The Hand that Rocks the Cradle

    “Blessings on the hand of women,” begins William Ross Wallace’s 1865 poem and, despite his slight grammatical inaccuracy, Wallace has a point, because where would Orinda be without the 14 female city councillors who have sought to make life better for their community over these past 40 years?
    Society has come a long way since 1558 when Scottish reformer John Knox railed against “that monstrous regiment of women” in a polemic arguing that rule by women was “contrary to the Bible.”
    So he may well start spinning in his grave if he should ever discover that Orinda’s mayor, vice-mayor, city attorney, city clerk, city manager and all three councillors – are part of that same regiment.
    Pacifica – with a population almost twice the size of Orinda’s – was the first small Californian city to present an all-female council when, in 1994, every single one of the 17-male councillor wannabes was defeated at the ballot box by a female adversary.
    But hope lives eternal and, today in 2025, Pacifica can boast one token male on the City Council – pour encourager des autres.
    It took 25 years after Pacifica made news before another fully-female council appeared in the Golden State – this time in the tiny (0.6 square miles) Humboldt County City of Blue Lake (pop. 1,200).
    But their joy was short-lived – within just a few months, one of the councillors was replaced by a man.
    The following year, Los Altos, with a population 50% higher than Orinda’s, made headlines as the only Bay Area city fielding an all-women council in 2018. Sadly, that claim to fame was also short-lived and today Jonathan, Pete and Larry grin victoriously from the city’s website.
    Orinda’s female city council has so far demonstrated undeniable staying power with three consecutive female mayors. In 2023, Inga Miller took on the mantle for a second time, as Orinda’s 40th mayor, and the following year was succeeded by Darlene Gee, also in her second term, with Latika Malkani hard on her heels in 2025.
    And with three councillors halfway through their four-year terms, and two others just beginning theirs, Orinda seems set for many more years of lady mayors.
    History shows that many of the all-women councils resulted from dissatisfaction with the way men were running things. The first of these, in 1888, came about in Oskaloosa, KS, a year after Kansas women got the right to vote in municipal elections. Running on an “Oskaloosa Improvement Ticket,” the ladies beat the boys by a two-to-one margin.
    But nothing lasts forever.
    Today, Oskaloosa, with a population a shade over 1,000, features one male mayor and five male councillors.
    For the record, Orinda has never had an all-male city council.
    One reason given why women, in the past, found it so difficult to make a difference in public life was that so much of their time was taken up with housework, part-time jobs, children and, very often, the lion’s share of voluntary work.
    Such was the case with Mary Chamberlain in Kanab, UT, when she was elected chairman of the Town Council in 1911, eight years before American women won the vote.
    As well as working part-time in the local store, and holding “several callings” for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Chamberlain had a husband to take care of – being his sixth (and last) wife – as well as two children. While he, poor busy man, had 53.
    Mary Chamberlain recalled that “the loafers on the ditch bank … made up our ticket as burlesque” but with no opposition, all five women got elected, “so we decided to tackle the job and see what we could do.”
    And what they did, amongst many other things, was to keep stray dogs and loose livestock from roaming the town, ban slingshots and oversee the construction of bridges for dikes and irrigation canals.
    They were also committed proponents of the national temperance movement.
    Curiously, once their term expired, no others could be persuaded to run for council, and the men, so absent in 1911, rushed to fill the vacuum.
Fast forward to the mid-‘70s, and mother-of-three Bobbie Landers had decided to run for a place on Orinda’s school board.
    “But several of my fellow parents took me aside,” she said, “and told me to get my husband to run for the position ‘because they’ll never elect a woman on the school board’.”
    And so Carl Landers ran in her place … and served the board for 12 years. But you can bet that his wife was his émininence grise.
    Come 1985, after a hard-won battle to achieve incorporation for Orinda, Landers decided to run for city council.
    “I knew I was probably the most knowledgeable candidate,” said Landers, “since I had been administrative secretary for The Orinda Association for some years. And I was pleased that the electorate probably thought so too.”
    Landers served as the only woman on Orinda’s inaugural City Council, and went on to serve another two terms as the city’s first female mayor.
    “I always hope that people will look at the track record of candidates and not necessarily their gender,” she says now.
    Fifty-five years after Wallace composed his most famous poem, American women finally got the vote. But long before that, he plainly knew what he was talking about when he wrote that “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”