Remembering Midge

I was so saddened to open this morning's paper and find out Midge Miller had passed away. She was an inspirational feminist and civic activist who changed the world with her true grit, smarts and sincere honesty. I am going to miss having her on the planet.

Here's an article I wrote about a woman's place in Wisconsin ... Midge's place.
A Woman's Place is in Wisconsin

By Brennan Nardi

Go back to 1856 and tell the stories of not just the men but the women who built this city into what it is today and Madison: The Formative Years author David Mollenhoff would have another hefty tome on his hands. To do the women of Madison and their contributions justice, you really need a Ph.D., a book deal, and permanent residence at the state historical society. I possess none of the above, but I did once ponder a Ph.D. - in women's history, no less. That is, in fact, what drew me to Madison.

It started back in 1989 at the University of Virginia, where a fledgling women's studies program was offering a freshman course called "The History of Feminism in America." It would be my subversive ticket out of plain-old history and into a world where the lives of Jane Adams, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan leapt off the pages of a different academic canon, and landed inside my psyche.

Along my merry undergraduate way, I discovered a political activist and historian named Gerda Lerner from the University of Wisconsin--Madison. Not only did she teach history, she had made history as a young Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust in 1938, chronicled in her 2002 autobiography Fireweed. Lerner's work turned up on more than one course syllabus during my college career (she pioneered women's history as its own academic discipline). Then, in my senior year, I took a class called "Women's Health in America." When I saw that the textbook was written by UW professor Judith Leavitt, I took it as a sign. My grandmother's family had "summered" in Wisconsin since that late 1800s. Having spent glorious vacations in the Northwoods as a girl, I was eager to find a way to extend my time there as a grownup. Grad school in Madison seemed like a respectable option.

I chose journalism over women's history, and never did meet Professor Emeritus Lerner, though I did solicit her for a campaign donation or two during my brief career in Madison politics. Instead of following Dr. Lerner into Bascom's Ivory Tower, I shadowed the women who were making history right before my eager eyes. It was on former State Rep. Midge Miller's porch -- where my mentor, political activist Jeanne DeRose, had wisely taken me one sunny afternoon -- that I fell in love with Wisconsin's progressive tradition, passed down to me by someone who had lived it and fought to keep it alive for nearly half a century.

Inspired by the Madisonians who came before them -- names like Belle Case LaFollette, Ruth Doyle and Carrie Lee Nelson -- women like Midge Miller, Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson, NOW co-founder Kathryn Clarenbach, Native American leader Ada Deer, and many, many others carried the torch of female leadership during the upper decades of the 20th century. While many are still hard at work today, that generation of leaders has begun to pass its legacy on to the women of Madison who are making history into the 21st century. Women like Madison's first female mayor: Sue Bauman; Fire chief: Debra Amesqua; UW System president: Katherine Lyall; County Executive: Kathleen Falk; Elected Lieutenant Governor: Barbara Lawton; conservationist Tia Nelson (daughter of Gaylord) and U.S. Representative: Tammy Baldwin.

It's the last name on that impressive (and not at all comprehensive) list that might resonate most for the next generation of women leaders in this city. A product of Madison public schools, and of Madison politics from the city council to the county board, the state assembly to the U.S. Congress, Tammy Baldwin has intelligently and gracefully broken through gender and diversity barriers all of her life. And she's only forty-four.

This fall, my daughter will start kindergarten. She will grow up not only witnessing but learning in school the accomplishments of Tammy Baldwin and the scores of influential women who have made Madison the kind of rich and varied community the Belle LaFollettes, Midge Millers and Ada Deers intended. The women's history of the next 150 years will be nothing less than … history itself. And it won't take a Ph.D. to find it.

Brennan Nardi is the first female editor of Madison Magazine, which was founded in 1978.