70-year-old's voice still one of protest.

PORT RICHEY - Jennie Kranak's 51-year-old son went to his high school reunion recently. ``How's your mom?'' asked one of his classmates. ``She still carrying a sign?''

Jennie Kranak had long put down her anti-Vietnam War signs. Instead, when President Bush sent troops to the Persian Gulf in 1990, she waved black trash bags, symbolizing body bags, in downtown Tampa.

Last year she turned her attention to the domestic battlefront and helped hoist a highway billboard saying spouse abuse was a crime and giving the number of a local shelter.

And throughout it all, she has wielded a powerful pen, writing outraged and occasionally outrageous letters to the editors of three newspapers.

Parkinson's disease has mangled her script. So now she prints. For example: ``How dare an Ohio judge order an accused abuser and batterer to marry his girlfriend? What is she - chattel, an item of property, an object?''

Kranak, 70, was honored recently with a 1995 Amigas award from the Women's Peacepower Foundation in San Antonio, run by Candice Slaughter. Two other Florida women, Miriam Pierce of Tallahassee and Emily Williams of St. Petersburg, also received Amigas awards for their work to help battered women.

Since the mid-'80s, Slaughter says, Kranak has worked to stop violence against women, writing letters, organizing demonstrations, getting signatures on petitions. Last year, Kranak pushed for the creation of a domestic violence prevention program in the Pasco County Sheriff's Office.

``She is willing to do whatever it takes to change things, and she often puts herself in a position to be chastised because she is taking a tough stand,'' Slaughter says.

``I've always been an activist,'' Kranak says. ``I know it makes some people mad, but we can't ignore these things. I can't see these things happen and not do anything about it.''

Parkinson's hasn't dampened her fire to change the world, though it has slowed her body. She's fighting now to recover from a broken hip.

This Christmas she struggled to make one sugar-free pumpkin chiffon pie. ``My hand just wouldn't grip the bowl.'' In the past, she says, she'd make a dozen pies at a time and fix Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for 30 people.

This was in a town near Pittsburgh, where the daughter of Italian immigrants was raised. Her mother was a saint of a woman and a heavenly cook who passed her secrets along to her daughter, she says. Her father was a forceful, old-fashioned man who ran a business that trucked Italian food throughout Pennsylvania.

She was a teenager when World War II killed the husbands of two of her sisters. She says she'll never forget when one of the mothers got the news. ``She was just screaming. She fell over and started shaking all over.''

PROTESTED VIETNAM WAR

Within a few years, Kranak was married, with the first of two sons. And in 1969, her oldest was sent to Vietnam.

``War is an incredibly horrible thing,'' says Kranak, who was already a protester, having organized a 22-bus anti-war caravan in 1968 from Pittsburgh to Washington.

Her family supported her, but some neighbors didn't. At a card party one evening, she says, one suggested she leave America if she didn't like its government.

``I said, `I love my country. And I'm going to fight to make it better.' ''

Her son, Bill, returned unhurt from the war.

After 28 years of marriage, Kranak and her first husband divorced in 1972. Her sons grown, she went to work in a department store. In 1979, she married Frank Kranak, and three years later the couple moved to Port Richey, where Jennie quickly became active with local women's groups.

Her anti-war ire was roused again six years ago when U.S. troops were sent to fight Saddam Hussein's.

``I was so furious I went to Tampa and stood on the street corner with those bags flopping around. I hate war. I just hate it.''

Last January, Kranak read about Barbara Honeyman, of New Port Richey, being stabbed to death by her estranged husband as their 15-year-old daughter watched.

In a fresh fury, she called the president of the local National Organization for Women. ``Don't tell me this is happening up here now,'' she said.

She began researching and learned that Gov. Lawton Chiles had just issued a report on domestic violence statewide that urged law enforcement agencies to create task forces. She also found out that Congress had set aside money for domestic violence prevention.

DISPUTE WITH SHERIFF

Over time, she and other NOW members say, they persuaded Pasco Sheriff Lee Cannon to apply for a grant. But the first meetings with sheriff's officials were rocky. Officials didn't move as quickly as Kranak expected. She became frustrated and in June fired off one of her letters to the editor.

It complained that a male Pasco deputy had been suspended for threatening to kill his wife, while a female deputy had been fired for swearing in the office.

``The double standard is alive in the Pasco County Sheriff's Department. As usual the male deputies come out the winners,'' said her letter to The Tampa Tribune.

This brought two piqued sheriff's officials to the home of a local NOW president for a talk about Kranak and NOW associate Joann Ross, who'd acquired a reputation as troublemakers out to bring down the sheriff.

The pair were almost thrown off NOW's domestic violence committee, which Kranak had helped create. Instead, the two NOW co-presidents ended up resigning.

On Sept. 22, Cannon announced his new domestic violence program, to be financed with a $150,000 grant from the state. The program is part of a countywide task force run by Penny Morrill, head of east Pasco's Sunrise women's shelter.

Four days after Cannon's announcement, Pasco County Commissioner Ed Collins declared October Domestic Violence Awareness Month, taking the occasion to recognize Kranak and Ross. Cannon complained the move was purely political.

Yes, Kranak had problems with the sheriff, Collins says. She pushes until she reaches her goal.

``She very outspoken, very strong for women's issues,'' he says.

``She has that fire,'' said local NOW associate Doris Rosen.

``I wish we didn't have these problems in the world,'' Kranak says. ``But they're here, and we have to do something about it.''

Women in their 90s look back proudly at the fight to win the right to vote.

TAMPA - They were the new women, the modern women. And many people, neighbors, brothers, other women - their mothers, even - thought they wanted too much.

They wanted to vote.

``We wanted to be real citizens,'' says 97-year-old Zennie Fisher of Plant City. ``We felt if we had to live under the laws, then why couldn't we help make them?''

Fisher got her wish in 1920 and soon cast the first of 75 years worth of ballots. Helen Emerson, 93, also went to the polls for that first election. She was too young to vote, but she stood at the fringes, yearning to be part of it.

