issues that had long been hidden. “We gave everything a name, things that had been invisible. Those things didn’t have names — domestic violence, child abuse, glass ceilings. Rather, they were things happening to you,” she said. “There was a time when it wasn’t a crime to hit your wife. Women couldn’t get a loan without a husband’s blessing, or buy a car.”

Today, the college doesn’t have a separate Women’s Center, but instead a Diversity &Equity Center.

Maria Pena, who started in July as EvCC’s chief diversity officer, said the approach now “absolutely involves gender equity, and a more expanded definition of diversity.” Tucker and other predecessors “paved the way for an integrated effort to promote and advocate equity and social justice on campus, and in the larger community,” Pena said.

Rich Haldi, who retired from EvCC in 2008, was instrumental in the early days of campus women’s programs. A former vice president for students services, dean of students, and director of student activities, Haldi said the women’s movement at EvCC started in the 1970s when students formed a Women’s Interest Group, known as WIG.

He recalls hearing about women who had gone back to school, but felt so out of step with younger students that they ate lunch in their cars.

The student group evolved into the Women’s Center and programs that included a “Women on the Move” series of classes, Haldi said. Tucker’s assistant, Laura Hedges, was a major part of those programs and later became the director. Hedges died last year.

Women are now in the majority on campus. “Our college is like almost every college in the country, with more female students than male students,” said Katherine Schiffner, EvCC’s public relations director. In the 2013-14 academic year, the student body was 57 percent women, 43 percent men.

Pena points to clubs on campus to show how doors have opened. Those include the Society of Women Engineers, SLICE (Supporting Parents With Limited Income for College Education), and Women in Advanced Manufacturing. The college recently received a National Science Foundation grant to support female and under-represented students in advanced manufacturing programs, including outreach to high schools.

Not long ago, TV’s “Big Bang Theory” actress Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, who earns about $1 million per episode, told a Redbook magazine interviewer she doesn’t consider herself a feminist. Time magazine last year called feminism “the ‘F’ word” in a piece listing young celebrities who are divided over the term.

Tucker doesn’t mind that some young women don’t embrace the label.

“That doesn’t matter to me. I have a granddaughter who is 19. She’s taking on the world and can do anything,” Tucker said. What matters is that “they take care of themselves, won’t allow themselves to be abused, and expect to work for equal pay,” she said.

“They have their own issues. We were strident,” Tucker said. “You don’t need a bullhorn all the time. It’s a process of change.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.