Grooming young women to be leaders
The San Francisco Chronicle, November 2000

By Carol Ness

It's a new millennium and a new economy, with "Charlie's Angels" the new kick-ass symbols of female power. But it's still the same old struggle for young women to build equality with men - even if not all of them realize it, their advocates say.

"To quote Gloria Steinem, 'I don't want to point out anyone's oppression,'" said Margot Magowan, one of Potrero Hill's resident feminists and the inspiration for the new Woodhull Institute for young women leaders in New York.

But oppression is still there, Magowan said, despite decades of efforts by leaders like Steinem. So Magowan, now 31, along with author and former San Franciscan Naomi Wolf, among others, decided that women coming into their own need a place where they can learn how to develop and assert their power, and to do it in what they are calling an ethical way.

Or, as one British newspaper wag put it, Woodhull is for "young women who want to be top dogs without being bitches."

"The reason I founded it was because I saw a need that needed to be filled," Magowan said, as Woodhull planned for its first Bay Area retreat.

What the Reagan Ranch has become for young Republicans, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Woodhull Institute is for young women, she said.

Named after Victoria Woodhull, the first female stockbroker on Wall Street and the first woman nominated for president of the United States (the nominee of the Equal Right Party in 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant won a second term), the institute has been called both a boot camp and a prep school for young women. It occupies 90 acres in the Hudson River Valley, just north of New York City.

Since its inception in 1999, 120 young women 21 to 28 years old have attended six retreats in Woodhull's big house.

In mid-November, Woodhull is bringing its act to the Bay Area, with its first retreat away from home, three days for 20 young women at the Green Gulch Zen center in Marin County.

Favianna Rodriguez, a 22-year-old who lives with her family in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, will be there. Through her work with schoolgirls through Girls Inc. and its program Latinas Y Que, she's already proved herself as a leader for her generation.

But she's well aware of the obstacles, and sees Woodhull both as a place to learn new strategies for success and an outfit that needs to hear her perspective as a first-generation American of Peruvian descent.

"It's important so that when we talk about women's empowerment, it's all women," Rodriguez said. "It's assumed that it should be a universal thing, but it really isn't."

Her experience as the first in her family to go to college - she was graduated from UC-Berkeley - taught her a lot about what young women like her need to succeed.

"It was hard financially and socially," she said. "None of my friends went to college Ü but I saw lot of my neighbors working there as a janitor or in the coffee shop. I felt a big class difference."

At the retreat, she will learn advocacy and negotiation, how to write a business plan and other financial strategies, public speaking and ethical leadership Ü Woodhull's founding principle that power and idealism don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Mentorship and networking are part of the package.

Shireen Lee will be there, too. She started out as an engineer, one of three women in a department of 50 at a large oil and gas company in Canada.

"As a young woman engineer, you have to prove yourself more than the boys do, you have to do twice as much for half the recognition," Lee said.

Little support in the workplace

While many programs now steer young women into science and math careers,workplace support still falls short, Lee said. That's just as true in the gleaming high-tech world of Silicon Valley as in an oil refinery, Magowan added.

Lee left engineering, and now, at age 28, works with young women and girls,currently with the nonprofit Three Guineas Fund in San Francisco.

While many corporations offer leadership training, Woodhull is different, she said.

"Woodhull addresses how do you do good and still advance in what you're doing," Lee said. "It's really key Ü and why it's so exciting."

Magowan, a producer for KGO radio and a writer for Voter.com, dreamed up the Woodhull concept after her graduation from New York University and after a spell bobbing between the nonprofit and corporate worlds. She worked with a rape crisis center, for ABC-TV, for an anti-censorship nonprofit and then in film.

The nonprofit world proved frustrating because the organizations had no power, and always had to beg the rich for money. The corporate world was frustrating in a different way, because young women's voices were stifled, and routes to power and success were often blocked.

Looking for good careers

Magowan had grown up amid the captains of industry: Her father rose to Safeway CEO and owns the San Francisco Giants. But hers was the first generation of women in her family to seek their own careers.

"Many of the women I grew up with went to good schools and did well academically, and we were all taking low-paying, low-status jobs with big corporations," she said. "The men we grew up with were starting their own businesses, publishing novels, opening restaurants, producing films. There was this huge difference Ü the men versus the women.

"We were dating the guys who were doing the things we wanted to do ourselves," Magowan said. But the women didn't know how to translate their dreams to reality.

And Magowan realized that if that were true of women like her, who came from privileged backgrounds, what about women who didn't?

When she was 25, Magowan wrote to Naomi Wolf, author of the best-selling book "The Beauty Myth." Magowan was especially inspired by another of her books, "Fire With Fire," in which Wolf wrote about women using power as a positive force.

"I saw that young women were not afraid of failure but afraid of success, not afraid of weakness but afraid of power," Magowan said. She related.

The two women talked and discovered a common vision: to provide a permanent place for the training of women leaders. Magowan saw it as "a way for women to work together that celebrated power and success and wasn't about eating disorders or sexual harassment." Wolf, she said, wanted it to be beautiful, "not Styrofoam cups in the basement kind of place."

Some $300,000 in fund-raising later, and Woodhull sprang into being last year. Backers include San Francisco financier Warren Hellman, Esprit co-founder Susie Tompkins Buell and an anonymous family foundation associated with a Silicon Valley corporation.

For inspiration in bringing visions to life, Magowan had to look no further than her father, Peter Magowan, a power behind the creation of the Giants' new ballpark, Pacific Bell Park.

"I'm really proud of him," she said. "It was a vision of his, and everyone told him he couldn't do it, and he did."

Her own vision of Woodhull is ever-expanding. Magowan and Wolf hope to make the institute self-sustaining, and expand to California, then nationwide and even internationally.

"That's the dream," Magowan said.