``I was waiting patiently. I can remember that so well,'' she says from her room in Palm Gardens of Tampa nursing home. ``I thought, `At last, we've made it.' ''

Emerson, Fisher and many of their allies in the fight for women's suffrage were first- and second-generation Americans or daughters of the frontier. Their parents had struggled to make a place for them in the young country, and they were ready to take that place.

Emerson grew up listening to her father hollering from the bathroom of their Paterson, N.J., home, ``Mother, there's no towels up here,'' and watching her mother rush to his aid.

In many ways, he was a traditional man. In other ways, he was not.

He was a weaver of silk who had come to America from Poland, desperate to leave the Old World behind. He insisted that his family speak nothing but English and that his children be well-educated, Emerson says, ``so we could take care of ourselves.''

Emerson, then named Begneski, was 16 when she graduated from high school, and she already had a job as a bookkeeper. It was 1918, and the men were overseas fighting in World War I.

``I was really interested in what was going on,'' she says. ``Gracious, I had an opinion on everything.''

The women's suffrage debate had been bubbling for years. But now that more women were out of the home, doing the jobs of men, the question loomed larger every day: If women were good enough to do men's work, why couldn't they vote?

``They needed us to work,'' Emerson says, ``but yet we weren't good enough to say anything about the affairs of state.''

DID SAME WORK AS MEN

Lots of men thought of women as children who needed to be sheltered, Fisher says. ``I think my mother was quite happy that women didn't have to worry about politics.''

Fisher couldn't help being interested.

Her father was a frontier politician. He owned a store in Oklahoma and ``sold everything from apples to dynamite,'' Fisher says.

Men would gather at the store, ``sit around the big stove, chew tobacco and run the government.''

Her father often took her there, and she listened to the men talk. Fisher, then named Young, was the eldest child and her father's pride, she says.

``I worked in the fields and did the same work as a man or a boy. I planted and I picked.''

America was at war when Fisher married, and she and her husband were assigned government jobs. The government moved them to West Virginia to work in a gunpowder factory.

They lived in the factory compound and never left the little town that sprang up, called Nitro.

``We were working for Uncle Sam,'' she says. ``We were working for our country.''

When the war ended, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Fisher's husband got a job as a policeman. But Fisher had a hard time finding work; many companies refused to hire married women. Fisher kept busy doing volunteer work. But she couldn't swallow the prohibition on voting.

``I had worked like a man. So, why couldn't I vote?''

Many others were asking the same question.

Women distinguished themselves during World War I, says Doris Weatherford of Seffner, author of ``American Women's History.''

They drove ambulances overseas, ran switchboards and worked in munitions plants, like Fisher. People who argued that only men should vote because only men serve in war had to find another argument.

``Indeed, it may have been the war as much as any organizational strategy that finally brought the vote,'' Weatherford says.

Still, some men argued that women didn't have the intellectual capacity to vote. They said women couldn't understand the issues.

Emerson and her friends had a name for such people: ``dopes.''

``They didn't even think women should work outside the home. There was no use arguing with them. They had one-track minds.''

Many women also disapproved, Fisher says. ``At least half of the women didn't think women should vote.

``We were different. We were the new, modern women.''

Neither Fisher nor Emerson has a clear memory of the day of that first election in 1920. They've been to the polls so many times in 75 years that the memories run together.

But they know how they felt.

``We were all delighted to be able to vote,'' Fisher says. ``We were delighted to have some say over what our country did and what would become of us.''

By the time my grandmother died in her late 80s, she was small and frail, a ghostly shadow of the vital woman I remember from my childhood.

Those images are of a tall, imposing, dynamic person - one who had a full-time job outside the home, kept her house as clean as a hospital, a woman with strong hands, a stronger heart and even stronger opinions, which she was not in the least afraid to express.

Nell, as my step-grandfather called her, always observed tradition and convention - when it was possible. A practical, down-to-earth New Englander, she believed in the sanctity of the home and of marriage. But she divorced her first husband - the father of her four children - in the early 1930s, unable any longer to live with his alcoholism and abuse.

Born in 1892, she endured enormous conflict in her own life. She also witnessed two world wars, a multitude of police actions and regional conflicts, dramatic social upheavals and countless and breathtaking cultural and technological advances, including flight, space travel, television, automobiles, the atomic bomb, the TV dinner.

None of what happened in the 20th century was more impressive to her, though, than suffrage.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN

She was 28 when women were finally granted the right to vote. She took full advantage of her franchise virtually until she died in the mid-1980s.

When I was little, I spent a fair amount of time with my grandmother. I was an only child, and no one really treated me like a child. Conversational topics tended to be of the adult variety, including those with my grandmother.

She talked a lot about the role of women, the injustices women faced during her girlhood and womanhood, the importance of being able to take care of yourself, of being responsible, of having a job skill. She had no formal job training herself so her working years were spent in low-wage, service-type jobs.

``You never can tell what will happen in life. You have to be prepared,'' she advised sagely.

Her two daughters were prepared. So are her six granddaughters.

Grandma also talked to me about the rights and responsibilities of being an American citizen.

Voting was among the most important of those responsibilities and the most cherished of those rights, she said.

``I remember when women couldn't vote,'' she'd remind me. ``You have to vote. That's the only way you have a voice.''

In the context of today's political landscape, when so few of the people who are eligible to vote are registered or actually cast ballots, that attitude seems almost quaint.

But imagine not being able to vote - to be turned away from the polls because you are female.

Doris Weatherford, author of several books on women's issues and women's history including ``American Women's History,'' is reassuring about suffrage.

Weatherford says that even if it had not passed in 1920, it would have sometime during Franklin Roosevelt's three-term presidency, which began in 1934.

``He took women seriously,'' says Weatherford.

A WOMAN'S INFLUENCE

Of course, Eleanor Roosevelt had enormous influence on Franklin.

``She pushed Franklin where he didn't want to go,'' says Weatherford, ``particularly in the area of women and minority issues.''

