City’s first female mayor ‘honored’ to be mayor at all

Anne McEnerny-Ogle didn’t know she would be Vancouver’s first female mayor. Like many in Vancouver, she presumed there had been others before her.

McEnerny-Ogle won the primary with 63 percent of the vote, and won the seat easily in November with 75 percent of the vote. That evening, election night, she was overcome with emotion — not because she was the first female mayor, but because she was mayor at all.

McEnerny-Ogle joins the few women who make up 19 percent of the nation’s mayors, according to Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics, as well as 10 women who also earned the title of first female mayor in 2017.

After the election, she spoke to The Columbian about what it means to be the first female at Vancouver’s helm, the gender divide in politics and the importance of female mentorship.

NOTE: Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

How does it feel to be the first female mayor of Vancouver?

This shouldn’t have been. We’ve had some great women candidates: Rose Besserman, Pat Jollota, Connie Kearney. I think the cards just fell the way they did. I would like to think people voted for me because I’m the most qualified. The question should have been what is it like to be mayor, period. Exciting, honored that you would want me, and the fact that I’m a woman doesn’t play into this much.

Did it surprise you to learn you would be the first woman to hold this office?

In (the millennial) generation, it surprises you. In my generation, it doesn’t.

I think everyone must have naturally assumed there was a female mayor back in the ’40s, ’50s or ’60s. And that was the case in the smaller cities, because women were taking those roles.

We have been building up the resumes, standing on the shoulders of our mothers. They gave us the confidence to reach out, have our jobs, our careers, whatever it was, and to keep reaching out.

How did you decide to run for mayor?

There were others ahead of me, but things just fell together.

As we looked at (running for re-election) and started considering it in December 2016, I said OK, Jack (Burkman), you’re not running for mayor. And Tim (Leavitt) isn’t running — I would never have run against the mayor. When he made the announcement he wasn’t running, it was, “Oh my gosh, wow, I could do this.” Terry (Ogle) and I didn’t know there was going to be a possibility until the end of 2016.

You spent time serving in local government before running for council and then mayor. But your male opponents did not.

When I look at the four men, and then the write-in, they were not involved in their neighborhood associations, they did not serve on boards or commissions — only Greg (Henderson), I think, actually volunteers for Boys & Girls Club or a nonprofit. Adam (Hamide) certainly didn’t; Steven (Cox) didn’t until he started running.

But what is it that told them they could run, what gave them the confidence that they could do nothing? They hadn’t even attended city council meetings, but they wanted that job.

They look at the president, and what qualifications did President (Donald) Trump have to have that position? He didn’t serve as a senator or a representative to know how the government worked, but he had something that people wanted.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy seems to have inspired more women to get involved in politics. Did she influence your decision?

No, because I had already been serving as the mayor pro tem. But I think it’s interesting now, all of the sexual harassment pieces that are coming out — and not just in our government or in Hollywood — but in France, which is totally unheard of.

This nationwide conversation that’s happening now, what is it that’s giving women the backbone to sit up and say no, or “I’m going to do this, I’m confident”?

Whether it’s a career or it’s the internet — and it levels the playing field because now we have equal opportunity to go after information — or we see women role models.

Do you consider yourself a role model for young girls?

(On election night), a little first-grader stayed up way past her bedtime to see the first woman mayor. And I asked her why. She said, “I don’t know any others.”

When we wanted to educate girls on math, we had books of girls doing math and girls doing chemistry and girls doing biology. They had to see it, and then they could dream it.

Now there are books of women being in government and being the mayor. It’s starting to weave its way in. They can understand it, and now they can aspire to it. Has it taken all of these years for the women nationally to see the shoulders of women ahead of them and to aspire to them and have the confidence to go after that? Maybe so.

Does a female mayor bring a different perspective to the table?

I don’t speak for all the … women; just because I am there doesn’t mean I represent all of them.

Molly (Coston, Washougal mayor-elect) and I have different life experience that we’ll bring to the table. Are they female? No, they’re just our life experiences.

How do we move this community forward in helping everyone be successful? That’s not easy. We’ll have to look for those opportunities.

Have you experienced any gender-typing since being elected?

Bless his heart, Eric Holmes, the city manager, sent me a little text after the results came out on election night — he said congratulations. I said, “Oh, great. I’ll be in tomorrow to measure for lace curtains.” He walked in and he saw Jill (Brown, administrative assistant) Wednesday morning and he said, “Anne’s coming in to measure for lace curtains” and Jill looked at him and had to tell him, “It’s OK, she’s teasing.” Then I thought, “Maybe. Tim is gone. I do have some lace. We could tape it to the windows and put up floral wallpaper and my sewing machine and a hot glue gun.” But that stereotype, Eric was just, “Oh my gosh, lace curtains,” and believed it.

You mentioned that women are feeling more confident to stand up for themselves and more willing to report sexual assault and harassment. Do you think the reports aren’t slowing down because women feel supported as others around them speak up?

Is that a female thing that we need? “Well, my sister said it, so now I’m comfortable saying it, too, even though it happened 26 years ago?” We were at a Clark College thing and a woman we all know and love just said, “When I was 15 years old, this happened to me in a legislative office. My father had stepped out with the aide and this senator or representative locked the door and this is what he did to me.” She said, “It has bothered me ever since.” And I thought, “How long has it been?” Because I suspect this woman is mid-60s, and this has stayed with her. But now she can say it. We didn’t talk about that even 10 years ago.

You can imagine my disappointment when certain things happen in our government and such, and we all went, “Oh, I thought we were so far beyond that. I thought we had moved beyond that type of activity.” Come to find out, it’s still there. But maybe we’re giving the confidence to all of our young people, males and females, to say no and to say yes on their choosing.

This could be a real sea change for so many things, but it might give those young men and women who were in middle school, in high school, in college, in their 20s (the ability) to say no and to get up and walk away, to unlock the door and leave, to make the announcement, to not keep this secret and to call them out on it. And not wait 50 years.