On their terms

Local women passionate about roles in setting policy

Editor's note: The second in an occasional series highlighting women who have left their mark on Naperville, in observance of Women's History Month.

When Mary Lou Cowlishaw's three kids were young, each weekday would find them heading off to school toting lunches packed by their mom. And each day, beneath the food in there, they would find a tiny scroll. On each tightly rolled bit of paper, before she tied it with a little ribbon, Cowlishaw would write a brief poem or a phrase of encouragement.

"I don't think there's anything more important than your children," Cowlishaw, 73, said recently in the kitchen of the home she shares with Wayne Cowlishaw, her husband of 50 years.

When her kids got older, the longtime Naperville woman translated her devotion to children and her passion for learning into action at the legislative level, serving for two decades in the Illinois General Assembly. In five terms in Springfield that began in 1983, Cowlishaw helped push through an array of bills for the betterment of education statewide.

It was her cause.

"No matter what other things people may accumulate in the course of a lifetime ... everything else that anybody can possess can be lost — sometimes overnight," Cowlishaw said. "But nobody can ever lose their education."

She cites her part in establishing the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy among her proudest achievements. The Aurora institution continues in the position of being an entirely state-supported residential high school, and it gives its students a place to learn that is theirs.

"Many of these kids have never been around other people who didn't say they were geeks," Cowlishaw said.

Driven by a home base
Matters of family, home and community also have helped anchor the decisions of other local women to seek elected positions and play a role in setting policy. Mary Ellingson, in her third term on the Naperville City Council, has been involved in numerous decisions that have helped build the city into a lead player in the region. She also was an architect of the city's millennium commemoration and worked on the municipality's 1996 strategic plan. "I find working in local government significant because I think communities are the building blocks of our nation," Ellingson said. She likes the aspect of the job that places her in the community, meeting residents and businesspeople, but she also continues to find it rewarding and challenging to be part of the team charged with overseeing taxpayers' hard-earned dollars.

"I think the whole process of the stewardship of public money is challenging," said Ellingson, 66. "I always feel like I can never know enough about the revenues, where the needs are, how it's being spent."

While she said she hopes her participation will be credited in part with helping Naperville become the model of unity it is today, Ellingson would like even more for history note her as a good mother to her two daughters, wife to William Ellingson, and friend.

"If I had to be remembered as one thing, I would like to be remembered as having been a friend to man," she said. "It's probably the thread that ties all those other things together."

Crystal ball gazing
Loyalties are important, but political success is built with help from components in addition to the ties that bind a resident to the place she lives. In a growing town, a touch of foresight is helpful.

"Often when you make a decision, you don't know what its impact will be for 20 or 25 years," said Peg Price, who preceded and followed her eight-year stint as Naperville mayor with terms on the council, sitting out only one four-year term between 1979 and 1999. "You have to look ahead. You have to see how things are going to have an impact."

The city had just 17,000 residents when Price and her husband, Charles, moved here in 1967, and the head count was still relatively low when she was handed the mayoral gavel in 1983. But there were still plenty of decisions to be made for the city's 45,000 residents at the time, and planning to be done for the 106,000 newcomers whose arrival was forecast.

"The reality was that we were going to grow," Price said, recalling that even before she ran for a council seat, she and her fellow Plan Commission members had come to appreciate the importance of annexing land around the city's periphery as a way to retain control over the development that was certain to follow.

It was fulfilling to be part of the preparations needed to make Naperville a much bigger town. Price, 71, found some of her most satisfying work in the nuts and bolts of the job, helping create the blueprints for transportation, planning, utilities and infrastructure upgrades.

Cowlishaw said she also found it necessary to look ahead in her work as a state representative from the 41st legislative district. Before she was even sworn in, the issue of the local public hospital, Edward Hospital, found its way onto her lap.

The facility had been converted from a tuberculosis sanitarium nearly three decades earlier, and in the ensuing years as a tax-supported hospital, it developed an array of ills. Cowlishaw said she knew a staff nurse at the time who always wore on a chain around her neck a tag that read, "If I am in an accident, do not take me to Edward Hospital." The hospital's new president visited her and shared his concern that there were at that point no legal mechanisms available for dissolving a public hospital district.

"The pillars that uphold the quality of life include education and the availability of health care," Cowlishaw said. "If people were going to continue to move here and live here and raise their families here, we had to have a hospital here that was of high quality."

In addressing that need successfully, Cowlishaw took on enemies she had not had before, and she met challenges she had not foreseen. In retrospect, her naivete might have been a good thing.

"Nobody told me in that first term that a change like that, and all that is involved in accomplishing it, are impossible for a freshman legislator," she said.

Initiates in a men's club
The reality of male majorities in their respective governing bodies was not lost on Cowlishaw and Price. They declined to allow it to deter them.

"I knew there were some men who resented a woman who had any power, but that was their problem," Price said.

One of the important men in her life had encouraged in her a drive to acquire some of that power.

"My dad always told me that I could be anything, do anything that I wanted to do," she said.

As she made her way through 20 years in public life, she liked the prospect that she eventually might serve as a role model for other young women and girls.

Ellingson said she took cues from some of the female role models she encountered along the way. Among them were her grandmother, a businesswoman who raised her children alone after being widowed at a young age; and her mother, who modeled devotion to community service.

However, she hesitates to assert that women are more gregarious than men. The suspects her own tendency to be a "people person" likely has more to do with her chosen profession.

"I'm a psychologist. I do focus on people," she said.

But she and the others recognize that focusing on others can be an important piece of public service. Two years ago, Cowlishaw teamed with her friend Mary Lou Wehrli to coordinate a dinner gathering of women who had been elected to positions on local school and park district boards and the City Council in the previous decade. Christened Naperville Women in Public Service, the event went well, and will be reprised at the end of this month. It provides a good empathetic forum, Cowlishaw said, for the exchange of ideas and experiences.

"You really let your hair down when everybody else there had to get elected, too. That's an agony that only people who have done it can share," she said. "This, I think, is such a good idea, as far as helping women in public service feel confident in what they do and to realize that they have support, they're not alone."

Having watched the interactions of her colleagues over the years, she has come to expect positive outcomes when people come together — especially when they are women who share a common experience.

"There is absolutely no way to describe how great it is to have other women around who lift you up and share in your challenges and celebrate your successes," Cowlishaw said. "I've always believed that an awful lot of things happen when you bring well-meaning people together and let them get acquainted — and I think women are particularly well-suited to that."

03/23/05