The specific results of suffrage are not easy to measure, though they are enormous.

Certainly there were some immediate and visible actions, such as the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which was intended to lower infant mortality rates by assisting states in building medical clinics. The law was repealed in 1929.

It's also hard to imagine what America would be like today if women could not vote.

Certainly, your life and mine and those of our children and grandchildren would be different.

Just how different is hard to say.

One near-90-year-old pointed out that it would all depend on the largess and enlightenment of your husband or your father.

LAKELAND - Heartbroken over her husband's death, Carrie Lane Chapman took a job as a secretary to fill the void, 11-year-old Laura Baum wrote in an essay.

``One evening, she delivered some papers to a businessman in his office,'' Laura wrote about the suffragist. ``After he had signed the papers, he put his arm around Carrie.

``She was horrified and pushed him away. He was startled and wrathful. He said, `Why do you come into a man's world, then, if you don't want some friendly attention?'

``Carrie ran out through the dark streets. All the while she was thinking, `Why should it always be a man's world? Can't a woman do a job and be treated with the same respect as a man?'

``Suddenly she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to work to help women win the right to be individuals and to achieve their goals.

``To Carrie, the first step should be winning the right for women to vote.''

In a contest last year by the National Organization for Women in Lakeland, Laura won first place, $50, for her essay on Carrie Lane Chapman Catt, a major figure in the latter half of the 72-year fight for women's right to vote.

Before the suffragist took the secretary job Laura wrote about, she had been a teacher and school administrator. She later remarried, with a notarized agreement guaranteeing her at least four months a year to work for suffrage.

Catt - unlike Susan B. Anthony, a key suffragist from the earliest days - lived to see the 19th Amendment added to the Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920, declaring that the right to vote shall not be denied ``on account of sex.''

Voting, Laura explained, ``gives you the chance to express your opinion and to say who should run the government and all.''

She had read ``They Led the Way,'' a book about 14 American women who worked hard for equal rights. She decided to focus on Catt because ``she wasn't someone big like Susan B. Anthony that everyone knows about. But she did a lot to help.''

``Working for the cause became Carrie Chapman's life,'' Laura wrote. ``She joined societies in Europe that were also concerned with winning the right to vote for women.

``In 1914 the nations of Europe went to war. Carrie hoped America could stay out, but when America declared war, Carrie encouraged women to help the war effort. Women took jobs in factories and offices, doing things that only men had done before.

``Gradually as men in politics began to see how much they needed women, many decided it might not hurt if women could vote - like men.'' Laura quoted Catt as saying afterward: ``Women have suffered an agony of soul, which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it.''

Laura, who just started sixth grade at Crystal Lake Middle School in Lakeland, was surprised to learn about the long, hard fight women had to endure to be considered equal citizens.

``I hope that in my lifetime, I see other injustices that have and are being done corrected,'' Laura wrote. ``Carrie Lane Chapman Catt and all the women before and after her stood up for what they believe.

``This has made the world a better place.''

femi-nism (femH e niz/em) n> [L femina, woman + ISM] 1. [Rare] feminine qualities 2. a) the principle that woman should have political, economic and social rights equal to those of men b) the movement to win such rights for women - feminist n., adj. Source: Webster's New World Dictionary Though the dictionary definition seems straightforward, this quiz, in honor of Women's History Month, may help women decide if they ``qualify'' as a feminist.

-- When updating your wardrobe, you look for: a) The very latest in fashionable clothing.

b) Something that appeals to your tastes.

c) Something created by indigenous people in cooperatives under the gentle guidance of matriarchs.

-- You bought a Wonderbra to: a) Compete with other cleavages.

b) Feel sexy and powerful like Madonna.

c) Put it in a time capsule to amuse your great-great-granddaughter.

-- You wear makeup: a) To please your man.

b) To express and enhance yourself.

c) Only on Halloween.

-- You shave your legs to: a) Feel more like a woman.

b) Conform to the corporate culture.

c) Reduce wind resistance in marathons.

-- You work out to: a) Get out of the house once in a while.

b) Feel stronger.

c) Give yourself an edge when defending women's clinics.

-- You joined a women's group to: a) Attend balls.

b) Network.

c) Worship the Goddess within.

-- Your lasting impression of the movie ``Thelma and Louise'' is: a) Brad Pitt.

b) You'd like to be more daring, but you'd stop short of the canyon's edge.

c) Live free or die.

-- Your favorite feminist author is: a) Camille Paglia.

b) Naomi Wolfe.

c) bell hooks.

-- The soundtrack of your life is sung by: a) Tammy ``Stand by Your Man'' Wynette.

b) Chaka/Whitney ``I'm Every Woman'' Khan/Houston.

c) Gloria ``I Will Survive'' Gaynor.

-- If you're heterosexual and mistaken for a lesbian, you are: a) Worried.

b) Flattered.

c) Accustomed to it.

-- If married, you expect your husband to support you: a) Financially.

b) Emotionally.

c) In overthrowing the patriarchy.

-- You bought your husband a subscription to Playboy: a) In the hope he will spend less on the lingerie modeling.

b) Because he likes the articles, and the magazine supports First Amendment cases.

c) To assist his research linking pornography and the subjugation of women.

-- When a man opens a door for you, you: a) Thank God that chivalry isn't dead.

b) Figure you'll get the door for him someday.

c) Wish he'd open the door to the corporate boardroom.

YOUR SCORE

Give yourself one point for each time you chose ``b'' and two points for each ``c.'' If you scored: 0 to 12: Relax. No one will ever call you a feminazi.

13 to 20: You may qualify as a feminist, even if you're uncomfortable with the label.

21-26: You rank high, but that shouldn't matter because you don't believe in hierarchies.

Feminism is defined by the successes and failures of countless individuals. The experiences of three Tampa Bay area women, spanning more than three decades, provide a microcosm of the total women's rights movement.

SARASOTA - She bristled under the expectations. In the late '50s, the girls from Virginia's Mary Washington College were supposed to major in education, get married and have babies. If they wanted careers, they had two choices: teaching and secretarial work.

