Affirmative action for women: accomplishments and limits
Cannon discusses the impact of affirmative action for women, which she worked to implement as mayor of Raleigh during the late 1970s. Cannon argues that although women had made advances in local government and in other leadership arenas, such as education and business, there was still much headway to be made. She suggests that perhaps the community was still not yet ready to accept women's changing status and points to her own failed bid for re-election in 1979 as evidence.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Isabella Cannon, June 27, 1989. Interview C-0062. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- KATHRYN NASSTROM:
-
Well, actually, I found this interesting, the affirmative action in city
government programs, and am I right in concluding from what
you've said that if you hadn't been there pushing
for these things, then the status quo would have remained the same?
- ISABELLA CANNON:
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There would have been some [change]. I added some impetus. Immediately
after I went in, I went into office in December, and in January,
affirmative action came back at us. We were out of compliance. If we
didn't get in compliance, it was going to cost us some
fourteen million dollars. Immediately, we set up mechanisms, albeit with
a lot of opposition to it, but here was this money. We had to get in
compliance. We were just dreadfully out of compliance with the
affirmative action, and the revenue sharing
depended on the affirmative action, so that was one of the most
difficult things and one of the things I had not really had the
background. I had to do an awful lot of work on that and had to rely on
the very competent people. I have said some critical things of the City
Manager, but the City Manager was a professional and was able to pull
some of that together in a tremendously good way. We were given quite a
long time, and we did get in compliance. We still do not have in our
city government good affirmative action. We have only one department
that has a woman head [of the department]. We have now one Assistant
City Manager, but we have very few, we don't have enough
women as heads of departments. This happens to be true, of course,
through places like N.C. State University, and you get what I call the
"A Train," the "Assistant," the
"Acting," the "Associate." So we are
still not giving full credit to the abilities of women. There are many
women now in city government, some of them in good positions, some of
them like inspectors and so on, but still the bulk of the work and the
administrative positions are held by men. So I gave some impetus to it.
I cannot take the full credit for it. I happened to think up the things,
particularly the things about the fire fighters. I had to give added
help to the police officers.
- KATHRYN NASSTROM:
-
Does it take someone in the position, say, of the Mayor or the City
Manager to very actively be going after affirmative action, otherwise it
gets stuck in this middle ground?
- ISABELLA CANNON:
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Yes. It has to be more the Mayor than the City Manager. The City Council
employs three people: the Clerk, who is a woman
and a fantastic person, the City Attorney, and the City Manager. Those
are the only three people that the City Council employs or can hire or
fire. The City Council sets policy. The City Manager, of course,
implements the policy. These creative things, primarily, have to come
from the Mayor or from the Council members. It can come as a consensus
from the Council, but Mayor, being in the visible position, it usually
has to come there. But implementation and the details, of course, are
handled by the professionals. We have some fine professionals in the
City Manager's office. We have now a City Manager and three
Assistants, one of those being a woman, one being black.
You've got that sort of representation.
- KATHRYN NASSTROM:
-
Is it possible to answer this question, very general, of what would it
take to get women, and then you were mentioning blacks too, past the
"A Train" into these very top level positions? Is that
too general a question or do you have a sense of what it would take to
accomplish this?
- ISABELLA CANNON:
-
No, I think it's a question that most of us wrestle with in
many areas. For instance, N. C. State, the federal government came down
on N. C. State. They looked at the salary levels and saw that the levels
are incredibly poor. The differentiation between women and men, not at
only N.C. State, at Chapel Hill. It's even worse at Chapel
Hill. The number of women who are heads of departments, we can go
farther to our University system. There is not a woman head. There has
been a woman at the one that you'd associate women more with,
the one at Winston Salem, but there has been only one woman head at
Charlotte, and she didn't last very
long there as head. Our community college system, I don't
know the numbers on that, if there are any women. For a while, there
were no women. Now, I have talked to Bob Scott who is the former
Governor, and he pointed out to me that this has to come from the local
community. I know that Neil McLeod was head of the community college
down at Martin College, but she was too liberal for the area, so the
local community has a great deal to do on that. To go back to your
question, perhaps more aggressiveness on the part of women, though if
they're too aggressive then they're
"pushy women" quote unquote. Women are coming along in
the pipeline, coming up the pipeline towards the head positions.
They're not getting all the support they should get on it.
It's too slow. I don't know of any women bank
presidents in North Carolina. There may be. There's a heck of
a lot of assistant vice presidents at () places.
Perhaps that's the pipeline. Perhaps lack of trust, perhaps
women haven't been in the business world long enough to
establish the trust that needs to be established to give women
confidence to be president of a bank, president of Wachovia, First
Union, or NCNB. I don't see that happening any time soon. I
get the Board of Directors annual reports. There are very few women.
Occasionally, Juanita Kreps gets in, but it's the exception.
I don't know. I look at the fact that I am the only woman
Mayor of Raleigh in almost 200 years of history. Unless a woman declares
this year, I will go onto the 200 as being the only woman who has ever
offered herself. You see, it's not just that the citizenry
can elect a woman - a woman has to offer
herself. It never occurred to me as anything historic when I did it. I
was just a furious, angry citizen, and I wanted to see something done. I
was not running as a female or as an older citizen. I was just running
as somebody mad about what was happening, and I felt like I could do
something about it. So the identification as a woman or an older citizen
was not there in my thinking at that time. In fact, nobody knew how old
I was, not because I was ashamed of it, but because I never thought of
it, and when it came out that I was seventy-three, it was a total shock
to people. "I didn't know you were that
old!" The newspaper, every time they put my name down, they put
my age beside it. Women have got to take more leadership roles. They do
run. Wilma Woodard has run and has been defeated. She's won,
and she's been defeated. We have women running for the
Legislature, some of them winning and some of them losing. We have now,
at the moment, four women on the City Council, which is a good
indication of the interest in women in the position, and
we've got a lot of women who are going to be running this
fall for, certainly, I know a number that are going to be running for
the at-large position, two at-large positions. Women need, themselves,
to have more confidence in themselves, be longer in the pipeline, be
longer in the business community, be more active in the political
community. Places like N.C. State, I don't know why there
aren't more women, and at Chapel Hill, more women heads of
departments. We have just had a woman who was a Nobel Prize winner. I
saw President Friday's interview of the male Nobel prize
winner, and no mention of the co-winner who was the woman.
Why, why did President Friday not do that? I need to
contact him and say, "Why? Why did you ignore the woman who was
the co-winner?" So, again, our society is still dragging our
feet. Their perception of women as leaders and as trustworthy has not
yet come. And I got defeated when I ran again. The citizens who had
supported me did not realize that I needed continuing support. Here was
the all-American young man - athletic, good looking, family
background. He defeated me very narrowly, by about 1000 votes, and only,
I think, by the fact that he was able to persuade the Council to change
the election from November to October.