As the Long Beach Post pairs with Choura Events to honor 30 women tomorrow night at The Grand, I have also had the pleasure of interviewing women appearing throughout the California Women’s Conference. However, before tomorrow, we felt it both appropriate and respectful to include, as our last female feature in the series, a local woman who is known throughout the city.
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Despite one’s view of her politics, there is one thing that cannot be taken away from 2nd District Councilmember Dr. Suja Lowenthal: she is eloquent with her beliefs and doesn’t need to sugarcoat them.
“Even outside of Long Beach in our neighboring city of Los Angeles, we stand to witness perhaps—in a very short time—an era when every councilmember on that council will be a man,” she said, having herself been elected to the Long Beach City Council in 2006. “There isn’t a stability to politics that is attractive to serious women. Does that make it a ‘boys’ club’ or does that make it a club where the very things that need to be present for a woman to participate in don’t exist?”
Stability is a pointedly fascinating aspect of Lowenthal’s belief as to why women do not civically engage, particularly within the political process. After all, women are still the mothers and caretakers of the universe as she points out—and the contact sport-like attitude of politics, even on the local level, ultimately becomes unappealing.
When it comes to the inspiration she received from the words of Bogotá, Colombia Mayor Enrique Peñalosa—whose definition of the role of elected officials was to expand the quality of life and provide a political backbone for those who are unable to stand up—and pairing those words with the reality of the political landscape, Suja does not mince her words.
“I don’t think every elected official—whether they realize it or not—realizes that they don’t live up to that definition. Your job is to make cities, to exercise a backbone, and to look around,” she said. “It’s an intense focus on where someone is going next as to rather where they are.”
This Sisyphus-like idea that purposeful endeavors in politics does not exist is not necessarily new; however, to have it come from a politician herself gives it far more impact in the realization that, oftentimes, politics pushes the stone up the hill just to bring it back to the bottom rather than make the achievement of making it to the top.
And for Suja, politics’ lack of female inclusion is still alive and well in this sense, exacerbating the character of Sisyphus on both tangible and psychosocial levels.
“There this physical stoning we regard as uncivilized in other societies but there’s a different kind of stoning that takes place here everyday—and we choose to ignore it,” Suja stated, calm as ever. “How far apart are we?”
In order to bridge that gap, Suja finds it key to look beyond just women and invite the inclusion other groups as well, despite their degree of oppression, particularly the LGBT community.
For her, the commonality of suffering is powerful when advocating for one another—and this particular belief was solidified in her work she did with the L.A. City Attorney’s office focusing on domestic violence. The amount of knowledge she gained, in her eyes, was indispensable, having to work with shelters and organizations that were setup to both help victims and alter policies.
“A lotta those women who started those groups were lesbian women. I learned—quite immensely—how sharing common experiences of oppression can be a powerful tool for working towards solutions. The matriarchs of the advocacy for battered women were, from what I dealt with, lesbian women who came of age in the 60s primarily.”
Having to deal with the double movements of both the feminist and LGBT movements that were occurring, these lesbians used their own struggles in order to grasp and help bridge the gender inequities involved in domestic violence. And with this, Suja realized that the advancement of women shared commonalities—both suffering and hope—with the advancement of the LGBT community; it is, for her, a deeply shared alliance.
If anyone, at least for Suja, attempts to carve out a space where one promotes a monopoly on suffering, society has taken a huge step back.
“People still say, ‘Well, you don’t know because you’re not this.’ And that has regressed us,” she said. “The only way to hopefully evolve is when you bring everyone else into that understanding and you make them the champions for the cause.”
She even applies this philosophy to biking, where she claims that if, as a city promoting alternative mobility, we only gear biking and walking towards those already heavily involved in such activities, the use of public space will lack its larger appeal and pull and possibility.
In essence, Suja seems to state that her core belief in the inclusion of diversity is the key to understanding the many issues we face: gender inequality, identity discrimination, healthy living promotion, accessibility in our new urbanism…
And this doesn’t negate the fact that massive amounts of work still need to be done.
“Just because we’ve changed the letter of our law doesn’t mean we have changed our mindsets,” she said, referring to many places—including neighborhoods right here in California—which still condone the subjugation of women.
And ironically, she points out that part of the mindset shift lies not just with men stuck in an archaic form of thinking, but with women gaining power and largely ignoring other women along the way.
“When you get women in the workplace,” she explained, “it is not a majority of us that actually nurture other women professionally. Something happens to a big portion of us the higher up we get: we don’t surround ourselves by women we are shepherding along the way—and we, of all people, have the best opportunity to do that.”