But Judith Levy had her own ideas. She majored in philosophy.

today, more than 35 years later, Levy is a secretary - of sorts. She holds down the front desk at the Counseling and Wellness Center on the University of South Florida's Sarasota campus. But she's much more than an office worker.

She's a wise friend, counselor and helper to the people she meets and with whom she shares the experiences of her life.

The women's movement was in its infancy when Levy set out on her own in the early'60s. She had read about the problems of the modern middle class and decided she didn't want to settle into the suburbs. But the idea of chasing a career was foreign. She didn't know what to do.

As the years passed and women began to define themselves as individuals, rather than daughters, wives and mothers, she forged her own path. She traveled the country and built an extended family of male and female friends.

``I thought I would end up alone, an artist, a lone eccentric,'' Levy says. ``But it turns out I have lots of company.''

The women's movement gave her freedom. Although ``feminism'' seems to have become a dirty word, she says, she has held fast to her own definition: ``It means demanding equal treatment. To get equal pay in a job and to be treated as an equal in a relationship.''

But she worries that the freedom to be financially independent and to compete with men for jobs has only made life harder for many women.

She hears the frustrations of friends who gave up career plans to devote themselves to their husbands and children. She knows others who traded motherhood for careers and felt a different sort of emptiness. And she watches the tired faces of friends who tried to have it all.

``I don't blame feminism,'' she says. The women's movement brought desperately needed changes. But something has been lost.

``Women are exhausted. Everything is work, for men and women both. There's no time for sitting on the porch, no time for Sunday dinner. That graciousness is gone.''

LOOKING AHEAD

As Levy approaches 54, watching her body grow a little heavier and her face a little drier, she begins to wonder about the kind of older woman she'll be.

In this increasingly complex world, she's seeking a slow, simple life that makes sense.

``I like to throw dinner parties,'' she says. ``I love to write letters.''

Sometime in the next 10 years or so, ``I expect to get some of the zany old babes like myself to live together and run an inn or something.''

Levy grew up in Virginia, with a mother and father who expected her to find a husband and build a household like theirs. Her Navy father also pushed her to be physically strong and to question and challenge him.

``He wanted a son,'' Levy says, and she did her best to live up to those expectations.

But he also wanted a son-in-law, so Levy was sent off to Mary Washington College, a woman's college in Fredericksburg, or, as she calls it, ``a holding tank for the University of Virginia boys.''

With her questioning mind, Levy managed to get out of the tank in 1963, still single and with a degree in philosophy. Soon she ended up behind a typewriter.

``I never meant to be a secretary,'' she says, ``but with every job interview, the first question was always, `How fast can you type?' ''

In 1967, while living in Washington, D.C., she married a Vietnam veteran and helped put him through college. They moved to Sarasota and she became interested in rehabilitation counseling, so after he graduated, she started working on a master's degree at USF.

In 1977, the marriage ended in divorce.

``Working on my master's made me too uppity for my husband,'' Levy says.

At 36, she hit the road, hoping to start over in a new town. She was alone and independent, and she liked it that way, but she didn't think of herself as a feminist. She wasn't even sure she liked other women.

Since childhood, she'd harbored thoughts that they were the less honorable of the two sexes.

``Both my mother and father taught me to distrust women,'' Levy says. They would say that successful men had character and charisma, but that women who succeeded were cunning and deceitful.

Then, in the late 1970s, Levy moved to Aspen, Colo. She worked as a counselor and became involved in a group of women who talked to one another about their dreams.

``I became aware of the strength of their minds, their independence and their trustworthiness,'' she says. ``Ever since, I've admired women.''

RUTHLESS PEOPLE

But she also has learned that women can be ruthless.

In California, she worked for a company owned and operated entirely by women, and it was the meanest organization she has ever encountered, she says. The company was run from the top down and the owners were ``driven.''

When male truck drivers would make deliveries, the women workers would holler and whistle unmercifully.

``I think power corrupts,'' Levy says. ``And it corrupts both men and women.''

Still, Levy believes men and women are fundamentally different in their thinking and approach to life.

``I like to get a man's point of view. I have wonderful men friends.''

She also has different expectations of men. ``If a man doesn't understand something, like why I'm afraid of a certain thing, I might try to explain it, because it may be something a man has never experienced. But I expect a woman to understand.''

As she has grown older, she says, her friendships with women have become stronger and more important. ``They're my baseline. They keep me grounded.''

But she realizes, with sadness, that women today are not in solidarity.

``With the voting power that women have, you would have thought that things would be better,'' she says.

``You would have thought that we would have done something, set up more job-sharing programs or something, to make work more family friendly.

``You would have thought that we wouldn't have women and children on the street.

``I would have thought that women would resent being called a minority by now, since they are a majority.''

Feminism is defined by the successes and failures of countless individuals. The experiences of three Tampa Bay area women, spanning more than three decades, provide a microcosm of the total women's rights movement.

TAMPA - Suzanne Persons has arrived. Finally.

At 47, she owns her own business, teaches courses in relationships at Hillsborough Community College and is raising a 13-year-old son.

With a doctorate in clinical psychology, the licensed mental health counselor runs seminars to help other women reconcile upbringings that did little to cater to their hopes and dreams.

Persons can relate. Like other women of the baby-boom generation, she jumped into the women's movement as an angry young feminist. But after years of therapy to resolve her anger, Persons finds the feminist label evokes a harsher image than she's comfortable with.

``I'm not interested in aligning myself with a group that the public perceives as being angry and bitter,'' she says.

In 1971, that wasn't the case.

Persons remembers being booed out of her class at the University of South Florida for making a feminist statement. She can't recall what the statement was, only that no other women stood up in her defense.

Although Persons admits her anger was a personal issue she spent years learning to deal with, she also insists that decades of being denied opportunities led to her rage.

The inequities began at home.

The youngest of three children, Persons learned early that being a boy exempted one from washing dishes and doing other household chores.

