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These last months, St. Catherine University President ReBecca Koenig Roloff says she's drawn inspiration from a friend's comment on the morning after the election.
"She said, 'I'm jealous of you. You woke up with great work to do,' " the leader of St. Paul's St. Kate's reported last week.
A sense that a moment has come for more women to put their shoulders to democracy's wheel has been widely felt in Minnesota and the rest of the nation since Donald Trump won the presidency by defeating a major party's first female nominee.
Make that shoulders to the wheel and feet on the ground — as illustrated by Saturday's massive women's marches in Washington, St. Paul and an astounding 600 or more locations around the country.
It's fitting that a delegation from the Abigail Quigley McCarthy Center for Women at St. Catherine University planned to join the assemblage at the State Capitol. (I say "planned" because this column has a Friday deadline.) And that the new president of the school that not long ago was known the College of St. Catherine, the largest Catholic women's college in the land, planned to walk and stand among them.
Not all Katies were Clinton voters, Roloff said. But many identified on some level with a candidate whose qualifications included a 1969 baccalaureate degree from all-female Wellesley College. Many were angered when Clinton's credentials were discounted. When fake news smeared her. When she was blamed for the misdeeds of her husband. When Trump's insults and boasts about mistreatment of women were deemed acceptable.
More than 44 percent of students in the College for Women (St. Kate's traditional undergraduate program) are students of color. Many are first-generation Americans. They listened to the campaign's heated rhetoric and wondered whether they belong in this country, Roloff related.
Days before the election and just two weeks after Roloff's inauguration, anxiety was running so high on campus that student leaders approached her with a request. After a career that included 11 years in the female-empowerment business as CEO of YWCA Minneapolis, Roloff would be worth hearing no matter the election's outcome, the students said. Would she convene a campuswide meeting on Nov. 9? Would she speak?
Roloff would, and did.
"There is plenty of work to do, and I get to help do it. So do each of you!" she said that night, expanding on her friend's message that morning. "We are all here for a reason. Right now. This day. This time in history … . Our mission, who we are and what we stand for, is a story that can and needs to be told even more boldly than it has ever been told before."
Roloff was an early articulator of the message that organizers hope this weekend's marches convey: For seekers of gender equity, the 2016 election wasn't an end point. It may be a new beginning — particularly among younger people. It revealed something about women's status in this country that disappointed them, and ought to motivate them.
"When my mother was a girl, nursing and teaching were the only professions open to women," said Roloff, 62. "Many young women today have mothers who are doctors and attorneys. They thought, that part of the fight is done. It's not my generation's fight. They thought their fight would be for the environment, or for gay rights, or against racism, not the women's issue.
"Then they saw what happened in this election, and their eyes were opened … . We need to keep fighting for the gains that have yet to be made."
Ask a college president to recommend a specific agenda for the women who marched this weekend, and the answer is bound to involve education. For good reason: Educational opportunity is a widely shared American priority, with considerable power to unite a divided electorate. Inequity in educational opportunity is a politically potent source of dissatisfaction with government and the status quo.
Fear that access to education will be constricted is a big source of student worry about a Trump presidency, Roloff said. Candidate Trump said next to nothing about widening educational doors. In the case of "dreamers" — the children of undocumented immigrants seeking access to college — he seemed to want to slam those doors shut.
"I know students and their parents who are working two jobs and taking out loans to pursue a vision for a better life," Roloff said. They're wondering, 'Do I belong here?' How can I help but say, 'Yes! I'm with you. How can I help?' "
In the face of a shortage of skilled workers in Minnesota, how can the Legislature's stewards of the State Grant Program not say the same thing?
How can this weekend's marchers sustain their push for gender justice during the Trump era? Promoting wider access to college education for young women of all colors and stations in life might serve their cause well.
Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.
