March 12, 2009 Issue
Local Women Making History
Trailblazers Make Life Easier For Followers
Boone Mayor Loretta Clawson, in her fourth year as Boone’s second lady mayor, first ran for Town Council in 1997, where she served for eight years. Velma Burnley was mayor before her for seventeen years.
Loretta Clawson belongs to an elite—not because she wants to, or is elitist at heart. It’s because of numbers. Boone’s top citizen is one of only 17 percent of female mayors in North Carolina.
That reflects the 17 percent of women in Congress after the 2008 general election, which places the United States at 69th in world rankings of female political representation.
“There is sometimes difficulty in getting women to run for office,” said Clawson. “A lot of times they’ll say. ‘I don’t have time, I have family commitments.’ When I go to [mayoral] meetings, I am always outnumbered.”
Clawson, in her fourth year as Boone’s second lady mayor, first ran for Town Council in 1997, where she served for eight years. Velma Burnley was mayor before her for seventeen years.
“I think that was one of the reasons it was easier for me to step into the role,” said Clawson, acknowledging that women who blaze the trail make life easier for those who follow.
Clawson was the only woman on town council when first elected. Only a couple of women had served previously. Nowadays, Clawson said, “In Boone it’s easier for a woman to be perceived as someone who can lead. It’s a more progressive area. The university probably helps that. It’s much more difficult I think in the counties for women to run [and women] are lucky in Boone because we have three women on council and myself and two men.”
Clawson entered politics because, “I love people. I love solving problems. I love going to meetings. I feel that every meeting I go to I come away with something I didn’t know.”
Clawson was born and raised in Old Beech Mountain.
“Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’m a strong woman. We grew up without very much, we worked hard, [my mother] would can a thousand cans of food. That’s what we ate. We didn’t have electricity [or] water [or] a bathroom. It made us strong.”
The young Loretta Guy fell in love and married E.D. Clawson right out of high school 45 years ago on March 28. She continued studies after high school with classes at ASU and got her real estate license at Caldwell Community College. She would still like to go back to school.
The Clawsons moved to Boone in 1966, living in a trailer home on Straight Street for six years. She worked with Shadowline Lingerie, then the Clerk of Court’s office and finally retired after 20 years with the Department of Transportation.
She began working in county politics in 1976. In Boone, she served on the Community Appearance Commission and on the Sign Ordinance Committee. This experience led her to run for Mayor.
“I was very concerned about the town of Boone. I saw some things I thought could be better. [It could be] a more progressive community, more environmentally friendly, very green, that type of thing,” she said.
Clawson is proud of progress in her time, such as the Greenway, preserving Howard’s Knob, promoting the Jones House, supporting Horn in the West, making Boone a more walkable community; and major water developments.
“I was the one that spotted we were in trouble about the water. I brought that to the council’s attention when I was a council member,” she said.
She’s especially proud of steep slope regulations.
This pre-eminently people person constantly reaches out to the community.
“If people want to meet with me in a particular place, I do that,” she said, referring to a recent meeting about wind turbines.
Her door is always open and students often come to talk to her.
“I’m very supportive of [them],” she said. “They are the future, the leaders of tomorrow.”
This female role-model in a position of power also encourages more women to take part in politics. “It’s really, really important for women to have a voice. Women do so much, we can bring a lot to the table,” she said.
North Carolina Women Shock The World!
A political first for women in United States history was a tea party in North Carolina. It began on October 25, 1774, when 52 women in Edenton gave up tea drinking. Drinking tea was a long-standing custom in the colonies, and social gatherings succeeded or failed by the amount and quality of tea served.
The boycott demonstrated solidarity with the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, and was in response to a North Carolina resolution to boycott British tea and cloth after September 10, 1774. Today’s “tea parties” echo those old protests against taxation without representation.
When the news hit Europe, it shocked the world, for organized political resistance by women—who were supposed to remain in the private sphere—was unknown.
One man who wrote to his brother in North Carolina early in 1775 said the incident was being dismissed because women led it.
“The only security on our side … is the probability that there are but few places in America which possess so much female artillery as Edenton,” he wrote.
A political cartoon published in London in March 1775 satirized the Edenton women, but at home the women were praised for their protest against English monarchical rule.
For more information, click to http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/20/entry
Women’s History Month Proclamations
Satirical drawing depicting the "Edenton Tea Party" published in a London Newspaper in March 1775. Image courtesy of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Congress designated March as Women’s History Month in 1987 and, in that spirit, Governor Beverly Perdue, North Carolina’s first female governor, has proclaimed March as Women’s History Month in North Carolina while Boone Mayor Loretta Clawson has proclaimed a Women’s History Month in Boone.
Governor Perdue and Mayor Clawson call for citizens to commemorate and observe the occasion with appropriate programs, ceremonies and activities.
In their proclamations, the Governor and Mayor recognize the contributions of all women of the state and town “in countless recorded and unrecorded ways.” They note that women have always played a critical role in every sphere of life, including the public, private and nonprofit sectors of the economy.
They mention women’s’ role in winning votes for women and in other areas, such as the civil rights and peace movements, and note that contributions from women have created “a more fair and just society for all.”
Mayor Clawson’s proclamation notes that “the role of American women in history has been consistently overlooked and undervalued, in the literature, teaching and study of American history.”
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