In junior high school, the young tomboy found her only option for class electives was home economics, not the wood shop she longed to take.

``I wasn't interested in sewing, but I didn't dare open my mouth because it would hurt my chances of getting a date,'' she says.

The willowy, 5-foot-9 teen would have been a natural at basketball, her first choice. But volleyball, swimming or cheerleading were the only school activities on the girls' menus.

The choices for part-time jobs were just as limited. While Persons watched boys haul in $100 a week as apprentices, she netted only $92 for an entire summer as a carhop at the Freezette on Indian Rocks Beach.

Academics were no better. As a high school senior, she scored in the top 4 percent nationally on the Scholastic Assessment Test in spatial relations. But Persons' counselor suggested careers in interior decorating or cosmetology, while boys with the same aptitude were steered toward architecture or aerospace engineering.

ON HER OWN

When it came time for college, Persons was told by her mother, ``I'm sure you'll find a way.'' Yet her mother had sold the family's sailboat to pay for her son's education.

Her younger daughter did find a way.

Persons sold everything, including her window air conditioner, to pay for her first semester of college at USF in May 1970. Scholarships, grants and loans, combined with tips from waitressing, paid for the rest.

She first majored in mass communications, where Persons was one of only two women. She recalls her first class project, a filmmaking venture, where she was told by male peers to be ``script girl'' or secretary while they directed and operated the camera.

Later, she changed her major.

Meanwhile, the women's movement slithered snail-like onto Tampa's college campuses in the 1970s, years behind the big cities, Persons says.

Persons joined consciousness-raising groups and political protests on campus but saw little change in attitudes about academic opportunities. For women the emphasis was on degrees in teaching, theater and dance; for men, on mathematics, business and science.

Even in a generation immersed in recreational drug use, only males were considered savvy enough to make drug buys, Persons recalls.

Thinking about having and rearing a child alone, Persons decided she needed a master's degree. So she got one in rehabilitative counseling and entered the working world. She married, then left her job to have her son.

Although she loves motherhood, Persons says leaving the working world where she had been since 13 was a jolt.

Having a child seemed to plummet her into the category of housewife. Even when she returned to work, Persons was expected to do the cooking, shopping, errands and laundry for the family.

``I was exhausted. I would fall into bed at night folding laundry,'' she says.

EQUALITY IN RELATIONSHIP

Persons later divorced. Now, she says, she enjoys the new roles men and women have created.

``I'm taking time to have my own life, separate from my relationship, and he does the same thing.''

Decades ago in relationships, Persons says, the message was: ``If she takes her eyes off him, he'll go find another woman to adore him and devote all her time to him.''

Now not only can Persons take her eyes off her mate, but also he can take his eyes off her so she can enjoy friendships with the opposite sex.

After years of struggle, Persons feels she can enjoy the best life has to offer in both career and interpersonal relationships. But she has hung up her ``feminist'' label and leaves that for others.

``My views about feminism have changed over the years. At first, I was extremely excited and hopeful. I felt we had broken through the ice and were going to come up for air.

``Now, the publicity that feminists get makes them seem too militant.''

Persons says after years of therapy, she discovered her anger toward men came from a father who was absent, angry, instilling fear or finding fault. He eventually abandoned Persons' family when she was 12 and refused to see his children again.

Gathering with other angry women, who she says had every right to be angry, just didn't help her release her emotions.

``What I have learned is that if you want to be heard, you have to come across in a way that people are willing to listen. If you come across with a lot of anger or as part of an angry group, people will misinterpret or misunderstand what you have to say.''

But 25 years ago, Persons says the rights she fought for made her feel connected to every woman in the country.

``It was the dawning of a new era for women. The doors were being thrown wide open.''

Feminism is defined by the successes and failures of countless individuals. The experiences of three Tampa Bay area women, spanning more than three decades, provide a microcosm of the total women's rights movement.

TAMPA - She is fiercely independent, hearkening to her own dreams when making decisions about her future. And if that makes Cris Rettler a feminist, so be it.

``I think feminism has gotten a bad name, so I don't go around saying that,'' says Rettler, 24, a recent University of South Florida graduate who lives in Tampa. ``To me, feminism means strong, independent woman. That's how I like to see myself.''

The anti-feminist backlash sweeping the social and political scene is disturbing to Rettler, who is keenly aware that the freedom she enjoys was hard-won by women in her mother's generation.

Rettler has taken full advantage of that freedom, traveling and working odd jobs before settling into a full-time career. After earning degrees in psychology and international studies, Rettler went to the Keys for two months to work in a floating tiki bar.

She says she feels no pressure to succeed for anyone but herself. However, it is important to Rettler that all women have the freedom to shape their own dreams.

``If you strive for equality in your home, in your job, in your personal relationships - that's my version of feminism,'' Rettler says. ``That's every bit as important as the bra burnings.''

Rettler's mother has told her about bra burnings and women's rights demonstrations in the 1960s and about the opposition she faced when she embarked on a career in criminal law.

Rettler has heard about women not being taken seriously at work and about hitting glass ceilings. Knowledge, Rettler says, is power.

``It's helpful to me to know what to expect,'' she says.

In some ways, however, what Rettler wants for herself is similar to what she grew up with in St. Paul, Minn.

Rettler's parents always worked as a team in raising their three children, sharing household duties and taking turns putting each other through school.

``I think it's important that children see you work as a team, that you don't have assigned sex roles,'' Rettler says.

NO HURRY FOR MARRIAGE

Marriage, however, does not top Rettler's priority list. True to her generation - which studies show is waiting longer than previous generations to tie the knot - she wants some time to herself first.

Here she deviates substantially from her mother, who delayed law school until she was in her 30s, had three children and had finished putting her husband through physical therapy school.

The law school her mother attended was in a different city, requiring her to live away from the family. Her father - ``a real man of the'90s'' - raised her and her brothers during that time.

``Not only do I want to be financially secure, but there are many things I want to do before I have kids,'' Rettler says. She could wait too long and never have them, she says, but ``I'm willing to take that chance.''

