The Only Woman in the Room: The Norma Paulus Story by Norma Paulus, with Gail Wells and Pat McCord Amacher

Abstract

134 OHQ vol. 119, no. 1 THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM: THE NORMA PAULUS STORY by Norma Paulus with Gail Wells and Pat McCord Amacher Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2017. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. 224 pages. $24.95, paper. In the 1980s and 1990s, Norma Paulus was one of the most well-known politicians in Oregon. And she was by far the most prominent woman among the moderate-to-liberal Republicans who once dominated statewide elected office. Her career spanned the glory years of such GOP stars as Gov. Tom McCall and Sen. Mark Hatfield as well as the later ascendancy of the Republican right. After serving two terms as secretary of state, she lost a hard-fought race for governor in 1986 (which also marked the beginning of the so-far-unbroken Democratic control of that office). Paulus was later elected superintendent of public instruction. But in 1995, a far more conservative Gordon Smith trounced her in a Republican primary for a special U.S. Senate election. It was clear that the GOP had passed her by. Gradually, mention of her faded from political articles discussing the evolution of the Oregon Republican. This new “sort-of” autobiography promises to help preserve the Paulus name. After recording several oral histories with the Oregon Historical Society, Paulus hired veteran political writer Russell Sadler in 2010 to help her write the story of her life. That venture faltered two years later as her “energy and memory were both waning,” according to Gail Wells and Pat McCord Amacher, the two writers who took up the project and produced what they call an “affectionate portrait” of Paulus (p. 11). The resulting book skips lightly over much of the politics swirling around her career. There is little attempt to explain why and how a progressive form of Republicanism was so successful in Oregon. The chapter on her loss to Democrat Neil Goldschmidt was also surprisingly brief. Wells and Amacher paint a vivid picture of her political successes and of her striking liberalism on issues ranging from the environment to women’s rights. It is difficult in today’s political climate to imagine someone with Paulus’s views finding a home in the GOP. “The Republicans were the ones that were exciting,” the authors quote Paulus recalling of her first ventures into campaign work in the 1960s. “They were the good thinkers, the moderates. They were the ones who wanted to be in government for all the right reasons” (p. 53). Paulus was elected to the state House in 1970 and soon became a noted participant in the decade’s major environmental battles, particularly the passage in 1973 of Oregon’s landmark statewide land-use planning controls. She was also heavily involved in the state’s approval of the Equal Rights Amendment (which failed to gain enough support nationally to become part of the U.S. Constitution) and in a slew of bills that helped bring gender quality to Oregon’s laws. Starting in 1977, Paulus began the first of two terms as secretary of state. It was in that job that she perhaps had the most impact on Oregon. Wells and Amacher describe how Paulus held the first vote-by-mail elections in Oregon and how she helped modernize the state’s somnambulant audit system. Among other targets, her auditors went after questionable bidding practices by timber companies operating in state lands. She was never more in the public eye than in 1984, when she tangled with the Rajneeshee community in central Oregon. The group was accused of massive voter registration fraud in their drive to gain political power in Wasco County (opponents were also accused of trying to pad the voter rolls). Paulus responded by sending a corps of volunteer attorneys into the county to vet the new registrants. This is all useful material to anyone interested in Oregon political history. While it is written in the third person, the Paulus book is reminiscent of autobiographies of two other pioneering women in Oregon politics — Barbara Roberts, the state’s first woman governor, and Betty Roberts, the state’s first woman Supreme Court justice. Wells and Amacher succeed in presenting a detailed view...