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Clara Fraser Wins Big in Seattle

After eight years of tortuous litigation, Clara Fraser, a prominent Seattle socialist-feminist organizer, speaker, writer, teacher and theorist, has emerged the total victor in her celebrated sex and political ideology discrimination suit against Seattle City Light. A string of rulings by King County Superior Court Judge William C. Goodloe that began August 9, 1982 and ended February 4, 1983 has won Fraser her former job as Education and Training Coordinator. She also was awarded a sum total of $135,265 for seven years of back wages, benefits, expenses and damages, and $52,390 for 21⁄2 years of lawyer fees and costs.

Fraser, who recently celebrated her 60th birthday,

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came to Seattle in 1946. She became an aircraft electrician on the Boeing assembly line and an activist in Aero Mechanics Lodge 751 of the International Association of Machinists. She fought for first-class membership for blacks, a demand finally won during the Boeing strike of 1948. She encouraged women workers to become involved in the union and during the strike, when the company got an injunction against mass picketing, she set up a special picket line of striking mothers with their children-a baby stroller brigade. The press loved it, and the police didn't harass the strange pickets.

In 1966, Clara and the entire Seattle Branch of the Socialist Workers Party, of which she was a member,

Salvadoran Woman Speaks at Rally

Guadalupe Gonzales, a member of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) of El Salvador, was in Cleveland recently to foster support for the guerillas in El Salvador. She spoke May 4 at WomenSpace and with various members of the media and local political groups, and was the main speaker at a May 7 rally sponsored by the Cleveland Central American Solidarity Committee.

Guadalupe is one of a team of five Salvadorans now in the U.S. who travel to various cities and university campuses in support of the revolution. Based in New York during the past two years, Guadalupe has traveled extensively throughout the U.S., and before that spent a year in Mexico. Another team of Salvadorans is in Washington, D.C., educating Congresspersons about conditions in El Salvador. Now 25 years old, Guadalupe has been working politically for six years. Her family is in El Salvador, and she plans to return there.

According to Guadalupe, the immediate priority for women in El Salvador is to unite with men against their common oppressor, the fascist government, in support of the revolution. She feels that women's rights cannot at this time be separated from the economic problems that beset all Salvadorans. Women have been integrated into the Salvadoran economy, but only to the extent that they are exploited with all other members of the family to harvest coffee, El Salvador's main product. Whole families go to the plantation for four months of the year with the women not only harvesting, but cooking meals and doing other menial tasks for no additional pay. During the other eight months of the year, many women do cottage industry at home while the men work in the cities.

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There are some women's organizations in El Salvador, such as the National Association of Teachers and the Association of Women of the Market, but they are exceptions. When in 1981 the government of El Salvador banned the wearing of trousers by women, the Women of the Market defied the ban, for practical as well, as political reasons. Members of the National Guard were sent to the marketplace to remove the trousers from the women forcibly.

After the revolution is won, Guadalupe believes that women will have equal rights with men, pointing out that in El Salvador, unlike the U.S., the rights of women are protected by the constitution. She pointed out that women are in command positions in the FALN, the FDR and the rural revolutionary move-

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ment, with 35-40 percent of the membership of political organizations being women.

As a result of their political activity, many Salvadoran women are being jailed or killed. There are three jails for political prisoners in El Salvador, two for men and one for women, and the Women's Section of Political Prisoners of Amnesty Interna-

Photo by Steve Cagan

tional estimates that 46,000 Salvadorans have been killed by the fascist government, a large percentage of them women.

Women in El Salvador, a strongly Catholic country, are sharply divided by class. Right-wing women, mostly the wives and relatives of landowners, support the fascist ideology of their class and recently demonstrated in support of the government, in skirts and high heels, complete with personal guards who brought machine guns to protect them.

It is difficult to predict what will happen to women's rights in El Salvador after the revolution, especially with such strong cultural forces to battle as Catholicism and the socially subservient position of women, but Guadalupe feels these issues must wait until the revolution is won, when she feels strongly women will be equal partners in a new society.

For more information or to send contributions, contact the Central American Solidarity Committee, 3206 Bridge Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44113.

split from the national organization to found the Freedom Socialist Party whose program was based on the issues of black liberation, women's emancipation, a multi-issue approach in the anti-war movement, and internal party democracy. In 1969, she was asked to help women strikers at the Perfect Photo Plant. She mobilized a large picket line of supporters and was arrested in a mass arrest. She won this case in court, on appeal. She also helped set up the first Free University class on "Women in Society," which became the first Women's Studies class at the University of Washington. Radical Women, the first socialist feminist organization in the country, also grew out of this class, with Clara's help, in 1967. Radical Women went on to become a nationwide organization.

In 1973, Clara was hired by Seattle City Light as its first Education Coordinator. One of her major assignments was to set up a pioneering affirmative action program to place ten women into the electrical trades, which she did. In 1974, the City Light workforce conducted at 11-day walkout to protest the anti-labor policies of Superintendent Gordon Vickery. Clara became a leading spokesperson for the workers, and was chairperson of the workers' committee that negotiated an employee Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. However, Vickery and the Mayor illegally refused to implement the bill, and suddenly terminated Clara. Once she was dismissed, eight of the ten women Electrical Trades Trainees were also summarily fired (they were rehired in 1976 after a class action sex discrimination suit).

Judge Goodloe's hallmark decision for workers' rights vindicated Fraser's allegation that City Light illegally fired her for her pro-labor and affirmative action advocacy on the job and her off the job affiliations with Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party. He upheld her right to free speech and association in the workplace and her related right to challenge management's ideology.

Fraser had won her case on two previous occasions, but one defeat forced her into Superior Court. In 1977, the Seattle Human Rights Department concluded a two-year investigation of her claim and upheld all her charges. Two years later, in June 1979, all parties in the case agreed to a conciliated settlement: $30,000 and a job in the Human Rights Department. But this was vetoed by the City Council in a 6-2 decision, forcing the case to proceed to a hearing, which began in January 1980.

For forty days over a 4-month period, Hearing Examiner Sally Pasette and three volunteer lay panelists, all women, listened to testimony from Fraser and a host of management and employee witnesses. During this hearing, City Light changed its argument that Fraser was "laid off" because of a 5 percent budget reduction and accused her of incompetence, abrasiveness, insubordination, dishonesty, theft and forgery! Dona Cloud, the assis-

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Women Win Pulitzers

Four women are among the 1983 Pulitzer Prize winners: Alice Walker for her novel The Color Pur ple; Marsha Norman for her play 'Night, Mother; Susan Sheehan for Is There No Place On Earth For Me?; and Ellen T. Zwilich for her musical composi tion. Walker is the first black woman to win the award and Zwilich the first woman to win the musical prize. Walker's novel, the story of two sisters, one a missionary in Africa, the other a child. bride in the South, is written in the form of letters. Norman's play is about a woman trying to talk her daughter out of suicide. Sheehan's book is an ac count of a schizophrenic woman.

-Boston Globe/Sojourner