Independence is so important to Rettler that she moved thousands of miles away from home to attend college and worked full time - as a waitress, then as a mental health technician - to pay her expenses.

Now she plans to return to Minnesota later this month to embark on a career in computer consulting with her uncle's firm. The job market is poor for psychologists, Rettler says.

In her dating relationships, Rettler seeks out men who are comfortable with her need for freedom and space, including spending time with other male and female friends.

``You need to make it clear from the beginning that you're not going to change your life for him,'' she says.

RESPECT A PRIORITY

She also expects any man she dates to treat her with the same respect he does his friends. Most men she has dated have come to appreciate and enjoy that.

``I was dating someone in a fraternity, and he had a friend who would come over all the time just to talk about women's roles,'' Rettler says, smiling. ``I think he was mortified. It's like you lose your attractiveness when you have these ideas men consider radical.''

However, some of the strongest anti-women statements Rettler has heard came from women who perceive feminism as a threat to femininity. This, too, she sees as fallout from anti-feminist backlash.

``Women compete with each other more than we compete with men,'' Rettler says. ``I think we spend a lot of time and energy competing for men.''

One of her male friends, for example, had a girlfriend who believed women had no place in politics.

``I can understand why men want women taken out of the power structure, but I don't understand why women would want to be taken out of the power structure,'' Rettler says.

``If anything, we should be more tolerant of whatever choices women make. If they want to stay home and raise kids, that's fine,'' she says. ``Women have enough problems in society - let's not play judge and jury.''

Her personal experiences with discrimination, for the most part, have been subtle - patronizing remarks in the weight-lifting room, inferior treatment in car dealership showrooms.

She has not experienced the degree of discrimination her mother faced, although she believes it's still out there.

Rettler believes her progressive upbringing benefited her, but she rejects the notion that the way you are raised governs what you become.

``In a way, you're a product of your environment, but that doesn't mean you follow in your parents' footsteps.

``I think a lot of women have the same views as me, but they just don't articulate them the way I do,'' Rettler says. ``There is a common ground. We're all women.''

During the past year, I've written several times about Eleanor McWilliams Chamberlain, who in 1893 started Florida's first organization to seek the vote for women.

``Ella'' Chamberlain, as she was known, had moved to Tampa in 1883 with her husband, Fielding P. Chamberlain.

Recently, I learned through Julius J. Gordon about a 1957 article, ``The Woman Suffrage Movement in Florida,'' by A. Elizabeth Taylor, which appeared in the Florida Historical Quarterly.

It confirmed that ``The woman suffrage movement in Florida originated in Tampa through the initiative of Mrs. Ella C. Chamberlain. ...'' The article went on to say: ``In 1892 Mrs. Chamberlain attended a suffrage conference in Des Moines, Iowa, and while there resolved to begin crusading in her home state, especially in the realm of press and organizational work.''

It appears that the newly inspired suffragist went to the editor of The Tampa Journal, a weekly newspaper, and asked to write a column. The editor suggested she write about topics of interest to women and children. But she replied that ``the world was not suffering for another cake recipe, and the children seemed to be getting along better than the women.''

She did write regular articles about women's rights. But copies of the Journal of that year are not available today.

STARTING A MOVEMENT

Chamberlain began speaking to groups, and from those activities the Florida Woman Suffrage Association emerged in 1893, with 20 members, eight of them men.

Chamberlain attended two conventions of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in 1893 in Washington, D.C., and in 1895 in Atlanta.

In January 1895, she led a state convention in Tampa. By then the Florida group had about 100 members. But the suffragists ``found their campaign a slow and difficult one, for to most of their contemporaries the philosophy of feminism was a strange and distasteful belief,'' Taylor wrote.

One of the arguments Chamberlain put forth was that while Southern women had no representation in lawmaking bodies, ``the alien and the Negro'' did.

When she appeared at a meeting in Limona in November 1894, a Tampa Tribune correspondent wrote, ``Does anyone marvel that Mrs. C. remonstrates against being classed with criminals, idiots and Indians, as far as the ballot is concerned? Even the Negro may cast his vote, when law and order prevails.''

A FRIEND TO ALL

Although one would gather from her comments that Ella Chamberlain was unsympathetic toward blacks and Indians, there is evidence from another source that she sought to assist the downtrodden, regardless of color.

I found a quotation on her work from Clara Frye, founder of Tampa's first hospital for blacks, in ``The Negro Blue Book of Tampa,'' published in 1925. Frye was telling of early efforts to care for patients who could not pay for treatment: ``We had no contract from the city, but we cared for the city patients just the same. Mrs. Chamberlain, one of Tampa's Dorcases, made herself a real agent for suffering people, looking them up in the slums and the prison and sending them to us all times of day and of night.''

Frye's reference to Chamberlain as a ``Dorcas'' came from the Biblical character known for her good works.

Actually, Chamberlain had ended her leadership in the women's vote crusade when she and her husband moved from Tampa in 1897. But she returned in the early 1900s after his death and became active in other causes.

It was then she made weekly visits to the jail and became known as ``The Prisoner's Friend.'' She spoke before a Florida legislative committee in 1913, seeking assistance for the widows of small children.

Chamberlain died in 1934, with no children of her own. One surviving niece, Agnes Todd, lives in Tampa.

-- -- --

Genealogy classes will start at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Tampa Bay History Center on the second level of the Shops on Harbour Island. Diane Covert Broderick will teach ``Beyond Vital Records,'' beginning with an overview of family history.

Cost is $35 for history center members and $45 for non-members. The course will continue on five subsequent Saturday mornings. For more information, call Liz Dunham at (813) 228-0097.

Ella Chamberlain began the state movement to win women the right to vote.

TAMPA - When women gained the right to vote nationally 75 years ago, they owed a debt to a Tampa crusader for female equality, Eleanor C. McWilliams Chamberlain.

Better known as Ella Chamberlain, she is credited with originating the first statewide women's suffrage movement in Florida, in 1893.

