BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |
Longtime lawmaker doesn’t believe ‘Wyoming woman’ archetype is an honest portrayal — but hopes one day it will be SETH KLAMANN
W
For the Star-Tribune
hat is the value of myth? The myth of Cathy Connolly considers this. She’s sitting in her small office in Ross Hall, on the University of Wyoming’s campus. To her back are windows that look upon Prexy’s Pasture. The brick walls are covered in photos and bumper stickers and posters, her bookshelves stuffed with works on sexuality and gender. A black-and-white photo on one cabinet shows an old woman, her hair hidden by a scarf knotted around her neck. The woman is holding an AK-47. “Social security” is written beneath the image. By that photo is a bumper sticker stuck to the same cabinet. It bears a slogan that reverses an old grumble: “I don’t mind straight people as long as they act gay in public.” A red, feathery boa hangs from a cabinet, slightly ajar, by the door. On this September afternoon, midway through the first day of classes at UW, professor Connolly is weighing the myth of the Wyoming Woman: the outfitter, the pink hard-hat wearing construction worker, the female rancher or oil worker. “I love those images,” she says. “But the reality is that is not the typical Wyoming woman. And it’s a myth that it’s the Wyoming woman. I’m going to love each one of them as well, and I’m thrilled. But that’s not the typical Wyoming woman. So I’m very cautious about embracing myths as if they’re realities because they cover up way too much.” What is the reality? The reality is 14 female state lawmakers out of 90 legislators. The reality is the 32 cent pay gap between men and women here. The reality is that nearly seven out of 10 minimum wage workers in Wyoming are women. The reality is that the female oil worker is the reality we want, and the disparities are the reality we have. “‘She’s the rancher, she’s the oil worker’ — part of the myth is this is the Wyoming woman, so all the other Wyoming women who work in service and retail say, ‘Ah, we’re not the real woman,’” Connolly says. “Or the more prevalent myth is that any woman could
Cathy Connolly’s quest to make
MYTH INTO
REALITY
CAYLA NIMMO, STAR-TRIBUNE
Cathy Connolly talks about her life during an interview Sept. 4 at her office on the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie. Connolly is a tenured professor at the university where she teaches in the gender and women’s studies department. be that person. And that just isn’t the case.” By this line of thinking, Connolly herself is a myth, perhaps more so than the others she lists. She’s a university professor with a Ph.D. and a law degree. She’s a female Democratic lawmaker in a Legislature that has as many men from Natrona County as Democrats from anywhere. She’s the first openly gay legislator to legislate in a state that, as recently as 2018, had residents who weren’t aware gay marriage was legal. She lives in one of two counties here that had less than 50 percent support for Donald Trump in 2016. She knows this, that she is not the norm. It’s part of the paradox of who she is: the myth who wants to make her status so mundane and commonplace for others that it’s no longer a myth at all, a Legislature that is truly reflective of
the Wyoming populace. But to do that, she has to be the myth — the equal-pay champion, the minority floor leader, the openly gay public official — to provide an example of what could be. “I want to be able to counter the notion that sex, gender and racism is irrelevant,” she says. “I think it is relevant. I think representation matters. Until we have a more accurate and adequate representation of a variety of people, we’re not doing as well by the state as we could or should be.” ••• Like any myth, Connolly has an origin story. The only daughter of a working class family of five, Connolly attended 12 years of Catholic school in the small town of Troy, which is a few miles north of Albany in northern New York. She worked through much of school — babysitting,
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cleaning houses, manning a toll booth (“I could classify vehicles with the best of ‘em”). Even now, decades later, her New York accent still slips in — the middle of “daughter” stretches like she’s talking around the vowels. Her high school — Catholic Central, whose Latin motto translates to “For God and country” — was large, she says. Her father had gone to — and been expelled from — the same school. When she took the entrance exam, she’d done well, scoring high enough that the nuns wanted to place her in a more rigorous track, with an eye toward college. Sitting in her office in September, roughly half a century later, she remembers her father’s response. Being a lifelong Catholic, all he typically said to the nuns was, “Yes, sister.” But he managed two sentences of protest. “I just thought she should be a secretary,” he told the nuns. Connolly smiles as she remembers. “She should learn to type.” The nuns assured him that his only daughter would indeed learn to type but that Connolly needed to be in a special program. “Yes, sister,” her father acquiesced. Her town and her state and the country were still grappling with the civil rights movement. She remembers briefly dating a black high schooler before starting at Catholic Central and the looks and threats directed at her as she walked down the hallways. She didn’t use a bathroom above the second floor until she was a senior. She was afraid she’d be thrown out of a window. She remembers one of her teachers — who wasn’t a priest — “having an affair” with two of her high school classmates. Connolly had been raised to believe that “boys were better than girls because boys could be priests and priests are God on earth.” She quickly dismissed the notion of the “infallibility of men.” Still, she didn’t dismiss the political undercurrent. The priests and nuns at her school had a Marxist streak, and many were politically active. She read Marx and Friedrich Engels, the behaviorist B.F. Skinner, the anti-war sci-fi of Kurt Vonnegut and the dystopian warnings of George Orwell. She remembers reading the autobiography of Malcolm X on a city bus. She would ride those buses until the end of the line, until the city lights came on and she would go home. The formation of her political beliefs, then, was less a moment of breakthrough and more an accumulation of formative experiences. Please see CONNOLLY, Page 19