Although the Florida Legislature failed at the time to endorse the 19th Amendment, which became part of the U.S. Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920, the state's women gained the right to the ballot along with others around the nation.

Their impact was felt in Tampa almost immediately in a charter election in November 1920, when their votes helped change city government to a commission/city manager framework.

By then, Chamberlain was widowed, and she had moved on to other causes - visiting prisoners in jail, assisting needy blacks to get hospital care and speaking out for the widows with young children.

Chamberlain had no children herself. She was quoted in an 1895 Atlanta newspaper article as saying her husband, Fielding P. Chamberlain, ``converted'' her to the right-to-vote movement.

Ella Chamberlain was one of several Tampa women who corresponded with Susan B. Anthony, seeking advice in the cause of equal rights.

As early as 1885, Julia B. Seiver had written to Anthony to express concern over apathy locally.

``The indifference of the women of the South is truly deplorable,'' Seiver, a native of Massachusetts, had written.

Her assessment coincides with a conclusion reached by Cherri C. Stratton, a recent Florida State University history graduate, who wrote a paper last year on ``The Woman Suffrage Movement in Florida.''

Stratton, 21, who hopes to return to graduate studies at FSU, interned at the Florida Commission on the Status of Women in Tallahassee. The commission circulated her paper in connection with the 75th anniversary of the suffrage amendment.

``The South in general suffered from a lack of interest in woman's suffrage,'' Stratton wrote, ``and also from a fear that woman's suffrage would destroy the home.''

Suffragists in Florida could not be described as radical, she said, for ``they tried as a group to sustain a `ladylike' appearance at all times.'' Stratton went on to say: ``Their reasons for wanting the vote often centered around improving society and the community so that they could be better mothers and, thereby, improve the home.''

Stratton noted that the Florida movement could not be considered a very active or effectual group compared with other states. But it did provide women a chance for political involvement and prepare them for the eventual vote.

Chamberlain's pioneering efforts began after she attended a suffrage conference in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1892. When she returned to Tampa, she began speaking out at meetings and writing a column for The Tampa Journal.

A theme Chamberlain voiced, ``taxation without representation,'' brought the suggestion she organize a women's vote society. And this led to the formation of the Florida Women's Suffrage Association in January 1893.

From a core of 20 members, the Florida group grew to about 100 by January 1895, when a state convention was held in Tampa. That year Chamberlain attended a national suffrage convention in Atlanta, where she was introduced to the gathering by Susan B. Anthony.

The well-known national leader referred to Chamberlain's practice of sending her a box of oranges every year - even in 1895, when a pair of killing freezes had made citrus scarce in Florida.

But Chamberlain and her husband moved to the Midwest in 1897, and the Florida association went defunct. When she returned to Tampa a widow in the early 1900s, she had lost her zeal for leading a voting rights group.

``From 1897 to 1912, there was no real suffrage association in Florida,'' Stratton recounted. In 1912, 30 women in Jacksonville started the Florida Equal Franchise League with a broad range of objectives ranging from the study of civics to the securing of the ballot for women.

The Orlando Suffrage League sprang up in 1913 after taxpaying women were turned away from a freeholders' election because of their gender. Mary Safford, a Unitarian minister originally from Iowa, led the group.

Safford went on to head the Florida Equal Suffrage Association, which took shape in 1913.

That spring, state Sen. Fred P. Cone of Lake City introduced a proposed amendment to the state constitution eliminating gender as a voting requirement.

Members of the Equal Franchise League rallied in Tallahassee and brought in a national speaker, Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who achieved fame later in Congress by voting against U.S. participation in both World Wars I and II.

But the Florida House committee on amendments blocked the suffrage proposal in the 1913 session, and it died.

The next year the National American Woman Suffrage Association sent representatives to help solidify the movement in Florida.

According to Stratton's research, the national representatives hit a snag when they sought to re-establish a suffrage unit in Tampa.

``The Era Club of Tampa formed briefly, but the atmosphere was not very receptive to suffrage activities,'' she wrote. Opposition from public officials and The Tampa Morning Tribune was blamed for the demise of the club.

WOMEN'S CLUBS ENDORSED

But women's groups were picking up momentum around Florida. A powerful stimulus came in November 1915 when the influential Florida Federation of Women's Clubs expressed solid backing for suffrage.

May Mann Jennings, president of the federation and wife of former Gov. William Sherman Jennings, was considered a ``genteel activist'' who knew how to lobby in Tallahassee. She gave unqualified support.

The alliance of the suffrage association and the 6,000-member-strong women's federation led to creation of the Political Equality Committee. It worked on behalf of amendments to the state and federal constitutions.

Another prestigious person - Mary Bryan, wife of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan - appeared before the 1917 legislative session to plead the cause of suffrage. She said that it was both timely and expedient - and would boost the dignity of women.

Among those in the gallery during Bryan's speech was Marjory Stoneman Douglas, long before she made her mark as one of Florida's leading environmentalists.

Although leading newspapers and legislators such as state Sen. Doyle Carlton Sr. of Tampa were swinging behind suffrage, it was still a losing battle in 1917.

One of the factors in that unabashedly segregationist era was concern that righting wrongs against women might affect laws limiting blacks' access to balloting in Florida.

John B. Johnson, president of the Senate in 1917, warned that if women got the right to vote, blacks would be pushing to vote in the Democratic Party primaries (from which they were then barred).

The state Senate did pass the bill favoring a state constitutional amendment for women, but the House failed to come up with the necessary three-fifths majority.

Again, in 1919, the Florida House of Representatives failed to eke out the margin of support needed to amend the state constitution.

After the 19th Amendment passed in the U.S. Congress that year, Gov. Sidney J. Catts expressed hope that Florida could be the first state to ratify it. But his call to the Legislature came in the waning moments of its biennial session.

FLORIDA MISSED OUT

The Legislature adjourned, and Catts failed to summon lawmakers back for a special session to act on ratifying the federal amendment. As things turned out, Tennessee became the 36th - and decisive - state to do so, in August 1920.

(Florida did not ratify the amendment until May 13, 1969 - as a symbolic gesture on the 50th anniversary of the Florida League of Women Voters.) The Tribune insisted editorially that it had supported suffrage at the state level and declared: ``There is no need for alarm over this new entrant to the voting booth. There is room for both, and The Tribune welcomes the fact that the women of this country will be as politically important hereafter as the men.''

The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville commented: ``The sun did not stop or hurry in its course. We do not look for any seismic disturbances in the political field... We look neither for the millennium nor for the destruction of the world.''

And The Miami Herald headlined its editorial ``The Rape Complete'' to indicate its disgust. Its editor said the government was ``raping'' the states by forcing them to accept the new constitutional amendment.

But the long struggle was over, and women voters began registering to vote and participating in the electoral process in Florida and in the United States.

Cherri Stratton said she came to ``look up to these women'' who worked so hard to gain the ballot.

``Too often we take their efforts for granted,'' she said.

CORRECTION - ID corrections

Two of the ``Faces of Florida Women'' had incorrect identifications on last week's History/Heritage page.

The first woman welder at Tampa Shipbuilding was Cecile Clark, who went on to christen a ship in 1943. ``That was a proud time for her,''

daughter-in-law Nada Hunt said. ``She was helping out her mother, who was a widow.''

Cecile Clark went on to marry contractor George Hunt, of Clearwater, and his construction firm built numerous big projects including Countryside Mall. The Hunts had three sons, Clark, Bill and George III.

Cecile Clark Hunt died last March, according to Nada Hunt, who described her as ``a wonderful lady.''

Carmen Ramirez Ferraro wrote to say: ``I was very pleasantly surprised to see my mother's name [Carmen Ramirez] included in this prominent display of prominent women that `left their mark' in our city's history.

``However, the picture of the lovely lady with the Spanish hat and guitar is not my mother's. Probably it was a young member of the Latin society dressed up to grace one of the many fiestas given at the Centro Espanol or Centro Asturiano.'' (9/03/95)

Women in their 90s look back proudly at the fight to win the right to vote.

TAMPA - They were the new women, the modern women. And many people, neighbors, brothers, other women - their mothers, even - thought they wanted too much.

They wanted to vote.

``We wanted to be real citizens,'' says 97-year-old Zennie Fisher of Plant City. ``We felt if we had to live under the laws, then why couldn't we help make them?''

Fisher got her wish in 1920 and soon cast the first of 75 years worth of ballots. Helen Emerson, 93, also went to the polls for that first election. She was too young to vote, but she stood at the fringes, yearning to be part of it.

``I was waiting patiently. I can remember that so well,'' she says from her room in Palm Gardens of Tampa nursing home. ``I thought, `At last, we've made it.' ''

Emerson, Fisher and many of their allies in the fight for women's suffrage were first- and second-generation Americans or daughters of the frontier. Their parents had struggled to make a place for them in the young country, and they were ready to take that place.

Emerson grew up listening to her father hollering from the bathroom of their Paterson, N.J., home, ``Mother, there's no towels up here,'' and watching her mother rush to his aid.

In many ways, he was a traditional man. In other ways, he was not.

He was a weaver of silk who had come to America from Poland, desperate to leave the Old World behind. He insisted that his family speak nothing but English and that his children be well-educated, Emerson says, ``so we could take care of ourselves.''

Emerson, then named Begneski, was 16 when she graduated from high school, and she already had a job as a bookkeeper. It was 1918, and the men were overseas fighting in World War I.

``I was really interested in what was going on,'' she says. ``Gracious, I had an opinion on everything.''

The women's suffrage debate had been bubbling for years. But now that more women were out of the home, doing the jobs of men, the question loomed larger every day: If women were good enough to do men's work, why couldn't they vote?

``They needed us to work,'' Emerson says, ``but yet we weren't good enough to say anything about the affairs of state.''

DID SAME WORK AS MEN

Lots of men thought of women as children who needed to be sheltered, Fisher says. ``I think my mother was quite happy that women didn't have to worry about politics.''

Fisher couldn't help being interested.

Her father was a frontier politician. He owned a store in Oklahoma and ``sold everything from apples to dynamite,'' Fisher says.

Men would gather at the store, ``sit around the big stove, chew tobacco and run the government.''

Her father often took her there, and she listened to the men talk. Fisher, then named Young, was the eldest child and her father's pride, she says.

``I worked in the fields and did the same work as a man or a boy. I planted and I picked.''

America was at war when Fisher married, and she and her husband were assigned government jobs. The government moved them to West Virginia to work in a gunpowder factory.

They lived in the factory compound and never left the little town that sprang up, called Nitro.

``We were working for Uncle Sam,'' she says. ``We were working for our country.''

When the war ended, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Fisher's husband got a job as a policeman. But Fisher had a hard time finding work; many companies refused to hire married women. Fisher kept busy doing volunteer work. But she couldn't swallow the prohibition on voting.

``I had worked like a man. So, why couldn't I vote?''

Many others were asking the same question.

Women distinguished themselves during World War I, says Doris Weatherford of Seffner, author of ``American Women's History.''

They drove ambulances overseas, ran switchboards and worked in munitions plants, like Fisher. People who argued that only men should vote because only men serve in war had to find another argument.

``Indeed, it may have been the war as much as any organizational strategy that finally brought the vote,'' Weatherford says.

Still, some men argued that women didn't have the intellectual capacity to vote. They said women couldn't understand the issues.

Emerson and her friends had a name for such people: ``dopes.''

``They didn't even think women should work outside the home. There was no use arguing with them. They had one-track minds.''

Many women also disapproved, Fisher says. ``At least half of the women didn't think women should vote.

``We were different. We were the new, modern women.''

Neither Fisher nor Emerson has a clear memory of the day of that first election in 1920. They've been to the polls so many times in 75 years that the memories run together.

But they know how they felt.

``We were all delighted to be able to vote,'' Fisher says. ``We were delighted to have some say over what our country did and what would become of us.''